News and Politics
Will bookshops soon be a distant memory?
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Free Ride into Space! Want you Name Sent to Space to Orbit Earth? For Free?
Now the names of millions of individuals sit on Mars or cling to an asteroid. And another batch slammed into a comet at over six miles per second. Those are toast, your name can be sent with a spacecraft that will orbit Earth collecting important data that will help our planet, and it will be there for a long time.
NASA recently announced another opportunity to fly high. Anyone can get their name aboard a satellite, this particular one is the first mission dedicated to understanding the effects of particles in the atmosphere and the sun's temper on our climate.
Participants will get a printable certificate and have their names recorded on a microchip aboard the spacecraft. The deadline to submit Nov. 1.
WPTV's Peace program that brings together musicians and artists from all over the world together in one place has received one of the first certificates, bringing us to the ultimate road to peace! We are on land and air (EuroRock), sea (Peace Full Sail) and now space! (EuroRock Peace Full Sail). We have also been recently entered into the 51st annual Grammy Awards and intend to be there with our entire crew and supporters. Swiss Chris, one of our collaborators and Partners and Detlef Kowelewski, our Peace Full Sail Skipper and myself composed the songs being presented this year.
If you want to sign up, go to: http://polls.nasa.gov Now the names of millions of individuals sit on Mars or cling to an asteroid. And another batch slammed into a comet at over six miles... more -
Pakistan Facing Bankruptcy
Pakistan's foreign exchange reserves are so low that the country can only afford one month of imports and faces possible bankruptcy. Pakistan's foreign exchange reserves are so low that the country can only afford one month of imports and faces possible bankrupt... more
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Tortoise Has Bladder Stone Removed (photos)
These interesting photos come from the Bristol Zoo in Bristol, England.
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St. Paul's Police Protest the Press
Chronicling his life as a journalist in the colonial British Raj, a young Winston Churchill wrote that, "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." Nor, I'd add, is there anything in life quite so discombobulating as to turn a corner and unexpectedly walk into a wall of tear gas.
It happened to me on a couple of occasions during the years of anti-Vietnam war protests, when I was a college student and young reporter in Washington, DC. Once I was gassed while filming a counterdemonstration on Honor America Day, a nationally televised celebration hosted by Bob Hope. As God is my witness, the gas hit just as Kate Smith was singing, "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever." Chronicling his life as a journalist in the colonial British Raj, a young Winston Churchill wrote that, "Nothing in life is so ex... more -
Judge Orders Guantanamo Releases
Washington - A federal judge on Tuesday, in a rebuke to the Bush administration, ordered the release in the United States of 17 Chinese Muslims who have been held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina read his ruling from the bench at a hearing to consider the appeals by the members of the Uighur ethnic group who are seeking freedom and asking to come to the United States.
The judge said there was no evidence the detainees, who have been held at Guantanamo for nearly seven years, were "enemy combatants" or a security risk, and that the U.S. Constitution prohibits indefinite detention without cause. Washington - A federal judge on Tuesday, in a rebuke to the Bush administration, ordered the release in the United States of 17 Chines... more -
McCain takes photos with 9/11 Truthers!
John McCain poses for a picture with guys holding a sign that reads "9/11 was an Inside Job," Truly entertaining!
McCain, who wrote the forward to Popular Mechanics' Debunking 9/11 Myths, repeatedly told reporters, "I do not support a new investigation" and stated that he believes the "9/11 Commission did a good job."
