poll: Romney up by two points in Virginia

 

Thise race for the White House has tightened in Virginia, where Mitt Romney is now preferred over Barack Obama by two percentage points -- 47-45 percent.  That’s according to a Fox News poll of Virginia likely voters released Thursday.  Romney’s edge is within the poll’s margin of sampling error.

The poll shows a nine-point shift in the margin and a four-point increase in support for Romney.  A month ago, Obama topped Romney by seven points in this battleground state (50-43 percent).
Click for the full poll results.
The president has also lost ground in the state on his job performance and favorable rating.
In 2008, Obama won 52 percent of the vote in Virginia and was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1964.
The biggest shift since September is among independents.  They now prefer Romney by 53-31 percent.  Last month they were split 43-43 percent.
The race is tight despite Romney’s wide advantage among independents because the poll finds by a five-point margin more voters identify themselves as Democrats -- and almost all of them back their party’s nominee.  In the 2008 presidential election, the Fox News exit poll found a six-point advantage in party identification for Democrats.
Some of Romney’s strongest groups include white men (+30 points), veterans and active military voters (+22 points) and voters living in $100,000-plus income households (+12 points).
Obama’s strengths include his support among blacks (+84 points), unmarried women (+32 points) and voters under age 35 (+18 points).
By a six-point margin, women side with Obama (49-43 percent).  He had a 12-point edge among women in September.  
The president’s support among women is also down from the 53 percent support in the 2008 exit poll.  Likewise, Obama’s current 40 percent support among men is far lower than the 51 percent he had in 2008.
Among the six in 10 voters “extremely” interested in the race, Romney leads by 52-44 percent.
In addition, the challenger’s supporters are a bit more enthusiastic: 64 percent of those backing Romney feel it’s “extremely” important he wins, while 60 percent of those supporting Obama feel that way.  
Romney is now as popular as Obama in Virginia:  54 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of each.  Obama’s favorable rating is down four points from 58 percent last month, while Romney’s is up six points from 48 percent.
More Virginia voters now trust Romney to improve the economy and create jobs by a six percentage-point margin.  That’s a reversal from last month when more voters trusted Obama by five points (September 16-18).
On foreign policy, Virginia voters prefer Obama by 6 points -- down from a 13-point advantage in September.  More voters also trust Obama on handling Medicare (+5 points).
They favor Romney on cutting government spending (+15 points).
Forty-five percent of Virginia voters think the nation’s economy is getting better, while almost as many -- 42 percent -- say it’s getting worse.
Fully 85 percent of those saying it’s getting better back Obama, while 88 percent of those saying things are getting worse side with Romney.   And the Republican challenger is largely favored among the 11 percent who feel things are staying the same:  53-35 percent.
Roughly equal numbers of Virginia voters think the Obama administration’s economic policies have helped the economy (38 percent) as say the policies have hurt (40 percent).  One voter in five says Obama’s policies didn’t make a difference either way (18 percent).
Last month, by a five-point margin, more voters said the administration’s policies had done more to help than hurt the economy (42-37 percent).
Virginia voters are divided on the job Obama is doing as president: 48 percent approve and 48 percent disapprove.  His approval is down from 53 percent in September.
At the same time nearly half of voters -- 49 percent -- approve of Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell’s job performance.
The Fox News poll is based on live telephone interviews on landlines and cell phones from October 23 to October 24 among 1,126 randomly-chosen likely voters in Virginia.  Likely voters are registered voters who are considered most likely to vote in the November presidential election or have already voted through early/absentee ballot.  The poll is conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R).  For the total sample, it has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points

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Syria agrees to cease-fire, sort of

UN: Syria agrees to holiday cease-fire

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: Saudi Arabia deports three Syrian diplomats
• Under pressure, the government announces the release of some detainees
• The cease-fire would extend to Monday

(CNN) -- The guns that have ravaged much of Syria since March 2011 may fall silent Friday, now that Syria's government has agreed to a cease-fire.

Syria's government and its main rebel force, the Free Syrian Army, said Thursday they would halt military operations during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, which runs from Friday to Monday.

But the terms of Syria's agreement have raised skepticism among some observers: Damascus reserves the right to respond to "terrorist" attacks, including bombings, as well as "terrorists" trying to reinforce their positions; and to protect neighboring borders crossed by "terrorists."

On the rebel side, a top Free Syrian Army general said his fighters had agreed to halt military operations if the Syrian government were to do so as well. But he said he doubted that the truce would hold.

Syria's rebel opposition is fractured, and Gen. Mustafa al-Sheikh noted that some rebel groups have not agreed to halt operations.

Hopes for a cease-fire in Syria

Video reportedly shows bakery attack

Photos: Showdown in Syria

The United States and the United Nations, which helped negotiate the truce through U.N.-Arab League special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, welcomed the news, despite the uncertainty.

Barbara Walters says she regrets trying to help Syrian aide

"What we are hoping and expecting is that they will not just talk the talk of cease-fire, but they will walk the walk -- beginning with the regime," said U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

At the United Nations, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "welcomes the reported announcements," U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters.

"Obviously, the world is now watching to see what will happen on Friday morning," he said. "We cannot be sure yet what will transpire, but the hope is that the guns will fall silent for the people of Syria so that they will have peace and quiet during this holy holiday."

U.N. humanitarian workers, working with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, are on standby to provide aid to areas that have not been easily accessible, he said.

Opposition forces said government troops struck rebel targets Thursday in the war's major hot spots, particularly in Aleppo, Syria's most populous city. The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported violence in Homs and Deir Ezzor.

At least 106 people were killed Thursday amid fighting and shelling nationwide, the opposition Local Coordination Committees of Syria said. At least 36 of them died in Damascus and its suburbs and 33 in Aleppo.

Rebels expressed skepticism over the truce. "They have betrayed us many times and they do not care if it is Eid or anything else, they will continue to kill," said Abdualla Yasin, the rebel Free Syrian Army spokesman in Aleppo.

Eid al-Adha is a major holiday on the Muslim calendar. It is described as a joyous time of peace as the faithful celebrate the end of the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

The government touted several goodwill efforts Thursday leading to its announcement that it will stop fighting.

State-run TV aired footage of men walking out of a prison -- part of a government amnesty program, a commentator said.

The release comes a week after rebel fighters told Al Jazeera news agency that they would agree to a proposed cease-fire only if the government were to release detainees, end a siege in the city of Homs and halt aerial attacks.

As the cease-fire was announced, rebels reported strategic military advances in the city of Aleppo.

Syria cease-fire: Could it really happen?

The rebel spokesman singled out Aleppo's Kurdish community for permitting the presence of rebels in their neighborhoods. Much of the opposition is Sunni Arab, and rebels said they were heartened to receive support from all groups in the diverse society.

"We were welcomed by the Kurds because people believe the FSA will liberate Syria," Yasin said. "Every small gain brings us closer to victory. The FSA was also happy to unite another facet of Syrian society under the FSA umbrella."

Previous truces have failed to take hold in Syria, which has been wracked by civil war since March 2011. In April, a cease-fire lasted barely a day before the killing resumed. In total, more than 32,000 Syrians have died since the conflict began, opposition activists say.

