Vox Verax

Pregnant, and Pushed Out of a Job

2012-01-31T07:10:00.002-06:00

By DINA BAKST
NYT

FEW people realize that getting pregnant can mean losing your job. Imagine a woman who, seven months into her pregnancy, is fired from her position as a cashier because she needed a few extra bathroom breaks. Or imagine another pregnant employee who was fired from her retail job after giving her supervisors a doctor’s note requesting she be allowed to refrain from heavy lifting and climbing ladders during the month and a half before her maternity leave: that’s what happened to Patricia Leahy. In 2008 a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled that her firing was fair because her employers were not obligated to accommodate her needs.

We see this kind of case in our legal clinic all the time. It happens every day to pregnant women in the United States, and it happens thanks to a gap between discrimination laws and disability laws.

Federal and state laws ban discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace. And amendments to the Americans With Disabilities Act require employers to provide reasonable accommodations to disabled employees (including most employees with medical complications arising from pregnancies) who need them to do their jobs. But because pregnancy itself is not considered a disability, employers are not obligated to accommodate most pregnant workers in any way.

As a result, thousands of pregnant women are pushed out of jobs that they are perfectly capable of performing — either put on unpaid leave or simply fired — when they request an accommodation to help maintain a healthy pregnancy. Many are single mothers or a family’s primary breadwinner. They are disproportionately low-income women, often in physically demanding jobs with little flexibility.

(More here.)

The Great Divorce

2012-01-31T07:07:00.001-06:00

By DAVID BROOKS
NYT

I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.

Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society. What’s impressive is the incredible data he produces to illustrate that trend and deepen our understanding of it.

His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big. A house in an upper-crust suburb cost only twice as much as the average new American home. The tippy-top luxury car, the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, cost about $47,000 in 2010 dollars. That’s pricy, but nowhere near the price of the top luxury cars today.

More important, the income gaps did not lead to big behavior gaps. Roughly 98 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 49 were in the labor force, upper class and lower class alike. Only about 3 percent of white kids were born outside of marriage. The rates were similar, upper class and lower class.

(More here.)

Restored Edison Records Revive Giants of 19th-Century Germany

2012-01-31T06:59:00.000-06:00

By RON COWEN
NYT

Tucked away for decades in a cabinet in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, just behind the cot in which the great inventor napped, a trove of wax cylinder phonograph records has been brought back to life after more than a century of silence.

The cylinders, from 1889 and 1890, include the only known recording of the voice of the powerful chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Two preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe’s “Faust” into a phonograph horn. (Moltke was 89 when he made the recordings — the only ones known to survive from someone born as early as 1800.) Other records found in the collection hold musical treasures — lieder and rhapsodies performed by German and Hungarian singers and pianists at the apex of the Romantic era, including what is thought to be the first recording of a work by Chopin.

Officials at Edison’s old laboratory in West Orange, N.J., now the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, unveiled the newly identified recordings on Monday.

“This is sensational,” said Ulrich Lappenküper, director of the Otto von Bismarck Foundation in Friedrichsruh, Germany. The Bismarck cylinder is documented in the foundation’s archive, but after searching for it in the United States and Germany since 2005, Dr. Lappenküper and his colleagues assumed it had been lost forever.

(More here.)

Saving Syria requires Russia’s cooperation

2012-01-31T06:51:00.002-06:00

By Editorial Board,
WashPost
Published: January 30

ARAB AND WESTERN governments plan to mount a major diplomatic offensive at the United Nations on Tuesday in the hope of breaking a deadlock in the Security Council on Syria. Nabil el-Araby, secretary general of the Arab League, will present a plan to end the swelling violence by calling for dictator Bashar al-Assad to step down and be replaced by a coalition government that would organize elections. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the foreign ministers of Britain and France will attend the meeting as a way of raising the pressure on Russia, which has been blocking action by the Security Council since the Syrian uprising began 10 months ago.

For now, there is little sign that Russia will yield: The government of Vladimir Putin is insisting that it will not support the removal of a regime that has been its primary ally in the Middle East. Yet if sustained, Moscow’s intransigence is likely to precipitate a disaster, both for Syria and for itself.

The Arab League plan is probably the only means left to avoid a full-scale civil war in Syria. Since the failure of the league’s observer mission last week, violence has again accelerated, while moving to the edge of Damascus. As a statement issued by Ms. Clinton reported Monday, “intensified Syrian security operations all around the country . . . have killed hundreds of civilians” in the past few days. It added: “The government has shelled civilian areas with mortars and tank fire and brought down whole buildings on top of their occupants.”

Despite such brutal behavior, Mr. Assad’s forces seem to be losing ground to armed opposition groups, which briefly held control of several Damascus suburbs and appear to be entrenched in cities such as Homs and Hama. The assessment of most outside observers is that the Assad regime is doomed. That means that if Russia continues to prop it up, it will not only damage its position with other Arab governments but will endanger its assets in Syria — including a naval base and weapons sales.

(More here.)

In Florida Everglades, pythons and anacondas dominate food chain

2012-01-31T06:44:00.002-06:00

Rabbits, raccoons, opossum and bobcats have all but disappeared from Everglades National Park, after giant pythons were introduced to the ecosystem.

By Darryl Fears
WashPost
Published: January 30

Every child learns this sad and basic truth about nature: The snake eats the rabbit.

But in the southernmost part of the Florida Everglades, things have taken a really wild turn. Pythons and anacondas are eating everything. The most common animals in Everglades National Park — rabbits, raccoons, opposums and bobcats — are almost gone, according to a study released Monday.

The snakes are literally fighting with alligators to sit atop the swamp’s food chain. In October, a 16-foot python was found resting after devouring a deer.

“There aren’t many native mammals that pythons can’t choke down,” said Robert N. Reed, a research wildlife biologist at the U.S. Geologial Survey’s Fort Collins Science Center and a co-author of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Officials can’t stop invasive pythons and anacondas from marauding in the Everglades, Reed said; they can only hope to contain them. “We’re trying to prevent spread to the Florida Keys and elsewhere north.”

(More here.)

Treasury Investigates Freddie Mac Investment

2012-01-31T06:34:00.002-06:00

By SHAILA DEWAN
NYT

The Treasury Department is investigating a report that Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant, bet against homeowners’ ability to refinance their loans even as it was making it more difficult for them to do so, Jay Carney, a White House spokesman, said on Monday.

The report came just as the Obama administration had been escalating its efforts to push Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to ease conditions for homeowners, including those who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

Last Friday, the Treasury announced that it would offer increased incentives to lenders to forgive portions of homeowner debt, saying pointedly that for the first time the incentives would be offered on loans held by Fannie and Freddie.

But Fannie and Freddie, which said they would review the increased incentives, have long declined to allow debt reduction on the loans it holds or guarantees, saying that it would create unnecessary losses for taxpayers. The companies, which are financed by taxpayers, have also maintained barriers to refinancing, like risk-based fees for homeowners, even as mortgage interest rates have dropped below 4 percent.

(More here.)

Report by House Democrats Absolves Administration in Gun Trafficking Case

2012-01-31T06:29:00.000-06:00

By CHARLIE SAVAGE
NYT

WASHINGTON — Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday are expected to publish a report on the disputed gun trafficking investigation called Operation Fast and Furious, concluding that agents in Arizona — not Obama administration officials — were responsible for the tactics used in the inquiry and for providing misleading information relayed to Congress.

