Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Greenpeace (thanks to a tip from Alegre)

After an Off Year, Wall Street Pay Is Bouncing Back‎ (New York Times)
The rest of the nation may be getting back to basics, but on Wall Street, paychecks still come with a golden promise. Workers at the largest financial institutions are on track to earn as much money this year as they did before the financial crisis began, because of the strong start of the year for bank profits. Even as the industry’s compensation has been put in the spotlight for being so high at a time when many banks have received taxpayer help, six of the biggest banks set aside over $36 billion in the first quarter to pay their employees, according to a review of financial statements. If that pace continues all year, the money set aside for compensation suggests that workers at many banks will see their pay — much of it in bonuses — recover from the lows of last year.
We give them billions of dollars after they failed miserably, they “lose” the month of December so that they can pretend to be making profits, and the Masters of the Universe still get their gigantic bonuses?  Ain’t it always the story?

Money for Nothing (by Paul Krugman)
From the 1930s until around 1980 banking was a staid, rather boring business that paid no better, on average, than other industries, yet kept the economy’s wheels turning. So why did some bankers suddenly begin making vast fortunes? It was, we were told, a reward for their creativity — for financial innovation. At this point, however, it’s hard to think of any major recent financial innovations that actually aided society, as opposed to being new, improved ways to blow bubbles, evade regulations and implement de facto Ponzi schemes…

One can argue that it’s necessary to rescue Wall Street to protect the economy as a whole — and in fact I agree. But given all that taxpayer money on the line, financial firms should be acting like public utilities, not returning to the practices and paychecks of 2007. Furthermore, paying vast sums to wheeler-dealers isn’t just outrageous; it’s dangerous. Why, after all, did bankers take such huge risks? Because success — or even the temporary appearance of success — offered such gigantic rewards: even executives who blew up their companies could and did walk away with hundreds of millions. Now we’re seeing similar rewards offered to people who can play their risky games with federal backing…

We can only hope that our leaders … carry through with real reform. In 2008, overpaid bankers taking big risks with other people’s money brought the world economy to its knees. The last thing we need is to give them a chance to do it all over again.

Good Government and Animal Spirits (by George A, Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, thanks to Economist’s View)
An understanding of animal spirits — the human psychology and culture at the heart of economic activity — confirms the need for restoring the role of regulators… [W]ith animal spirits, waves of optimism and pessimism cause large-scale changes in aggregate demand… When demand goes down, unemployment rises. It is the role of the government to mute those changes… Its role is not to harness animal spirits but really to set them free, to allow them to be maximally creative… The challenge for the Obama administration, along with the U.S. Congress and our SROs, is to invent a new and better American version of the capitalist game.
Presuming that “creative” is what our masters want us to be…

Creativity, convention, and tradition (by Daniel Little at Understanding Society, thanks to Economist’s View)
[H]ere is an apparent conundrum of creativity and convention. Any performance or artistic work that is wholly determined by the relevant conventions is, for that reason, wholly uncreative… But … novelty without regard to the frame of tradition is incomprehensible and meaningless…

It is relevant here that we are led to refer to the audience. Because cultural products require the conveying of meaning; and communication of meaning requires some reference to conventions shared with the audience — whether in music, painting, literature, or hiphop. Meaning of any cultural performance is inherently public, and this means there have to be publicly shared standards of interpretation. The audience can only interpret the performance by relating it to some set of conventions or other. These may be conventions of representation, structure, or mythology; but the audience needs some clues in order to be able to “read” the work.
I’m thinking that the same is true in political commentary and persuasion. You can’t get too far ahead of the audience, or they will reject what you have to say. I wish I had the skill to help people get from what they want to believe to believing what is actually true, but I’m too blunt. It seems to be embedded in my DNA.

Oh, hey, it’s not just me:
The Sensible People Do Love Their Conventional Wisdom (by Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
I sometimes think the reason I’ve never really gotten that much recognition in the blogosphere is because I’ve never trusted sensible opinion and made no bones about it. And since I wasn’t seeking a career in Democratic punditry, I had no incentive to even simulate that trust. The fact that I’m not deferential to my betters has always been a problem in terms of career advancement. Oh well! It sucks to be Cassandra.

Meltdown notes: Beware Obama — and the guy AFTER Obama (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
If you want to know what will soon hit America, look at Dubai… Dubai teaches us just how callous rich people truly are. Unchained capitalism inevitably forges the chains of slavery. If and when Obama fails, a well-organized propaganda campaign will tell us that socialism has failed, even though socialism was never tried. We will be told — repeatedly — that the only solution is libertarianism, a.k.a. Milton Friedmanism. Propagandists always portray free market fundamentalism as the great untried panacea. In fact, it has been tried again and again — and it has failed again and again.

Free market fundamentalism is not the answer — unless the question is : What got us into this mess? I fear Obama. But I fear the guy coming after Obama far more. I don’t know his name, but I can give you his job description. He’ll be a salesman. He’ll be a charmer, as the best salesmen always are. I can already see his reassuring smile, I can already hear his patter, and I can already sense the scheme that lies behind the spiel. And I know his task: Turn America into Dubai.

But it doesn’t HAVE to be that way:
When textbook macro pays off (by Dani Rodrik, thanks to Economist’s View)
Macroeconomics doesn’t get much plaudits around now, but here is a real-life story that should hearten those who think the field is really broken.  It concerns Andres Velasco, a distinguished macroeconomist who is currently the minister of finance in Chile, and who also happens to be a good friend, colleague and co-author. Until the current crisis hit, Chile’s economy was booming, fueled in part by high world prices for copper, its leading export… Being fully aware of Latin America’s commodity boom-and-bust-cycles and recognizing that high copper prices were temporary, Velasco stood his ground and decided to do what any good macroeconomist would do:  smooth intertemporal consumption by saving most of the copper surplus.  He ran up the largest fiscal surpluses Chile has seen in modern times…

The surpluses accumulated during the good years has given the Chilean government unusual latitude in responding to the [current financial] crisis.  As a result, the economy is doing much better than its peers.  As Bloomberg reports, “the country’s economy is expected to grow 0.1 percent in 2009, as the region contracts 1.5 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund.” And does good economics pay off politically?  Eventually, yes.  Five months after being burned in effigy, Velasco is currently President Bachelet’s most popular minister.
I had a dream last night about seven fat cows and seven lean cows—oh wait, that story’s already been told.  Why can’t we save during the fat years to support us in the lean years, instead of the other way around?  Talk about your Ponzi schemes!

