Hello friends! So the original headline for this post was, let's talk about your halloween costume and how you ate too many Milk Duds last night. We can talk about that, but we can also talk about anything your heart desires. And today, my heart desires a Google Nexus 5
     |
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/DZ4yEnKz7tI/@marioaguilarRepublican Dean Young (above) is backed by the Tea Party. He faces Bradley Byrne in a special runoff election Tuesday to fill Alabama's 1st Congressional District seat.
Republican Dean Young (above) is backed by the Tea Party. He faces Bradley Byrne in a special runoff election Tuesday to fill Alabama's 1st Congressional District seat.
If the Republican establishment doesn't get its preferred candidate in Tuesday's Alabama special congressional runoff election, it won't be for want of an overwhelming cash advantage.
Bradley Byrne, a former head of the state's community college system, has outraised Tea Party favorite Dean Young $689,000 to $260,000, according to the latest Federal Election Commission filings. And Young's total includes $175,000 the real estate developer and political consultant has lent himself, meaning the actual fundraising ratio is more like 8 to 1.
The outside money ratio is also 8 to 1, according to an NPR review of FEC independent expenditure reports. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has, as of Halloween, poured in $199,000 to help Byrne in the final days before next week's runoff, paying for phone calls, emails, Web ads and direct mail pieces.
Young has benefited from $25,000 worth of television ads from Our Voice PAC, a group run by unsuccessful Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle. Angle was the Tea Party favorite who won the GOP nomination in 2010 but then lost to Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid. Her group had previously spent $40,000 helping Young in the days before the Sept. 24 primary election, which helped him finish second in the crowded field and set up Tuesday's runoff.
The election is the first in what could be a series of Republican primaries where establishment money that has traditionally been saved for a general election against a Democrat is instead spent defeating a Tea Party-backed candidate. Big businesses, investors and other traditional GOP allies have become increasingly frustrated with congressional Republicans willing to take confrontational positions to appease their Tea Party faction.
The government shutdown and apparent willingness to breach the nation's debt ceiling last month have led the chamber and other groups to decide to get more actively involved in Republican primaries.
Whether this big money advantage will matter is an open question. There has been little public polling — and polls of low-turnout special elections are notoriously unreliable to begin with. Nonetheless, Byrne's campaign has said it believes the race is close.
Young is a Christian conservative and former campaign aide to Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore. He has accused Byrne of not accepting the Bible as literal truth and has praised Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for leading the push to defund the Affordable Care Act that led to the 16-day government shutdown.
Byrne has accused Young of being more interested in promoting himself than representing the Mobile-area district. He has received the endorsement of much of the city's establishment, including that of the former representative, Jo Bonner, whose resignation from the House in August led to the special election to replace him.
The seat is heavily Republican and the winner of Tuesday's runoff is expected to win the December general election easily.
S.V. Dáte edits politics and campaign finance coverage for NPR's Washington Desk.
Charlotte Bobcats owner Michael Jordan talks about the progress his NBA basketball team is making during an interview with The Associated Press Friday, Nov. 1, 2013, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
Charlotte Bobcats owner Michael Jordan talks about the progress his NBA basketball team is making during an interview with The Associated Press Friday, Nov. 1, 2013, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
Charlotte Bobcats owner Michael Jordan talks about the progress his NBA basketball team is making during an interview with The Associated Press Friday, Nov. 1, 2013, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
Charlotte Bobcats owner Michael Jordan talks about the progress his NBA basketball team is making during an interview with The Associated Press Friday, Nov. 1, 2013, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
Charlotte Bobcats owner Michael Jordan smiles as he talks about the progress his NBA basketball team is making during an interview with The Associated Press Friday, Nov. 1, 2013, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
Charlotte Bobcats owner Michael Jordan listens to a question during an interview with The Associated Press about his NBA basetball team Friday, Nov. 1, 2013, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Michael Jordan scoffs at the idea of tanking games.
The fiery 14-time All-Star who helped the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships simply doesn't have it in his makeup to intentionally lose games this season just so his Charlotte Bobcats can get a better draft pick next year.
Forget that the NBA would likely hand down a hefty fine and fans would probably boycott if a team admitted to doing that, the Bobcats owner said purposely losing games is just not part of his competitive DNA.
"I don't know if some teams have thought of that. That's not something that we would do," Jordan told The Associated Press on Friday. "I don't believe in that."
He then laughed heartily and said, "If that was my intention I never would have paid (free agent) Al Jefferson $13 million a year."
It's not that the Bobcats couldn't use a player like Andrew Wiggins at Kansas or Duke's Jabari Parker — two college freshman who many view as potential NBA stars.
