JetStreamHD starts shipping, leaves iPad media streaming vapor trails in its wake (video)
September 14, 2011 No Comment
With Pogoplug Video out of the picture, Nuvyyo’s JetStreamHD is ready to become your default iPad media streamer. The tower plugs into your router and delivers streaming content like hi-def videos, music and photos from your home network to your Apple tablet. And the free JetSteamHD iPad app makes it easier to sort through your content, while promising the best available resolution for seamless entertainment streaming. The device is shipping now, for a suggested price of $199. Video and PR after the break. Continue reading JetStreamHD starts shipping, leaves iPad media streaming vapor trails in its wake (video) JetStreamHD starts shipping, leaves iPad media streaming vapor trails in its wake (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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He complained of being a piñata last time. This time, Perry was the punchbag – and it was Michele Bachmann landing the blows Mitt Romney’s dogged professionalism has mostly been a problem for him in the political world. The same smooth, practised charm – unleavened with not-obviously-practised sense of humour – that reassures investors can strike voters as forced and fake. But give him this: he is an avid student of his own mistakes, and every debate thus far has seen him stretch his emotional range a little. In his tussles with Rick Perry Monday evening (and there were several), he may have even gotten the needle to something like “testy!” His awkwardness with humour and unsubtle way with metaphor still give the impression of someone trying too hard. He tends to pile on figures of speech like an insecure college student: it’s a pay phone world versus smart phone world! Quarters! Being dealt aces! Someone in the Romney campaign was, apparently, an English lit major. But such enthusiasm is probably preferable to the stance so often taken by political candidates in search of a personality: approval-grubbing like a high school principal trying to be cool. Speaking of which, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman continued his campaign for the hipster vote with a reference to Kurt Cobain that might as well have been spoken in that Mandarin he’s so fluent in for all the sense and impact it made. See, Romney’s campaign pamphlet-cum-book was called “No Apologies”, and Cobain wrote a song called “All Apologies”, and Romney is a fecund Mormon and Cobain was a nihilistic heroin addict who committed suicide, so … erm? But at least we know what to gift Huntsman on iTunes! For all his improvements, though, this was not a Romney crowd. CNN decided to co-sponsor the debate with one of the few quasi-legitimate organisations that can claim to represent the “Tea Party” – Sal Russo’s the Tea Party Express . Romney’s relationship to the Tea Party is uncomfortable at best; in the last debate, he dodged a question about being a member of the group – or even agreeing with them: “I don’t think you carry cards in the Tea Party.” He chuckled at his own joke, but no one else did. The avid conservatism of the Tea Party, and the crowd, made for a debate much friendlier to the race’s less likely contenders: Ron Paul – in a too-large suit that only emphasised how lost he can seem when confronted with issues of actual governance – got warm responses for his talk about getting the government out of, well, everything. Rick Santorum was positively graceful in asserting his right to be on the stage. And Michele Bachmann, founder of Congress’s “Tea Party Caucus”, was especially in her element. She attacked Perry with gusto – and actual information – over his approval of mandatory HPV vaccination: the connection between Perry and the drug company that manufactures the vaccine sometimes gets lost in the hand-wringing over “forced injections to 12-year-old girls”, but it didn’t tonight. Perry’s response to Bachmann’s needling showed his weakness as a candidate: he was defensive and repeated himself. He seems to want to focus on being the frontrunner yet not have to do the work to get there. Romney can try to tag Perry as a professional politician, but it’s Mitt that seems to have the polish and finesse (if also a feeling of rote memorisation) that comes with having done a national campaign before. Perry can’t quite get the smirk off his face when he’s not actually speaking. He seems to alternate between rogueish charm and cocky impetuousness. And then there are his policies, which seem to be undergoing a similar vacillation. He can’t decide whether he wants to hang Ben Bernanke or diplomatically show him the door, compare social security to a con game or talk soberly about reforming it. The good news for Perry, if not for us, is that he’s going to get a lot more practice in performing the part of a candidate: there are 11 more of these debates to go before we ever get to New Hampshire and an actual vote cast. Republicans US elections 2012 US politics Rick Perry Mitt Romney Ron Paul Michele Bachmann Newt Gingrich Jon Huntsman Tea Party movement CNN US television United States Ana Marie Cox guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Injury added to insult as Democrats lose New York seat | Ana Marie Cox
September 14, 2011 No Comment