In an 89-page report, titled “Fatally Flawed: Five Years of Gun-walking in Arizona,” the Democratic staff portrays Fast and Furious as the fourth investigation, dating back to 2006, in which Arizona-based agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives employed the tactic “gun-walking” — failing to interdict illegally purchased guns in an attempt to build a bigger case.

“This report debunks many unsubstantiated conspiracy theories,” Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, wrote in a cover letter. “Contrary to repeated claims by some, the committee has obtained no evidence that Operation Fast and Furious was a politically motivated operation conceived and directed by high-level Obama administration political appointees at the Department of Justice.”

Still, because the report was written by Democrats, the political impact of its conclusion exonerating high-level officials of wrongdoing may be limited. Its publication comes two days before Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is to testify before the committee. In previous hearings, Republicans have accused the department of sanctioning the tactics and lying to Congress.

(More here.)

Republicans have only themselves to blame

2012-01-30T22:07:00.000-06:00

By Richard Cohen,
WashPost
Monday, January 30, 5:30 PM

On Saturday night, at precisely 9:19 and 30 seconds, my iPhone, my iPad, my computer and, for all I know, my toaster were informed that Herman Cain had endorsed Newt Gingrich. The ping-ping of the devices suggested that something momentous had happened — alerts from both The Post and the New York Times — but in fact it was just additional evidence that the Republican Party has become a circus: One clown endorsed another.

It’s hard to know who is the more ridiculous figure — the grandiloquent, bombastic and compulsively dishonest Gingrich, or the beguilingly ignorant Cain, a man who has never held elective office and who was reduced to speechlessness when asked a question about Libya. Nonetheless, Gingrich, his Alfred E. Neuman grin on his face, accepted the endorsement and then went on with his nihilistic campaign for the White House. This has been an exceedingly silly political season.

But it has also been a sad one. The Republican establishment acts as if this season’s goon squad of presidential candidates has come out of nowhere, an act of God — a tsunami that hit the party and receded, leaving nothing but nitwits standing. In column after column, conservative commentators lament the present condition, but not their past acquiescence as their party turned hostile to thought, reason and the two most important words in the English language: It depends.

If you ask me what I think of abortion, I’d say, “It depends.” It depends on whether you’re talking about the ninth month of pregnancy, the first, the health of the mother, the fetus — or, even, the morning-after pill. But in the Republican contest, the answer to the question is always the same: no, no and no again. Thanks for giving the matter such careful thought.

(More here.)

The end of the road for Newt Gingrich?

2012-01-30T22:04:00.000-06:00

By Dana Milbank,
WashPost
Monday, January 30, 7:17 PM

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — It was approaching 11 p.m. at the Hyatt hotel bar here on Sunday, and reporters covering Newt Gingrich’s campaign were enjoying a few drinks when a familiar figure approached.

Gingrich put a hand on the shoulders of two women at the table and imparted a big scoop. “There’s a new poll coming out,” he announced. “I’m within five points of Romney. . . . I’ve got all the momentum.”

It’s hard to know what the most pitiful part was: That a presidential candidate was whiling away the night at a hotel bar (it was his second visit to the journalists’ table that evening)? That he felt the need to do his own spinning? That the survey he was spinning was a “robo-poll” done by machines? Or that the pollster who did it used to work for Gingrich?

In fact, real polls were showing the opposite — a new Quinnipiac poll had Mitt Romney with a 14-point lead over Gingrich in Florida. If such a drubbing occurs in the state’s primary on Tuesday, that would, for all intents and purposes, end Gingrich’s campaign. But Gingrich is going down in his own style, leaving fabrications, insults and scorched earth all the way from Miami to Pensacola.

(More here.)

CBO: Federal workers make more than their private-sector counterparts

2012-01-30T16:58:00.002-06:00

By Suzy Khimm,
WashPost
Monday, January 30, 4:05 PM

The Congressional Budget Office has found that the federal government pays slightly more in average wages and significantly more in benefits than the private sector. But the advantages mostly accrue to less-educated workers, while compensation for federal employees with professional and doctoral degrees lag significantly behind their private-sector counterparts. The Washington Post Federal workers, shown in front of the White House.

On average, the CBO discovered that the federal government pays about 2 percent more in total wages and about 16 percent more when the employer-provided benefits are factored in, comparing workers with similar occupations and backgrounds. But there was a big range based on education level: Federal workers with no more than a high-school degree earned about 21 percent more than comparable private-sector workers, while those with a professional or doctoral degree earned about 23 percent less on average.

Anecdotal evidence seems to back this up, too: The highest-paid White House advisers made $172,200 last year, as Derek Thompson points out, and it’s reasonable to assume that former Office of Management and Budget chief Peter Orszag makes significantly more at his new job at Citigroup. Though, as Modeled Behavior rightly notes, his compensation may be higher because of his White House experience, revealing the latent benefit of federal employment for higher-educated workers who leave for the private sector.

Similarly, if the value of benefits were factored in, those with a high-school degree at most had 36 percent higher total compensation, while the professional/doctoral set earned about 18 percent less than their private-sector counterparts. The biggest factor behind this gap is “the defined-benefit pension plan that is available to most federal employees,” the CBO explains, noting that private employers have been moving away from such benefits.

(More here.)

A Mormon church in need of reform

2012-01-30T16:55:00.000-06:00

By Carrie Sheffield,
WashPost
Published: January 29

There has been much talk recently about whether America is ready for a Mormon president. This tolerance question should cut both ways.

Nearly a quarter of Americans told Gallup last summer that they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon president, which is unfortunate since former governor Mitt Romney and former candidate Jon Huntsman are both smart, capable men.

Meanwhile, though the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life recently found that 56 percent of Mormons think America is ready for a Mormon president, the church isn’t exactly welcoming of outsiders. Mormons account for 57 percent of Utah residents yet some 91 percent of Utah state legislators self-identify as Mormons. The state that’s home to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has elected only two non-Mormon governors in nearly 116 years and has sent just one non-Mormon to Congress in the past five decades.

Some of this distrust of outsiders is understandable because the church has been persecuted by religious and secular foes since its inception. Many mainstream Christians consider Mormonism a cult — a fact thought to have given Romney trouble in South Carolina’s primary. To combat anti-Mormonism, last year church leaders expanded a multimillion-dollar image campaign begun in 2010 that is nearly identical to the “I Am A Scientologist” campaign from a year earlier: On airwaves, YouTube, billboards and more, smiling, family-oriented people declare, “I’m a Mormon.” It’s part of a series of efforts to buy public affection.

(More here.)

Newt Gingrich and the Future of the Right

2012-01-30T12:08:00.000-06:00

By THOMAS B. EDSALL
NYT

In 1999, shortly after the Senate voted to acquit President Clinton on two charges of impeachment stemming from his affair with the intern Monica Lewinsky, Paul Weyrich — mastermind of the union of the Republican Party and the Christian right, a founder of the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the Free Congress Foundation — threw up his hands in despair.

In a letter to his ideological allies, Weyrich declared: “I no longer believe that there is a moral majority. I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values.”

Weyrich declared defeat:

Cultural Marxism is succeeding in its war against our culture. The question becomes, if we are unable to escape the cultural disintegration that is gripping society, then what hope can we have?

In the face of this onslaught of moral corruption, Weyrich counseled withdrawal from society at large. A “legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture,” he wrote. “We need to drop out of this culture, and find places, even if it is where we physically are right now, where we can live godly, righteous and sober lives.”

(More here.)

