Texas school can force teenagers to wear locator chip: judge

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - A public school district in Texas can require students to wear locator chips when they are on school property, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday in a case raising technology-driven privacy concerns among liberal and conservative groups alike.
U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia said the San Antonio Northside School District had the right to expel sophomore Andrea Hernandez, 15, from a magnet school at Jay High School, because she refused to wear the device, which is required of all students.
The judge refused the student's request to block the district from removing her from the school while the case works its way through the federal courts.
The American Civil Liberties Union is among the rights organizations to oppose the district's use of radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology.
"We don't want to see this kind of intrusive surveillance infrastructure gain inroads into our culture," ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley said. "We should not be teaching our children to accept such an intrusive surveillance technology."
The district's RFID policy has also been criticized by conservatives, who call it an example of "big government" further monitoring individuals and eroding their liberties and privacy rights.
The Rutherford Institute, a conservative Virginia-based policy center that represented Hernandez in her federal court case, said the ruling violated the student's constitutional right to privacy, and vowed to appeal.
The school district - the fourth largest in Texas with about 100,000 students - is not attempting to track or regulate students' activities, or spy on them, district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said. Northside is using the technology to locate students who are in the school building but not in the classroom when the morning bell rings, he said.
Texas law counts a student present for purposes of distributing state aid to education funds based on the number of pupils in the classroom at the start of the day. Northside said it was losing $1.7 million a year due to students loitering in the stairwells or chatting in the hallways.
The software works only within the walls of the school building, cannot track the movements of students, and does not allow students to be monitored by third parties, Gonzalez said.
The ruling gave Hernandez and her father, an outspoken opponent of the use of RFID technology, until the start of the spring semester later this month to decide whether to accept district policy and remain at the magnet school or return to her home campus, where RFID chips are not required.

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US sees Iran behind hostage photos of ex-FBI agent

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two years after a hostage video and photographs of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson raised the possibility that the missing American was being held by terrorists, U.S. officials now see the government of Iran behind the images, intelligence officials told The Associated Press.
Levinson, a private investigator, disappeared in 2007 on the Iranian island of Kish. The Iranian government has repeatedly denied knowing anything about his disappearance, and the disturbing video and photos that Levinson's family received in late 2010 and early 2011 seemed to give credence to the idea.
The extraordinary photos — showing Levinson's hair wild and gray, his beard long and unkempt — are being seen for the first time publicly after the family provided copies to the AP. The video has been previously released.
In response to Iran's repeated denials, and amid secret conversations with Iran's government, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a statement in March 2011 that Levinson was being held somewhere in South Asia. The implication was that Levinson might be in the hands of terrorist group or criminal organization somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan.
The statement was a goodwill gesture to Iran, one that the U.S. hoped would prod Tehran to help bring him home.
But nothing happened.
Two years later, with the investigation stalled, the consensus now among some U.S. officials involved in the case is that despite years of denials, Iran's intelligence service was almost certainly behind the 54-second video and five photographs of Levinson that were emailed anonymously to his family. The tradecraft used to send those items was too good, indicating professional spies were behind them, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk publicly. While everything dealing with Iran is murky, their conclusion is based on the U.S. government's best intelligence analysis.
The photos, for example, portray Levinson in an orange jumpsuit like those worn by detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. The family received them via email in April 2011. In each photo, he held a sign bearing a different message.
"I am here in Guantanamo," one said. "Do you know where it is?"
Another read: "This is the result of 30 years serving for USA."
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has personally and repeatedly criticized the U.S. over its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.
U.S. operatives in Afghanistan managed to trace the cellphone used to send the photographs, officials said. But the owner had nothing to do with the photos, and the trail went cold.
It was that way, too, with the hostage video the family received. It was sent from a cyber cafe in Pakistan in November 2010. The video depicted a haggard Levinson, who said he was being held by a "group." In the background, Pashtun wedding music can be heard. The Pashtun people live primarily in Pakistan and Afghanistan, just across Iran's eastern border.
Yet the sender left no clues to his identity and never used that email address again.
Whoever was behind the photos and video was no amateur, U.S. authorities concluded. They made no mistakes, leading investigators to conclude it had to be a professional intelligence service like Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security.
Levinson's wife, Christine, provided the photos to The Associated Press because she felt her husband's disappearance was not getting the attention it deserves from the government.
"There isn't any pressure on Iran to resolve this," she said. "It's been much too long."
Though U.S. diplomats and the FBI have tried behind the scenes to find Levinson, of Coral Springs, Fla., and bring him home, both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have said little about his case and have applied little public pressure on Iran for more information about Levinson's whereabouts.
Christine Levinson has watched more public pressure result in Iran's release of a trio of hikers, a journalist named Roxana Saberi and a team of British sailors captured by the Iranian Navy. Everyone has come home except her husband.
Washington's quiet diplomacy, meanwhile, has yielded scant results beyond the Iranian president's promise to help find Levinson.
"We assumed there would be some kind of follow-up and we didn't get any," Christine Levinson said. "After those pictures came, we received nothing."
In one meeting between the two countries, the Iranians told the U.S. that they were looking for Levinson and were conducting raids in Baluchistan, a mountainous region that includes parts of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, U.S. officials said. But the U.S. ultimately concluded that the Iranians made up the story. There were no raids, and officials determined that the episode was a ruse by Iranian counterintelligence to learn how U.S. intelligence agencies work.
In a statement late Tuesday, Alireza Miryusefi, a spokesman for Iran's U.N. Mission, said the Iranian government has been assisting the Levinson family to find the ex-FBI agent. "Even his family traveled to Iran and were accommodated by the government. Further investigation proved that Levinson is not in Iran and there is no single evidence that he is in Iran."
The spokesman added: "It is a very important to find an FBI agent who had traveled to a free zone of Iran, which if he is found, then the U.S. should explain why the said agent has been sent to Iran and what was his mission."
An expert on Russian organized crime, Levinson retired from the FBI in 1998 and became a private investigator. He was investigating cigarette smuggling in early 2007, and his family has said that took him to the Iranian island of Kish, where he was last seen. Kish is a popular resort area and a hotbed of smuggling and organized crime. It is also a free trade zone, meaning U.S. citizens do not need visas to travel there.
FBI spokeswoman Jacqueline Maguire said: "As we near the sixth anniversary of his disappearance, the FBI remains committed to bringing Bob home safely to his family."
In an interview, Levinson's wife said that because her husband disappeared in Iran, she believes her husband is still being held there. She doesn't think the U.S. government has put enough pressure on Iran to release her husband.
"It needs to come front and center again," Levinson said. "There needs to be a lot more public outcry."
She said she has met with Obama and John Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism czar and nominee to run the CIA. She said that both men pledged to do everything they could to free her husband. Now, nearly six years after his disappearance, she thinks Iran is being let off the hook.
"He's a good man," she said. "He just doesn't deserve this."
Meanwhile, Robert Levinson will miss another family milestone when his oldest daughter Susan gets married in February.
"He's missed so many," his wife said. "It's very upsetting.

