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I didn't come up with a "What To Expect" for the Democrats' convention in Charlotte, mostly because I really did not know which approach they would take: offense (going after Romney/Ryan for being one-percenters obsessed with harsh tax cuts and even harsher spending cuts) or defense (trying to explain all the things Obama did do during his 3 1/2 years of being in the White House).
The possibility they would do both was there, but unlikely in my mind. And it turns out I was well off-target. For the most part it has been a healthy (or unhealthy depending on your POV) mix of speakers hitting at Romney's weak job-creation record and weak record supporting minorities and women, alongside speakers highlighting the accomplishments of Obama's administration on the steady economic rebuilding efforts.
Topped off by what has become an instant classic of a speech from former President Bill Clinton that both slammed Romney and the Republicans as well as promote Obama at the same time.
There's still a little time left here before Obama should be performing his acceptance speech at the convention, though, so I could take a moment here to take a few wild guesses to what Obama will say:
An obvious thank-you to Bill Clinton;
An obvious I-love-you to Michelle and the kids;
A long and focused description of a jobs-stimulus program Obama hopes to get done if re-elected;
A short quip-worthy attempt to mock Republican inability offer any substantive proposals outside of "trust us";
An avoidance of Eastwooding: dude, it should be about class, and digging in that direction wouldn't be worth it;
A tribute to the soldiers (a theme in the DNC convention, something that the Republicans for all their flag-waving patriotism refused to do);
A call to action! Thrilling exhortation! ...oh wait, I'm channeling a pretty funny Doonesbury parody of your standard graduation valedictions... my bad.
So, anybody ready for a DNC bounce of more than 5 points?
To contact us Click HERE Gen. Chang - I AM AS CONSTANT AS THE NORTHERN STAR! Dr. McCoy - I'd give real money if he'd shut up... - Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country
It's not enough to point how just how often and how severe that Mitt Romney changes his story, changes his opinion, changes his political stance: how he, in fact, LIES on nearly every issue.
It's not enough to pile on to the observation of how Romney's currently best-known nickname got to be "Mr. Etch-A-Sketch".
It needs to be pointed out as often as possible how Mitt Romney is the LEAST-LIKED Presidential candidate in AGES, but that's not the point of this blog entry here.
The point of this article is to focus on what Mitt Romney REALLY WANTS if he becomes President. It's kind of hard to do when he's got this well-deserved reputation for flip-flopping and pandering in such a way it's made other panderers - both Clintons come to mind - look like sagacious pillars of consistency. But beneath all the bluster, behind all the constant "re-inventing" and "re-branding", at the base of EVERYTHING on Mitt's clouded and passed-over agenda (the one where he keeps saying "Trust me" as though that's always a good-enough answer): there is one consistent item on the agenda Mitt has NEVER renounced and ALWAYS persisted.
A massive tax cut.
Everything else on the table - abortion, foreign policy, Medicare/Medicaid and health care reform in general, education costs, energy needs - Romney has flipped on at least once this year.
But the tax cut plan, despite the occasional "tweaks" to how it's presented, has pretty much remained the same. And it's remained the core element of Romney's economic package, as though the massive tax cut will solve all woes, create all jobs, save all mankind.
Even though a majority of Americans ought to f-cking know better by now. Considering we've had a Republican President pass a massive tax cut plan roughly 11 years ago, and we've had all this time to see what the results have been (first chart from Ezra Klein, second chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) :
The Tax Rate of the cuts for upper income clearly get bigger, doubling and tripling in size for the top three brackets. What does this say about the tax burden for upper income Americans? How regressive have these Bush tax cuts really been?
Note how most of the deficit causes shrink eventually: The Bush Tax Cuts NEVER SHRINK AND IN FACT GET BIGGER
And consider this: Romney wants his tax cut plan to go DEEPER than the Bush tax cuts ever went. He's asking for a $5 TRILLION cut, ostensibly across the board except for the fact that he's scaling it more for upper income over middle-and-lower incomes. Because hidden in his tax proposal, Mitt wants to kill off the Alternative Minimum Tax and the Earned Income Tax Credit (both of which benefit middle and lower class taxpayers). Check this chart (from Klein's guest-blogger Dylan Matthews):
Everyone under $25,000 income has to pay MORE taxes by 1 to 2 percent, while the jump from $147,000 to $150,000 income from a 2 percent cut straight up to a 6 percent cut.
