Panetta Credits Pakistani Doctor in Bin Laden Raid

By MARK MAZZETTI
NYT

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has confirmed publicly for the first time that an imprisoned doctor in Pakistan was working with the C.I.A. to gain access to Osama bin Laden’s compound in the months before American troops killed Bin Laden last May.

Mr. Panetta, in an interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes” to be broadcast Sunday, also said he believed that some officials in Pakistan knew that Bin Laden was hiding in the sprawling Abbottabad compound that was encircled with walls 18 feet high. CBS released excerpts from the interview on Saturday.

“It was the largest compound in the area,” Mr. Panetta said. “So, you would have thought that somebody would have asked the question, ‘What the hell’s going on there?’ ”

Mr. Panetta said that his beliefs were based on a hunch rather than any hard evidence, and American officials have said privately that the cache of electronic files seized at Bin Laden’s compound contain no proof that Pakistani authorities were protecting Bin Laden.

(More here.)

5 Are Arrested in British Tabloid Scandal

By JOHN F. BURNS
NYT

LONDON — A Scotland Yard team investigating the bribery of police officers by journalists searched the offices of Rupert Murdoch’s flagship British tabloid, The Sun, on Saturday after arresting a police officer and four men identified as current or former journalists at the paper. A police statement said searches were also being conducted at the homes of the arrested men.

The arrests appeared to be an intensification of the police investigation into the role of The Sun, Britain’s highest circulation daily newspaper, in the illegal news-gathering techniques that prompted Mr. Murdoch, 80, last summer to close The Sun’s sister newspaper, the weekend News of the World.

Police investigations of wrongdoing at The News of the World, involving the illegal hacking of cellphone voice mail messages and the bribery of police officers for leaking confidential information, have led to the arrest of more than a dozen reporters, editors, executives and others who worked for that paper.

A statement issued by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation in New York said the arrests on Saturday resulted from information provided to the police by the company’s Management and Standards Committee, which was charged by Mr. Murdoch last year with rooting out what the company called “unacceptable news gathering practices by individuals” at the newspapers of the company’s British subsidiary, News International.

(More here.)

Newt’s Real Legacy

By GAIL COLLINS
NYT

DO you think that after all is said and done, Newt Gingrich will just go down in history as the politician who conclusively proved that voters don’t care about a candidate’s sexual misbehavior?

Imagine the history students of 2112, reading about the early 21st century on their vaporphones, or whatever they have by then. They would get to this presidential campaign and there would be a little footnote saying that despite a totally outrageous marital history, Newt Gingrich won the presidential primary in one of the most socially conservative states in the country. Maybe there would be a clip of him making the how-dare-you-sir speech to CNN’s John King.

Probably not exactly what Newt has in mind.

Perhaps things will go differently. Maybe, despite his blah debate performances in Florida, Newt will do well in this week’s primary, and go on to win the nomination, become president and build lots of moon colonies while saving America from Shariah law and the corrosive effects of the writing of Saul Alinsky.

(More here.)

Lunar Colonies, Lunacy and Losses

By CHARLES M. BLOW
NYT

Newt Gingrich is spaced-out. Literally.

Anyone who remembers him from his days as speaker of the House in the ’90s remembers how erratic, unpredictable and off-the-wall he could be, but, so far, this campaign season he has managed to conceal his many absurdities and eccentricities.

Furthermore, many Republican primary voters seem willing to forgive and forget his past. Others seem not even to remember it. He has been able to pass himself off as a wise elder statesman — a historian without a history — able to capture the anger and anxiety of the right and articulate it with force, lucidity and gravitas.

Oh, it is to laugh! That is if you’re on the left.

(More here.)

Pursuing iPhone Thief, Officer Knew Right Buttons to Push

By C. J. HUGHES
NYT

As crime-solving tools go, it may not have the same pedigree as, say, the oversize magnifying glass. But with apologies to Sherlock Holmes, an iPhone — specifically, the iPhone 4 — proved quite useful in helping police officers track down a robber on Thursday in Manhattan.

And at a pace that may shock any reader of a long-winded Victorian detective novel, it was all wrapped up within a half-hour.

The case involved the robbery of a similar iPhone from a handbag store. On Friday, the arresting officer, Robert Garland, shared details about how the low-level crime occurred, and how the high-tech arrest was made.

At about 7 p.m. on Thursday, a cashier at Tuci Italia, at 1393 Avenue of the Americas, near West 57th Street, was taking a break near the entrance of the shop and watching videos on YouTube, Officer Garland said, noting she was wearing headphones.

(More here.)

For Ford, Three Years of Profit in a Row

By NICK BUNKLEY
NYT

DEARBORN, Mich. — The Ford Motor Company reported its third consecutive full-year profit on Friday and its largest in 13 years, ensuring its hourly workers one of the biggest profit-sharing bonuses in the company’s history.