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Debt ceiling no place for stand on spending: Nasdaq's Greifeld

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. borrowing limit should not be used as leverage by members of Congress to force the Obama administration to cut spending as there will be other opportunities to make a stand, said Robert Greifeld, chief executive of Nasdaq OMX Group.
The debt ceiling, which could be hit as early as mid-February, has been dragged into a high-stakes fiscal battle snarling Washington, with Republicans refusing to raise it unless Democrats agree to deep spending cuts to tame the ballooning national debt. Neither side is giving much ground.
"The full faith and credit of the U.S. government is an important concept that we should not violate, because these are debts that have been incurred and are coming due, so it is just not right," Greifeld said in an interview on Tuesday.
A failure by Washington to reach a deal to increase the $16.4 trillion legal limit on the nation's debt raises the threat of a U.S. default, another credit downgrade and a panic in the financial markets.
Greifeld is one of more than 100 CEOs who are part of a group called "Campaign to Fix the Debt." The group has been pushing Congress to work together to create a long-term plan to get the federal deficit under control through both increased taxes and spending cuts.
TRIPLE FISCAL FIASCO
Fix the Debt mounted a media blitz in the two months leading up to the so-called fiscal cliff - a package of automatic tax increases and indiscriminate spending cuts scheduled to start at the beginning of the year that threatened to push the nation back into recession, until averted by last-minute legislation.
During the media campaign, the business leaders lined up to say it was okay to raise taxes on the wealthy, but that spending cuts in programs such as Medicare and Social Security were needed as well to put the United States on a more sound fiscal footing.
But the 11th-hour bill, which included tax hikes on household incomes over $450,000, pushed forward the decision on spending cuts, known as the "sequester," by two months, setting up another, possibly more damaging scenario.
In late February-early March, the delay in the sequester ends, the federal government hits its borrowing limit, and authorization for the federal budget runs out.
Erskine Bowles, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton who along with former Republican senator Alan Simpson founded Fix the Debt, called it "a triple fiscal fiasco."
"If you think you saw uncertainty and concern when we were facing the fiscal cliff, man, you haven't seen anything yet," Bowles told reporters at a press conference at Nasdaq's MarketSite in New York.
SEVERELY DISAPPOINTED
Raising the debt ceiling periodically has not traditionally been a major issue, as government must account for the deficits resulting from its tax and spending decisions.
But last August was an exception. Congress attempted to make spending cuts a condition of raising the debt ceiling, causing volatility in the markets as the United States was pushed to the brink of default and its credit rating was cut.
Greifeld said he and other CEOs were "severely disappointed" that meaningful spending cuts were not addressed in the fiscal cliff negotiations, but that they are hopeful a more balanced approach will be taken in the near future. There will also be other opportunities to force the issue.
"The sequester - we kind of stand out there as the place to make a stand. The debt ceiling is not the place to do it," he said.

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Legal Scholar Robert Bork Dies

American legal scholar Robert Bork, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan for the U.S. Supreme Court, died on Wednesday morning. He was 85.
The Senate rejected Bork’s nomination to the high court following objections from civil rights groups over his views of the federal government and voting rights.
Conservatives blamed his failed nomination on partisanship.
During the 2012 election, Mitt Romney made Bork the chairman of his Justice Advisory Board.
Bork died in Virginia from heart disease.