Jordan, 50, hasn't been able to translate his on-court success to winning as an NBA owner and executive. The Bobcats are just 62-168 in his three full seasons as majority owner. They were 21-61 last season.
Still, he doesn't believe there are shortcuts to winning.
While the 2014 NBA draft offers hopes to fledgling teams with a host of talented players, Jordan made it clear he isn't thinking about losing.
"It's not guaranteed (the player) you are going to get is going to be that star anyway," Jordan said. "I did read that certain teams are thinking about doing it. But I'm not one of them.
"So let's alleviate that conversation."
Jordan, relaxed and at ease at the Bobcats headquarters hours before his team's regular season home opener, has been widely criticized for his failures with the Bobcats and for his struggles in the front office with the Washington Wizards.
He said some of that comes with the territory.
"It's somewhat unfair, but you come to expect it," said Jordan, who became the majority owner of the Bobcats in 2010. "You set certain standards as a player that transcend whatever you do. It goes where you go. You will be wearing that around your neck so that when people see the name they expect the results.
"It's somewhat unfair but it is what it is. I don't let it define me."
However, Jordan said he remains committed to the Bobcats and said he's tried to be transparent with the fans about the direction of the team.
This past offseason he used the amnesty clause on forward Tyrus Thomas, a move that took his hefty contract off the books.
Jordan still has to pay Thomas $18 million, but the move freed up that money under the salary cap as part of a one-time policy under the new collective bargaining agreement. The Bobcats used that money to sign Jefferson to three-year $41 million contact and to re-sign guard Gerald Henderson for $18 million over three seasons.
"I mean, that was a statement," Jordan said of his commitment to the Bobcats. "I still have to pay more than $17 million, but it was a move that we needed to make to build and go get a guy like Big Al."
Jordan also feels like he finally has the right man in charge in new coach Steve Clifford, a long-time NBA assistant who took over for Mike Dunlap, who was fired after one season.
"We're focused on what we're trying to do," Jordan said. "I think the direction we're moving is positive. ... It is baby steps. Every now and again you have a hiccup. But I must admit that we're headed in the right direction and I'm very happy with that."
The Bobcats, however, along with other small market NBA teams, are at a disadvantage with potential free agents like LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Chris Bosh — who all could be a part of the 2014 class.
The stars want to go "where the lights are," Jordan said.
He said last year he didn't think the new CBA did enough to help level the playing field for small market teams in terms of helping them land — or keep — a high-profile difference maker in free agency.
A year later, after seeing the system at work, he has eased up on that stance.
"It's better," Jordan said. "We are still going through and seeing the full effects of it. From a business standpoint if you operate your team in the right way it gives you a chance to break even or be profitable. And it makes it more difficult for your talent to get up and go somewhere else.
"You can provide more advantages than other teams to keep your player. It's a fair assessment that if you get your star you can get parity within the league. I think parity is starting to happen within the league."
Jordan doesn't feel players orchestrating deals that land a trio of stars in big markets to form a "big three" is necessarily good for the game.
"I'm not a big advocate for it," Jordan said. "I came from an era where it didn't happen. If that happened to evolve from the draft, then you seemed pretty smart."
Now he's trying to make that happen in Charlotte.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/apdefault/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-11-01-Michael%20Jordan/id-c6013dacaa354459b54d00450182288eSaying good-bye to the chilly air the day after Halloween (November 1), German beauty Heidi Klum was spotted leaving her hotel in New York City on her way to the airport.
The "Project Runway" hostess was sexy and stylish, wearing a black overcoat, black skinnies and matching black boots, walking with pomp and purpose on her way.
The 40-year-old hottie posted a pic on Twitter as she jumped on her plane, writing, "That was a great night ! Thank you NY. Going Home." The snapshot showed a cute Heidi flashing a smile from her window seat.
In related news, Heidi also remembered her make-up artist for his genius in creating her "old woman" get up for Halloween, writing, "Thanks to Andy Clement and #creativeCharacterEngineering for my amazing prosthetics."
Painting by Joel Spector via Wikimedia Commons
In May, Senior U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin told the New York Law Journal that judges don’t take enough chances. "They are fearful or they want a promotion or whatever it is, they don't exercise the independence they should have,” she said. “State court judges of course face re-election, which is a terrible thing, but federal judges, who are appointed for life, don't appreciate how much independence they have—many of them are a little cautious, more cautious than they should be."
