Republicans and Racism

From TNR's Timothy Noah's article, some highlights:

• The Republican party's small-government philosophy has limited federal interference with discriminatory practices at the state and local level, and with racial bigotry generally. 
• The Republican majority on the Supreme Court will likely soon abolish affirmative action altogether. 
• The Republican party's tax policies favor rich "job creators," who tend disproportionately to be white, and its opposition to the welfare state--initially to cash transfers, then to non-cash assistance like food stamps, and finally even to unemployment benefits--tends to harm lower-income people, who tend disproportionately to be black. 
• The Republican party's criminal justice policies have put an appallingly high proportion of black men in jail, often for petty drug offenses. 
• Republicans tend to favor the death penalty, which leads to execution of a disproportionate number of blacks.

What Obama is doing Wrong

Glenn Greewald lists all the things Obama is doing that are against Progressive/Liberal world view

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations withdrones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of aCongressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremelyracist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation”, all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.

Getting Started with iPhone 4S

List of useful apps to get you started

Flipboard, Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, Foursquare more here and here 

Top 100 Free Apps 

Quixey - Search for an app by what you want to do

Gizmodo Best iPhone app list

Time Magazine - 50 Best iPhone Apps of 2011

iPhone Home screens of Top Techies

How to check your iPhone's Data usage

First, head to your iPhone's settings app. Scroll down to "General," then click on "usage." You'll see your minute breakdown, but at the very bottom you'll see your data usage (sending and receiving) over AT&T's cellular network. If you've never reset your stats, you'll find that this number will be fairly high. (source: geeksugar)

You can also call *DATA# and AT&T will send you a text message with your data usage this billing cycle. 

Organize your ever increasing apps into folders

Steve Jobs presented the new folder feature as easy as dropping one app on top of another to create a new folder. Yes, that’s easy to do, but if you have several hundred apps on your iPhone, that process is a lot more tedious than most will like. Read more here

 Keep up-to-date on iPhone happenings using these popular blogs' iPhone tags

All Things Digital

TechCrunch

lifehacker

How to restart an iPhone

To restart iPhone, first turn iPhone off by pressing and holding the Sleep/Wake button until a red slider appears. Slide your finger across the slider and iPhone will turn off after a few moments. Next, turn iPhone on by pressing and holding the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple logo appears.

Indian Cricketers with Most frequent Man of the Match Awards

Sachin is the undisputed king. He has a Man of the Match for every 7 ODI inns. The following is a list of Indian cricketers with atleast 5 Mom Awards. Surprising omission Harbhajan Singh. He has only 4 MoM awards till date. Kohli is raising fast in the ranks

Obama's Achievements so far

A good website with more specifics: http://whattheheckhasobamadonesofar.com/

From Andrew Sullivan:

Here are the political accomplishments: defeating the most heavily favored party machine in decades (the Clintons) while actually bringing his biggest rival into his cabinet, where she has performed extraordinarily well; helping to cement the GOP's broad identity as extremists opposed to compromise; entrenching black and Hispanic loyalty to his party; retaining solid favorables and not-too-shabby approval ratings during the worst recession since the 1930s. 44 percent of the country still (rightly) blame Bush for this mess, only 15 percent blame Obama. 

On policy: ending the US torture regime; prevention of a second Great Depression; enacting universal healthcare; taking the first serious steps toward reining in healthcare costs; two new female Supreme Court Justices; ending the gay ban in the military; ending the Iraq war; justifying his Afghan Surge by killing bin Laden and now disentangling with face saved; firming up alliances with India, Indonesia and Japan as counter-weights to China; bailing out the banks and auto companies without massive losses (and surging GM profits); advancing (slowly) balanced debt reduction without drastic cuts during the recession; and financial re-regulation. 

Yes, there have been failures. The election of Scott Brown; the 2010 mid-terms; the surrender to Netanyahu and AIPAC; the botched and ill-conceived war in Libya; the failure to embrace Bowles Simpson up-front; the collapse of cap and trade (maybe not such a bad thing anyway). 

Interesting Stats about Asians in America

• The top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. This is what it looks like: Asian-­Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school.
• The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade has calculated that an Asian applicant must, in practice, score 140 points higher on the SAT than a comparable white applicant to have the same chance of admission.
• According to a recent study, Asian-­Americans represent roughly 5 percent of the population but only 0.3 percent of corporate officers, less than 1 percent of corporate board members, and around 2 percent of college presidents. There are nine Asian-American CEOs in the Fortune 500. In specific fields where Asian-Americans are heavily represented, there is a similar asymmetry. A third of all software engineers in Silicon Valley are Asian, and yet they make up only 6 percent of board members and about 10 percent of corporate officers of the Bay Area’s 25 largest companies. At the National Institutes of Health, where 21.5 percent of tenure-track scientists are Asians, only 4.7 percent of the lab or branch directors are, according to a study conducted in 2005. 
• While only 15 percent of the male population is at least six feet tall, 58 percent of all corporate CEOs are. 

source: http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/asian-americans-2011-5/

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