I can't listen to the speeches.
Every time I turn it on I want to tell them they lie.
http://robertreich.org/post/30413604638
"How Romney Keeps Lying Through His Big White Teeth
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” says Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.
A half dozen fact-checking organizations and websites have refuted Romney’s claims that Obama removed the work requirement from the welfare law and will cut Medicare benefits by $216 billion.
Last Sunday’s New York Times even reported on its front page that Romney has been “falsely charging” President Obama with removing the work requirement. Those are strong words from the venerable Times. Yet Romney is still making the false charge. Ads containing it continue to be aired.
Presumably the Romney campaign continues its false claims because they’re effective. But this raises a more basic question: How can they remain effective when they’ve been so overwhelmingly discredited by the media?
The answer is the Republican Party has developed three means of bypassing the mainstream media and its fact-checkers.
The first is by repeating big lies so often in TV spots – financed by a mountain of campaign money – that the public can no longer recall (if it ever knew) that the mainstream media and its fact-checkers have found them to be lies.
The second is by discrediting the mainstream media – asserting it’s run by “liberal elites” that can’t be trusted to tell the truth. “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” Newt Gingrich charged at a Republican debate last January, in what’s become a standard GOP attack line.
The third is by using its own misinformation outlets – led by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his yell-radio imitators, book publisher Regnery, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, along with a right-wing blogosphere – to spread the lies, or at least spread doubt about what’s true.
Together, these three mechanisms are creating a parallel Republican universe of Orwellian dimension – where anything can be asserted, where pollsters and political advisers are free to create whatever concoction of lies will help elect their candidate, and where “fact-checkers” are as irrelevant and intrusive as is the truth.
Democracy cannot thrive in such a place. To the contrary, history teaches that this is where demagogues take root.
The Romney campaign has decided it won’t be dictated by fact-checkers. But a society without trusted arbiters of what is true and what is false is vulnerable to every lie imaginable."
A half dozen fact-checking organizations and websites have refuted Romney’s claims that Obama removed the work requirement from the welfare law and will cut Medicare benefits by $216 billion.
Last Sunday’s New York Times even reported on its front page that Romney has been “falsely charging” President Obama with removing the work requirement. Those are strong words from the venerable Times. Yet Romney is still making the false charge. Ads containing it continue to be aired.
Presumably the Romney campaign continues its false claims because they’re effective. But this raises a more basic question: How can they remain effective when they’ve been so overwhelmingly discredited by the media?
The answer is the Republican Party has developed three means of bypassing the mainstream media and its fact-checkers.
The first is by repeating big lies so often in TV spots – financed by a mountain of campaign money – that the public can no longer recall (if it ever knew) that the mainstream media and its fact-checkers have found them to be lies.
The second is by discrediting the mainstream media – asserting it’s run by “liberal elites” that can’t be trusted to tell the truth. “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” Newt Gingrich charged at a Republican debate last January, in what’s become a standard GOP attack line.
The third is by using its own misinformation outlets – led by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his yell-radio imitators, book publisher Regnery, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, along with a right-wing blogosphere – to spread the lies, or at least spread doubt about what’s true.
Together, these three mechanisms are creating a parallel Republican universe of Orwellian dimension – where anything can be asserted, where pollsters and political advisers are free to create whatever concoction of lies will help elect their candidate, and where “fact-checkers” are as irrelevant and intrusive as is the truth.
Democracy cannot thrive in such a place. To the contrary, history teaches that this is where demagogues take root.
The Romney campaign has decided it won’t be dictated by fact-checkers. But a society without trusted arbiters of what is true and what is false is vulnerable to every lie imaginable."
The storm, Isaac, is bad but not beyond the capability of the defenses.
More will be known in the morning.
Europe is nervous. There appears to be no drama as yet. Money moving out of Spain is noted.