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Republicans Turn to Bush for Inspiration

As Republicans reassess their future in the presidential wilderness, seeking a message and messenger to resonate with a new generation of voters, one unlikely name has popped up as a role model: former President George W. Bush.
Prominent Republicans eager to rebuild the party in the wake of the 2012 election are pointing to Bush’s successful campaigns for Hispanic votes, his efforts to pass immigration reform, and his mantra of “compassionate conservatism.” Bush won 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2000 and at least 40 percent in 2004, a high-water mark for a Republican presidential candidate.
In contrast, Romney received only 27 percent of the Latino vote, after taking a hard-line approach to illegal immigration during the Republican presidential primaries, touting “self-deportation” for undocumented workers. In exit polls, a majority of voters said that Romney was out of touch with the American people and that his policies would favor the rich. While Romney beat Obama on questions of leadership, values, and vision, the president trounced him by 63 points when voters were asked which candidate “cares about people like me.”
These signs of wear and tear to the Republican brand are prompting some of Bush’s critics to acknowledge his political foresight and ability to connect with a diverse swath of Americans, although the economic crash and unpopular wars on his watch make it unlikely he will ever be held up as a great president.
“I think I owe an apology to George W. Bush,” wrote Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of the conservative National Review Online, after the election. “I still don't like compassionate conservatism or its conception of the role of government. But given the election results, I have to acknowledge that Bush was more prescient than I appreciated at the time.”
The ebb in Bush-bashing could help pave the way for a 2016 presidential bid by his brother, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, another proponent of immigration reform with proven appeal in the Hispanic community. “The Bush family knows how to expand the party and how to win,” said GOP consultant Mark McKinnon, a former George W. Bush political aide, when asked about a possible Jeb Bush campaign. Voter wariness toward a third Bush administration could ease if the former president and his father, who served one term, are remembered less for their failures and more for their advocacy of “compassionate conservatism” and “a kinder, gentler nation.”
“I think all that certainly helps if Jeb decides to do so something down the road, though I think he will eventually be judged on his own,” said Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union, who led the Florida Republican Party when Bush was governor.
President Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, was tapped last week by the Republican National Committee to serve on a five-member committee examining what went wrong in the 2012 election. Two days earlier, a survey released by Resurgent Republic and the Hispanic Leadership Network found that a majority of Hispanic voters in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and New Mexico  don’t think the GOP “respects” their values and concerns.
“One of the party’s biggest challenges going forward is the perception that Republicans don’t care about people, about minorities, about gays, about poor people,” Fleischer said. “President Bush regularly made a push to send welcoming messages, and one of the lessons of 2012 is that we have to demonstrate that we are an inclusive party.”
President Bush’s success with minority voters stemmed in large part from his two campaigns for governor in Texas. He liked to say, “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande.” Unlike Romney, who invested little in Spanish-language advertising until the final two months of his campaign, Bush began reaching out to Hispanics early; he outspent his Democratic opponents in Spanish media in both the 2000 and 2004 campaigns.
“I remember people grumbling about making calls in December 2003, but we kept pushing,” said Jennifer Korn, who led Bush’s Hispanic outreach in his 2004 campaign. The president’s upbeat Spanish-language ads depicted Latino families getting ahead in school and at work. “I’m with Bush because he understands my family,” was the theme of one spot.
Korn, who now serves as executive director of the Hispanic Leadership Network, said Republicans are constantly asking her how the party can win a bigger share of the Latino vote.
“I tell them we already did it,” she said. “President Obama just took Bush’s plan and updated it.”
Republicans are also looking at the groundwork that Bush laid on immigration reform. He has kept a low profile since leaving office, but he waded into the debate in a speech in Dallas last month. The legislation he backed in his second term would have increased border security, created a guest-worker program, and allowed illegal immigrants to earn citizenship after paying penalties and back taxes.
“America can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time,” Bush said in Dallas. “As our nation debates the proper course of action related to immigration I hope we do so with a benevolent spirit and keep in mind the contributions of immigrants.”
Bush is even a presence in the current high-stakes budget negotiations between Capitol Hill and the White House. Although the tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration for the wealthiest Americans have been a major sticking point, the tax policy it put in place for the vast majority of households has bipartisan support.
“When you consider that the Obama administration is talking about not whether to extend the Bush tax cuts but how much of them to extend, you see that Bush is still setting the agenda,” said Republican consultant Alex Castellanos, who worked on Bush’s 2004 campaign.
While a possible presidential bid by Jeb Bush heightens the impact of his brother’s evolving legacy, it’s not unusual for a president’s image to change after leaving office. (Look at former President Clinton, who enjoyed positive ratings during most of his presidency, infuriated Obama supporters during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008, and emerged after the election as a better Democratic spokesman than Obama.)  Gallup pegged Bush’s presidential approval at 25 percent at the end of his second term, the lowest ranking since Richard Nixon. But after President Obama spearheaded unpopular spending packages and health care reforms, Bush’s popularity began to tick up.
A Bloomberg News survey in late September showed Bush’s favorability at 46 percent, 3 points higher than Romney’s rating. Still, with a majority of voters viewing the former president unfavorably, Romney rarely, if ever, mentioned his name during the campaign. Asked to address the differences between him and the former president in one of the debates, Romney said, “I’m going to get us to a balanced budget. President Bush didn’t.” Obama seized on the comparison, taking the unusual tack of praising the Republican successor he had vilified in his first campaign to portray Romney as an extremist.
“George Bush didn’t propose turning Medicare into a voucher,” Obama said. “George Bush embraced comprehensive immigration reform. He didn’t call for self-deportation. George Bush never suggested that we eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood.”
Democrats and moderate Republicans found themselves cheering for Bush, if only for a moment. A majority of voters said that Bush is more to blame for the current economic problems than Obama, according to exit polling. If Bush wasn’t the bigger scapegoat, Obama may not have won a second term.
Veterans of Bush’s campaigns and administrations say that while learning from his mistakes, Republicans should also take note of the political risks he took by proposing reforms to immigration and education laws and boosting funding for community health centers and AIDS outreach in Africa.
“One of the issues we ran into in the 2012 campaign is that there weren’t a lot of differences between Mitt Romney and Republican orthodoxy,” said Terry Nelson, Bush’s political director in the 2004 campaign. “I think that’s something Republican candidates in the future have to consider.  The public respects it when you can show you can stand up to your party on certain issues. Bush did that.

