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As I have previously warned–and I hope I’m wrong–President Obama seems on the verge of needlessly cutting America’s most valued social program and the one that best differentiates Republicans from Democrats. This is part of a vain effort to appease deficit hawks in his own party and on Wall Street, as well as Republicans who are utter hypocrites when it comes to deficits–increasing them as long as the purpose is tax cuts but then turning around and demanding program cuts in order to reduce the deficits they created.
All the choreography is in place for the president to embrace Social Security cuts in his upcoming State of the Union address.
Cutting Social Security is financially needless–the program is in sound shape for the next 27 years. It has nothing to do with the current deficit. It will be solvent indefinitely if we can get some wage growth going

As I write this, the motivation behind the shooting of my friend Gabby Giffords and eleven others isn’t clear. We don’t know what prompted the shooter to show up at Gabby’s Congress on Your Corner at a Tucson grocery store with a semiautomatic pistol and the motivation to kill innocent people. We don’t know if it was unmitigated hatred and misdirected rage or paranoid delusion. We don’t know if was politics — aimed at Gabby’s courageous stands on health care and

On Sunday January 9, 2011, Mike attended services honoring the first anniversary of the Haitian earthquake at Evangelical Crusade of Fishers of Men Church in Brooklyn, where he spoke about the tragic events in Arizona on January 8. The following are Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s remarks as delivered.
I walked into this church this morning with a heavy heart, thinking about the tragic shooting in Arizona yesterday. And while the singing was going on, I said a little prayer for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and everyone who was murdered or injured yesterday.
I think that millions of people in New York, and in every part of our country and from every corner of the world, are doing the same

For years now, Apple Computer has held a firm grip on the consumer electronics gadget market. With huge hits like the iPod MP3 player, the iPod Touch media player, the iPhone cellular phone device, and lately the iPad, Apple is consistently hitting the consumer nail-on-the-head. So why is it so hard for competitors to keep pace, much less surpass any of Apple’s offerings? I believe that Apple’s intent (and business model) is to have its competitors shooting at moving targets; targets that Apple itself uses to keep the competition busy shooting at “technological shadow puppets”.
Due to the advancements of electronic technologies, the consumer electronics sector has been really busy (and very competitive) in the last 10 years or so. Advancements like lower powered devices, battery life improvements, sharper screens, touch enabled interfaces, and the like, have created a surge in new and innovative gadgets for the

The cardinal rule of journalism is simple. Get it right or don’t report it. Especially when it comes to matters of life and death.
This weekend during live coverage of the Tucson shootings the media – in its rush to beat the competition – got it wrong over and over again. Sadly, the errors – including one-source reporting and anonymous sources – are not isolated

The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue. With articles ranging from the evolution of the suit to the dangers of medieval warfare, I was not disappointed with this year’s. The cover story, however, was perhaps the most

I say this because Arizona is not the problem. We the people are the problem.
That is, we Americans who think it is cool to engage in rhetoric, political or otherwise, that encourages division, ugliness, hatred, and violence, directly or indirectly.
Over the past several years, we’ve witnessed this madness via certain television networks, TV and radio talk shows, the Internet, and various rallies and protests: a climate of hatred and, yes, violence, which has been boiling with a quickness in our America.
This is not about left versus right political philosophies, nor Democrats versus Republicans, nor progressives versus Tea Party followers, nor about the wackness of Arizona, a state that once, aided by one of its senators, John McCain, refused to celebrate the

Each of us is at least 75 percent responsible for how others treat us. If they are disdainful and we do not respond in a way that causes them to change their tone and attitude, then we essentially encourage them to continue to berate us.
This is what Americans do when they listen to shock jocks and others whose larger purpose in life is to draw attention and wealth to themselves by spewing hatred and lies.
When we don’t expect support for assertions, anyone can convince us of anything. They foul our environment with vitriol seeping downward to our children where bullying is becoming more and more prevalent.
We can choose to extricate ourselves from the URPs (unwanted repetitive episodes) of vile

An IranAir passenger flight carrying 106 passengers crashed earlier today while attempting an emergency landing in the middle of a severe snowstorm outside the city of Orumiyeh in Western Azerbaijan.
Iranian media reported that 71 people onboard died and 35 survived with light to serious injuries.
The plane took off late owing to poor weather conditions on a direct flight from Tehran to Orumiyeh, 460 miles in a northwesterly direction.
The aircraft was an old Boeing 727, which has been out of production in the United States for more than a couple of decades.
Iranian airlines have frequent incidents of aircraft failure due to an aging fleet and poor maintenance.