Ford said strong sales in North America overshadowed higher commodity costs and losses in other parts of the world. The North American results mean 41,600 hourly workers in the United States will receive $6,200 in profit-sharing bonuses for 2011, up from $5,000 the year before.

Ford made an unusual accounting adjustment in the fourth quarter worth $12.4 billion that increased its 2011 earnings to $20.2 billion, the second-highest total ever for the carmaker. But excluding that one-time gain, Ford’s fourth-quarter operating profit declined.

The accounting change eliminated most of a tax allowance created when the company was bleeding billions of dollars in 2006 and saw little likelihood of making a profit in the coming years. By making the adjustment, Ford is now signaling that it expects to continue earning substantial profits.

(More here.)

No More Nice Guys: Fans Love ‘Nuclear Newt’

By TRIP GABRIEL
NYT

MOUNT DORA, Fla. — Newt Gingrich is happy to talk about Reaganomics or his plan for an “environmental solutions agency” and almost any other issue under the sun, or moon for that matter. But that is not really what his supporters come to hear.

“I think it’s about time the Republican Party put somebody up not because it’s their turn,” said Carroll Jaskulski, 63, who works in real estate, “but somebody who will get in the opposition’s face.”

For better or worse, Mr. Gingrich’s candidacy revolves around his personality, as evidenced by the disappointed reviews after a debate on Thursday in which his fires were uncharacteristically banked.

Supporters say what they love is the bombastic, take-no-prisoners candidate, the man whose signature moments were debates last week in South Carolina when he turned his cold fury on the news media.

(More here.)

France, Breaking With NATO, Will Speed Afghan Exit

By STEVEN ERLANGER and ROD NORDLAND
NYT

PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy announced on Friday that France would break with its allies in NATO and accelerate the French withdrawal from Afghanistan, pulling back combat troops a year early, by the end of 2013. Mr. Sarkozy also said that he and Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, would ask the NATO alliance for a similar speedup of the transfer of primary security responsibilities to Afghan troops.

Mr. Sarkozy increased this year’s withdrawal of troops to 1,000 from 600, and said that French troops would hand over security duties in one of their main areas of responsibility, Kapisa Province, northeast of Kabul, beginning in March, at least four months early.

“Continuing the transition and the gradual transfer of combat responsibilities will let us plan for the return of all our fighting forces by the end of 2013,” Mr. Sarkozy said after a meeting here with Mr. Karzai.

The moves followed an attack a week ago by a rogue Afghan soldier who fired on unarmed French troops embedded with Afghan forces on a training mission in Kapisa, killing 4 soldiers and wounding 15, 8 of them seriously. The attack was a major blow for France, and occurred amid a tough re-election campaign for Mr. Sarkozy. His main rival for the presidency, the Socialist François Hollande, has promised to pull all French troops out by the end of this year, contending just last Sunday that “our mission there is finished.”

(More here.)

Syrian Rebels Make Inroads With Help of Armed Fighters

By KAREEM FAHIM
NYT

SAQBA, Syria — If the scene here on Friday was anything to judge by, the armed opposition to the Syrian government was making inroads and had won control of this town at the doorstep of the capital, Damascus, and perhaps of several other neighborhoods, signaling an escalation of violence in this beleaguered country.

At a funeral for one of the more than 5,400 victims of Syria’s unfolding civil war, fighters from the opposition Free Syrian Army kept watch, their faces covered with scarves and balaclavas as they stood at the edge of a square, carrying assault rifles and grenade launchers. Thousands of demonstrators marched behind the coffin beneath the green, white and black banner of the opposition — not the Syrian government’s flag. Suspected state security agents were grabbed by the crowd.

The growing violence and assertiveness of the loosely organized military force hinted at the expanding role of armed fighters in a movement that began peacefully more than 10 months ago and that now seems to attract more defectors from Syria’s military by the day. After months of a withering government crackdown on the opposition, many protesters have come to welcome the fighters as a bulwark against the security forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

The Free Syrian Army’s leadership is based over the border in Turkey. It is unclear whether it has any organizational control over the local, ad hoc militias in Syria that one person described as “franchises.” The scene in the square in Saqba showed that the ranks of the fighters had been buttressed by army conscripts and others, including air force veterans. In some places the militias are filled with local men, and in others, like Saqba, many of the defectors come from other parts of the country, welcome but somewhat mysterious guests.

(More here.)

List of Pardons Included Many Tied to Power

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and STEPHANIE SAUL
NYT

JACKSON, Miss. — On a Saturday night in October 1995, a blue Toyota came hurtling down the wrong side of a county road in North Mississippi and crashed head-on into a pickup truck. Scotty Plunk, the driver of the truck, was killed. The driver of the Toyota, 19-year-old Joel Vann, had been drinking so much that he did not remember the accident.