Ceding Anthony Weiner’s former seat to Republican Bob Turner is a humiliation. But voters right now are angry at everyone Americans’ prudishness almost never looks good (or quite sincere) in retrospect. In the case of the special election in New York’s 9th district , which straddles of Brooklyn and Queens, to replace congressional sexter Anthony Weiner, the Democratic party is probably pining for a chance to re-examine its decision to boot the randy representative: Republican Bob Turner becomes the first Republican elected to Congress from that district since 1920 . Conservative pundits claim that the defeat of the Democratic nominee, David Weprin , signals the depth of voters’ disappointment in the Obama administration. That may be true, but it’s not exactly bad news – or at least, it’s not as though it’s much of a surprise. Voters in special elections tend to vote according to whatever emotions are running high at the moment; with Obama’s approval rating in the district running at 31%, it’s no wonder that constituents would strike a symbolic vote against the administration by rejecting the candidate that represents the status quo. It’s just a good thing for the GOP that they didn’t already control that seat – a referendum on the job they’re doing would probably reflect their 15% approval rating. (These numbers reflect Americans’ negative and “negativer” feelings about the President and Congress nationwide.) The loss is embarrassing to the Democratic party, there’s no doubt – it might even be more embarrassing than a member’s inability to mind his member. Certainly, the Democratic congressional campaign committee’s belated, desperate dumping of almost half a million dollars into the race suggests as much. But the election that actually counts – at least, counts on a national level (intensely though poor Weprin may feel this loss) – is 14 long months away. Time enough for the economy to recover – or not – if only barely enough time for Turner to enjoy his victory before redistricting likely disappears the seat entirely (also in 2012). Then again! Turner may get a chance to vote against Obama’s jobs bill, an action that itself could be much more meaningful, or at least symbolic, when it comes to 2012. Republicans are counting on the economy to continue to drag Obama down; how far will they go to ensure that he and it remain as downcast as they are now? Will they vote against measures that have a chance of making Americans’ lives better? Will they water down those measures and hope for the worst? Will they vamp madly until it’s too late and hope to play Obama off the stage? Turner, in his life before politics, was a producer of “The Jerry Springer Show”, a three-ring circus of transvestites who had their uncles’ baby and chair-throwing adulterous housewives. In all seriousness (I guess?), episodes included guests opining on such topics as “I’m Happy I Cut Off my Legs” and “I’m a Breeder for the [Klu Klux] Klan”. Democrats who thought ousting Weiner would conform to Americans’ desire for propriety clearly don’t watch enough TV. New York US politics Republicans Democrats Anthony Weiner United States US Congress Obama administration Ana Marie Cox guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …In through the out door: how lobbyists rule Congress | Pratap Chatterjee
September 14, 2011 No Comment
The revolving door between the lobbying industry and Capitol Hill makes the lavishly funded K Street the real hub of power Every weekday, groups of scrubbed and shiny 14 year olds pile out of the Washington subway on school trips to visit the halls of the US Congress on Capitol Hill. They come to watch how their elected representatives govern “the land of the free and the home of the brave” in the real-life version of what they have studied in their civics textbooks. Alas, every last student goes to the wrong place. The real power in Washington is not on Capitol Hill, nor even at the White House, but rather a few blocks to the north on the much less exciting road of nondescript modern office buildings known as K street. Indeed, K street has become a euphemism for the world of lobbyists. According to an exhaustive new study just published by LegiStorm , a Washington watchdog group, there are 11,700 registered lobbyists in Washington, DC – almost one for each of the 14,000 staff that work in Congress. “You can’t tell your story unless you get your foot in the door,” a lobbyist by the name of William Chasey once told filmmaker Michael Moore in 1994 . “And if you already have your foot in the door it makes it a lot easier.” For the measly sum of $5,000, Chasey agreed to try to convince Congress to name one day in the year after “TV Nation” – the name of Moore’s satirical TV news show. Not only was Chasey able to introduce a bill, he even got a Republican (Howard Coble of North Carolina) to sponsor it. Moore got himself a bargain. Perhaps the most scandalous operative on K street was lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who charged six Native American tribes $85m between 1995 to 2004 to lobby on behalf of their casinos, even as he accepted money from other interests to do the opposite. Many a member of Congress accepted lavish gifts from such lobbyists – although few match Tom DeLay of Texas. In 2006, two activist groups – Campaign for America’s Future and Public Campaign Action Fund – took out a TV ad to hammer home how much DeLay had received: “Forty-eight trips to golf resorts, 100 flights aboard company jets, 200 nights at world-class resorts and hotels. One million dollars from Russian tycoons to allegedly influence his vote,” intones the announcer. In a 2005 report published by Public Citizen , “The Journey from Congress to K Street”, the watchdog group calculated that more than four out of ten members of Congress had gone to work on K Street after they left elected office. Six years later, the story hasn’t really changed. In the