Before Tea, Thank Your Lucky Stars, by Robert Frank, Commentary, NY Times, thanks to Economist’s View)
THE link between success and luck is stronger than many people think… Contrary to what many parents tell their children, talent and hard work are neither necessary nor sufficient for economic success. It helps to be talented and hard-working, of course, yet some people enjoy spectacular success despite having neither attribute. (Lip-synching members of boy bands? Money managers who bet clients’ retirement savings on subprime-mortgage-backed securities?)

Far more numerous are talented people who work very hard, only to achieve modest earnings. There are hundreds of them for every skilled, perseverant person who strikes it rich — disparities that often stem from random events… Financially successful tax protesters seem blissfully unaware of how incredibly fortunate they are. To borrow from the late Ann Richards and her description of the first President Bush, they were born on third base and thought they’d hit a triple.
Long time readers: have I not been saying this for years? Why are liberals not conducting education campaigns to make people understand this important point? And to realize that the more you own, the more you benefit from the existence of government and its services? Which justifies higher rates of tax for people who own a lot.

Markets Cheer Stress Test Double Speak (by Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)
Forgive me for sounding even crankier than usual, but the reason deception sells is that so many people line up for it.[*] [Emphasis added.] The release claiming to describe how the stress tests were conducted in fact provided no new information… Financial stocks did well on the belief that most of the big banks would get clean bills of health. But that was the plan from the outset, to validate that the system was more or less OK so that if the poor chump taxpayer had to stump up more money, it could be positioned as due to completely unforeseen events (thanks to having put on very big blinkers) yet still a good risk. 

The cheer seems a naive view. Citi is far from out of the woods, with a half trillion of foreign deposits, plus roughly $1 trillion in off balance sheet exposures (remember those SIVs, the watchword of late 2007?). Dislocation there would have far bigger ramifications. The Financial Times, looking at more or less the same fact set, comes to less upbeat conclusions. Is this the result of being further from the spinmeisters?
*As I said after last year’s election, “Most of the people WANT TO BE FOOLED most of the time.”

The lying will continue until confidence improves (by lambert at Corrente)
[T]he whole point of the stress tests is that they are a lie. The whole point is to lie, have everyone know it’s a lie, and get away with it; the worst kind of power trip imaginable. Only when our banksters are sure that they can keep lying — about their balance sheets, about their business practices, about their deals, about their fees, about their salaries — will “confidence” be restored. To the banksters, that is the very definition of confidence. Rahm already told us this, in the clearest possible language.

Bill Moyers’ Journal…–Simon Johnson and Michael Perino, author of new book on Pecora Commission, for the hour (by jawbone at Corrente)
Michael Perino, the author, seems less audacious than Simon (or Krugman or Stiglitz). This is a comment which sort of grew into live blogging of the discussion, but, fortunately, Moyers will have an excellent transcript up soon and the video is available at his site. While this financial failure has it’s own peculiarities, it’s still very much the same old/same old. Perino, the author of the book, is saying there’s a danger of going overboard, that just recently the questions have changed from “what went wrong” to “who caused this.” Moyers pushed back on that, saying aren’t both important.

Bear, AIG Dumped $74 Billion in Subprime, CDOs on Fed (Bloomberg)
The Federal Reserve took on more than $74 billion in subprime mortgages, depreciating commercial leases and other assets after Bear Stearns Cos. and American International Group Inc. collapsed. In its biggest disclosure of the securities accepted to stabilize capital markets, the Fed said yesterday it had unrealized losses of $9.6 billion on the assets as of Dec. 31. The bonds, swaps and notes were taken in from Bear Stearns, once the fifth-biggest Wall Street firm by capitalization, and AIG, which had been the world’s largest insurer… The central bank lent $2 trillion to financial institutions and hasn’t disclosed information about most of the collateral backing those loans.
We are proud, PROUD owners of toxic assets, and so happy that our masters don’t burden us with the silly details of what we bought.

Why don’t we turn the banks into regulated public utilities? (by lambert at Corrente)
James Kwak in Baseline Scenario quotes Nicholas Brady, of all people: “I believe that we need a simpler system centered on deposit-based banks. Under this approach, individual accounts in the depository banks would continue to be protected up to $250,000 and these banks would have access to the country’s central bank. These institutions would not be allowed to participate in markets involving inordinate leverage or equity transactions that would risk their deposit-protecting charter… First we should just come out and say it: the financial system that led us to the brink of disaster is broken.”

I don’t think that for Summers, Geithner, Emmanuel, or Obama, the idea that the financial system is broken is even on the table. The entire Obama administration plan — the stress tests, PPIP, the whole contraption — seems designed to let us avoid taking the truth serum, ever. It’s not going to work. And the insiders know this.

Where Are The Pitchforks? (by Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
John Emerson (h/t Avedon): “If there was ever a time for pitchfork populism, it’s right now. Unemployment is past 8% and still rising, and most people have seen a third to half of their retirement money disappear, and this was all the result of multimillionaires’ financial machinations. But so far we haven’t seen much public rage… Someone is going to be blamed, and the Republicans have figured out who: Clinton and Obama. But the Democrats are staying above the battle and refuse to ‘play the blame game’. This responsible, patrician, professional approach hasn’t worked for the Democrats for thirty or forty years, not even during normal times, and it’s certainly not going to work now. But the Democrats don’t realize this, and they’re so committed to their cool, professionalism that are unlikely to be able to deal with the politics of the impending disaster at all.”

At least there was a bit of action at the IMF meeting:
Protesters, police clash near IMF meetings in DC (AP)
More than 100 protesters upset with the way world leaders have handled the economic crisis clashed with police Saturday outside the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings. Authorities used batons and pepper spray when activists tried to march onto a prohibited street, and several people were pushed to the ground by police. The protesters swarmed officers unexpectedly, and police had to respond, said D.C. police Capt. Jeffrey Herold… Protesters claimed police responded without warning.

