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In his 2013 State of the Union, President Obama proposed a $9 federal minimum wage, indexed to inflation. Here to discuss the minimum wage as a policy is Arindrajit Dube.
Dube is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a widely respected scholar of labor markets and the minimum wage. Along with T. William Lester and Michael Reich, he is the author of Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders: Estimates Using Contiguous Counties (2010), a major study that found no adverse employment effects of minimum wages increases by studying counties that cross state lines.
Dube has written a summary back in 2011 on the state of this research here. Narrow, technical issues have dominated so much of the debate on the minimum wage, so I wanted to step back and get a better understanding of the minimum wage as a policy mechanism. These remarks are lightly edited.
What does an introductory-level Economics 101 textbook tell us about the minimum wage, and how does that contrast with how advanced scholars approach the topic?
In the Economics 101 textbook model, there are a couple of effects we can expect from an increase in the minimum wage in a competitive labor market. It's going to increase the cost of production and, as a result, employers may be expected to cut back on employment. But they'll also be able to pass on some of the costs to consumers. So to what extent, even in a competitive market, the minimum wage causes a loss in employment, as opposed to an increase in price, is theoretically ambiguous.
However nowadays when economists—labor or otherwise—study the labor market, they not only think about employment levels but also about flows. There are a lot of things about the labor market that don't really fit really well with the simplest competitive model of the labor market. In reality there are good jobs and bad jobs, and workers try to get to a better job whenever they can. So there's a lot of turnover and churning in the low-end of the labor market.
To the extent that the minimum wage makes the lowest paid jobs better, it tends to reduce turnover and reduce vacancies. So an increase in the minimum wage may not kill jobs but kill vacancies in a low-end labor market. This is consistent with the more realistic models of the labor market. Our new work shows this for the U.S., but there is evidence from other countries as well. So minimum-wage laws may make jobs more stable while raising wage.
Your research argues that there aren't employment effects from raising the minimum wage. But why bother increasing the minimum wage when we could just increase the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which also supports the wages of low-wage workers?
There are some opponents of minimum wages who point to the EITC as a better alternative. But here's the thing. Research by Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein shows that roughly 27 cents on the dollar from the EITC is passed on to employers. So there's some leakage there. And for some people, the presence of EITC acts as a multiplier for a hike in the minimum wage.
So as a result, when thinking in terms of efficacy, these two policies may complement each other. They may go together.
Right. David Lee and Emmanuel Saez have also theorized that, when employers capture part of an EITC, a minimum wage is a good compliment. And there's also leakage from the EITC to "fast cash" refund loans too. But does the minimum wage really help the poor? I've heard it isn't well targeted as a program.
Now they both have leakages of various sorts. The point on the minimum wage may be somewhat overplayed. But certainly it is the case that there are a lot of poor people who don't have jobs, and so the minimum wage is not going to be able to help them.
Food stamps are a lot better at aiding the very needy who aren't even in the labor force than a minimum wage, because it makes sure they have basic sustenance. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we should have food stamps only and not a minimum wage. It's a false choice.
So the first part of the answer is thinking in terms of a portfolio of policies that policymakers should consider.
Another point goes back to the nature of low-wage labor markets. We understand that the low-wage labor market has a lot of turnover and frictions. A minimum wage can reduce churning while not reducing employment. So those together point to the idea that a higher minimum wage not only increases wages but may also improve the functioning of the labor market.
There are reasons to believe that, for instance, in a high turnover environment, firms may be less willing to invest in training. There are good theoretical reasons why that would the case. With a higher minimum wage reducing turnover and increasing job stability, they might be more incentivized to do that which may increase productivity.
So what is the right way to think of how the minimum wage is targeted in regards to workers?
There are two issues here. How much of the gains go to people who are poor? But there's also a second issue of how much of the money goes to people who are near poor. From a certain perspective, even if a relatively small but not negligible gain go to the poor, we aren't doing very badly given how few of the poor are in the labor market.
If the minimum wage is going to be good for working-class families, but not necessarily poor families, I'm not entirely sure why we should think of that as being a leakage of the policy. We have different polices designed for different distributional goals. We need to think not in terms of a single policy, but instead think in terms of what is the right portfolio of policies given the range of objectives you have.
So if going to a $9 minimum wage is such a good idea, why not go to a $40 minimum wage?
Is there ever too much of a good thing? I think for most things the answer is yes. The range of minimum-wage increases we have seen in the United States, the evidence speaks pretty clearly to there not being job losses, and also gains to workers.
So what is that range? Let's go back to 1968. In 1968 the minimum wage was around 50 percent of the average production-worker wage. If that were true today, that minimum wage would be around $10 an hour. So from that perspective, raising it to $9 is well within, indeed under, the historical norm between the minimum and average wage of production workers.
Another way to think about this is looking at other countries. There are many countries in the developed world that have a minimum wage that is as, or even more, generous than 50 percent of average wages.
Another way to think about this is to consider what the purchasing power of the minimum wage. The 1968 minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, today would be somewhere between $9.25 and $10.50 depending on what CPI index you use. Again what the Obama administration is proposing is safely below this.
We can't say, based on historical evidence in the United States, what a $40 minimum wage would do, but we can say a lot about what a $9 or $10 minimum wage would look like.
In addition to a $9 minimum wage, President Obama proposed indexing it so that it goes up with the cost of living. How does that complicate a minimum wage?
First of all, nine states already have an indexed cost-of-living increase for the minimum wage.
One thing that I would do is makes wage changes more predictable. At the federal level, we have gone through extended periods when the nominal minimum wage has been stagnant, then there's a big fight about it followed by a sizable increase, and then it stays there for a while. I don't know of any economic model which says this is a good way to go. This creates uncertainty about the timing and extent of the wage increases, and it generally not a great way of setting the minimum wage, no matter what level you think it should be.
We could disagree about the level of the minimum wage, but it seems like a no-brainer to me that no matter what level we pick, we should have a relatively smooth adjustment process. A natural adjustment process is tying the rate of cost of living increases, like many items including Social Security payments. It makes a lot of sense. Daniel Hammermesh—a well-known labor economist who in general is not in favor of high minimum wages—has nonetheless come out supporting indexation.
Let's say that we increase the minimum wage to $9, and it turns out that your research showing no job losses wasn't correct or didn't hold. What's a bad case scenario for workers who would be affected?
Here's an important thing to keep in mind. What does the minimum wage do in a competitive labor market? If the law of demand holds without any frictions then employment falls. But by how much? And does it mean that if it falls, we shouldn't do it? Absolutely not. Before the debate that started on minimum wages in the mid 1990s, when the consensus of the discipline was that there were detectible effects of minimum wages on jobs, many economists still supported the minimum wage!
And their idea was that the costs were there, in terms of jobs, but the benefits were nevertheless higher. Now the debate has shifted to whether there are any costs in terms of employment, while there is still the benefit.
So even if some jobs were lost, a person who might have a smaller probability of employment is also going to have a higher wage if he or she were to be employed. As a result, it is not at all clear that they'd be worse off. When you balance these things, including less churning in the labor market, it is easy to imagine workers being better off even if there are job losses.
As a result, it is interesting that surveys of workers show a clear preference for an increase in the policy.
Anything else you'd like to share on Obama's proposal?
Full disclosure: if this passes, it would directly hurt my career as an applied micro-econometrician! We'd have little variation in minimum wages with which to run more regressions. But the variations we've seen, the kind I've done my work on, don't make much economic sense. They are driven by political cycles, and business cycles, in ways that are counterproductive. So while we can disagree about what the level of the minimum wage should be, putting it on a predictable adjustment process is something we should all be able to agree on.
Fri, 2013-02-15 11:54
Open letter to Oakland mayor Jean Quan:
The only legislation that can realistically end gun violence in Oakland – and Chicago – is a labor law: doubling the minimum wage to $30,000/yr. The Crips and the Bloods could not whip a decent paying Ronald McDonald.
Crackpot? More than doubling the federal minimum wage from $7.25/hr to $15/hr ($600/wk) would cause less than 4% direct inflation:
$3.87/hr (half/average raise) X 2080 hours (full work year) = $8,049/yr X 70 million workers (half the workforce -- $15/hr is today's median wage) = $563.4 billion. (3.5 million workers at the minimum wage would get a full $16,020 raise may be left out to simplify eighth-grade math.) Divide $563.4 billion by a $15.8 trillion GDP and we get 3.6% direct inflation (not counting leap frog pushups which may not add up to that much – LBJ's median wage was only 25% higher than his minimum – high minimum wages often approach median level in other economies).
Oakland won't educate its way out of poverty and crime. Catch 22: political scientist Martin Sanchez-Jankowski, from neighboring UC Berkeley -- who spent nine years in five poor New York and Los Angeles neighborhoods (and ten years before that researching street gangs) -- explains in his 2008 book Cracks in the Pavement that ghetto schools don't work mostly because students (and teachers!) don't expect anything decent awaiting for them in the labor market, so think it hopeless to make the effort.