Scheindlin was determined not to fall into that trap. In August, she ruled that the New York Police Department violated the Constitution with its stop-and-frisk program, finding that it relied on racial profiling. Scheindlin’s decision famously incensed Mayor Michael Bloomberg and forced a reckoning that has already led to changes in the way the city deploys stop and frisk. More change will follow after next Tuesday’s mayoral election: Bill de Blasio, who will almost certainly succeed Bloomberg, has made it clear that he’s leery of the disproportionate stops of African-Americans and Hispanics and wants to rein in this practice. But Scheindlin herself was smacked down Thursday by three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. They said she overreached in taking multiple stop-and-frisk cases and created an appearance of impropriety by talking to the media. The appellate judges have yanked the stop-and-frisk cases (there's more than one) from Scheindlin and reassigned them to another judge, in an order designed both to personally embarrass her and to send a message to other bold judges, particularly those who dare talk to the press: Watch your step.
That’s a big shame, because it will have a sad effect on the public role that judges play. Scheindlin sounded a self-aggrandizing note in the interviews she gave last spring and summer. “What I did was gutsy,” she said in The New Yorker about a Sept. 11 case she handled. And: “I don’t think I’m the favorite of the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District. Because I’m independent. I believe in the Constitution. I believe in the Bill of Rights. These issues come up, and I take them quite seriously. I’m not afraid to rule against the government.” For a judge to talk like that with a big civil rights case pending isn’t the most circumspect or prudent move. But what should matter far more is that Scheindlin didn’t break the rule against talking about pending cases, as she has pointed out. And so scolding her for talking to the press will just make other judges afraid to get anywhere close to the line. I know it’s in my interest as a journalist for judges to feel freer to talk. But really, the larger problem is that the public doesn’t understand enough about the work that judges do, not that Scheindlin got a little carried away in trying to shed some light on it.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The 2nd Circuit hasn’t said whether Scheindlin’s ruling against New York City was right or wrong. Instead, the three-judge panel said she “ran afoul” of the code of conduct for federal judges by making her impartiality seem as if it could be questioned and through her “improper application” of the rule by which judges agree to handle “related cases.” The 2nd Circuit dinged her for giving media interviews and for telling the plaintiffs in a previous civil rights suit against New York City that if they had proof of “inappropriate racial profiling” they could file a new lawsuit and “mark it as related,” which would route it to her chambers. Scheindlin added, referring to the filing fee, “I am sure I am going to get in trouble for saying it, for $65 you can bring that lawsuit.” Sure, that off-the-cuff remark looks impolitic now that the appeals court has shone a spotlight on it. But the reason for routing related cases to a single judge is to make the system more efficient and conserve resources. Why should Scheindlin have handed off a new case to a different judge?
There’s no question that Bloomberg and the NYPD hated having her preside over the stop-and-frisk suits. But that doesn’t mean she was biased. It means that she was giving them a hard time, for reasons that the appeals court may yet find were entirely justified. And tellingly, the city’s lawyers didn’t ask the 2nd Circuit to disqualify her. That means no one briefed or argued this question, and Scheindlin had no chance to defend or explain herself before the decision was made. The 2nd Circuit’s move to remove her was itself an overreach. “There is absolutely nothing in the record before the 2nd Circuit addressing these issues,” says Nancy Gertner, a former (bold) federal judge in Boston who now teaches at Harvard Law School. “If there is bias here, it is that of the 2nd Circuit that went out of its way to disqualify a judge—outside of the normal processes, looking beyond the record, and without giving her a chance to respond.”
And since the 2nd Circuit’s order also freezes the stop-and-frisk cases until further appellate rulings, there was just no reason to remove Scheindlin (other than the message sending and the personal rebuking, that is). “Given the order to stay, which left the district court with nothing to do, reaching out to decide disqualification now was premature and precipitous,” says Yale Law School professor Judith Resnik.
The upshot of this is that Scheindlin’s effort to dismantle the worst aspects of stop and frisk will have lasting and important impact. But so will the blow the 2nd Circuit has dealt to judges who refuse to be overcautious. And for that, we’re all the poorer.
Photo courtesy Arcade Fire/Facebook
Arcade Fire is dancing. Arcade Fire has on its shoulders a big shiny head that looks like Arcade Fire’s own head, but huge and crinkled. Arcade Fire is playing a song that sounds like Arcade Fire’s own song, but fatter and clumsier. It looks like dancing, but it is social work. It looks like dancing, but it is guilt. It looks like praying, but it is a lecture about praying. It looks like fun, but it is not fun. Arcade Fire says it is fun, because Arcade Fire is dancing.
I often feel logy before putting on a record that I’m slated to review, like I’m getting up in the morning for work. But that dissipates. The music soon becomes a pool cue that gets mental billiards rolling, points clacking against counterpoints. I get hooked, as by a game or by the rush of conversation. Five listens into Arcade Fire’s Reflektor, I still feel like I’m commuting and the train is late. It’s not because the songs are long, although the songs are long. It’s that the band sounds like they are working, adding up data, taking meetings. Dancing on the clock. Not like they’re playing. It makes me feel bad for them. Sorry you have a hard job, Arcade Fire.