Fighting Back Against Corporate Personhood

2012-01-30T06:09:00.003-06:00

Friday 27 January 2012
by Bill Moyers
Foreward to "Corporations Are Not People" by Jeffrey D. Clements
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five conservative members of the Supreme Court handed for-profit corporations the right to secretly flood political campaigns with tidal waves of cash on the eve of an election, they moved America closer to outright plutocracy, where political power derived from wealth is devoted to the protection of wealth. It is now official: Just as they have adorned our athletic stadiums and multiple places of public assembly with their logos, corporations can officially put their brand on the government of the United States as well as the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the fifty states.

The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission giving “artificial entities” the same rights of “free speech” as living, breathing human beings will likely prove as infamous as the Dred Scott ruling of 1857 that opened the unsettled territories of the United States to slavery whether future inhabitants wanted it or not. It took a civil war and another hundred years of enforced segregation and deprivation before the effects of that ruling were finally exorcised from our laws. God spare us civil strife over the pernicious consequences of Citizens United, but unless citizens stand their ground, America will divide even more swiftly into winners and losers with little pity for the latter.

Citizens United is but the latest battle in the class war waged for thirty years from the top down by the corporate and political right. Instead of creating a fair and level playing field for all, government would become the agent of the powerful and privileged. Public institutions, laws, and regulations, as well as the ideas, norms, and beliefs that aimed to protect the common good and helped create America’s iconic middle class, would become increasingly vulnerable. The Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow succinctly summed up results: “The redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful.” In the wake of Citizens United, popular resistance is all that can prevent the richest economic interests in the country from buying the democratic process lock, stock, and barrel.

America has a long record of conflict with corporations. Wealth acquired under capitalism is in and of itself no enemy to democracy, but wealth armed with political power—power to choke off opportunities for others to rise, power to subvert public purposes and deny public needs—is a proven danger to the “general welfare” proclaimed in the Preamble to the Constitution as one of the justifications for America’s existence.

(Original here.)

FDA workers sue agency over monitoring personal e-mails

2012-01-30T05:51:00.000-06:00

By Ellen Nakashima and Lisa Rein,
WashPost
Published: January 29

The Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices that posed unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show.

The surveillance — detailed in e-mails and memos unearthed by the scientists and doctors, who filed a lawsuit against the FDA in U.S. District Court in Washington this week — took place over two years as the plaintiffs accessed their personal Gmail accounts from government computers.

Information garnered this way eventually contributed to the harassment or dismissal of all six of the FDA employees, the suit alleges. All had worked in an office responsible for reviewing devices for cancer screening and other purposes.

The government documents show that, starting in January 2009, the FDA intercepted communications with congressional staffers and draft versions of whistleblower complaints complete with editing notes in the margins. The agency also took electronic snapshots of the computer desktops of the FDA employees and reviewed documents they saved on the hard drives of their government computers.

(More here.)

Gingrich delivers on ‘wild and woolly’ vow

2012-01-30T05:43:00.000-06:00

By Stephanie McCrummen,
WashPost
Published: January 29

SARASOTA, Fla. — In a cavernous airplane hangar, an emcee warmed up a restless crowd.

“If you’re going to take on the establishment, you can’t be namby-pamby . . . !” he began as people cheered and waved little American flags.

“Let’s send Obama back to Chicago!” he went on, and a gray-haired woman yelled, “You mean out of the country!” and an elderly man shouted, “Yeah!” and a younger woman held up a homemade sign that read “Newt-er Obama!”

“Throw the dogs a bone!” a man in neatly creased khakis blurted out, and soon people began chanting the name of the candidate they believe could give them the brawl they were spoiling for.

“Newt! Newt! Newt! Newt!”

(More here.)

The Austerity Debacle

2012-01-30T05:32:00.000-06:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.

And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.

O.K., about those caveats: On one side, British unemployment was much higher in the 1930s than it is now, because the British economy was depressed — mainly thanks to an ill-advised return to the gold standard — even before the Depression struck. On the other side, Britain had a notably mild Depression compared with the United States.

(More here.)

The Mixtape of the Revolution

2012-01-30T05:27:00.000-06:00

By SUJATHA FERNANDES
NYT

DEF JAM will probably never sign them, but Cheikh Oumar Cyrille Touré, from a small town about 100 miles southeast of Dakar, Senegal, and Hamada Ben Amor, a 22-year-old man from a port city 170 miles southeast of Tunis, may be two of the most influential rappers in the history of hip-hop.

Mr. Touré, a k a Thiat (“Junior”), and Mr. Ben Amor, a k a El Général, both wrote protest songs that led to their arrests and generated powerful political movements. “We are drowning in hunger and unemployment,” spits Thiat on “Coup 2 Gueule” (from a phrase meaning “rant”) with the Keurgui Crew. El Général’s song “Head of State” addresses the now-deposed President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali over a plaintive background beat. “A lot of money was pledged for projects and infrastructure/Schools, hospitals, buildings, houses/but the sons of dogs swallowed it in their big bellies.” Later, he rhymes, “I know people have a lot to say in their hearts, but no way to convey it.” The song acted as sluice gates for the release of anger that until then was being expressed clandestinely, if at all.

During the recent wave of revolutions across the Arab world and the protests against illegitimate presidents in African countries like Guinea and Djibouti, rap music has played a critical role in articulating citizen discontent over poverty, rising food prices, blackouts, unemployment, police repression and political corruption. Rap songs in Arabic in particular — the new lingua franca of the hip-hop world — have spread through YouTube, Facebook, mixtapes, ringtones and MP3s from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya and Algeria, helping to disseminate ideas and anthems as the insurrections progressed. El Général, for example, was featured on a mixtape put out by the dissident group Khalas (Enough) in Libya, which also included songs like “Tripoli Is Calling” and “Dirty Colonel.”

(More here.)

Surveying a Global Power Shift

2012-01-30T05:23:00.002-06:00

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
NYT Book Review

STRATEGIC VISION: America and the Crisis of Global Power
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Illustrated. 208 pages. Basic Books. $26.

The 2008 crash and America and Europe’s continuing economic woes; the rise of China and worries about the decline of the West; and technology-fueled uprisings around the world from the Arab Spring protests to anti-Putin demonstrations in Russia — such developments underscore just how prescient Zbigniew Brzezinski has been in his earlier writings.

In the early 1990s, when some scholars were arguing that the end of the cold war and the implosion of the Soviet Union signified the advent of a new era in which liberal democracy would triumph around the planet, Mr. Brzezinski was warning about the forces of upheaval rumbling through the developing world and the weaknesses of the West that could undermine its global clout.

In his 1993 book “Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century” Mr. Brzezinski argued that the acceleration of communication made possible by technology set contemporary history apart from the past, that China was more likely than Russia to assume a leadership role on the world stage, and that America’s emphasis on “material wealth, on consumption and on the propagation of self-indulgence as the definition of the good life” could endanger its pre-eminence as a global power.

Now, in his provocative new book, “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power,” Mr. Brzezinski — the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter — surveys the current state of world affairs. He provides a clear-eyed, sharp-tongued assessment of this hinge moment in time, when the world’s center of gravity is shifting “from the West to the East.”

(More here.)

Trillions in tax cuts

2012-01-29T19:34:00.002-06:00

By Editorial Board,
Washington Post
Sunday, January 29, 6:05 PM

THE REPUBLICAN presidential candidates claim to abhor debt, yet propose tax cuts that would add trillions more.

Yes, trillions.