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A new way to communicate?
It is time for a change — and while it needs to be led by both parties, the real responsibility lies with every individual in the United States of America to make that change.
The tragic events in Tucson bring home the point that America’s political dialogue needs to change now. As the ultimate sacrifices made due to the politics of personal destruction demonstrated, we need to relearn how to debate and argue without the threatening rhetoric so commonly unleashed today.
While most Americans calmly evaluate wild assertions and don’t give credence to calls for “action” against “targeted” individuals (such as those who are illustrated with gun-sights on their districts, offices, homes, or persons), the reality is a small segment of the population is differently effected — misguidedly believing such calls are justifications for violence.
If we don’t begin to make changes now, we will scare off many of the best people we could have as public servants and leaders. Already intimidated by the nonstop litany of false accusations made in attack ads and rationally concerned about the lack of privacy holding office entails, highly qualified citizens otherwise willing to serve will be intimidated further by the possibility of loss of their lives as well as harm to their loved ones.
Democrats and Republicans alike have effectively deployed the politics of personal destruction with its efficacy reaching new heights in 2010 due to (1) the disconnect between candidate campaigns (where personal responsibility still exists) and third party groups (who have no palpable accountability whatsoever) and (2) the consistent effectiveness of negative advertising. Third party organizations have free rein to say anything without direct repercussions and, as a result, have lowered the political realm even further than once imagined.
It is time for every American to take the actions necessary to restore civility to the process and to reject the approaches so effectively used

Arizona’s weak gun laws could reach a new low this spring.
When the Arizona state legislature reconvenes tomorrow for the first day of the new session, two gun bills will be on the table for debate.
One bill–H2001–will allow faculty members to carry concealed weapons on campus.
The other bill–H2014–will prevent educational institutions from stopping a person from carrying a weapon with a valid permit.
In the blazing summer of 2009,

I don’t know what motivated the young man who allegedly murdered several people and critically wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords but whether or not the case, his actions could possibly have been affected by what he saw on TV, heard on the radio or read on the Internet.
I would never equate bullying with murder but when trying to understand this tragedy, I am reminded about how other young people in our society are influenced by what they too read, hear and see.
In April, I wrote a column entitled “Adults On TV Are Bad Role Models for Teen Bullies,” pointing out how young people learn not from how we tell them to act but how we (adults) act in their presence. While the alleged 22-year old shooter is technically an adult, he is a very young man and, aside from what whatever mental instabilities he may have, like many young people, he is likely influenced by his media environment.
Of course it’s too early to tell exactly what motivated him and premature to convict him in the press before he’s even arraigned let alone

One of the headlines of Saturday’s Christian Science Monitor read “Why are Americans so Angry?” That is a common enough thread though occasionally the shock and blame levels get to code orange when tragedies such as the deadly shooting while a lawmaker is the midst of meeting with constituents outside of a supermarket.
The shock antennae are up. President Obama and other important figures are horrified, saying this kind of violence has no place in a free nation like America. Yet, I am asking why we are in effect ignoring the widespread nature of the acts and attitudes of violence throughout our human climate in general?
For instance we in effect ignore our general addiction to both violence and humiliation in our choices of television and film. We ignore our own participation as we allow the closing of the very schools that are the lifeline of our children, and in the foreign policies (and lies within that) which, for me, all have no place in a democracy or anything close.
The bigger question is why the violence is so rampant, not only in our streets, but against almost anyone of different political persuasion so much so that we are persuaded by fear into various belief systems

(Courtesy: Alex Bauzon)
Every Tuesday afternoon you can hear the wheels of Herman Travis’ shopping cart clacking against the cracked, sloped sidewalks of San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood — an annoying sound for any passerby. But for many residents in this low-income community the sound is heavenly. It’s their angel, 50-year-old Travis.
“It makes me feel good, seeing them smile when I knock on their door, it just makes me feel good,” Travis said humbly.
Travis is the lifeline for many of those who depend on him to eat.
With a cheery disposition, Travis delivers food to 60 neighbors who eagerly wait for his visit. Many recipients are elderly and

Question: How does a mentally unstable man who was kicked out of school and had run-ins with the law buy an assault weapon?
The weapon reportedly used in the mass murders in Tucson was an assault weapon — a Glock 19, semi-automatic pistol, with an extended magazine. That weapon was illegal to sell in the US from 1994 to 2004 under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. It is now legal to sell and own. The National Rifle Association reports there are tens of millions of assault weapons in private hands in the US.
The federal background check for people purchasing such weapons only prohibits selling such weapons to people who have been legally determined to be mentally defective or found insane or convicted of

