Gingrich Stuck to Caustic Path in Ethics Battles

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT

WASHINGTON — Newt Gingrich had an urgent warning for conservatives: Jim Wright, the Democratic speaker of the House, was out to destroy America.

It was April 1988, a month before Mr. Gingrich, an up-and-coming Republican congressman, shocked colleagues by pressing ethics charges against the powerful Mr. Wright. Now, he was singling out the speaker as a major obstacle in a coming “civil war” with liberals.

“This war has to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars,” Mr. Gingrich said, in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation. He branded Mr. Wright as part of “the hard left,” whose members, he warned, “will try by chameleon-like actions to destroy our country.”

The brutal civil war Mr. Gingrich predicted did indeed come to pass, during a nearly decadelong conflict in which ethics charges were the primary weapon. Mr. Gingrich lodged a complaint against Mr. Wright, which cost the Democratic speaker his job. Democrats, in turn, bombarded Mr. Gingrich with accusations of ethical impropriety, which led to a $300,000 fine and a reprimand for bringing discredit to the House.

(More here.)

A brilliant historian (who happens to be running for President) offers the definitive history of Western Civilization

By Alexandra Petri
ComPost from the Washington Post

Newt Gingrich is back on top of the Republican pack. First, at such a critical time for Floridians, let’s peer inside his mind.

A HISTORY OF THE WORLD, by Newt Gingrich

0 AD: Birth of Jesus. A pretty good guy, but no Newt Gingrich.

476: Rome falls. Newt Gingrich could have averted this.

1215: The English wisely take Newt Gingrich’s suggestion to write the Magna Carta.

1492: Newt suggests, winking, that Columbus sail the wrong way to India, “where I think you’ll find something very interesting.”

1533: Henry VIII decides to take the same number of wives as Newt Gingrich.

1602: Gingrich writes “Hamlet.”

1776: Inspired by “A Nation Like No Other” by Newt Gingrich, available now in hardcover on Amazon.com for just $11.25, the Founding Fathers write the Declaration of Independence.

(More here.)

House Democrats Embrace Obama’s Newfound Combativeness

By JONATHAN WEISMAN
NYT

CAMBRIDGE, Md. – The on-again-off-again relationship between Barack Obama and House Democrats appears to be on again with the president’s turn toward a more populist, confrontational tone on the Republican Party.

Meeting here for their annual retreat, House Democrats appeared to be buoyed by Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address, his new class-conscious emphasis on “fairness” for the middle class and his public castigation of Republicans for failing to cooperate on his agenda.

Congressional Democrats had expressed frustration – even anger – in the past, sometimes because they saw Mr. Obama as too quick to compromise, and sometimes because they feared his broadsides against Congress would harm incumbents in the coming election.

But as they try to put control of the House in play, Democratic leaders are now encouraging confrontation, and they say they will deliver that message to the president and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Friday, when both are scheduled to address them.

(More here.)

CNN Florida debate: Winners and losers

By Aaron Blake and Rachel Weiner,
WashPost
Published: January 26 | Updated: Friday, January 27, 5:00 AM

Jacksonville, Fla., and CNN put on one of the best debates of the GOP presidential race on Thursday night — a debate that is sure to have an effect on Tuesday’s all-important Florida primary.

The Fix was live-chatting all night, but we also thought we’d pass along our thoughts on the debate, in the form — naturally — of winners and losers.

WINNERS

* Mitt Romney: The obvious one, yes. It wasn’t all good for the former Massachusetts governor, but given how lackluster Newt Gingrich’s performance was, it’s hard not to call this anything but a win for Romney, who wins whenever Gingrich fails.

In fact, Romney slipped up a few times. He again said rather tone-deafly that he would “fire” somebody who told him a moon colony was a good idea in tough economic times, he incorrectly stated that one of his ads wasn’t his ad, and he suggested to Rick Santorum that President Obama’s health care bill wasn’t something to get angry about (we think many Republicans are pretty openly angry about it).

And in none of these three cases did Romney’s opponents — and particularly Gingrich — make him pay for it.

(More here.)

How Siri is ruining your cellphone service

By Paul Farhi,
WashPost
Published: January 26

Like a few million other people this past holiday season, we bought an iPhone 4S, with its much-hyped Siri feature. The vocal interface allows users to speak all kinds of commands into the phone (“What’s the weather in San Francisco?”) and get answers from a sultry-voiced robot/concierge.

We’ve used Siri to get directions, to make hands-free mobile calls and to fetch answers to trivia questions. Sometimes we just goof on Siri. “Siri, do you love me?” my daughter asked the other day. (Siri’s heartbreaking response: “I am not capable of love.”) Most ways you look at it, Siri is pretty magical.