last decade, 393 members of Congress have gone to work on K street to lobby their former colleagues, according to LegiStorm. All told, some 5,400 congressional staffers have worked as lobbyists over the same time period. And the revolving door works both ways – today, 605 former lobbyists work for members of Congress. There is a very simple reason – there is a lot of money to be made. Last year, these lobbyists spent a whopping $3.5bn, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics . Over the last 13 years, one group alone – the US Chamber of Commerce – spent over $750m trying to push its agenda in Congress . In 1863, Abraham Lincoln invoked the idea of a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as his vision for the country, in his famous Gettysburg address. A century and a half later, LegiStorm’s new study suggests that Washington has become a government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, for special interest groups. But you won’t find that in a civics book. The lobbyists will make sure of that. US Congress Washington DC United States US politics Pratap Chatterjee guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …In through the out door: how lobbyists rule Congress | Pratap Chatterjee
September 14, 2011 No CommentThe revolving door between the lobbying industry and Capitol Hill makes the lavishly funded K Street the real hub of power Every weekday, groups of scrubbed and shiny 14 year olds pile out of the Washington subway on school trips to visit the halls of the US Congress on Capitol Hill. They come to watch how their elected representatives govern “the land of the free and the home of the brave” in the real-life version of what they have studied in their civics textbooks. Alas, every last student goes to the wrong place. The real power in Washington is not on Capitol Hill, nor even at the White House, but rather a few blocks to the north on the much less exciting road of nondescript modern office buildings known as K street. Indeed, K street has become a euphemism for the world of lobbyists. According to an exhaustive new study just published by LegiStorm , a Washington watchdog group, there are 11,700 registered lobbyists in Washington, DC – almost one for each of the 14,000 staff that work in Congress. “You can’t tell your story unless you get your foot in the door,” a lobbyist by the name of William Chasey once told filmmaker Michael Moore in 1994 . “And if you already have your foot in the door it makes it a lot easier.” For the measly sum of $5,000, Chasey agreed to try to convince Congress to name one day in the year after “TV Nation” – the name of Moore’s satirical TV news show. Not only was Chasey able to introduce a bill, he even got a Republican (Howard Coble of North Carolina) to sponsor it. Moore got himself a bargain. Perhaps the most scandalous operative on K street was lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who charged six Native American tribes $85m between 1995 to 2004 to lobby on behalf of their casinos, even as he accepted money from other interests to do the opposite. Many a member of Congress accepted lavish gifts from such lobbyists – although few match Tom DeLay of Texas. In 2006, two activist groups – Campaign for America’s Future and Public Campaign Action Fund – took out a TV ad to hammer home how much DeLay had received: “Forty-eight trips to golf resorts, 100 flights aboard company jets, 200 nights at world-class resorts and hotels. One million dollars from Russian tycoons to allegedly influence his vote,” intones the announcer. In a 2005 report published by Public Citizen , “The Journey from Congress to K Street”, the watchdog group calculated that more than four out of ten members of Congress had gone to work on K Street after they left elected office. Six years later, the story hasn’t really changed. In the last decade, 393 members of Congress have gone to work on K street to lobby their former colleagues, according to LegiStorm. All told, some 5,400 congressional staffers have worked as lobbyists over the same time period. And the revolving door works both ways – today, 605 former lobbyists work for members of Congress. There is a very simple reason – there is a lot of money to be made. Last year, these lobbyists spent a whopping $3.5bn, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics . Over the last 13 years, one group alone – the US Chamber of Commerce – spent over $750m trying to push its agenda in Congress . In 1863, Abraham Lincoln invoked the idea of a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as his vision for the country, in his famous Gettysburg address. A century and a half later, LegiStorm’s new study suggests that Washington has become a government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, for special interest groups. But you won’t find that in a civics book. The lobbyists will make sure of that. US Congress Washington DC United States US politics Pratap Chatterjee guardian.co.uk
