The GOP Plan to Flush Your State?s Economy Down the Toilet

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February 11, 2013 ?| ?

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The GOP has plans for a comeback. But it may cost you a lot. The idea is to capitalize on recent Republican state takeovers to conduct an austerity experiment known as the new ?red-state model? and prove that faulty policies can be turned into gold.

There will be smoke. There will be mirrors. And there will be a lot of ordinary people suffering needlessly in the wake of this ideological train wreck.

We already have a red-state model, and it?s called Mississippi. Or Texas. Or any number of states characterized by low public investment, worker abuse, environmental degradation, educational backwardness, high rates of unwanted pregnancy, poor health, and so on.

Now the GOP is determined to bring that horrible model to the rest of America.

In Kansas, the Wall Street Journal reports that Governor Sam Brownback is aiming to up his profile ?by turning Kansas into what he calls Exhibit A for how sharp cuts in taxes and government spending can generate jobs, wean residents off public aid and spur economic growth.? In remarks quoted in the same article, Brownback announced that "My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, 'See, we've got a different way, and it works.? "

Brownback?s economic inspiration is Reagan-era supply-side economist Arthur Laffer and the folks at Americans for Prosperity, the conservative outfit backed by the deep coffers of the Koch brothers.

This new austerity talk focused on ?fiscal innovations? is emboldening Republicans in other states that have been gerrymandered into submission to the GOP, including Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, and alas, my home state of North Carolina.

Republications have been eyeing the Tar Heel state with interest due to its recent swing status in presidential elections. The state was also the target of a gerrymandering strategy that worked out wonderfully for the Republicans, but not so well for democracy. Sam Wang, the founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, wrote recently in the New York Times about how Republican redistricting thwarted Democratic voters:

"Although gerrymandering is usually thought of as a bipartisan offense, the rather asymmetrical results may surprise you....I have developed approaches to detect such shenanigans by looking only at election returns. To see how the sleuthing works, start with the na?ve standard that the party that wins more than half the votes should get at least half the seats. In November, five states failed to clear even this low bar: Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. ... In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans ? a split that occurred in less than 1 percent of simulations. If districts were drawn fairly, this lopsided discrepancy would hardly ever occur."

The lesson of North Carolina tells you that the GOP red-state model is based, first and foremost, on efforts to flagrantly disregard the will of the people. NC?s discount-store mogul Art Pope, a longtime GOP donor and champion of free-market fundamentalism, has been appointed state budget director by the new Republican governor, Pat McCrory. In an incredible display of money buying political influence, Pope has gone well beyond his donor-counterparts in other states. Instead of just funding the politicians he wants, he has gone for direct rule by occupying government himself. Tax repeal is the centerpiece of his announced plans, but his hatred of public investment means he has much more than that in store for one of the most progressive states in the South. Pope is said to be more powerful than the governor, giving rise to the term ?Pope administration? to describe the new political reality.

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Former aide to Newark mayor to be sentenced

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Egypt court orders YouTube blocked for a month

CAIRO (AP) ? A Cairo court on Saturday ordered the government to block access to the video-sharing website YouTube for 30 days for carrying an anti-Islam film that caused deadly riots across the world.

Judge Hassouna Tawfiq ordered YouTube blocked for carrying the film, which he described as "offensive to Islam and the Prophet (Muhammad)." He made the ruling in the Egyptian capital where the first protests against the film erupted last September before spreading to more than 20 countries, killing more than 50 people.

The ruling however can be appealed, and based on precedent, might not be enforced. A spokeswoman for YouTube's parent company, Google, said in a statement that the firm had "received nothing from the judge or government related to this matter."

The 14-minute trailer for the movie "Innocence of Muslims" portrays Islam's Prophet Muhammad as a religious fraud, womanizer and pedophile. It was produced in the United States by an Egyptian-born Christian who's now a U.S. citizen.

Egypt's new constitution includes a ban on insulting "religious messengers and prophets." Broadly worded blasphemy laws were also in effect under former President Hosni Mubarak prior to his ouster in a popular revolt two years ago.

Similar orders to censor pornographic websites deemed offensive have not been enforced in Egypt because of high costs associated with technical applications. Blocking YouTube might be easier to enforce, though it also can be circumvented by active Internet users.

