Wednesday, February 02, 2005
today's papersDean's ListBy Eric UmanskyPosted Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2005, at 12:21 AM PT
The New York Times leads with Howard Dean becoming essentially a sure thing to head the Democratic National Committee, as his main rival dropped out of the race. "It's a fait accompli," said one powerful union leader. "Dean's going to be it." The final vote will be in about two weeks. Dean has promised he'll focus on, or least won't neglect, meat-and-potato issues such as channeling lots of dough to candidates. The Los Angeles Times' lead announces: "SHIITE ALLIANCE CLAIMS VICTORY." It's an interesting choice since, as the piece notes, whatever the alliance is claiming, international observers insisted there are no solid numbers yet. "My feeling is there isn't anybody in the country who knows how to calculate a statistically reliable estimate for this election," one "expert" told the Washington Post.
USA Today leads with Pope John Paul II being hospitalized for breathing trouble, apparently after coming down with the flu. The Post leads with the National Institutes of Health banning all 18,000 of its employees from consulting for or investing in drug companies. While the LAT flagged the new regs yesterday, the Post emphasizes NIH employees griping that the ban is too wide. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox (online, at least) with a preview of tonight's State of the Union address, where President Bush is apparently going to tease just a bit more of his plan for Social Security.
The WP says there's been a "sharp drop in attacks" since Sunday's vote—and lingering happiness on the street. Meanwhile, four Iraqi soldiers were killed in Mosul, and two police officers were killed in the Kurdish city of Irbil.
The NYT says the U.S., as has long been discussed, is now shifting some GIs from combat and to training and advising Iraqi troops.
Everybody mentions that Iraq's interim, Sunni, and largely ceremonial president, Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar said it would be "complete nonsense" to ask for the U.S.'s withdrawal.
The papers all mention the photo insurgents released of an apparently captured GI ... doll. The Pentagon said no soldiers are missing. And a toy-maker said the "hostage" looks just like the action-figure they make, complete with goofy, non-standard vest. Here's a blog that seems to have figured it out first. (The NYT doesn't quote the manufacturer; instead it cites the "Drudge Report, a Web site that specializes in media issues.")
The NYT goes inside with a few "claims of elections irregularities." Most prominently, Kurdish Christian leaders complained that about 200,000 of their supporters were effectively disenfranchised after ballots didn't arrive. The electoral commission said it will investigate any protests.
USAT profiles an Iraqi policeman who, when he spotted a suicide attacker at a polling site, "threw his arms around the bomber and drove him backward ... into an intersection." The attacker blew himself up, killing only himself and the policeman. "Suicide bombers are not the only ones willing to give up their lives," said one of cop's commanders. Voting continued after the attack.
The NYT off-leads government scientists concluding "with near certainty" that North Korea has sold processed uranium to Libya. And now the U.S. is running around trying to figure out if Pyongyang has been selling the stuff to others too. The Times says the White House has previously argued there was no rush to solve things with North Korea since there was no evidence it was pawning nuclear goods.
The Post says inside that Egypt is cracking down on opposition politicians as President Hosni Mubarak mulls a potential referendum that would rubber-stamp his rule for another six years. The WP doesn't mention the White House's reaction. But a WP editorial says the administration has actually "forcefully" complained about the case behind closed doors—and, says the editorial, should do more.
The LAT notices that much of what's on the White House's domestic to-do list would not only further the GOP's agenda but also probably help benefit the GOP itself. For instance, as one Republican senator recently put it, "If we could succeed in getting some form of tort reform passed—medical malpractice reform or any of part of that—it would go a long ways toward taking away the muscle, the financial muscle" of Democratic-supporting lawyers.