The case for continuing the George W. Bush tax cuts, at a cost of $3.7 trillion over 10 years (including interest), is shaky enough. The cuts for the wealthy alone, which President Obama would end, would cost with interest about $1 trillion over the next decade. But the GOP candidates want to continue all those cuts — and add many more, the vast bulk of which would again go to the wealthiest taxpayers.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney proposes additional cuts that would drain $180 billion from the treasury in 2015 alone, according to calculations by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. The nonpartisan center has not calculated the 10-year cost of the plan. But merely multiplying by 10 illustrates that Romney is talking trillions.

And Mr. Romney’s is the most modest of the GOP proposals. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s plan would cost an astonishing $850 billion in 2015 on top of the Bush tax cuts. Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum’s would cost $900 billion in 2015 alone.

(More here.)

Solyndra as a victim of entrepreneurial history

2012-01-29T19:21:00.002-06:00

LP note: This is what I teach my students — the business of technological advances is not all ups. It's a progression of ups and downs. Usually the end result is up, but there are the inevitable failures along the way. Look at the history just in this century: Cars, aeronautics, radio, TV, computers, internet. The evidence is clear.

In the case of Solyndra, it was external inputs that caused the company's rise and demise. Sure, U.S. taxpayers lost money. But this amount is clearly minuscule compared to the amounts lost due to the 2008 financial meltdown and the Iraq War.

And who knows? Solyndra's technology may ultimately win out in the end ... once the Chinese see it as superior and adopt it.

Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust

By Juliet Eilperin January 20, 2012 | 3:21 pm | Wired February 2012

In 2005, Congress created a federal loan guarantee program as part of the Energy Policy Act, which initially was authorized at $4 billion. Though ostensibly set up to promote nonpolluting energy sources, it was, like most federal slush funds, created by a politician (in this case, former Republican New Mexico senator Pete Domenici) to help a specific industry (in this case, nuclear energy). But the expected nuclear renaissance never happened; the private market was unwilling to finance plants that cost billions to build, created toxic waste, and ran into all the NIMBY hurdles that come with nuclear energy. So the door was open for applications from other clean-energy sectors.

While solar projects would ultimately receive more than three-quarters of the program’s financial support, the list of recipients included everything from a wind farm in Oregon to a cellulosic ethanol plant in Kansas. But by the time Bush left office, not a penny had been distributed. Most of the applications, including one from Solyndra, were still wending their way through the approval rounds at the Department of Energy. There were only 16 employees tasked with sorting through the applications and relevant data, and the loan program was more of a theoretical construct than an engine of economic activity.

Then Obama took office, and the loan program suddenly had an administration committed to using federal dollars to stimulate what it referred to repeatedly as “the clean-energy economy.” For Democrats, the concept of clean energy hit every button there was to push: It addressed the looming problem of climate change, offered a domestic source of electricity and fuel, and promised new jobs in a shaky economy.

The Department of Energy, which for decades had focused on managing nuclear waste and weapons and doling out subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, had a new leader—Steven Chu, a renowned physicist and Nobel laureate—and a fresh mandate.

(More here.)

GOP's politics of racial resentment

2012-01-29T19:12:00.000-06:00

By Leonard Pitts Jr.
Philadelphia Inquirer

I got my first job when I was 12. The deacons at my church paid me $2 a week to keep it swept and mopped.

So I do not need Newt Gingrich to lecture me about a good work ethic. In this, I suspect I speak for the vast majority of 39 million African Americans.

There has been a lot of talk about whether Gingrich's recent language, including his performance in the South Carolina debates and his earlier declaration that Barack Obama has been America's best "food-stamp president," amounts to a coded appeal to racist sensitivities. The answer is simple: yes.

In this, Gingrich joins a line of Republicans stretching back at least to Richard Nixon. From that president's trumpeting of "law and order" (i.e., "I will get these black demonstrators off the streets") to Ronald Reagan's denunciation of "welfare queens" (i.e., "I will stop these lazy black women from living high on your tax dollars") to George H.W. Bush's use of Willie Horton (i.e., "Elect me or this scary black man will get you"), the GOP long ago mastered the craft of using nonracial language to say racial things.

So Gingrich is working from a well-thumbed playbook when he hectors blacks about their work ethic and says they should demand paychecks and not be "satisfied" with food stamps. As if most blacks had ever done anything else. As if an unemployment rate that for some mysterious reason runs twice the national average does not make paychecks hard to come by. As if blacks were the only, or even the majority of, food-stamp recipients.

(More here.)

Abracadabra: Vaporizing trash

2012-01-29T19:05:00.001-06:00

High-Powered Plasma Turns Garbage Into Gas

By David Wolman January 20, 2012 | 3:26 pm | Wired February 2012

From the highway, one of the biggest landfills in the US doesn’t look at all like a dump. It’s more like a misplaced mesa. Only when you drive closer to the center of operations at the 700-acre Columbia Ridge Landfill in Arlington, Oregon, does the function of this place become clear. Some 35,000 tons of mostly household trash arrive here weekly by train from Seattle and by truck from Portland.

Dump trucks inch up the gravel road to the top of the heap, where they tip their cargo of dirty diapers, discarded furniture, lemon rinds, spent lightbulbs, Styrofoam peanuts, and all the rest onto a carefully flattened blanket of dirt. At night, more dump trucks spread another layer of dirt over the day’s deposits, preventing trash from escaping on the breeze.

But as of November, not all the trash arriving at Columbia Ridge has ended up buried. On the southwest side of the landfill, bus-sized containers of gas connect to ribbons of piping, which run into a building that looks like an airplane hangar with a loading dock. Here, dump trucks also offload refuse. This trash, however, is destined for a special kind of treatment—one that could redefine how we think about trash.

In an era when it’s getting more and more confusing to determine where to toss your paper coffee cup—compost? recycle? trash? arrrgh!—and when no one seems to have a viable solution to the problem of humanity’s ever-expanding rubbish pile, this plant represents a step toward radical simplification. It uses plasma gasification, a technology that turns trash into a fuel without producing emissions. In other words: a guilt-free solution to our waste problems.

(More here.)

Bill Moyers (again) tells it like it is

2012-01-29T18:21:00.000-06:00

If you are still wondering what happened in 2008 with the financial meltdown and why we're still suffering from it today, you need to view the first few episodes of Bill Moyers & Company. Moyers is a soothsayer, and while his detractors would portray him as being an unrepentant liberal, one cannot logically argue with facts.

Enough said.

John Reed on Big Banks' Power and Influence from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Hysteria and the Teenage Girl

2012-01-29T14:37:00.000-06:00

By CAITLIN FLANAGAN
NYT

LOS ANGELES

CHEERLEADERS with Tourette’s syndrome. Like a fly buzzing against the window, this weird arrangement of words flitted across the edge of my consciousness last week. I kept thinking I should take a minute to track down the Onion piece from which this kooky phrase surely emanated, but finally committed some desultory Googling, and discovered that the buzzing idea correlated (more or less) to an actual event. A break in the case — and the appearance of two of the girls in a television interview — brought the story to national attention.

One afternoon last October in a small town about 50 miles from Buffalo, a high school cheerleader lay down for a nap, and woke up changed. She had been struck not with Tourette’s but with a host of symptoms that resembled it: facial tics, uncontrollable movement, stuttering, verbal outbursts. Several other schoolmates have been afflicted, for a total of 14 girls. One boy reported symptoms.