In 1956 majority leader LBJ steered an $8.50/hr ($1/hr nominally) minimum wage bill through the US Senate. In 1968 (hourly increments and retail workers added in years between) president LBJ piloted a minimum wage of $10.50/hr ($1.60/hr nominally) into law -- per capita income having expanded 25% in the dozen years intervening.
Per capita income has doubled in the two generations since 1968.
There would be a dismal gap even between a minimum wage of $15/hr, or $30,000/yr and a reality-based minimum needs (poverty) level for a family of three – and even between a median wage 25% higher of $18.75/hr, or $37,500/yr.
A realistic poverty line for a family of three is $45,476 in 2012 dollars according to the 2001 Ms. Foundation book Raise the Floor (table 3-2 on p.44 -- includes $8,786 medical insurance cost). Raise totals up from a comprehensive list of expenses, including taxes to get its figure. (Raise provides extensive explanations for its minimum needs parameters in Appendix B, citing Solutions for Progress -- allots $3,000 to yearly medical expenses even if the family has insurance.)
$19,090, supposedly covers the minimum needs for a family of three under the 1955 era federal formula. Both the Ms. and government formulas calculate about $6 per person/per day for food – the ancient federal methodology multiplies the cost of food three times and leaves it at that. Which is why you won't see the federal measure quoted much anywhere except as a formula multiple (2X, 3X, 4X).A wage even 50% higher than today's median, of $22.75/hr or $45,000/yr, would barely support a family of three.
"Since 1973 [note: the last year national income gains were shared across-the-board], productivity has grown roughly 80 percent while median hourly compensation improved by roughly 11 percent." Something more elemental than "raising the floor" needs to be prescribe.
Anyone can work up a list ruses by which the average American's interests are being hung out to dry these days. I was just going to say the only thing not foisted upon us so far is foreign firms buying up local water rights and charging them back to us triple.
Then I remembered Chicago leasing its parking meter system for 75 years for $1.15 billion:
Up the road from Oakland City Hall – up College Avenue – on the UC of Berkeley campus labors as progressive a progressive economics faculty as anyone should wish. They could you tell you, Madam Mayor, and tell everyone else at the same time [this essay may hopefully edge them in the latter direction] about a species of labor legislation that can potentially re-write the American social contract front to back, economic to political.
Legislation that has been tried and tested over half a century in the first world (Germany, France) moving to the second and third worlds (Argentina, Indonesia) as well as right next door (French Canada). Legislation bringing to Americans a labor market setup devised – not by Karl Marx – but by post WW II German and other continental industrialists – not to empower labor -- but to stifle union wage races-to-the-top that would divert money from industrial bases rebuilding. (England did not take this path which is why it fell behind – which I'm pretty sure I read in Berkeley's, Barry Eichengreen's 2008 The European Economy Since 1945.)
Europe's fabled welfare state was offered as a compensation for labor price moderation. Magic bullet: legally mandated, sector-wide collective bargaining – wherein everyone working the same category of job (e.g., retail clerk) in the same geographic locale (where applicable) works under one common contract with all employers – thwarts the race-to-the-bottom just as surely – just the right barraging balance.
The late David Broder, dean of the Washington press corps, said that, when he came to D.C. 50 years ago, all the lobbyists were union – which meant: naturally balanced campaign financing, someone minding the store on the average person's interests, all backed by the majority of voters -- perfect democracy. http://www.amazon.com/Were-You-Born-Wrong-Continent/dp/1595587063/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360528052&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=were+you+raised+on+the+wrong+side
Your friendly economics faculty up the avenue can tell you all about all of this – but you'll have to ask.
Denis Drew
Chicago (sometimes Berkeley)
Sun, 2013-02-17 20:30
Sat, 2013-02-23 11:04
It might cause such a small economic hiccup, as to be barely noticed, should we more than double the federal minimum wage over just one, single year -- say, in three quick jumps -- from $7.25/hr to $15/hr -- just plausible ...
... 70 million workers (half the work force -- $15/hr being today's median wage) X average raise $8,000 (half the full $16,000) = a mere $560 billion increase in the cost of a GDP output of $15.6 trillion: yielding a piddling 3.6% direct inflation.
Imagine instead that starting from an even higher minimum wage (say, $10.50/hr -- just to pick a number out of a hat), we had spread that raise over 45 years (say, from 1968 to 2013 -- just to pick some "arbitrary dates") -- and, that, to further dampen the "shock" of 2% direct increase over today's prices, that per capita income had so very conveniently doubled in the meantime ...
... would anyone have barely noticed?
Wed, 2013-02-27 12:07
If there were a Teamster Union-tough retail employees union -- able to negotiate one contract with all employers (under a setup called sector-wide labor agreements) couldn't the bottom wage be raised to $15/hr -- simply because the market would bear it?
Wal-Mart employee wages would go up about 66% (these are all just rough estimates on my part) while Wal-Mart prices would only go up about 8%. McDonald's wages would double while a Big Mack went up 33%. Top 10 percentile wages would not go up and overall prices they pay would go up a tiny little bit -- is the latter what public policy should be concerned about?
In Chicago, CBS-TV News reports that 100,000 gang age minority youth are in street gangs * (mostly selling drugs) out of I estimate 200,000 the same age. Are minority males evil or do they just refuse to work for nothing (the super-low minimum wage having effectively out-sourced most such jobs to American-Mexico)?
* http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57451996/gang-wars-at-the-root-of-chicagos-high-murder-rate/
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If you're looking for accommodation, look no further. The Holiday Garden Hotel & Resort
is one of the best budget hotels in Chiang Mai. Beautiful lush gardens surround this boutique hotel,
which offers a full range of amenities and services to suit your needs whether you are on holiday or business.
The resort hotel is in a prime location, just a short walking distance to shopping centers, restaurants, bars, night market and the new community mall 'The Habour.' It's also close to the popular and trendy Nimmanhaemin Road. You'll feel right at home in this Chiang Mai hotel.
|The only resort within the city of Chiang Mai
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Within ten minutes drive you can be at the Night Bazaar, all the old city's attractions,
the Chiang Mai Zoo, the Night Safari, the Royal Flora project, the 700 Year Stadium, and other great places to visit.

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There was no way that an Arkansas college kid could've imagined that the $1,100 used Chevy that he bought for transportation in 1970 would evolve into a treasured possession, or that said '63 Chevrolet would still be an integral part of his household over three decades later. Of course, when that old Chevy happens to be a Corvette, a Split Window coupe, well, we doubt many folks would not understand how such a thing could occur.
The college kid's name was Jeff Montgomery, the Corvette was a two-owner silver coupe with about 85,000 miles showing on the odometer, and the '63 spent the next four years functioning as a transportation module (yeah, but what a transportation module!). After Montgomery's graduation, he kept right on using the coupe as his daily driver for another three years. And, at the same time, he began modifying and personalizing it, both to suit his tastes and to keep up-within reason-with the latest trends.
In the '70s, that meant flared fenders and gold Imron paint, 8-inch wide Cragar SS wheels, and, after pulling out and carefully setting aside the original 327, an assortment of small-blocks ranging from a 302 to a 377-inch stroker. Jeff showed the first inkling of what would develop into his process of refining and evolving the Sting Ray with updates from newer model Corvettes, when he bought a wrecked '65 coupe (for $400!) and updated the "Split" with the slightly newer donor car's four-wheel disc brakes, Muncie four-speed, the rearend and springs, and the seats.
Come the '80s and it was time for another round of updates as well as some serious refurbishing, as the odometer in Jeff's Vette was on its third go-round (the old Sting Ray had amassed over 200,000 miles). And by this time, applying bits of technology from the latest model Corvette was becoming a habit for Jeff. It was also "time for a new look."
The "new look" was also a kind of "old look" with the car being returned to its original Sebring Silver, and the interior getting restored. However, the flares stayed. Additionally, Jeff added chrome-plated Hooker side pipes, a set of A/P chromed wire wheels, a repop L88-style hood, and deleted the front bumpers. This round of reworks and updating cost about $5,000-a sizable sum in the early '80s-and readied the 'Ray for another decade, and another 50,000 miles of enjoyment.
Enter the '90s. Another decade and, in Jeff's words, "...it was time for a new look, again." This time the "new look" was definitely a look back, as the flared fenders were replaced by stock contour panels, the stock hood was re-installed, and the chromed wires were deep-sixed in favor of reproduction factory knock-offs. Jeff took the original engine, complete with its factory-installed shielding and numbers-matching parts, out of storage, freshened it up, and slipped it back into its old home in lieu of the latest in a string of hot rod engines. Montgomery's back-to-almost-original movement (the '65 brakes, Muncie, and other miscellaneous parts stayed) was capped with the fitment of a factory-style exhaust system in place of the side pipes.


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For instance, if you're hanging pieces in a kitchen or bathroom, hang in a place where it can escape damage from heat, grease and water.
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- Willamette
- News
- News Archive
- 2011
- May
- Willamette recognized for service
Willamette students created the Tiger Club to mentor and tutor local elementary students.