Finance Chiefs Back a Bolder IMF, Bigger Role for Emerging Nations (Washington Post)
Global financial chiefs agreed yesterday to reshape the International Monetary Fund, moving to broaden its mission and accelerate plans to give developing giants including China, Brazil and India more say within the institution. The IMF, which in recent years had become largely an advisory body to nations in crisis, will now be charged with aggressive monitoring of the global economy. Underscoring that role, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said yesterday that Washington had consented to a rigorous IMF review of the U.S. financial system for the first time since the fund was created at the end of World War II.

Health care happening (by Paul Krugman)
OK, it looks as if major health care reform is actually going to happen. Democrats have agreed that if Republicans try to block reform in the Senate, they will use the reconciliation process to bypass a filibuster. Republicans will, of course, scream that this is a terrible, terrible thing — something they themselves would never have done — except, of course, to cut food stamps, pass both major Bush tax cuts, and more. We’ll still have to see what the reform looks like — especially whether the public plan survives. But kudos to the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership: this is the big one, and so far it looks very, very good.

I can’t be as sanguine as the good perfesser:
Max Baucus can’t read polls (by DCblogger at Corrente)
I listened to a stomach-turningly dishonest colloquy with Senator Max Baucus last night on NPR. Baucus declared he wouldn’t “waste (his) time” fighting for universal care which had no political support. As we know, a majority of Americans and a majority of doctors support a Medicare for All system.

Health care reform (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
Health care reform is actually possible. The Republicans cannot filibuster. For the first time in my memory, the single-payer option is viable. Unfortunately, Obama and Pelosi seem wedded to the idea of keeping private insurers — otherwise known as USELESS LEECHES – in the system. Read this Corrente piece. A single payer activist has received the following feedback from Capitol Hill: “…Pelosi’s aide: ‘Where are the phone calls, e-mails and faxes in support of single-payer? Speaker Pelosi has been in favor of single-payer for a long time. Now make us do it.’”

Will calls and faxes do the trick? I’m captious, but I also believe in doing everything we can. Go here and learn how to do what needs to be done.  Inundate Pelosi’s office. Demand single payer. ALL DAY MONDAY, call her office and say “I want single payer!” Then call your own representative (if you do not live in Nancy‘s district). Don’t let Nancy Pelosi get away with pretending that the people have not spoken. Make it clear — to her and to history — that if she does not put single payer on the table, she acts against the will of the people. [Emphasis added.]

Waterboarding Song Is Surprisingly Enjoyable (by Ryan Tate at Gawker)
Jonathan Mann, he of the Paul Krugman tribute pop song, is back with a new tune on waterboarding. Actually, Mann uploads a new song every day, but this is the first one Dick Cheney can rock out to on the way to Starbucks each morning.
Click through to watch the video.  It really is good.

Spies Come Out to Criticize Memos’ Release (ABC News)
Former Bush CIA chief Porter Goss said in an op-ed [last week], that the Obama administration had “crossed the line” by releasing the memos. “We can’t have a secret intelligence service, if we keep giving away all the secrets,” he wrote. Goss excoriates lawmakers who say they were never given a full and clear picture about the interrogation tactics the CIA was considering using against high value terrorist suspects in U.S. detention. “In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s ‘high value terrorist program,’ including the development of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and what those techniques were,” he wrote.

Colleen Rowley blogs about torture… (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
The 9/11 FBI whistleblower makes a guest appearance on BradBlog…, and her piece is a must-read. She quotes another former FBI agent, Ali Soufan: “There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. We have some idea as to nature of the backfiring, as when Khaled Sheikh Muhammed ‘confessed’ to a plot to destroy a building that had not been built at the time of his capture.”

Those who allow the occasional bit of paranoid speculation to color their worldview tend to suspect that false confessions were the point of Bush administration torture

Most Ops Officers Condemn Torture (by Larry Johnson, formerly with the CIA and the State Department, an international security expert)
There are a few apologists masquerading as “CIA veterans” touting the virtues of torture. But if you pick beneath the surface the so-called veterans–Mark Lowenthal and Marc Thiessen in particular–have zero field experience and really know nothing of how our men and women who serve overseas go about gathering intelligence. I am more impressed by the voices of those who have long experience in the field and know what it takes to get reliable information about potential threats. Who? Men like Ray Close (who served honorably for years in the Middle East as a Chief of Station), Haviland Smith (a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff), Milt Bearden (who helped organize the Afghan resistance against the Soviets) and Tyler Drumheller (former Chief of the European Division)…

If Americans want to listen to political clowns and hacks like Dick Cheney and Marc Thiessen, so be it. But know this. No American can delude themselves with the lie that most CIA field officers who actually work against these targets believe torture efficacious or moral.

The real test:
Torture and truthiness (by Joe Conason, Salon)
If Dick Cheney believes he can prove that torture saved us from terrorist attacks, why does he oppose a full investigation?

Upping the ante:
Freedom of Disinformation (by Joseph C. Wilson IV, writing at the Daily Beast)
Dick Cheney has called for declassifying memos he claims will vindicate the Bush administration’s torture policy. Now former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV urges the former vice president to extend his demand for transparency to his still-secret testimony in the Scooter Libby obstruction of justice case.

Military agency warned Bush administration in 2002 that its interrogation program was ‘torture.’ (Think Progress)
In a July 2002 document uncovered by the Washington Post, the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency warned that the Bush administration’s interrogation program was “torture” and that it would produce “unreliable information.” JPRA is the military agency that ran the program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), “which trains pilots and others to resist hostile questioning.” JPRA warned in the 2002 document: The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel.

Top of the Heap: The Democrats’ Teachable Moment on Torture (by Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque)
Here is one of the most clear-cut points of national decision and self-definition that can be imagined. Clear, credible evidence of atrocity and conspiracy has been produced. The course prescribed by law is clear: criminal investigation and, if warranted, prosecution. If, as you claim, your state is founded upon the rule of law, then there simply is no choice in the matter: the torture program and all of its perpetrators, facilitators and instigators must be subjected to the due process of law, without fear or favor. If this does not happen, then your state, however modernized and sophisticated, is nothing but a gilded barbarism, a gangland, where the brute force of money, privilege and power hold tyrannical sway. There is no law, only the triumph of the will of corrupt and criminal factions as they preen and jostle for position atop a fetid heap of blood and filth.

