January 12, 2010 - Posted by zengxin987 - 0 Comments
Five years after famously dodging questions about steroids during a nationally televised Congressional hearing, Mark McGwire admitted on Monday to using them throughout his career.
In a statement released by the St. Louis cheap uggs online Cardinals, McGwire said that he began using steroids in the late 1980s and used them “on occasion throughout the 1990s,” including the 1998 season, when McGwire captivated the nation by hitting 70 home runs to break the all-time single season record of 61 held by Roger Maris.
McGwire’s statement comes as he prepares to return to baseball as the hitting coach for the Cardinals, the team he played for when he set the home run record.
“Now that I have become the hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals,” McGwire said, “I have the chance to do something that I wish I was able to do five years ago. I never knew when, but I always knew this day would come. It’s time for me to talk about the past and to confirm what people have suspected. I used steroids during my playing career and I apologize.”
McGwire said that he briefly used steroids in the off-season before the 1990 season and then resumed using them after he was injured in 1993. McGwire retired after an injury-marred 2001 season, in which he played in only 97 games and hit .187.
“I wish I had never touched steroids,” he said in the statement. “It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era.”
Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said that he was pleased that McGwire had “confronted his use of performance-enhancing substances as a player,” and said that the steroid era had come to an end.
“The use of steroids and amphetamines amongst today’s players has greatly subsided and is virtually non-existent as our testing results have shown,” Selig said. “The so-called “steroid era” — a reference that is resented by the many players who played in that era and never touched the substances — is clearly a thing of the past, and Mark’s admission today is another step in the right direction.”
Although many anti-doping experts are critical of baseball’s current drug testing program, Selig lauded it as “the toughest and most effective in professional sports” citing only two players testing positive out of more than 3,000 tests in 2009.
Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt also lauded UGG Classic Tall Boots McGwire’s admission in a statement.
“On behalf of the entire Cardinals organization, I believe Mark McGwire today did the right thing by telling the truth and openly acknowledging his past mistakes,” DeWitt said. “No one condones what Mark did more than 10 years ago, but we hired him as our hitting coach because we know there are many contributions that Mark can and will make to our team and to this game.”
McGwire is one of dozens of players from the past two decades who have been tied to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Last year it was revealed that Sammy Sosa, who dueled with McGwire for the home run record in 1998, tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003.
“I’m sure people will wonder if I could have hit all those home runs had I never taken steroids,” McGwire’s statement read. “I had good years when I didn’t take any and I had bad years when I didn’t take any. I had good years when I took steroids and I had bad years when I took steroids. But no matter what, I shouldn’t have done it and for that I’m truly sorry.”
McGwire’s statement confirmed what had widely assumed within baseball and what has damaged McGwire’s chances in the last four years of balloting for the Hall of Fame; in none of them, did he come anywhere near the number of votes he needed for induction.
During his career, McGwire admitted using androstenedione, a steroid precursor now banned in baseball and long considered a performance-enhancing drug by the World Anti-Doping Agency, but McGwire was also tied to the use of steroids in Jose Canseco’s 2005 book “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big.” Canseco, the former slugger who played with McGwire in the A’s from 1986 to 1991, said that he introduced McGwire to the substances and injected him.
The book tied several players to the use of steroids and depicted a portrait of baseball in which steroid use was rampant. The allegations from Canseco prompted the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to hold a hearing on the issue in March 2005.
At the hearing McGwire did lasting damage UGG Classic Short Boots to his image when he said: “I’m not here to talk about the past,” when asked about his steroid use and repeatedly declined to address the issue.
January 11, 2010 - Posted by zengxin987 - 0 Comments
Why another book on the 2008 campaign, a year after the inauguration of President Obama? What more is there to say about a race that was covered day in and day out by newspapers, magazines, television, radio and bloggers? Is there anything more to learn about the candidates — and does it matter to an American public now focused on unemployment and health care and ugg boots terrorism?
The veteran political reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin think they do have something new to say. “What was missing” from the wall-to-wall coverage and what “might be of enduring value,” they write in their buzzy new book “Game Change,” was “an intimate portrait of the candidates and spouses who (in our judgment) stood a reasonable chance of occupying the White House.”
They proceed in these pages to serve up a spicy smorgasbord of observations, revelations and allegations — some that are based on impressive legwork and access, some that simply crystallize rumors and whispers from the campaign trail, and some that it’s hard to verify independently as more than spin or speculation on the part of unnamed sources. The authors mix savvy political analysis in these pages with detailed reconstructions of scenes and conversations they did not witness firsthand (like an exchange that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton had on a beach in Anguilla). They employ the same sort of technique Bob Woodward has pioneered in his best-selling books: relying heavily on “deep background” interviews, along with e-mail messages, memorandums and other forms of documentation to create a novelistic narrative that often reflects the views of the authors’ most cooperative or voluble sources. Unlike Mr. Woodward’s last two books this volume has no source notes at the end.
The authors write that one of Mrs. Clinton’s “senior-most lieutenants” watched her “bitter and befuddled reaction” to her loss in Iowa, and thought for the first time, “This woman shouldn’t be president.” They write that during debate preps, some staff members assigned to Sarah Palin by the McCain campaign discussed the “threatening possibility: that Palin was mentally unstable.” They add that several of Senator John McCain’s lieutenants agreed that if it looked as if their candidate might actually win in November, they would have to discuss how to relegate Ms. Palin “to the largely ceremonial role that premodern vice presidents inhabited”: “it was inconceivable” that “if McCain fell ill or died, the country be left in the hands of a President Palin.”
