By Joe Conason By stalling or killing President Obama’s new START treaty, Republicans would provide moral support to Iran, North Korea and any other rogue regime seeking to arm itself with nukes. Related Entries November 25, 2010 The Thanksgiving Wars? No Thanks November 24, 2010 Fail and Grow Rich on Wall Street
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Photo: Yukari* / CC Obesity rates among people worldwide have soared over the last several decades — but it turns out that humans aren’t the only ones packing on the pounds. According to a recent study from the University of Alabama, many animals that spend too much time living around humans are prone to becoming overweight, and researchers aren’t entirely sure why…. Read the full story on TreeHugger
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When it comes to thwarting bike thieves , even the best bike-locks can’t guarantee your cycle won’t get jacked. But here’s a simple idea — instead of chaining up your ride to an object at ground level, imagine if you had a lock that could hoist it high overhead, safely out of reach from would-be robbers. Well, that’s exactly what gave one group of German designers the bright idea to create a bike lock that can climb a light pole…. Read the full story on TreeHugger
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YEONPYEONG ISLAND, South Korea (AP) — South Korea’s president on Monday took responsibility for failing to protect South Koreans from a deadly North Korean artillery attack last week, even as he vowed that the North would face consequences for future aggression. Lee Myung-bak didn’t offer specifics about those consequences nor did he say what actions South Korea…
Continue reading …Partisan Inconsistency: In Close Congressional Races, AP Gives Two Paragraphs to GOP Win in IL-08, 14 to Dem in CA-11
November 29, 2010 No CommentI've noted an interesting disparity in how the Associated Press, the so-called Essential Global News Network, has covered Democratic and Republican congressional victories in situations where the counting has gone on well past Election Day. Let's contrast the amount of ink and bandwidth devoted to Republican Joe Walsh's victory over incumbent Democrat Melissa Bean in Illinois compared to the coverage accorded California Democrat Jerry McNerney in his victory over the GOP's David Harmer. First, in Walsh vs. Bean, the following is the only item that comes up in a search on Ms. Bean's name at the AP's main site: read more
Continue reading …McCain attacks ‘inexperienced’ Obama for promising ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ repeal
November 29, 2010 No Comment
Click here to view this media The military’s controversial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy which forces gay, lesbian and trans-gender members to hide their personal lives or face expulsion from the service “is working,” according to Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain. The Pentagon is expected to release a survey Tuesday that will say most of those serving don’t have strong objections to repealing the policy. In mid-November, McCain said he rejected that study because it didn’t ask service members whether the policy should be repealed. “[T]his study was directed at how to implement the repeal, not whether the repeal should take place or not,” McCain said. But Defense Secretary Robert Gates disagrees that there should be a new survey that amounts to a “referendum.” “I do not believe that military policy decisions — on this or any other subject — should be made through a referendum of Servicemembers,” Gates wrote to McCain in October. “I think he certainly has a point,” McCain told CNN’s Candy Crowley Sunday. The Arizona senator belives that by repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the Obama administration is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. “I would also certainly say that we should remember where this all started. There was no uprising in the military, no problems in the military with ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” McCain noted. “It’s called ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ If you don’t ask somebody, and they don’t tell,” he said. “The fact is this was a political promise made by an inexperienced president or candidate for presidency of the United States. The military is at its highest point in recruitment and retention and professionalism and capability, so to somehow allege that this policy has been damaging the military is simply false,” McCain continued. “So the fact is that this system is working,” he added.
Continue reading …Sony fires barrage of touchscreen patent applications, only one points at new PSP
November 29, 2010 No Comment
Lawyers for Sony Computer Entertainment America must have been mighty busy last October, hatching the wild scheme that came to light this week — a series of eight intertwining patent applications all describing a single device with an intriguing touchscreen interface. Though it’s hard to tell what form the final device might take — the apps suggest sliders, clamshells and slates — a few distinct ideas bubble to the surface, and we’ll knock them out one by one. First, the inventors seem to be rather particular about having a touchpad that’s separate from the main screen — perhaps even on its back like the rumored PSP2 — and Sony’s trying to patent a way to manipulate objects through the screen as well. Second, there’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo about being able to “enhance” or “transform” the user interface in response to different forms of input, which seems to boil down to this: Sony’s trying to get some multitouch up in there, especially pinch-to-zoom. Last but not least, the company’s looking to cordon off a section of touchscreen buttons, including a ‘paste’ command, and patent a “prediction engine” that would dynamically change the onscreen layout based on your past behavior. If most of these ideas sound more at home in a new tablet computer rather than a gaming handheld, then great minds think alike. Still, SCEA is Sony’s gaming division — forlorn Linux computing aside — so consider us stumped for now. Sony fires barrage of touchscreen patent applications, only one points at new PSP originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Nov 2010 21:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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Click here to view this media The utter falsity of a statement is no barrier to Republican leaders repeating it. And so it was Sunday, as South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham offered his version of the GOP’s Uber Lie that tax cuts pay for themselves. Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Graham defended the Republicans’ demand for another $700 billion windfall for the wealthy by announcing the fiscal equivalent of the sun rising in the west and setting in the east: “When you look historically, when we raise taxes, the economy slows and we don’t get any more revenue. When we cut taxes, the economy grows and we maintain the same amount of revenue.” Not on this planet. In his version of the Republican myth that ” tax cuts pay for themselves ,” President Bush confidently proclaimed, “You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase.” In 2007, Graham’s puppet master John McCain explained, “Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues.” As it turned out, not so much. After Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt with his supply-side tax cuts, George W. Bush doubled it again with his own. And in between, the Clinton years saw robust economic growth, balanced budgets along with higher taxes (which, by the way, every single Republican in the House and Senate voted against.) In fact, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) found that the Bush tax cuts accounted for almost half of the mushrooming deficits during his tenure. As another CBPP analysis forecast , over the next 10 years, the Bush tax cuts if made permanent will contribute more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession put together . Predictably, the Bush tax cuts didn’t come anywhere close to paying for themselves. And as Congressional Budget Office projections revealed in June, making them permanent is the very worst thing the so-called deficit hawks could do to reduce the U.S. debt. Sadly, Lindsay Graham’s fraud is now orthodoxy in Republican circles . Despite the inescapable conclusion of history, theory and empirical evidence to the contrary, Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, John Boehner, Tom Coburn, John McCain, Kay Bailey Hutchison and other Republican alchemists continue to insist that cutting taxes increases government revenue and thereby reduces the deficit. Of course, even though the tax cut claim is laughably false, conservative ideology requires that it must true. Otherwise, the Republicans have just been giving money to rich people . For more background, charts and data, see ” 10 Epic Failure of the Bush Tax Cuts .”