But not in every way. Siri’s dirty little secret is that she’s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.

To make your wish her command, Siri floods your cell network with a stream of data; her responses require a similarly large flow in return. A study published this month by Arieso, an Atlanta firm that specializes in mobile networks, found that the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S uses twice as much data as does the plain old iPhone 4 and nearly three times as much as does the iPhone 3G. The new phone requires far more data than most other advanced smartphones, which are pretty data-intensive themselves, The Post has reported.

(More here.)

Hillary Clinton: Done with the ‘high wire’ of politics. Really.

By Karen DeYoung
WashPost

President Obama greeted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at his State of the Union address earlier this week. (Win McNamee — Getty Images)

Like President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says she hasn’t been watching the Republican primary debates. But at least Clinton has an excuse for tuning out — she says she’s quitting government after the election no matter who wins.

“What could we do to persuade you to run for vice president?” a staffer asked at a State Department town hall meeting Thursday, referring to cyclical rumors and the wishful thinking of some supporters. “Oh, my goodness,” Clinton replied.

“I will certainly stay on until the president nominates someone and that transition can occur,” said Clinton, who has insisted repeatedly that she will be a one-term secretary. “But I think, after 20 years ...of being on the high wire of American politics, and all of the challenges that come with that, it would probably be a good idea to just find out how tired I am.”

(Original here.)

Talk of Taxing the Rich More Faces Political Realities

By JONATHAN WEISMAN and ANNIE LOWREY
NYT

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s call for “tax fairness” and Mitt Romney’s tax returns have catapulted the debate over tax increases on the rich to the top of the political agenda. But with even some top Democrats hesitant, the prospects of a so-called Buffett tax on high-earning households remain uncertain, if not remote, for the immediate future. What is left may be only politics, at least until after the November elections.

Democrats promised Wednesday that this time their calls for serious tax changes for the rich were serious. For two years, when their party controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, Democratic leaders failed to change the rules on “carried interest” to ensure that private equity titans and venture capitalists pay more than a 15 percent tax rate on fees reaped from their investor clients. Democrats hardly mentioned raising the 15 percent tax rates on dividends and capital gains, the largest reason the super-rich pay less of their income in taxes than many middle-class families.

But that was before Mr. Romney released a 2010 tax return that showed income of $21.6 million, and an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent, a rate more typical of a household earning about $80,000. An Individual Retirement Account with significant investments in the Cayman Islands valued at $20 million to $100 million, along with investments scattered in tax havens from Switzerland to Luxembourg to Ireland, has also provoked scrutiny.

“All you need to do is look at the former governor of Massachusetts’ tax return to understand why this has become an emergency,” Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, said Wednesday, referring to Mr. Romney.

(More here.)

Dole Releases Stinging Critique of Gingrich

By GERRY MULLANY and RICHARD A. OPPEL JR.
NYT

3:59 p.m. | Updated The Romney campaign on Thursday released a scathing critique of Newt Gingrich by Bob Dole, the former Republican presidential candidate and senator from Kansas. The statement comes as some establishment Republicans have been stepping up their attacks of Mr. Gingrich.

The Gingrich campaign’s response follows the statement.

The statement reads:

I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich, but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late. If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway.

Gingrich served as speaker from 1995 to 1999 and had trouble within his own party. Already in 1997 a number of House members wanted to throw him out as speaker. But he hung on until after the 1998 elections when the writing was on the wall. His mounting ethics problems caused him to resign in early 1999. I know whereof I speak as I helped establish a line of credit of $150,000 to help Newt pay off the fine for his ethics violations. In the end, he paid the fine with money from other sources.

(More here.)

RealClearScience.com: U.S. Science Doing Well but Many Challenges Ahead

The State of Science in America

By Alex B. Berezow & Ross Pomeroy
RealClearScience.com

Editor’s Note: In advance of President Obama’s State of the Union address next week, RCP is rolling out daily “state of” reports to better frame the issues he might discuss. The following is a transcript of how the editors of RealClearScience would deliver a "State of Science" address.

We are pleased to report that as we enter a new year, American research continues to dominate the world of science.

In 2012, the United States is projected to spend $436 billion on research and development. No other country on Earth comes close. Combined, the nations of Europe will spend $338 billion. China will spend $199 billion. If all the research money in the world were put in a giant pot, about a third would be filled with money from the United States.