In the hothouse terrarium that is Chicago politics, a stormy debate over teacher accountability is looming large.
One thing everyone seems to agree on is that a quality classroom teacher is the single most important factor in student performance and lifetime achievement. The evidence has been mounting for years, but a recent groundbreaking study by superstar Northwestern economist and fellow Nettelhorst mom Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach actually quantifies it. Diane’s team found that when a student moves from a below-average teacher to an above-average teacher, the child’s adult earnings rise by about 3.5 percent per year, amounting to more than $10K in additional lifetime

I was recently contacted via email for my perspective on GAD65, one of several auto antibodies (antibodies against some of our own tissue) commonly seen in type 1 diabetes. My correspondent had a friend who appeared to have type 2 diabetes, had a positive GAD65 test for type 1 diabetes, was treated with insulin for type 1 diabetes and got markedly worse.
I promise to return to GAD65 and related antibody tests for diabetes — and the important distinctions between type 1 and type 2, and when they can blur — in a subsequent post. For now, I want to confront the potential tyranny of diagnostic medical testing in general.
Let’s use the same EKG machine to evaluate two distinct, hypothetical patients with moderately severe chest pain.
Before we get to the patients, we must establish the performance characteristics of the test. This term refers broadly to how reliably a test finds what it is looking for, and how reliably it finds only what it is looking for without mistakenly sounding an unnecessary

For the longest time I thought it was funny. Well, maybe not funny just kinda weird. The very first night I lived in Tucson Arizona I turned on the local news and was greeted by an interview with a local law enforcement Chief thanking a couple of residents for their quick action in helping one of his officers.
It seems they had seen him, the officer, chasing a suspect and had jumped out of their car and helped him. Jumped out of their car with their guns

Like anyone else who has a heart, mine goes out to all of the innocent victims of this weekend’s human tragedy in Arizona. Yet somehow as a parent, I personally cannot help but focus on the utterly tragic loss of Christina Taylor Green, an innocent nine-year-old girl born on September 11, 2001 who simply wanted to see how our government works up close. At times like this, all Americans — including all of us who gather here — ought to reflect on the toxic tone of our national conversation and ask ourselves a larger question — what’s going on?
WHAT’S GOING ON – Marvin Gaye
WAKE UP EVERYBODY – Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes
BLOWIN’ THE WIND – Bob Dylan
HIGHER GROUND – Stevie Wonder
GIVE ME LOVE (GIVE ME PEACE ON EARTH) – George Harrison
21 GUNS – Green Day
ONE LOVE – Bob Marley
GIVE PEACE A CHANCE – The Plastic One Band
(WHAT’S SO FUNNY ‘BOUT) PEACE, LOVE & UNDERSTANDING? – Elvis Costello & The Attractions
GET TOGETHER – The Youngbloods
SOMEDAY WE’LL ALL BE FREE – Donny Hathaway
LET THERE BE PEACE ON EARTH – Vince & Jenny Gill
US AND THEM – Pink Floyd
I HOPE – Dixie Chicks
PEACE TRAIN – Cat Stevens
PRIDE (IN THE NAME OF LOVE) – U2
KEEP ME IN YOUR HEART – Warren Zevon

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Rihanna has set a new record as the first female solo artist in UK chart history to achieve number one singles in five consecutive years.
The Official Charts Company announced her record after What's My Name? rose from number two to the top spot.
The last artist to achieve the feat was Elvis Presley, who had UK numbers ones in each year between 1957 and 1963.
Rihanna's album Loud also holds on to its number one slot, giving her the second UK chart double of her career.

As the nation recoils from the horror of the mass shooting in Arizona, I am struck by a strong sense of terrible inevitability. The cauldron of political violence had been allowed to boil for too long. As it did in 1995 with Timothy McVeigh, at some point violent action was destined to follow the violent talk and the brandishing of guns.
It started two summers ago during the red hot public debate over health care, when angry protesters with guns started showing up at Presidential events and town hall meetings. A dozen people openly carried guns outside the Phoenix convention center where the President was giving a speech, including one with an AR-15 assault rifle strapped to his

Here is the second of five excerpts from law professor Laura Dickinson’s book, Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Find the first part here.
PMC supporters will be heartened to read her view that she does not believe the cure to more effective oversight and accountability is passage of more laws.

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