In an interview with Dan Rather, when asked if over this past decade evidence pointed to "State Sponsored Terrorism" and that a decision was made to look the other way,
McCain responded by saying:
"I felt that there's been involvement" John McCain poses for a picture with guys holding a sign that reads "9/11 was an Inside Job," Truly entertaining! ... more -
Osama in tribal areas of Pakistan: Obama
White House hopeful Barack Obama has said that Osama Bin Laden is in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
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Welcome to the Sixties, Yet Again
In the late sixties, Martha Rosler became known for a so-so series of collages titled “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful.” She juxtaposed images of models, home décor, and the Vietnam War: A Vietnamese woman carried a bleeding baby in an unsullied American home, housewives dutifully cleaned battlefields, and so on. Although on a formal level Rosler simply mixed the harshness of John Heartfield’s thirties photomontages of the Third Reich with the pop-surreal sensibility of Richard Hamilton’s famous 1956 collage of a muscleman and a pinup girl in a contemporary living room, she did spice it with something new—an ironic, media-savvy attitude that changed the look of much art. In the late sixties, Martha Rosler became known for a so-so series of collages titled “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful.” She ju... more
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Gawker Media Fires Nineteen Employees
According to an e-mail obtained by Radar, Gawker owner Nick Denton has fired nineteen editorial employees today, including Gawker editor Moe Tkacik, right. He has also announced a change in their salary system: Next quarter, most staffers will receive a small raise in exchange for the suspension of their traffic bonuses. The site also confirmed what we and Radar heard earlier this week, that Gabriel Snyder will be the new managing editor of Gawker.com. "The news about the job and bonus cuts will be demoralizing. The golden age of the blog is over, people will say," Denton wrote to his staffers. "Gawker Media is behaving like those big media companies that we mock so easily." We're bummed for our fellow bloggers, but allow us to be the first to not say this marks the end of the "golden age of the blog. According to an e-mail obtained by Radar, Gawker owner Nick Denton has fired nineteen editorial employees today, including Gawker edit... more
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In Tough Times, Wall Streeters Forced to Make Humiliating Lifestyle Changes
Grim news for Merrill Lynch in the FT today: Executives have been informed that there will be no more private-jet travel, unless they really, really need to do it. That's right! No more attentive service and wet bar and those delicious crunchy things that Marquis serves every time they go anywhere. Turns out writing down $9 billion has a terrible price. Says the FT:
The restrictions on flying by private jet are also meant to demonstrate that the firm’s top brass must set an example to the rank and file in tightening belts. Other changes include requiring bankers to travel by taxi rather than limousine and reduced allowances for dinner on the job. Grim news for Merrill Lynch in the FT today: Executives have been informed that there will be no more private-jet travel, unless they ... more -
Bleeding ‘Times’ Blood
Which is more important to a 25-year-old Ochs-Sulzberger heir: the sense of honor that comes with owning the New York Times, or enough money to do whatever he wants for the rest of his life? Which is more important to a 25-year-old Ochs-Sulzberger heir: the sense of honor that comes with owning the New York Times, or enough... more
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Fact Check: Did Obama vote 94 times for higher taxes?
The Statement:
Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain said at the Oct. 7 presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee, that Democratic opponent Sen. Barack Obama "has voted 94 times to either increase your taxes or against tax cuts. That's his record."
Get the facts!
The Facts:
The effort to convince voters that Sen. Barack Obama would support higher taxes is a central part of Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign. McCain and the Republican National Committee have repeatedly cited 94 alleged votes by Obama to bolster their argument.
Factcheck.org, a non-partisan project of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, pieced through records to determine just what these 94 votes were.
Key findings:
–53 were votes on budget resolutions or amendments that "could not have resulted by themselves in raising taxes," though many "were clear statements of approval for increased taxes"
–23 were against proposed tax cuts
–11 were to increase taxes on people making more than $1 million a year, to help fund programs such as Head Start, school nutrition, or veterans' health care
–Seven were "for measures that would have lowered taxes for many, while raising them on a relative few, either corporations or affluent individuals."
– The total includes multiple votes on the same measures.
Annenberg says a close look at the record reveals that Obama has "voted consistently to restore higher tax rates on upper-income taxpayers but not on middle- or low-income workers."
Verdict:
Misleading. McCain's summary ignores the fact that some of the votes were for measures to lower taxes for many Americans, while increasing them for a much smaller number of taxpayers. A nonpartisan examination also finds that the 94 total includes multiple votes on the same measures and budget votes that would not directly lead to higher taxes. The Statement: ... more -
What Tina Fey Would Do for a SoyJoy
Dick Blasucci was worrying about the Toyota Yaris . Those days, the car was on his mind all the time.
Blasucci had written television comedy since 1980, but he’d never seen anything like the mess at Mad TV. With lousy ratings, the Fox sketch show was the RC Cola to Saturday Night Live’s Pepsi : no buzz, little profit. So the showrunner wasn’t surprised when his bosses patched him in to a conference call with Madison Road, a broker for product integration—the latest fad in TV economics, the killer app meant to save TV from TiVo . Dick Blasucci was worrying about the Toyota Yaris . Those days, the car was on his mind all the time. ... more -
Obama money from abroad could total millions - msnbc.com
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has raised about $3.3 million from contributors who did not list a home state or who designated their state with an abbreviation that did not match one of the 50 states or U.S. territories, according to records provided by the Federal Election Commission.
Most of those contributors did identify themselves as living abroad in foreign cities. Under federal law, foreign citizens cannot make political contributions, but U.S. citizens living abroad can.
The Republican National Committee filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Monday asking for an investigation of Obama's foreign contributions, among other things.
Story continues below
The FEC on Monday provided The Associated Press with a spread sheet of potential overseas donors that did not include contributors who left their state designation blank. As a result, the list was incomplete.
The $3.3 million total does not include donors who have given less than $200 and whose contributions do not have to be itemized. Some of that money could also have come from overseas. About half of Obama's $455 million in contributions so far are unitemized. The campaign does not identify those donors.
Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, speaking to reporters en route to Nashville, Tennessee, on Tuesday, noted that anyone can donate to the campaign through the Internet. "We monitor these things as best we can," he said.
Republican John McCain's campaign lists all his donors, even those who give less than $200, on his Web site.
The Obama campaign has begun to request passport numbers from donors to verify their citizenship.
Asked why the Obama campaign does not do the same and open its database to the public, Axelrod said the campaign returns improper contributions.
"Obviously we've got a huge database of contributors," he said. "It's valuable to our campaign... We're probably more forthcoming about disclosure than anyone."
Independent watchdog groups, however, have asked the campaign to provide more information about its fundraisers and to at least provide information about small donors by zip code or country from where they donate. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has raised about $3.3 million from contributors who did not list a home state or who de... more -
This Depression Is the Greatest (in Bed)
Okay, okay, so we're 8 years old. But the stock market is tanking again this afternoon and it's been a long day. So what if the CNN headline here about Bush's economy speech this afternoon made us titter? Okay, okay, so we're 8 years old. But the stock market is tanking again this afternoon and it's been a long day. So what if ... more
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Low-voltage debate for presidential rivals - msnbc.com
Stuck on talking points, neither says how he'd finance his spending plans
ANALYSIS
By Tom Curry
National affairs writer
MSNBC
updated 12:36 a.m. ET Oct. 8, 2008
WASHINGTON - The second debate between the rival presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama came across on television as a remarkably sedate, low-voltage and perhaps at times tedious affair, with no trace of the personal attacks that had enlivened the campaign in the last few days.
From the charges that had flown back and forth recently between the rival campaigns, you might have expected good brawling blood-and-guts politics when you tuned in on Tuesday night.
But what viewers got was a pair of candidates who seemed unwilling or unable to break out of their straightjacket of talking points.
By the halfway point the only winner that had emerged was financial wizard (and Obama supporter) Warren Buffet, who both candidates suggested would make a good secretary of the Treasury in the new administration.
Each candidate reeled off the need for more tax breaks (for energy efficient cars, for example) and low tax rates (“Let's not raise taxes on anybody today,” McCain said) and an assertive, interventionist foreign policy (both candidates called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan, and Obama called for American financial aid to Georgia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia “and all of the nations that were former Soviet satellites”).
But as they did this, there was a huge unspoken question: How long will the Chinese, Japanese and the other foreign creditors of the United States continue to lend their money so that President Obama or President McCain can engage in a policy of tax breaks at home and free-spending interventionism abroad?
After all, the revenue must come from someone.
And as most Americans look at their investments this week, they know they are for now, and perhaps for a long while, poorer.
Both candidates said at the outset of the debate and at its end that the financial market turmoil had left Americans financially “hurting,” as McCain put it.
China, one of America's major creditors through its purchase of U.S. Treasury securities, did make a few appearances from time to time during the 90-minute conversation. Stuck on talking points, neither says how he'd finance his spending plans ANALYSIS By Tom Curry National affairs writer ... more -
The Last Deadline
Seth Lipsky chose a bad month to find new backers for his broadsheet. The seven-year run of the New York Sun.
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Last Monday, on what must have been the worst day in recent memory to find funding for anything, New York Sun editor Seth Lipsky was trying to save, of all things, a broadsheet daily newspaper. On September 4, the paper had published a letter by Lipsky outlining the paper’s financial woes. Plainspoken and unflinching, it announced that should new funding not be found, the Sun would close at the end of the month Seth Lipsky chose a bad month to find new backers for his broadsheet. The seven-year run of the New York Sun. ------------------ ... more -
Bloomberg Bets the Farm
The retrospectives could have been written already, to be touched up slightly as January 1, 2010, closed in. After eight years as mayor, Michael Bloomberg would have been remembered as the billionaire political neophyte who calmed a shaken New York in the crucial months after September 11 and helped guide it back to economic health. He would have been the mayor who shrugged off howls of protest and imposed a smoking ban that will save thousands of lives, created 311, and hired the gifted police commissioner who drove crime rates down to unimaginable lows. The reviews would also note Bloomberg’s losses—the 2012 Olympics, congestion pricing—and they’d incorporate his response to the great Wall Street bust of 2008. On balance, he’d have been judged a great success.