Current News
Willamette earns high recognition in national community service honor roll
Willamette University is one of five colleges and universities nationwide to be named a special focus area finalist in the 2010 Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll — the second highest tier of recognition.
Only 11 out of 851 colleges and universities were named finalists in the honor roll, which recognizes schools for their commitment to service-learning and civic engagement. Six institutions earned the Presidential Award, the highest honor possible, which Willamette received in 2009.
The special focus area recognition is in honor of Willamette's work improving the educational and developmental outcomes of children in distressed communities, and transforming those communities by improving education outcomes.
Willamette has many programs devoted to this area, including Willamette Academy, which provides underrepresented middle- and high-school students with support and educational activities to help them be the first in their families to attend college; and Tiger Club, an in-class and after-school mentoring program Willamette students created at nearby Bush Elementary School.
Willamette students, faculty and staff dedicated 149,400 hours to service during the 2009–10 academic year. These hours provided more than 2,500 youth in the community with tutoring and mentoring, prepared hundreds of pounds of food for distribution to hungry families in the area, and equipped hundreds of Willamette students for lifetimes of service.
The honor roll is administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency that engages Americans in service through its Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, and Learn and Serve America programs; and leads President Barack Obama's national call to service initiative, United We Serve.
Learn more about service at Willamette through the Office of Community Service Learning.


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Ann joins us today as my third guest in a feature series I'm calling "Her Personal Space . . . . A few weeks ago, I thought it would be fun to visit places where some of my blogger friends go to to chill, read a book and relax -- at home. I had asked "where do you go to escape the 'noise'?" This is Ann's favorite spot:
Thank you, Ann, for sharing your favorite spot -- at home!
Tomorrow, please drop by and see where Maya at Completely Coastal likes to go, again at her home.
p.s. Sorry I'm late posting today; We've had a busy ArtWalk in Salida (see below for previous post). And here are the first two guests in "Her Personal Space:
Vicky at Room Service -- Decorating 101
Greet at Belgian Pearls


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New England's Best Historic Inns
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These are the moody weeks between foliage color and holiday glitz, a lull best captured with a night or two away. An old inn, one with the patina and the stories that come with age, seems particularly suited to this reflective time. We traveled many hundreds of miles in our search for the best of New England's oldest inns and B&Bs–those that still evoke the 18th century but are cushioned in contemporary comforts. The following historic and restful places emerged as our favorites.
No. 1
New Marlborough, Massachusetts
Late one afternoon we arrived at The Old Inn on the Green in New Marlborough, Massachusetts. This classic 1760s stagecoach inn stands in the southern Berkshires on the far side of a green along Route 57, now a quiet byway but once a bustling road heading west toward New York State. It's a long, low-slung building faced with columned first- and second-story porches; it's flanked by a gold-domed meetinghouse and a sprinkling of early homes in matching white clapboard.
We were greeted by delicious aromas and a cheerful staffer who ushered us out the door and across the green to a ground-floor room, furnished with antiques, in the nearby Thayer House, a vintage 1820s home. Would we like our hearth lit? Of course.
We sank into the wing chairs on either side of the shallow Rumford fireplace. The logs blazed, then settled into shifting patterns. Finally we stirred as far as the sitting room across the hall and checked out our bathroom with its full-headed shower and a separate Jacuzzi; also robes and bath salts. Ah yes …
By 6:30, one of the inn's three dining rooms had already filled; patrons were taking advantage of acclaimed chef/owner Peter Platt's reasonably priced midweek menu. The low-ceilinged dining rooms were lit by candles that blazed in iron chandeliers as well as on tables. Roasted-red-pepper soup came studded with tempura shrimp and a tender veal scaloppine, with seasonal veggies polenta. A series of amuse-bouches included risotto with onions and mushrooms and a lobster pate.
"It's like unpacking a Christmas stocking," my companion observed. "You have no idea what will come next, even with what's on the menu."
Next morning, after a breakfast of French-press coffee, juice, and the flakiest, most buttery of fresh croissants, we looked into the five light-filled upstairs rooms, all successfully preserving a 1700s feel–with style and comfort.
No. 2
Newport, Rhode Island
Please Note: This information was accurate at the time of publication. When planning a trip, please confirm details by directly contacting any company or establishment you intend to visit.


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Disney California Adventure Park
Hollywood Land
Teens, Adults
Big Drops, Dark, Loud, Scary, Thrill Rides
Accessibility and Other Information - Opens Dialog
FASTPASS, Indoor, Rider Switch
Hold on tight for a thrilling journey into another realm of sight and sound you're sure to never forget.
A Grand Re-Opening
Explore the notorious Hollywood Tower Hotel, the onetime haunt of Tinseltown's rich and famous until a mysterious event forced it to close. Edge past the wrought-iron gates of the abandoned abode and wind through a neglected, weed-filled garden before stepping inside a dilapidated lobby, seemingly frozen in time.
Make your way into a cozy library and behold curious artifacts from around the globe. As lightning ignites the darkened room, a nearby television set springs to life and Rod Serling welcomes you on a journey into the Twilight Zone.
From a secret passage, trudge into the shadowy confines of a dilapidated boiler room, where your vessel into the 5th dimension awaits. Enter the dusty service "elevator" and strap yourself in, light bulbs flickering on and off above you.
Going Up?
Launch upward through the hotel in darkness as the voice of Rod Serling echoes all around you. Suddenly, the corroded doors spring open to reveal a lengthy hallway inhabited by the otherworldly hotel inhabitants from 1939 beckoning for you to join them. But your skyward journey has just begun.
Going Down!
Squeal in terror as you plunge down the abandoned shaft then unexpectedly change direction and hurtle back up the hotel. Gaze out through a missing wall 13 stories high as the doors inexplicably open and close to reveal the hotel grounds. As if possessed by some unseen phantom, the "lift" plummets down and speeds upward over and over again, the sound of cables snapping and metal clanging overhead.
Will you make it back to the real world… or will you become a permanent resident of the Twilight Zone?
One stormy Halloween night in 1939, 5 unlucky souls mysteriously disappeared from the Hollywood Tower Hotel's doomed elevator.
Classic stars of the silver screen sought rest and relaxation at the Hollywood Tower Hotel during the Golden Age of Hollywood. In 1939, during a gloomy Halloween night, 5 unfortunate hotel patrons were riding in the elevator when a violent storm struck the building… and they were never seen again. Wherever they may have gone or whatever became of them has remained a mystery to this day. The hotel closed down that night and has remained abandoned ever since.
The Present Day
You're invited to take a tour of the Hollywood Tower Hotel and ride in one of the only working "elevators" to unravel the mystery.
The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is based on the popular anthology series The Twilight Zone, which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1964. Created, hosted and written by Rod Serling, the award-winning show—with its imaginative storylines and unexpected twist endings—was wildly successful.
The Twilight Zone® is a registered trademark of CBS, Inc. and used with permission pursuant to a license with CBS, Inc.


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This training course covers the issues involved in developing software for platforms powered by the ARM Cortex-A12 application processors.
This course is aimed at software developers writing low level and bare-metal code for ARMv7-A processors, concentrating on the Cortex-A12 processor.
3+ days
Optional Day 0:
ARM Architecture Fundamentals.
Recommended for audiences developing low level code on ARM for the first time. This optional day introduces the ARMv7-A ISA, exception model and memory model.
Day 1 - 3:
Optional Day 4:
Exploring one subject in more detail. Available topics are:


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Due to system migration members will not be able to earn JPMiles for subscription to Mint until further notice.Mint was launched in 2007 with the premise of bringing "Clarity in Business News", a need strongly articulated by business-news readers in the country. Mint aims to demystify complex business issues and provide unmatched clarity and depth in its coverage. Whether it is the refreshing new Berliner format, the design by an internationally acclaimed designer, the daily section on Markets and Finance – Mint Money, the unique weekend magazine Lounge or the association with The Wall Street Journal, Mint has features that no other business paper in the country has.
Mint has made rapid strides in setting up new benchmarks for business journalism in the country. This is a fact borne out by the endorsement and trust that readers have placed in Mint – making it the second most widely read business daily in the country within a short span.
Through its presence in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune and Chandigarh, Mint reaches the who's who of corporate India nationally.
Mint has been voted as India's No. 1 Business Media Brand by advertisers for the last 2 years in a row.
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Moderators: Tonyblack, Jason, Toothy
Natalya wrote:I watched them both.
I watched "Color of Magic" 2 years ago and watched "Going Postal" at last weekend.
"Going Postal" - It was delicious!
As "Doctor Who" It was absolutely really!
And Sir Terry who arised in last moment ...very amazing surprise!
Pip, thank you for your advice very much!
I vote for "Going postal", absolutely!
author3 wrote:Have you seen Hogfather?It's really good.
Natalya wrote:author3 wrote:Have you seen Hogfather?It's really good.
Yes some years ago, but.... Sorry, it seems unreal to me < sorry, I cann't choose English words for real explain > .