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My time with the Unitarians provided a welcome break from some of the more violent undertones of Christian worship I went to a Unitarian service on Sunday, near where I’m living in Brooklyn. I didn’t know much about this denomination. I knew that they don’t believe in the Trinity, but that doesn’t narrow things down very much – nor do Muslims or Richard Dawkins. Do they believe in God at all? They don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, but do they nevertheless see him as a unique moral teacher? I knew that they originally believed very strongly in God, back in the late 18th century, and rejected his threeness as irrational: they believed in the God of the rational Enlightenment, and saw Jesus as the heroic communicator of this superstition-busting deity. Could it be that they still believed in that? I also knew that, in its early days, this movement was favoured by some of the Founding Fathers. Jefferson once expressed the hope that soon all young men in America would be Unitarians (I suppose he was less optimistic about young women). John Adams was also a big fan. And some decades later the movement influenced the Transcendentalism of Emerson and others. I wanted to know what had become of this early strain of the American soul. We gathered in a surprisingly crowded church hall. The service was led by a group of laywomen who had recently put on a play called Mother Wove the Morning. Between gentle, participatory songs, some accompanied by a ukelele, these women spoke on a jittery hand-held mike. The first spoke of her “journey into the goddess”. She briefly mentioned her childhood image of God, a cross between Santa Claus and Jesus – this produced a small ripple of knowing laughter in the congregation. It was the only time that Jesus was mentioned I think. Another woman spoke of the sexism she had encountered in the financial industry, and of the succour she had found in Native American folklore, and of the need to keep taking “buffalo medicine” which I think was a metaphorical substance. Another spoke “as a therapist” about some of the issues raised in the play they had performed. Another, who identified herself as a humanist, noted that Unitarianism had in the past “committed heresy” by overemphasising oneness, as if there were just one path to the divine. As she spoke I noticed a row of old photographs of men, many wearing facial hair, all wearing serious expressions, as if pondering the saving oneness of God. They looked on unimpressed at our final song, Ancient Mother, I Hear you Calling, for which baskets containing percussion instruments were handed round. It was a fun atmosphere; some people got really into it and made surprising whooping animal noises. I have no idea whether this spiritualised feminism is a regular component of this community; maybe most weeks it’s burly men doing the talking, about the sense of rational peace they have while out fishing. But at least three quarters of the congregation was female. And it felt as if the language of therapeutic self-affirmation, whether feminist or not, was very well rooted here. It is now seemingly the Unitarian fashion to deny any single path to truth, but there is still an element of oneness to justify the denomination’s name: its very deep respect for Number One. I came away with the feeling that it was very harmless. And maybe that’s the key difference from Christian worship. In Christian worship there’s a certain sense of risk: we risk affirming an idea of truth that is somewhat at odds with natural wisdom, inner peace. And we risk affirming a tradition that has an aura of violence – the violent rhetoric about the Lord of hosts and so forth – and the references to death and blood in the sombre ritual. There’s a sense of potential danger in Christianity – this religion has been used for violent ends, and people have suffered martyrdom for it too. There’s a disturbing absoluteness. Unitarianism carries about as much sense of dangerous otherness as a tots’ singalong at the local library. Christianity Religion New York United States Theo Hobson guardian.co.uk
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Click here to view this media Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul explained Wednesday that famines in Africa were a result of a lack of a “free market systems.” “All I know is if you look at history and if you compare good medical care and you compare famine, the countries that are more socialistic have more famines,” Paul told CNN’s T.J. Holmes. “If you look at Africa, they don’t have any free market systems and property rights and they have famines and no medical care. So the freer the system, the better the health care.” Writing for the World Bank in 1996, Australian economist Martin Ravallion noted the importance of a social safety net for preventing famines. “The literature on famines reviewed here has suggested that failures of both market and nonmarket institutions lie at the heart of famine causation; so it can be argued that famines can be ameliorated by longer-term development policies which strengthen the social and economic institutions (both governmental and non-governmental) which help protect poor people from economy-wide shocks,” he wrote. “Evidence in the famines literature and elsewhere also suggests that an effective social safety net for protecting poor households from severe shocks is consistent with longer-term goals of economic growth and environmental protection.” Holmes also gave Paul a chance to respond to a controversy that ensued after the tea party audience at Monday night’s Republican presidential debate cheered the notion that an uninsured man in a coma would be left to die. “This whole idea that they world will not provide for people if you don’t depend on government — freedom provides more prosperity and better health care than all the socialism and welfarism in the world,” Paul said. “Nobody can compete with me about compassion because I know and understand how free markets and sound money and a sensible foreign policy is the most compassionate system ever known to mankind. So if you care about people you have to look to the freedom philosophy and limited government.”
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Click here to view this media Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul explained Wednesday that famines in Africa were a result of a lack of a “free market systems.” “All I know is if you look at history and if you compare good medical care and you compare famine, the countries that are more socialistic have more famines,” Paul told CNN’s T.J. Holmes. “If you look at Africa, they don’t have any free market systems and property rights and they have famines and no medical care. So the freer the system, the better the health care.” Writing for the World Bank in 1996, Australian economist Martin Ravallion noted the importance of a social safety net for preventing famines. “The literature on famines reviewed here has suggested that failures of both market and nonmarket institutions lie at the heart of famine causation; so it can be argued that famines can be ameliorated by longer-term development policies which strengthen the social and economic institutions (both governmental and non-governmental) which help protect poor people from economy-wide shocks,” he wrote. “Evidence in the famines literature and elsewhere also suggests that an effective social safety net for protecting poor households from severe shocks is consistent with longer-term goals of economic growth and environmental protection.” Holmes also gave Paul a chance to respond to a controversy that ensued after the tea party audience at Monday night’s Republican presidential debate cheered the notion that an uninsured man in a coma would be left to die. “This whole idea that they world will not provide for people if you don’t depend on government — freedom provides more prosperity and better health care than all the socialism and welfarism in the world,” Paul said. “Nobody can compete with me about compassion because I know and understand how free markets and sound money and a sensible foreign policy is the most compassionate system ever known to mankind. So if you care about people you have to look to the freedom philosophy and limited government.”
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Click here to view this media Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul explained Wednesday that famines in Africa were a result of a lack of a “free market systems.” “All I know is if you look at history and if you compare good medical care and you compare famine, the countries that are more socialistic have more famines,” Paul told CNN’s T.J. Holmes. “If you look at Africa, they don’t have any free market systems and property rights and they have famines and no medical care. So the freer the system, the better the health care.” Writing for the World Bank in 1996, Australian economist Martin Ravallion noted the importance of a social safety net for preventing famines. “The literature on famines reviewed here has suggested that failures of both market and nonmarket institutions lie at the heart of famine causation; so it can be argued that famines can be ameliorated by longer-term development policies which strengthen the social and economic institutions (both governmental and non-governmental) which help protect poor people from economy-wide shocks,” he wrote. “Evidence in the famines literature and elsewhere also suggests that an effective social safety net for protecting poor households from severe shocks is consistent with longer-term goals of economic growth and environmental protection.” Holmes also gave Paul a chance to respond to a controversy that ensued after the tea party audience at Monday night’s Republican presidential debate cheered the notion that an uninsured man in a coma would be left to die. “This whole idea that they world will not provide for people if you don’t depend on government — freedom provides more prosperity and better health care than all the socialism and welfarism in the world,” Paul said. “Nobody can compete with me about compassion because I know and understand how free markets and sound money and a sensible foreign policy is the most compassionate system ever known to mankind. So if you care about people you have to look to the freedom philosophy and limited government.”
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Some of the entrants in this year’s chronicle of the fastest, the tallest, the hairiest and the downright weirdest
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