Giffords who missed last year’s speech after being shot in the head has made an amazing recovery.  Here is how the New York Times described last night

There is no protocol to announce a member of the House as she enters the House chamber on the night of the State of the Union address, so Representative Gabrielle Giffords slid in quietly, flanked by two other Arizonans, Representative Jeff Flake, a Republican, and Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a Democrat, who led her gingerly to her front-row seat on the Democratic side. Ms. Giffords clutched the hands of both lawmakers as applause

…

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also made a beeline for Ms. Giffords after she entered the chamber, as did Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who placed his hands on Ms. Giffords’s face and kissed her.

Her final visitor at her seat was President Obama, whom she clung to, eyes shut, swaying a little, before he kissed her cheek and made his way to the lectern.

Giffords announced her resignation today bringing many, including John Boehner to tears.  Must one almost die to bring unity to Congress?

Then this happened today.

There is a lot of speculation as to what they were saying to each other, the President and the Governor.  It is reported that the President was not happy about Brewer’s book, Scorpions for Breakfast.  According to Politico.com, the President didn’t think she had accurately describe their meeting in the White House.  Whatever.  This picture makes her look  angry and the President slightly bemused.

In 24 hours, the President has had two very different encounters with women from Arizona.

My husband thinks that Newt is dangerous and could get enough people to buy into what he is saying to prevail.  I think it will be a hard election no matter who the Republican nominee is but one thing is for certain – if it is Obama and Gingrich the contract in styles will be stark.  Gingrich is a bomb-thrower while the President is calm and methodical.  Roger Simon writing in Politico this morning says “Anger, umbrage and bitterness are so much a part of Gingrich’s public persona that he likes to attack the very concept of happiness.”  In contrast you have the President playing what Andrew Sullivan calls “the long game.”    (Sullivan’s long article for Newsweek is well worth reading no matter which side you are on.)

Simon goes on to say

Gingrich, like other candidates for the Republican nomination, has a fondness for quoting the Founding Fathers, but he now says that when they wrote “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, it did not mean what we think it means.

“Happiness in the 18th century meant wisdom and virtue, not hedonism,” Gingrich says without a scintilla of embarrassment, even though he, himself, has pursued a fair amount of hedonism in his lifetime.

And they promised us the right to pursue,” Gingrich continues. “There is no provision for a Department of Happiness. They issued no happiness stamps. And if you said that you were going to take happiness from some and distribute it to others, the Founding Fathers would have asked by what right?”

So if we don’t have happiness to look forward to, what does Gingrich offer?

Work. Effort. Struggle.

“Work is something you need,” Gingrich says. “I don’t think it’s inappropriate for a 12- or 13-year-old to push a mop.

…

Americans don’t want sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. They want blood, toil, tears and sweat. They want a dependably gloomy man in the Oval Office. They want Newt!

 

 

 

This is a man with big ideas.  Remember the Contract with America?  Gingrich is not a patient man and I understand that his campaign is not well organized.  Look at his failure to get on the ballot in his new home state of Virginia.  He has also said he wants to be able to haul judges before Congress to testify if they make rulings he doesn’t like.  This doesn’t bode well for District Judge John A. Gibney if Gingrich gets elected.  Gibney issued the ruling denying Perry, Gingrich, Santorum and Huntsman access to the Virginia Republican Primary ballot. 

 

Will Gingrich’s anger continue to play well?  Will the American voters in November, assuming he is the nominee, want a President who is angry? 

 

On the other hand, the President has a style that may be difficult to sell for another term.  He plays what Andrew Sullivan calls the long game.   

it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.

Sullivan goes on to talk about why it seems to take the President so long to do things.

 

What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for. And so I railed against him for the better part of two years for dragging his feet on gay issues. But what he was doing was getting his Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to move before he did. The man who made the case for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was, in the end, Adm. Mike Mullen. This took time—as did his painstaking change in the rule barring HIV-positive immigrants and tourists—but the slow and deliberate and unprovocative manner in which it was accomplished made the changes more durable. Not for the first time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long view. Because he does.