A spokesman for the Syrian National Council, an opposition coalition, said the truce is an attempt by President Bashar al-Assad to buy time.

"The whole world knows that the Syrian regime cannot be trusted and doesn't have any credibility in fulfilling any promise that they make to anyone," said George Sabra, a Paris-based spokesman for the Syrian National Council, which speaks for rebels fighting al-Assad. "The Assad regime is trying a diversion."

It's foolish to expect a total cease-fire, said Aram Nerguizian, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. A cease-fire in this context is about a larger goal of getting most rebel brigades and al-Assad forces to halt or reduce the killing.

The rebels themselves are partly to blame for the failure of this spring's cease-fire, Nerguizian said. They have been just as vicious in their killing as al-Assad's forces, he said.

But getting them to work together and resist the urge to fight, he said, is unrealistic.

Meanwhile, the United Nations' investigation into alleged war crimes in Syria is moving forward. The Geneva-based U.N. commission investigating war crimes announced Thursday it has requested a meeting with al-Assad to discuss gaining access to Syria for the team.

5 things you need to know about Lebanon and Syria

Carla del Ponte, who once served as prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, is part of the commission. Noted for her investigation of war crimes in the Balkans in the 1990s, she cited similarities with past probes.

"The similarity is, of course, we are handling the same crimes, crimes against humanity and war crimes for sure," she said.

The Syrian government's isolation continued to grow.

In Jedda, Saudi authorities announced the deportation of three staff members of the Syrian Consulate General, the official Saudi Press Agency said Thursday. The move was taken because "authorities have concluded that their behaviors are incompatible with their consular duties and assignments," it said.

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Fatal explosion hits Damascus; at least 10 dead

21/10/2012 - 10:43:05
An explosion has hit the Old City of Damascus, killing at least 10 people and wounding dozens of other civilians, Syrian activists said.

It came as president Bashar Assad discussed the civil war in his country with visiting UN peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.

The blast targeted a police station in the Bab Touma neighbourhood, a Syrian official said.

Bab Touma, a popular attraction for shoppers, is inhabited mostly by members of Syria’s Christian minority.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported the death toll. It said it was not immediately clear if the victims were civilians or policemen but it described the blast as “strong” and said ambulances and police cars were rushing to the area.

Mr Brahimi, who represents the UN and the Arab League, met Assad in another part of the capital.

Mr Brahimi has appealed for a truce between Assad’s forces and rebels for the four-day Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, which begins on October 26.

Mr Brahimi arrived in Damascus on Friday after a tour of Middle East capitals to drum up support for the ceasefire, which he hopes will pave the way for a longer-term truce.

A range of countries including Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Germany have thrown their support behind the idea, but neither the Syrian government nor the rebels have signed on.

Mr Brahimi met foreign minister Walid al-Moallem on yesterday. A Foreign Ministry statement released after the meeting did not mention the proposed truce, but said the two men discussed “objective and rational circumstances to stop the violence from any side in order to prepare for a comprehensive dialogue among the Syrians”.

Syrian government forces and rebels have both agreed to, and then promptly violated, internationally brokered ceasefires in the past, and there is little indication that either is willing to stop fighting now.

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Cash seized at Dublin Airport

25/10/2012 - 18:35:47
Revenue Customs officers have seized almost €100,000 at Dublin Airport.

The €99,900 in notes was found when a 55-year-old Slovakian man was stopped and searched as he was about to board a flight to Vienna this morning.

The money was found on the man's person and concealed inside this clothing.

A Dublin court has granted the officers a three-month detention order while they carry out further investigations.

Its the sixth cash seizure at Dublin Airport in the past 10 days.

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Romney, let's not quickly indict Ahmadinejad

Reality Check: Nuclear Iran

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Mitt Romney proposed indicting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for inciting genocide
• William Burke-White: Romney's idea is legally challenging and diplomatically wrongheaded
• Should Ahmadinejad actually be tried, he may well be acquitted, Burke-White says
• Burke-White: For now, America must use diplomacy in dealing with Iran

Editor's note: William Burke-White is a professor of law and deputy dean at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. From 2009 to 2011, he was on Secretary Hillary Clinton's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State.

(CNN) -- In Monday night's final presidential debate, Mitt Romney made the unusual suggestion that the international criminal justice system be used to ratchet up diplomatic pressure on Iran. Specifically, he vowed that if he were elected, "I'd make sure that (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad is indicted under the Genocide Convention. His words amount to genocide incitation."

It was a fleeting talking point, perhaps reflecting Romney's continuing shift to the center in the campaign's closing weeks. But his implicit embrace of the International Criminal Court, which is where Ahmadinejad would have to be tried, has the hallmarks of a candidate who has impetuously seized a debate prep briefing book memo as a means to differentiate his policy from that of President Barack Obama, without actually having thought through a policy that is at once legally challenging and diplomatically wrongheaded.

William Burke-White

Republicans have disparaged the ICC since well before it was established in 2002. President George W. Bush tried to kill it by "unsigning" the treaty President Bill Clinton and more than 100 other world leaders signed. When Obama was supportive of referring Libya's Moammar Gadhafi to the ICC for prosecution, John Bolton, Bush's former U.N. ambassador and a Romney foreign policy adviser, dismissed the court as "one of the world's most illegitimate multilateral institutions," adding that the president's stance was an "abdication of responsibility."

Opinion: Muslims must engage politically, look outside themselves

Still, Romney's reference to prosecuting Ahmadinejad could be viewed as a welcome change of heart about the efficacy of international criminal justice -- that is, if this proposal were not so ill thought out.

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The idea makes little sense, which is why the Obama administration has previously considered and rejected it. There are at least four difficulties.

First, Iran is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. This means that Ahmadinejad cannot be prosecuted unless the U.N. Security Council refers the case to the ICC, which is a long shot since Russia and China will likely veto the move.

Talking tough on Iran

 

The debate over Iran, horses & bayonets

 

Second, even if Ahmadinejad were indicted, the chance of his being arrested is nil. After all, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, is doing fine in his country. The United States and its allies risk a similar spectacle with Ahmadinejad running around Iran flaunting international justice, which almost makes a bad situation worse.

Third, incitement of genocide is one of the hardest crimes in the world to prove. Prosecutors must show that someone has an intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, and that their words were meant to cause others to do so.

That has happened exactly once, in a case against three Rwandans who had used the radio to incite the killing of Rwandan Tutsis. While convicted of a number of crimes, their conviction was overturned in part on appeal because the tribunal found many of their broadcasts lacking sufficiently direct connection to the genocide in Rwanda.

It is entirely possible that should Ahmadinejad actually be tried, he would be acquitted on the grounds that his "hate speech" -- while horrific -- did not meet the legal threshold for incitement to genocide. An innocent verdict would give Ahmadinejad a dangerous free hand.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, Romney's idea runs the risk of undermining the U.S. diplomatic efforts. Our current strategy is to exert as much pressure as possible, while offering Iran a pathway back into the international community if it ends its nuclear program.

If Ahmadinejad were indicted, negotiations may well break down.