Despite the frequently expressed perception that the U.S. is declining in the world, in reality our scientists continue to perform the world's most cutting-edge research. Just this past year, an American shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for unraveling exquisite details about the immune system. Three Americans were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for overturning conventional wisdom about the fundamental nature of our universe.

For what it's worth, two Americans were even awarded the Nobel Prize in economics.

U.S. researchers continue to publish more papers than their foreign colleagues in the most influential science journals. And 31 of the top 100 universities in the world are found in the United States.

If we continue to put forth the type of effort displayed in the 20th century, then the 21st century will again be an American century.

But we have a lot of work to do and many challenges to overcome.

(Continued here.)

The right drops a bomb on Newt

By: Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen
Politico.com
January 26, 2012 08:00 AM EST

Newt Gingrich better hope voters who lapped up his delicious hits on the “elite media” and liberals don’t read the Drudge Report this morning.

Or the National Review. Or the American Spectator. Or Ann Coulter.

If they do, Gingrich comes off looking like a dangerous, anti-Reagan, Clintonian fraud.

It’s as if the conservative media over the past 24 hours decided Gingrich is for real, and they need to come clean about the man they really know before it’s too late. This is just a sampling of what’s hitting Newt:

• The overnight Drudge Report banner: “Insider: Gingrich repeatedly Insulted Reagan.” The headline linked to a devastating takedown by Elliott Abrams in the National Review, who wrote, among other things, that Gingrich had a long record of criticizing and undermining Reagan’s most transformative policies.

(More here.)

President Ahmadinejad adds voice to Iran’s call for nuclear talks with world powers

By Associated Press, Updated: Thursday, January 26, 5:58 AM

TEHRAN, Iran — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Iran is ready for nuclear talks with the world powers amid toughening sanctions aimed at forcing Tehran to sharply scale back its nuclear program.

Ahmadinejad, however, says sanctions won’t force Iran to capitulate to Western demands.

The United States and allies want Iran to halt uranium enrichment, which they worry could lead to weapons-grade material. Iran says it only seeks reactors for energy and research.

(Original here.)

Obama tangles with Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer over immigration book

By David Nakamura
WashPost

PHOENIX — President Obama is used to tangling with Republicans in Congress. On Wednesday, he sparred with one on a tarmac.

Arriving in this Southwestern city on the second stop of his post-State of the Union tour, Obama descended the stairs of Air Force One and was greeted by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who was among the local politicians waiting for him in a customary receiving line.

Such moments are photo ops designed to burnish the image of the president and the politicians. This time, it quickly turned into a dust-up in the desert.

Brewer attempted to hand Obama a letter, which she later told reporters was an invitation to sit down with her to discuss “Arizona’s comeback” and to tour the U.S.-Mexican border with her.

(Continued here.)

Obama team sees Romney damaging self with independents for fall campaign

By Dan Balz,
WashPost
Published: January 25

CHICAGO — President Obama’s political advisers have long been preparing for a general-election contest against Republican Mitt Romney. What they have seen of the former Massachusetts governor in the past 30 days makes them think he will enter a fall campaign, if he survives a turbulent nomination battle, significantly weakened by self-inflicted wounds and a major strategic mistake.

That assessment in no way changes the view from the sixth floor of the Prudential Building here that the president faces major challenges in his bid for a second term. Continuing economic uncertainties, general unrest among the electorate, frustration with the pace of the recovery and the reluctance of independent voters to embrace the president constitute the stiff head winds that Obama and his team are facing.

The gap between what the president promised and the expectations he created in 2008 and his record of delivering will be at the heart of the Republican argument that he does not deserve a second term.

But the chaotic Republican race, and the way Romney has dealt with vulnerability and adversity, give those guiding the president’s reelection campaign confidence that, when the general-election campaign begins, the president will hold several advantages over the GOP nominee.

(More here.)

How Pimps Use the Web to Sell Girls

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT

In November, a terrified 13-year-old girl pounded on an apartment door in Brooklyn. When a surprised woman answered, the girl pleaded for a phone. She called her mother, and then dialed 911.

The girl, whom I’ll call Baby Face because of her looks, frantically told police that a violent pimp was selling her for sex. He had taken her to the building and ordered her to go to an apartment where a customer was waiting, she said, and now he was waiting downstairs to make sure she did not escape. She had followed the pimp’s directions and gone upstairs, but then had pounded randomly on this door in hopes of getting help.

Baby Face said she hurt too much to endure yet another rape by a john. She told prosecutors later that she was bleeding vaginally and that her pimp had recently kicked her down a stairwell for trying to flee.