The Post fronts "turf battles" that have been adding to the Department of Homeland Security's already well-documented problems. One "former official" referred to "a civil war" within the department that has caused paralysis on, among other things, shoring up shipping container safety. Meanwhile, DHS's investigative branch got in some sort of funding tiff and has been operating with so little money "that use of agency vehicles and photocopying were at times banned." Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2113040/
Google shares soar to record on strong sales and profit By Saul Hansell The New York Times Thursday, February 3, 2005Google shares rose more than 10 percent on Wednesday after the Internet search engine surprised Wall Street by announcing that its sales and profit margins grew much faster than expected in the fourth quarter.The results, announced late Tuesday, were in sharp contrast to the warnings in November that Google's revenue for the quarter would probably decline because of increased competition and a slowing of what had been a rapid pace of growth.Google's shares surged Wednesday to an intraday high of $216.80, a record. The company sold shares in its initial offering in August for $85 each. In late trading the stock was at $19.68, or 10.3 percent, at $211.58 on the Nasdaq. "More humans around the world are using Google, and they are spending more time with Google per human," the chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said in an interview. At the same time, he said, "Advertisers are bidding higher because they understand the value of clicks better." Google makes nearly all of its money when users click on the ads that appear on its search site and on the sites of other publishers for whom it sells ads. The price per click is determined by an auction.Bid prices, Schmidt said, have increased sharply outside the United States, where Google has made substantial investments over the past year.Google, based in Mountain View, California, reported a profit of $204 million in the fourth quarter, up from $27.3 million a year earlier. Revenue doubled to $1.03 billion. Its revenue grew nearly as fast from the network of sites on which it sells ads as it did for sites it owns, even though Google had predicted that the network growth would slow.Ad revenue from Google's sites was $530 million, up 118 percent. Ad revenue from the network of other sites was $490 million, up 92 percent, but Google paid $378 million of that revenue to the sites' owners.Payments to other sites, however, are declining as a percentage of network ad revenue. Google paid 77 percent of its network revenue to other sites in the most recent quarter, compared with 85 percent a year earlier. That came despite sharp competition from Yahoo, which is also bidding to sell ads for other sites.Google's profit was equal to 71 cents a share. Wall Street, however, excludes noncash charges for stock option grants and some other items from its estimates. On that basis, Google earned 92 cents a share, while analysts had expected 77 cents.Schmidt said that the warning Google issued in November, which was in a regulatory filing, had come at the suggestion of Google's lawyers and that while he expected growth to slow eventually, that was not happening now.Still, he said, the most recent quarter exceeded his expectations."We expected a good quarter," he said, "and it turned out to be exceptional."Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, said that while he had expected Google to do well overseas, he was especially surprised at the company's growth in the United States.Several market research companies have said that Yahoo is gaining on Google, but it appears that Google's share of search revenue increased."People are starting to use Google in more ways and more often than ever before," Rohan said. "They may only use Yahoo to look up specific things."Schmidt said that Google now had more advertising revenue than any other company. And indeed its revenue, after payments to other sites, was $654 million, compared with $618 million in the fourth quarter for Yahoo, the previous leader. Google did not make any forecasts of future sales and earnings, which left analysts struggling to figure out how to adjust their own projections. Rohan, who has not finished adjusting his forecast, said that his estimates for sales and profit would be increasing and that he expected Google's share price to rise.Schmidt said one priority for Google would be the personalization of a search, taking advantage of information about the interests and attributes of each user to present better results. This has been a focus of Yahoo, which has a much bigger database on individual users than does Google."Our priority is to have more information, delivered more personally, more globally, with more targeting of who the end users are and what they are looking for," Schmidt said.
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In Speech, Bush Sketches a Bold Domestic and Foreign AgendaBy RICHARD W. STEVENSONand DAVID E. SANGER
ASHINGTON, Feb. 2 - President Bush challenged Congress on Wednesday night to join him in reinventing Social Security for the 21st century, and for the first time he laid out details of how he would create individual investment accounts and assure the long-term health of the retirement system.
"Social Security was a great moral success of the 20th century, and we must honor its great purposes in this new century," he said. "The system, however, on its current path, is headed toward bankruptcy. And so we must join together to strengthen and save Social Security."
Delivering his State of the Union address three days after Iraqis went to the polls in their first free election in half a century, Mr. Bush also promised not to abandon the American mission there before the Iraqis are capable of providing their own security.
"We will not set an artificial timetable for leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out," he said.
Turning to the Middle East, where Israelis and Palestinians are embarking on a new effort at peace, he asked Congress for $350 million to support the Palestinians under their new president, Mahmoud Abbas.
He also expanded on the promise in his Inaugural Address to fight tyranny, saying to the Iranian people, "As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you," and urging Saudi Arabia and Egypt to "show the way toward democracy in the Middle East."
He gave a preview of a domestic battle he will join in earnest next week, saying the budget he will propose on Monday would substantially reduce or eliminate more than 150 programs, an assault on government spending of a scale not seen since the ill-fated effort by Congressional Republicans in 1995 to cut entire cabinet agencies.
"The principle here is clear," he said. "A taxpayer dollar must be spent wisely, or not at all."