I liked Susan personality, but other - not impressed me... sorry
It's mostly blame of wrong translate, perhaps.
pip wrote:You use my own cat against me
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Unfiltered takes on politics, ideas and culture from Nation editors and contributors.
A prolonged civil disobedience campaign outside the White House that opposes a major oil pipeline from the "tar sands" of Canada is now in its sixth day, and 322 people have been arrested.
The Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico would carry 900,000 barrels per day of crude oil refined from bitumen in the Canadian soil. Aside from the ravaging impacts of extraction, the process contributes anywhere from twice to three times as much greenhouse gases as normal crude refining, and there's serious potential for leaks in the transcontinental pipeline.
The State Department, which is now conducting an environmental review, will then decide by the end of the year whether to issue a "certificate of national interest," which would allow the pipeline project to go forward.
As the arrests build, so too does the movement's support. Yesterday, every major environmental group in the country came out in opposition to the pipeline in a joint letter. The groups, ranging from the Sierra Club to Greenpeace, have often clashed on climate strategy in the Obama era, so the support is particularly notable. "On an issue as complicated as climate, there will often be disagreements over tactics and goals—just recall the differences over the Senate climate bill this time last year," environmentalist and protest organizer Bill McKibben, said. "But there are some projects so obviously dangerous that they unify everyone, and the Keystone XL pipeline is the best example yet."
The protests have brought a fair amount of mainstream media coverage to the issue, culminating in a strong New York Times editorial earlier this week, urging the State Department to "acknowledge the environmental risk of the pipeline and the larger damage caused by tar sands production."
(The media coverage was far less than what it could be, however, given the import of the issue—NASA's James Hansen has said that if tar sand oil makes a massive entry into the market, it's "game over" for efforts to stop catastrophic climate change. And as Mother Jones environmental reporter Kate Sheppard mused on Twitter today, "Can you imagine how much more coverage this would get if 272 tea partiers had been arrested?")
Nevertheless, the industry has taken note of the protests. The American Petroleum Institute has repeatedly bashed the Times editorial, and ThinkProgress' dogged Chamber of Commerce chronicler Lee Fang noticed the Chamber hitting back too.
Unfortunately, the administration has not yet acknowledged the mass civil disobedience. And more troublingly, reports suggest and approval of the pipeline is likely.
A State Department spokesperson told The Nation when asked about the protests that "The State Department continues to assess the proposal for the Keystone XL pipeline project. We consider the input and feedback from the publican important part of the determination process." The White House would similarly not acknowledge the action outside the gates, telling The Nation only that "The State Department is assessing the project on behalf of the federal government. That process is ongoing, including receiving important input from the public and stakeholders."
The State Department may be trying to throw some cold water on the movement, however—according to a curiously timed leak to the Washington Post yesterday, the State Department's environmental review, scheduled to be released by the end of the month, "will remove a major roadblock to construction" of the Keystone XL pipeline.
According to the source, the review is expected to affirm the State Department's earlier finding that the project will have "limited adverse environmental impacts." (A University of Nebraska study has found this evaluation to be deeply flawed).
But there's still nine days of civil disobedience left—and many more willing to be arrested.
When news emerged from Tripoli on Sunday night that rebels were closing in on the capital city and Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi was soon to be deposed, it should have been a cause for celebration, even among those of us who opposed American military involvement as ill-advised foreign policy adventurism. Although the future remains uncertain, Qaddafi's departure should and the opportunity it creates should, in and of itself, be noteworthy to anyone aspiring to lead the free world. Republican presidential aspirants did not need to say much to rise to the occasion: a simple statement of praise for the good news, or hope that Libyans will build a better future, or that the aftermath won't follow the chaos and mayhem of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, or that the US will be supportive without extending unwise military involvement. But that was asking too much. In many cases, Republicans who want to be president failed to act presidential.
The highest marks go, as usual, to Jon Huntsman. Huntsman had opposed US involvement in the Libyan conflict because we are too over-extended, especially financially, to afford another war. But nonetheless he said on Monday: "Gaddafi has been a longtime opponent of freedom, and I am hopeful—as the whole world should be—that his defeat is a step toward openness, democracy and human rights for a people who greatly deserve it."
Rick Perry, not known for his sober commentary, issued a similar statement. But Perry pretended that Qaddafi's regime had just spontaneously combusted, instead of acknowledging the role that the US and its allies played, much less—heaven forbid—praising Obama. "The crumbling of Muammar Ghadafi's reign, a violent, repressive dictatorship with a history of terrorism, is cause for cautious celebration," Mr. Perry said in a statement. "The lasting impact of events in Libya will depend on ensuring rebel factions form a unified, civil government that guarantees personal freedoms, and builds a new relationship with the West where we are allies instead of adversaries."
Not everyone followed their lead. Mitt Romney issued a strange statement demanding that the not yet formed Libyan government extradite Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who was convicted for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. The Scottish government released Megrahi in 2009. Romney's demand is politically clever, as it positions him as a more forthright defender of American interests than Obama. But it is wildly unsound on policy grounds. For one thing, al-Megrahi has already been tried, convicted, served time and released. To try him again would violate the constitutional principle of double jeopardy. And the US has more pressing concerns in Libya than further punishing al-Megrahi. Our first demand of the new Libyan government should be that it set up a system of constitutional liberty that safeguards individual freedom using an independent judiciary, free press and free religion. Secondarily they will need to hold elections so as to be democratically governed. Then we can perhaps we can work with them on our own strategic interests in the region. Romney's focus on al Megrahi is an unhelpful diversion.
Remarkably enough, Michele Bachmann actually made more sense in her response to the Libyan events than did Romney. Bachmann hit similar notes to Huntsman and Perry but prefaced them by reiterating her opposition to the US role in Qaddafi's ouster. "I opposed US military involvement in Libya and I am hopeful that our intervention there is about to end," said Bachmann in a statement. "I also hope the progress of events in Libya will ultimately lead to a government that honors the rule of law, respects the people of Libya and their yearning for freedom, and one that will be a good partner to the United States and the international community."
Bachmann's comment should not, unfortunately, be taken as a sign that she holds surprisingly realist or dovish views on foreign policy. Rather, as Eli Lake explains in The New Republic, she belongs to the racist school of thought among anti-Muslim bigots on the right who believe Muslims are not capable of democratic self-governance. As Lake writes, "Such ideas almost certainly explain why Bachmann showed little interest in backing the Arab protesters earlier this year. Many neocons attacked President Obama for not doing enough to support the protesters in Egypt, but Bachmann criticized the president from the opposite side."
Rick Santorum churlishly tried to deny Obama credit for the victory our military support just assisted. "Ridding the world of the likes of Gadhafi is a good thing, but this indecisive President had little to do with this triumph," he said in a statement.
But give credit to those candidates for at least addressing a NATO-backed rebellion in the Middle East overthrowing a longtime US adversary. Half of the GOP field has simply ignored the event, since it is difficult to fit into their partisan framework.
Of course, foreign policy is also a soft spot for most Republican candidates. All Republicans must wrestle with President Bush's failures to pacify Afghanistan, catch Osama bin Laden, spread democracy in the Middle East, enhance American popularity or prestige abroad, or manage the Iraqi occupation. Obama, by contrast, killed bin Laden, has seen the Arab Spring rise on his watch, drawn down troops in Iraq without disaster unfolding, and more successfully combated Al Qaeda than Bush did. All that makes this a hard time to criticize Obama, particularly on the grounds that he is soft on national security. Qaddafi's departure will make it no easier.
Moreover, the GOP field right now is a group with virtually no foreign policy expertise. Composed primarily of former governors and House backbenchers, only Huntsman can claim any significant foreign policy experience. And several candidates have shown themselves to be especially incoherent or ignorant on the Middle East.
Back in March Newt Gingrich made a series of contradictory and controversial statements on US involvement in Libya. On March 7, he called for a no-fly zone "this evening," explaining, "All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we're intervening." But on March 23, after the no-fly zone had begun, he said he opposed it. "We are not in a position to go around the world every time there's a local problem and intervene." Having taken two diametrically opposed positions, anything he says now will counter one of them, so he is probably reluctant to contradict himself yet again.
Pizza magnate Herman Cain made his biggest gaffe of the campaign when he made a statement in May that exposed his total unfamiliarity with the issue of the Palestinian right of return, so he may be wary of weighing in on foreign policy as well.
Foreign policy divides the Republican candidates as no other issue does. The only interesting part of the last debate was seeing Rick Santorum and Ron Paul debate US policy towards Iran. Paul had also opposed the Libyan intervention, but has been surprisingly quiet on Qaddafi's downfall.
It seems, though, that there is one thing the Republicans can always agree upon: never to credit Barack Obama for anything, even an outcome they sought.
The success of the Libyan revolution and toppling of Muammar Qaddafi has put conservative commentators in an awfully tough position. President Reagan had unsuccessfully bombed Libya in order to kill Qaddaffi, and had failed at exacting any revenge for Libya's murder of hundreds of American civilians on Pan Am flight 103. President Bush had worked to normalize relations with Libya and claimed Qaddafi's willingness to give up weapons programs as evidence of the Iraq invasion's success at scaring the bad guys straight.