President Barack Obama and the Democratic leaders have now openly joined the long-time Republican resistance to applying the law of the land to the torture program. What lesson, then, are we to take from this “teachable moment”? What does this decision, this act of self-definition, say about the true nature of the American system of government today? Where does it put our righteous, noble, God-professing leaders? Why, on top of that stinking heap, of course!

Amid Outcry on Memo, Signer’s Private Regret (Washington Post)
“I’ve heard him express regret at the contents of the memo,” said a fellow legal scholar and longtime friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity while offering remarks that might appear as “piling on.” “I’ve heard him express regret that the memo was misused. I’ve heard him express regret at the lack of context — of the enormous pressure and the enormous time pressure that he was under. And anyone would have regrets simply because of the notoriety.”
Misused? Lack of context? Sorry he got caught? No way this man should be a federal judge.

Podesta Calls For Bybee Impeachment On CNN, Delivers Your Petitions To Congress (Think Progress)
Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union [Sunday] morning, Center for American Progress Action Fund President and CEO John Podesta called on Congress to commence impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee, should he decide not to voluntarily resign his seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals… Podesta added that he suspects the White House doesn’t agree with the call for impeaching Bybee. The other panelists — David Gergen and former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein — disagreed with the call for impeachment.
Click through to watch the video.

Bybee’s ‘remoteness from the actual torturers’ increases his ‘degree of responsibility.’ (Think Progress)
Jon Eisenberg, one of the lawyers who is representing the plaintiffs in a case challenging Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, writes in the Philadephia Inquirer today that Jay Bybee’s “remoteness from the actual torturers increases his degree of responsibility”: “Bybee did not write the torture memo he signed; it was written by John Yoo, then at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and currently a law school professor… Far from absolving him of guilt, his remoteness from the actual torturers – his thoughtlessness – increases the degree of his responsibility. His is a special kind of evil – the evil of nonchalance where there should be outrage.”

Appeals court rejects lawsuit by Guantanamo detainees (Boston Globe)
A federal appeals court yesterday for a second time rejected a lawsuit by Guantanamo Bay detainees who say they were tortured and denied religious rights… The Court of Appeals in Washington ruled against the detainees early last year, saying because the men were foreigners held outside the United States, they do not fall within the definition of a “person” protected by the act… [Emphasis added.] [Saturday], the appeals court reached the same conclusion… The Obama administration supported the case’s dismissal, arguing that holding military officials liable for their treatment of prisoners could cause them to make future decisions based on fear of litigation rather than appropriate military policy.

So the military should never, ever think about the possibility of being brought to justice if they do things that are morally wrong, no matter what they might have been told by a superior?  Not the standard I’d like to see.

Politics and the English language at WaPo (by lambert at Corrente)
When you get mildew, it’s never just one plant. Whatever rotted Broder’s sensibility and conscience infests everything. Take a look at this front page teaser today from Pravda on the Potomac:

It’s all here, isn’t it? All wrapped up in one little compact package.

Obama wants to limit the legal rights of all of us, not just the detainees:
Obama legal team wants to limit defendants’ rights (AP)
The Obama administration is asking the Supreme Court to overrule a 23 year-old decision that stopped police from initiating questions unless a defendant’s lawyer is present, the latest stance that has disappointed civil rights and civil liberties groups… Since taking office, Obama has drawn criticism for backing the continued imprisonment of enemy combatants in Afghanistan without trial, invoking the “state secrets” privilege to avoid releasing information in lawsuits and limiting the rights of prisoners to test genetic evidence used to convict them.

Unions See Specter Opening, Dangle Electoral Help For EFCA Vote (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
With poll numbers showing Sen. Arlen Specter in dangerous electoral water, union officials have begun presenting what amounts to a “get-out-of-jail-free” card for the Pennsylvania Republican: Recant your opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act, pledge to support the labor-backed bill, and we might be able to carry you to reelection… The senator’s abruptly-declared opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act was supposed to stop the bleeding he was experiencing among more conservative Pennsylvanians. Now, with evidence suggesting the opposite, union officials see an opening to win his vote back.

FEC Report: PACs Doubled Independent Expenditures for ’08 Races (OpenSecrets.org)
Special interests appear to have made an unparalleled pre-emptive strike in the 2008 election cycle as they anticipated which legislative battles they’d face this year. According to an extensive report released by the Federal Election Commission today, political action committees spent $135.2 million on independent expenditures in the last election cycle in an attempt either to seat the congressional candidates and presidential hopefuls that would best promote their agenda or to defeat those they thought would not. That’s a 250 percent increase over their independent expenditures in the 2006 election cycle and a 100 percent increase over what they spent to influence elections in the last presidential election cycle in 2004.

Not surprisingly, the largest chunk of those independent expenditures ($58.6 million) came from labor unions, which were gearing up for another fight over the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would give workers more options for ways to unionize, including by collecting signatures from a majority of employees.
Click through for highlights of the findings.

GOP sees lessons, silver lining in Tedisco loss (The Hill)
“If you look at the recent voting in this district, having the race end in a virtual tie was pretty damned impressive,” said one House Republican leadership aide. “Would I rather have won than lost in the end?  Sure, but we should remember that this is the sort of Northeastern district where we got crushed in November of ’06 and ’08.  Getting to a push is real progress.” Though they expressed disappointment at the results, GOP officials like National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) and Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said they saw progress being made.

“The Republican Party must be competitive in districts like NY-20 if we are going to regain our Congressional majorities,” Steele said in a statement released Friday. “While we were unsuccessful in this race, the combined efforts of our candidate, the national and state parties and NRCC show that the GOP is going to invest the resources necessary to regain our majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
I, too, am surprised they came so close.  And I still can’t believe that Obama beat McCain by such a small margin—only because of the ginned up hysteria over the economy, the October Surprise that gave the election to Obama so that the Republicans could blame all of Bush’s failures on him. Which they’re now doing.  While the Democrats, as always, sit on their hands.

Masters of disaster (by Paul Krugman)
So Bobby Jindal makes fun of “volcano monitoring”, and soon afterwards Mt. Redoubt erupts. Susan Collins makes sure that funds for pandemic protection are stripped from the stimulus bill, and the swine quickly attack. What else did the right oppose recently? I just want enough information to take cover.