Record deposit flight from Spanish banks
28 Aug 2012
| 11 Comments Nations 'stand ready' for emergency oil release
28 Aug 2012
| Comment Debt crisis: as it happened, August 28
28 Aug 2012
| 390 Comments 
Catalonia asks Spain for €5bn bailout
Spain's north-eastern region of Catalonia, which represents around a fifth of the country's economic output, will tap a state liquidity facility for just over €5bn, a spokeswoman for the region's economy head has said.28 Aug 2012
| 86 Comments Can Olympic cup inspire Greece to beat recession?
The trophy won by the marathon winner at the 1896 Olympics has gone on display for the first time in Greece, and the prime minister said he hoped it would help inspire Greeks to overcome the economic crisis.28 Aug 2012
| 1 Comment Mario Draghi cancels Jackson Hole appearance
European Central Bank president Mario Draghi will not attend the US Federal Reserve's Jackson Hole gathering of central bankers later this week due to a heavy workload, a spokesman said Tuesday.28 Aug 2012
| 2 Comments France to spend €300m on cutting petrol prices
France is to spend €300m on temporarily cutting petrol prices for motorists, the heavily indebted country's finance minister has said.28 Aug 2012
| 10 Comments Credit Agricole profits drop two-thirds on eurozone woes
Credit Agricole profits plunged by more than two thirds in second quarter profits due to problems in Greece and Italy.28 Aug 2012
| 1 Comment- 28 Aug 2012: François Hollande under pressure over economy, eurozone treaty and minister's comments that nuclear power was the future
- 28 Aug 2012: Bank of Spain data showing sudden drop in amount on deposit comes as recession revealed to be deeper than thought
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28 Aug 2012: Europe's leaders cannot win the battle to save the euro in September – but they can certainly lose it
- 27 Aug 2012: Finance ministers announce working group to integrate policies as German business confidence falls to lowest level since 2010
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/2012-or-never-for-gops-white-base.html
Team Romney White-Vote Push: ‘This Is the Last Time Anyone Will Try to Do This’
A Republican strategist said something interesting and revealing on Friday, though it largely escaped attention in the howling gusts of punditry over Mitt Romney’s birth certificate crack and a potential convention-altering hurricane. The subject was a Ron Brownstein story outlining the demographic hit rates each party requires to win in November. To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure exceeding what George H.W. Bush commanded over Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Republican strategist told Brownstein, “This is the last time anyone will try to do this” — “this” being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.
I wrote a long story last February arguing that the Republican Party had grown intensely conscious of both the inescapable gravity of the long-term relative decline of the white population, and the short-term window of opportunity opened for the party by the economic crisis. I think we’re continuing to see the GOP operate under an integrated political and policy strategy constructed on this premise. This is their last, best chance to win an election in the party’s current demographic and ideological form. Future generations of GOP politicians will have to appeal to nonwhite voters who hold far more liberal views about the role of government than does the party’s current base.
The “2012 or never” hypothesis helps explain why a series of Republican candidates, first in the House and most recently at the presidential candidate level, have taken the politically risky step of openly declaring themselves for Paul Ryan’s radical blueprint. Romney’s campaign has been floating word of late that it sees a potential presidency as following the mold of James K. Polk — fulfilling dramatic policy change, and leaving after a single term. “Multiple senior Romney advisers assured me that they had had conversations with the candidate in which he conveyed a depth of conviction about the need to try to enact something like Ryan’s controversial budget and entitlement reforms,” reports the Huffington Post’s Jonathan Ward. “Romney, they said, was willing to count the cost politically in order to achieve it.” David Leonhardt floats a similar sketch, plausibly outlining how Romney could transform the shape of American government by using a Senate procedure that circumvents the filibuster to quickly lock in large regressive tax cuts and repeal of health insurance subsidies to tens of millions of Americans.
Blowing up the welfare state and affecting the largest upward redistribution of wealth in American history is a politically tricky project (hence Romney's belief that he may need to forego a second term). Hence the Romney campaign's clear plan to suture off its slowly declining but still potent base. Romney’s political-policy theme is an unmistakable appeal to identity politics. On Medicare, Romney is putting himself forward as the candidate who will outspend Obama, at least when it comes to benefits for people 55 years old and up. Romney will restore the $700 billion in Medicare budget cuts imposed by Obama to its rightful owners — people who are currently old.