But Qaddafi remained a dictator and a routine violator of human rights. Conservatives say the United States has an obligation to intervene militarily to depose hostile regimes such as Qaddafi's. But it's awfully embarrassing for them when it turns out that it is a Democrat who does so, and at considerably lower cost than we paid in Iraq. So how did the conservative media respond on Monday?
One approach is to avoid the subject. Visitors to Townhall.com this afternoon were treated to sizable headlines about Vice President Biden's comments on China's one-child policy and Representative Maxine Waters's distaste for the Tea Party, but could be forgiven for not realizing anything had happened at Libya at all. An Associated Press story relegated to a small side box was the extent of their Libya coverage.
Human Events was practically a stereotype of itself. Its first story in the site lead box asked, "How Long Will Sarah Palin Keep us in Suspense?" followed by an attack on Obama as anti–free trade, a story complaining that Obama is on vacation and an apparent attempt at humor arguing that placing hand sanitizer in the voting booth will help Republicans win next fall. The word "Libya" was nowhere to be found on the homepage.
Influential blog Red State did not weigh in on Libya all day Monday.
The neoconservative Weekly Standard, which exists primarily to editorialize in favor of militarily toppling Middle Eastern regimes, became suddenly demure. They dutifully reported statements from Obama and leading Republicans on the events without offering any analysis.
Other conservative outlets took it upon themselves to finesse the fact that Barack Obama just helped overthrow a terrorism-sponsoring tyrant into their preconceived notions about foreign policy. It wasn't easy.
On Fox News Sean Hannity cracked that the Libya operation shows that Obama "agrees with President Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive" military action. This makes no sense, unless Hannity is under the bizarre false impression that the United States supported the Libyan rebels to preempt some imagined attack on the United States's using imaginary weapons of mass destruction. Otherwise, there is no meaningful analogy to Iraq. Hannity also took multiple shots at Obama for being "on the golf course" during these events.
"So Qaddafi has been toppled, but only after a notably weak and unnecessarily prolonged campaign," Stanley Kurtz writes in National Review. Rather than seeing our strategic objective achieved without a single American casualty as a good thing, he complains of "a reluctance to see American casualties." Aside from lives lost and dollars spent (cost being a factor that supposed fiscal conservatives never mention when exhorting the United States to invade foreign countries), the other cost of the Iraq War we have been spared thus far in Libya is the wave of anti-Americanism stirred up by a unilateral invasion. That also disappoints Kurtz, who writes disapprovingly that "Obama was determined that Libya should stand as a precedent for multilateral interventions under United Nations auspices, fought according to UN rules of war." Most preposterously, Kurtz claims that Obama's success at working with allies to do what Ronald Reagan could not is evidence that our defense has gone soft. "We may have narrowly escaped the disaster of a failed intervention but Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and other potential adversaries have taken note of the West's weakness."
The Wall Street Journal editorial page made the now-moot criticism that Obama took too long to get behind the insurgency. "We and many others had urged the State Department to engage with the rebels from the earliest days of the revolt, but the U.S. was slow to do so." Compared to, say, the American Revolution victory has come pretty quickly for the Libyan rebels, but not fast enough for the keyboard commandos on Rupert Murdoch's payroll.
With these kinds of responses to an operation's success, it's hard to imagine what criticisms conservatives would come up with if the Libya mission had actually failed. But they'd figure out something, because that's what partisan hacks do.
The largest act of civil disobedience by environmentalists in decades began outside the White House this morning, as more than seventy activists were arrested at the north gates during a protest against the Keystone XL pipeline, which if approved by the administration would carry 900,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
The activists, who sat down at the gates at 11 am holding large banners reading "Climate change is not in our national interest," were warned three times by US Park Police to move along, and were handcuffed and removed after they refused. More than 2,000 people have pledged to be arrested outside the White House every day until September 3, in daily installments of seventy-five to 100 people.
The Keystone Pipeline would carry oil gouged from the "tar sands" of Alberta—areas where soil is thick with bitumen, which can be refined into synthetic crude oil. The process is environmentally devastating. Parts of Alberta have already been ravaged by the extraction, and the refining process involved creates twice the greenhouse gases as producing a normal barrel of crude.
Since the pipeline would cross an international border, the State Department has jurisdiction and is completing an environmental assessment of the project, which could be released this week. The White House will have ninety days to decide whether to grant a permit for the pipeline. The grassroots group 350.org, which includes many Nation writers, has called for a campaign of nonviolent direct action aimed at persuading the administration to deny the permit.
The Alberta tar sands represent the second-largest repository of oil in the world, and climate scientists are horrified with the prospect of pumping that much carbon into the atmosphere. Environmentalist Bill McKibben, who led today's action, noted that if all of the oil were extracted overnight it would increase the carbon in the earth's atmosphere from 393 parts per million to 550 parts per million—a devastating increase. NASA climate scientist James Hansen recently wrote that since phasing existing carbon emissions out is already an enormous task, "if the tar sands are thrown into the mix, it is essentially game over."
Beyond the climate concerns, there's the issue of pipeline safety—Keystone XL would traverse the entire country, from Montana to the Gulf of Mexico. Anyone unconcerned with potential pipeline failures should note the recent incident underneath the Yellowstone River, where an Exxon pipeline ruptured and spilled over 1,000 barrels of crude into the river.
There are, of course, massive financial interests behind the construction of Keystone XL. Tar sands commercials are ubiquitous on television, particularly during news programming. The industry, led by the American Petroleum Institute, has launched an enormous advertising and lobbying push.
McKibben rallied the activists in Lafayette Park moments before the action began, and noted the enormous amount of money on the other side of the fight.
"There is enormous pressure coming down on the White House from the fossil fuels industry. These are the richest people. They are the most powerful people on our planet. They usually win," McKibben said. "We have to find a different currency to work in. Our currency today and for the next two weeks is our bodies and our creativity and our spirit. And that's all we've got to put up against all that money, and we will find out if it's enough."
Since Congress is not involved in this decision, the White House is the decisive chokepoint for the Keystone XL project—Obama doesn't have to tangle with industry-friendly members of Congress. McKibben told reporters in Lafayette Park that "it is really the environmental test for Barack Obama, really in the course of his first term."
Many of the activists wore buttons from the Obama 2008 presidential campaign, which climaxed in Denver at the Democratic National Convention, where Obama famously marked the moment "when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." McKibben predicted that "if Barack Obama mans up and says 'no' to this thing, it will send a surge of electricity through all of the people who voted for him three years ago. It'll be the reminder of why we were so enamored with this guy in 2008."
When the arrests began, the activists—including McKibben, FireDogLake founder Jane Hamsher, Lt. Dan Choi, and Vermont Law School professor Gus Speth—repeated chants of "Hey hey, ho ho, Keystone XL's got to go" and "Ain't no power like the power of the sun, because the power of the sun don't stop."
They were handcuffed with zip ties, led one-by-one into a tent set up by the US Park Police, processed and loaded into the back of a large van as tourists watched. The arresting officers gave the activists water over the course of the two-hour process, which took place in the sweltering late-summer heat of Washington. Several activists noted that if Keystone XL isn't stopped, the hottest weather is surely yet to come.
It's been a really rough week for Standard & Poor's. As we noted Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission is "reviewing" the rating agencies' recent decision to downgrade the federal government's credit rating, which is totally inconsistent with actual economic indicators of the country's ability to pay its debt. The Senate Banking Committee is "gathering information" into that decision as well.
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice has been probing Standard & Poor's for its role in blessing toxic mortgage-backed securities in the years leading to the financial crisis those instruments ultimately caused. The investigation could "accelerate the shift away from the traditional ratings system," the Times notes.
The Justice probe focuses on whether managers at Standard & Poor's deliberately kept high ratings for mortgage-backed securities, despite the advice of some of the company's analysts, in order to preserve income from the very trading firms that trafficked in the dangerous tranches. According to the Times, investigators are questioning witnesses who might have heard Standard & Poor's managing director David Tesher warned employees: "Don't kill the golden goose."
Senator Al Franken wrote an opinion piece for CNN today highlighting another bit of evidence: a 2006 e-mail from a Standard & Poor's official, which said: "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters."
As experts are trying to piece together why Standard & Poor's made a clearly political, and clearly not economic, decision to downgrade the federal debt, it's crucially important to include the context of these ongoing investigations.
While nobody else knows what is driving Standard & Poor's to act, it is easy to see how it might believe the downgrade helps them—first, because while under attack for being blind to the mortgage-backed securities, they can now appear tough-minded about a debt crisis, which while again isn't economically present, is taken seriously by many DC policymakers.
Moreover, by issuing the downgrade and striking a blow against the administration, Standard & Poor's may be hoping to paint any ongoing investigations as retribution. If that's the strategy, it's starting to work. The lead of an ABC News story on the Justice investigation, for example, asks if the downgrade has made Standard & Poor's "a lightning rod for critics and regulators." The Washington Post similarly characterizes the investigation as "likely to add to the political firestorm created by the downgrade."