I am not trying to be sarcastic about Arcade Fire. They do have a hard job. By inclination, as well as by structural position as the cult band that became massive (Best Album Grammy, sold-out arena shows, Internet-straining album leaks), Arcade Fire radiates earnestness, and the fallout of earnestness is sarcasm. But I respect and believe in Arcade Fire’s sincerity, intelligence, ambition, conscientiousness, skill. The loss this week of Lou Reed was an apt reminder that perversely inspired willfulness and not-a-shit-giving can trump such commendable virtues. But not always. Arcade Fire’s high-water marks on record and in concert are fine arguments for the humanist band (Beatles, Springsteen, Clash, Outkast) even though their most-mentioned heroes hit their peaks as anti-humanists, such as David Bowie (who guests here), New Order, and Talking Heads (who haunt here).
Using sophisticated recording technology to criticize technology is modern rock’s most exhausted routine.
The benefit of anti-humanism is that it sets an artist apart in splendid isolation. The benefit of humanism is connection—a value Arcade Fire always has enacted, with its large ensemble singing chorally in procession through a crowd. But the risk in that linkage is that as the artist gains status the exchange becomes uneven, shifts from symbiosis to control. The artist becomes the educator, the evangelist. When Bruce Springsteen sings Woody Guthrie he is not demonstrating against the state but demonstrating something to his audience, teaching a lesson. This may be the way Arcade Fire is dancing.
What they have made instead is almost the record I was hoping to hear, but there is nothing more frustrating than a near miss. I’d hoped Reflektor would carry on directly from the about-face at the end of The Suburbs, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” a sparkling recapitulation of the band’s bedroom-transcendentalist mythos as utopian disco, with lead vocals by Régine Chassagne.
I was encouraged by “Reflektor,” the first single—it has the beat, albeit a draggy version that never spirals into Giorgio Moroder stratospherics. I figured there’d be more where it came from. Ideally with Chassagne fronting again, because “Reflektor” makes a solid case that Win Butler can’t step lightly enough to sing disco.
It turns out there’s not a lot more like “Sprawl II” here, though. Chassagne still doesn’t sing enough. The band is a bit defensive about having brought in the party scientist James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) as a co-producer, saying he didn’t really change the record much. I wish he’d done more. No question, there are beats aplenty, like the badly overdone dub-reggae of “Flashbulb Eyes,” and the not-so-bad diluted Chic pulse of “Afterlife” near the end. There’s “Here Comes the Night Time,” its take on Caribbean carnival rhythms held to midtempo (and Van Morrison-like) which gives the band time to dig in and find geography, geometry, and chronometry in it—that is, momentum.
But the only track that slakes my original craving is the 10th one, “It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus),” in which synthesized and electric basses tongue-kiss and Chassagne and Butler wind their voices together like ivy. When rhythm comes alive it’s always both direct experience and metaphor—here, a metaphor for the patience required to outwit and outlive a crisis, as well as a metaphor for the ongoing crisis of life itself. Like metaphor, true dancing is doubling. Compounding. Counterforce and contretemps.
Much of the rest of the time, the crisis that seems like it will never end is the record itself. This hour-plus of music gets stagnant as songs bog down in flourishes and effects, as if to compensate for the punch the rhythm section can’t quite land.
There are some excellent guitar solos, but excellent guitar solos are kind of the kryptonite of dancing.
Lyrically Reflektor seems to get tangled in side issues that stand in for more substantial ones. I will spare you my rant about the immature condescension of “Normal Person,” which is also my rant about the immature condescension of “Modern Man” on The Suburbs. I will spare you my rant about the “k” in “Reflektor.” I am still deciding whether to spare you my rant about the Orpheus and Eurydice references; let’s just say it’s usually a sign of trouble when rockers turn to stock classical allusions.
These are significant problems because this is Arcade Fire, the great humanist band of the decade, the one that said a rock group could be like a neighborhood, a town, a family, and that by extension your family, your friends, your town could be like a rock band. I get that they can’t stick with that formula forever. But if what they resort to instead is trite symbolism, to spoonfuls of science fiction, the bedroom transcendentalists leave themselves without any linoleum or tile flooring to rise above. As Marianne Moore might say, their imaginary gardens have no real toads in them. As Lou Reed might say, they tell you they’re waiting on the street with money in their hands, but they don’t say which intersection and how much money.
Waiting another month for that new inspirational Gloria Gaynor book? You'll survive, most likely -- but just in case, Amazon's debuting a new program called Kindle First. Customers can get early access to new titles for $1.99 - or for free, if they're a member of the exclusive club that is Amazon ...
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/hH1wkkYsl2s/