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Senators Screen 'Lincoln' with Stars Tonight

As lawmakers struggle to solve the fiscal cliff, they're set for a movie night tonight in the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.,will meet with the cast and crew of "Lincoln" including Director Steven Spielberg and actor Daniel Day-Lewis in the Capitol before the special showing.
Then each senator, along with their spouse, will be invited to watch the film in the Capitol Visitors Center within the Capitol Complex.
The film's release was delayed until after the 2012 election - but DreamWorks still scheduled a special extended two-minute TV ad during the commercial break right after the first presidential debate.
Reid, a Democrat, is a huge fan of the biopic about the most famous Republican president.

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In crusade against guns, Bloomberg finds platform beyond City Hall

Just days after he publicly scolded President Barack Obama for not being more aggressive in his efforts to curb gun violence, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he was “very encouraged” to see Obama pressing for new gun measures in the wake of last week’s deadly school shooting in Connecticut.
“His announcement is an important step in the right direction,” Bloomberg said in response to Obama announcing that he’s setting up a task force to come up with gun control proposals. “This country needs his leadership if we are going to reduce the daily bloodshed from gun violence that we have seen for far too long.”
But, the mayor added, Obama’s task force needs to “move quickly with its work.”
It was the latest example of the outspoken mayor holding the Obama administration’s feet to the fire on the hot-button issue of gun control—a subject that has been long close to the mayor’s heart.
In the days since last week’s shooting, Bloomberg has arguably become one of the key public faces of the tragedy as he bluntly urged the president and members of Congress to offer more than just “talk” in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting.
His aggressive posture comes as Bloomberg seeks to transition from being the lame duck mayor of the nation's largest city to a potentially more prominent role on the national political stage.
The 70-year-old billionaire media mogul, who is a registered Independent, has already sought to position himself as someone who can influence and shape public policy on the issues he cares about, including gun control, climate change and health care.
New York City has already been a laboratory for some of Bloomberg’s ideas throughout his three terms. Over the last decade, he’s implemented a smoking ban in New York’s restaurants, bars and parks, and pushed fast-food restaurants to post calorie counts—controversial ideas that have since been embraced by other cities around the country. More recently, Bloomberg sought to curb New York’s growing obesity epidemic by restricting the sizes of some sodas and other sugary drinks sold in the city.
"Bloomberg has been fearless in stepping out on big, controversial issues. I think he is on his way to becoming the most influential private citizen in the history of the country,” Mark McKinnon, a Texas-based political strategist who previously worked for George W. Bush, told Yahoo News.
McKinnon, who has worked with Bloomberg on a group called “No Labels,” which aims to promote nonpartisanship in politics, said the mayor’s influence extends “well beyond New York City, where he has proven what a determined mayor can get accomplished.”
But Bloomberg’s outspoken stance on guns in the aftermath of the Connecticut shooting could prove to be turning point in his efforts to move beyond City Hall.
Bloomberg co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns in 2006 and launched a super PAC last fall that worked to unseat lawmakers who were against gun control. But since last week’s shooting, the mayor has been the gun control movement's most visible champion—willing to aggressively challenge lawmakers, as he’s put it, to "do the right thing.”
Just hours after Obama went before cameras last Friday to pledge “meaningful action” in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shooting, Bloomberg issued a tough statement calling on the president to offer more than just “rhetoric.”
"Calling for 'meaningful action' is not enough. We need immediate action," the mayor said. "We have heard all the rhetoric before. What we have not seen is leadership—not from the White House and not from Congress."
Bloomberg followed up that statement with a litany of television appearances in recent days. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, the mayor insisted curbing gun violence should be Obama’s “No. 1 agenda.”
“He’s president of the United States,” Bloomberg told NBC. “And if he does nothing during his second term, something like 48,000 Americans will be killed with illegal guns.”
On Monday, Bloomberg held a news conference featuring family members of those killed in other mass shootings, including the deadly attack at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., in July, and the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech.
Addressing the group just one day after Obama spoke at a memorial service in Newtown, where he vowed to act, Bloomberg didn’t let up on the pressure, telling the group of Obama’s speech, “Words alone cannot heal our nation. Only action can do that.”
It’s unclear how influential Bloomberg is with Obama, whom he endorsed in the final weeks of the 2012 election. While Bloomberg said he had spoken with Vice President Joe Biden, who is leading the president’s task force on gun violence, there was no indication he had spoken to the president.
Asked about his Obama endorsement on “Meet the Press,” Bloomberg didn’t backtrack.
“I said in my endorsement that I endorse Barack Obama because I think his views on issues like this are the right views,” Bloomberg said. “But the president has to translate those views into action.  His job is not just to be well-meaning. His job is to perform and to protect the American public.