But the house of cards is faltering outside of Washington, too. Municipalities across the country are abandoning Standard & Poor's after being downgraded themselves, often unfairly. Municipalities have been asking Standard & Poor's and other agencies to rate their finances since around 1994, essentially as a public relations move following a major financial crisis in Orange County, California.
In just the past week, the City of Los Angeles; Manatee County, Florida; and San Mateo County, California, have all dropped Standard & Poor's after being downgraded. "We found the whole process of the downgrade flawed," the treasurer of San Mateo County told the Wall Street Journal. The county will save $20,000 annually by not paying Standard & Poor's, and won't sign up with another rating agency in the near future.
Standard & Poor's downgraded those municipalities because they held US Treasury bonds, so it flowed from the original flawed federal downgrade. But some recent downgrades have been even more unfounded—for example, Standard & Poor's issued a recent downgrade report on the county of Manassas Park, Virginia, citing in part increased salaries for public employees.
There are two small problems: Manassas Park is a city, not a county, and they haven't increased salaries in two years. Local officials pointed this out, but the downgrade was not retracted. (City officials told the Wall Street Journal they are not dropping Standard & Poor's, however).
In any case, it's particularly galling for some local officials who saw their municipality downgraded by Standard & Poor's, even if the assessment is technically fair. Local finances are often in trouble precisely because they are still holding toxic mortgage-backed securities that Standard & Poor's dubbed safe earlier in the decade. For example, Manatee County is still holding about $1 million in toxic debt—something Standard & Poor's cited in its recent decision to downgrade the county's rating.
We recently reported on how Texas Governor Rick Perry has raked in remarkably large donations from business executives in exchange for governmental appointments and policy favors. Now even conservatives are criticizing Perry for putting the interests of corporations ahead of the public interest.
The conservative Washington Examiner lambasted Perry on Wednesday as a "cowboy corporatist." Timothy Carney, who covers the intersection of corporate and political power for the Examiner, detailed how Perry created and ran the Texas Enterprise Fund and the Texas Emerging Technology Fund to hand over taxpayer money to private businesses. The nominal purpose is helping businesses expand in Texas or relocate there. Being a Perry donor is the surest route to winning a grant from one of these slush funds. Half of Perry's "mega-donors" have gotten money. Examples include a $4.5 million grant to $80,000 Perry donor David Nance and poultry mogul Joe Sanderson, who gave Perry's campaign $165,000, receiving $500,000 from the state government.
Carney concludes that "Perry made government a venture capital fund." The truth is much worse. Venture capital funds can make a profit for their investors. In this case, government was, in the words of Craig McDonald of Texans for Public Justice (TPJ), "providing direct grants to profitable corporations." Perry turned Texas into a corporate welfare agency.
What did Texas get in return? Not much, according to a "Phantom Jobs," a 2009 study by TPJ, which found that 66 percent of Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) grant recipients failed to deliver on their job creation promises. Looking at the compliance reports of fifty TEF grants that cost a total $368 million, TPJ found that thirty-three recipients failed to meet or amended their job creation or maintenance projections. Collectively they delivered 30,381 jobs instead of the promised 49,581. At more than $10,000 per job created, Perry would certainly deride any federal program with similar results as wasteful socialism.
"He's an exuberant corporate Republican," says former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower. "He's fully embraced the corporate plutocracy."
Another boondoggle for contributors was Perry's dream of creating a "Trans-Texas Corridor" (TTC). The mega-highway would have taken land through eminent domain to build a privately owned toll road. Eager to grab their share of the impending road-paving bonanza, construction companies stepped up their donation and lobbying expenditures. As TPJ reported in 2009, "Since the state solicited its first bids for a leg of the TTC project in 2003, private companies that have landed lucrative TTC contracts have contributed $3.4 million to Texas candidates and political committees—a significant increase in their political activity. TTC contractors also have spent up to $6.1 million on Texas lobbyists since the state solicited their respective bids."
The construction industry is a major source of Perry's campaign cash. According to TPJ, "From mid-1997 to mid-2001, TxDOT [Texas Department of Transportation] contractors contributed $239,750 to Perry. During Perry's first nine months in the Governor's Mansion his administration awarded almost $1 billion in contracts to these same TxDOT contributors." Between July 2003 and July 2008 Perry received $354,450 from contractors for the Trans-Texas Corridor.
The project has caused headaches for Perry among many different conservative constituencies. Concerns about eminent domain abuse cost Perry the endorsement of the Texas Farm Bureau in his 2006 re-election campaign. Conspiracy-minded paranoids think the Trans-Texas Corridor was part of a planned "NAFTA superhighway." The right-wing website Townhall ran an article last week called "Rick Perry's NAFTA Superhighway Problem." And the plan to lease the highway to a foreign corporation raised hackles on the nativist right.
Perry's favors for other foreign corporations could pose problems for him with hawkish conservatives. Neoconservative Eli Lake reports in The New Republic that Perry enticed Citgo, owned by the Venezualan government, to move its headquarters to Houston and expand a refinery in Texas with a grant and low-interest loan package worth $35 million. Perry also has cozy relations with Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei.
The most notorious misstep Perry made among conservatives was signing legislation that would require vaccination among Texas schoolgirls for HPV. HPV vaccination happens to be a good idea. But given Perry's opposition to most other good ideas, it's just as likely that he was swayed by the $6,000 dollars that Merck, the maker of the vaccine, gave to Perry's re-election campaign, as by the merits of the issue. Perry has recently reversed himself on the subject, but his right-wing critics, such as blogger Michele Malkin, remain unmollified. After eight years of crony capitalism under another recent Governor of Texas, it's not only conservatives that Perry will have to worry about.
Thursday morning's cover of USA Today blared the two words on everyone's lips: "the death penalty." No, this isn't because Texas Governor Rick Perry—who just loves executin' innocent and guilty alike—is now running for president. It's the fate that most people believe awaits the storied football team at the University of Miami. The death penalty means that the NCAA will for an indeterminate time shut down the entire Hurricanes program. It's a brutal, financially crippling fate that many believe Miami has more than earned, following a Yahoo Sports exposé by Charles Robinson that detailed eight years of amateur violations that would make Dennis Rodman blush. A mini-Madoff financial criminal named Nevin Shapiro, currently serving twenty years behind bars, offered prostitutes, payola, jewelry, yacht parties and every possible South Beach excess for the Hurricane players. While corrupting the athletic program, he was simultaneously being feted by the school's president, former Clinton cabinet member Donna Shalala, and Hurricanes athletic director Paul Dee. They even let him on two occasions lead the team out of the tunnel on game day.
This bombshell has the moral majority of sports journalists in full froth, rushing to the barricades to defend amateur sports. We have people like Sporting News columnist David Whitley, to use merely one example writing," The only way to make Miami behave is a long timeout. No more football, smoke and parties for a couple of years. Nothing else has a chance of ending the culture of corruption that is The U." He even calls Miami "the Ben Tre of college football," writing, "American forces wiped out the village to get rid of the Viet Cong, prompting a timeless explanation from the US commander: 'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.' The only way to save Miami is to destroy it, stripper pole and all." But like the war in Vietnam, not to mention the actual death penalty, the call for the NCAA to shut down the program is dead wrong. As with capital punishment, eliminating the Hurricanes is an exercise in hypocrisy that does nothing but ensure that these scandals will happen again and again.
What this scandal should produce, instead of the isolation and destruction of one program, is a serious reflection on the gutter economy that is college athletics. Players cannot be paid openly and legally, so instead we get the amoral wampum of "amateur sports." Reading the Yahoo Sports story, it's difficult to not be chilled by the casual misogyny detailed as strippers, "escorts" and hookers were purchased and handed to players like party favors. You wonder why more than 80 percent of NFL players get divorced after retirement. It's because as teenagers they are mentored by parasites like Nevin Shapiro who show them that women are the exchange value for their lucrative labor. This kind of gutter economy also has an ugly echo in old slave plantations, as the prized sports specimens in the antebellum South were handed women by the masters in return for their athletic prowess. Or as David Steele wrote earlier this week, "Of course, America's tender little feelings will be bruised if this is equated to slavery, or a plantation economy, or a plantation mentality. Fine. Maybe it can live with a metaphor like sharecropping. You do all the work, we take all the profits, we compensate you with the bare necessities of life, and tough break if you don't like it."
The metaphor works because once you wave away the smoke and hot air, this is about jock-sniffing criminals and corrupted college presidents taking advantage of primarily poor African-Americans from the South, who see everyone getting paid but them. One anonymous University of Miami player told Yahoo Sports about University running back Tyrone Moss, who took $1,000 from Shapiro. "The guy had a kid while he was in college, a little Tyrone Jr.," the player said. "He comes in poor as [expletive] from Pompano and he's got a little kid to feed. I could barely feed myself. I can't imagine having to feed a kid, too. Of course he's going to take it when someone offers him $1,000. Who wouldn't in that situation?"