Rights activists say Egypt's ministry of communications and information technology has appeared unwilling to enforce such bans. The Cabinet spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment.

Human rights lawyer Gamal Eid said the decision to ban YouTube stems in large part from a lack of knowledge among judges about how the Internet works. Activists say this has led to a lack of courtroom discussion on technical aspects of digital technology, leaving cases based solely on threats to national security and defamation of religion.

"This verdict shows that judges' understanding of technology is weak," Eid said. "The judges do not realize that one wrong post on a website does not mean you have to block the entire website."

Eid, who is executive director at The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, said the government should file an appeal and make it clear to judges that, at most, only specific pages on websites should be blocked.

His group released a statement saying that the decision to block YouTube is counterproductive, citing thousands of videos that seek to promote a better understanding of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad on the website.

Google declined requests to remove the video from the website last year, but restricted access to it in certain countries, including Egypt, Libya and Indonesia, because it said the video broke laws in those countries. At the height of the protests in September, YouTube was ordered blocked in several countries, including Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah issued an order blocking all websites with access to the anti-Islam film in the conservative kingdom.

Lawyer Mohammed Hamid Salim, who filed the case against the Egyptian government, alleged the film constitutes a threat to Egypt's security, adding that YouTube refused to remove the film despite its offensive content. Protesters in Cairo scaled the U.S. Embassy's walls and brought down the U.S. flag in the first demonstration against the film last year.

Two other cases filed against the government and Google are pending in Egyptian courts. One lawsuit calls for a complete ban on Google's search engine and demands the company pay a $2 billion fine.

Last year, an Egyptian court convicted in absentia seven Egyptian Coptic Christians and a Florida-based American pastor, who allegedly promoted the film, sentencing them to death on charges linked to the anti-Islam film. The case was seen as largely symbolic because the defendants were outside Egypt and unlikely to ever face the sentence.

The cases raise concern by some seculars and liberals that Islamist lawyers, emboldened by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups' rise to power, are seeking to curb freedom of speech. However, the most widespread curb occurred under Mubarak when his government blocked all access to the Internet for several days during the 18-day uprising that ousted him from power in an attempt to disrupt communications among activists.

Protests have continued to roil Egypt in the two years since Mubarak was toppled, with the latest bout of violence directed against President Mohammed Morsi's rule. Friday's protests were ignited partly by the apparent torture-death this week of activist Mohammed el-Gindy, whose body showed marks of electrical shocks on his tongue, wire marks around his neck, smashed ribs and a broken skull, according to an initial medical examination and one of his colleagues.

However, on Saturday the justice minister told the state-run Ahram Arabic website that an official medical report showed el-Gindy died in a car accident. The autopsy report was not immediately available.

___

Associated Press Writer John S. Marshall in San Francisco contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-court-orders-youtube-blocked-month-140531389.html

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Is this Super Bowl ad kiss too steamy for TV?

By Ben Popken, TODAY contributor

GoDaddy's reputation, and infamy, has been built in large part due to its lewd, mammary-filled Super Bowl ads. This year's, while still trading in the "sex sells" mentality, is a little different. But not so different as to fail to meet the expectations everyone has for a GoDaddy Super Bowl ad.

Featuring model Bar?Refaeli in a drawn-out smooch with a tech geek, one of GoDaddy's two 2013 Super Bowl ads once again cashes in on sex appeal. Compared to its earlier efforts, though, this one is classy, even sweet.

The commercial also stars race car driver Danica Patrick, who regularly appears in commercials for GoDaddy. The ad opens with a statement from Danica:

"There are two sides to GoDaddy. There's the sexy side represented by Bar Refaeli. ?And the smart side that creates a killer website for your small business, represented by Walter. Together, they're perfect.?

Cue the kiss.

At the end you're not left hating (but remembering) GoDaddy. Instead, you're rooting for the nerdly, curly-haired, bespectacled "Walter," played by Hollywood extra Jesse Heiman, who gets to do the lingering intense kiss with the blonde Refaeli.

"I told Jesse that he's a very good kisser," said Refaeli on the TODAY show, appearing via satellite from Tel Aviv.