Texas governor’s secession talk a laughing matter on Capitol Hill‎ (Miami Herald)
There’s been an almost universal reaction in the halls of Congress to Gov. Rick Perry’s suggestion that Texas maybe, oughta, secede from the union. Laughter. “It’s known as a joking matter up here,” said Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, who chuckled when he was asked about it earlier this week. “It doesn’t present Texas in the best way.”
Is this what Obama meant when he said he would change the tone in Washington, that Democrats could now laugh freely at legitimate concerns expressed by conservatives?  Perry didn’t say Texas would secede, the story is that “Gov. Perry Backs Resolution Affirming Texas’ Sovereignty Under 10th Amendment”.  But we must laugh, because we are all sixth graders now.

Secessionist Gov. Rick Perry asks for federal help to deal with swine flu. (Think Progress)
Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who was last making headlines for suggesting that Texas may consider seceding from the Union, is requesting help from the federal government to deal with a possible swine flu pandemic: Gov. Rick Perry [Sunday] in a precautionary measure requested the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provide 37,430 courses of antiviral medications from the Strategic National Stockpile to Texas to prevent the spread of swine flu. Currently, three cases of swine flu have been confirmed in Texas.
Think Progress is pretty consistently accurate, but as we saw above, Gov. Perry did not talk about seceding. But it’s hypocritical of him to talk about reserving rights while asking for more money from the federal government.

In GOP base, a ‘rebellion brewing’ (Politico, thanks to Alegre)
There was Sen. John McCain’s daughter and his campaign manager who last week demanded that their fellow Republicans embrace same-sex marriage. Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman – the most devoted modernizer among the party’s 2012 hopefuls – won approving words from New York Times columnist Frank Rich for his call to downplay divisive values issues. The party’s top elected leaders in Congress, meanwhile, spooked by being attacked as the “party of no,” were recasting themselves as a constructive, respectful opposition to a popular president.

But outside Washington, the reality is very different. Rank-and-file Republicans remain, by all indications, staunchly conservative, and they appear to have no desire to moderate their views. GOP activists and operatives say they hear intense anger at the White House and at the party’s own leaders on familiar issues – taxes, homosexuality, and immigration. Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.

Antiabortion movement gets a new-media twist (Los Angeles Times)
Lila Rose, a UCLA student, goes undercover at Planned Parenthood clinics to pose as an underage girl pregnant by a 31-year-old. Her surreptitious videos go on YouTube, and inspire outrage.

George W Bush think tank plan provokes controversy as he begins to raise cash (The Telegraph)
Academics at SMU have mostly welcomed the plan to host Mr Bush’s presidential library, which will eventually house all the documents from his eight-year administration and be run impartially by the National Archive. But they fear that the George W.Bush Policy Institute – whose goal is to “further the domestic and international goals of the Bush administration” – will become a vehicle for propaganda, not least about the Iraq war.

Professor Thomas Knock, a noted historian and expert on presidential and diplomatic history, told The New York Times that the prospect of a George W.Bush policy institute within the walls of SMU that was “in no way beholden to academic principles or standards, responsible only to itself”, appalled him and many of his colleagues as well.

Obama May Sweep Aside TV Schedule  (Washington Post, thanks to Alegre)
President Obama might take an additional $9 million to $10 million out of the purse of the broadcast TV industry when he stages another of his news conferences next week to talk about his efforts to bail out the banking and automotive industries… Obama’s camp is asking for the 8 p.m. hour this coming Wednesday. That date, not coincidentally, marks his 100th day in office. He is expected to use the news conference to take control of the inevitable 100-days-in-office news-cycle blather — first-100-days navel-gazing being a time-honored journalistic tradition. Sadly for broadcasters, April 29 — Wednesday — also falls in the May sweeps ratings derby, which started last night.

Can CNN compete effectively with news delivered more or less straight?
Competitors and even some of CNN’s own staffers say recent trends suggest the answer may be no. “The people who watch these channels are news junkies,” MSNBC president Phil Griffin tells Bill Carter. “They’ve already had access to the headlines all day long on the Internet. In prime time you’ve got to stand out and make a splash.”
Because we need more performers and fewer reporters, don’t we?  Do you think Walter Cronkite ever worried about making a splash?

What’s the journalistic benefit of Atlantic owner’s off-the-record dinners? (Poynter Online)
David Bradley’s catered gatherings for journalists and newsmakers sound rather cozy, writes Howard Kurtz, “like some secret-handshake gathering of an entrenched elite. Are the top-level officials, strategists and foreign leaders there for serious questioning or risk-free spin sessions? And what exactly is the journalistic benefit if the visitors are protected by a shield of anonymity?”

Bronstein gives Dowd a tour of SF places where journalism had had an impact (Poynter Online)
They swing by police headquarters, the Castro, and the Giants’ ballpark. Phil Bronstein ends the tour by telling Maureen Dowd. “For people who still love print, who like to hold it, feel it, rustle it, tear stuff out, do their I. F. Stone thing, it’s important to remember that people are living longer. That’s the most hopeful thing you can say about print journalism, that old people are living longer.”

Sisyphus Shrugged – columnist fails to recognize mouldering corpse of undead irony, which then eats her brain (thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
[Y]ou, Maureen Dowd, are the woman who mainstreamed snark. So you kind of own the commentary career of William Kristol. You were the precipitating cause of Dana Milbank’s decline from a damn good reporter into someone who thinks the readers of his paper tune in to monitor the production of his gall bladder, and the godmother of Ron Fournier’s figleaf attempt to disguise naked political partisanship as a fearless determination to remain unspun. You, Red, are a shining symbol of the royal road to success that lies in writing low-content trash which amuses the folks your publisher or your great and good friend the managing editor network with.

And here’s the thing – lots of folks, now that they don’t have to write journalism with standards any more, are better at it than you are. They’re also younger and hungrier, and while they may not all have the sterling family political connections that got you your shot at the big time over others equally young and hungry who had to start a bit lower down the food chain, a lot of them are funnier, and smarter, and didn’t spend the last eight years writing think pieces about Hillary’s fat ankles.