This is what Mitt Romney wants. This is his obsession, his passion, his ever-fixed mark. Everything else on his platform changes from day-to-day like the Etch A Sketch candidate he is. He wants this massive tax cut.
Even though FOR THE LOVE OF GOD we have all seen that tax cuts - especially cuts that are NOT PAID FOR by targeted spending cuts to balance it out - DO NOT WORK. Even though we've got economic experts - from the usual suspects like Krugman to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center to serious fiscal Republicans like David Frum - screaming how Romney's tax plan is IMPOSSIBLE. Romney is insisting on this tax cut plan, claiming it will "create jobs," "create growth," "fix government."
Tax cuts are not job creators : direct investment into business expansion and start-ups are. Tax cuts do not stimulate the economy. Tax cuts do not help curb spending: not only did spending get out of control during the GOP-led Bush era by so-called fiscal conservatives, but even hardcore fiscal conservative Ben Stein is now noting that at the current tax rates - "they're too low" - there aren't enough spending cuts to flatten out the deficit.
And Romney wants to make the tax rates LOWER. No matter the excuse or justification. He just does.
This alone should be disqualifying Mitt Romney from even being a Presidential candidate, for God's sake. But he's up there on the ballot, and GOD HELP US the polls are getting too close for comfort.
What can I say? I'm swamped with getting more NaNoWriMo done...
Losers: I mentioned them in an earlier post. The elite pundit class - especially the conservative ones who came to power during the Reagan administration 30 years ago - really got their butts kicked for publicly anointing their preferred candidate Romney when the stats said otherwise, and even going out of their way to mock the statisticians who focused more on polling results and provable trends.
Winners: Nate Silver and every other statistician who worked on the numbers, stuck to the arithmetic, and proved themselves far more accurate than the pundits who preferred "narrative" and "gut instinct" over facts. Arithmetic, bitches.
Next, the guy making xkcd will chart with unnerving accuracy the flow of Karl Rove's tears.
Winner: the Word of the Year, thanks to Bill Clinton and Nate Silver. Arithmetic.
Loser: Karl Rove. The "genius" for the Republicans, the man responsible for coming up with a winning strategy to get George W. into the White House, exposed by his own network on Election Night being completely out-of-touch YET AGAIN. Why Rove keeps getting treated as a genius is beyond me: his game-plan of playing to the base and do just the bare minimum to get enough independent voters to side with you (the "50-plus-one" plan) is half-lazy, half-reckless, and it relies too much on luck and a broken electoral system. Outside of 2004, when Rove tricked the Democratic leadership to back a weak candidate in Kerry (vulnerable to attacks on his military record and pro-Iraq War vote), this guy really didn't win anything (if it weren't for the Butterfly Ballot in Palm Beach County, Gore would have won Florida and the 2000 election). Rove's one true skill seems to be bluffing. Too bad Obama's a better game-player than Rove, eh?
Losers: The vote suppressors. In battleground states where the Republicans held control of the state legislatures and governorships, there were clear and open attempts to suppress minority, poor, and college-age voters in a blatant and coordinated effort to weaken the turnout of Obama's voting base. Like Pennsylvania. Like Ohio, repeatedly by a Sec of State John Husted who kept defying the demands of the courts (if anyone needs to see jail time over this, it's Husted). Like Florida, where Rick "Yes, I HATE This Guy" Scott tried to slash the voter rolls claiming non-existent fraud, and cut back on early voting days in an effort to cut back voter turnout in key counties like Dade and Broward. Good news is, it looks post-election that their efforts were for naught. In fact, by pushing so hard so publicly to disenfranchise voters across the nation, it seemed to have the effect of getting even more minority voters and college-age voters out to vote... more voters 2012 than there were in 2008.
Winners: Obama's ground game crew. Every volunteer, every campaign office organizer, every person who manned the phones and canvassed the neighborhoods and registered the voters. This was the antidote to the vote suppression efforts. If the Republicans wanted to suppress the vote: make sure there were enough registered voters to overwhelm any suppression. If the Republicans wanted to cut back on voting hours and early voting days: get more people to vote with absentee ballots that get around the restrictions. If long lines were gonna form up at the precincts: make sure the voters know that they have the right to stay in line even past closing hours. It worked.
