News Nuggets 658

 This important comparative chart comes from the Economist of the UK.  It relates directly to Secretary of Defense Gates' comments noted in the article below from the Daily Beast.

UP-FRONT APPALLING TV RECESSION NUGGET!!
Jobless Young People: Good for a Laugh, eh (Laurie Penny) from the Independent [of the UK]
"If being one of almost a million young people out of work weren't humiliating enough, the BBC has now commissioned a programme pitting jobless graduates and school-leavers against one another while viewers watch and snicker. According to the careers website Graduate Fog, Love Productions is advertising for contestants on the show, which will see employers hiring or rejecting young hopefuls live on air."
Read the article -- it gets worse.  What is the world coming to when ANYONE thinks this is funny!?  What type of insouciant "I have mine" cement heads would do this!?  Breath-taking!  Look for FOX to pick up and run with this concept in the US market.

Left over from yesterday:

We have a CORRECT ANSWER to that globally important Anthony Weiner question: "How could someone be so stupid?"  The correct answer is supplied by the late, great historian, Steven Ambrose: "God created man with a penis and a brain and gave him only enough blood to run one at a time."

From the PBS "Newshour" during Clinton-Lewinsky scandal
See the Wall Street Journal article by John Steele Gordon below.

Libya's Future to Be Decided on the Streets of Tripoli from Der Spiegel [of Germany in English]
"At night, NATO bombs strike strategic targets in Tripoli. During the day, pro-Gadhafi loyalists battle it out against pro-democracy insurgents. Amid the turmoil, a Frenchman is trying to save his business, and to get the two sides to the negotiating table in Paris."

Qaddafi’s Son Approaches Rebels With Libya Exit Proposal, Jebril Aide Says from the Bloomberg News Service
"Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, has approached rebels to negotiate an exit from power for his father in the last few days, an aide to National Transitional Council leader Mahmoud Jebril said."

Testing the Afghan Exit Ramps (David Ignatius) from the Washington Post
"The argument within the Obama administration for a big troop withdrawal from Afghanistan over the next year goes roughly like this: We’ve killed Osama bin Laden. That means we’ve achieved the core goal for which we sent forces in 2001. We have a ticket out, and we should take it. The counterargument from administration hawks is that a quick departure is a guarantee of failure.  ... Somewhere in the middle is President Obama."

Gates Blasts NATO, Questions Future of Alliance from the Associated Press
"America's military alliance with Europe — the cornerstone of U.S. security policy for six decades — faces a "dim, if not dismal" future, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday in a blunt valedictory address. In his final policy speech as Pentagon chief, Gates questioned the viability of NATO, saying its members' penny-pinching and lack of political will could hasten the end of U.S. support. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in 1949 as a U.S.-led bulwark against Soviet aggression, but in the post-Cold War era it has struggled to find a purpose."
I view this as Gates' version of a "dummy slap" to the US's European allies.  Message: The Europeans need to pony up WAY MORE than they have -- they CANNOT expect the US to continue to pay such a disproportionate level of the alliance's expenses, particularly as US lawmakers look to cut funding for a social safety net in the US that was never even close to what Europeans were providing for their own people.

Merkel and Obama 'More Similar than They Like to Admit' from Der Spiegel [of Germany in English]
"US-German relations have soured in recent months, a development Barack Obama tried to remedy this week with a glittering state reception for Chancellor Angela Merkel. German commentators on Thursday take stock of the American president's efforts and the message behind them."

Clinton World Bank President? Secretary Of State Seeks Position: Sources from Reuters via the Huffington Post
"U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been in discussions with the White House about leaving her job next year to become head of the World Bank, sources familiar with the discussions said on Thursday."

The American Public’s Great Depression (Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza) from the Washington Post
"A new CNN/Opinion Research poll shows that nearly half of Americans think a new Great Depression is likely to occur in the next year. Whether or not that Great Depression actually materializes in the economy, it’s pretty obvious that a (lower-case) great depression already exists when it comes to the American psyche, and it’s casting a pall over the 2012 race for president."

President Obama's Campaign Expands its 2012 Map from Politico
"President Barack Obama’s campaign team is gaming out complex state-by-state scenarios for 2012 that anticipate uphill battles in recession-ravaged blue states — and new opportunities in Arizona and Georgia. Their underlying assumption is that the GOP presidential field remains so fluid – and the country’s economic outlook so devilishly unpredictable – that Obama must construct robust grassroots field operations in nearly every competitive state in order to hit the magic number of 270 electoral votes and win re-election."

Gabrielle Giffords' Staffer Talks About Congresswoman's Health from the Arizona Republic
""She's living. She's alive. But if she were to plateau today, and this was as far as she gets, it would not be nearly the quality of life she had before," Carusone said. "There's no comparison. All that we can hope for is that she won't plateau today and that she'll keep going and that when she does plateau, it will be at a place far away from here.""
The staffer talks at length -- and the picture that emerges is: Giffords has come a long way ... and, boy, she has a long way to go.  I don't get that she will be running for anything next year.