Parents, school officials and doctors investigated possible organic causes of this troubling event, and serially ruled out potential suspects, from vaccine reactions to environmental hazards. (Erin Brockovich is looking into possible toxic causes.) The girls continued to suffer, dropped out of school and gave television interviews in which their arms looped around wildly and their voices broke and warbled.

Well, that’s the kind of nutty story that only happens once, or so I briefly thought, until more focused Googling quickly led me to an almost identical episode, this one in 2002, in a high school in rural North Carolina. Once again, a cheerleader was first to manifest the strange symptoms, and once again other girls, some of them cheerleaders, were struck with the same condition.

(More here.)

How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘1 Percent’

2012-01-29T13:12:00.001-06:00

By George Lakey, Waging Nonviolence
Posted on January 29, 2012, Printed on January 29, 2012
Alternet

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”

Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Kurt Wallender and Jo Nesbro will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories.

(More here.)

McManus: A Gingrich presidency?

2012-01-29T07:50:00.003-06:00

It would be just like its chief: Noisy, combative and prone to self-generated crises.

Doyle McManus
LA Times
January 29, 2012

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that if Mitt Romney won the South Carolina primary, the Republican presidential race would be over and he would be the nominee. But Romney didn't win, and that means it's time to consider the unthinkable: What would life under President Gingrich be like?

It's an easy question to answer because Gingrich has spent much of his campaign listing all the things he wants to do — not only in his first term or his first 100 days but in his first eight hours.

A Gingrich presidency would be just like its chief: noisy, combative and prone to self-generated crises.

But don't take my word for it. Let's allow President Gingrich to describe his first day in the White House in his own words.

"Our goal would be, by the time President Obama lands in Chicago, to have dismantled about 40% of his government," Gingrich said recently.

(More here.)

Pentagon Seeks Mightier Bomb vs. Iran

2012-01-29T07:46:00.000-06:00

By ADAM ENTOUS And JULIAN E. BARNES
WSJ

WASHINGTON—Pentagon war planners have concluded that their largest conventional bomb isn't yet capable of destroying Iran's most heavily fortified underground facilities, and are stepping up efforts to make it more powerful, according to U.S. officials briefed on the plan.

The 30,000-pound "bunker-buster" bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, was specifically designed to take out the hardened fortifications built by Iran and North Korea to cloak their nuclear programs.

But initial tests indicated that the bomb, as currently configured, wouldn't be capable of destroying some of Iran's facilities, either because of their depth or because Tehran has added new fortifications to protect them.

Doubts about the MOP's effectiveness prompted the Pentagon this month to secretly submit a request to Congress for funding to enhance the bomb's ability to penetrate deeper into rock, concrete and steel before exploding, the officials said.

(More here.)

For CIA family, a deadly suicide bombing leads to painful divisions

2012-01-29T07:19:00.001-06:00

Jennifer Matthews was on assignment in Afghanistan in 2009 when a suicide bomber killed her and six other CIA operatives. Now, her relatives break their silence on how her death affected them.

By Ian Shapira,
WashPost
Published: January 28

The call from the Central Intelligence Agency came on a December afternoon in 2009 while Gary Anderson was skiing with his three children. It’s about your wife, the agency man said.

Standing inside Eagle Rock ski lodge in Pennsylvania, Anderson pleaded for details. The CIA official said simply: Where are you? We’ll meet you.

Anderson suspected dreadful news about Jennifer Matthews, his college sweetheart, his wife of 22 years and a CIA operative on assignment almost 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. With several hours until the CIA meeting, Anderson and his three children — then 12, 9 and 6 — hit the slopes for one more hour. The father wanted to cling a little longer to normalcy, to a life between before and after.

Finally, the Fredericksburg family got into their silver minivan and headed to a nearby motel. There, in a sterile conference room, CIA officials told Anderson the news: His wife, one of the CIA’s top al-Qaeda experts, had just been killed in an explosion at a base in Khost province, in eastern Afghanistan. There was no mention of a double agent, no indication that six other CIA operatives had died in the deadliest attack on agency personnel in decades.

(More here.)

Made in the World

2012-01-29T07:10:00.000-06:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT

THE Associated Press reported last week that Fidel Castro, the former president of Cuba, wrote an opinion piece on a Cuban Web site, following a Republican Party presidential candidates’ debate in Florida, in which he argued that the “selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”

When Marxists are complaining that your party’s candidates are disconnected from today’s global realities, it’s generally not a good sign. But they’re not alone.

There is today an enormous gap between the way many C.E.O.’s in America — not Wall Street-types, but the people who lead premier companies that make things and create real jobs — look at the world and how the average congressmen, senator or president looks at the world. They are literally looking at two different worlds — and this applies to both parties.

Consider the meeting that this paper reported on from last February between President Obama and the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in October. The president, understandably, asked Jobs why almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were made overseas. Obama inquired, couldn’t that work come back home? “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs replied.

(More here.)

Ritalin Gone Wrong

2012-01-29T06:59:00.000-06:00

By L. ALAN SROUFE
NYT

THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning.

But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled?

In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.

As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.

(More here.)

Tension on the Tarmac

2012-01-29T06:55:00.002-06:00

By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT

MIAMI

WHAT is it with Barack Obama’s penchant for getting in tangles with blond politicians on airport tarmacs?

Usually, tarmacs are for joyous welcomes or teary goodbyes. But No Drama Obama saves his rare tempests for the runway.

In the last primary season, the tension in the relationship between Hillary Clinton, who had expected to glide to the nomination, and the upstart younger senator from Illinois came to a head one day in December 2007 as both were preparing to board their planes in Washington to go to an Iowa debate.

Hillary had sent word that she wanted to talk to Obama. Standing in front of her plane, she apologized to him for the comments of her co-chairman in New Hampshire, Billy Shaheen, who had warned that Republicans would pounce on Obama’s confessions of cocaine and marijuana use.

But given the opening, Obama dived in, telling Clinton that she should intervene to stop the pattern of insinuations and attacks by her supporters, including one by a volunteer in Iowa who had forwarded an e-mail claiming Obama was a Muslim.

(More here.)

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind?

2012-01-29T05:45:00.001-06:00

Children today reach puberty earlier and adulthood later. The result: A lot of teenage weirdness. Alison Gopnik on how we might readjust adolescence.

By ALISON GOPNIK
WSJ

"What was he thinking?" It's the familiar cry of bewildered parents trying to understand why their teenagers act the way they do.

How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash? Why does the girl who knows all about birth control find herself pregnant by a boy she doesn't even like? What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?

If you think of the teenage brain as a car, today's adolescents acquire an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.

Adolescence has always been troubled, but for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. A leading theory points to changes in energy balance as children eat more and move less.

(More here.)

The Calculations That Led Romney to the Warpath

2012-01-29T05:25:00.002-06:00

By JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY
NYT

MIAMI — Facing the unthinkable here just seven days ago — a second loss in a row to Newt Gingrich — Mitt Romney’s campaign team hatched a two-part plan to win in Florida: make Newt mad and Mitt meaner.

In a call last Sunday morning, just hours after Mr. Romney’s double-digit loss to Mr. Gingrich in the South Carolina primary, the Romney team outlined the new approach to the candidate. Put aside the more acute focus on President Obama and narrow in on Mr. Gingrich.

Find lines of attack that could goad Mr. Gingrich into angry responses and rally mainstream Republicans. Swarm Gingrich campaign events to rattle him. Have Mr. Romney drop his above-the-fray persona and carry the fight directly to his opponent, especially in two critical debates scheduled for the week.