Losers: Every Republican candidate who wanted to ban abortion and dismissed rape as an issue, especially the Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. They got their asses handed to them and kept the Senate safe for the Democratic Party. As a side observation, a major Florida amendment ballot tried to limit abortion access to where the only exception allowed was "the health of the mother". Yes, the ballot DID NOT have an exception to rape/incest, which happen to be very popular exceptions for a vast majority of Americans (even the ones who profess being pro-life: even they know how serious the problem rape and incest are). Result: the ballot went down to defeat by a solid majority. Lesson to the GOP: DO NOT DISMISS RAPE AS A SERIOUS ISSUE.
Losers: Rick Scott. Thanks to his voter suppression efforts, our state was even more ill-prepared for the election turnout than in 2000, making us more a laughing stock than we were back then. Also, 8 of the 11 amendment ballots he and his legislative buddies pushed onto the election suffered major rejections, especially the amendment that tried to Court-Pack the state judicial system to make it more partisan (the amendments that passed were three tax exemption ballots for veterans, widows of veterans and first responders, and low-income seniors: I argued against them mainly because of their origins, the revenue cuts may prove minor given how these changes benefit a slight minority of the populus). Better still, the effort to get three State Court Justices voted off the bench - a clear attempt at forcing vacancies that Scott could fill with cronies - came back with all three judges getting 3/4ths of the vote to RETAIN, a huge slap in the face to Scott. In short: BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. The big talk I'm hearing right now is how to kick Scott out of office in 2014 when he comes up for re-election. If the state Republicans had any sense, they'd look at Scott's poor polling and run a viable primary candidate to kick him out before the whole state does...
Winners: Marriage equality advocates and Pot Legalization advocates. Two states (almost three, I think one state is still counting ballots) voted in FAVOR of gay marriage rights, while one more state voted down a ballot that would have overturned a legislative pro-gay law. Two states voted to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, a huge salvo in the fight to end a broken and ineffective War on Drugs.
Winners: Women. Women candidates won elective office in huge numbers across the nation at both the state and federal level. Lemme double check, but I think nine women won Senate seats this election, a huge uptick in gender representation in the Upper House of Congress. Guess what, pundits? There was a War on Women, and the women fought back.
Losers: Senate Republicans. Not only did they fail dramatically to garner a slim hold of that wing of Congress - which would have combined with their solid hold of the House - but they lost major leadership from either retirement (Kyl, indy Senator Lieberman) or losing to more liberal Democratic candidates (Scott Brown losing to Elizabeth Warren). The incoming Democratic Senate make-up is going to be more liberal than ever before, and more than likely to weaken if not eliminate the Cloture rule (and by extension the filibuster), the biggest weapon the Senate GOP had in obstructing Obama's policy agendas.
Winner: Me. The blog traffic to my site bounced from single-digits to the hundreds thanks to my article on the Florida 2012 amendment ballots. Especially a huge crowd of viewers conducting search terms from Japan. Wow. Now, if I can get you new viewers to consider the fine possibility of buying my ebooks... wait, don't go! Sniff, it gets so lonely here...
Loser: Well, yeah, had to mention him sooner or later. Hi, Mitt.
Winner: Barack Obama.
And now, with his Anger Translator Luther:
Luther: "“I mean, you know how much money they spent trying to get rid of this? Millions, son! I said millions!"
Losers: Speaking of those millions, the billionaires who shipped tens of not hundreds of millions of dollars into unregulated SuperPACs in an effort to make Obama a One-Termer. What you all get for your value, dawgs? NOTHING! ALL THAT MONEY WASTED BWHAHAHAHA!
Instead of being afraid of how Citizens United may make it easier for the wealthy to win elections - which 2012 proved the opposite - there needs to be a genuine investigation into what happened with all that money that got funneled into Karl Rove's and others' SuperPACs. There seems to be a lot of waste happening there: not many ads made, almost no ground game like how Obama organized, a great number of reports of how the people "managing" the SuperPACs walked off with huge salaries and bonuses they paid themselves... I'm serious. Campaigning has turned into a BILLION-DOLLAR industry and there's little oversight: it's the perfect scam for con artists...
Winners: every person in Dade and Broward Counties who stood in line for 7,8, God love 'em probably 10 hours on Election Night. The Obama campaign made sure the word got out that the law ensures any person standing in line at the Closing time (7 pm EST) had the right to stay in line and get their vote in, no matter how late it got past that. This is democracy in action. While it was a damn shame they had to wait so long, God Bless Them for doing so. And next time, let's make it easier on them to get their votes in and counted.
