In observance of Washington's Birthday -- the official name for Presidents Day -- the Center for Responsive Politics is closed today.Staff members will return phone messages and e-mails on Tuesday. Members of the working press with extremely urgent questions should call 817-917-4141.Check back this afternoon, too, as the Capital Eye Blog will post a new PolitiQuizz, as well as the answer to last week's contest.
Some 350 prominent economists from all over the world have written to the leaders of the G20 calling on them to implement the so-called "Robin Hood tax" on the banks "as a matter of urgency".
Two Nobel prizewinners, including the outspoken critic of the financial system Joseph Stiglitz, and scores of professors at universities from Harvard to Kyoto, are calling on G20 governments to back a financial transactions tax on speculative dealings in foreign currencies, shares and other securities of 0.05 per cent – say £500 on a £1m transaction.
The letter argues: "This tax is an idea that has come of age. The financial crisis has shown us the dangers of unregulated finance, and the link between the financial sector and society has been broken. It is time to fix this link and for the financial sector to give something back to society.
"This money is urgently needed. The crises of poverty and of climate change require an historic transfer of billions of dollars from the rich world to the poor world, and this tax would offer a clear way to help fund this."
You can read the four-paragraph letter signed by numerous Americans, including Jeffrey Sachs, here. And, in the campaign's video, you can see actor Bill Nighy as a profoundly discomfited banker reacting to the tax here:
Somebody at Goldman-Sachs wasn't swayed by banker Nighy. Last week, an attempt to game an opinion poll on the campaign's Web site was detected when there was a spike in traffic that was traced to a computer server registered at the investment giant.
That, of course, is just one of the many tactics likely to be used to shut down this idea. While a transaction tax on securities was proposed nearly four decades ago by James Tobin, his had a regulatory purpose in mind, and a levy of 0.5%, the Robin Hood Tax has revenue as its object and would be 1/100th size of Tobin's original proposal.
A proposal similar to the Robin Hood tax popped up at the G20 meeting November 7 when Prime Minister Gordon Brown suggested it.
A transactions tax would face tough sledding in the U.S. For instance, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is dead set against it. As is, no surprise, Wall Street. The White House has proposed a levy on banks that would raise $90 billion over a decade.
House Democrats led Oregon Rep. Pete DeFazio introduced their own transaction proposal - with the idea of raising $150 billion a year - in December as HR 4191. The bill has 29 co-sponsors, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated cautious support for the idea. But Democratic Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Mike McMahon of New York, and Debbie Halverson of Illinois, are actively opposing the bill.
This Sunday morning (Valentine's Day, 2010), Jonathan Karl auditioned to replace George Stephanopoulos on ABC's Sunday morning show, This Week. Karl's exclusive "get" for his host debut was former Vice President Dick Cheney, who Karl last interviewed on December 16, 2008 - a month before Barack Obama took the helm as President and Joe Biden replaced Mr. Cheney.
AFP - Five Muslims who plotted an attack using guns and explosives to protest against Australia's part in the "war on terror" were jailed for up to 28 years Monday, after the country's longest extremism trial.
Meant to roll this out a bit earlier, but better late than never.
What I've done is to compile the projected medal winners in the 86 Winter Olympic disciplines from five six sources that forecasted individual winners; these are the Associated Press, USA Today, Sports Illustrated, Canwest, and (for some events only) ESPN.com and betting odds at Ladbrokes. Nothing fancy here: I've taken a simple mean of the number of medals that each country was expected to win in each discipline, as averaged across the six sources.
For the events in which medals have been awarded thus far, I've then compared the projected medal winners against the actual ones. You can see how each country is performing against its forecast in the 'variance' column down below. For example, the United States was originally projected to have won 2.6 medals in the events that have taken place to date, but we've actually won 6, meaning that we're 3-4 medals ahead of pace. I've then added back in the consensus projections for the remaining events to produce a revised forecast.
Thanks to the USA's strong performance thus far, we're now essentially in a three-way tie with Canada and Germany in the overall projections, with each country predicted to win between 30 and 34 medals. Norway and Austria, long-shots to begin with, are 2 medals off their pace thus far and would need a miracle to come back. Russia, once dominant in the Winter Olympics, has been harmed be the addition of events like short-track speed skating, freestyle skiing, and snowboarding in which they're not very strong.
Canada has never stood atop the Winter Olympic medals table and the United States has just once, in the 1932 games in Lake Placid.
The USA is projected to win 2.0 medals in the events that will award medals tomorrow, Canada 1.4 and Germany 1.0.
I'm not going to promise that we'll update this chart every single day, but we should do so periodically throughout the Games.
NOTE: ESPN.com projections were added, although they have the USA doing very well and seem pretty homerish.
After unleashing a Pandora's box of privacy issues with the launch of their new Facebook wannabe "Google Buzz" feature earlier this week, Google now says they are taking the problem seriously.
“We’re very sorry for the concern we’ve caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback,” Google Buzz product manager Todd Jackson wrote in a statement over the weekend. “We’ll continue to do so.”
The "concern" at the heart of the problem is thus: When Google Buzz was launched, it automatically listed you as a "follower" of all of your most frequent Gmail and Google Chat contacts. Even worse, it made your followers list public knowledge to anyone following you, essentially negating the whole idea of having a private address book.
To remedy the situation, Google Buzz will no longer auto-add followers. Much like users of Google Reader have had to do for quite a while, you'll have to manually create your follow/followers list. And speaking of Google Reader, Buzz will no longer automatically link in your Reader or Picasa accounts.
Of course, you could just turn it off and use Facebook and Twitter to follow your contacts' random musings on the weather, American Idol and what have you.
Do you really need one site that combines every aspect of your life? Is there a danger to consolidating everything in one place, or do you find it to be a convenience?
Source: Reuters MARJAH, Afghanistan, Feb 15 (Reuters) - Twelve Taliban fighters were killed overnight in a NATO offensive against the group's last stronghold in Afghanistan's most violent province, a government ...
Reuters - Twelve Taliban fighters were killed overnight in a NATO offensive against the group's last stronghold in Afghanistan's most violent province, a government official said.