Opinion: Cool Obama, square Romney

Recall the challenges of dealing with Slobodan Milosevic in the late 1990s after he was indicated by the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The United States and its allies cannot halt an ICC indictment, which becomes legally binding and is not easily susceptible to political or diplomatic influence. That's one of the great virtues of the international criminal justice system. But in this case, it would be a liability. The danger is that such an indictment becomes all stick and no carrot in our efforts to push Iran to relinquish its nuclear program.

Kudos to Romney for embracing international criminal justice. The idea of indicting Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide must have struck him as a smart new way to appear muscular while not being hawkish on the debate stage. But it would be a bad idea to pursue.

Obama has been extraordinarily effective in applying pressure on Iran, which Romney endorsed as the right thing to do on Monday night. But the United States must maintain flexibility in the way that pressure is deployed. Once Ahmadinejad is out of power, he should face the hand of justice. Until then, America and its allies must rely on tough diplomacy.

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Industrial action from Aer Lingus workers now 'inevitable'

25/10/2012 - 19:05:47
SIPTU said this evening that industrial action is now inevitable after talks with Aer Lingus regarding its pension scheme collapsed.

It is expected that a wide-ranging strike will take place in the coming weeks.

Earlier this month strike action at the country's main airports was narrowly averted when both sides returned to the Labour Relations Commission.

"It's quite a dark situation," said SIPTU organiser Dermot O'Loughlin.

"The LRC have confirmed that their processes can bring this no further, and upon a request from the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, it was confirmed that the Aer Lingus management team won't attend the Labour Court.

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Finding Zen in a Patch of Nature

Buck Butler for The New York Times

David Haskell in in Sewanee, Tenn., on the Domain of the University of the South.

SEWANEE, Tenn. — It is afternoon in a hardwood forest on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and the cicadas are singing.

David Haskell, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of the South, is taking me through part of the 13,000 acres owned by the university, to a small circle of forest floor a bit over a yard in diameter. He visited this randomly chosen forest “mandala,” as he calls it, many times over the course of a year and recorded his observations in

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In Contest for Rescue Robots, Darpa Offers $2 Million Prize

The Pentagon’s advanced research agency said on Wednesday that it will offer a prize of $2 million to the winners of a contest testing the performance of robots that could be used in emergencies like the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan.
The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, which is responsible for helping the nation avoid unpleasant technological surprises, had previously announced its Robotics Challenge, but on Wednesday it added details and announced the selection of teams that will compete in separate “tracks” of the contest.
In one competition the contestants will build their own robots, while in a second they will design software to control a humanoid-style robot supplied by the government and developed by Boston Dynamics, a developer of advanced mobile robots. Boston Dynamics is known for the Big Dog robot it developed for Darpa, which walks on four legs and is able to carry heavy loads on uneven ground. More recently it has gotten Internet attention for a robot named Cheetah. In a video, Cheetah runs on an indoor track at 28.3 miles per hour, faster than Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest human. Another video shows a robot designed for Darpa by Boston Dynamics that stands on two legs and avoids obstacles.
Two other contests will take place in a computerized simulation system and are intended to be broadly open to a range of entrants from around the world.
Gill Pratt, the Darpa program manager who is directing the Robotics Challenge, said in a telephone press conference on Monday that the program was not intended to develop futuristic robot war fighters.
Currently the United States military has both airborne and undersea robotic weapons systems, but it has made less progress in ground-based weapons. Thousands of robots are now used in Iraq and Afghanistan to deal with land mines, and there are some experimental vehicles that carry equipment being used in war zones. But the military has done little to design robotic soldiers for use on the ground.
“We’re aiming for a challenge on a different technical problem right now,” Dr. Pratt said. One of the missions of the United States military is to respond with humanitarian assistance to events like natural and manmade disasters, and in situations like the Fukushima disaster. In that emergency, robots were sent to the plant but its technical experts had to be trained to use them, which took valuable time. Dr. Pratt said that a generation of robots that were simpler to operate and had the capability to use tools that are often already available at disaster sites would make a big difference in speeding the response to a future crisis.

The robot supplied by the government and developed by Boston Dynamics.

Darpa has sponsored a number of similar challenges. The highest-profile contests focused on autonomous vehicles in 2004, 2005 and 2007. They are widely seen to have served as a catalyst that has jump-started commercial development of self-driving cars. A number of automobile manufacturers as well as Google are now nearing commercialization of self-driving technologies.
In one of the new Robotics Challenge tracks, the agency has chosen Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center, Drexel University, Raytheon, Schaft, Virginia Tech, NASA’s Johnson Space Center and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to design their own systems. The robots are not required to be humanoid forms, and several of the competitors are creating machines that look anything but human. For example, a prototype from JPL has three legs and one arm.
Teams from these organizations will be supplied with an advanced robot from Boston Dynamics and will be required to program it in the contest: Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Laboratories, RE2, University of Kansas, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, TRAC Labs, University of Washington, the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Ben-Gurion University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and TORC Robotics.
The robots will be required to do things like drive vehicles, climb over debris, operate power tools and control machines and valves.
The agency is also organizing a separate contest inside an online virtual world that will allow a wider range of contestants to design software avatars to perform rescue missions, Dr. Pratt said.
“There has been tremendous work in the gaming field, and we believe that a lot of the talent in that field can be brought in to play here,” he said.
In the real-world version of the challenge, it will not be mandatory for the robots to be autonomous, but systems that are designed to operate without direct human control will be scored higher, Dr. Pratt said. The agency will adjust the wireless bandwidth available to control the robots in an effort to simulate real world conditions. For example, in the Fukushima disaster, thick walls made it difficult to control robots that were designed to communicate wirelessly with human operators.
The issue of autonomous weapons systems has been controversial because of the Pentagon’s use of airborne drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Earlier this year a report issued by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board said the military had been slow in deploying technologies that would allow weapons more autonomy. It noted that in some cases, it requires teams of several hundred weapons operators to support a single airborne drone mission.

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True Blue Stands Out in an Earthy Crowd

Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

NATURAL COLOR: Wild blueberries ready for harvesting in Warren, Me.

For the French Fauvist painter and color gourmand Raoul Dufy, blue was the only color with enough strength of character to remain blue “in all its tones.” Darkened red looks brown and whitened red turns pink, Dufy said, while yellow blackens with shading and fades away in the light. But blue can be brightened or dimmed, the artist said, and “it will always stay blue.”

Scientists, too, have lately been bullish on blue, captivated by its optical purity, complexity and metaphorical fluency. They’re exploring the physics and chemistry of blueness in nature, the evolution of blue ornaments and blue come-ons, and the sheer brazenness of being blue when most earthly life forms opt for earthy raiments of beige, ruddy or taupe.

One research team recently reported the structural analysis of a small, dazzlingly blue fruit from the African Pollia condensata plant that may well be the brightest terrestrial object in nature. Another group working in the central Congo basin announced the discovery of a new species of monkey, a rare event in mammalogy. Rarer still is the noteworthiest trait of the monkey, called the lesula: a patch of brilliant blue skin on the male’s buttocks and scrotal area that stands out from the surrounding fur like neon underpants.

Still other researchers are tracing the history of blue pigments in human culture, and the role those pigments have played in shaping our notions of virtue, authority, divinity and social class. “Blue pigments played an outstanding role in human development,” said Heinz Berke, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Zurich. For some cultures, he said, they were as valuable as gold.