Web vid spec has Microsoft on board, but Apple's still hanging back
Now that the web vid spec MPEG DASH has been published and interoperability testing is well underway, vendors are starting to put their cards on the table with serious deployments. One of the first to build DASH into products is Thomson Video Networks, which is now supporting it in its ViBE VS7000 multi-screen video platform, with the help of multi-media software company VisualOn. The DASH support is built into VisualOn's multi-media player that Thomson now incorporates into ViBE for cross-platform audio and video playback on target devices.…
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Intel contextual awareness: 'We know what your wife is up to'
Scientists provide a measure of uncertainty
NZ software giants join patent bill protest
E-publisher 'fesses up: 'Apple UDIDs were ours'
GNOME hacker: Culture isn't holding desktop Linux back
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:13 PM PDT
'There is no single simple issue to fix'
Open source bigwigs like Alan Cox, Miguel De Icaza, and Linus Torvalds can bicker all they want, says GNOME hacker Michael Meeks, but changing developer culture won't do a thing to attract more consumers to the Linux desktop.…
Thomas-Rasset faces $220,000 file-sharing bill after losing appeal
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:46 PM PDT
Court rules $9,250 per track is constitutionally fair
Nearly five years after being found guilty of file-sharing in the media industry's first jury trial on the issue, Minnesotan mother of four Jammie Thomas-Rasset is back where she started after the appeals court upheld the original verdict.…
Intel to turn Ultrabooks, all-in-one desktops into giant tablets
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:49 PM PDT
Can't beat 'em, join 'em
IDF 2012 Intel wants to turn laptops and even desktops into tablets in order to reverse the decline in the personal computer market. To that end, it unwrapped two form-factors it will be promoting to get tablet-hungry consumers back buying PCs.…
Intel demos next-generation voice and gesture interfaces
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:25 PM PDT
Offers a million bucks for the best 'perceptual computing' idea
IDF 2012 Intel wants computers to be as smart as humans in how they understand voices and gestures – and it's offering $1m to the best idea that can help achieve that goal.…
Touch tech firms tap Intel for factory cash
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:18 PM PDT
Chip giant to keep Win8 touch bandwagon rolling
IDF 2012 Intel has been pumping money into the touchscreen component business in order to encourage the production of panels of 13in and up to make sure there are enough of them for vendors to build all the touch-enabled Windows 8 notebooks Intel hopes World+Dog will want.…
iPhone to account for half of US economy by 2030 - projection
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:07 PM PDT
America to get rich selling Foxconn gizmos to itself!
Strange, terrible, yet curiously inevitable news today - the day before iPhone 5 day. Analysis based on figures from hefty Wall Street brains appears to show that the Jesus Phone is set to account for a large chunk - perhaps the majority - of US economic activity within a matter of decades.…
Microsoft betas System Center service pack for unified control
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 11:33 AM PDT
SP1 beta increases InTune integration
Redmond's been talking about how System Center will be at the heart of its reboot of the Windows franchise for months now, and now it has released the beta of its first service pack.…
Day-long outage 'not a hack,' claims GoDaddy
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 10:53 AM PDT
Just a little router trouble, that's all
Domain registrar GoDaddy has commented on the daylong DNS outage that downed many of its customers' websites on Monday, saying that not only was a hacker not responsible, but that the service interruption wasn't the result of a DDoS attack at all.…
Al-Jazeera's mobe news feed hijacked by pro-Assad hacktivists
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 10:24 AM PDT
More breaking news on the conflict in Syria
Pro-Syrian government hacktivists have cracked the mobile update service of al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite news network.…
UK.gov blacklists Fujitsu from future contracts - report
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 09:24 AM PDT
Not good enough for government work. Cutting
Japanese IT group Fujitsu is among several companies that have been "blacklisted" by the UK Government, claims the Financial Times.…
Pirate Bay co-founder named in probe into Logica, tax office hacks
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 09:02 AM PDT
Warg hauled back to Sweden for copyright cooler stint
Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, a co-founder of download haven The Pirate Bay, is back in Sweden - and now faces allegations of playing a role in an attack on the country's taxmen and IT consultancy biz Logica.…
Viewsonic 22in Android 'tablet' hands-on review
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 08:28 AM PDT
Passes the Google test and then some
First look There was birthday cake aplenty at Viewsonic's 25th anniversary event in London today that also saw the introduction of three new products covering an innovative range of display options.…
Who'll save the 100 most endangered species? Microsoft, apparently