Now Bloomberg’s legacy will be much different. That’s one reason three of his closest aides were against challenging term limits. If Bloomberg succeeds in winning four more years, pushing back his exit until 2014, his first-term achievements will seem like ancient history; his second term will be a footnote. Instead, he’ll be staking his mayoral reputation on how he muscled his way into a third term and what he did with it. No matter how much Bloomberg claims that he’s doing this for the kids and that sticking around has nothing to do with his ego, he’s well aware of his place in history. And it’s about to sink or soar like the Dow. The retrospectives could have been written already, to be touched up slightly as January 1, 2010, closed in. After eight years as mayo... more -
Debate II: McCain struggles to derail Obama - Politico.com
By CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN & BILL NICHOLS | 10/8/08 12:21 AM EDT
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — John McCain came here Tuesday hoping the second presidential debate would help him jar loose a campaign that for the past three weeks has been about the economy, the economy and the economy.
He didn't get his wish.
Energized in his demeanor, McCain took his case to Barack Obama at Belmont University with waspish intensity, and he came with at least one big new idea on how the country can weather this financial storm. But the transcendent threat of the nation's economic crisis utterly dominated the evening — another night when millions of Americans did not hear a crisp counterargument from McCain about why the Democrats can't blame the meltdown on eight years of Republican White House rule.
By night's end, while McCain knocked Obama back on his heels at times, Democrats felt their nominee had made no misstep and that a playing field utterly focused on economic issues still strongly favors the Illinois senator.
McCain needed to move the conversation beyond the economy, but a 500-point drop Tuesday of the Dow Jones Industrial Average made it virtually impossible. Much of the debate was a substantive discussion of the $700 billion bailout legislation, the prospect of the economy worsening before it gets better, and the housing crisis.
McCain did come with new ammunition on how to challenge his opponent’s seeming superiority with voters on economic issues. “One of the real catalysts, really the match that lit the fire, was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” McCain said, referring to the government-sanctioned mortgage lenders. “They’re the ones that, with the encouragement of Sen. Obama and his cronies and friends in Washington, that went out and made all these risky loans, gave them to people that could never afford to pay back.”
The comment prompted Obama to drop his head and smile. It was one of the first in a series of elbows thrown by both nominees.
“Now, I’ve got to correct a little bit of Sen. McCain’s history, not surprisingly,” Obama said. “I never promoted Fannie Mae. In fact, Sen. McCain’s campaign chairman’s firm was a lobbyist on behalf of Fannie Mae.”
That was one of the more personal exchanges on a night that some thought might be the culmination of days of increasing nastiness on the campaign trail. The speculation proved mostly misplaced.
McCain did not mention the 1960s-era radical William Ayers, with whom Obama has been acquainted in Chicago. Obama did not raise Charles Keating, the McCain supporter whose involvement in the savings and loan crisis tarnished the Arizona Republican. Neither man called the other a liar.
Still, the tension between them was palpable.
McCain barely contained his disregard for Obama, at one point referring to the Democratic nominee as “that one” when describing who voted for a 2005 energy bill. Obama kept a tight smile that occasionally gave way to laughter.
The debate, held on the charmingly Southern campus of this college in downtown Nashville, came at an absolutely crucial time for McCain, who has seen his burst of momentum after the Republican convention slow into a potentially fatal downward spiral in polls in key battleground states.
Just as telling, the mood within the Republican Party — so buoyant after Sarah Palin’s selection as McCain’s running mate and her dramatic national debut in St. Paul — has turned morose. Party leaders on hand the past few days in Nashville have stayed loyal in public; but behind the scenes, there was a litany of complaints about the McCain campaign’s basic competence and its bungling of the economic issue, in particular.
(more at the link) By CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN & BILL NICHOLS | 10/8/08 12:21 AM EDT ... more -
How McCain Lost His Brand
I have sat across from Chris Matthews enough times now, participating in that psychotropic ritual known as Hardball, that I thought I’d heard it all—but then the other night he uncorked a doozy that actually rendered me speechless. (No, that is not a misprint.) “Let’s start with John McCain,” he said to me on the air shortly after the first presidential debate between McCain and Barack Obama. “Do you think he was too troll-like tonight? You know, too much of a troll?” I laughed. “Seriously,” Chris went on. “Do people really want to put up with four years of that? Of [him] sitting there, angrily, grumpily, like a codger?”
As both a media figure and a human being, Matthews is sui generis—and yet what made his comments so remarkable was how unremarkable they were. In the past several weeks, the shift of press-corps sentiment against McCain has been stark and undeniable, even among heavies such as Matthews long accused by the left of being residents of the Arizonan’s amen corner. Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, Jacob Weisberg: all former McCain admirers now turned brutal critics. Equally if not more damaging, the shift has been just as pronounced, if less operatic, among straight-news reporters. Suddenly, McCain is no longer being portrayed as a straight-talking, truth-telling maverick but as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues. I have sat across from Chris Matthews enough times now, participating in that psychotropic ritual known as Hardball, that I thought I’... more
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