He will cut subsidies to the non-elderly people who would get insurance through Obamacare — a program that, Romney’s ads remind older voters, is “NOT FOR YOU.” Romney’s repeated ads on welfare, blaring the brazen lie that Obama has repealed the welfare work requirement, hammer home the same theme. The purpose is to portray Obama as diverting resources from us to them.
In their heart of hearts, Romney and Ryan would probably prefer a more sweeping, across-the-board assault on the welfare state. But the immense popularity of the largest, middle-class social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security force them into the divide-and-conquer gambit. They can promise to hold their disproportionately old, white base harmless and impose the entire brunt of their ambitious downsizing of government on young, poor, and disproportionately nonwhite Democratic constituencies.
There’s no moral or policy rationale for Romney’s proposal to increase social safety net spending on current retirees while cutting Pell Grants, Medicaid, children’s health insurance, and food stamps to shreds. The nonwhite share of the electorate is increasing fast enough that the political math of this sort of gambit will grow completely impossible — there will simply be, from the right-wing perspective, too many of them and not enough us. But there may be just enough us to pull out one more win, and thus the Republican determination to make such a win as consequential as possible."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/is-economic-growth-going-down-the-drain/
Is Economic Growth Going Down The Drain?
FT Alphaville has an ungated version of Robert Gordon’s latest pessimistic paper on prospects for long-run economic growth (pdf). It’s not the first time Gordon has written on this subject, although I believe this is his first definitive statement that the IT revolution has been a big disappointment.
I have mixed feelings on that one; I see his point, but wonder whether there may be a lot more yet to come. But really, the point of such papers is to make you think differently. And I was very struck by Gordon’s big example: the relative importance of fancy electronics (which he considers part of the Third Industrial Revolution) as compared with indoor plumbing (part of the second):
I have mixed feelings on that one; I see his point, but wonder whether there may be a lot more yet to come. But really, the point of such papers is to make you think differently. And I was very struck by Gordon’s big example: the relative importance of fancy electronics (which he considers part of the Third Industrial Revolution) as compared with indoor plumbing (part of the second):
A thought experiment helps to illustrate the fundamental importance of the inventions of IR #2 compared to the subset of IR #3 inventions that have occurred since 2002. You are required to make a choice between option A and option B. With option A you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002.Indeed. If you visit one of my favorite places, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, what’s really striking about the early 1860s incarnations of the building was the lack of plumbing: outhouses outside, and water from a nearby well (with exactly the high infant mortality you’d expect as a result). By the 1930s the apartments were still grim — I described them to my parents, and they said “We grew up in that apartment!” — but they did have plumbing. And I’d say that nothing in these past 80 year matches that."
Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?
I looked at the Gordon paper referenced here.
I vigorously disagree with his model of industrial civilization.
I agree that product without production does not drive growth.
Apple's resounding patent victory over Samsung in a California courtroom last Friday is a blow to the competition, which now won't be able copy Apple's technology. But it is a win for competition. It will force everyone to think harder about turning the unimaginable into the normal.
And that's what technology innovation is all about.
I am all for intellectual property (it's how writers make a living) and no particular fan of software patents, which can be vague and overly broad. It's a very tangled area of IP that in the modern-day tech industry has been a life-support system (think Kodak) and a means of protecting oneself against patent trolls (like that guy who tried to sue the World Wide Web). Patent troves, in the astute description of technologist Andy Baio, have also been weaponized in perverted campaigns to stifle innovation.
Apple and Samsung are duking it out all over the world -- some 50 lawsuits in about 10 countries, by one reckoning -- in a sort of forever war. Samsung got a favorable ruling just days before in a South Korean court. But the marquee case was the one in San Jose, California, where a jury found that Samsung had violated six of the seven patents Apple sought to defend - three software and three design - and awarded the company $1.05 billion.
The conventional wisdom is that a victory like this for a company like Apple is bad for consumers because it gives a virtual monopoly even more marketplace power.