The results of that strategy, carried out by a veteran squad of strategists and operatives assembled by Mr. Romney to deal with just this kind of moment, have been on striking display here.

(More here.)

Panetta Credits Pakistani Doctor in Bin Laden Raid

2012-01-28T17:49:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-28T17:44:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-28T17:36:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-28T10:15:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-28T06:21:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-28T06:18:00.002-06:00

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’

2012-01-28T06:14:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-28T06:03:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-28T05:53:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-28T05:43:00.000-06:00

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?

2012-01-27T21:56:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-27T21:53:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-27T21:49:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-27T21:37:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-27T18:03:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-27T08:44:00.004-06:00

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

2012-01-27T07:40:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-27T07:26:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-27T07:23:00.000-06:00

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.

2012-01-27T07:13:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-27T07:01:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-27T06:50:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-26T19:49:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-26T07:28:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-26T06:07:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-26T06:05:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-26T05:58:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-26T05:44:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-26T05:42:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-26T05:38:00.003-06:00

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

2012-01-26T05:22:00.003-06:00

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.

2012-01-26T05:15:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-26T05:13:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-26T05:06:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-26T04:55:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-25T19:13:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-25T18:16:00.002-06:00

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?

2012-01-25T17:41:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-25T13:00:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-25T06:35:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-25T06:30:00.001-06:00

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?

2012-01-25T06:27:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-25T06:20:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-25T06:14:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-25T06:12:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-25T06:09:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-24T20:33:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-24T18:24:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-24T18:20:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-24T18:13:00.002-06:00

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.)

Poll: Partisan Split Over Tax Policies

2012-01-24T15:22:00.000-06:00

By ALLISON KOPICKI
NYT

It may come as no surprise, but Americans are deeply split along party lines when it comes to federal tax policy.

A New York Times/CBS News poll released Tuesday found that a majority of Republicans approve of the current tax policy, while most Democrats and independents disapprove of taxing income from capital gains at a lower rate than earned income.

The survey was taken in the last several days as Mitt Romney faced intensifying criticism from his rivals to release his tax returns, resulting in his decision to disclose his 2010 information and his anticipated 2011 payments.

Just before the South Carolina primary last week, Mr. Romney announced that his marginal tax rate was closer to 15 percent – the rate levied on dividends and capital gains. A review by The New York Times of the returns released Tuesday showed that his tax rate for 2010 was closer to 14 percent, but is expected to be more than 15 percent for 2011.

(More here.)

Poll: Romney's Unfavorability Skyrockets

2012-01-24T14:36:00.000-06:00

by Steven Shepard
National Journal
Updated: January 24, 2012 | 8:23 a.m.
January 24, 2012 | 7:46 a.m.

The percentage of Americans who have a favorable opinion of Mitt Romney decreased over the past two weeks, and the number who hold an unfavorable opinion of the former Massachusetts governor has skyrocketed 15 percentage points over that time, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll released early Tuesday.

Just 31 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Romney, the poll shows. Almost half, 49 percent, have an unfavorable opinion, and 21 percent said they have no opinion. Romney now holds virtually the same favorable and unfavorable ratings as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose numbers have also dropped over the past month -- suggesting that the ugly, protracted fight for the Republican presidential nomination is dragging down its two most prominent participants.

In the previous poll, conducted between Romney's then-apparent victory in Iowa and his rout in New Hampshire, 39 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of him, and only 34 percent had an unfavorable opinion.

But since his New Hampshire victory, Romney has been savaged by his GOP opponents and outside groups on his personal income taxes and his role at Bain Capital, the Boston-based investment firm he helped found.

(More here.)

Paul Begala: The Strangely Silent Jan. 23 Debate in Tampa

2012-01-24T07:43:00.002-06:00

Without the cheering and jeering crowds to whip him up, Newt was oddly subdued. That left Mitt in the spotlight, squirming about his tax returns.

by Paul Begala
The Daily Beast
January 24, 2012 12:10 AM EST

When NBC’s Matt Lauer asked multimillionaire Mitt Romney about income inequality and the decline of the middle class, Romney replied, “You know, I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms.”

Lauer’s NBC colleague Brian Williams gave Romney and his competitors a chance to discuss issues without the cheering, jeering, booing, embarrassing crowds we have seen in prior GOP debates. Without the roar of the crowd, Newt was much less effective. Like all bullies, he feeds off the mob. But tonight, at the urging of Williams, the crowd was mute and Gingrich’s faux fury, so effective in prior debates, never materialized.

Romney got what he wanted—a quiet room where he could coolly rebut Gingrich’s attacks and then launch his own preprogrammed counterattacks. His super-duper PAC is already savaging Gingrich on television, spending millions to inform Florida Republicans about Gingrich’s ethical woes, his lucrative Beltway consulting gigs, and his sofa sharing with Nancy Pelosi.

This will not, I believe, stop Newt’s momentum. And it does not do anything for the central problems facing Romney’s candidacy: middle-class voters don’t like him and conservative voters don’t trust him. Romney simply cannot connect to what Bill Clinton used to call “walkin’ around folks.” He looked especially phony when talking about undocumented workers “self-deporting” and squirmed when asked about his tax returns.

Indeed, the saddest moment of the debate—perhaps of the entire campaign—was Willard Mitt Romney distancing himself from George Romney. The elder Romney walked out of the 1964 GOP Convention because he believed the party of Lincoln was walking away from civil rights. And when he sought the presidency in 1968 he released 12 years of back tax returns, noting at the time that releasing only one year might allow a politician to clean up his returns knowing he was planning to run for office.

(More here.)

The Gusts of Gingrich

2012-01-24T06:02:00.002-06:00

By FRANK BRUNI
NYT

Not long ago, a veteran Republican strategist told me that a politician could succeed with his zipper down, but not with his words unbridled.

He was talking about Newt Gingrich, and was saying that Gingrich’s philandering and three marriages weren’t going to be his real problem, given how many men in government had been forgiven for messy sexual pasts.

His greater liabilities were his wildly mixed messages, gross overstatements and insistence on inserting himself — like some mouthy Gump doppelgänger with a doctorate — into every key moment of the late 20th century. Gingrich was supposed to bloviate his way into oblivion.

Instead he bloviated his way to a 12-point victory in South Carolina and a credible shot at the Republican nomination. Grandiosity, it turns out, is good.

(More here.)

Preserved in Tar, Relics From Long Before Freeways

2012-01-24T05:56:00.003-06:00

By SEAN B. CARROLL
NYT

LOS ANGELES — No one expects to stumble across a cache of Picasso’s works in the middle of a desert. So who would think that just off bustling Wilshire Boulevard, tucked between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the national headquarters of the Screen Actors Guild, lie buried some of the most exquisitely preserved fossils in the world?

The fossils of the La Brea Tar Pits are just that. They were first discovered in Maj. Henry Hancock’s asphalt mine in the 1870s, when Los Angeles was but a village. Since the early 20th century, more than one million bones have been excavated from the pits; when reassembled, they provide an extraordinary time capsule of the creatures that roamed Southern California 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.

Interest in these animals today, however, is more than a matter of prehistoric curiosity. Many of the species found at La Brea disappeared altogether as the planet warmed at the end of the last ice age. The reasons for their demise are not yet fully understood, but may be especially pertinent to understanding the effects of climate change on animal populations today.