In addition Mr. Heilemann, who works for New York magazine, and Mr. Halperin, for Time magazine, write that Mrs. Clinton, encouraged by her husband and aides, considered running for president in 2004 but ended up listening to her daughter, Chelsea, who argued that she needed to finish her Senate term. They write that Mr. Clinton and George W. Bush “spoke more often than almost anyone knew” — that “from time to time, when 43 was bored, he would call 42 to chew the fat.” And they assert that Mrs. Clinton blew an opportunity to win the endorsement of Caroline Kennedy, who, they say, had been “dreading a call from Hillary” asking her to go to Iowa on her behalf, knowing, the authors write, that “once she had campaigned for Clinton, siding with Obama would be off the table.” Instead of making the call herself, Mrs. Clinton had one of her staffers phone Ms. Kennedy, who ducked the call.
In another passage, which was widely reported over the weekend, Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write that the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, encouraged Mr. Obama to run early on, arguing that “the country UGG Ultra Short boots was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.’ ” Over the weekend Mr. Reid called the president to apologize for his choice of words. Other senators, including Charles E. Schumer, Byron L. Dorgan, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Barbara Boxer and Edward M. Kennedy, the authors add, were also nudging Mr. Obama, then a senator, to take the plunge, though most would “root for Obama secretly,” as they feared retribution from the Clintons should Mrs. Clinton eventually prevail.
Mrs. Clinton, long the front-runner in the race, was so confident of winning, Mr. Heilemann and Mr. Halperin write, that she went so far as to start thinking about her choice of a running mate in fall 2007: she “had already determined without a sliver of doubt that she was not going to choose Obama,” they say, and told her aides that Evan Bayh, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Tom Vilsack and Ted Strickland were at the top of her short list. Around the same time, they write, Mrs. Clinton asked her friend Roger Altman, deputy Treasury secretary in her husband’s administration, to lead a secret project — planning her transition to the White House based on the assumption that a year later she would win the general election.
Mr. Heilemann wrote incisively about Mrs. Clinton in the pages of New York magazine — chunks of his reportage and analysis, taken directly from his articles, appear in this book — and there is more revealing material about her and Mr. Clinton in this volume than the other candidates and their wives. The authors not only dissect the dysfunctional, conflict-ridden Clinton campaign — something that has already been done in detail by many other reporters — but they also emphasize that communication difficulties between the Clintons exacerbated that campaign’s problems.
They write that Mrs. Clinton “couldn’t bear to confront her husband directly” after his heated words about Mr. Obama caused an uproar in South Carolina, and asked aides “to implore him either to leave the state or to pipe down.” They write that Patti Solis Doyle, Cheryl Mills and Howard Wolfson “formed a war room within a war room inside Hillaryland, dedicated to managing the threat posed by Bill’s libido.” And they quote one “old Clinton hand” who suggests that Mrs. Clinton stayed in the primary race to the bitter end, because Mr. Clinton’s approval mattered a lot to her, and “throwing in the towel would mark her as a failure in his eyes.”
In a fascinating account about Mrs. Clinton’s UGG Ultra Tall boots initial decision to decline the post of secretary of state, Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann paraphrase a conversation between the two former rivals in which, they contend, Mrs. Clinton brought up the Bill issue: “You know my husband, she said. You’ve seen what happens. We’re going to be explaining something that he said every other day. You know I can’t control him, and at some point he’ll be a problem.”
The authors describe the Obamas’ marriage as a model one (“Obama adored his wife” and “didn’t even bother to pretend that he enjoyed anyone else’s company remotely as much as he relished being with her and their daughters”), but their portraits of the other candidates’ contentious spousal relationships actually make the Clintons’ partnership seem like a happy one in comparison.
Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write, for instance, that the strategist John Weaver suspected the rumor Cindy McCain had a “long-term boyfriend” in Arizona “was rooted in truth,” and that the McCains “fought in front of others, during small meetings and before large events, to the amazement and discomfort of the staff.” The authors say that Mrs. McCain accused the senator of ruining her life, that she never wanted him to run again for president, and that “when it came time to film campaign videos of the couple, the camera crews had to roll for hours to capture a few minutes of warmth.”
As for John and Elizabeth Edwards, the authors are even harsher. They describe in detail Mr. Edwards’s infatuation with the video maker Rielle Hunter — whose behavior they call “freaky, wildly inappropriate, and all too visible,” and they write that he continued to nurse delusional hopes of being named attorney general in an Obama administration even after the National Enquirer ran a photograph of him holding Ms. Hunter’s new baby. In the wake of the first Enquirer story about Mr. Edwards’s affair, the authors write, Mrs. Edwards “was sobbing, out of control, incoherent,” and vented her fury on the “very aides who had kept the matter from mushrooming” further.
Edwards aides, Mr. Heilemann and Mr. Halperin write, felt that their boss had become increasingly megalomaniacal and narcissistic over the years, and that while the aides had sympathy for Mrs. Edwards’s struggle with cancer, they regarded her as a badgering, often irrational presence on the campaign. “The nearly universal assessment among them,” Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write of the Edwards aides, “was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing. What UGG Nightfall Boots the world saw in Elizabeth: a valiant, determined, heroic everywoman. What the Edwards insiders saw: an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazywoman.”