The solution lies in paying the players but it also lies in driving a stake through the heart of the NCAA as an instrument of enforcement. Having the NCAA shut down the program only reinforces the illusion that they are the motor of morality, compliance and justice, when in fact they are the corrupters of these concepts. Already, NCAA President Mark Emmert, he of the seven-figure salary, has been across the national media, preaching about protecting, "The integrity of intercollegiate athletics." Emmert and his fourteen assistants, each who make at least $400,000 a year, will stand on their soapbox and quarantine the bad boys of Miami just in time to save the Golden Goose: the billion-dollar television contracts, and the $135 million from the Bowl Championship Series used to crown a fake national champion.
They defend amateurism as an end unto itself, but this is also complete nonsense. As Patrick Hruby wrote at espn.com last year, "Philosophically speaking, amateurism is malarkey, about as credible as the Tooth Fairy. The Victorian-era English aristocrats who came up with the concept ascribed it to the ancient Greeks, who supposedly competed for nothing more than glory, honor and olive wreaths. The only problem? History and the legend don't match. Modern archeology suggests that the ancient Olympics were rife with spoils. Think prize money, prime amphitheater seats, generous pensions and civic appointments. According to Olympic historian Tony Perottet, one Games winner even parlayed his victory into a senatorial seat in Athens. Indeed, the ancient Greeks didn't even have a word for amateur, and the closest term—idiotes—needs no translation."
Let what has happened at Miami be a wakeup call: the NCAA has about as much moral authority to give "the death penalty" as Rick Perry. If this ends with the NCAA giving Miami the death penalty, then the "gutter economy" survives and we are all the worse for it. If you listen closely, you can hear King Leopold's chains rattling in the NCAA's halls, haunting and guiding the daily maneuvers of this "nonprofit" that enriches itself by paying its laborers nothing. Shut it down and end the culture of corruption once and for all.
One of Texas Governor Rick Perry's oft-touted strengths in the Republican primary is his demonstrated prowess at fundraising. Less widely known is how he has raised that money and what he has done in return for it. According to Texas good government and environmental watchdogs, Perry has raised much of his campaign funds from business executives who have financial interests in state government decisions. Often Perry's supporters come from the energy sector and Perry's help for them has come at the expense of the environment.
Over his three campaigns for governor Perry raised a remarkable $102 million. Perry's predecessor, George W. Bush, who was no slouch at fundraising himself, brought in $41 million over two campaigns.
Half of Perry's haul, $51 million, has come from just 204 sources. Some are political action committees, but most are wealthy individuals. "He relies on a relatively small network of very big hitters, wealthy businessmen and their spouses who want something out of Texas government," says Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, a nonprofit research group that tracks the influence of money in Texas politics. As the Dallas Morning News reported during Perry's re-election bid last year, "Perry tapped scores of big-dollar donors—including some who have business before the state or have benefited from taxpayer subsidies," to vastly outraise his Democratic opponent, Bill White.
As McDonald explains, "Texas is a pay-to-play state." That means Perry has generously rewarded his contributors with appointments and political favors. Perry has appointed 921 people, who have donated to his campaigns, for a total of $17.1 million, to various jobs and boards. These are not always disinterested public servants. McDonald says, "There are lots of people who have business interests who got appointed to positions with regulatory power over them."
Perry has also shown an eagerness to do the bidding of his major supporters. Most notably, his second-biggest all-time donor, Harold Simmons, owns a nuclear waste dump. Perry led the charge in 2010, while Simmons gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Perry's re-election campaign, to allow Simmons to import nuclear waste from thirty-eight states. On June 27 of this year, ten days after Perry signed the legislation, Simmons gave $100,000 to Americans for Rick Perry. Tom Smith, director of Public Citizen's Texas office, estimates that the rule change will bring upward of $2 billion for Simmons. "If you put money in Perry's purse, he'll create policies you need," says Smith.
Perry has been similarly accommodating of various other energy interests in the state. Texas has violated the Clean Air Act by allowing industrial plants such as oil refineries to reduce emissions overall rather than at each emissions point. When the Environmental Protection Agency informed Texas that they would have to take over Clean Air Act implementation in the state, Perry complained. "Perry's on the cutting edge of this whole 'job-killing EPA' strategy that Republicans have used," says Smith. There's a saying Texas, according to Smith that "it's cheaper to invest in politicians than in pollution controls." Perry has been similarly critical of the EPA's efforts to regulate greenhouse gases nationally.
Perry has been carrying water for environmentally destructive industries since his days in the Texas legislature. Back then, in the late 1980s, he led efforts to prevent species such as the golden cheek warbler from being listed as endangered, because their habitats in West Texas were threatened by suburban sprawl. Developers feared that they would be unable to pave over sensitive lands. Perry's all-time biggest donor is home builder Bob Perry (no relation).
Most infamously, when liberal Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower sought to require farmers to meet some basic safety requirements for use of pesticides, Perry led the opposition. Hightower merely sought to require public posting of when pesticides would be used and what dangerous chemicals they contain, so that farm workers and neighbors could take precautions. Farm workers would also have been not allowed into fields for a time after spraying. The chemical industry was not pleased. Perry, as chair of the relevant subcommittee in the legislature, tried to revoke the Agriculture Commissioner's rule-making authority and to make the position appointed rather than elected. When that failed, Perry switched parties to run against Hightower, winning his first statewide election in 1990.
"Perry had been recruited by Karl Rove to switch parties and run against me on behalf of the chemical lobbies," recalls Hightower. "He is a complete whore to polluter interests in our state. He's avid practitioner of crony politics."
But just in case you were worried that Perry has enriched polluters while having to live on a public servant's salary, rest assured that Perry has become a multimillionaire while in public office. In 2001 Perry bought a house from a friend who had bought it from Doug Jaffe, a member of a family with prominent ties in Texas business and political circles, for $300,000, less than two-thirds of its market value. Six years later he sold it to another associate of Jaffe's for $1.3 million, pocketing an impressive profit.
Last week Politico reported that, facing falling approval ratings and high unemployment, President Obama's re-election campaign would go negative on his Republican opponent. Currently that means training their fire on Mitt Romney, the national front runner. "Obama's re-elect will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama's advisers in about a dozen interviews, "weird," write Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin.
The inevitable high-minded hand-wringing about the "moral cost" to the Obama campaign ensued, and by Friday morning Obama adviser David Axelrod was disavowing the story, saying he would fire anyone who calls Romney weird.
Hopefully that's just spin from Axelrod, because the strategy Politico describes is a good one. The same exact line of attack against John Kerry—that he's an out-of-touch flip-flopper—worked well for George W. Bush in 2004. That's how Bush managed to win re-election with only a 48 percent approval rating.
Of course, the attack against Kerry was silly. Anyone who has spent a long enough time in politics will have what at least appear to be shifts in position. George W. Bush could have just as fairly been described as a flip-flopping elite as Kerry, but that was hardly the main reason Bush was a bad president.
So what makes Romney's flip-flopping different? The fact that it exposes not just changes in specific position but rather Romney's total lack of identity or purpose in politics.
Most politicians adhere to a broad political orientation, such as liberal Democrat or conservative Republican, and shift positions over time as the nature of what it means to hold that place on the spectrum changes. For example, if you are a liberal on social issues you may have flip-flopped over the last decade from opposing to supporting gay marriage, as the realm of what is politically possible has shifted. But there is an underlying constancy in that you are always pushing for social progress.
Romney, on the other hand, has no such identity. In Massachusetts he ran to the left; now he runs far to the right. There is no overarching purpose—whether it be fighting for social justice or defending traditional family values—to his political career.
It is perfectly normal for candidates to recalibrate their stance on a complicated issue such as a war over time, but Romney changes his position on issues like abortion on which there is no change of facts on the ground, only in the office he seeks. And when he makes a reversal he adopts the most extreme iteration of his new stance. So he says the Affordable Care Act, modeled on his own law in Massachusetts, is not only a step too far for the federal government it is "a government takeover of healthcare." (Politifact labels that claim "flatly incorrect.")
In 2002 he boasted that "there's not a paper's width worth of difference" between his and Democrat Shannon O'Brien's position on abortion, now he adheres to Republican antiabortion rights orthodoxy and wants a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. In 1996 he was so opposed to a flat tax that he took out an ad in the Boston Globe calling it "a tax cut for fat cats." On Monday he said he wants only one tax bracket.
Romney obviously doesn't really believe what he now says and it's not clear if he believed his initial position either. That's especially true because he does not even bother to come up with a plausible explanation—other than political expediency—as to why he has so radically changed his position.
What one comes away with from watching Romney is that he lacks any core convictions whatsoever. That's preferable to the ignorance and extremism of his primary opponents. But it is not a positive characteristic. People who got into politics with no sense of what they wish to accomplish other than attaining status and power strike many voters as untrustworthy, and with good reason.
There is nothing underhanded or unfair about Obama's campaign or supporters pointing this out. It is the flip side of how he would run against Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann, where he would presumably attack their outlandish, if honestly held, positions.