And last week we got another example of the President’s style in the proposed reorganization of the six agencies that deal with business.  Joe Davidson had an interesting piece in his Federal Diary column in the Washington Post.

When President Obama detailed proposals to reorganize and streamline certain government functions last week, some folks wanted to know why it took nearly a year to develop the plan.

One reason is the involvement of federal employees.

No, they didn’t gum up the bureaucracy or sit on their hands or hinder progress, as is too often the unfair and inaccurate caricature of government workers.

Instead, they were a valuable part of a long process leading to Obama’s announcement that six agencies dealing with business and trade would be consolidated into what is now the Commerce Department. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which takes the largest part of Commerce’s budget and includes the National Weather Service, would move to the Interior Department.

The reorganization proposal, which must be approved by Congress, took time, Jeffrey D. Zients, the administration’s chief performance officer, told reporters last week. “We talked to hundreds of businesses, reached out to federal employees,” he said. “This is very rigorous work, and we wanted to make sure we got it right.”

So now, the employees of the agencies concerned have a stake in what happens.  It is all about buy in. 

If November is Gingrich v. Obama we will have a clear contrast in styles.  I wonder if Gingrich sings.

 

 The President at the Apollo Theater

Photo: Shahar Azran/WireImage

Obama sings. Maybe that is the President’s secret weapon.

A leap second is time added or subtracted to the atomic clock.

A leap second is a second, as measured by an atomic clock, added to or subtracted from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to make it agree with astronomical time to within 0.9 second. It compensates for the slowing in the Earth’s rotation and is added during the end of June or December. It is important to look at how seconds are used in relation to modern time keeping to gain an understanding of the concept of the leap second and why it is used.

The International Earth Rotation and Reference System Service (IERS) observes the Earth’s rotation and nearly six months in advance (January and July) a “Bulletin C” message is sent out, which reports whether or not to add a leap second in the end of June and December.

IERS schedules a leap second as needed to keep the time difference between atomic clocks and Earth’s rotation to below 0.9 seconds.

Seems pretty simple.  But somehow it has become controversial.  According to the New York Times

Opponents of leap seconds, led by the United States, say the sporadic addition of these timekeeping hiccups is a potential nightmare for computer networks that depend on precise time to coordinate communications.

But nations like Britain that wish to keep the current system say that eliminating leap seconds might create bigger problems.

They also oppose the uncoupling of time from the notion that the length of a day is tied to the motion of Earth and Sun. Because Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing, days are lengthening. Without leap seconds, noon on the clock would slide earlier and earlier in the morning.

This is a fight between nature and technology.  The decision about adding another leap second has been put off for three years but the leap second will be still be added in June.  This is how this will happen.

If you are a conservative with what are generally referred to as family values who do you support?  Do you vote for Santorum and let Romney have the nomination or do you hold your nose and vote for Gingrich?  Speaking of noses, don’t let Newt pinch yours!

Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, pinches the nose of Bonnie Ellison, 78, of Easley, S.C. while shaking hands with supporters at Mutt’s Barbeque in Easley, S.C. Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012. (AP Photo/The Independent-Mail, Nathan Gray)

What is that all about?

Oh, and Mitt has not lived in Washington but has lived on the streets.  This from Politico

But the combination of the tax return issue, reports that his former firm parked assets in Cayman tax shelters and his own rhetorical missteps is beginning to paint him as a plutocrat rather than “someone who’s lived in the real streets of America,” as he described himself at Thursday’s debate.

Notice that it is called the Attack in B Minor for Strings and features the voice of John Lithgow.

You may recall that Stephen Colbert handed over his PAC to Jon Stewart in a live ceremony in the presence of a lawyer explaining the rules after Citizens United.  As the New York Times wrote

Mr. Colbert has used his PAC — called either “Americans for a Better Tomorrow Tomorrow” or “The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC” — to mock the loopholes in the nation’s campaign finance system. Last week he announced he was handing over control of the PAC to his fellow Comedy Central host Jon Stewart so he could run for “president of the United States of South Carolina” without legal complications. A super PAC is not supposed to coordinate with the campaign it is supporting.