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Opinion: How Demography Became the Narrative for Obama's 2012 Victory

Since 2008, commentary about presidential campaigns has been saturated in the rhetoric of narrative. However, President Obama’s 2012 presidential victory wasn’t, strictly speaking, based on narrative.
So what happened? The Obama campaign focused strategically on offering specific policies or programs that targeted the new demographics. This meant ensuring a government mandate to address immigration, the issues of single women, the concerns of Hispanic, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Americans, the supporters of trade unions, and ordinary folks struggling to find jobs or keep the ones they had.
Exit polls suggested the importance of demographics. Obama captured 71 percent of the Latino vote, in contrast with only 23 percent for former Gov. Mitt Romney. The president garnered 93 percent of African-American men and 96 percent of African-American women. He won 73 percent of the Asian-American vote.
Indeed, electoral demographics have become the driving force of the past two presidential elections, a fulfillment of Peter Brimelow and Ed Rubenstein’s 1997 prophecy, “Demography is destiny in American politics.” They forecast 2008 as the year when a shift in ethnic demographics would ensure the Republican Party’s inexorable slide to “minority status.”
What, then, do the demographics of the 2012 presidential election indicate? As Nancy Benac and Connie Cass illustrated, nonwhites represented 28 percent of the 2012 electorate in contrast to just 20 percent in 2000. Obama received 80 percent of the nonwhite vote in both 2008 and 2012. White, male voters represented only 34 percent of the votes cast in the 2012 election as compared with 46 percent in 1972.
According to John Cassidy, white men chose Romney over Obama by 27 percent (62 percent to 35 percent). Caucasian women voted for Romney over Obama by 56 percent to 42 percent, a higher percentage than those who voted for either McCain in 2008 or Bush in 2004.
Today, according to Benac and Cass, 54 percent of single women vote Democratic, in contrast to 36 percent of married women. The single women’s vote was strategically significant since it accounted for nearly a quarter of all voters (23 percent) in the election.
White voters favored less government (60 percent), Hispanics wanted more (58 percent), and, by comparison, blacks were the most interventionist of these ethnic groups (73 percent). Hispanics represented a significant and growing share of prospective voters in the Western battleground states.
In 2000, for instance, white voters constituted 80 percent of voters in Nevada. But by 2012 their percentage of the total vote had declined to 64 percent while the Hispanic vote had increased by 19 percent. Not surprisingly, 70 percent of Hispanics voted for Obama in Nevada.
The youth vote sided decisively with Obama, as Benac and Cass demonstrated. In the case of North Carolina, a battleground state that narrowly supported Romney, two-thirds of these voters supported Obama. Younger voters are also more ethnically diverse. Of all Americans under 30 who voted in the election, 58 percent are white as compared with 87 percent of seniors who voted.
Just how significant are these numbers? As Ryan Lizza noted, three-fifths of white voters selected Romney, equaling or exceeding the support that former Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush had received from white voters in 1980 and 1988, respectively. But if the white electorate was 87 percent of voters in 1992, by 2016 they will represent fewer than 70 percent of American voters.
As the demographic landscape of our country changes, even conservative strongholds such as Texas will be at risk. Ted Cruz, a newly elected senator from Texas, who campaigned from a “secure-the-borders” perspective, expressed it this way to Lizza.
In not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat.... If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House.... If Texas turns bright blue, the Electoral College math is simple. We won’t be talking about Ohio, we won’t be talking about Florida or Virginia, because it won’t matter. If Texas is bright blue, you can’t get to 270electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist.
Obama and his team of advisers ran a tactically brilliant campaign. Obama’s victory wasn’t based on a narrative, because that would have exposed the economic failings of his administration.
Instead, the campaign demonized Mitt Romney by appealing to the “diversity values” of the Democratic rank and file while saturating the battleground states with attack ads. The party appealed to a multicultural mosaic: Hispanics, single women, African-Americans, ethnic minorities, young people, as well as many of the economically disenfranchised who voted, a significant number of affluent progressives, and, of course, the LGBT community.
The Democrats strategically targeted their demographic, and the demographic became the narrative. “In sports parlance,” as I have noted on The Huffington Post, “Obama’s ‘ground game’ was hard-hitting and decisive. The demonization against Romney began early and never stopped. Even before he was the designated Republican candidate, the Obama machine had Romney effectively in their sights. All is fair in political warfare. And this Democratic victory was supremely won.”
Dr. Diana E. Sheets, an iFoundry Fellow and Research Scholar at the University of Illinois, writes literary criticism, political commentary, and fiction. You can view her work at www.LiteraryGulag.com.