The president went into the speech fortified by his narrow but decisive victory over Senator John Kerry in November, expanded Republican majorities in the House and Senate and images of Iraqis turning out to vote on Sunday in large numbers. Lawmakers stopped on their way into the House chamber to dip their fingers into purple ink in a gesture of solidarity with Iraqis similarly marked when they cast their ballots.
Mr. Bush will not face the voters again. But this year's address opened what could be the last two campaigns of his career. One is to persuade Congress and the American people to go along with his plans to remake not just Social Security but large swaths of other domestic policy along conservative lines through judicial appointments, legislation and executive action.
The other is to shape his own place in history as a leader who extended freedom and democracy more broadly into the world even as he unleashed American military might to combat what he has cast as the terrorist threat to those values.
He linked the two as elements of a generational commitment, referring to the children and grandchildren of those holding power today and asking, "What will be the state of their union?"
Mr. Bush's proposal for Social Security, if enacted, would produce the first fundamental overhaul in the way the retirement system works since it was created seven decades ago. Once fully phased in, his plan would allow workers who will be 55 or younger this year to place as much as four percentage points of their Social Security payroll tax into personal accounts that they could invest in stocks and bonds and draw on only after retiring.
He did not say how he would pay for his plan; nor did he commit himself to any particular course of cuts in the guaranteed benefit to restore the retirement system's financial health. But simply by putting Social Security at the top of his domestic agenda and making it the centerpiece of his address, he declared his willingness to engage fully in one of the most politically fraught and ideologically charged policy battles of recent times.
To create a sense of urgency in Congress, where Democrats are united against him on the issue and many if not most Republicans are far less eager than he is to change the federal retirement program, Mr. Bush described Social Security as in dire financial condition.
"If you've got children in their 20's, as some of us do, the idea of Social Security collapsing before they retire does not seem like a small matter," he said. "And it should not be a small matter to the United States Congress."
Critics of Mr. Bush's approach have accused him of fear-mongering, saying there is no immediate crisis and that his prescription for change is too expensive and introduces too much risk. His references to impending bankruptcy brought hoots of protest from Democrats in the House chamber.
In the Democratic response to Mr. Bush, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the party's leader in the Senate, likened the president's Social Security plan to roulette.
"Democrats are all for giving Americans more of a say and more choices when it comes to their retirement savings," Mr. Reid said. "But that doesn't mean taking Social Security's guarantee and gambling with it. And that's coming from a senator who represents Las Vegas."
Social Security's actuaries estimate that the system will remain healthy until 2018, when it will begin paying out more in benefits than it takes in through payroll taxes. It would then be able to pay full benefits until 2042 by cashing in its trust fund of government bonds. After that, it would be able to pay about three-quarters of the benefits promised under current law, which calls for benefits to rise faster than the cost of living.
As outlined by Mr. Bush in his address and described in more detail by a White House official beforehand, the proposal would eventually allow workers born in 1950 and later to divert as much as a third of the payroll taxes that they and their employers contribute to Social Security into a personal account. Their government-paid Social Security benefit would be reduced by the amount they place in the account. If Wall Street continued to deliver the rates of return on investments in coming decades that it has in the past, workers would in theory come out ahead.
But Mr. Bush did little to resolve how he would deal with the most explosive component of his approach: the additional benefit cuts that would be necessary to solve Social Security's long-term financial problems. But for the first time he spelled out some of the options, including changing the formula used to set initial benefits, discouraging early retirement and raising the retirement age, notably attributing each idea to a Democrat, including former President Bill Clinton and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who died two years ago.
"All these ideas are on the table," he said. "I know that none of these reforms would be easy. But we have to move ahead with courage and honesty, because our children's retirement security is more important than partisan politics."
Mr. Bush skirted the issue of paying for the establishment of the accounts. That process, by the White House's calculation, would require more than $750 billion in additional government borrowing between now and 2015, and trillions of dollars of additional borrowing in the subsequent decade once the system is fully up and running.
A senior administration official acknowledged before Mr. Bush's address that his framework for the personal accounts would not by itself do anything to close the financial gap Social Security will face in coming decades as the baby-boom generation retires and life expectancy continues to increase.
Because of the need for benefit cuts and large-scale borrowing at a time when the nation's indebtedness is already weighing on its economic prospects, the outlook for Mr. Bush's proposal in Congress is murky at best.
