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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (549267)	2/10/2010 6:02:12 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577939

Palin running for higher office is a liberal's dream... Rasmussen and CNN polls show that only 29% think she is qualified to be president...

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (549267)	2/10/2010 11:13:28 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1577939

Oxfordgirl vs Ahmadinejad: the Twitter user taking on the Iranian regime A woman tweeting from an English village is helping to moblise opposition protests across Iran Matthew Weaver guardian.co.uk As the resident of a quiet village in Oxfordshire with a plummy accent to match, she makes an unlikely revolutionary. But she has become a key player in the unrest that is shaking Iran and is such an irritant to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that she has been subjected to a propaganda campaign by the regime's henchmen. Known only by her Twitter name, Oxfordgirl has emerged as a crucial link between the protesters and the outside world. "Before they started blocking mobile phones I was almost co-ordinating people's individual movements – 'Go to such and such street,' or 'Don't go there, the Basij [militia] are waiting,' " she said. "It was very strange to be sitting in Oxford and co-ordinating things like that." Tomorrow the opposition is planning another demonstration under the cloak of an official rally to mark the 31st anniversary of the revolution. Oxfordgirl, who guards her identity for fear of reprisals against her family in Iran, said: "It's going to be a big day for the Persian psyche. It won't topple the regime but it's part of the process of showing the resistance won't go away. "It's significant because of the symbolism of the revolution. A lot of people will attend the official rally and see lots of protesters coming out against the regime." Over the last seven months Oxfordgirl has built a reputation as one of the most reliable sources of information on the turmoil. Since the disputed election last June she has posted more than 12,000 updates on Twitter, and has become convinced that the social networking site is helping to bring down the regime. "People who haven't been involved in Iran don't understand how Twitter can work – they think it's about chatting about pop stars. But if it hadn't been for Twitter a lot of people wouldn't have got involved [in the unrest] and they wouldn't know what's going on. "On a practical level it has saved lots of lives by warning people not to go down certain roads." A former journalist in Tehran, she has used her contacts to spread word of the unrest. With heavy restrictions on foreign media, Twitter updates from Oxfordgirl and a handful of others counter-balance the official version of events. "In the early days I was posting news of riots in other cities, at a time when the international media was saying it was only in Tehran," she said. "Several days later the BBC confirmed there had been riots elsewhere. This made what I was tweeting more trustworthy." In the run-up to tomorrow's protest she has been using her 10,000 Twitter followers to disseminate ways of avoiding the anticipated crackdown. "The regime is getting better at shutting down the internet and my contacts are nervous about what might happen," she said. "But Iranians are clever at getting around things." Oxfordgirl's effectiveness appears to have rattled the regime. She is convinced that the Iranian government has tried to use Twitter itself to undermine her. "One day a whole load of new people arrived on Twitter. It was quite clear that some ministry got them to join at the same time and follow each other. They started putting out rumours about me. When Persiankiwi [another prominent Twitter user] went silent, they said it was me who had turned him in. Then they started saying I was Maryam Rajavi [an exiled opposition leader regarded as a terrorist in Iran]." She is acutely aware of the dangers of being discovered. "I live in a small village so anyone who is out of place stands out immediately. There have been a couple of moments when I've seen people outside, and my heart started going faster. Your imagination runs wild. I don't want my cousins disappeared in the middle of the night." Despite the risks she is determined to carry on. "I'm doing this because I love Iran and I want to it to be free," she said. "I don't want people to be frightened of what they say." guardian.co.uk

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (549267)	2/11/2010 10:42:04 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577939

Obama ‘Agnostic’ on Deficit Cuts, Won’t Prejudge Tax Increases By Rich Miller bloomberg.com Feb. 11 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit. Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. “The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.” Obama repeatedly vowed during the 2008 presidential election campaign that he would not raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and households earning less than $250,000 a year. When senior White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner suggested in August that the administration might be open to going back on that pledge, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs quickly reiterated the president’s promise. In the interview, Obama said that putting preconditions on the agenda of a bipartisan advisory commission, which he said he would soon establish, would just undermine its purpose. “What I can’t do is to set the thing up where a whole bunch of things are off the table,” Obama said. “Some would say we can’t look at entitlements. There are going to be some that say we can’t look at taxes, and pretty soon, you just can’t solve the problem.” Politically Risky It would be politically risky for Obama to abandon his promise not to increase taxes on the middle class. Only 26 percent of Americans surveyed in a December poll by Bloomberg News said they favored such a step as a way to reduce the budget shortfall. Many economists, including conservatives such as former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, argue that tax increases will be necessary as part of a broad package to control the deficit, which the White House projects will hit a record $1.6 trillion in the fiscal year ending on Sept. 30. Obama said the U.S. was faced with a “structural deficit” that was in place before the recession began and that was only made worse by the deepest drop in the economy since the 1930s. Revenue ‘Mismatch’ “Our real problem is not the spike in spending last year, or the lost, even the lost revenues last year, as significant as those are,” he said. “The real problem has to do with the fact that there is a just a mismatch between the amount of money coming in and the amount of money going out. And that is going to require some big, tough choices that, so far, the political system has been unable to deal with.” The administration hopes the bipartisan commission will make it easier to produce a comprehensive plan to reduce the budget gap to a sustainable level, often described as 3 percent of the overall economy, by 2015. The White House decided to set up the group on its own after the Senate blocked a measure to establish a congressional panel whose recommendations would have been guaranteed a vote by lawmakers. Opponents, including a majority of Senate Republicans, complained that the plan would result in tax increases and that Congress wouldn’t have a chance to amend the panel’s recommendations. Under a presidentially appointed commission, Congress could ignore any panel recommendations. Republican Skepticism House Republican leader John Boehner has expressed skepticism about the Obama commission and has sought assurances from the White House that its makeup would be bipartisan and not predisposed to tax increases. The Ohio Republican said he is still considering whether to appoint members from his party to the panel after a Feb. 9 meeting with the president. Americans’ favorite way of cutting the budget deficit is by raising taxes on the wealthy, according to the Bloomberg News poll conducted by Des Moines, Iowa-based Selzer & Co. Two-thirds of the 1,000 adults surveyed Dec. 3-7 backed that approach. The Obama administration’s budget already takes that route with its proposed $970 billion tax increase over the next decade on Americans earning more than $200,000 a year, largely by not extending former President George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy beyond 2010. Even with those revenues -- and a proposed three-year freeze on some discretionary spending by the government -- the administration still projects a deficit of $752 billion in 2015, equivalent to 3.9 percent of gross domestic product. That’s above the 3 percent mark that White House budget director Peter Orszag has said is necessary to stop the rise in government debt as a proportion of the economy. Budget Gap Analysts say that middle-class taxes will need to be increased because the government can’t raise enough money from the wealthy alone to close the budget gap. “It’s just not possible to get the revenue you need only from this group,” said Joel Slemrod, director of the Office of Tax Policy Research at the University of Michigan. Going back on his campaign pledge would be fraught with risks for Obama. Former President George H.W. Bush paid a steep political price when he abandoned his 1988 campaign promise not to raise taxes, losing out in his bid for a second term to Bill Clinton. To contact the reporter on this story: Rich Miller in Washington rmiller28@bloomberg.net Last Updated: February 11, 2010 00:01 EST