That 911 call set in motion the arrest of Kendale Judge, then 21. Judge has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, kidnapping, rape and compelling prostitution. He is in jail, and we haven’t heard his side of the events yet.

(More here.)

A Judge in the Dock

By DAN KAUFMAN
NYT

IN October 1998, British police officers arrested the Chilean general Augusto Pinochet while he was recuperating from back surgery at a London hospital. They were acting on an international warrant issued by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón seeking General Pinochet’s extradition to stand trial in Spain on charges of torture and murder. After a 17-month legal battle, General Pinochet was released on medical grounds, but Judge Garzón’s warrant paved the way for stripping the former dictator of immunity and prosecuting him in Chile.

Since the Pinochet arrest, Judge Garzón has indicted human-rights violators around the world. His actions helped make it possible to prosecute expatriate Rwandans for their role in the 1994 genocide and Chad’s former dictator, Hissène Habré, who was indicted for crimes against humanity by a Senegalese judge.

Yet Judge Garzón is now himself under legal attack for confronting Spain’s own dark history. He is on trial this week before the Spanish Supreme Court for daring to investigate crimes committed during the Spanish Civil War and the nearly four-decade dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco. The case against him is fueled by domestic political vendettas rather than substantive legal arguments and it could dramatically set back international efforts to hold human-rights violators accountable for their crimes.

In October 2008, in response to a petition from victims and relatives of those killed or tortured by Franco’s forces, Judge Garzón ordered the exhumation of 19 mass graves and charged Franco and his accomplices posthumously with the murder and disappearance of more than 114,000 people.

(More here.)

Applied Neuroscience, the Six-String Method

By BRUCE HEADLAM
NYT

At 13, an age when most boys want to learn the guitar, Gary Marcus, decided he wanted to be a scientist. Twenty-five years later he had become one of the country’s best known cognitive psychologists, with major papers and three general-interest books on the workings of the human mind and a position running New York University’s Center for Language and Music.

And he wanted to play the guitar.

For any adult learning an instrument or a new language is terrifying. For a cognitive scientist, it can also be downright depressing. Humans have an early childhood window to acquire such skills easily, according to a long-held tenet in his profession, and it’s a window that closes quickly. Then there is the issue of innate ability. While no single gene can explain Beethoven, Yo-Yo Ma or “Waterloo Sunset,” Dr. Marcus does believe in natural talent, he said, or at least in the certainty he doesn’t have any.

Despite those misgivings he allowed himself one year of dedicated practice, armed with instruction books, a $75 Yamaha acoustic bought on eBay and one thing few adult music students have at their disposal: a year’s sabbatical.

Three years later he has chronicled his journey in a new book, “Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning” (Penguin). Like Daniel J. Levitin’s “World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature” and Oliver Sacks’s “Musicophilia,” “Guitar Zero” investigates the intersection between neuroscience and music. But the thread here is Dr. Marcus’s own often frustrating attempts to learn guitar. It’s the sort of book where Steven Pinker (Dr. Marcus’s mentor and collaborator) mixes with K. Anders Ericsson (the psychologist most associated with the “10,000 hours” theory of expertise) and Tom Morello (the lead guitarist from Rage Against the Machine).

(More here.)

States’ Drive to Collect Taxes on Internet Sales Is a Blow to Marketers

By IAN MOUNT
NYT

On a dreary day last April, Tim Storm, the founder of FatWallet, and his 54 employees formed a convoy of some 30 cars, three moving trucks and a trailer laden with two fiberglass cows (one purple, one black), and drove five miles north from their old corporate home in Rockton, Ill.. to the new FatWallet headquarters in Beloit, Wis.

The move certainly seemed to be an odd business decision: it cost $100,000, and the company left behind a $5 million, three-year-old, custom-built office building in Rockton, whose maintenance would continue to cost $30,000 a month until it finds a tenant. But Mr. Storm felt he had to do it for his business to survive.

One of the country’s biggest bargain hunter Web sites, FatWallet publishes coupons and deals from about 1,000 companies that range from small shops like PennyWise.biz to retail giants like Amazon. Since 2005, the company has acted as the middleman in more than $1.2 billion in Internet sales. (It says its own revenue was $12 million in 2010.)

But last March, Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois signed House Bill 3659, a so-called affiliate nexus tax that would require out-of-state retailers that advertise through Illinois-based Internet marketing “affiliates” like FatWallet to collect and remit Illinois sales tax.

(More here.)

New Housing Task Force Will Zero In on Wall St.

By EDWARD WYATT and SHAILA DEWAN
NYT

After failing to produce any major prosecutions stemming from the housing crisis, an expanded federal task force is planning a new tack, cracking down on financial firms suspected of improperly bundling home loans into securities for investors, officials said Wednesday.