As a matter of fact, since you don’t necessarily need a research department or actual reporting to do what you do, many of the people who are better than you at it write for blogs. After you, the deluge, sunshine. Hope you wore your hipboots.

Times Suppressed News of William F. Buckley’s Suicide Impulse (by Ryan Tate at Gawker)
Christopher Buckley’s family tell-all has already made him some enemies. Will people look more kindly on the writer’s crusade to break the news of his father’s suicide urge? Buckley told the Washington Post his memoir has eroded his standing within Manhattan society, even prior to its release. It depicts his father Willilam F. Buckley Jr. relieving himself out of a car window, ditching Christopher’s Yale graduation in boredom and, apparently suffering dementia, planning a party for dead associates. The book also reveals that the conservative icon considered suicide in his last days, amid emphysema and a heavy regimen of pills, before heeding the Catholic Church’s prohibition against the act.

It turns out Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times Book Review nearly broke this news first in the Times, two days after William F. Buckley’s February death — until Christopher Buckley strong-armed him… Instead, the news appeared weeks later in the gossip section of the New York Post, a seemingly odd venue for someone trying to protect his father’s image against sensationalism (the headline: “BILL BUCKLEY’S MORBID END”). The item was careful to credit Buckley’s book. Go figure.
The son of the Father of Modern Conservatism was another early Obama supporter.

FactCheck posted these new items during the week ending April 24, 2009 (Follow links to read complete answers)

Q: Did Obama delay the rescue of Captain Phillips?
A:  No. Military officials say that the claims being made in a widely circulated chain e-mail are false.

Q: Have 84 members of Congress been arrested for drunk driving in the last year? Have seven been arrested for fraud?
A: We judge these statistics to be not credible. They originated nearly a decade ago with a Web site that still refuses to provide any proof or documentation, or even to name those accused.

Congress and Progress
A liberal group’s ad claims Republicans in Congress oppose “progress.”

Helen Was Right
Veteran reporter Thomas got Obama’s bio right; press secretary Gibbs was wrong.

Hot Air on “This Week”
Rep. Boehner claims carbon dioxide isn’t “harmful to our environment.”

Drugs: To Legalize or Not (by Steven B. Duke, professor of law at Yale Law School, writing in the Wall Street Journal)
Decriminalizing the possession and use of marijuana would raise billions in taxes and eliminate much of the profits that fuel bloodshed and violence in Mexico.
Don’t go making SENSE, now!

The Original Bernie Madoff (by Frank Partnoy, Professor of Law and Finance at the University of San Diego, writing at the Daily Beast)
The forgotten saga of Ivar Kreuger—a financial fraudster from the 1920s who spun lies to friends and investors, was put under surveillance in his Park Avenue apartment, and sparked an epic bankruptcy scandal— provides valuable lessons for today’s economic crisis.

High school hell is great fodder for games
War is hell, but a few savvy developers have figured out an even more hellish and heart-pounding backdrop for games: high school. Bullets whizzing past your head? Pshaw. Just try surviving the cafeteria.
High school hell is great fodder for suicides.

Commentary: Addressing harassment and suicide prevention in schools
The affect of language and behavior can be deadly, especially in a school environment where young people are already highly impressionable and vulnerable. Unfortunately, this difficult lesson has been conveyed many times when young people resort to drastic and permanent measures to escape the despair of enduring constant bullying and harassment at school.

What if Susan Boyle Couldn’t Sing? (by Dennis Palumbo, Huffington Post)
Like millions of viewers, I was thrilled and moved when 47-year-old Susan Boyle wowed the judges and audience on Britain’s Got Talent with her superb singing. As everyone knows by now, the unmarried, “never been kissed” woman from a small village was greeted by both the audience and the talent show’s judges with derision when she first took the stage… Then Susan opened her mouth and sang. And her voice was so powerful, so achingly beautiful, so full of yearning, that even the usually heartless Simon Cowell was blown away. As were the other judges, and the audience, all of whom gave Susan a standing ovation. And now, online and elsewhere, Susan’s voice, and the story of her triumph on that stage, are known throughout the world…

But I can’t help wondering, what would have been the reaction if Susan Boyle couldn’t sing?… Would we still acknowledge that the derisive treatment she received before performing was callous, insensitive and cruel? The unspoken message of this whole episode is that, since Susan Boyle has a wonderful talent, we were wrong to judge her based on her looks and demeanor. Meaning what? That if she couldn’t sing so well, we were correct to judge her on that basis? That demeaning someone whose looks don’t match our impossible, media-reinforced standards of beauty is perfectly okay, unless some mitigating circumstance makes us re-think our opinion?
I guess I’ve heard the song, “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” most of my life, but one day—I don’t even remember when—it struck me as a pretty sad commentary on the other reindeer. They made fun of Rudolph until Santa gave his stamp of approval to Rudolph’s special gift. So it took intervention from a higher authority for the reindeer to appreciate Rudolph. Before that, they had bullied and shunned him. According to the song, it’s just great and wonderful that the other reindeer started loving Rudolph and letting him play their games.  They never had to learn a damn thing, so what will happen when the next unusual reindeer comes along? I hate that song now, because I’ve seen too many instances where the higher authority never appeared, and the stupids just kept on being stupid.

Media Matters for America headlines

On Fox, McInerney criticizes Gates for proposed F-22 replacement without noting ties to aircraft subcontractor

AP reported that Gore “bragged” he read energy bill, but he was asked if he had done so

Claiming “[e]verybody supported” interrogation methods, Scarborough misrepresents Holder

Fox omits Republican role in Sebelius confirmation delay

National Journal’s Taylor latest to advance debunked Library Tower claim

Huckabee falsely claimed Obama “toying with … criminal prosecutions” for CIA interrogators

Goler reverses meaning of Obama quote to falsely suggest he supports European-style health care

Media reported GOP reconciliation criticisms, ignored their previous support for process

100 days of myths and falsehoods

NRO’s Hemingway gets history wrong in accusing Begala of botching facts

Commentary: Not much to celebrate on World Press Freedom Day (Editorial, Miami Herald)
Monday is World Press Freedom Day, but don’t expect a party. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 125 members of the press are being held in prisons around the world. China, as usual, is leading the pack with 28 behind bars and Cuba is second with 21. At least 11 journalists have been killed worldwide in 2009, and now American reporters in Iran and North Korea have become pawns in international negotiations.