The tar pits have so many fossils precisely because of the tar, which one can still see bubbling to the surface in spots throughout Hancock Park. The gooey asphalt that trapped and entombed the animals turns out to be a great preservative. Thousands of perfect skulls and nearly complete skeletons representing more than 200 vertebrate species have been retrieved from the death trap.

(More here.)

After Being Stricken by Drought, Istanbul Yields Ancient Treasure

2012-01-24T05:52:00.002-06:00

By JENNIFER PINKOWSKI
NYT

ISTANBUL — For 1,600 years, this city — Turkey’s largest — has been built and destroyed, erected and erased, as layer upon layer of life has thrived on its seven hills.

Today, Istanbul is a city of 13 million, spread far beyond those hills. And on a long-farmed peninsula jutting into Lake Kucukcekmece, 13 miles west of the city center, archaeologists have made an extraordinary find.

The find is Bathonea, a substantial harbor town dating from the second century B.C. Discovered in 2007 after a drought lowered the lake’s water table, it has been yielding a trove of relics from the fourth to the sixth centuries A.D., a period that parallels Istanbul’s founding and its rise as Constantinople, a seat of power for three successive empires — the Eastern Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman.

While there are some historical records of this early period, precious few physical artifacts exist. The slim offerings in the Istanbul section of the Archaeological Museums here reflect that, paling in comparison with the riches on display from Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Lebanon.

(More here.)

‘Super PAC’ for Gingrich to Get $5 Million Infusion

2012-01-24T05:41:00.000-06:00

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
NYT

A wealthy backer of Newt Gingrich will inject $5 million into a “super PAC” supporting his presidential bid, two people with knowledge of the contribution said on Monday, providing a major boost to Mr. Gingrich as he seeks to fend off aggressive attacks from Mitt Romney, his main Republican rival.

The supporter, Dr. Miriam Adelson, is the wife of Sheldon Adelson, a longtime Gingrich friend and a patron who this month contributed $5 million to the super PAC, Winning Our Future. Dr. Adelson’s check will bring the couple’s total contributions to Winning Our Future to $10 million, a figure that could substantially neutralize the millions of dollars already being spent in Florida by Mr. Romney and Restore Our Future, a super PAC supporting him.

Mr. Adelson’s initial check financed a barrage of negative ads against Mr. Romney in South Carolina, helping Mr. Gingrich to an upset victory in Saturday’s Republican primary there. But those attacks, which focused on Mr. Romney’s wealth and private equity career, also drew condemnation from many conservatives, who said Mr. Gingrich’s allies were undercutting free-market capitalism and amplifying class-warfare arguments being made by Democrats and Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.

In making the couple’s second $5 million contribution, Dr. Adelson expressed a wish to Winning Our Future officials that the money be used “to continue the pro-Newt message,” one of the people familiar with the contribution said, rather than attack Mr. Romney.

(More here.)

Mitt Romney’s tax returns shed some light on his investment wealth

2012-01-24T05:36:00.002-06:00

By Lori Montgomery, Jia Lynn Yang and Philip Rucker,
WashPost
Published: January 23

Mitt Romney offered a partial snapshot of his vast personal fortune late Monday, disclosing income of $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million last year — virtually all of it profits, dividends or interest from investments.

None came from wages, the primary source of income for most Americans. Instead, Romney and his wife, Ann, collected millions in capital gains from a profusion of investments, as well as stock dividends and interest payments.

The couple gave away $7 million in charitable contributions over the past two years, including at least $4.1 million to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Romney’s family has for generations been among the Mormon Church’s most prominent members.

The Romneys sent somewhat less to Washington over that period, paying an estimated $6.2 million in federal income taxes. According to his 2010 return, Romney paid about $3 million to the IRS, for an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent.

(More here.)

Newt’s nastiness comes back to haunt him

2012-01-24T05:28:00.000-06:00

By Dana Milbank,
WashPost
Published: December 9

The campaign of Mitt Romney, the Rip Van Winkle of presidential politics, finally awakened this week with a savage counterattack against Newt Gingrich, the man who against all odds is threatening to wrest the Republican nomination from Romney.

In a conference call Thursday sponsored by Romney’s campaign, two surrogates of the former Massachusetts governor let fly with a barrage against Gingrich that was shockingly harsh even by today’s caustic standards.

“For Newt Gingrich, in an effort of self-aggrandizement, to come out and throw a clever phrase that has no other purpose than to make him sound a little smarter than the conservative Republican leadership,” said former White House chief of staff John Sununu, “is the most self-serving, anti-conservative thing one can imagine happening . . . just the latest in a pattern of anti-principled actions that really irritated his own leadership and produced 88 percent of the Republicans in Congress voting for his reprimand.”

“He’s not a reliable or trustworthy leader,” former Missouri senator Jim Talent said of Gingrich’s labeling the House Republican budget a “radical” proposition. He “says and does those kinds of things because he’s not reliable as a leader.”

(More here.)

The following post is related....

The Frank Luntz/Newt Gingrich list of persuasive terms (from 1994)

2012-01-24T05:25:00.002-06:00

Language: A Key Mechanism of Control

As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that "language matters." In the video "We are a Majority," Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: "I wish I could speak like Newt."

That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.

This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used.

While the list could be the size of the latest "College Edition" dictionary, we have attempted to keep it small enough to be readily useful yet large enough to be broadly functional. The list is divided into two sections: Optimistic Positive Governing words and phrases to help describe your vision for the future of your community (your message) and Contrasting words to help you clearly define the policies and record of your opponent and the Democratic party.

Please let us know if you have any other suggestions or additions. We would also like to know how you use the list. Call us at GOPAC or write with your suggestions and comments. We may include them in the next tape mailing so that others can benefit from your knowledge and experience.

Optimistic Positive Governing Words

Use the list below to help define your campaign and your vision of public service. These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!

active(ly)
activist
building
candid(ly)
care(ing)
challenge
change
children
choice/choose
citizen
commitment
common sense
compete
confident
conflict
control
courage
crusade
debate
dream
duty
eliminate good-time in prison
empower(ment)
fair
family
freedom
hard work
help
humane
incentive
initiative
lead
learn
legacy
liberty
light
listen
mobilize
moral
movement
opportunity
passionate
peace
pioneer
precious
premise
preserve
principle(d)
pristine
pro- (issue): flag, children, environment, reform
prosperity
protect
proud/pride
provide
reform
rights
share
strength
success
tough
truth
unique
vision
we/us/our

Contrasting Words

Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

abuse of power
anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs
betray
bizarre
bosses
bureaucracy
cheat
coercion
"compassion" is not enough
collapse(ing)
consequences
corrupt
corruption
criminal rights
crisis
cynicism
decay
deeper
destroy
destructive
devour
disgrace
endanger
excuses
failure (fail)
greed
hypocrisy
ideological
impose
incompetent
insecure
insensitive
intolerant
liberal
lie
limit(s)
machine
mandate(s)
obsolete
pathetic
patronage
permissive attitude
pessimistic
punish (poor ...)
radical
red tape
self-serving
selfish
sensationalists
shallow
shame
sick
spend(ing)
stagnation
status quo
steal
taxes
they/them
threaten
traitors
unionized
urgent (cy)
waste
welfare

Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney’s attack dog

2012-01-24T05:17:00.002-06:00

By Dana Milbank,
WashPost
Published: January 23

During his brief and ill-fated presidential bid, Tim Pawlenty pursued the role of attack dog about as well as you would expect a golden retriever to do.