Dan Gimor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication -- and nobody's fool -- presents this case as clearly as I have seen:
…e're likely to see a ban on many mobile devices from Samsung and other manufacturers in the wake of this case, as an emboldened Apple tries to create an unprecedented monopoly. If so, the ultimate loser will be competition in the technology marketplace, with even more power accruing to a company that already has too much.
Leave aside the California jury's wisdom or the possibility the outcome will be reversed on appeal. Leave aside how you feel about the iPhone. Leave aside how you feel about Apple, whose Microsoft-like imperiousness was more charming when it was a minor underdog and not bigger than Microsoft. Leave aside how much Apple's deep hatred of Google related to Android, the market-leading mobile operating system that powers Samsung and many other phones, may be driving this blood feud.
We tech consumers are interested in price, and in the near term, tablets and smartphones could be more expensive because of license fees and the huge cost of patent litigation added to the cost of the electronics we buy. And there may also be less choice for a while.
But we have a deeper vested interest in the leveling power that comes from true competition, even if it costs a little more to get there. It's not about rewarding the originator of an idea. It's about challenging everyone else to come up with a better one. We should be for things that punish technological complacency and that protect conditions for innovation, not take a rooting interest in which companies are winning and which are losing (Pandodaily's Farhad Manjoo makes a great case that copying paid off handsomely for Samsung -- revenue of about $25 million from the infringing handsets, versus a cost of litigation of about $3 billion).
Extending the status quo -- as in making more phones like iPhones -- may have made things cheaper, but it wasn't going to inspire innovation or cultivate the Next Great Thing. It's the difference between competing in the marketplace and competing in the marketplace of ideas: There's a narrow advantage to us in the former and an incalculable one in the latter.
Take a look at one of the patents Apple successfully defended. Apple's strict enforcement of "bounce-back scroll" -- which alerts you to the "bottom" of a "page" by snapping it back to fill the screen -- would mean that Android phones can't have it. Owners of anything but an iPhone would be denied a very obvious and very handy feature -- without feedback, you might just think that the page has stopped loading, which happens quite a lot. This sort of animation adds character and makes a smartphone more intuitive. It's not a killer app but, like power steering, maybe should be on every car once it's invented.
It came into being because some smart person or team thought it up to address a user interface shortcoming that nobody else had given much attention to, or that hadn't been solved as well. Apple took a chance on it (and dozens of other big and little original ideas) and struck gold with the iPhone and its operating system.
Whether or not you believe Apple should even be in a position to own it is irrelevant. By borrowing so heavily, Apple's competitors aren't on the road to inventing anything that could change everything. They aren't competing. They're just offering modestly differentiated alternatives of an idea of a smartphone that has already caught on.
Competitors need to identify flaws the other guy hasn't and boldly pursue solutions. Apple does this, not so much by inventing but by reimagining: There were music players before the iPod, desktop computers before the iMac, smartphones before the iPhone, tablets before the iPad. But they all had missing ingredients Apple didn't pluck off someone else's shelf.
So powerful is Apple's reputation for radically improving on things that have been tried that we are pining to see what its vision for a TV set might be (in an era when the best TV set you have is your smartphone or tablet), and ponder how it would have designed a car.
Where is Apple's competition?
The irony is that Samsung has already come up with a suitable alternative to bounce-back scroll, the New York Times reports: a blue glow when you reach the bottom of a page. Sounds cool. Maybe even cooler.
Even more ironic: Patents complicate progress but are more like annoying speed bumps than insurmountable walls. "In this industry, patents are not a clean weapon to stop others," Silicon Valley consultant and former IBM IP Strategy VP Kevin G. Rivette told the Times. "The technology, like water, will find its way around impediments."
Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu also argues as much. In telling Reuters that the entire Android universe may now have to consider "doing something different", Wu is postulating that there always is something different to do.
What's good for a competitor isn't necessarily what's good for competition. Necessity, the old saying goes, is the mother of invention. Competition slows when competitors sample, when they rely too heavily on the breakthroughs of others.
It's no accident that every smartphone now looks a lot like the iPhone (and none did before the iPhone). But it is a crying shame. Invent something, already.
(John C. Abell is a columnist for Reuters.)
Thinking. Reading.
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