Though this book focuses on personal matters, not policy concerns, and though some of what will be its most talked about passages fall into the realm of gossip and reflect the views of chatty and, in some cases, bitter, regretful or spin-conscious aides, the volume does leave the reader with a vivid, visceral sense of the campaign and a keen understanding of the paradoxes and contingencies of history. The authors note, for instance, that had Mrs. Clinton decided to run for president in 2004, John Kerry might not have become the Democratic nominee that year and would not have had the opportunity to choose as the convention’s keynote speaker a young and then largely unknown Illinois state legislator by the name of Barack Obama.
January 10, 2010 - Posted by zengxin987 - 0 Comments
Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, apologized on Saturday for once predicting that Barack Obama could become the country’s first black president because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, cheap ugg unless he wanted to have one.”
Mr. Reid telephoned the president to convey his regret personally, aides to both men said, for a comment from a new published account of the 2008 presidential race. The book reported that Mr. Reid privately urged Mr. Obama, then a freshman senator, to seek the presidency in the fall of 2006 despite his limited experience and the historical obstacles to making such a run.
“I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words,” Mr. Reid said in a statement. “I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African-Americans, for my improper comments.”
President Obama quickly expressed support for Mr. Reid.
“I accepted Harry’s apology without question because I’ve known him for years. I’ve seen the passionate leadership he’s shown on issues of social justice, and I know what’s in his heart,” Mr. Obama said in a statement, adding that the remark was “unfortunate.” “As far as I am concerned, the book is closed.”
Mr. Reid moved aggressively to respond to the comment he made to the two authors of the book, “Game Change.” In addition to calling Mr. Obama on Saturday, Mr. Reid reached out to several black political leaders as his aides sought to quell the political fallout that other politicians have endured after making impolitic comments about race.
Mr. Reid, who is embroiled in a difficult re-election battle in Nevada and a bruising legislative fight over health care on Capitol Hill, had already been fighting speculation that he might step down. Republicans sharply criticized him for the comments, but there were no indications that his Democratic allies would abandon him.
While Mr. Obama has acknowledged that his race has played a role in his rapid national rise, he has long sought to prevent race from being a distraction to his political campaigns and his agenda. The White House swiftly issued a statement, aides said, in an effort to keep the controversy from interfering with a final push on health care legislation and from setting back one of the party’s leaders in the mid-term elections.
The call from Mr. Reid was the latest in a string of apologies Mr. Obama has accepted over the years, underscoring the sometimes uneasy evolution of race and politics in America. Three years ago, then-Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware told the New York Observer that Mr. Obama was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a cheap uggs nice-looking guy.”
Mr. Obama accepted Mr. Biden’s apology and more than a year later selected him as the Democratic vice presidential nominee.
The relationship between the president and Mr. Reid has been strong since Mr. Obama arrived in Washington as a senator in 2005. One year later, Mr. Reid encouraged Mr. Obama to think about running for president.
The comments by Mr. Reid were contained in the book written by the political journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. He made the remark to the authors in the context of praising Mr. Obama’s political skills. An aide to Mr. Reid said the comments about how he believed the country would accept Mr. Obama, whose father was black and mother was white, were not intended for use in the book.
In Washington and in Nevada, the exchange set off something of a political furor for Mr. Reid. One adviser said that Mr. Reid’s aggressive response was an attempt to avoid the fate of a recent Republican majority leader, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, who stepped down after making a racially tinged remark in 2002.
In contrast to Mr. Reid’s endorsement of a black candidate, Mr. Lott appeared to endorse the long-past segregationist candidacy of Strom Thurmond. The National Republican Senatorial Committee on Saturday circulated comments that Mr. Reid made during the Lott controversy. Mr. Reid said at the time: “If you tell ethnic jokes in the back room, it’s that much easier to say ethnic things publicly. I’ve always practiced how I play.”
Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, was among the black leaders who received a call from Mr. Reid. Mr. Clyburn said that Mr. Reid should be judged on the merits of his record to respond to diversity and to advance the president’s agenda.
“I am one of those who wish to one UGG Classic Tall Boots day live in a color-blind nation,” Mr. Clyburn said. “But the fact is that none of us do today.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton of New York offered his support for Mr. Reid after receiving a telephone call from him. He said that while Mr. Reid “did not select the best word choice in this instance,” the comments should not distract Congress or the White House.
The remark from Mr. Reid is one of several items in the book that present new assertions from the 2008 presidential campaign.
In another passage, the book says that Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York was among the Democrats quietly encouraging Mr. Obama to enter the race. Mr. Schumer later endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton, but he and Mr. Reid jointly urged Mr. Obama to run in late 2006. (Mr. Schumer said through a spokesman that he “had a high regard for President Obama, but he was a strong and devoted supporter of then-Senator Clinton from the day she announced her campaign to the day she withdrew.”)
January 9, 2010 - Posted by zengxin987 - 0 Comments
Even before a landmark Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance law expected within days, a series of other court decisions is reshaping the political battlefield by freeing corporations, unions and other nba jerseys interest groups from many of the restrictions on their advertising about issues and candidates.