The former Minnesota governor was just too cuddly. When he fleetingly referred to rival Mitt Romney’s “ObamneyCare” health legislation, he was invited to repeat the accusation to Romney’s face during a debate — and he awkwardly demurred.

Belatedly, Pawlenty has found his venom sac. And on Monday morning, he poured it on Newt Gingrich during a conference call with reporters.

“For Republicans and conservatives all across this country, a question is going to have to be as they consider Newt Gingrich as a potential nominee for president: Really? I mean, really?”

Pawlenty went on to dub Gingrich a lobbyist and “influence peddler” and demanded that he release his client list and contract with the mortgage provider Freddie Mac.

(More here.)

How Gingrich’s unruly mind could benefit Obama

2012-01-24T05:13:00.000-06:00

By Richard Cohen,
WashPost
Published: January 23

Where is the Democratic Gingrich?

I do not mean that Newt Gingrich — the one who is a virtual Michelin Man of grandiosity, pneumatically overstuffed with self-references and appeals to the political gutter. I do not mean the man whose public life has been as chaotic as his private one (and vice versa) and who is capable of the most sinister simplicities, such as the time he suggested that Susan Smith would not have murdered her two children had Republicans been in power. This Gingrich is a Rorschach test: If you don’t think he’s nuts, you are.

The Gingrich I seek is not the man above but the one of big ideas. The term gets thrown around a lot, and Gingrich himself is apt to think his every idea is BIG. His mind is always in the tumble cycle. And even when he is spouting boilerplate, he can distance himself from his worn verbiage to say something fresh or provocative or ugly — it’s all the same to him. Out of nowhere, he has exhumed Saul Alinsky, whose fame is limited to university sociology departments, and yet whose name is so perfectly evocative of old-style radicalism, vaguely European in sound, that it fits Gingrich’s recent formulation, “people who don’t like the classical America.” Who dat, Newt?

The reference, although a tad obscure, is nevertheless intriguing. It shows that Gingrich is familiar with the late father of community organizing who died in 1972, and who by occupation and residence (Chicago) is suggestive of Barack Obama. Alinsky was no communist but he was a radical, and to have his name mentioned by a presidential candidate is just plain thrilling — also chilling. This is the bright and the dark side of Gingrich. He knows his stuff and often can’t stop from showing off. Foe of Big Government though he be, he could not help but remind Ron Paul in a recent debate of the wonderful role the G.I. Bill played after World War II — a stellar example of what the old liberalism could accomplish.

(More here.)

Ex-C.I.A. Agent Accused of Leaking Identity of Covert Officer

2012-01-23T20:34:00.000-06:00

By CHARLIE SAVAGE
NYT

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Monday charged a former Central Intelligence Agency officer with disclosing classified information to journalists about the capture and brutal interrogation of a suspected member of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah — adding another chapter to the Obama administration’s crackdown on leaks.

In a criminal complaint filed on Monday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation accused John Kiriakou, the former C.I.A. officer, of disclosing the identity of a C.I.A. analyst who worked on a 2002 operation that located and interrogated Abu Zubaydah. The journalists included a New York Times reporter, the complaint alleged.

“Safeguarding classified information, including the identities of C.I.A. officers involved in sensitive operations, is critical to keeping our intelligence officers safe and protecting our national security,” said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., in a statement.

At the same time, the department on Monday cleared of wrongdoing a legal defense team for inmates at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for its efforts to identify officials involved in the coercive interrogations of “high value” Qaeda suspects. The effort was a joint project by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to bolster the representation of detainees facing death sentences in military commissions.

(More here.)

The Obama Memos

2012-01-23T18:29:00.001-06:00

The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency

by Ryan Lizza January 30, 2012
The New Yorker

On a frigid January evening in 2009, a week before his Inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of George Will, the Washington Post columnist, who had assembled a number of right-leaning journalists to meet the President-elect. Accepting such an invitation was a gesture on Obama’s part that signalled his desire to project an image of himself as a post-ideological politician, a Chicago Democrat eager to forge alliances with conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. That week, Obama was still working on an Inaugural Address that would call for “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

Obama sprang coatless from his limousine and headed up the steps of Will’s yellow clapboard house. He was greeted by Will, Michael Barone, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Lawrence Kudlow, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan. They were Reaganites all, yet some had paid tribute to Obama during the campaign. Lowry, who is the editor of the National Review, called Obama “the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement.” Krauthammer, an intellectual and ornery voice on Fox News and in the pages of the Washington Post, had written that Obama would be “a president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin,” who would “bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan.” And Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and a former aide to Dan Quayle, wrote, “I look forward to Obama’s inauguration with a surprising degree of hope and good cheer.”

(Read more here.)

Chaotic Start to Egypt’s First Democratically Elected Parliament

2012-01-23T16:32:00.003-06:00

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
NYT

CAIRO — The opening session of Egypt’s first democratically elected Parliament in more than six decades erupted in chaos Monday as the Islamists dominating the chamber struggled to keep order and thousands of demonstrators gathered outside in an unruly mix of celebration and protest.

It took until nightfall for the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, to decisively beat back an unexpectedly vocal challenge from a dissident former member so that the parliamentarians could elect a Brotherhood stalwart, Saad el Katatni, as speaker.

Mr. Katatni’s victory, by a vote of 399 to 97, signified an important turn in the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been banned by Hosni Mubarak, the former autocratic president deposed in the Egypt revolution a year ago. After 84 years of struggle in the shadows of monarchy and dictatorship, the Brotherhood— a secretive, once-militant group that became the fountainhead of Islamist ideologies around the world — was closer than ever to both political power and democratic legitimacy.

“This is democracy that had left this hall for years, and now the people have grasped it,” Mr. Katatni said in a speech after his election. “We want Egypt and the whole world to know that our revolution will continue and we will not rest and our eyes won’t sleep until the revolution fulfills all its demands.”

(More here.)

Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy Rights

2012-01-23T16:24:00.002-06:00

By ADAM LIPTAK
NYT

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s car and monitored its movements for 28 days.

But the justices divided 5-to-4 on the rationale for the decision, with the majority saying that the problem was the placement of the device on private property. That ruling avoided many difficult questions, including how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies.

Walter Dellinger, a lawyer for the defendant in the case and a former acting United States solicitor general, said the decision “is a signal event in Fourth Amendment history.”

“Law enforcement is now on notice,” he said, “that almost any use of G.P.S. electronic surveillance of a citizen’s movement will be legally questionable unless a warrant is obtained in advance.”

(More here.)

Private Inequity

2012-01-23T14:28:00.001-06:00

by James Surowiecki
The New Yorker
January 30, 2012

At this point, the people who run America’s private-equity funds must be ruing the day Mitt Romney decided to run for President. His fellow Republican candidates, of all people, have painted a vivid picture of private-equity firms—including Bain Capital, where he worked for fifteen years—as job-destroying vultures, who scavenge the meat from American companies and leave their carcasses by the side of the road. Not since the days of “Wall Street” and “Barbarians at the Gate” have the masters of leveraged buyouts looked quite so bad.

Given the weak job market, it makes sense that the attacks have focussed on layoffs. But the real problem with leveraged-buyout firms isn’t their impact on jobs, which studies suggest isn’t that substantial one way or the other. A 2008 study of companies bought by private-equity firms found that their job growth was only about one per cent slower than at similar, public companies; there was more job destruction but also more job creation. And, while private-equity firms are not great employers in terms of wage growth, there’s not much evidence that they’re significantly worse than the rest of corporate America, which has been treating workers more stingily for about three decades.

(Read more here.)