"I actually had this very strange dream that all my friends know about. I always wanted to go to a club... look around, choose the one guy it's most unlikely that I'll ever kiss ... and kiss him in front of everyone, so he will be happy and he'll remember it for the rest of the week," said Refaeli, who?was voted #1 on Maxim magazine's Hot 100 list of 2012.?"GoDaddy made my dream come true."

The scene apparently took 65 takes.

"We tried to get it as perfect as possible," said Heiman, who smiled and shook his head when asked if he purposely messed it up in order to keep the kisses coming.

Bar?Refaeli, a 2009 Sports Illustrated cover model and the former flame of Leonardo DiCaprio,?does reveal a hint of cleavage in her taut, pink cocktail dress. However, there's no wardrobe malfunctions or down-the-shirt shots. Make no mistake, the centerpiece of the ad is an act of sexuality, a long kiss, but it's less "Girls Gone Wild" and more in the awkward rom-com vein you might see in a Judd Apatow-produced film.

Has GoDaddy grown up?

Somewhat. They're still up to their old teasing tricks. GoDaddy said CBS rejected a version of the ad that showed Refaeli and Heiman's tongues wrapped around each other's in an extended close-up, footage which the company shared with our producers.?A "non-Frenching" version will air during the Big Game.?But Heiman was quick to remind viewers of the TODAY show during his appearance this morning that they can go online to see more than what will be allowed during the Super Bowl.

GoDaddy's previous ads have had Danica Patrick slowly unzipping her jacket and then appearing to cut away right as she was about to show her breasts. Those ads told watchers to go online to GoDaddy.com to "see more."

The first time GoDaddy's ad appeared in the Super Bowl, visits to their website surged 400 percent, and orders shot up 100 percent, according to data by comScore.

"I would be very much fine with the second one airing and not the tamer one," Refaeli said. "When we do something?like that filled with a lot of humor, and we are joking about ourselves, I'd rather we go all the way." For those viewers who agree, GoDaddy will have something waiting for them on their website after the ad airs on the game, along with their ready and waiting online cash registers.

{"contentId":"16804921","totalVotes":"13095"}

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Sony announces the world's first 4K OLED TV at CES: 3,840 x 2,160 resolution, no price or release in sight

4K TVs look amazing. OLED TVs look amazing. You can imagine, therefore, how good a 4K OLED TV will look. Sony has just wowed the audience here at CES 2013 with the news that it's produced the world's first Ultra High Definition television that uses Organic LEDs. Given how many companies have launched 4K sets here -- Westinghouse, Hisense, Toshiba and LG, just to name a few -- it's not unusual to hear that Sony has one-upped the crowd by adding a pinch of OLED to the mix.

The 56-inch set boasts a native 3,840 x 2,160 OLED panel, and a prototype will be on display here at CES 2013 in Las Vegas. Sony's pimping its own "oxide semiconductor TFTs" and "Super Top Emission" technologies, but isn't saying much else. There's zero mention of contrast ratio, refresh ratio, thickness, power draw, or any other specifications. Not exactly a shocker, but disheartening nonetheless. We'll be prying for more -- including any plans for a commercial release -- as the show rolls on.

Gallery: Sony 56-inch 4K OLED TV

Daniel Cooper contributed to this article.

Continue reading Sony announces the world's first 4K OLED TV at CES: 3,840 x 2,160 resolution, no price or release in sight

Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment, HD, Sony

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Mississippi river diversion helped build Louisiana wetlands, geologists find

ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2012) ? The extensive system of levees along the Mississippi River has done much to prevent devastating floods in riverside communities. But the levees have also contributed to the loss of Louisiana's wetlands. By holding in floodwaters, they prevent sediment from flowing into the watershed and rebuilding marshes, which are compacting under their own weight and losing ground to sea-level rise.

Reporting in Nature Geoscience, a team of University of Pennsylvania geologists and others used the Mississippi River flood of the spring of 2011 to observe how floodwaters deposited sediment in the Mississippi Delta. Their findings offer insight into how new diversions in the Mississippi River's levees may help restore Louisiana's wetlands.

While scientists and engineers have previously proposed ways of altering the levee system to restore some of the natural wetland-building ability of the Mississippi, this is among the only large-scale experiments to demonstrate how these modifications might function.