Oklahoma Man Arrested for Twittering Tea Party Death Threats
An Oklahoma City man who announced on Twitter that he would turn an April 15 tax protest into a bloodbath was hit with a federal charge of making interstate threats last week, in what appears to be first criminal prosecution to stem from posts on the microblogging site.

Obama Passing New Law To Allow Searching of PC’s, Laptops, and Media Devices (video at AfterDowningStreet.org)

Judge in RealNetworks Case Seals Court‎
U.S. District Court judge Marilyn Hall Patel sealed the San Francisco courtroom Friday where RealNetworks and several Hollywood studios began squaring off over the issue of whether Real’s RealDVD software can be legally sold. The decision came as a result of a motion by the DVD Copy Control Association, who argued that public testimony of aspects of the CSS copy-control technology would violate trade secrets.

Update: Coach who banned student reporters apologizes for “unacceptable” behavior
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater head football coach Lance Leipold has apologized to the campus newspaper for his use of inappropriate language to a reporter and his banning of student reporters from covering the team. He promises to cooperate with the paper in the future, says a release.

J-schools should teach students how to be storytellers
“It’s easy to teach people to become recorders of events or repeaters, transferring a message from one source to another,” writes former Rocky editor John Temple. “It’s difficult to teach people how to become storytellers. And, yes, of course I mean ‘all-platform’ storytellers.”
Paging Bob Somerby, paging Bob Somerby!  Story telling by the media, instead of plain old reporting, is what has gotten us into so much trouble.

Sun-Times’ city hall reporter had 600+ bylined stories last year
“I can tell you her great frustration was that — in an era of shrinking newspapers — there wasn’t room for hundreds more she wanted to write,” writes Mark Brown. Longtime Sun-Times city hall reporter Fran Spielman receives the Chicago Headline Club’s Lifetime Achievement Award tonight.
Give the woman a blog, Sun-Times, so she can write as much as she wants to.

Drop in Newspaper Circulation Accelerates
The rate of decline in circulation at the nation’s newspapers has accelerated since last fall, with industry figures showing a more than 7 percent drop compared with the prior year.

Publishers Seize on iPhone as Great White Digital Hope for Print
Industry Progressing from Replicas of Issues to Formats Better Suited to Small Screen

Google CEO bats down rumors about getting into the content creation business
Sharon Waxman says Eric Schmidt repeats what he’s said before: Google isn’t interested in creating original content. In about six months, he says, the company will roll out a system that will bring high-quality news content to users without them actively looking for it, and hopes to sell premium ads against that premium content. News orgs, however, won’t see more money for supplying the content. || More Waxman: What Huffington has attempted is working.

AOL Gets Political—And More Professional—As Content Rollout Continues (Paid Content)
AOL has been reworking its content strategy yet again—BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine half-jokingly estimates the Time Warner unit is on its 72nd revamp since 2001—this time with an eye towards politics.PoliticsDaily.com is the latest blog being rolled out by the portal’s programming unit, MediaGlow. In a conversation last week with AOL programming SVP Marty Moe, the site is a bit different than the series of blogs it has been rolling out last year.

INDenverTimes Troubles May Signal Difficulty of Replicating Newsrooms (by Amy Gahran at Poynter Online)
Funders of INDenverTimes — the independent online-only startup founded by former employees of the Rocky Mountain News — announced today they will not move forward under the original business model but will explore a different model for the site, without some of the journalists who created it.

Execs Talk Compensation at Festival of Media
Agency CEOs Say It’s Time to Alter Payment Model, Relationships With Clients

At Newspapers, New Levels of Job Insecurity
The fast-shrinking newspaper business set a new standard for job insecurity in the last couple of weeks. Winning your profession’s highest honor does not mean you get to keep your job, and neither does taking a bullet while at work.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newsroom staffers approve 6.6% pay cut
The vote was 86 to 46. If Milwaukee Newspaper Guild members hadn’t approved the proposal on Thursday, Journal Sentinel was prepared to lay off more newsroom staffers at the end of April.

Star Tribune union says it has a tentative deal on “painful and distasteful” concessions
The tentative deal calls for a 3% pay cut; a wage freeze that extends to the end of the current contract, July 31, 2011; a two-day furlough in each of the next two years; and other concessions. The agreement, which needs membership approval, prevents a filing to terminate the union’s contract in bankruptcy court.

It’s Official (and Hacked): 4chan Founder Sweeps Time’s Top 100 List (Mashable)
The Internet has different rules. The folks at Time just learned about it in a very amusing way, as their third annual poll for the world’s most influential person was topped by moot A.K.A. Christopher Poole, founder of the legendary meme breeding forum 4chan… One can easily argue that 4chan is one of the most influential sites on the Internet… However, the results of the vote have nothing to do with influence. If you think that this is the result of a fair vote, think again. The entire first 21 results, as noted days ago, are the result of an elaborate hack done by 4chan users.

Tierney collected $1.175M in salary and bonuses in ’08
That’s somewhat higher than previously disclosed. Philadelphia Media Holdings CEO Brian Tierney’s compensation included $650,000 in salary, a $350,000 bonus for 2008, a $175,000 bonus for 2007 and $81,000 in transportation costs. Court filings also show payments of $50,000 to an Internet consulting company Tierney’s son Brian Jr. co-owns. The company, Clipper Global, has no website or phone number.

Keller: “I’m a little puzzled by WSJ’s evolving identity”
“Some days the front page is mostly general-interest news, like a cross between the Times and USA Today,” NYT executive editor Bill Keller e-mails Scott Sherman. “Then the next day you get a front like today [March 12], when the lead story (‘EBay Retreats in Web Retailing’) is clearly aimed at core business readers. Some days the tone is FT (a top-of-the-page curtain raiser on the G-20 summit); some days it is tabloid populist (lashing the million-dollar-bonus recipients at Merrill). …Maybe they hope we’ll all keep reading just to see how they resolve their identity crisis.”