Legal experts and political operatives say the cases roll back campaign spending rules to the years before Watergate. The end of decades-old restrictions could unleash a torrent of negative advertisements, help cash-poor Republicans in a pivotal year, and push President Obama to bring in more money for his party.
If the Supreme Court, as widely expected, rules against core elements of the existing limits, Democrats say they will try to enact new laws to reinstate the restrictions in time for the midterm elections in November. And advocates of stricter campaign finance laws say they hope the developments will prod the president to fulfill a campaign promise to update the presidential campaign financing system, even though it would diminish his edge as incumbent.
Many legal experts say they expect the court to use its imminent ruling, in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, to eliminate the remaining restrictions on advertisements for or against candidates paid for corporations, unions and advocacy organizations. (The case centers on whether spending restrictions apply to a conservative group’s documentary, “Hillary: The Movie.”)
Even if the court rules more narrowly, legal experts and political advocates say that the 2010 elections will bring the first large-scale application of previous court decisions that have all but stripped away those restrictions. Though the rulings have not challenged the bans on direct corporate contributions to parties and candidates, political operatives say that as a practical matter the rulings and a deadlock at the Federal Election Commission have already opened wide latitude for independent groups to advocate for and against candidates.
“It will be no holds barred when it comes to independent expenditures,” said Kenneth A. Gross, a veteran political law expert at the firm of Skadden Arps in Washington.
The United States Chamber of Commerce, the goliath of the lobbying world, is expected to outline its battle plan next week for the midterms. It spent $25 million on advertisements and get-out-the-vote efforts in the 2006 elections and $36 million in 2008, and will spend far more this year, chamber officials say. And in the last election it was already probing the limits of the court’s rulings with commercials like one in New Hampshire denouncing Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, as “a taxing machine.”
Labor unions, stalwart outside allies to the Democrats, plan to take advantage of the changing rules with their own record-setting spending, said Karen Ackerman, political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. basketball shoes But business, she argued, had more to gain..
“The corporate side will always have more to spend than the union side,” she said.
Even before the Supreme Court issues its Citizens United ruling, Democrats in the House and the Senate have begun lamenting its expected result. “Clearly, the Republican Party overwhelmingly would benefit,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey.
Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland vowed a “prompt legislative response” if the Supreme Court rules broadly. In the meantime, he said, the Democratic campaign committee planned to counterattack big donors to outside groups to show “they are not just disinterested citizens.”
Conservatives accused the Democrats of using the specter of corruption as an excuse to silence their opponents. “What this is about is prohibiting information from reaching the American people if it is critical of them, those poor little dears who can’t stand criticism,” said Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association.
Senator John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the Republican Senate campaign committee, said: “It is about a nonprofit group’s ability to speak about the public issue. I can’t think of a more fundamental First Amendment issue.”
Still, Mr. Cornyn acknowledged that the expected ruling could “open up resources that have not previously been available” for the Republicans.
Democratic candidates and party committees have raised a total of $396.5 million for the midterms, with $50 million on hand and $10 million debts in public filings released this week. Republicans had just raised just $204.7 million, with about $30 million on hand and about $6 million in debts, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
The campaign finance system imposed after the Watergate scandal began to spring leaks in the 1990s with the large-scale exploitation of unlimited “soft money” contributions to political parties from wealthy individuals, corporations, unions and others. Congress fortified those rules by eliminating soft money with the 2002 campaign finance law known as McCain-Feingold, and since then activists and nike basketball shoes operatives have played cat-and-mouse with regulators in the search for other loopholes.
The Supreme Court began to poke new holes in the system in a 2007 ruling that outside groups could pay for critical commercials attacking individual candidates on specific issues up to the day of the election, as long as the ad did not explicitly urge a “vote for” or “vote against.”
The 2010 midterms will be the first big test of the changing rules in part because in 2008 both major party candidates — Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain — explicitly discouraged independent spending by their supporters. The Federal Election Commission had also punished previous efforts to evade the McCain-Feingold rules severely enough to discourage new attempts.
No such restraints apply this year, in part because the changing composition of the Federal Election Commission has created a deadlock blocking vigorous enforcement. “The cop is gone from the beat,” said Trevor Potter, a lawyer for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center who has also worked for Mr. McCain.
Campaign finance laws block outside groups from coordinating with candidates, but it is easy enough for outside allies to read in news reports where a campaign wants to spend money and what message it wants to send. Such also groups tend to favor negative commercials because they are more potent.
So if the court strikes down the restrictions on outside spending, some legal experts say, the remaining restrictions on direct contributions to campaigns would mean much less because it would be easy to support a Allen Iverson campaign through an outside group.
“The campaign finance system would certainly be less regulated than any time since Watergate,” said Richard L. Hasen, a campaign law expert at the Loyala Law School in Los Angeles.
January 8, 2010 - Posted by zengxin987 - 0 Comments
The State Senate on Thursday rejected a proposal that would have made New Jersey the sixth state in the nation to allow marriages involving same sex-couples, the latest in a succession of setbacks for advocates of gay marriage across uggs outlet the country.
After months of intense lobbying and hours of emotional debate, lawmakers voted 20 to 14 against the bill, bringing tears from some advocates who packed the Senate chambers and rousing applause from opponents of the measure, who also came out in force. The vote ends the effort to win legislative approval of the measure, and sets the stage for a new battle before the New Jersey Supreme Court.