The study was headed by Douglas Jerolmack, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at Penn, and Federico Falcini, who at the time was a postdoctoral researcher in Jerolmack's lab and is now at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Rome. Benjamin Horton, an associate professor in the Earth and Environmental Science Department; Nicole Khan, a doctoral student in Horton's lab; and Alessandro Salusti, a visiting undergraduate researcher also contributed to the work. The Penn researchers worked with Rosalia Santoleri, Simone Colella and Gianluca Volpe of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche; Leonardo Macelloni, Carol B. Lutken and Marco D'Emidio of the University of Mississippi; Karen L. McKee of the U.S. Geological Survey; and Chunyan Li of Louisiana State University.

The 2011 floods broke records across several states, damaged homes and crops and took several lives. The destruction was reduced, however, because the Army Corps of Engineers opened the Morganza Spillway, a river-control structure, for the first time since 1973 to divert water off of the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya River Basin. This action involved the deliberate flooding of more than 12,000 square kilometers and alleviated pressures on downstream levees and spared Baton Rouge and New Orleans from the worst of the flood.

For the Penn researchers, the opening of the Morganza Spillway provided a rare look into how floods along the Mississippi may have occurred before engineered structures were put in place to control the river's flow.

"While this was catastrophic to the people living in the Atchafalaya Basin, it was also simulating -- accidentally -- the sort of natural flood that used to happen all the time," Jerolmack said. "We were interested in how this sort of natural flooding scenario would differ from the controlled floods contained within levees that we normally see in the Delta."

To capitalize on this opportunity, the team began examining satellite images showing the plume of sediment-laden water emerging from the mouths of the Atchafalaya and Mississippi rivers. They calculated the amount of sediment in the plumes for the duration of the flood based on the ocean color in the satellite images and calibrated these data to field samples taken from a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. Their boat sampling also allowed them to gather data on the speed of the plume and the extent to which river water mixed with ocean water.

From the satellite images, researchers observed that the Mississippi River unleashed a jet of water into the ocean. In contrast, the waters diverted into the Atchafalaya Basin spread out over 100 kilometers of coastline, the sediment lingering in a wide swampy area.

"You have this intentionally flooded Atchafalaya Basin and when those flood waters hit the coast they were trapped there for a month, where tides and waves could bring them back on shore," Jerolmack said. "Whereas in the Mississippi channel, where all the waters were totally leveed, you could see from satellite images this sort of fire hose of water that pushed the sediment from the river far off shore."

The researchers used a helicopter to travel to 45 sites across the two basins, where they sampled sediment cores. They observed that sediment deposited to a greater extent in the Atchafalaya Basin than in any area of the Mississippi Basin wetlands, even though the Mississippi River plume contained more total sediment.

The recently deposited sediments lacked plant roots and were different in color and consistency from the older sediments. Laboratory analyses of diatoms, or photosynthetic algae, also revealed another signature of newly deposited sediments: They contained a higher proportion of round diatoms to rod-shaped diatoms than did deeper layers of sediment.

"This diatom ratio can now serve as an indicator for freshwater floods," Horton said. "With longer sediment cores and analyses of the diatoms, we may be able to work out how many floods have occurred, how much sediment they deposited and what their recurrence intervals were."

Taken together, the researchers' findings offer a large-scale demonstration of how flooding over the Atchafalaya's wide basin built up sediment in wetland areas, compared to the more-focused plume of water from the Mississippi River. Jerolmack says this "natural experiment" provides a convincing and reliable way of gathering data and information about how changes in the Mississippi's levees and control structures could help restore marsh in other areas of the Delta.

"One of the things that we found here is that the Atchafalaya, which is this wide, slow plume, actually produced a lot of sedimentation over a broad area," Jerolmack said. "We think that what the Atchafalaya is showing us on a field scale is that this is the sort of diversion that you would need in order to create effective sedimentation and marsh building."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Pennsylvania, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Federico Falcini, Nicole S. Khan, Leonardo Macelloni, Benjamin P. Horton, Carol B. Lutken, Karen L. McKee, Rosalia Santoleri, Simone Colella, Chunyan Li, Gianluca Volpe, Marco D?Emidio, Alessandro Salusti, Douglas J. Jerolmack. Linking the historic 2011 Mississippi River flood to coastal wetland sedimentation. Nature Geoscience, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1615

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/PDvLGGz-e1M/121021133913.htm

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