As a raft of surveys has shown, blue love is a global affair. Ask people their favorite color, and in most parts of the world roughly half will say blue, a figure three to four times the support accorded common second-place finishers like purple or green. Just one in six Americans is blue-eyed, but nearly one in two consider blue the prettiest eye color, which could be why some 50 percent of tinted contact lenses sold are the kind that make your brown eyes blue.

Sick children like their caretakers in blue: A recent study at the Cleveland Clinic found that young patients preferred nurses wearing blue uniforms to those in white or yellow. And am I the only person in the United States who doesn’t own a single pair of those permanently popular pants formerly known as dungarees?

“For Americans, bluejeans have a special connotation because of their association with the Old West and rugged individualism,” said Steven Bleicher, author of “Contemporary Color: Theory and Use.” The jeans take their John Wayne reputation seriously. “Because the indigo dye fades during washing, everyone’s blue becomes uniquely different,” said Dr. Bleicher, a professor of visual arts at Coastal Carolina University. “They’re your bluejeans.”

According to psychologists who explore the complex interplay of color, mood and behavior, blue’s basic emotional valence is calmness and open-endedness, in contrast to the aggressive specificity associated with red. Blue is sea and sky, a pocket-size vacation.

In a study that appeared in the journal Perceptual & Motor Skills, researchers at Aichi University in Japan found that subjects who performed a lengthy video game exercise while sitting next to a blue partition reported feeling less fatigued and claustrophobic, and displayed a more regular heart beat pattern, than did people who sat by red or yellow partitions.

In the journal Science, researchers at the University of British Columbia described their study of how computer screen color affected participants’ ability to solve either creative problems — for example, determining the word that best unifies the terms “shelf,” “read” and “end” (answer: book) — or detail-oriented tasks like copy editing. The researchers found that blue screens were superior to red or white backgrounds at enhancing creativity, while red screens worked best for accuracy tasks. Interestingly, when participants were asked to predict which screen color would improve performance on the two categories of problems, big majorities deemed blue the ideal desktop setting for both.

But skies have their limits, and blue can also imply coldness, sorrow and death. On learning of a good friend’s suicide in 1901, Pablo Picasso fell into a severe depression, and he began painting images of beggars, drunks, the poor and the halt, all famously rendered in a palette of blue.

The provenance of using “the blues” to mean sadness isn’t clear, but L. Elizabeth Crawford, a professor of psychology at the University of Richmond in Virginia, suggested that the association arose from the look of the body when it’s in a low energy, low oxygen state. “The lips turn blue, there’s a blue pallor to the complexion,” she said. “It’s the opposite of the warm flushing of the skin that we associate with love, kindness and affection.”

Blue is also known to suppress the appetite, possibly as an adaptation against eating rotten meat, which can have a bluish tinge. “If you’re on a diet, my advice is, take the white bulb out of the refrigerator and put in a blue one instead,” Dr. Bleicher said. “A blue glow makes food look very unappetizing.”

Not so to those that would dine upon us. Field studies of color-coded insect traps have shown that mosquitoes are particularly attracted to blue.

That blue can connote coolness and tranquillity is one of nature’s little inside jokes. Blue light is on the high-energy end of the visible spectrum, and the comparative shortness of its wavelengths explains why the blue portion of the white light from the sun is easily scattered by the nitrogen and oxygen molecules in our atmosphere, and thus why the sky looks blue.

Down on earth, organisms assume many of their colors with pigments, chemical substances that selectively absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others — the ones we then see as the object’s color. Plants look green because the chlorophyll pigment in their leaves absorbs pretty much all sunlight except green. Cardinals owe their flaming feathers to carotenoids, orange-reflecting pigments the birds extract from ingested berries and insects. 

When it comes to blueness, though, the chemical approach is not always an option. Fungi, crabs and beetles may do cerulean, said the Yale ornithologist Richard O. Prum, “but for some reason, vertebrate physiology never evolved the ability to make or use blue pigments.”

In place of blue pigment, vertebrates and others turn to figment. As Dr. Prum and others have determined lately, many of nature’s most spectacular blues — the plumage of a blue jay or indigo bunting, the teal of a skink lizard’s tail, and now the lesula monkey’s blue scrotum and Pollia’s shimmering blue fruit — are structural in nature. They arise from the specific shape and arrangement of their underlying components.

“When you have a color obtained with pigment, it’s a characteristic of the material itself,” said Silvia Vignolini, a physicist at the University of Cambridge and the lead author of the new report about the Pollia condensata. “When you make color with structure, you start with a material that is transparent, but by changing the structure by just a few hundred nanometers” — billionths of a meter — “you can change the color.”

Dr. Vignolini cited the analogy of soap bubbles, which begin as clear liquid and then assume different hues depending on their size, the thickness of their membranes and the angle at which they’re viewed. Structural blues are essentially built of soap membranes trapped at just the right orientation and thickness to forever glint blue.

Stacking style counts, too. Sometimes the color-forming components are arrayed in a so-called quasi-ordered formation, a mix of regularity and randomness, like spaghetti packed in a box. That pattern yields the steady matte blues of the jay’s feathers and the monkey’s pelvis. In other cases, the constituent bubbles are more strongly periodic in their arrangement, like atoms in a crystal, and the resulting blues possess the glittering, iridescent sheen seen in the wings of a blue morpho butterfly or, brighter still, the Pollia fruit. Dr. Vignolini and her colleagues determined that the lentil-size fruit reflected back 30 percent of the light cast upon it, the highest reflectivity for any land-based biological product known.

The bold blue covering turns out to be a bit of a cheap trick, designed to attract birds and other potential seed dispersers without bothering to invest in the expensive quid pro quo of a pulp. “The fruit has no nutritional value,” Dr. Vignolini said. “It doesn’t harm birds, but it doesn’t benefit them, either.”

The ruse doesn’t fade with time. “We have some samples in our collection that are almost 100 years old,” Dr. Vignolini said, “and they look the same as the fruit growing today,”

In life as in art, blue will always stay blue.

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Fish Off Japan’s Coast Said to Contain Elevated Levels of Cesium

TOKYO — Elevated levels of cesium still detected in fish off the Fukushima coast of Japan suggest that radioactive particles from last year’s nuclear disaster have accumulated on the seafloor and could contaminate sea life for decades, according to new research.

Enlarge This Image

Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images

A broker inspected octopus from Fukushima at a market in Tokyo in August.

Multimedia

 

The findings published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science highlight the challenges facing Japan as it seeks to protect its food supply and rebuild the local fisheries industry.

More than 18 months after the nuclear disaster, Japan still has bans on the sale of 36 species of fish caught off Fukushima, rendering the bulk of its fishing boats idle and denying the region one of its mainstay industries.

Still, some local fishermen are trying to return to work. Since July, a handful of them have resumed small-scale commercial fishing for species, like octopus, that have cleared government radiation tests. Radiation readings in waters off Fukushima and beyond have returned to near-normal levels.

But about 40 percent of fish caught off Fukushima and tested by the government still have too much cesium to be safe to eat under regulatory limits set by the Japanese government last year, said the article’s author, Ken O. Buesseler, a leading marine chemistry expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who analyzed test results from the 12 months following the March 2011 disaster.