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 08:06 AM PDT
No, not Nokia engineers. Well, not this time
Microsoft has pledged software and expertise in a battle to save the world's most endangered species - and we don't mean Nokia engineers.…
Zombie PC herders issue commands from Tor hideout
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:42 AM PDT
Bury command server deep in the onion
Security researchers have discovered a botnet that uses the Tor anonymiser network to hide its command nodes.…
Google's Nexus 7 tabs 'can't perform' if flash RAM crammed
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:18 AM PDT
Fondling fandroids say slab needs hard reset
Reports are filtering in that some Google Nexus 7 tablets slow to a crawl once the memory starts filling up, and require a hard reset to bring them back to the admirable speed expected of Google's flagship hardware.…
There is life after the death of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Start button
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:01 AM PDT
Keep calm and download these handy tools
Comment The disappearance of the Start button in Microsoft's new Windows has proved unsettling for users. "I want Start. Start I say," said an early tester in a post entitled "Worst 60 minutes in my entire life".…
Cable offers to shower UK biz in taxpayer gold to stimulate growth
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 06:29 AM PDT
Govt-backed bank may pump bioscience, tech sectors
Blighty's Business Secretary Vince Cable pulled back the curtains on his new biz investment bank this morning.…
Shuttleworth drops one million cluster bucks on Ceph upstart
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 06:00 AM PDT
Linux moneybags funds Um Bongo's cloudy file system
Billionaire Linux kingpin Mark Shuttleworth has injected $1m into storage startup Inktank to bring the team's distributed file system Ceph to cloud computing.…
Google skids car insurance comparison engine onto rivals' lawn
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 05:42 AM PDT
Now, Brits, tell us everything about your motors
Google is now offering to compare car insurance prices for Brits following the company's acquisition of BeatThatQuote.…
Backroom music streamer Omnifone palms first profit
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 05:24 AM PDT
Stuffs wallet with Sony and BlackBerry cash
Privately owned music services pioneer Omnifone boasted its first ever annual profit this morning. The company provides a platform for streaming services including that of Sony (Music Unlimited) and RIM (BBM Music) and operates in 28 markets. Omnifone was founded in 2003 and launched its first service, MusicStation, in 2007. It has notched up several firsts, including the first cloud streaming service and the first licensed scan-and-match service.…
Windows 8? Nah: Win Phone 8 should give Apple the fear
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 05:01 AM PDT
Tiled phone, not PC, could put Redmond on top
Open ... and Shut Windows Phone 8 might spell the beginning of a climb to relevance for a desktop vendor breaking out its latest PC operating system at almost the same time.…
Laugh all you want at 'the cloud' - it'll be worth '$100bn by 2016'
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:44 AM PDT
Public-facing services to coin it, predicts IDC
Some $100bn will be slurped up by public IT cloud services by 2016, according to the crystal-ball gazers at IDC.…
Phone-hack saga: Prison officer cuffed in cop bung probe
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:26 AM PDT
Operation Elveden nets another suspect
A 31-year-old prison officer was arrested at his home in Northampton this morning as part of Scotland Yard's investigation into alleged bungs to cops. The probe is related to the Met's ongoing phone-hacking inquiry.…
Profs: Massive use of wind turbines WON'T destroy the environment
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:17 AM PDT
Would destroy the economy, though
Windy professors in the States have produced research in which they say that massive use of wind power would not, as had been thought, damage the planet's atmosphere and cause undesirable climate changes. They also argue that it would be "practical" to obtain half the energy required by the human race using wind turbines.…
Everything Everywhere swept away by its own 4G hype tsunami
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:02 AM PDT
EE rises to promise 16 cities next-gen mobe broadband
Everything Everywhere is no more: long live EE and 4G. The mobile operator now gets to watch its children, Orange and T-Mobile, starve to death as they're denied access to the 4G feast.…
More 'iPad Mini' tat pics leak ahead of Apple's big unzip
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 03:43 AM PDT
Rumour mill in overdrive for 7in tablet
Rumours that Apple will launch an "iPad mini" at its unveiling event tomorrow intensified today after more pictures of cases leaked online and retailers started advertising screen protectors for a 7in slab.…
What a card: Brit boffin Alan Turing stars in Monopoly tribute set
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 03:14 AM PDT
Bletchley Park flogs custom board in honour of code-breaker
He may not have made it onto the £10 banknote, but the face of WWII code-breaking hero Alan Turing now adorns the back of the silly money that's boxed into a new custom Monopoly set.…
So many devices, so little policy
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:45 AM PDT
So what are you waiting for?