“We applaud the senators for upholding a time-tested institution: marriage,” said Len Deo, president of the New Jersey Family Policy Council, which has argued that gay marriage would weaken the social fabric by redefining one of society’s bedrock institutions.
Supporters of gay marriage had hoped to win approval before Jan. 19, when Gov. Jon S. Corzine, who promised to sign it, will be replaced by Gov.-elect Christopher J. Christie, who opposes it.
With the effort to win legislative approval now dead, supporters of same-sex marriage vowed to focus their efforts on the state’s highest court, which in 2006 ordered lawmakers to give same-sex couples the same rights as others whether or not they called such unions marriages. The Legislature responded by enacting a civil unions law, but gay-rights leaders say that the measure still leaves them subject to discrimination when applying for health insurance or trying to visit partners in hospitals, and they will ask the court to grant them equal treatment.
“Even our opponents in the Legislature acknowledge that the civil-union law has not provided equal protection,” said Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, who has led the lobbying for the past six years and wept as the bill’s sponsor, Senator Loretta Weinberg of Teaneck, introduced it.
The defeat in New Jersey, which has widely been viewed as one of the nation’s most socially tolerant states, was a significant setback for advocates of gay marriage. Last month, a similar measure was defeated in New York’s Legislature, and in November voters in Maine repealed a gay-marriage law in a referendum.
But leaders of Legal Defense Fund, which has helped coordinate gay rights causes in New Jersey and elsewhere, said they said they were confident that the court would prove more receptive than the cheap ugg online Legislature.
“We are upset, we are disappointed, but we aren’t done fighting,” said Leslie Gabel-Brett, Llamda’s director of Education and Public Affairs.
Opponents of gay marriage said that they, too, were prepared for a legal fight. Jon Tomicki, of the New Jersey Coalition to Preserve and Protect Marriage, said that legislators had already complied with the court order by enacting civil unions, and urged lawmakers to let the public cast its verdict on gay marriage in a referendum.
“In 30 other states, voters have gotten the chance to decide,” Mr. Tomicki said. “There’s no reason why New Jerseyeans shouldn’t have the same right.” In all 30 instances in which gay marriage has been put up for a referendum, it has been defeated.
But supporters of gay marriage view their cause as a matter of civil rights, which should be settled by the courts and Legislature, and point out that in 1915 New Jersey voters rejected a referendum that would have allowed women the right to vote. Three years later, the 19th Amendment granted women voting rights.
Although it was not a major issue in the governor’s race, the effort to win legislative approval of same-sex marriage is widely viewed as a casualty of Mr. Corzine’s defeat in November. Some Democrats who had been receptive to the issue, and took financial and organizational support from gay activists, grew squeamish. Senator Stephen Sweeney, who is scheduled to become Senate President this month, said publicly that he thought voters would look unkindly on the Legislature if it pushed for a social issue at a time of economic suffering. Senator Sweeney did not cast a vote on the measure on Thursday. In all, five senators did not vote and one was too ill to attend.
Senator Gerald Cardinale, a Republican from Creskill, said during the debate on the Senate floor on Thursday that the results of the governor’s race were clearly an indication that voters opposed gay marriage. Senator Cardinale said that although the civil unions statute was flawed, the state would be doing “violence” to the institution of marriage by changing its current definition of a union between one man and one woman.
“There are many who believe that this bill cheap ugg boots online will change our entire culture,” he said, shortly before casting his not vote.
But Senate President Richard Codey, a Democrat from Essex, said that the furor surrounding gay marriage is based on the same type of unfounded fear of the unknown that was used to justify discrimination against women and racial minorities.
“One day people will look back and say, ‘What were they thinking?’” Codey said. And, ‘What were they so afraid of?’”
After the vote, hundreds of supporters of the bill gathered in front of the State House to exchange tearful hugs and plot the next move in their effort. Among them was Christi Sturmont, who said she and her partner were dejected, but not despondent.
“We were holding out hope that we’d be able to get married and have full citizenship,” she said. “But now we’ll have to settle for second-class citizenship. For now. We’re not done fighting.”
January 7, 2010 - Posted by zengxin987 - 0 Comments
A Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day was indicted Wednesday on charges including attempted murder and trying to use a weapon of mass destruction to kill nearly ugg outlet 300 people.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, was traveling from Amsterdam when he tried to destroy the plane by injecting chemicals into a package of pentrite explosive concealed in his underwear, authorities say.
The failed attack caused popping sounds and flames that passengers and crew rushed to extinguish.
The bomb was designed to detonate ”at a time of his choosing,” the grand jury’s indictment said.
There is no specific mention of terrorism in the seven-page indictment, but President Barack Obama considers the incident an attempted strike against the United States by an affiliate of al-Qaida.
Abdulmutallab has told U.S. investigators he received training and instructions from al-Qaida operatives in Yemen. His father warned the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria that his son had drifted into extremism in Yemen, but that threat was UGG Kids Boots never fully digested by the U.S. security apparatus.
Since the failed attack, airlines and the Transportation Security Administration have boosted security in airports in the U.S. and around the world. Obama has said the government had information that could have stopped Abdulmutallab, but intelligence agencies failed to connect the dots.
