"...Monday's ruling elevates the Second Amendment right to bear arms to the status of a fundamental right that states can't abridge.
"It is clear that the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty," wrote Justice Alito in his majority opinion..."
Nearly doubling the spectrum available for commercial wireless broadband during the next 10 years is good news indeed. Presumably the more efficient use of all spectrum is a companion goal.
As these announcements are made about the expansion of broadband, I think of George Gilder’s predictions more than a decade ago about the coming massive shift in how services are carried. Gilder predicted a massive migration of services carried on wire (telephony) to wireless and services carried on the air (broadcast television) to wireline (fiber optics and cable).
Broadband to Be Available for More Commercial Use - NYTimes.com
"What we saw yesterday ... is a bunch of thugs that pretend to have a difference of opinion with policies and instead choose violence in order to express those so-called differences of opinion," Dimitri Soudas, spokesman for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, told a news conference.
The roving band of protesters torched four police cruisers and shattered shop windows with baseball bats and hammers for blocks, including at police headquarters, then shed some of their black clothes, revealing other garments, and continued their rampage.
"...Overall, the stimulus plan would create or save about 3.6 million jobs by the end of 2010, according to projections last month by Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, economists in the Obama administration, based on early versions of the plan. They say a stimulus bill would mean an unemployment rate of 7% in 2010, versus 8.8% otherwise. The estimate doesn't detail how many jobs are saved, as opposed to created..."
"What the world has now reached instead is a Keynesian dead end. We are told to let Congress continue to spend and borrow until the precise moment when Mr. Summers and Mark Zandi and the other architects of our current policy say it is time to raise taxes to reduce the huge deficits and debt that their spending has produced. Meanwhile, individuals and businesses are supposed to be unaffected by the prospect of future tax increases, higher interest rates, and more government control over nearly every area of the economy. Even the CEOs of the Business Roundtable now see the damage this is doing.
A better economic policy will have to await a new Congress, which we hope at a minimum can prevent punishing tax increases. But for now the good news is that voters and markets are telling politicians to stop doing what hasn't worked."
"I don’t make this decision based on any difference in policy with Gen. McChrystal, as we are in full agreement about our strategy. Nor do I make this decision out of any sense of personal insult. The conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general, it undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of ourdemocratic system and it erodes the trust that is necessary for our team to work together to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan."
"I read with concern the profile piece on Gen. Stanley McChrystal in the upcoming edition of “Rolling Stone” magazine. I believe that Gen. McChrystal made a significant mistake and exercised poor judgment in this case. We are fighting a war against al Qaeda and its extremist allies, who directly threaten the United States, Afghanistan, and our friends and allies around the world. Going forward, we must pursue this mission with a unity of purpose. Our troops and coalition partners are making extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our security, and our singular focus must be on supporting them and succeeding in Afghanistan without such distractions. Gen. McChrystal has apologized to me and is similarly reaching out to others named in this article to apologize to them as well. I have recalled Gen. McChrystal to Washington to discuss this in person."
"According to the report, which was described Monday in The New York Times, Afghanistan has at least $1 trillion in mineral deposits that have yet to be unearthed. It is a potential income source so vast that if it were tapped and the wealth handled in a way to benefit the whole population, the country could be transformed. It would also turn Afghanistan into a mining center.The full Times story is here.
That would, however, require a substantial change in the country’s circumstances, since many of the reserves were found in politically unstable areas, said Mr. Omar, the Mines Ministry spokesman.
“Mining is not like a shop that you can open and immediately take advantage of,” he said, adding that it would most likely take five to 10 years before the country could begin to use those reserves."
"He should not have hesitated to suspend the expanded oil drilling program and he should have moved a lot faster to begin political and criminal investigations of the spill."
"Hence the persistent speculation that AT&T’s boss, Randall Stephenson, may launch a bid for DirecTV, an American satellite broadcaster, to give his firm yet another means of entry to people’s homes. AT&T may also be tempted to buy a bigger foothold in fast-growing emerging markets. This week it denied rumours that it was in talks to buy a minority stake in India’s Reliance Communications. Finding the right partners abroad will be devilishly hard. But given the flesh-eaters stalking the American market, Mr Stephenson must be making plenty of calls."
Alberto Alesina of Harvard has surveyed the history of debt reduction. He’s found that, in many cases, large and decisive deficit reduction policies were followed by increases in growth, not recessions. Countries that reduced debt viewed the future with more confidence. The political leaders who ordered the painful cuts were often returned to office. As Alesina put it in a recent paper, “in several episodes, spending cuts adopted to reduce deficits have been associated with economic expansions rather than recessions.”
This was true in Europe and the U.S. in the 1990s, and in many other cases before. In a separate study, Italian economists Francesco Giavazzi and Marco Pagano looked at the way Ireland and Denmark sharply cut debt in the 1980s. Once again, lower deficits led to higher growth.
"During the period of consolidation, in other words, the government will have to spend less, but target better. That will require enormous dexterity and intelligence from a political system that has recently shown neither."
"...Think of the impact on our global economy when you can't read and dropout of school - business and industry lose $730 billion each year in lost wages and taxes. Health literacy has also become a huge concern: not being able to read prescriptions or Medicaid forms has significant consequences. Dropouts are more than eight times as likely to be in prison where 70% of inmates are at the lowest levels of literacy. It is remarkable that, in 2010, 80 million American adults are functionally illiterate. Borad Member Reid Lyon nailed when he said that reading failure is not just an education problem: it is a social, health and economic problem.
We feel privileged to work with educators and school leaders trying to reach those most vulnerable. When 58% of children enter kindergarten not ready to read, we know we have to start early. We have known for years that 75% of children not reading in third grade cocntinue to have difficulties in ninth grade..."