Live event Every one of your users has a computer at home, maybe a laptop, definitely a phone, and likes to log in from someone else's computer from time to time. They're carrying your data around, but often not your security policy.…
Acer racks up Xeon E5s, picks fight with US server bad boys
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:44 AM PDT
From little seeds giant oaks shipments grow
It has been a while since Taiwanese server and PC maker Acer has made some noise in the server racket, but the company is plodding along after planting its seeds on United States soil in February 2011 with a revamping of its Xeon-based servers.…
Blighty battles Oz for stratospheric supremacy
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:28 AM PDT
Amateur ballooning rivals meet for head-to-head showdown
Pics The friendly rivalry between Brit and Oz amateur High Altitude Ballooning (HAB) enthusiasts hit new heights over the weekend when the two nations went head-to-head in a stratospheric clash of high-altitude titans.…
Array biz Nimble: Quick, lob us $40m before storage giants wallop us
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:58 AM PDT
Hybrid racker needs VC cash
Hybrid flash and disk drive array start-up Nimble Storage has been given $40.7m in venture capital funding to boost sales, marketing and engineering.…
Gov IT bods must shield their budgets from gov's knife – Socitm
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:42 AM PDT
Increased use of council ICT services putting the squeeze on managers
A report from the public sector IT directors' group Socitm has identified four ongoing priorities for ICT managers in the wake of continuing austerity.…
Want to avoid another cookie law mess? Talk to EU bods next time
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:19 AM PDT
'Dear ICO, sue us ... We're sick of you and this ridiculous cookie law'
UK businesses should actively involve themselves in the debate over changes to EU law if they want to avoid problems stemming from the way those laws are drafted, an expert has advised.…
WD to parade flash-disk mutant for Wall St moneybags this week
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:02 AM PDT
Thinner, 'extreme' capacities promised
Western Digital will face investors on Thursday and tell them what the world's new number-one disk drive supplier is going to do to stay at the top.…
Apple's soon-to-be-slurped securo firm shrugs off crypto warning
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:33 AM PDT
Windows passwords exposure confusion
AuthenTec, the security firm that's the target of an $356m acquisition by Apple, has denied reports that possible cryptographic weaknesses in its fingerprint scanner software pose a risk to the security of laptops.…
Ambitious Alibaba wants to take on Android
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:30 AM PDT
There's only one way to settle this...FIGHT!
Not content with dominating the massive Chinese e-commerce market, local hero Alibaba now wants to chase Android into the sea by making its cloud-based Aliyun mobile operating system China's preferred smartphone OS.…
Microsoft urges devs to 'lead Windows 8 app land grab'
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:11 AM PDT
Give the people what they want - ASAP
Microsoft has urged developers to "lead the land grab" by developing Windows 8 apps ASAP.…
Archos 101 XS 10.1in Android tablet review
Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:00 AM PDT
Magnetic keyblet combo, anyone?
Archos has built a decent business making budget Android tablets, so I suspect the word 'merde' echoed loudly around the Igny HQ when Google pulled the rug asunder with its low Nexus 7 pricing. Archos hasn't given up though and has now released a new device pitched as a budget alternative to the Asus Transformer Pad.…
Samsung accused of sex discrimination in China plant
Posted: 10 Sep 2012 10:47 PM PDT
Electronics giant's woes continue as CLW turns the knife
South Korean electronics behemoth Samsung has been hit by fresh allegations of impropriety at one of its manufacturing plants in China, this time involving purported sexual discrimination in its hiring policy.…
Oz court to test AdWords' WHOLE BUSINESS MODEL
Posted: 10 Sep 2012 10:05 PM PDT
Regulator insists ad placements can misled and deceive
Australia's High Court, from which no appeal is possible, will this week hear a case in which Google stands accused of intentionally deceiving and misleading consumers by automatically placing ads according to advertisers' requested keywords.…
iPad no flight risk says Federal Aviation Authority
Posted: 10 Sep 2012 09:28 PM PDT
American Airlines allowed to use in-cockpit fondleslabs "in all phases of flight"
Being asked to switch off your electronic devices during the takeoff and landing phases of a flight now looks even more anachronistic, after American Airlines announced it has been given permission to let its pilots use iPads in the cockpit "in all phases of flight".…
UK's loyalty set for £1.2bn Huawei reward
Posted: 10 Sep 2012 08:50 PM PDT
There's a good boy...
The UK economy is set to get a much needed boost on Tuesday when Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei announces an expected £1.2bn investment including hundreds of jobs.…
Stretches Freedom interconnect fabric out to storage
SeaMicro is not longer an independent company, but you would not have guessed that if you were dropped in from outer space to attend the launch of the new SM15000 microserver in San Francisco on Monday afternoon. Advanced Micro Devices may own SeaMicro, but the company went out of its way to support the latest "Ivy Bridge" Xeon E3-1200 v2 processor from rival Intel as well as its own forthcoming "Piledriver" Opteron processor as new compute nodes in a new SeaMicro chassis.…
McAfee: Emma Watson riskiest celebrity search
Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:50 PM PDT
Malwaria activissima
In McAfee's latest survey of the celebrity searches most likely to lead to malware infection, Emma Watson – perhaps best known as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films – has taken the top spot, knocking off model Heidi Klum from last year's most-likely-to-infect honors.…
Hacker uses Kindle as Raspberry Pi screen
Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:34 PM PDT
DIY instructions await the brave or foolish
A hacker named Gef has rigged up his Raspberry Pi to use a Kindle e-reader as its monitor.…
Firefox support extended to older Android mobiles
Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:22 PM PDT
Experimental builds for phones with ARMv6 chips
The Mozilla Foundation would like to see its Firefox browser running on more mobile phones. But since almost no handsets ship with Firefox pre-installed, that means getting the software onto more of the phones that are already out there – even if they use older hardware.…
Intel contextual awareness: 'We know what your wife is up to'
Posted: 10 Sep 2012 04:38 PM PDT
Knows when its best to call, text, or just leave her alone
IDF 2012 Intel Labs is working on a technology that uses what it calls "contextual awareness" to advise you of the best method to use when contacting others.…
Scientists provide a measure of uncertainty
Posted: 10 Sep 2012 04:16 PM PDT
What would Heisenberg's position be?
A group of Canadian PhD researchers claim to have obtained information beyond the "Heisenberg limit" using a technique called "weak measurement".…
NZ software giants join patent bill protest
Posted: 10 Sep 2012 03:45 PM PDT
Petitioning against patent trolls
Updated: govt says "no" New Zealand's largest software exporters, Jade and Orion Healthcare, have lined up with the NZ Open Source Society, InternetNZ, and local industry lobby NZRise to ask the government to revise its proposed patent laws.…
E-publisher 'fesses up: 'Apple UDIDs were ours'
Posted: 10 Sep 2012 03:14 PM PDT
BlueToad clears FBI of device data collection
It seems both Apple and the FBI were telling the truth: the Apple UDIDs published last week didn't come from either organization, with an American e-publisher posting a statement that the data was stolen from its systems.…
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I didn't come up with a "What To Expect" for the Democrats' convention in Charlotte, mostly because I really did not know which approach they would take: offense (going after Romney/Ryan for being one-percenters obsessed with harsh tax cuts and even harsher spending cuts) or defense (trying to explain all the things Obama did do during his 3 1/2 years of being in the White House).
The possibility they would do both was there, but unlikely in my mind. And it turns out I was well off-target. For the most part it has been a healthy (or unhealthy depending on your POV) mix of speakers hitting at Romney's weak job-creation record and weak record supporting minorities and women, alongside speakers highlighting the accomplishments of Obama's administration on the steady economic rebuilding efforts.
Topped off by what has become an instant classic of a speech from former President Bill Clinton that both slammed Romney and the Republicans as well as promote Obama at the same time.
There's still a little time left here before Obama should be performing his acceptance speech at the convention, though, so I could take a moment here to take a few wild guesses to what Obama will say:
An obvious thank-you to Bill Clinton;
An obvious I-love-you to Michelle and the kids;
A long and focused description of a jobs-stimulus program Obama hopes to get done if re-elected;
A short quip-worthy attempt to mock Republican inability offer any substantive proposals outside of "trust us";
An avoidance of Eastwooding: dude, it should be about class, and digging in that direction wouldn't be worth it;
A tribute to the soldiers (a theme in the DNC convention, something that the Republicans for all their flag-waving patriotism refused to do);
A call to action! Thrilling exhortation! ...oh wait, I'm channeling a pretty funny Doonesbury parody of your standard graduation valedictions... my bad.
So, anybody ready for a DNC bounce of more than 5 points?
To contact us Click HERE Gen. Chang - I AM AS CONSTANT AS THE NORTHERN STAR! Dr. McCoy - I'd give real money if he'd shut up... - Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country
It's not enough to point how just how often and how severe that Mitt Romney changes his story, changes his opinion, changes his political stance: how he, in fact, LIES on nearly every issue.
It's not enough to pile on to the observation of how Romney's currently best-known nickname got to be "Mr. Etch-A-Sketch".
It needs to be pointed out as often as possible how Mitt Romney is the LEAST-LIKED Presidential candidate in AGES, but that's not the point of this blog entry here.
The point of this article is to focus on what Mitt Romney REALLY WANTS if he becomes President. It's kind of hard to do when he's got this well-deserved reputation for flip-flopping and pandering in such a way it's made other panderers - both Clintons come to mind - look like sagacious pillars of consistency. But beneath all the bluster, behind all the constant "re-inventing" and "re-branding", at the base of EVERYTHING on Mitt's clouded and passed-over agenda (the one where he keeps saying "Trust me" as though that's always a good-enough answer): there is one consistent item on the agenda Mitt has NEVER renounced and ALWAYS persisted.
A massive tax cut.
Everything else on the table - abortion, foreign policy, Medicare/Medicaid and health care reform in general, education costs, energy needs - Romney has flipped on at least once this year.
But the tax cut plan, despite the occasional "tweaks" to how it's presented, has pretty much remained the same. And it's remained the core element of Romney's economic package, as though the massive tax cut will solve all woes, create all jobs, save all mankind.
Even though a majority of Americans ought to f-cking know better by now. Considering we've had a Republican President pass a massive tax cut plan roughly 11 years ago, and we've had all this time to see what the results have been (first chart from Ezra Klein, second chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) :
The Tax Rate of the cuts for upper income clearly get bigger, doubling and tripling in size for the top three brackets. What does this say about the tax burden for upper income Americans? How regressive have these Bush tax cuts really been?
Note how most of the deficit causes shrink eventually: The Bush Tax Cuts NEVER SHRINK AND IN FACT GET BIGGER
And consider this: Romney wants his tax cut plan to go DEEPER than the Bush tax cuts ever went. He's asking for a $5 TRILLION cut, ostensibly across the board except for the fact that he's scaling it more for upper income over middle-and-lower incomes. Because hidden in his tax proposal, Mitt wants to kill off the Alternative Minimum Tax and the Earned Income Tax Credit (both of which benefit middle and lower class taxpayers). Check this chart (from Klein's guest-blogger Dylan Matthews):
Everyone under $25,000 income has to pay MORE taxes by 1 to 2 percent, while the jump from $147,000 to $150,000 income from a 2 percent cut straight up to a 6 percent cut.
This is what Mitt Romney wants. This is his obsession, his passion, his ever-fixed mark. Everything else on his platform changes from day-to-day like the Etch A Sketch candidate he is. He wants this massive tax cut.
Even though FOR THE LOVE OF GOD we have all seen that tax cuts - especially cuts that are NOT PAID FOR by targeted spending cuts to balance it out - DO NOT WORK. Even though we've got economic experts - from the usual suspects like Krugman to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center to serious fiscal Republicans like David Frum - screaming how Romney's tax plan is IMPOSSIBLE. Romney is insisting on this tax cut plan, claiming it will "create jobs," "create growth," "fix government."
Tax cuts are not job creators : direct investment into business expansion and start-ups are. Tax cuts do not stimulate the economy. Tax cuts do not help curb spending: not only did spending get out of control during the GOP-led Bush era by so-called fiscal conservatives, but even hardcore fiscal conservative Ben Stein is now noting that at the current tax rates - "they're too low" - there aren't enough spending cuts to flatten out the deficit.
And Romney wants to make the tax rates LOWER. No matter the excuse or justification. He just does.
This alone should be disqualifying Mitt Romney from even being a Presidential candidate, for God's sake. But he's up there on the ballot, and GOD HELP US the polls are getting too close for comfort.