Graham: WP bought Foreign Policy for its “very, very remarkable audience”
Erik Wemple asks: Why would a company in the midst of a tanking media economy snap up a property like Foreign Policy, which is running year-after-year losses in the millions of dollars? Washington Post Co. CEO Donald Graham explains: Foreign Policy has “attracted a very, very remarkable audience — a tremendous number of policy makers and foreign ministers that advertisers want to reach. We know a little bit about selling to such an audience.”

Empire of Martha Marches On
David Carr: Martha Stewart is prevented by law from running her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. But you get the feeling that no one else is allowed to run it without her say-so, either. Stewart is still very much the creative maypole of the franchise.

It’s Still Called PRWeek, but It’s Going Monthly
The magazine is shrinking its format, adding longer feature articles and charging for its Web site.

Scientific American Cuts Workforce 5 Percent; Mag’s President, Editor Prepare To Leave (Paid Content)
Scientific American has laid off 5 percent of its staff and is losing its president and its editor, Folio reported. President Steven Yee is preparing to step down from his post this summer.  He told Folio that the decision was related to the magazine’s “transition” into parent Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group. He plans to go into what he would only describe as a “design-related entrepreneurial venture.” Also, editor John Rennie will exit his post after 15 years at the magazine. Executive editor Mariette DiChristina will serve as acting editor-in-chief.

Esquire says prediction of its demise is wrong
Douglas McIntyre, who recently angered many editors and publishers with his prediction that their papers will go under, has now targeted Esquire. He says the magazine won’t survive the downturn, which the Hearst title denies. “The Esquire brand has shown stunning vitality in the recent past,” say the editors.

Hearst Enters The Modern Age, Orders Agencies To Submit All Ads Via Portal (Paid Content)
Hearst Magazines has created an online portal—not for users, but for advertisers and agencies. AdAge notes the mag publishers is compelling marketers and agencies to send all advertising through its portal and will no longer accept ads delivered physically. The system will be fully in place this summer. Hearst hopes to make it easier to place ads across its various properties by requiring standard, uniform settings on the ads. This is also the idea behind the Online Publishers Association’s test of three distinct display ad formats.

Hearst also wants to give more flexibility to the lead time for when its print mags can accept ads. Magazines can lose potential revenue when an ad is submitted too late for publication and has to be dropped. The publisher has tried to reform the process and claims some success already. Hearst execs tell AdAge that Cosmopolitan’s has cut the lead time down from 48 days to 28 days. It expects to cut more when the system is in place.

Condé Nast Closes Portfolio Magazine
Portfolio, a business magazine that Condé Nast began publishing in April 2007 with much fanfare, will cease publication immediately.

Sirius Debt Challenges Aside, Satellite Radio Has Largely Lived Up To Expectations (by Rory Maher at Paid Content)
Sirius XM Satellite Radio has had an interesting 2009: it fended off rumors its burdensome debt would send it into bankruptcy, then reported that Q408 subscriber additions had plummeted. But, while the company’s debt issues have fueled speculation about the viability of its business, few reports explore whether the satellite radio industry as a whole has achieved success as a viable consumer product. With that in mind, I compared forecasts from one of the original analyst reports on satellite radio—published in 2002…—with benchmarks the industry achieved in 2008. The result may be surprising to some who have been negative on the industry’s prospects: it largely has lived up to expectations set way back in 2002, when the satellites were first being sent into orbit.

How Network TV Will Reinvent Itself (by Ronald Grover and Tom Lowry, Business Week)
For decades network TV has been about reach. Programmers traditionally chose shows with broad appeal, the better to get millions of viewers and, in turn, persuade national advertisers to buy those eyeballs. That era is essentially over and the networks are scrambling to adapt to a fragmented landscape where even popular shows are lucky to pull in 10 million viewers… In time, TV networks likely will start to look more like cable channels that have built audiences based on shows that cater to specific groups.
I’m no expert, but it seems to me that everyone in media needs to start thinking smaller, and that goes for book publishing, movie and TV show making, and maybe everything else, too. Think about works produced with smaller budgets—but many with higher quality, because no one is pretending to appeal to everyone. Aiming to recoup the cost of each production with maybe a small profit could be a viable business model.  And now and then there might be the lagniappe of a breakout hit that appeals to a vast audience.

For Fox, a Contest Offers a Chance to Hunt for the Next Big TV Show
In a partnership with the New York Television Festival, the network will solicit scripts from aspiring writers.

Facebook Makes It Easier For Developers To Play With Its Data (Paid Content)
Facebook is slated to give third-party developers like Playdom and LivingSocial greater access to its data—loosening the restrictions on the kinds of data they can pull into their applications, as well as what the apps can do with that info… Inside Facebook suggests that Facebook will let developers piggyback off of members’ “shared items,” or the articles, videos and other content that they post to their profiles; access to this info would give developers a better read on when and where specific content like videos and news articles started to “go viral,” and could help them create apps with more longevity.

Alaskans using Twitter to call out bad drivers
Forget about waving fists and wagging middle fingers, a few Alaska motorists are venting road rage with something more high tech: Twitter.

Online Video Ad Spend Still On Track To Generate $1 Billion By 2011 (Paid Content)
While ad spending in general craters, online video is still growing despite experiencing a significant slowdown. Interpublic Group’s Magna forecasts the US market for online video will grow by 32 percent this year, rising from $531 million in 2008 to $699 million in 2009.

Lambient Media
In U.K., Selling Train Tickets Using Sheep as Billboards

U.K. Insurer Says, ‘Help Yourself’
PruHealth Teams With JCDecaux Innovate to Dispense Free Goodies With a Message

Verizon 1st-qtr profit, revenue beat expectations
Verizon Communications Inc. said Monday its earnings grew 5 percent in the first quarter, boosted by its acquisition of Alltel Corp. and strong demand for its wireless, Internet and TV services.

Internet users ’could suffer brownouts due to YouTube and iPlayer’‎
Internet users will endure slower and less reliable connections from next year as websites such as YouTube and the BBC’s iPlayer cause online traffic to double, experts warn.

One Internet Village, Divided: In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit
To serve emerging markets, companies like YouTube need to invest in expensive servers, but ad revenue for those countries doesn’t cover those additional costs.

G.E.’s Breakthrough Can Put 100 DVDs on a Disc
Experts say the breakthrough holds the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses.