links for 2009-07-07

Wolff agrees Google is the "most likely" buyer of Twitter, given its deep pockets and the fact both Stone and Williams are alums of the search giant. Facebook "would sorely love to buy Twitter," he adds, but it's unclear if Stone and Williams would want to trade shares in one pre-public company for another.

News Corp. is also a likely entrant to any Twitter bidding war, according to Wolff, author of (most recently) The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch.

The Ventura County Young Republicans announce that Former Miss California, Carrie Prejean, to be the keynote speaker for the 2009 convention. A California native, the 21 year old model was crowned Miss Greater San Diego in 2007, and most recently was the former Miss California 2009. She was second runner up in the April Miss USA pageant.

Ventura County Young Republicans believe that “Carrie is a fresh new face for conservatives in California. We feel that adding her to our slate of speakers will greatly amplify the excitement around our convention. We are proud to continue pushing the envelope in recruiting vibrant young Republican leaders.”

The dinner banquet will take place at 6:30pm on Saturday, August 15th at the Grand Vista hotel in Simi Valley, Ca.

Dozens of protesters, some of them in wheelchairs, blocked the hallway outside Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Capitol office for hours Tuesday to protest proposed cuts to health and social service programs.

Spokeswoman Denika Boardman said that 15 to 20 of the participants were willing to be arrested, if necessary, to press their case that the state needs new revenue to help balance its $26.3 billion budget hole.

The protest, called People's Day of Reckoning, began about 1 p.m. and was still going strong about 5 p.m. Organizers said the event drew about 120 people at its height, dropping to about 75 within a couple hours.

California Highway Patrol Capt. Bob Ghiglieri said the demonstration was peaceful, public safety was not endangered, and that no decision had been made late Tuesday afternoon on dispersing the group.

U.S. mortgage fraud reports jumped 36 percent last year as desperate homeowners and industry professionals tried to maintain their standard of living from the boom years, the FBI said on Tuesday.

Suspicious activity reports rose to 63,713 in fiscal year 2008, which ended last September, from 46,717 the year before. California and Florida, centers of the housing bust, had the highest numbers of suspicious reports as foreclosures jumped, the stock market dropped and credit dried up.

The top U.S. military officer warned on Tuesday that time is running out for dialogue with Tehran to avoid either a nuclear-armed Iran or a possible military strike against the Islamic Republic.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it is critical for diplomatic efforts to reach a solution before Iran develops a nuclear weapon or faces an Israeli or U.S. strike to turn back its nuclear program.

"That window is a very narrow window," Mullen told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

"There's a great deal that certainly depends on the dialogue and the engagement," he said. "I'm hopeful that that dialogue is productive. I worry about it a great deal if it's not."

Mullen noted that some forecasters believe Iran could be as little as a year away from developing a nuclear bomb, adding: "The clock has continued to tick."

Turning to domestic issues, the president said that when Vice President Joe Biden recently told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that the White House “misread” the economy when planning the stimulus package in January, the president said that “what Vice President Biden was referring to was simply the fact that when we passed he stimulus, we hadn’t gotten the full report of the first quarter contractions in the economy that turned out to be way worse than anybody had anticipated.”

But the president denied that his economic prescription was wrong because the diagnosis was incomplete.

“There’s nothing that we would have done differently,” he said. “We needed a stimulus and we needed a substantial stimulus.”
++++++
Oh really?

The Obama administration hoped spending $787 billion in stimulus would jump-start the economy, build new schools and usher in an era of education reform. So far, government auditors say, many states are setting aside such grand plans and simply trying to stay afloat.
Since Obama signed the stimulus bill in February, the economy has shed more than 2 million jobs. Unemployment now stands at 9.5 percent, the highest in more than a quarter century.

A key lawmaker says senators at work on health care legislation are having second thoughts about imposing a tax on high-end insurance coverage that workers receive on the job.

Sen. Kent Conrad says polling shows widespread public opposition to the idea, and lawmakers are now considering other options to help pay for an expansion of care to millions of people who now lack insurance.

The North Dakota Democrat did not go into details Tuesday.

In a compilation of four public opinion polls shown to lawmakers, opposition to taxing health care benefits ranged from 59 percent to 70 percent. In private talks, lawmakers have been discussing a tax on workers who receive coverage that has particularly high premiums.

A Senate Democrat involved in negotiations on legislation to overhaul the health-care system said senators may be souring on a plan to tax some employer-provided health benefits.

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said that public polls conducted over the July 4 congressional recess and reviewed by senators are causing lawmakers to have second thoughts about limiting the tax exclusion for employer health plans.

"It remains a significant option, but we're looking at other options," Conrad told a group of reporters Tuesday. "When you go out and ask people across the country, their initial reaction is, they don't like it."

Senate Finance Committee members, including Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., Conrad and Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, are trying to prepare a bill for consideration by the Senate in July. They are hunting for new revenues to offset as much as half of the bill's expected $1 trillion cost.

81: Average percentage of those who survive a diagnosis of prostate cancer in the United States versus 43% in Britain under their National Health Service.

90: Number of days, on average, each Canadian patient must wait for an MRI under the Canadian government-run health care system.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday ordered Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to drop a proposal to tax health benefits and stop chasing Republican votes on a massive health care reform bill.

Reid, whose leadership is considered crucial if President Barack Obama is to deliver on his promise of enacting health care reform this year, offered the directive to Baucus through an intermediary after consulting with Senate Democratic leaders during Tuesday morning’s regularly scheduled leadership meeting. Baucus was meeting with Finance ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) Tuesday afternoon to relay the information.

According to Democratic sources, Reid told Baucus that taxing health benefits and failing to include a strong government-run insurance option of some sort in his bill would cost 10 to 15 Democratic votes; Reid told Baucus it wasn’t worth securing the support of Grassley and at best a few additional Republicans.

Facing criticism for having backed the “wrong” side in the recent coup in Honduras, President Obama Tuesday tried to explain his advocacy on behalf of ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

“America supports now the restoration of the democratically-elected President of Honduras, even though he has strongly opposed American policies,” the president told graduate students at the commencement ceremony of Moscow’s New Economic School. “We do so not because we agree with him. We do so because we respect the universal principle that people should choose their own leaders, whether they are leaders we agree with or not. “

President Barack Obama gets a lackluster 49 – 44 percent approval rating in Ohio, considered by many to be the most important swing state in a presidential election, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. This is President Obama's lowest approval rating in any national or statewide Quinnipiac University poll since he was inaugurated and is down from 62 – 31 percent in a May 6 survey.

By a small 48 – 46 percent margin, voters disapprove of the way Obama is handling the economy, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds. This is down from a 57 – 36 percent approval May 6. A total of 66 percent of Ohio voters are "somewhat dissatisfied" or "very dissatisfied" with the way things are going in the state, while 33 percent are "very satisfied" or "somewhat satisfied," numbers that haven't changed since Obama was elected.

House Ways and Means Committee members are likely to propose a surtax on high-income Americans to help pay for an overhaul of the health-care system, according to people familiar with the plan.

The tax would be similar to, yet much smaller than, a surtax proposed in 2007 by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, a person familiar with the committee’s talks said. That plan would have added at least a 4 percent levy on incomes exceeding $200,000, and was projected to reap as much as $832 billion over 10 years.

Two people familiar with closed-door talks by committee Democrats said a House bill probably will include a surtax on incomes exceeding $250,000, as Congress seeks ways to pay for changes to a health-care system that accounts for almost 18 percent of the U.S. economy. By targeting wealthier Americans, a surtax may hold more appeal for House Democrats than a Senate proposal to tax some employer-provided health benefits.

Add it all up, and it looks like the next year is going to be a pretty lucrative one for Sarah Palin, Inc. By our estimates, she’s going to pull in anywhere from $17 million to $20.75 million in the next 12 months. At the low end of that range, she's tied with Sandra Bullock and Serena Williams on the 2009 Forbes Celebrity 100, which measures wealth, fame and power. Williams just won Wimbledon for the first time in six years, while Sandra Bullock had a career rebound with The Proposal. Are those omens for Palin?

New Hampshire Attorney General Kelly Ayotte (R) announced she will be resigning her post to pursue a campaign for the Senate, landing Republicans a top-tier recruit to run against Rep. Paul Hodes (D-NH), according to Politico.

"A recently-released Granite State poll confirms that she'd be the strongest Republican candidate for the seat held by retiring Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH). Of all the potential GOP candidates, she held the highest approval ratings and led Hodes in a head-to-head matchup."

The clogged tourist travel route between Southern California and Las Vegas has been designated a federal high-speed rail corridor, in a move that officials hope will signal increased cooperation between the regions on building speedier train travel.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced Thursday that the route is now considered part of the federally designated California high-speed-rail corridor.

LaHood called the congestion on Interstate 15 linking Southern California and the Las Vegas area “very bad for business, very bad for safety and certainly very bad for the environment.”

He made the announcement at a news conference in Las Vegas, accompanied by Sen. Harry Reid and California Department of Transportation Director Will Kempton.

A group of the biggest U.S. banks said they would stop accepting California's IOUs on Friday, adding pressure on the state to close its $26.3 billion annual budget gap.
The development is the latest twist in California's struggle to deal with the effects of the recession. After state leaders failed to agree on budget solutions last week, California began issuing IOUs — or "individual registered warrants" — to hundreds of thousands of creditors. State Controller John Chiang said that without IOUs, California would run out of cash by July's end.

But now, if California continues to issue the IOUs, creditors will be forced to hold on to them until they mature on Oct. 2, or find other banks to honor them. When the IOUs mature, holders will be paid back directly by the state at an annual 3.75% interest rate. Some banks might also work with creditors to come up with an interim solution, such as extending them a line of credit, said Beth Mills, a California Bankers Association spokeswoman.

The U.S. should consider drafting a second stimulus package focusing on infrastructure projects because the $787 billion approved in February was “a bit too small,” said Laura Tyson, an outside adviser to President Barack Obama.

The current plan “will have a positive effect, but the real economy is a sicker patient,” Tyson said in a speech in Singapore today. The package will have a more pronounced impact in the third and fourth quarters, she added, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not the administration.

Al Gore today compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis.

The former US Vice President said the world lacked the political will to act and invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill by encouraging leaders to unite their nations to fight climate change.

He also accused politicians around the world of exploiting ignorance about the dangers of global warming to avoid difficult decisions.

Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment , sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: “Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War II.”

Russia's foreign minister warned Tuesday that the U.S. would jeopardize progress toward a new treaty with Russia on nuclear arms cuts if it decides to create a global missile defense system.

Sergey Lavrov spoke a day after the Russian and U.S. presidents reached a preliminary agreement setting targets for further reductions of the world's largest offensive nuclear arsenals.

Lavrov's message was that Russia will not agree to the cuts—which both countries say they want to codify in a treaty before the existing START I agreement expires in December—if the U.S. fails to assuage its concerns over missile defense plans.

Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin praised the hospitality and openness of U.S. former President George W. Bush in a telegramme sent hours before meeting his successor Barack Obama.

"During the last years we have been working on strengthening Russia-U.S. cooperation. Although there were differences between our countries, I always valued your openness and sincerity," Putin said, congratulating Bush on his 63rd birthday on July 6.

"With special warmth I recall your hospitality in the Crawford ranch and your family estate in Kennebunkport," Putin wrote, referring to their 2007 meeting at the Bush family vacation home when the two leaders went fishing and ate lobster.