In a statement announcing the ad’s debut on Sunday, Mr. Stewart said, “Mitt Romney claims to be pro-corporations. But would you let him date your daughter’s corporation?”

A few days ago, I wrote about Citizens United and three approaches to overturning the decision.  We can add this as a fourth.

 Shirt from the last election.

Leslie Savin writes in The Nation about his appearance on This Week with George Stephanopolus.

You know how hard it is to give away your baby?” Colbert bemoaned  on This Weekwith George Stephanopolus on Sunday. “Now imagine if that baby had a lot of money.”

It is clear that Colbert knows how to talk like a candidate, specifically a certain front-runner. “Excuse me, George, I was talking,” he said at one point, and of the PAC ad in question, he claimed, “I have not seen this ad.” Colbert also took umbrage whenever Stephanopoulos referred to his “campaign” for president, explaining that he is not “campaigning” but forming an “exploratory committee.” “I’m a one-man Lewis and Clark.”

Explorer Stephen, of course, wholeheartedly believes that corporations are people, but when Stephanopoulos wouldn’t agree, Colbert went further than Mitt or even Newt would dare: “You won’t weigh in on whether some people are people? That’s seems kind of racist, George.”

As for the ad’s controversial contention, Colbert said, “I don’t know if Mitt Romney is a serial killer. That’s a question he’s going to have to answer.”

Do you think any of the Supremes thinks this is funny?  Will it help them think of a graceful way they can get us out of this mess they have gotten us into?  This is more than Pat Paulson running for President.  This is serious business.

Then last week we had the incident at the New York Philharmonic.  According to the story in the New York Times

The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor.

After words from Mr. Gilbert, and what seemed like weeks, the cellphone owner finally silenced his device. After the audience cheered, the concert resumed. Internet vitriol ensued.

 Gustave Mahler

So the cell phone owner, Patron X, claims he didn’t know it was his phone ringing.  He thought he had turned it off, but the alarm was still on. 

But no one, it seems, felt worse than the culprit, who agreed to an interview on Thursday on condition that he not be identified — for obvious reasons.

“You can imagine how devastating it is to know you had a hand in that,” said the man, who described himself as a business executive between 60 and 70 who runs two companies. “It’s horrible, horrible.” The man said he had not slept in two days.

The man, called Patron X by the Philharmonic, said he was a lifelong classical music lover and 20-year subscriber to the orchestra who was friendly with several of its members. He said he himself was often irked by coughs, badly timed applause — and cellphone rings. “Then God, there was I. Holy smokes,” he said.

“It was just awful to have any role in something like that, that is so disturbing and disrespectful not only to the conductor but to all the musicians and not least to the audience, which was so into this concert,” he said by telephone.

“I hope the people at that performance and members of the orchestra can certainly forgive me for this whole event. I apologize to the whole audience.”

What have we learned from this incident?  First, music, live music, is still important.  Two, many people have no clue about how to use their technology.  I’m not talking about knowing the programming or electronics, but how to turn it on and off and what bells and whistles it has.  Anyone read the instructions? 

I think the incident at the Philharmonic shows again that we are being ruled by our technology.   The Economist had this comment

The problem is that although most people are minded to silence their mobile phones during performances, alarms are often designed to make a racket regardless of whether the phone is in silent mode (some even sound when the device is powered down). In 2007 Apple’s late boss, Steve Jobs, touted the original iPhone’s mute switch in 2007, which could be without messing with menus (though the device can also be unintentionally unmuted in a pocket). But alarms override the mute function.

Donald Norman, a guru of usable design and a former Apple and HP executive, says that there have been proposals to design phones to detect a signal disseminated in a performance space that instructed the phone to mute itself. (Suggestions involving signal blockers are no use against alarms, and are in any case banned by telecoms regulators.) He notes that the vibration mode is of little help. After all, the vibrations need to be significant enough to rouse a mobile’s owner, and creating them produces sound. Perhaps, Mr Norman suggests facetiously, concertgoers ought be frisked before entering a theatre.