The Obama administration tried to instill confidence in the effort by installing Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York state attorney general who is viewed by liberal groups as a crusader against big banks, as one of the leaders of a new unit within the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. But skeptics still doubted the sincerity of the new effort.

The unit, announced by President Obama in the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, while Mr. Schneiderman looked on from a prime seat behind Michelle Obama, is the latest in a string of efforts undertaken by the administration over the last three years to prosecute crimes related to the financial crisis, bolster the housing market and help homeowners who are suffering under unaffordable mortgages.

Many of those efforts have met with limited success. The Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, created in late 2009, seemed little more than “a press release collection agency” being propped up by the Justice Department “to collect examples of investigations or prosecutions that would otherwise have been brought,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, at a Senate oversight hearing in June.

(More here.)

With Audiences Encouraged to React, Primary Debates Seem More Made for TV

By JEREMY W. PETERS
NYT

“Hello, Charleston!”

It was a few minutes before CNN’s debate in South Carolina last week, and a director for the network took the stage to make sure the audience was primed and limber.

Evidently dissatisfied with the lack of enthusiasm, he tried again. “You can do better than that!” he shouted. “Louder!”

“It was like whipping up a crowd before a high school basketball game,” recalled Bill Press, the liberal syndicated columnist and talk show host, who described CNN’s crowd warm-up in an interview. Minutes into that debate, Newt Gingrich would tear into the moderator, John King, for asking about the sordid allegations of an ex-wife, and would send the crowd to its feet.

“That’s the atmosphere that they wanted,” Mr. Press said. “And that’s the atmosphere that they got.”

(More here.)

The True Cost of High School Dropouts

By HENRY M. LEVIN and CECILIA E. ROUSE
NYT

ONLY 21 states require students to attend high school until they graduate or turn 18. The proposal President Obama announced on Tuesday night in his State of the Union address — to make such attendance compulsory in every state — is a step in the right direction, but it would not go far enough to reduce a dropout rate that imposes a heavy cost on the entire economy, not just on those who fail to obtain a diploma.

In 1970, the United States had the world’s highest rate of high school and college graduation. Today, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we’ve slipped to No. 21 in high school completion and No. 15 in college completion, as other countries surpassed us in the quality of their primary and secondary education.

Only 7 of 10 ninth graders today will get high school diplomas. A decade after the No Child Left Behind law mandated efforts to reduce the racial gap, about 80 percent of white and Asian students graduate from high school, compared with only 55 percent of blacks and Hispanics.

Like President Obama, many reformers focus their dropout prevention efforts on high schoolers; replacing large high schools with smaller learning communities where poor students can get individualized instruction from dedicated teachers has been shown to be effective. Rigorous evidence gathered over decades suggests that some of the most promising approaches need to start even earlier: preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, who are fed and taught in small groups, followed up with home visits by teachers and with group meetings of parents; reducing class size in the early grades; and increasing teacher salaries from kindergarten through 12th grade.

(More here.)

In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad

By CHARLES DUHIGG and DAVID BARBOZA
NYT

The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws.

When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.

Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.

“Are you Lai Xiaodong’s father?” a caller asked when the phone rang at Mr. Lai’s childhood home. Six months earlier, the 22-year-old had moved to Chengdu, in southwest China, to become one of the millions of human cogs powering the largest, fastest and most sophisticated manufacturing system on earth. That system has made it possible for Apple and hundreds of other companies to build devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up.

(More here.)

The Fiscally Reckless Mitch Daniels

Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews
January 24, 2012

Exclusive: Delivering the GOP rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is hailed as a “fiscal conservative,” but his actual record as George W. Bush’s budget director was one of fiscal recklessness, taking America from surpluses to massive deficits, as Robert Parry reports.

By Robert Parry

The Republican Party has tapped Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels to deliver the response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address – and the hearts of Official Washington are aflutter again over this darling “fiscal conservative.”

A New York Times’ article about the choice of Daniels noted that “the sight of Mr. Daniels on national television is sure to raise wistful ‘if onlys’ in a Republican establishment that had put the governor at the top of its wish list for a White House run.” But that article – like others about Daniels – leaves out a salient fact about his alleged “fiscal conservatism”: as President George W. Bush’s original budget director, Mitch Daniels helped create today’s fiscal mess.

Daniels oversaw the federal budget as it was making its historic reversal from a $236 billion surplus – then on a trajectory to eliminate the entire federal debt in a decade – to a $400 billion deficit by the time Daniels left the Office of Management and Budget in June 2003.

(More here.)

Taking DNA From All Criminals Should Be Standard Procedure

By CYRUS R. VANCE Jr.
NYT

WE have a tool that can prevent hundreds of murders, rapes and robberies each year at minimal cost to taxpayers. But we’re not using it in a majority of cases because a state law restricts its use.

DNA evidence solves crimes. Since 1996, when New York State’s DNA databank opened with strong support from my predecessor, Robert M. Morgenthau, the bank’s DNA samples have been linked to more than 3,500 sexual assaults, 860 murders, 1,100 robberies and 3,400 burglaries. Thousands of criminal convictions have resulted. Today, however, we are hamstrung by a law that does not authorize the collection of DNA following convictions of certain misdemeanors. This has meant that we can’t use DNA technology in more than half of our cases. By expanding the collection of DNA to include those convicted of all crimes in New York State’s penal law, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has called for, we will be better able to identify the guilty, exonerate the innocent, bring justice to crime victims and prevent additional crimes from occurring.

In 2006, lawmakers decided to include some but not all misdemeanors in the DNA databank. Opponents questioned why someone convicted of a low-level misdemeanor — petty larceny, for example — should be required to provide a DNA sample. The answer can be found in the results of that decision: samples collected from people convicted of petty larceny have been linked to roughly 48 murders and 220 sexual assaults. Clearly, the 2006 expansion of the DNA program — which passed with only six dissenting votes in the State Assembly — confirmed that collecting samples from offenders convicted of minor crimes helps solve and prevent more serious crimes.

Whom does DNA bring to justice, and how does it prevent future crimes? The case of Curtis Tucker is instructive. Following his conviction in 2010 for robbing and assaulting a 74-year-old Manhattan man suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Mr. Tucker was required to submit a DNA sample, which typically is obtained by swabbing the inside of a person’s cheek. Three days later, that $30 test produced a match linking Mr. Tucker to a brutal 2004 assault and attempted rape of a 15-year-old girl in the stairwell of her Manhattan apartment building.

(More here.)

Will Israel Attack Iran?

By RONEN BERGMAN
NYT

As the Sabbath evening approached on Jan. 13, Ehud Barak paced the wide living-room floor of his home high above a street in north Tel Aviv, its walls lined with thousands of books on subjects ranging from philosophy and poetry to military strategy. Barak, the Israeli defense minister, is the most decorated soldier in the country’s history and one of its most experienced and controversial politicians. He has served as chief of the general staff for the Israel Defense Forces, interior minister, foreign minister and prime minister. He now faces, along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and 12 other members of Iraeli’s inner security cabinet, the most important decision of his life — whether to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran. We met in the late afternoon, and our conversation — the first of several over the next week — lasted for two and a half hours, long past nightfall. “This is not about some abstract concept,” Barak said as he gazed out at the lights of Tel Aviv, “but a genuine concern. The Iranians are, after all, a nation whose leaders have set themselves a strategic goal of wiping Israel off the map.”

When I mentioned to Barak the opinion voiced by the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and the former chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi — that the Iranian threat was not as imminent as he and Netanyahu have suggested and that a military strike would be catastrophic (and that they, Barak and Netanyahu, were cynically looking to score populist points at the expense of national security), Barak reacted with uncharacteristic anger. He and Netanyahu, he said, are responsible “in a very direct and concrete way for the existence of the State of Israel — indeed, for the future of the Jewish people.” As for the top-ranking military personnel with whom I’ve spoken who argued that an attack on Iran was either unnecessary or would be ineffective at this stage, Barak said: “It’s good to have diversity in thinking and for people to voice their opinions. But at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us — the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”

Netanyahu and Barak have both repeatedly stressed that a decision has not yet been made and that a deadline for making one has not been set. As we spoke, however, Barak laid out three categories of questions, which he characterized as “Israel’s ability to act,” “international legitimacy” and “necessity,” all of which require affirmative responses before a decision is made to attack:

(More here.)

A Legal Defense Fund for Climate Scientists

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
NYT

For years, climate scientists have been assailed from many sides — through e-mail hacking, death threats, politician’s demands for documents, Freedom of Information requests (many having the strong smell of a fishing expedition).

A Climate Science Legal Defense Fund set up last fall has taken on a formal affiliation with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an established nonprofit group offering aid and advice to government whistleblowers and scientists working on environmental issues.

Below you can read a news release distributed by one of the organizers of the fund, Scott A. Mandia, a physical sciences professor* at Suffolk County Community College. There will be three focal points, according to the fund Web site:

(More here.)