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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On , a column about consumer technology. When Acer announced a slate of new devices at a New York press conference last week , the overarching message was simple — keyboards are as done as a Thanksgiving turkey. The company introduced an array of tablets, most of which were running Android, with sizes ranging from five- to ten-inches each. That’s almost as broad a lineup as Archos, which has dipped down to what most would consider digital audio player turf with a three-inch tablet (tablette?) and a precursor to what is sure to be a merciless barrage of tablets on the slate for CES. The single manifestation of a physical QWERTY text entry device was a keyboard dock designed for a 10-inch tablet running Windows. But as much as Acer’s tablet lineup seems poised to flounder in the coming sea of similarity, its Iconia laptop stood out, eschewing a keyboard for a second 14-inch touchscreen to match the main display. Unlike the dual 14-inch hinged Kno device discussed in columns prior , this one is clearly designed to be used in a landscape orientation, and unlike the 7-inch Toshiba Libretto , the Iconia is not being positioned as some kind of limited-edition experiment. If anything, Acer signaled that it would be the first in a series of products that would unfold over the next several years. Continue reading Switched On: Acer’s Iconic Keyboard Switched On: Acer’s Iconic Keyboard originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Nov 2010 21:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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enlarge And the fur will start flying. Wikileaks has released some 250,000 documents from US Embassy cables (thus dubbing this latest scandals “Cablegate”) and what they reveal isn’t pretty for this country. Huffington Post : WikiLeaks published the first set of more than 250,000 secret State Department documents Sunday, in one of the largest leaks of classified information in history. Earlier in the day, The New York Times and The Guardian published a selection of the documents. The WikiLeaks website was inaccessible for part of the day, and WikiLeaks said in its Twitter feed that it was experiencing a denial of service attack . WikiLeaks also provided the documents to Spain’s El Pais , France’s Le Monde , and Germany’s Der Spiegel . The website says it will publish the full set of 250,000 documents in stages over the next few months. According to The New York Times , the cables reveal how foreign leaders, including Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, urged the U.S. to confront Iran over its nuclear program . “The cables also contain a fresh American intelligence assessment of Iran’s missile program,” The Times reports. “They reveal for the first time that the United States believes that Iran has obtained advanced missiles from North Korea that could let it strike at Western European capitals and Moscow and help it develop more formidable long-range ballistic missiles.” Haaretz reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to pressure the U.S. into military action against Iran by exaggerating its nuclear capabilities: Meanwhile, another cable shows that a 2009 claim by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Iran was months away from achieving military nuclear capability was dismissed by the Americans as a ploy. According to German weekly Der Spiegel, which also received advance information from WIkiLeaks, a State Department official says in a classified cable that Netanyahu informed the United States of Iran’s nuclear advancement in November 2009, but that the prime minister’s estimate was likely unfounded and intended to pressure Washington into action against the Islamic Republic. Perhaps more embarrassing to U.S. officials is the revelation, according to The Guardian that U.S. diplomats spied on UN officials , including Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: A classified directive which appears to blur the line between diplomacy and spying was issued to US diplomats under Hillary Clinton’s name in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top UN officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications. Story continues below It called for detailed biometric information “on key UN officials, to include undersecretaries, heads of specialised agencies and their chief advisers, top SYG [secretary general] aides, heads of peace operations and political field missions, including force commanders” as well as intelligence on Ban’s “management and decision-making style and his influence on the secretariat”. The cables also provide frank assessments of foreign leaders : Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev “plays Robin to Putin’s Batman.” French president Nicholas Sarkozy displayed a “thin-skinned and authoritarian personal style.” Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is described as “feckless, vain, and ineffective as a modern European leader.” Hamid Karzai, is “an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts but was instead easily swayed by anyone who came to report even the most bizarre stories or plots against him.” At least one progressive blogger, while generally supportive of Wikileak’s actions, sees some long term damage from this . However, I’m of the belief that if this is the price we must pay to show the government that acting as if no one has a right to privacy is a double-edged sword that can hurt them as well, we might as well pay it now. If the government thinks it will damage their interests to have their corrupt actions known, perhaps they might not want to participate in them.
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