Abdulmutallab faces up to life in prison if convicted of attempting to use a bomb on the plane. He is being held at a federal prison in Milan, Mich., and a message seeking comment was left Wednesday with his lawyers, Miriam Siefer and Leroy Soles.
”This investigation is fast-paced, global and ongoing, and it has already yielded valuable intelligence that we will follow wherever it leads,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. ”Anyone we find responsible for this alleged attack will be brought to justice using every tool — military or judicial — available to our government.”
Abdulmutallab will make his first appearance in federal court on Friday for an arraignment and a hearing to determine if he stays in custody.
”Short of actual murder, these are some of the most UGG Ultra Short boots serious charges in the criminal code,” said Lloyd Meyer, a former terrorism prosecutor at U.S. war crimes tribunals at the Guantanamo Bay prison. ”These charges are tailored to the facts of what happened over the sky in Detroit.”
January 6, 2010 - Posted by zengxin987 - 0 Comments
Apple is likely looking to get a piece of the mobile advertising space on its own App Store, but is also looking to dominate ads on its forthcoming tablet from the get-go
with the purchase of Quattro Wireless, one analyst told nba jerseys AppleInsider.
Tole Hart, research director, consumer services with Gartner, said Apple’s $275 million acquisition of Quattro will give the Cupertino, Calif., company flexibility not only with
App Store software, but also on mobile Web sites tailored specifically for the iPhone. In that respect it’s a defensive move to fend off its rival, Google.
As Google encroaches on Apple’s smartphone market with Android, Apple is likely looking to retain some control on its own platform, Hart said. Google is already the largest
online advertiser, and the acquisition of AdMob, if approved by the Federal Trade Commission, will make it a dominant force in the mobile advertising space.
But while Apple is playing catch-up with Google in the iPhone advertising space, it can get a head start on everyone else with the forthcoming multimedia tablet device it is
expected to announce this month and release in March.
“I think this is more of an offensive move for the tablet,” Hart told AppleInsider, “and if they had to do it over again with the iPhone and iTouch, they might have more control
over the advertising. The tablet gives them a second basketball shoes crack at this.”
Earlier Tuesday, Andy Miller, CEO of Quattro Wireless, confirmed Apple purchased his company. Miller, who has been named vice president of Mobile Advertising at Apple, said the
offerings and services provided by Quattro would not change in the immediate future.
“Together with Apple, we look forward to developing exciting new opportunities in the future that will benefit our customers,” he said.
Apple’s interest in the mobile advertising space is not new. Before it was acquired by Google for $750 million, AdMob was approached by Apple. The terms of the two companies’
discussions are unknown.
Hart said Apple is likely to allow other services to place advertisements within App Store software. But Apple could make it easier or allow a more robust feature set for
developers who embrace the homegrown advertising service.
“I think they want a piece of the iPhone and iPod nike basketball shoes touch action,” he said. “They do want to let other ad
networks in, because they do not want to stifle developers.”
January 5, 2010 - Posted by zengxin987 - 0 Comments
One day after their season ended with a second consecutive humiliating defeat, the Giants fired their defensive coordinator, Bill Sheridan.
The decision, made by Coach Tom Coughlin, was announced nba jerseys Monday afternoon in a one-sentence release from the Giants’ media relations department.
It came during an afternoon of public soul-searching by Coughlin, General Manager Jerry Reese and John Mara, the president and part owner of the team.
Earlier in the day, Mara said Coughlin and Reese would return in their roles but would not voice the same support for Coughlin’s staff or the playing roster.
No replacement was named for Sheridan, who worked one year after being promoted from linebackers coach following the departure of Steve Spagnuolo, who left as Giants defensive coordinator to become coach of the St. Louis Rams this season.
One possible candidate for the job is Dick Jauron, fired during the season as coach of the Buffalo Bills. Jauron was a defensive coordinator for Coughlin in the late 1990s in Jacksonville.
Sheridan’s dismissal followed an 8-8 season that ended with two humiliating defeats and the team’s first finish out of the playoffs since 2004.
“The status quo is not acceptable,” Mara said. “When you lose that many games where you get blown out, there’s something wrong.” Mara said the 8-8 record felt more like 2-14.
When asked specifically if Reese and Coughlin were safe in their roles, Mara said: “Yes. We’re not making changes at the head coach or the G.M.”
The Giants gave up 40 points or more in five games, including a 44-7 defeat in Minnesota on Sunday and a 41-9 defeat the week before against Carolina in Giants Stadium when the Giants still had a chance to qualify for the postseason.
Many Giants fans perceived that the players, particularly the defenders, quit trying in the last two games but Reese said he rejected that conclusion.
“No, I don’t think that,” Reese said. “I look Allen Iverson for that. I think our players played hard and tried hard. The perception is they laid down and didn’t compete. I didn’t see that.”
One of the problems on defense was a rift between Sheridan and Osi Umenyiora, a defensive end who walked out of a practice before the season after a disagreement with Sheridan.
Late in the season, Umenyiora expressed his unhappiness after Sheridan demoted him to the second string as a pass-rush specialist. But that was not Sheridan’s only problem.
Even in training camp, it became apparent that Sheridan and Coughlin were not in accord on everything when Coughlin rejected Sheridan’s plan to coach during games from a booth high above the field.