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

By CHARLES DUHIGG and KEITH BRADSHER
NYT

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

(More here.)

Average Is Over

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT

In an essay, entitled “Making It in America,” in the latest issue of The Atlantic, the author Adam Davidson relates a joke from cotton country about just how much a modern textile mill has been automated: The average mill has only two employees today, “a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.”

Davidson’s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and sagging middle-class incomes today is largely because of the big drop in demand because of the Great Recession, but it is also because of the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign workers.

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. As they say, if horses could have voted, there never would have been cars. But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, “In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs — about 6 million in total — disappeared.”

(More here.)

Mitt, Is This Wit?

By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT

WASHINGTON

Sure, Mittens can be annoying.

Paying an infuriatingly low tax rate and stashing millions in Swiss banks and the Cayman Islands, like a John Grisham villain. Letting son Tagg tweet a picture of him doing laundry on the road.

No matter what Romney is talking about in a debate, such as the inane suggestion that illegal aliens engage in “self-deportation,” he always looks like he’s really thinking: “Holy cow, it’s mine! GIVE IT TO ME!!”

But the most annoying thing about him may be that he’s a prankster. If wit is the most sophisticated form of humor, pranks are the most juvenile.

W. was a big prankster, and you see where that got us. As head of the D.K.E. fraternity in the ’60s — when many students were risking arrest for political protests — W. branded pledges with hot wire hangers and, after some holiday beers with pals, took a “decorating committee” on a mission to the New Haven shopping district.

(More here.)

Obama Urges Tougher Laws on Financial Fraud

By EDWARD WYATT
NYT

WASHINGTON — President Obama called on Congress Tuesday to toughen laws against securities fraud and to strengthen the ability of the Securities and Exchange Commission to punish Wall Street firms that repeatedly violate antifraud statutes.

In his State of the Union address, Mr. Obama also said he would ask the attorney general to establish a special financial crimes unit to prosecute cases of large-scale financial fraud.

It is not clear how that effort would differ from the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, a cross-agency group that Mr. Obama established in November 2009. Its mission, as the White House put it then, was to “hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial crisis and to prevent another crisis from happening.”

The two initiatives represent an attempt to give financial regulators a greater ability to police the financial markets. In addition, the proposals seek to acknowledge the continuing frustration among many Americans — exemplified by the Occupy Wall Street movement — that few financial executives have been prosecuted for their actions leading up to the crisis.

(More here.)

Critiques for Capitalists in Obama’s Speech, With One in Particular in His Sights

By MARK LANDLER
NYT

WASHINGTON — President Obama did not mention Mitt Romney on Tuesday evening, but he didn’t need to. Mr. Romney, whom the president’s aides still view as his most likely opponent in the fall, was the unspoken adversary in Mr. Obama’s call for a more equitable society — the natural foil for his proposals to level the playing field for middle-class Americans, from taxes to trade policy.

When Mr. Obama talked about levying a millionaires’ tax, he might have been referring to Mr. Romney’s newly released tax return, which disclosed he paid a tax rate of 13.9 percent on income of more than $20 million in 2010.

When he referred to his administration’s bailout of the auto industry, noting that “some even said we should let it die,” he could have been talking about Mr. Romney’s argument that the carmakers should have been allowed to fail. And when he said he would oppose “any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place,” he could have been referring to Mr. Romney’s call for a rollback of regulations on Wall Street.

Nine months before he faces the voters, Mr. Obama seized what is likely to be one of his most prominent platforms of the year to draw a bright line between himself and Mr. Romney — and, in the process, try to appeal to those frustrated by the deepening economic divide.

(More here.)

Obama’s State of the Union speech: Confrontation wrapped in Kumbaya

By Chris Cillizza,
WashPost
Published: January 24

At first listen, President Obama’s State of the Union address had all the hallmarks of the sort of bipartisan, let’s-do-the-right-thing-for-America tone that characterized his 2008 presidential campaign.

But, listen closer and a more hard-edged, challenging tone reveals itself— a preview of what the incumbent will likely sound like as he seeks a second term this November.

“We’ve come too far to turn back now,” said Obama at one point. “As long as I’m President, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.”

(More here.)

In State of the Union address, Obama puts focus on economic inequality

By Peter Wallsten,
WashPost
Published: January 24

The economy continues to struggle and Americans are largely pessimistic, but dueling events Tuesday showed why in politics it’s good to be the incumbent.

In Washington, President Obama harnessed one of the grand symbols of his office — a prime-time State of the Union speech — to present himself to voters as a champion for middle-class families struggling to get by and declare that “we’ve come too far to turn back now.”