Mr. Vann pleaded guilty to “D.U.I.-death,” and in lieu of jail attended a residential treatment program. This month he was one of 198 people pardoned by Mississippi’s governor, Haley Barbour, as he left office.

It is unclear what persuaded the governor to pardon Mr. Vann; his clemency application contains glowing references and a case study. But the letter to the governor from Mr. Vann’s father, the brother-in-law of a former Republican state committee member and contributor to Mr. Barbour, had a familiar tone.

“All is well in Corinth, and as you may know, we have two new Republican aldermen,” the letter said. It traced Mr. Vann’s path from rehabilitation through college, marriage and fatherhood before asking for “your consideration to grant Joel a pardon at the most appropriate time.”

(More here.)

So Who’s a Lobbyist?

NYT editorial

Under the federal lobbying law, Newt Gingrich can legitimately claim that he is not a lobbyist. That alone demonstrates how much the law needs to be changed.

As his rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, regularly and correctly points out, Mr. Gingrich has made a great deal of money in Washington peddling his influence, while carefully staying about half-an-inch short of the legal definition of lobbyist. He is only one of thousands of people in Washington’s influence industry who skirt the common-sense definition of lobbying by taking advantage of the law’s loopholes.

The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 has three tests: 1) Do you make more than $3,000 over three months from lobbying? 2) Have you had more than one lobbying contact? 3) Have you spent more than 20 percent of your time lobbying for a single client over three months?

Only a person who has met all three tests must register as a lobbyist. So a former lawmaker who has many lobbying contacts and makes $1 million a year lobbying but has no single client who takes up more than 20 percent of his time would not be considered a lobbyist.

(More here.)

Jobs, Jobs and Cars

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT

Mitch Daniels, the former Bush budget director who is now Indiana’s governor, made the Republicans’ reply to President Obama’s State of the Union address. His performance was, well, boring. But he did say something thought-provoking — and I mean that in the worst way.

For Mr. Daniels tried to wrap his party in the mantle of the late Steve Jobs, whom he portrayed as a great job creator — which is one thing that Jobs definitely wasn’t. And if we ask why Apple has created so few American jobs, we get an insight into what is wrong with the ideology dominating much of our politics.

Mr. Daniels first berated the president for his “constant disparagement of people in business,” which happens to be a complete fabrication. Mr. Obama has never done anything of the sort. He went on: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.”

Clearly, Mr. Daniels doesn’t have much of a future in the humor business. But, more to the point, anyone who reads The New York Times knows that his assertion about job creation was completely false: Apple employs very few people in this country.

(More here.)

For $2 a Star, an Online Retailer Gets 5-Star Product Reviews

By DAVID STREITFELD
NYT

In the brutal world of online commerce, where a competing product is just a click away, retailers need all the juice they can get to close a sale.

Some exalt themselves by anonymously posting their own laudatory reviews. Now there is an even simpler approach: offering a refund to customers in exchange for a write-up.

By the time VIP Deals ended its rebate on Amazon.com late last month, its leather case for the Kindle Fire was receiving the sort of acclaim once reserved for the likes of Kim Jong-il. Hundreds of reviewers proclaimed the case a marvel, a delight, exactly what they needed to achieve bliss. And definitely worth five stars.

As the collective wisdom of the crowd displaces traditional advertising, the roaring engines of e-commerce are being stoked by favorable reviews. The VIP deal reflects the importance merchants place on these evaluations — and the lengths to which they go to game the system.

Fake reviews are drawing the attention of regulators. They have cracked down on a few firms for deceitful hyping and suspect these are far from isolated instances. “Advertising disguised as editorial is an old problem, but it’s now presenting itself in different ways,” said Mary K. Engle, the Federal Trade Commission’s associate director for advertising practices. “We’re very concerned.”

(More here.)

Deconstructing a Demagogue

By TIMOTHY EGAN
NYT

When not holding forth from his favorite table at L’Auberge Chez François, nestled among the manor houses of lobbyist-thick Great Falls, Va., Dr. Newton L. Gingrich likes to lecture people about food stamps and how out-of-touch the elites are with real America.

Gingrich, as he showed in a gasping effort in Thursday night’s debate in Florida, is a demagogue distilled, like a French sauce, to the purest essence of the word’s meaning. He has no shame. He thinks the rules do not apply to him. And he turns questions about his odious personal behavior into mock outrage over the audacity of the questioner.

After inventing, and then perfecting, the modern politics of personal destruction, Gingrich has decided now to bank on the dark fears of the worst element of the Republican base to seize the nomination — using skills refined over four decades.
Monica Almeida/The New York TimesNewt Gingrich spoke at the 1998 Republican National Convention winter meeting in Indian Well, Calif.

Deconstructed, Gingrich is a thing to behold. Let’s go have a look, as my friend the travel guide Rick Steves likes to say:

(More here.)

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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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