Enough About You... (Eric Alterman) from the Nation
"Aiding and abetting this political negligence is a Washington press corps obsessed with covering meaningless personal dalliances and punitive long-term entitlement cuts. But to really ask ourselves how we got here, to a point where the political debate has shifted so far away from what needs to be done now, there is perhaps no better place to start than to take a brief travelogue through the Washington Post’s supposedly left-leaning op-ed columns."
This speaks to a much bigger phenomena I have been noting for several years: that any average consumer can cruise the national papers and the cable news networks for hours on end and NEVER read or hear directly an opinion ventured by someone who makes less than six, seven or even eight figures a year.  How are lawmakers or anyone supposed to get a real picture of the recession's impact on average people if THESE are the people always presenting and analyzing the news?  Back in the Great Depression days, reporters were overwhelmingly working class stiffs who understood poverty and unemployment on a personal, visceral level.  Not now.  For even the most *well-intentioned* pundit or New York Times reporter, such unpleasant realities are remote abstractions which, lets face it, after three years, simply become boring.  But, oh thank God, there goes Sarah Palin's bus... 

Newt Gingrich Advisers Resign En Masse from Politico
"Newt Gingrich’s top staff quit en masse Thursday, throwing into question whether his already troubled presidential campaign can continue. Two sources close to the situation confirmed that campaign manager Rob Johnson, strategists Sam Dawson and Dave Carney, spokesman Rick Tyler, and consultants Katon Dawson in South Carolina and Craig Schoenfeld in Iowa have all quit to protest what one called a “different vision” for the campaign."
What an EPIC fail!! Since 1994, THIS GUY was touted by folks on the right as "presidential material" -- "informed people" had been saying for years that he should run for the presidency because he was SO BRILLIANT, he was such an IDEAS MAN, he was like the SECOND COMING OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN!!  He FINALLY stops dithering and throws his hat in the ring -- and what do we get?!  A campaign made up of THREE SOLID WEEKS of laughs!  IN-credible!!

How Newt Gingrich's Campaign Imploded (Peter J. Boyer) from the Daily Beast
"The former speaker's top aides bolted en masse Thursday, leaving his campaign in tatters. Peter J. Boyer on staffers’ complaints about Gingrich’s rogue inclinations, the Greek cruise with wife Callista that was the final straw—and whether the candidate has any chance of recovering."

The Paul Revere Strategy (Jonathan Bernstein) from the Washington Post
"Is there any idea too crazy for the 2012 GOP hopefuls? Is there any nutty idea that, once proposed, GOP presidential candidates won’t try to match or even top? Looks like we’re about to find out."

Tea Party for Two (John Heilemann) from New York Magazine
"If Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann decide to run, who will notice the men?"

Palin, Bachmann Aren't the Only Americans to Stumble over History (Leonard Pitts) from the Miami Herald via the Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Researchers found that the majority of seniors at the nation's best colleges could not identify the words of the Gettysburg Address or explain the significance of Valley Forge. They did not know, the study concluded, because they had not been taught. History, the study said, was no longer a requirement in the nation's top schools."
INDEED!!  Speaking as someone who teaches at a top-25 university, this is absolutely true!  And, sadly, from public schools to community colleges to elite universities, investment in US history education is trending downwards, not up.

And it's good to see some people are beginning to notice and take action:
CIVICS EDUCATION NUGGET!!
Richard Dreyfuss' New Teaching Quest (Eleanor Clift) from the Daily Beast
"The Oscar-winning actor and liberal activist tells Eleanor Clift about his nonpartisan campaign to promote civic education and deeper knowledge of American history—especially the extraordinary efforts of George Washington and others who shaped the country."
We so need initiatives like this one!

WEINER HISTORY NUGGET!!
A Short History of Political Suicide (John Steele Gordon) from the Wall Street Journal
"Anthony Weiner's Twitter disaster may well cost him his seat in Congress. Washington has seen many other sordid meltdowns."

COMPUTING NUGGET!!
Welcome to the Beginning of the End of the PC Era from Time Magazine
"In the past eight days, Microsoft and Apple have shown off upcoming versions of their respective operating systems. Their plans differ in fundamental respects, but both companies are looking past the PC era we've lived in for the past three decades. They're building software for an age in which people do their computing and communicating on all kinds of gadgets — ones which are simpler, more portable, and more Internet-centric than PCs as we've known them for all these years."

TECHNOLOGY NUGGET!!
Breakthrough in Battery Technology Could Revolutionize Electric Vehicles from Raw Story
"The MIT News Office reported that the new architecture suspends the active electrical components of a battery, such as positive and negative electrodes, as particles in a liquid. This black electric sludge, which resembles petroleum, has been dubbed "Cambridge crude" by its inventors. The new design, called a "semi-solid flow cell," could allow electric vehicles to refuel by pumping the used electric sludge out and replacing it with fully charged electric sludge."