Maybe it won’t come to that. Modern smartphones can use satellite-navigation and Wi-Fi network information to determine location indoors. They also have an array of sensors for noise, light and movement. It shouldn’t be too difficult to teach an operating system to suppress all alerts when, say, it discerns live music at the same time as locating itself in Avery Fisher Hall (the New York Philharmonic’s home). 

For now, though, vigilance remains the only safeguard—albeit not a foolproof one. Mr Norman, doubtless a sophisticated user, admits that even he can’t disable all sounds on his phone; every once in a while, the blasted device beeps. One can only hope it doesn’t choose to do so at an inopportune time. Like the adagio of Mahler’s Ninth.

As I said, technology rules us.  I wonder what Mahler would think.  Happy 100th Birthay, Gustav!

Question for Rick Santorum:  Why are you so obsessed with kinky sex, polygamy, and other people’s sex lives anyway?  Is there something you aren’t telling us?

But on Friday, the cavalry arrived: a $5 million check from Mr. Adelson to Winning Our Future, a “super PAC” that supports Mr. Gingrich. By Monday morning, the group had reserved more than $3.4 million in advertising time in South Carolina, a huge sum in a state where the airwaves come cheap and the primary is 11 days away. The group is planning to air portions of a movie critical of Mr. Romney’s time at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he helped found.

The last-minute injection underscores how the 2010 landmark Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance has made it possible for a wealthy individual to influence an election. Mr. Adelson’s contribution to the super PAC is 1,000 times the $5,000 he could legally give directly to Mr. Gingrich’s campaign this year.

And Mr. Adelson is not the only one.  Most contributors are hidden.

So what can we do about this?  Martha Coakley, Masschusetts Attorney General  writes in the Huffington Post that we need a Constitutional amendment to make it clear that corporations are not people.

There is a national movement afoot to amend the Constitution to make clear that the First Amendment applies only to people and not corporations. Several proposed amendments have been introduced in Congress, including the so-called “People’s Rights Amendment” introduced by Congressman James P. McGovern with bipartisan support. Further, at least 10 states, including Massachusetts, have introduced resolutions calling on Congress to pass one of these proposed amendments.

I was proud to join with 25 other state Attorneys General during the Citizens case in filing a brief urging the Supreme Court to leave the states’ ability to regulate and restrict corporate political spending intact. And I am proud to be the first state Attorney General to call for passage of a constitutional amendment to reverse the Citizens decision.

But Constitutional amendments take time and the outcome of an effort is never certain.  I remember working for the Equal Rights Amendment which finally failed.  The ideal may be that states should be allowed to make their own regs for their states.  Montana is already headed in that direction with the recent Montana Supreme Court ruling that Citizen’s United does not apply to Montana campaign finance laws.

Last Friday [December 30, 2011], the Montana Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a 1912 voter initiative – the Corrupt Practices Act – that prohibits corporations from making contributions to or expenditures on behalf of state political candidates and political parties. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that a similar federal prohibition was unconstitutional, prompting a wave of bills and court rulings that erased prohibitions on corporate and union political expenditures around the country.

“For over 100 years, Montana has had an electoral system that preserves the integrity of the political process, encourages full participation and safeguards against corruption,” state Attorney General Steve Bullock said in a statement after the ruling, adding, “the [Montana] Supreme Court’s decision upholds that system and is truly a victory for all Montanans.”

 Montana Supreme Court

Of course it will be appealed.

Besides state by state fights and the long road to a Constitutional amendment, President Obama could issue an Executive Order.  He could direct that any company that gets any federal money has to disclose its political contributions.  Remember that corporations are people.  People who give money have to say they are citizens and who employs them.  It makes sense that corporations have to make some disclosures also.  Steven Rosenfeld writing in AlterNet thinks this is a possibility.

“It’s simple—any company that is paid with taxpayer dollars should be required to disclose political contributions,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., who has pushed for the White House to issue the order. “With public dollars come public responsibilities, and I hope President Obama will issue his executive order right away.”