In Florida, the escalating battle for the right to challenge Obama threatened to further bloody the leading contenders — with Mitt Romney on the defensive over his tax rate as revealed by the Tuesday release of his 2010 returns and Newt Gingrich trying to fend off questions about his consulting work for mortgage giant Freddie Mac.

The day brought a reminder that, for all of Obama’s many political challenges and relatively low approval ratings, the White House has some reason for optimism.

(More here.)

Gingrich is Obama’s best surrogate

By Dana Milbank,
WashPost
Tuesday, January 24, 7:24 PM

The most important figure in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address wasn’t on the House floor. In fact, he hasn’t taken a seat in front of the chamber in 13 years.

But as he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination in Florida, former House speaker Newt Gingrich was doing more to boost President Obama’s reelection prospects than anything Obama himself could do.

Obama’s address, which marked the unofficial start of his campaign, aimed to take the economic misery that threatens to doom his reelection and turn it into class resentment: the privileged wealthy against ordinary Americans. “We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by,” he said, in remarks prepared for delivery. “Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”

Gingrich assisted in making this case by helpfully arranging for Republicans to serve as fat-cat foils. The former speaker, whose allies had already branded Mitt Romney a job-destroying “predatory capitalist,” successfully goaded the former Massachusetts governor into releasing tax returns that reveal him to be making millions of dollars per year from investments and paying paltry tax rates — while tucking money in the Cayman Islands, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock and a Swiss bank account. Gingrich exulted Tuesday that the already rich Romney is “getting richer off Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

(More here.)

Obama Speech to Make Pitch for Economic Fairness

By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr. and HELENE COOPER
NYT

WASHINGTON — President Obama, confronting a Congress in which Republicans have been determined to stymie him, will use his third State of the Union address on Tuesday night to offer a populist pitch for greater economic fairness as part of his re-election campaign.

“We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by,” Mr. Obama says in brief excerpts of the speech released by the White House on Tuesday evening. “Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”

By putting a significant accent on taxes, where his differences with Congressional Republicans have always been pronounced, Mr. Obama renews the pressure on them to extend once again a temporary payroll tax break for most working Americans — and also amplifies the attention that has been focused all week on the wealth of Mitt Romney, one of his leading challengers, who has disclosed that he pays less than 15 percent on income of more than $20 million a year.

For weeks, Mr. Obama and his aides have been signaling that the theme of Tuesday’s speech, scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. Eastern Time, would be that the richest Americans should shoulder more of the nation’s tax burden, that the middle class should have a shot at prosperity and that the disadvantaged should be provided social scaffolding to help them climb upward.

(More here.)

State of the Union? More Like State of the Campaign

By JOHN HARWOOD
NYT

Republicans have good reason to believe that when President Obama delivers the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, his goals are more partisan than presidential.

Mr. Obama has shifted into full-bore campaigning. He expects little from Congress this year beyond the extension of existing payroll tax cuts. His highest-profile initiatives are designed to enhance his re-election prospects.

Where Republicans stand on shakier ground is in their assessment of Mr. Obama’s ultimate destination. On the principal conflict between the two parties this past year — over paring long-term debt and deficits — the president can still stake a stronger claim to the political center than his Republican antagonists.

Polls show that Mr. Obama’s budget positions are closer to those of most voters than the Republican positions are. His ultimate goal, advisers say, remains a bipartisan deficit deal along the lines of the one he nearly negotiated with Speaker John A. Boehner.

(More here.)

Reagan Count: Gingrich 55, Romney 6

By NATE SILVER
NYT

In Monday night’s debate in Tampa, Fla., Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, mentioned Ronald Reagan just four words into his first answer of the night. It was the first of five times that Mr. Gingrich would mention Reagan; no other candidate did so even once.

This was not, it turns out, an isolated example. Mr. Gingrich uses Reagan’s name early and often, and in almost every debate.

Over the course of the 17 debates that he has participated in during this cycle, Mr. Gingrich has used the term “Reagan” 55 times, according to debate transcripts. By comparison, the nine other Republican candidates who have participated in the debates mentioned Reagan just 51 times combined. (Rick Santorum is a distant second to Mr. Gingrich with 14 mentions.)

Mr. Gingrich failed to mention Reagan’s name at just one debate, on Oct. 11, 2011, in Hanover, N.H. However, Mr. Gingrich had mentioned Reagan nine times at the Sept. 7 debate, which was held at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif. His use of Reagan’s name has picked up recently, with 22 mentions in the past four debates.

(More here.)