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Changes in law aim to protect kids' online data

Aiming to prevent companies from exploiting online information about children under 13, the Obama administration on Wednesday imposed sweeping changes in regulations designed to protect a young generation with easy access to the Internet.
Two years in the making, the amended rules to the decade-old Children's Online Privacy Protection Act go into effect in July. Privacy advocates said the changes were long overdue in an era of cellphones, tablets, social networking services and online stores with cellphone apps aimed at kids for as little as 99 cents.
Siphoning details of children's personal lives — their physical location, contact information, names of friends and more — from their Internet activities can be highly valuable to advertisers, marketers and data brokers.
The Obama administration has largely refrained from issuing regulations that might stifle growth in the technology industry, one of the U.S. economy's brightest spots. Yet the Federal Trade Commission pressed ahead with the new kids' privacy guidelines despite loud complaints — particularly from small businesses and software apps developers — that the revisions would be too costly to comply with and cause responsible companies to abandon the children's marketplace.
As evidence of online risks, the FTC last week said it was investigating an unspecified number of software developers that may have illegally gathered information without the consent of parents.
Under the changes to the law, known as COPPA, information about children that cannot be collected unless a parent first gives permission now includes the location data that a cellphone generates, as well as photos, videos and audio files containing a human image or voice.
The Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus commended the FTC for writing the new rules. "Keeping kids safe on the Internet is as important as ensuring their safety in schools, in homes, in cars," caucus co-chairman Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said at a Capitol Hill news conference.
Data known as "persistent identifiers," which allow a person to be tracked over time and across websites, are also considered personal data and covered by the rules, the agency said. But parental consent is not required when a website operator collects this data solely to support its internal operations, which can include advertising, site analysis and network communications.
The rules offer several new methods for verifying a parent's consent, including electronically scanned consent forms, video conferencing and email.
The FTC sought to achieve a balance between protecting kids and spurring innovation in the technology industry, said Jon Leibowitz, the agency's chairman.
The final rules expand the definition of a website or online service directed at children to include plug-ins and advertising networks that collect personal information from kids.
But the rules were also tightened in a way favorable to some Internet heavyweights, Google and Apple. Their online apps stores, which dominate the marketplace for mobile applications, won't be held liable for violations because they "merely offer the public access to child-directed apps," the FTC said.
Google and Apple had warned that if the rule were written to include their stores, they would jettison many apps specifically intended for kids. They said that would hurt the nation's classrooms, where new and interactive apps are used by teachers and students.
A Washington trade group that represents independent apps developers criticized the agency for addressing the concerns of large businesses while doing too little for the startups that make educational apps parents and teachers want. The FTC's belief that the apps industry will figure out how to thrive under the new rules is akin to jumping off a cliff then building a parachute, said Morgan Reed, executive director of the Association for Competitive Technology.
"While that may work for big companies, small companies lack the silk and line to build that parachute before they hit the ground," Reed said.
Companies are not excluded from advertising on websites directed at children, allowing business models that rely on advertising to continue, Leibowitz said. But behavioral marketing techniques that target children are prohibited unless a parent agrees. "You may not track children to build massive profiles," he said.
The agency included in the rules new methods for securing verifiable consent after the software industry and Internet companies raised concerns over how to confirm that the permission actually came from a parent. Electronic scans of signed consent forms are acceptable, as is video-teleconferencing between the website operator or online service and the parent, according to the agency.
The FTC also said it is encouraging technology companies to recommend additional verification methods. Leibowitz said he expects that this will "unleash innovation around consent mechanisms."
Emailed consent is also acceptable as long as the business confirms it by sending an email back to the parent or calling or sending a letter. In cases of email confirmation, the information collected can only be used for internal use by that company and not shared with third parties, the agency said.
The FTC's investigation of apps developers came after the agency examined 400 kids' apps that it purchased from Apple's iTunes store and Google's apps store, Google Play. It determined that 60 percent of them transmitted the user's unique device identification to the software maker or, more frequently, to advertising networks and companies that compile, analyze and sell consumer information for marketing campaigns.

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US, China economies 'inseparable': China official

 The economies of China and the U.S. have become "interdependent and inseparable," a top Chinese official said Wednesday after high-level trade talks which were being watched for signs of how the two powers will cooperate after their respective political transitions.
Vice Premier Wang Qishan was speaking after the annual U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade. Tackling dozens of thorny, detailed trade issues, the two days of talks were short on big outcomes but set an upbeat tone for relations after President Barack Obama's re-election and the elevation of new leaders of China's ruling Communist Party.
Wang, who last month was elevated to a spot in the elite seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, said recovery of the world economy in the next five years will be sluggish, so the U.S.-China economic relationship has acquired critical importance.
"Our two countries have to strengthen our economic relationship. We have to come to terms with the fact that we have become interdependent and inseparable," he said.
The two nations share more than $500 billion in two-way trade, heavily weighted in China's favor. That is a longstanding bone of contention for Washington, which has stepped up its trade complaints against China. It also wants Beijing to stimulate domestic demand so its economy is less reliant on export growth and allow more market access for American companies.
New Chinese party leader Xi Jinping, who will succeed Hu Jintao as the nation's president in March, is already under domestic pressure to revive a Chinese economy that has slowed some after three decades of rapid growth.
Speaking to American business executives at a glitzy dinner after the trade talks, Wang drew a direct comparison between Xi and Obama, saying both had a "very heavy weight to bear" to make good on promises they have made to their peoples during the campaign for "election."
Wang said China was sticking to the path of economic reform. He said China would honor its promises to observe trade rules and give fair treatment to foreign companies — amid concerns over the reach of China's hulking state-owned enterprises and restrictions on investment in some sectors of the economy.
"When we say we are opening up in China, it's not just empty talk," said Wang, who has been China's point man on financial and trade policy with the United States. He will soon be giving up that portfolio to focus on the fight against corruption.
Both sides were upbeat about the wide-ranging trade talks.
The U.S. cited progress on intellectual property protection, market barriers and Chinese government procurement policies but said there was much more to be done.
"We have provided a new platform for a strong U.S.-China relationship," acting U.S. Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank told a news conference.
China pointed to U.S. reforms of its controls on high-technology exports and a commitment to fair treatment for Chinese companies investing in the U.S. China claims its companies are discriminated against in national security screening procedures.
Commerce Minister Chen Deming sounded a note of caution, saying China still needed to wait for a while to observe "what kind of measures the U.S. side is going to take." Wang contended that Chinese investors were being subject to political background checks.
U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said China's concerns on the investment screening would be referred to Treasury but defended the screening procedures as having affected few investors. He said Chinese direct investment in the U.S. had grown to $9 billion from $2 billion in just three years.