Because cesium tends not to stay in the tissues of saltwater fish very long, and because high radiation levels have been detected — particularly in bottom-feeding fish — it is likely that fish are being newly contaminated by cesium on the seabed, Mr. Buesseler wrote in the Science article.

“The fact that many fish are just as contaminated today with cesium 134 and cesium 137 as they were more than one year ago implies that cesium is still being released into the food chain,” Mr. Buesseler wrote. This kind of cesium has a half-life of 30 years, meaning that it falls off by half in radioactive intensity every 30 years. Given that, he said, “sediments would remain contaminated for decades to come.”

Officials at Japan’s Fisheries Agency, which conducted the tests, said Mr. Buesseler’s analysis made sense.

“In the early days, as the fallout hit the ocean, we saw high levels of radiation from fish near the surface,” said Koichi Tahara, assistant director of the agency’s resources and research division. “But now it would be reasonable to assume that radioactive substances are settling on the seafloor.”

But that was less of a concern than Mr. Buesseler’s research might suggest, Mr. Tahara said, because the cesium was expected to eventually settle down into the seabed.

Mr. Tahara also stressed that the government would continue its vigorous testing and that fishing bans would remain in place until radiation readings returned to acceptable levels.

Naohiro Yoshida, an environmental chemistry expert at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, said that while he agreed with much of Mr. Buesseler’s analysis, it was too early to reach a conclusion on how extensive radioactive contamination of Japan’s oceans would be, and how long it would have an impact on marine life in the area.

Further research was needed on ocean currents, sediments and how different species of fish are affected by radioactive contamination, he said.

As much as four-fifths of the radioactive substances released from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are thought to have entered the sea, either blown offshore or released directly into the ocean from water used to cool the site’s reactors in the wake of the accident.

Sea currents quickly dispersed that radioactivity, and seawater readings off the Fukushima shore returned to near-normal levels. But fish caught in the area continue to show elevated readings for radioactive cesium, which is associated with an increased risk of cancer in humans.

Just two months ago, two greenling caught close to the Fukushima shore were found to contain more than 25,000 becquerels a kilogram of cesium, the highest cesium levels found in fish since the disaster and almost 250 times the government’s safety limit.

The operator of the Fukushima plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said that the site no longer released contaminated water into the ocean, and that radiation levels in waters around the plant had stabilized.

But Yoshikazu Nagai, a spokesman for the company, said he could not rule out continued leaks into the ocean from its reactors, the basements of which remain flooded with cooling water.

To stop water from seeping out of the plant, Tokyo Electric is building a 2,400-foot-long wall between the site’s reactors and the ocean. But Mr. Nagai said the steel-and-concrete wall, which will reach 100 feet underground, would take until mid-2014 to build.

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No Rest for the Eerie

Getty Images

IT’S surprising that American audiences still get a thrill from seeing a haunted house on screen. Hasn’t the subprime crisis, with its predatory lending and underwater mortgages, caused enough real-life home-related terror in the last few years?

But last weekend, “Paranormal Activity 4,” the latest in the popular movie franchise that mines horror from everyday life in a suburban tract home (a scary enough premise), topped the box office.

Weeks earlier, another horror movie, “House at the End of the Street,” grabbed the top spot. And in April, “The Cabin in the Woods” opened strong, proving that four walls and demonic activity within them are all that is needed to scare the bejesus out of us.

From these recent examples to “House on Haunted Hill” in 1999 and “The Amityville Horror” 20 years before that, the haunted house has been a Hollywood mainstay for decades.

In literature, the genre dates from at least the 18th century, with the publication of “The Castle of Otranto” by Horace Walpole — long before Edith Wharton published her ghost stories or Stephen King transferred the ghoulish action to an isolated hotel in “The Shining.”

What accounts for our continuing fascination with “the old dark house,” as John Tibbetts, a media studies professor at the University of Kansas and the author of “The Gothic Imagination,” calls it? In both literature and film, he said, it endures because it plays on our collective notion of home as a safe space.

“That’s your sanctuary,” Mr. Tibbetts said. “When that barrier is breached, you’ve had it.”

And it doesn’t take much to accomplish that.

Oren Peli, the writer and director who created the “Paranormal” franchise, said one of his favorite moments in the first film is when the bedroom door of the couple being harassed by evil spirits moves a few inches. Audiences always gasp, Mr. Peli said. “Compared to a typical horror movie, where guts spill out, you’d think it would take a lot to shock people,” he said. “But the gasping confirms that any kind of evidence that something is inside your house is a very unsettling feeling.”

In “House of Leaves,” Mark Z. Danielewski’s intricately creepy 1999 novel, a family’s life begins to unravel after the discovery that the dimensions of their historic Virginia home are three-quarters of an inch larger on the inside than on the outside. A carpenter’s nightmare, surely, but a powerful source of terror?

As Mr. Danielewski explained: “House and home go beyond the material architecture. As soon as we question the walls, we start questioning how our family or our larger society is organized.”

Discovering dark energy in a home and being willing to explore it is “a noble goal,” he continued. “You may discover a darkness in your own mind, and it’s not so easy to flee. Are you going to outrace it or are you going to try to deal with it?”

Perhaps the scariest houses aren’t the ones that serve as a mere setting for horror, as in “The Exorcist” or “The Others,” but those that are actively malevolent: houses that seem to possess their own sense of agency. Or, as the trailer voice-over for “The Haunting” put it: “Some houses are born bad.”

“Burnt Offerings,” a 1976 film in which a house renews itself, vampire-like, by injuring and killing its inhabitants, perhaps best taps into our conflicted feelings about homeownership, which represents something of a Faustian pact, Mr. Tibbetts said. “It’s this idea that the dream to own a house gets you in trouble,” he said. “You want the house, but you have to pay the price.” 

THERE’S a familiar architecture to a haunted house, creepy Victorian being the preferred style. Dark basements, creaking attics and strangely cold rooms abound. Indian burial grounds seem to be a common building site.

You almost never see a modernist haunted house, no scary movies bearing the title “The Ghosts of Case Study House No. 22.” Perhaps that’s because the starkly furnished rooms and the transparency don’t offer the creepy patina of accumulated history that Mr. Danielewski was referring to, only a kind of existential dread.

Families in these stories are always escaping to the quiet suburbs or the countryside, as they do in “The Changeling” and “House of Leaves,” and scooping up a historic showplace at a bargain price, without ever asking the real estate agent why it’s a steal.

The owners of these cursed homes are astonishingly flinty, too, refusing to pack up and leave long after the oven pukes blood and the kitchen cutlery flies across the room of its own accord. As Ariel Schulman, a director of “Paranormal 4” with Henry Joost, said: “They never get out of the house. I’d call my broker. ‘Put it on the market. I’m moving to Flushing.’ ”

But in recent years, a new kind of haunted house has become increasingly popular, one whose style could be described as suburban banal.

Mark Tonderai, who directed “House at the End of the Street,” which centers on a home where a gruesome family murder has occurred, said the film presents the house as emotionally scarred victim. “You know how you can go into places and feel that bad stuff has happened there?” Mr. Tonderai said. “The residue of that bad event has seeped into the masonry.”

But the director shot the movie in a home in Ottawa that was outwardly unremarkable, although it hadn’t been fully finished. “Because the guy who built it wasn’t a great carpenter, it was just a little off,” Mr. Tonderai said. “It made you feel a slight discomfort.”

Mr. Peli adopted the same approach when designing the set for the first “Paranormal Activity” film, which was shot in his home, a typical tract house in San Diego. “I was never tempted to do anything to make the house look creepy,” he said. “So the audience thinks, ‘If it can happen in a normal house, maybe it can happen in my house.’ ”

In continuing the “Paranormal” franchise, Mr. Schulman has tried to make the domestic settings as contemporary as possible, with laptops, Skype and video-game consoles used in such a way that they take on a terrifying aspect. “The point is to illustrate the fear in everyday household scenarios,” he said.

Indeed, the latest “Paranormal” film takes place in Nevada, a state where property values have dropped over 40 percent since 2008 and nearly two-thirds of all homeowners are stuck in a home worth less than they bought it for.

What could be scarier?

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Bleary-Eyed Troops Fight a Building at a Time in Syria

Muhammad Al-Ibrahim/Shaam News Network, via Reuters

A photo released by activists was said to show an opposition flag flying Sunday in Homs, Syria.

By JANINE DI GIOVANNI

Published: October 24, 2012

HOMS, Syria — For more than 24 hours, President Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers fought their way through this city, bleary-eyed men, worn down by months of combat. Afraid to go into the streets, where snipers pick their targets, the government men snaked their way through “mouse holes” punched in walls of blown-out buildings. Their goal was to retake one building, just one, a former school controlled by the rebel Free Syrian Army.

Multimedia

Embedded With the Syrian Army

The New York Times

Bab al-Sebaa Street, once a desired address, is in ruins.

“We will eventually get this school,” said Rifaf, part of a small group of soldiers on the mission. “But it’s a matter of time.”

In many ways, Homs serves as a microcosm of Syria, a community of Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites and Christians who lived side by side, only to find that the collapse of the police state quickly dissolved any sense of common purpose. Civil war came to Homs early, and it has ground on ever since, one street, one building, one apartment at a time. It has been a seesaw, with the opposition gaining ground, then the government taking it back.

That is the story of the school, this group of government soldiers and a nation caught in a contest of attrition. Half of Homs exists as it did before, where some Christians and Alawites, allied with President Assad, still cling to a normal routine, visit cafes and enjoy strolling the streets.

The other half is rubble.

“See the snipers? They have been shooting at us all day,” Rifaf said as he took cover in an abandoned apartment, crouched beneath a window as the familiar crack of automatic gunfire echoed in the courtyard.

“The sniper is there,” he said, nodding toward a blasted-out building a few blocks away. Like the others interviewed for this article, he did not want to be fully identified for security reasons.

That was the school, a building used by the insurgents as a weapons depot. And it was the day’s objective.

Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, is one of many hot spots around the nation, where the military and the insurgents play a lethal game of cat and mouse. Last week, the government began an operation to retake the whole city.

The government’s men here say they respect the opposition, at least as fighters, noting that they are challenging adversaries, skilled at urban combat and far more familiar with the terrain. But these men also feel deeply about their cause, fighting for a state that they support and a leader for whom they at least say they are willing to give their lives.

The government wanted that story told, so it allowed a reporter based in Paris to have exclusive access to Homs in the company of a Ministry of Information officer, and to be effectively embedded for one day with Syrian soldiers.

The commander of that unit said he was not sure how many rebel soldiers were left in Homs, within their stronghold inside the Old City, but he estimated 1,500 to 2,000 fighters.

“They know what they are doing,” he said.

His senior officer, who goes by General Baba and is the son of a farmer, said: “We will win. It will take time, but we will win.” He sat in his office, a burned-out storefront, with a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher balanced on his hip.

But it is exhausting work, and these men are showing the strains. “We fight for hours, sometimes days, to take one building,” said Rifaf, the young soldier, whose name translates roughly to the sound a bird makes when its wings flutter.

To reach the front line, the soldier and the government guide, Shaza, traveled through the ruins of Bab al-Sebaa Street, once among the better addresses in this war-weary city.

With a few Syrian Army soldiers, the group navigated its way through deserted buildings, climbing through mouse holes while snipers looked down from many a rooftop.

There were signs everywhere of the retreating opposition, and in one open area amid the rubble there was what looked like a rebel base: a couple of homemade bombs, medical supplies scattered on the tables of a makeshift infirmary. The rebels left in haste after an all-night battle fought simply to open a route to reach the ultimate objective, the school.

“For torture,” Shaza, the Information Ministry official, said as she pointed to meat hooks and electric wires dangling from the walls. It was hard to know. Perhaps the meat hooks had been used to hang intravenous bags, or perhaps for nothing, but this was the government’s tour, and its version of events. There was a hole in the ground, too. It looked like a well, at the base of a wall.

Shaza said that bodies of Syrian soldiers had been found, dumped in the hole.

The Syrian government has grown frustrated with its inability to crush the opposition forces, so it has adopted an unforgiving strategy of using tanks, artillery and aircraft to bomb and blast them into submission. That has worked in smaller places, like the village of Maarat al-Noaman, obliterated last week just after the opposition declared it “liberated.”

But it cannot work here: the city is too large, too built up, so the government’s soldiers are forced to fight on the ground, and find their way through these kinds of spaces.

The small unit stationed here was a mixture of young recruits and older career officers. “God! Syria!” they chanted as they made their way through the warren that has become the city. “Syria and God!”

When the senior commander in Homs was asked how many men he had lost, he paused, sipped tea and replied, “A huge amount.”

Few of the civilians who remain here see a way back. They hold on to what they have, but also recognize that the social fabric has unraveled so much that they are not sure of the way forward.

“Some people here hate,” said Mayada, part of the Ismaili Shiite minority, who is married to an Alawite and lives in one of the safer neighborhoods.

“But some get much closer because we refuse a sectarian war,” Mayada said. “Some keep neutral — I would say 60 percent — and learn to live with the bombs.”

Shaza, the information officer, tried to spin a more optimistic view, saying that thousands of people had returned to Homs. Carla, 32, a Christian mother of three children, returned recently to a shuttered house opposite the destroyed St. Matanius Church. Her daughter Naya, 12, has seen the devastation of war in a personal way. “Nobody,” she said with a grown-up voice, “knows where this war is going.”

Outside, the fighting continued, grinding on through the night.

By morning, Rifaf and his exhausted comrades had taken the school, but there was no celebration. They were exhausted.

“We’ve finished the battle at 5 a.m.,” he croaked in a weary voice. “I’ve got to sleep because we have to start again later in the day.”

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Obama: GOP nominee suffering from 'Romnesia'

Jason Reed / Reuters

President Barack Obama stops mid-stride to greet supporters during a campaign rally at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., Oct. 19, 2012.

By NBC's Ali Weinberg

President Barack Obama has been hitting GOP nominee Mitt Romney for weeks over what he says is Romney’s shifting to more moderate general-election policies, but now he has a new catchphrase for it: "Romnesia."
Speaking at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., Obama turned the joke into a four-minute soliloquy, laying out what he said were all of Romney’s inconsistent positions.
“He's changing up so much -- backtracking and sidestepping. We've got to name this condition that he's going through. I think ... I think it's called 'Romnesia,'" he said as the crowd of 9,000 erupted into cheers and applause. “Now, I'm not a medical doctor but I do want to go over some of the symptoms with you. Because I want to make sure nobody else catches it.”
Given that the event was geared towards female voters -- signs at the front of the stage read “Women’s Health Security” and even the invocation was centered around women’s issues -- Obama first mentioned what he said were Romney’s evolving statements on workplace fairness and women’s health.

President Barack Obama speaks at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., telling supporters that Governor Mitt Romney's plan will squeeze the middle class.

“If you say you're for equal pay for equal work, but you keep refusing to say whether or not you'd sign a bill that protects equal pay for equal work, you might have Romnesia,” he said as the crowd laughed. “If you say women should have access to contraceptive care, but you supported legislation that would let your employers deny you contraceptive care, you might have a case of Romnesia.”
He concluded by joking that his health care plan would be able to cure anyone suffering from what ails Romney.
“And if you come down with a case of Romnesia, and you can't seem to remember the policies that are still on your website or the promises you've made over the six years you've been running for president, here's the good news. 'Obamacare' covers preexisting conditions! We can fix you up! We've got a cure!” he exclaimed as the audience reached a fever pitch.
Before launching into his new attack line, Obama also renewed his criticism over Romney’s economic plan, again calling it a “sketchy deal” and noting that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called it a “snow job on the American people.”
But most of Obama’s critiques for Romney pertained specifically to women’s issues, which emerged as one of the hottest topics in Tuesday’s presidential debate.
He warned that the next president would potentially have the ability to appoint a new Supreme Court justice, raising the prospect of revisiting the landmark Roe v. Wade decision regarding abortion rights.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Two-year-old Sacha Marzett wears a homemade Obama t-shirt while waiting in line to attend a campaign rally at George Mason University campus October 19, 2012 in Fairfax, Va.

Obama also alluded to Romney’s “binders full of women” comment during the debate.
“When the next president and Congress would tip the balance of the highest court in the land in a way that turns back the clock for women and families for decades to come, you don't want someone who needs to ask for binders of women. You don't want that guy," he said.
Virginia Delegate Barbara Comstock responded to the president’s remarks on behalf of the Romney campaign, saying in a statement: "Women haven’t forgotten how we’ve suffered over the last four years in the Obama economy with higher taxes, higher unemployment, and record levels of poverty. President Obama has failed to put forward a second-term agenda -- and when you don’t have a plan to run on, you stoop to scare tactics."
The president returned to the White House after his remarks, from which he'll depart later on Friday for Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, where he’ll prepare for next Monday’s presidential debate.

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The Right Goal, the Wrong Approach

Monica Youn is the Brennan Center Constitutional Fellow at New York University School of Law.

October 24, 2012

A proposal to amend the Constitution can function on two levels, the actual -- forcing a change in constitutional law -- or the aspirational -- transforming popular understanding and engagement.

It’s a lot easier for politicians to back an unlikely constitutional amendment than to back reforms to change their own fund-raising .

I have serious doubts that trying to amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens United would work on an actual level, even apart from the obvious problem of amassing the necessary support. An amendment strategy assumes there is a silver bullet that can take care of a particular problem with a simple constitutional proposition, or a set of simple propositions. But even critics of the ruling (myself included), cannot agree on the crux of the problem -- whether it’s corporate personhood, equating money with speech, or the special status of elections in First Amendment law. More fundamentally, the complex regulatory problems of money in politics require flexibility and nuance and resist such encapsulation.
Even if you pick the right target for the silver bullet, you can never underestimate an unwilling Supreme Court’s ability to dodge it through an interpretive evasion. This creates a separate dilemma -- either you draft your amendment narrowly, accepting that resistant judges and private actors will make the most of whatever loopholes remain, or you go broad, creating potentially enormous problems of unintended consequences in the sensitive sphere of expressive freedoms.
On the aspirational level, however, a constitutional amendment strategy may be more valuable. Unlike ordinary legislation, an amendment has a unique power to capture the public imagination, catalyzing awareness and engagement. Such a strategy can yield concrete gains whether or not the proposed amendment is adopted. An educated and energized constituency is a lasting resource that can be mobilized to push for other, more readily achievable reforms.
We should, however, be suspicious when politicians use the aspirational as political cover to avoid talking about the actual. Even in the post-Citizens United era, there are reforms that are within reach and that would make a difference -- such as greater disclosure, public financing, regulatory reform and a Federal Elections Commission overhaul.
But it’s a lot easier for politicians to sign on to a highly unlikely constitutional amendment than to back reforms that would force changes in their own fund-raising practices. Treating a largely political problem as a purely constitutional problem can be just another way of passing the buck, of blaming the Supreme Court for our own failings.

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Venerable Way to Overrule Reactionary Justices

Jamie Raskin is a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law and a state senator in Maryland, where he leads the Special Committee on Ethics Reform and serves as whip for the Democratic majority. He is the author of "Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court Versus the American People."

October 24, 2012

“The state need not permit its own creation to consume it.” -- Justice Byron White
We the people have amended the Constitution many times to repair the damage to democracy inflicted by a reactionary Supreme Court. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments after the Civil War dismantled the Dred Scott decision (1857); the 19th Amendment (1920) overturned Minor v. Hapersett (1875), which held that Equal Protection did not protect the right of women to vote; and the 24th Amendment (1964) repudiated Breedlove v. Suttles (1937), which upheld the use of poll taxes to keep poor people from voting.
Today, Citizens United cries out for constitutional correction, because modern democracy requires a wall of separation between the awesome wealth of private corporations and political campaigns for public office.

All constitutional amendments seem impossible until they become inevitable, but this one is essential.

The Roberts court bulldozed this wall which, although in place for decades, was vulnerable because it was written into statute rather than into Constitutional bedrock. When the conservative bloc demolished the wall, and the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia wiped out any limits on what wealthy individuals can give to independent expenditure campaigns, these outbursts of judicial reactivism released a flood of billions of dollars into our politics.
Speaking both legally and politically, corporate political spending can have only one purpose: to earn back higher returns for investors by turning elected officials, the public and the government itself into effective tools of private corporate gain.
By converting every corporate treasury in America into a potential political slush fund, the court has endangered not only the integrity of our political institutions but the fairness and competitiveness of our market economy. Businesses should thrive by virtue of their creativity rather than the volume of their campaign spending and the number of lobbyists they employ. Adam Smith would be just as appalled as Thomas Jefferson or Franklin D. Roosevelt at this state of affairs.
A plutocratic corporate state favors huge corporations that have a symbiotic relationship with politicians and government — think of the military-industrial complex, big Pharma, the energy industry. Free-market economists are warning us that incumbent “extractive” industries like these use political power to monopolize the market, crush competition and distort public priorities. They are urging us to “save capitalism from the capitalists.” But, to do so, we first have to save the Constitution from the Supreme Court.
All constitutional amendments seem impossible until they become inevitable, but this one is essential. An amendment to empower Congress and the states to reasonably regulate campaign contributions and expenditures will allow us to restore, on firm constitutional ground, the wall of separation between corporations and elections and some semblance of political equality between the rich and everyone else.
It will protect the public’s imperiled interest in campaign finance disclosure and our nearly obliterated interest in building public financing regimes that make publicly financed candidates minimally competitive with candidates bankrolled by big private bucks.

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The First Amendment Is Just Fine As Is

Floyd Abrams is a senior partner in the firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel. He represented Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, in the Citizens United case. He also has represented The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case and other prominent cases.

October 24, 2012

I’ve just returned from a few days in Ohio. Yes, that Ohio, the likely election-deciding state. The Citizens United case, so persistently damned by so many, is at work there. Sometimes a viewer will see four ads in a row urging viewers to vote for or, at least as often, against. Sometimes it’s aggravating, sometimes enlightening. But always, it’s a vindication of the First Amendment.

The core principle that underlies the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling is the same one that underlies the First Amendment. As Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in his opinion in the case, “political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it, whether by design or inadvertence.” And, he said, the First Amendment “has its fullest and most urgent applications to speech uttered during a campaign for political office.”

It would be wrong to amend the Constitution for the first time in a way that would limit speech and freedom.

Well-established principles like these are what led the court in Citizens United to strike down legislation that made it a crime for any corporate or union money to be spent within 60 days of an election on material that appears on television, cable or satellite that endorses or denounces a candidate for federal office. It was not new for the court to apply the First Amendment to speech of corporations; Justice Kennedy cited 25 prior cases (including ones involving the corporate owner of The New York Times) involving just such First Amendment protection. The opinion, as well, made clear that Congress was fully empowered to require disclosure of who made what expenditures and in what amount.
In Citizens United itself, the speech at issue was contained in a documentary prepared by a right-wing group that harshly (and in my view terribly unfairly) criticized then-Senator Hillary Clinton when she seemed likely to be nominated by the Democratic Party for president in 2008. But that’s what the First Amendment exists to protect. The same is true of the advertisements that I saw in Ohio.
Some critics of Citizens United have gone so far as to suggest a constitutional amendment that would bar or limit what individuals could spend of their own money to seek to persuade others to support or oppose. As far back as 1976, the Supreme Court correctly concluded that any such efforts violated the First Amendment since it did not limit corruption or even the appearance of it, but did severely limit speech.

That’s the crux of the matter. Critics of Citizens United believe it is undemocratic. What they ignore is that nothing could be more undemocratic than amending the First Amendment for the first time in our history in a way that would lead to less speech and far less freedom.

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The Only Way to Revive Real Democracy

Bob Edgar is the president and chief executive of Common Cause. He represented a suburban Pennsylvania district in the House as a Democrat from 1975 to 1987.

October 24, 2012

If we’re serious about restoring government of, by and for the people, we need to get big money out of our elections.
From the Watergate era through the early 2000s, Congress and state legislatures passed campaign finance laws designed to limit the influence of corporations and wealthy donors on elections and public officials. The system was less than perfect, but it has been decimated in recent years by Supreme Court rulings like Citizens United v. F.E.C. that give corporations and unions the same constitutional rights as human beings, and equate spending an unlimited amount of money on politics with free speech.

Correct the court’s error with an amendment that would authorize limits on political money and corporate rights.

The money now flowing into our politics isn’t free speech; it’s paid speech. In this presidential campaign alone, a handful of deep-pocketed supporters of Governor Romney and President Obama are in the process of spending well over $1 billion carpeting the airwaves with mostly negative advertising.
No one invests such sums without expecting a return, and no one should be surprised when this year’s big political investors start collecting favors from the people they helped elect. It’s time to stop this charade. Corporations aren’t people. They don’t vote, get sick or die in wars for our country. The Constitution was written to protect the rights of individuals, not corporations.
We can correct the Supreme Court’s misreading of our Constitution by passing an amendment that authorizes limits on campaign contributions and spending, reins in corporate rights and ensures that all citizens, regardless of wealth, have an opportunity to speak and be heard.
Passing a constitutional amendment is rightly difficult. It requires super-majority support like that evident in a Hart Research poll done last year that found 87 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of independents and 68 percent of Republicans in support of an amendment to overturn Citizens United.
Legislators in nine states and local officials in more than 300 cities already have called for such an amendment. This Election Day, voters in Colorado, Montana, Chicago, San Francisco and dozens of municipalities will vote on ballot measures instructing their members of Congress to work and vote for such an amendment.
Big money has no place in elections, and our democracy should never be for sale. Let’s “amend to mend” the misreading of our Constitution by an overly ideological Supreme Court.

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Truth Squad: The third and final presidential debate

Andrea Mitchell and NBC's Truth Squad examine claims made by each candidate at the third and final debate of the 2012 presidential election in Boca, Raton, Fla.

NBC News takes a deep dive into the statements made by President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in their third and final debate of the 2012 election cycle.
We take a look at two topics and put their comments to the test.
IraqDuring the debate, Romney said, “We don't want another Iraq, we don't want another Afghanistan. That's not the right course for us.”
But four years ago – during another debate in Boca Raton – NBC’s Tim Russert, the moderator, asked whether the war in Iraq was worth "the cost in blood and treasure we have spent?"
Romney responded: "It was the right decision to go into Iraq. I supported it at the time. I support it now."

The president and Mitt Romney debate the best strategy for keeping the military strong.

Obama also argued that Romney, as recently as two weeks ago, said the administration should have kept troops in Iraq. “This is just a few weeks ago, you indicated that we should still have troops in Iraq,” said the president.
“No I didn't,” Romney responded. “I'm sorry.”
“It was in your speech,” Obama shot back.
“I indicated that you failed to put in place a Status of Forces agreement at the end of the conflict that existed,” Romney said.
But both men were shading their past positions.
The president was referring to an Oct. 8, 2012, speech that Romney gave criticizing the “abrupt” withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq, but the Republican didn’t explicitly say the U.S. should have more troops there.
Romney is right that the administration tried and failed to get an agreement that would have allowed a small force of U.S. troops to remain for several years.
But there is some truth in what the president said -- over the last year, Romney has said he would have left between 10,000 and 30,000 troops in Iraq to transition to Iraqi security forces taking over.
'Apology tour'During the debate, Romney pulled out one of his most frequent attack lines against the president, charging that Obama went on an “apology tour,” criticizing U.S. actions when he visited other countries early in his presidency.
“And then the president began what I've called an ‘apology tour’ of going to -- to various nations in the Middle East and -- and criticizing America,” Romney said. “I think they looked at that and saw weakness.”

The president says credibility is what's important in dealing with world affairs.

Obama responded, “Nothing Gov. Romney just said is true, starting with this notion of me apologizing, that has been the biggest whopper that’s been told in the course of this campaign and every fact checker and every reporter who has looked at it governor, has said this is not true.”
This charge is so central to Romney campaign that the governor even titled his own book, “No Apology.”
So is Romney right about this?
The president pushed back hard, insisting that he never used the word “apologize” when explaining that he thought the U.S. had made some mistakes in dealing with the world.
But this is open to interpretation. Romney points to several examples, including when the president said, in Strasbourg , France, in 2009 that, “America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”
Romney claims that shows weakness, which is harmful to U.S. positioning in the world.

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