Coughlin rejected the idea in part because linebacker Antonio Pierce, the defensive captain, said he preferred to have his defensive coordinator on the sideline.
As the season evolved, Pierce and other defensive players spoke vaguely of communication issues. After Game 15, Umenyiora said he might have played his last game as a Giant.
Coughlin, reflecting on this last Monday, said Umenyiora was a valuable part of the team but was not as supportive of Sheridan.
The defense, a strength of the team two seasons ago when the Giants won a Super Bowl championship, faltered noticeably, particularly in execution of tackles and rushing of opposing quarterbacks.
Part of the problem was a season-ending neck disk injury to Pierce and other injuries that sidelined players like safety Kenny Phillips and cornerback Aaron Ross and hampered stars like defensive end Justin Tuck.
Reese, in particular on Monday, cited injuries Tim Duncan several times in his meeting with the news media.
“Bill Sheridan has been hammered by everybody, it seems like,” Reese said, hours before Sheridan’s dismissal. “But Bill Sheridan can’t go out there and make a tackle.”
But Mara, Reese and Coughlin also conceded that coaching also would be evaluated.
Coughlin refused to be expansive in his answers about questions involving Sheridan.
“It’ll be my decision,” he said of Sheridan’s job status. “We have to regain the hard-nosed toughness. We’re in the process of evaluating everything.”
One of those evaluations might be the use of Coughlin’s leadership council, a committee of veterans with whom he meets to improve communication with the 53-man roster.
Coughlin formed the group in 2007 and it was considered important in bonding the team that won the championship. Last week, when asked about input from the leaders, Coughlin said there was not much he could use and that, in most of those meetings, Coughlin did most of the speaking.
“Perhaps more has to come,” Coughlin said, Penny Hardaway referring to the leadership council.
January 3, 2010 - Posted by zengxin987 - 0 Comments
A STOCK that builds momentum in one year often carries it over into the next. Might that momentum effect work for the overall stock market?
It’s an especially tantalizing prospect right now, after nba jerseys the market’s surge over the last nine months of 2009. Investors would love to see that trend continue into this year.
Unfortunately, though, there is precious little statistical support for it.
Consider the yearly returns of the Dow Jones industrial average since 1896, the year the index was created. The Dow rose in 73 of those years. And in the year after each of those climbs, it rose 64 percent of the time. That’s statistically indistinguishable from the 65 percent frequency with which the Dow rose after years when the index fell.
These results suggest that the market’s performance in 2009 doesn’t increase the probability of a net gain in 2010. (The good news, of course, is that high frequency of yearly gains. That means you’re likely to make money if you buy and hold a broad portfolio of stocks over the long term.)
Let’s slice the market another way. Growth stocks outperformed value stocks last year. Investment newsletters often argue that this means growth stocks are likely to do so in 2010 as well. Though not every adviser agrees on how to define these two types of stocks, researchers generally rely on the ratio of price to book value per share. Stocks with the highest ratios are deemed growth stocks, while those with the lowest ratios are considered value stocks.
Using these definitions, the finance professors Eugene F. Fama of the University of Chicago and Kenneth R. French of Dartmouth have calculated the returns of both categories back to 1926. But their database shows no correlation in performance from one year to the next for either class. That means that, while growth stocks this year may very well continue to lead the market, whether they do so won’t be determined by their 2009 performance.
There are good reasons for these findings, according to Lawrence G. Tint, chairman of Quantal International, a firm that conducts risk modeling for institutional investors. Mr. Tint said that if the market’s return in one year were a predictor of its return the next year, “investors would rush in on Jan. 1 to buy or sell, depending on the direction of the anticipated basketball shoes movement.”
“A few savvy investors would try to jump the gun by anticipating year-end results in December, others would try to beat them, and eventually the historic relationship would be destroyed,” he said.
Though some investors might be frustrated that 2009’s returns provide no insight into 2010’s, Mr. Tint says the lack of a correlation is something to celebrate. If the market’s return in a given year were related to how it fared the previous year, it “would be subject to unnecessary and unhealthy turmoil,” he said.
“We can be comforted by the fact that reasonably efficient markets always base their level on anticipated future returns,” he added, “and do not include history in the calculation.”
One exception to this general pattern involves the relative performance of small-capitalization stocks, which over the last 80 years have shown some modest persistence from year to year. That makes sense, because small caps are the market’s least efficient sector, and it therefore takes longer for their prices to adjust to new information.
Consider those years since 1926 when the 50 percent of stocks with the smallest market caps outperformed the rest of the market, according to a database maintained by the two professors. Over the subsequent 12 months, on average, those small caps fared 6.5 percentage points better than the stocks with the largest market caps.
After years when the small caps lagged behind the rest of the market, however, there was no difference, on average, in the two sectors’ performance.
Small caps beat large caps generally — by an average of 3.6 percentage points a year, according to the professors. So the persistence of small caps’ relative strength bodes particularly well for the sector in 2010, nike basketball shoes because the average small-cap stock handily outperformed the average large cap last year.
Note, however, that this weathervane points only to relative, not absolute, performance. Small caps could lose money in 2010 and still outperform their large-cap brethren.
January 2, 2010 - Posted by zengxin987 - 0 Comments
The changes across the landscape here would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago.