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Reported sex assaults spike at military academies

Reported sexual assaults at the nation's three military academies jumped by 23 percent overall this year, but the data signaled a continued reluctance by victims to seek criminal investigations.
According to a report obtained by The Associated Press, the number of assaults rose from 65 in the 2011 academic year to 80 in 2012. However, nearly half the assaults involved victims who sought confidential medical or other care and did not trigger an investigation. There were 41 assaults reported in 2010.
Reported sexual assaults have climbed steadily since the 2009 academic year. The Defense Department has urged the academies to take steps to encourage cadets and midshipmen at the Army, Navy and Air Force academies to report sexual harassment and assaults in order to get care to everyone and hold aggressors accountable. The number of assaults reported by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., increased, while reports at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., declined.
In addition to the sexual assault report, the military also is releasing the results of its biannual anonymous survey of academy students, which showed that 12 percent of the women said they experienced "unwanted sexual contact" and 51 percent said they were sexually harassed. Of the men, 2 percent experienced unwanted contact and 10 percent said they were sexually harassed.
Officials are concerned whenever the number of reported sexual assaults goes down while the anonymous survey suggests that unwanted sexual contact goes up or stays the same. That's because military officials want victims to feel comfortable going to their superiors to report incidents.
The report divides the assaults into two categories, restricted and unrestricted. Unrestricted reports rose slightly from 38 last year to 42 this year, and those are provided to either law enforcement or military commanders for an investigation. Restricted reports jumped from 27 last year to 38 this year, and in those cases victims sought medical care and advocacy services but did not seek an official investigation.

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Census: US population growth rising again

America's population is now increasing a bit faster thanks to an improving economy, but not enough to lift growth above its lowest level since the Great Depression.
New 2012 estimates released Thursday by the Census Bureau offer the latest snapshot of the U.S. population, whose growth has slowed dramatically since the recent recession.
"After decades of wars, a depression, immigration surges, baby booms, boomlets and busts, we are entering a new era of modest growth," said William H. Frey, a demographer at Brookings Institution, who analyzed the numbers.
As a whole, the U.S. population grew by 2.3 million, reaching 313.9 million people. That growth of 0.75 percent was higher than the 0.73 percent rate in 2011, ending five years of slowing growth rates. Nevertheless, growth levels remains stuck at historically low levels not seen since 1937, restrained by reduced childbirths.
Over the last year, the economy has shown improvement, with the unemployment rate declining modestly and U.S. migration edging up after hitting a record low in 2011. As a result, states including Texas, North Dakota, Colorado, Oregon and Virginia posted population growth increases as many young adults moved out from their parents' homes, seeking to test the job market in areas with thriving economies in energy or technology.
Still, the nation continues to get older, due to aging baby boomers and fewer people in their child-bearing years. Newly released census projections now show that U.S. growth may have largely peaked, barring a significant and sustained increase in new immigrants. The numbers put U.S. growth in the next year or two at just under 0.8 percent, before flattening and gradually falling to rates of about half a percent, a level unseen in more than a century.
U.S. growth reached a high in 1950 of more than 2 percent, lifted by the post-World War II baby boom.
Foreign immigration also was back on the uptick in 2012, after falling significantly during the downturn, although it remained far from the level seen during the mid-2000 housing boom. Congress is expected to debate an overhaul of immigration law next year.
"We will now need to cope with population challenges that past growth has left us — notably, the needs of a large aging baby boom population which will require resources for its medical care, and the social and economic integration of first- and second-generation immigrants," Frey said.
The Census Bureau released state population estimates as of July 1, 2012. The data show annual changes through births, deaths, and domestic and foreign migration.
The data suggest that the impact of the recession on formerly fast-growing Sun Belt states may be waning. Nevada had more residents move into the state this year after suffering migration losses in previous years. Arizona and Florida, two other housing boom-and-bust states, also showed renewed migration gains after seeing their growth drop off sharply at the end of the last decade.
In all, 26 states grew faster this year compared to the previous year, of which 19 are in the South and West region.
"These gains remain far smaller than those each state experienced during the economic boom, but reflect considerable improvement over the situation at the depths of the recession," said Kenneth Johnson, a sociologist and senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire, referring specifically to Arizona, Nevada and Florida.
In contrast, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey saw more of their residents move out compared to the previous year.
North Dakota grew faster than any state in the nation, climbing by 2.2 percent from July 2011 to July of this year. The District of Columbia was next-fastest growing, followed by Texas, Wyoming and Utah.
Two states lost population: Rhode Island and Vermont.
Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, said if the 2010 census had been held this year, Minnesota would have lost a seat in the House of Representatives and North Carolina would have picked up one due to the shifting population figures. Based on continuing losses, Rhode Island is now on track to lose one of its two seats with just 33,000 people to spare — potentially to the gain of Oregon, which is about 59,000 people away from gaining a sixth seat.
"We are seeing some signs of revival and change," Brace said.
California remained the most populous state, followed by Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois.

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Groups: $12 million mystery donation was crime

Two election watchdog organizations on Thursday urged the Justice Department and Federal Election Commission to investigate more than $12 million in campaign contributions that were mysteriously funneled through two little-known companies in Tennessee to a prominent tea party group. The origin of the money, the largest anonymous political donations in a campaign year filled with them, remains a secret.
The watchdog groups said routing the $12 million through the Tennessee companies appeared to violate a U.S. law prohibiting the practice of laundering campaign contributions in the name of another person. They also said the lawyer in Tennessee who registered the companies, William S. Rose Jr. of Knoxville, may have violated three other laws by failing to organize each company as a political committee, register them as political committees and file financial statements for them with the government.
Rose did not return a telephone message, text message and email from The Associated Press and could not otherwise be reached immediately for comment. He previously told AP that his business was a "family secret" and he was not obligated to disclose the origin of the $12 million routed through Specialty Investments Group Inc. and Kingston Pike Development Corp. Business records indicate that Rose registered Kingston Pike one day after he created Specialty Group, in the final weeks before Election Day. Rose previously complained that phone calls and emails from reporters were irritating.
The watchdog organizations, the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21, said a criminal investigation by the Justice Department was necessary "because the integrity of U.S. elections depends on the effective enforcement of the nation's campaign finance laws." They noted that, although the FEC traditionally enforces campaign finance laws and imposes civil fines for violations, the Justice Department can conduct criminal investigations of "knowing and willful" violations under the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act. Violations could carry up to 5 years in prison. The groups separately urged the FEC to investigate.
The contributions "raise serious questions about whether this was an illegal scheme to launder money into the 2012 elections and hide from the public the true identity of the sources of the money," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21. He said no one should be permitted to "launder huge, secret contributions through corporate shells into federal elections."
The money went to the tea party's most prominent "super" political committee, FreedomWorks for America, which spent the money on high-profile congressional races. The $12 million accounted for most of the $20 million the group raised this year. A spokeswoman for the FreedomWorks organization, Jackie Bodnar, did not return a telephone message left with her. FreedomWorks has previously declined to identify who was behind the donations to its super PAC or discuss them further.
The contributions represent a glaring example of the murkiness surrounding who is giving money to politicians in modern elections, shaped by new federal rules allowing unlimited and anonymous donations. The law has allowed wealthy executives, corporations and other organizations to establish shell companies and mail drops to disguise the source of the money they give to political groups and politicians. But the mysterious donations linked to Rose by far eclipse any suspicious money sent to support the campaigns of President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney.
More than half the $12 million in contributions was routed through Rose's companies in the final days before the election even as the AP and Knoxville News Sentinel were jointly investigating $5.2 million in suspicious donations traced to one of the companies during October. That company, Specialty Group Inc., filed incorporation papers in September less than one week before it gave FreedomWorks several contributions worth between $125,000 and $1.5 million each. Specialty Group appeared to have no website describing its products or services. It was registered to a suburban Knoxville home.
Rose subsequently renamed the company Specialty Investments Group Inc. That firm and Kingston Pike Development Corp. — which Rose also registered and owns — were used to steer $6.8 million more in contributions to FreedomWorks. Among other amounts, FreedomWorks spent more than $1.8 million of the money on Connie Mack's unsuccessful Senate campaign in Florida and a similar amount opposing Tammy Duckworth, who was elected to Congress in Illinois.
Under U.S. law, corporations can give unlimited sums of money to outside groups supporting candidates, but not if their sole purpose is to make campaign contributions.
"These companies appear to have been created to hide the identities of one or more donors that pumped millions of dollars into a super PAC anonymously in the final weeks before an election," said the senior counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, Paul S. Ryan. He said such contributions could allow foreign governments, companies or citizens — all of whom are prohibited from donating to U.S. politicians — to launder money into American elections using similar practices.
Rose said in a statement last month that he formed Specialty Group to buy, sell, develop and invest in a variety of real estate ventures and investments. He declined interview requests from the AP over three weeks and complained in his statement that reporters had contacted his ex-wife and business colleagues. He also disputed any characterization that his company was "shadowy."
"The business of Specialty Group is my family secret, a secret that will be kept — as allowed by applicable law — for at least another 50 years," Rose said in his statement.

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