Democrats, unified against Mr. Bush on the issue as they have been on few others over the last four years, assailed his approach and announced plans to wage an aggressive campaign against it. Republicans praised his address as a step forward in building a consensus for overhauling the system, but some of them acknowledged continued unease in their ranks over whether and how to proceed. He tried to assuage his conservative base by reasserting his opposition to gay marriage, repeating his support for a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as between a man and a woman. He went on to repeat his belief in "a culture of life," and while not specifying whether he would revisit his decision on limiting stem cell research, he said he wanted to "work with Congress to ensure that human embryos are not created for experimentation or grown for body parts."
He also described a new three-year initiative to "keep young people out of gangs" and said the effort would be led by his wife, Laura Bush.
Wednesday night was the sixth time Mr. Bush has stood in the House chamber to address the nation.
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today's papers
Dean's List
By Eric Umansky
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2005, at 12:21 AM PT
The New York Times leads with Howard Dean becoming essentially a sure thing to head the Democratic National Committee, as his main rival dropped out of the race. "It's a fait accompli," said one powerful union leader. "Dean's going to be it." The final vote will be in about two weeks. Dean has promised he'll focus on, or least won't neglect, meat-and-potato issues such as channeling lots of dough to candidates. The Los Angeles Times' lead announces: "SHIITE ALLIANCE CLAIMS VICTORY." It's an interesting choice since, as the piece notes, whatever the alliance is claiming, international observers insisted there are no solid numbers yet. "My feeling is there isn't anybody in the country who knows how to calculate a statistically reliable estimate for this election," one "expert" told the Washington Post.
USA Today leads with Pope John Paul II being hospitalized for breathing trouble, apparently after coming down with the flu. The Post leads with the National Institutes of Health banning all 18,000 of its employees from consulting for or investing in drug companies. While the LAT flagged the new regs yesterday, the Post emphasizes NIH employees griping that the ban is too wide. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox (online, at least) with a preview of tonight's State of the Union address, where President Bush is apparently going to tease just a bit more of his plan for Social Security.
The WP says there's been a "sharp drop in attacks" since Sunday's vote—and lingering happiness on the street. Meanwhile, four Iraqi soldiers were killed in Mosul, and two police officers were killed in the Kurdish city of Irbil.
The NYT says the U.S., as has long been discussed, is now shifting some GIs from combat and to training and advising Iraqi troops.
Everybody mentions that Iraq's interim, Sunni, and largely ceremonial president, Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar said it would be "complete nonsense" to ask for the U.S.'s withdrawal.
The papers all mention the photo insurgents released of an apparently captured GI ... doll. The Pentagon said no soldiers are missing. And a toy-maker said the "hostage" looks just like the action-figure they make, complete with goofy, non-standard vest. Here's a blog that seems to have figured it out first. (The NYT doesn't quote the manufacturer; instead it cites the "Drudge Report, a Web site that specializes in media issues.")
The NYT goes inside with a few "claims of elections irregularities." Most prominently, Kurdish Christian leaders complained that about 200,000 of their supporters were effectively disenfranchised after ballots didn't arrive. The electoral commission said it will investigate any protests.
USAT profiles an Iraqi policeman who, when he spotted a suicide attacker at a polling site, "threw his arms around the bomber and drove him backward ... into an intersection." The attacker blew himself up, killing only himself and the policeman. "Suicide bombers are not the only ones willing to give up their lives," said one of cop's commanders. Voting continued after the attack.
The NYT off-leads government scientists concluding "with near certainty" that North Korea has sold processed uranium to Libya. And now the U.S. is running around trying to figure out if Pyongyang has been selling the stuff to others too. The Times says the White House has previously argued there was no rush to solve things with North Korea since there was no evidence it was pawning nuclear goods.
The Post says inside that Egypt is cracking down on opposition politicians as President Hosni Mubarak mulls a potential referendum that would rubber-stamp his rule for another six years. The WP doesn't mention the White House's reaction. But a WP editorial says the administration has actually "forcefully" complained about the case behind closed doors—and, says the editorial, should do more.
The LAT notices that much of what's on the White House's domestic to-do list would not only further the GOP's agenda but also probably help benefit the GOP itself. For instance, as one Republican senator recently put it, "If we could succeed in getting some form of tort reform passed—medical malpractice reform or any of part of that—it would go a long ways toward taking away the muscle, the financial muscle" of Democratic-supporting lawyers.
The Post fronts "turf battles" that have been adding to the Department of Homeland Security's already well-documented problems. One "former official" referred to "a civil war" within the department that has caused paralysis on, among other things, shoring up shipping container safety. Meanwhile, DHS's investigative branch got in some sort of funding tiff and has been operating with so little money "that use of agency vehicles and photocopying were at times banned."
Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2113040/