The order, if issued, would likely be the only campaign finance initiative to emerge from Washington this year as nothing is expected from Congress. It would take effect after the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council adopts new disclosure rules. That could come as the 2012 election season moves beyond the primaries and it would offer a new way to see who is behind the newest independent groups spending millions on political attack ads.

…

Spending on federal contracts was $541 billion in 2010, which was about 4 percent of the gross domestic product, according to the Congressional Research Service, and almost 15 percent of the federal budget. The top 100 contractors are some of America’s biggest firms, and include support services for the military overseas, weapons makers, computer companies, telecommunication firms and other service providers. Companies that could fall under the disclosure order employ about 22 percent of the domestic workforce, CRS said. 

When the possibility of an executive order was last floated, Congressional Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce rose up in arms.  Maybe now that they see the distortion money is causing in the Republican primaries, the Congressional Republicans, at least, will change their tune.  Given the growing awareness of Super PAC’s through the sheer volume of advertising being unleashed in South Carolina, the average citizen may well decide to support measures to mitigated their influence.

Two interesting facts I ran across today.

First, Glenn Kessler the Washington Post fact checker on Mitt Romney’s job creation record gave his claim of 100,000 jobs three out of four Pinocchio’s.

By all accounts, Romney was a highly successful venture capitalist. While running Bain Capital, he helped pick some real winners, earning his investors substantial returns. High finance is a difficult subject to convey in a sound bite, so Romney evidently has chosen to focus on job creation. 

This is a mistake, because it overstates the purposes of Bain’s investments and has now led Romney into a factually challenging cul-de-sac.

Romney never could have raised money from investors if the prospectus seeking $1-million investments from the super wealthy had said it would focus on creating jobs. Instead, it said: “The objective of the fund is to achieve an annual rate of return on invested capital in excess of the returns generated by conventional investments in the public equity market and the private equity market.”

 Indeed, the prospectus never mentions “jobs,” “job,” or “employees.”

…

When Romney made a run for the governorship, the Boston Globe reported in 2002 that he had not been involved in the details of many deals toward the end of his Bain experience: “These days, Romney can say he hasn’t inked a deal in many years. Even during the end of his tenure at Bain, from 1994 to 1999, he played the role of CEO and rainmaker rather than delving into the details of buyouts.”

 Interestingly, when Romney ran for the Senate in 1994, his campaign only claimed he had created 10,000 jobs. In one ad, a narrator said: “Mitt Romney has spent his life building more than 20 businesses and helping to create more than 10,000 jobs. So when it comes to creating jobs, he’s not just talk. He’s done it.”

Now, apparently, those 10,000 jobs have increased tenfold, apparently in part because of Bain investments in which Romney had at best a tangential role.

The Pinocchio Test

 Romney certainly has a good story to tell about knowing how to manage a business, spotting opportunities and understanding high finance. But if he is to continue to make claims about job creation, the Romney campaign needs to provide a real accounting of how many jobs were gained or lost through Bain Capital investments while the firm managed these companies — and while Romney was chief executive. Any jobs counted after either of those data points simply do not pass the laugh test.

Three Pinocchios

 

With Gingrich and Perry ready to pounce on Romney in South Carolina, I don’t think it is over.   I think the vetting of Willard is just beginning.

The seond item comes from Nate Silver who is live blogging for the New York Times at 8:57

Turnout in G.O.P. Primary Tracking Well Below 2008 Pace

Although the polls made pretty good predictions of the election outcome tonight, forecasting turnout is harder. So far it looks like rumors of a record Republican turnout in New Hampshire were greatly exaggerated.

With 85 of 301 precincts reporting, 52,191 voters have cast a ballot in the Republican primary so far. That projects to about 185,000 votes statewide, as compared with about 240,000 votes in the Republican primary in 2008.

The drop-off in turnout looks worse for Republicans since a higher fraction of voters – about half this year, compared to 37 percent in 2008 – are independents. That means that turnout among registered Republicans could alone be off by nearly 40 percent from 2008.