Every election is, or at least should be, a "choice" election rather than a referendum on the incumbent. Voters who went to the polls in 2010 to register their displeasure with deficit spending and slow economic growth by voting Republican acted stupidly. They returned to power the Republicans' austerity regime and refusal to make a fair deal to reduce the deficit. If they had realized that they were choosing the greater of two evils they might have voted differently. It is not only fair for the Obama campaign to make this choice explicit, it is their democratic duty.
If you want to see just how far Mitt Romney has come from 2002, watch this video his gubernatorial debate with O'Brien.
According to a Reuters report this morning, the Securities and Exchange Commission is "reviewing" the decision of rating agency Standard & Poor's to downgrade the federal government's credit rating.
The decision to issue a downgrade—despite the fact that interest rates for US Treasury bonds remain at near-historic lows, and a lack of any evidence the country won't be able to honor its obligations—has already been criticized by several powerful Washington players. Senator Tim Johnson, chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, blasted the decision last week in a statement. "In the minds of serious, reasonable, and informed individuals there is no doubt that the US will meet its debt," he said. "I am deeply disappointed in S&P's decision to enter into the game of political punditry."
An aide told me the Banking Committee is "looking into the issue and gathering information."
The SEC's review is made possible by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, which gave the agency expanded power to review the actions of rating agencies like Standard & Poor's. The SEC cannot second-guess a rating decision outright, but can, however, make sure the issuing agency followed its own guidelines.
The current review into the downgrade decision is focused on Standard & Poor's transparency rules, according to one Reuter's source—whether, for example, the Standard & Poor's committee held the necessary meetings on the decision. Given the very curious nature of the downgrade, it will be interesting to see if Standard & Poor's complied with transparency rules in making it.
The SEC is also already undergoing a broader examination of all rating agencies, as required by the Dodd-Frank reforms. The agency will issue that report sometime in December. It has already removed references to the opinion of private rating agencies from federal guidelines, and created a separate metric for evaluating investments that could be used as an alternative to the current rating agencies.
If Standard & Poor's was motivated to issue their downgrade as an assertion of power against increasing regulation, the SEC review would indicate the government is not cowed.
An alternate, or perhaps complimentary, theory of Standard & Poor's downgrade decision is that the agency was trying to appear tough after having endorsed the mortgage-backed securities that eventually destroyed the economy. Last week, University of Massachusetts professor Robert Pollin told me that perhaps Standard & Poor's was trying to create the impression that "they're hard nosed, they're courageous; this is their best objective analysis. All of a sudden, after being shill for the financial bubble, they're going to be hard-nosed." He added that perhaps Standard & Poor's was trying to appear more decisive than the other two rating agencies, Fitch and Moody's.
If that was indeed the strategy, it too may be backfiring. Amidst SEC and Senate "reviews," and harsh comments from other prominent politicians about Standard & Poor's, the rival agency Fitch announced this morning it is reaffirming the United States's AAA rating and said it doesn't anticipate downgrade.


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Nah, Dolphi's one of a very small handful that uses QT, the rest primarily GTK, including Thunar. Not a fan of Thunar myself, kind of lacking on features, but that's opinion of course, judge for yourself.
It's XFCE based, so probably would have the same issue as Dolphin being KDE. Though I don't know that for sure.


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Black Ninja!
Normal Member
Black Ninja!
The Trinity
Senior Member
Black Ninja!!
I'm sure many people are still hyped from Punk's promo that he had cut on this past Monday Night RAW. Now that Punk has broken through with this promo, this gives CM Punk fans more incentive to say "he's the best and should be the poster boy of the WWE". But what does it take to be a poster boy of the WWE? And is CM Punk really "WWE Poster Boy Material"?
In my opinion,
From the title, I can expect that most people will believe that this blog is more than likely about how WWE is currently forcing us a terrible product. However, this is not the case. This blog is about why WWE has decided to make the product the way it is now.
For the past 3 years or so, WWE has managed to turn it's product into a family orientated product. In doing so, their hardcore
Ever since 1988, the Royal Rumble has been classified as WWE's most popular events. This year, Alberto Del Rio was the 24th winner of the traditional royal rumble match. Alberto Del Rio won by eliminating Santino Marella. Ever since 1990, the winner of the royal rumble would always have an opportunity to face the world champion and headline Wrestlemania. However, this year is a little different
This is the problem that TNA has:
TNA has yet to realize that all wrestling is just a soap opera with a lot of action. Most soap operas are realistic and even if some aren't, they at least don't cross the border to a point where people are getting hit with a big nail 2 by 4 and still staying alive (Ex// Abyss). TNA needs to captivate the viewers in a way that gets them emotional and
WWE has been known for making larger than life characters. They've been known to create those superstars that the fans rally behind. Those superstars that I am referring to are babyfaces. However, there seems to be a shortage in main eventer babyfaces.
While looking through the WWE roster one afternoon, I realized that the top heels of WWE outweigh the top faces of WWE. John Cena,


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Councilmember Elrich, the chief sponsor of legislation to create a County minimum wage at a Dec. 5 ceremony in which County Executive Leggett signed the bill. Read more..
News and Initiatives
Statement by Montgomery County Councilmember Marc Elrich on Increase in State Minimum Wage
Last night's historic vote in the Maryland's General Assembly to raise the minimum wage has taken the most important and meaningful step we, as elected officials, can take to lift people out of poverty. This legislation means Maryland workers will see a real and significant increase in the wages they earn for a hard day's labor.
When I approached Council Chairman Phil Mendelson of the District of Columbia and Council Chair Andrea Harrison of Prince George's County last summer about taking a regional approach to raising the minimum wage, I wanted to ensure that raising the minimum wage locally would not create an economic disadvantage for our county. Their cooperation demonstrated our shared concern for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Read more...
Connect With Us:
Call : 240-777-7966
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Montgomery County Council, 100 Maryland Ave, Rockville MD 20850
Phone: (240) 777-7900 (voice) • (240) 777-7888 (fax) • (MD Relay) Dial 711 or 800-201-7165
Contact the County Council and Legislative Branch Offices


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Special Agent Strahm is dead, and Detective Hoffman has emerged as the unchallenged successor to Jigsaw's legacy. However, when the FBI draws closer to Hoffman, he is forced to set a game into motion, and Jigsaw's grand scheme is finally understood.
Rated R for sequences of grisly bloody violence, torture and language.
Visit the official site
Cast: Shawnee Smith, Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Betsy Russell, Mark Rolston
Produced by:
Directed by: Kevin Greutert
Written by:
Running time: 1hr 31min
Opens: Oct 23, 2009 Nationwide


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‹ Exit photo gallery
Memorial Day: Photos of The Old Guard at Arlington National Cemetery
On the eve of Memorial Day weekend since 1948, the Army's official ceremonial unit dubbed The Old Guard deploys at Arlington National Cemetery. Nearly 900 soldiers place American flags on each and every grave.
(Photo: James Joslyn) fullscreen mode


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Akram Khan Company: Desh
Helyszín Sadler's Wells
Akram Khan's full-length contemporary solo DESH made its world premiere in 2011 to unanimous critical praise and has since enjoyed two triumphant runs at Sadler's Wells. His most personal work to date, DESH has been declared "a masterpiece" (The Observer) and won an Olivier Award for best new dance production. Meaning "homeland" in Bengali, DESH draws on multiple tales of land, nation and resistance, all converging in the body and voice of one man trying to find his balance in an unstable world. Moving between Britain and Bangladesh, Khan weaves threads of memory, experience and myth into a surreal world of surprising connection. A collaboration of extraordinary proportions, Khan joined forces with visual artist Tim Yip (production designer for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), award-winning lighting designer Michael Hulls, writer and poet Karthika Nair, Olivier Award-winning composer Jocelyn Pook and slam poet PolarBear to create "the most urgent, beautiful and confident work of his career" (The Guardian).
Esti előadások
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 7.30pm
Kezdő dátum
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Előadás hossza:
1 hour 20 minutes (no interval)
(5mins) Take Upper St towards the City Road crossroads. Continue straight and turn right into Rosebery Avenue, where the theatre is 100m down on the right.


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Top Searches:
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Drama, Suspense/Thriller
Lured by imploring letters from the beautiful siren Charlotte, handsome, hard-nosed reporter Ward James and his partner, Yardley Acheman, return to Ward's hometown of Lately, Florida, to investigate the seemingly unjust imprisonment of Charlotte's lover, alligator hunter Hillary Van Wetter. Hardened backwoods criminal Van Wetter has been stewing in a cell for four years, convicted - without conclusive evidence or even a fair trial - of killing the town's sheriff. The investigative trio is made a quartet with the addition of Ward's younger brother, Jack, who quickly confuses Charlotte's maternal nature with love, and vows to protect her from Van Wetter.
Rated R for strong sexual content, violence and language.
Visit the official site
Cast: Scott Glenn, Nicole Kidman, Matthew McConaughey, John Cusack, Zac Efron
Produced by: Lee Daniels, Ed Cathell III
Directed by: Lee Daniels
Written by: Peter Dexter
Running time: 1hr 41min
Opens: Oct 05, 2012 Limited