The rebel groups that started the war in Darfur in 2003, nba jerseys catalyzing a conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of
lives, almost seem to have gone into hibernation. So, too, have the infamous janjaweed, the marauding bandits who raped, killed and terrorized countless civilians.
And this planting season, for the first time since 2003, United Nations officials say that tens of thousands of farmers who had been seeking refuge in squalid displaced persons
camps returned to their villages to plant crops, a journey many Darfurians would have considered suicide until recently.
“People need to update their perception of Darfur,” said Daniel Augstburger, the director of the African Union-United Nations humanitarian liaison office in Darfur. “It’s
not like there are still janjaweed riding around, burning down villages.”
At El Fasher airport — which used to be crawling with pilots, soldiers, national security agents and dubious armed men — the fighter jets sit idle on the runway, cockpits
covered in canvas. Occasionally they fly sorties, the camouflage-painted planes cutting across an impossibly bright sky. But there have been no major bombing campaigns for
months, if not years, peacekeeping officials said.
“Frozen,” said Lt. Gen. Patrick Nyamvumba, the Rwandan commander of the 20,000 peacekeepers in Darfur. “That is a good word for the situation. It is calm, very calm at the
moment, but it remains unpredictable.”
Darfur, Sudan’s enormous western region that has become virtually synonymous with conflict, seems to be stuck between war and peace. There is still violence, a lot of it, with
five Rwandan peacekeepers recently killed and aid workers kidnapped and routinely carjacked. Heavily armed bandits — possibly castoffs from the earlier days of more organized
warfare — have become ubiquitous. Partly because of that, the flow of people out of the camps is just a trickle compared with the 2.7 million still stuck in them, afraid to go
home.
But the rebel groups have been quiet in the past year, hobbled by endless fragmentation and no clear political agenda. At the same time, the Sudanese government seems encouraged
by the Obama administration’s talk of engaging with the nation, rather than isolating it, and United Nations officials say there is little evidence the government is sponsoring
ethnic violence here, as it was accused of doing not so long ago.
Even some of the most outspoken activists on Darfur, who helped keep this conflict on the world’s front pages for the past five years, drawing more attention to Darfur than
just about any other African war in recent memory, do not automatically recoil anymore at statements like, “The war is over.” That was essentially what the former peacekeeping
commander said in August, provoking a basketball shoes protracted controversy.
“There is no doubt that violence has diminished significantly in the past two or three years — and many, including myself, have been slow to recognize how significant this
reduction has been,” said Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College and one of the leading academic voices on Darfur.
But, he added, civilians were still being attacked and, “The anger, frustration and despair simply cannot be overstated.”
That said, few of the cataclysmic predictions of the past few years have come true — not the big Sudanese government offensives that many feared would take place in 2006 and
2007, or the expected attacks by thousands of janjaweed against refugee camps. Even the widespread death and disease that United Nations officials and many aid workers worried
would be the consequence of the Sudanese government’s expulsion of 13 foreign aid organizations last year were largely averted.
“People were crying wolf,” Mr. Augstburger said. “The crisis within the crisis never happened.”
The hybrid African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission, the most expensive in the world at $1.6 billion per year, which took years of negotiation to put in place, is also
going much better than expected, the peacekeepers say.
“Yes, we have obstructions from time to time,” General Nyamvumba said. “But it’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”
All this seems to add up to a single question, asked from the sprawling refugee camps to the inner circles of the Sudanese government: now what?
In the camps, the transient life of the refugee nike basketball shoes is becoming permanent. Most people hate living here. The
crowded huts, the waiting for food handouts, the idleness are steadily taking their toll.
“I am uncomfortable and depressed,” said Abbas Abdallah Mohamed, a farmer who fled his village four years ago. But like many others, he was not ready to venture home.
“If we go back, maybe there will be tribal war,” he said, referring to one of the biggest problems today in Darfur, the fighting between different ethnic groups over shrinking
grazing land.
Some camp dwellers have begun taking jobs in nearby towns making bricks the biblical way, out of mud and straw, building solid homes for others while they themselves live in
temporary shelters often constructed from twigs and plastic bags.
“The possibility is that they could be here forever,” said Mohamed B. Yonis, a top United Nations official in Darfur.
In El Fasher’s market, shopkeepers in white prayer hats sit cross-legged behind pyramids of spices and dates. Young men with strong voices belt out the price of beef. The
streets are clogged not with armed pickups but with horse-drawn carts pulling blocks of soap.
The focus in Sudan seems to be steadily shifting to the south. Rebels in southern Sudan fought a separatist war for decades, and the region is scheduled to vote on its
independence next year. But as the south edges toward nationhood, ethnic violence is building, with more than 2,000 people killed in 2009, many more than in Darfur, according to
United Nations officials.
The root cause of both rebellions, in the south and in Darfur, is the same: marginalization. Sudan has a history of concentrating power and wealth in the center of the country,
at the expense of the periphery. Until that is UGG Classic Cardy Boots addressed, analysts say, Darfur
will most likely remain tense, even if that tension is not expressed in mass killings or scorched villages.
But one glimmer of hope is that camp elders, religious figures and women’s leaders are being given prominent roles in peace talks for the first time.
“Will it be the big breakthrough?” Mr. Augstburger said. “I don’t know. But the movements are starting to get concerned. It’s a brand-new dynamic.”
