Like It is Girls that are like SOOO Ahead of the Linguistic Curvrrvveee

They’re, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve

Paul Hoppe

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA

From Valley Girls to the Kardashians, young women have long been mocked for the way they talk.

Whether it be uptalk (pronouncing statements as if they were questions? Like this?), creating slang words like “bitchin’ ” and “ridic,” or the incessant use of “like” as a conversation filler, vocal trends associated with young women are often seen as markers of immaturity or even stupidity.

Right?

But linguists — many of whom once promoted theories consistent with that attitude — now say such thinking is outmoded. Girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang, they say, adding that young women use these embellishments in much more sophisticated ways than people tend to realize.

“A lot of these really flamboyant things you hear are cute, and girls are supposed to be cute,” said Penny Eckert, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. “But they’re not just using them because they’re girls. They’re using them to achieve some kind of interactional and stylistic end.”

The latest linguistic curiosity to emerge from the petri dish of girl culture gained a burst of public recognition in December, when researchers from Long Island Universitypublished a paper about it in The Journal of Voice. Working with what they acknowledged was a very small sample — recorded speech from 34 women ages 18 to 25 — the professors said they had found evidence of a new trend among female college students: a guttural fluttering of the vocal cords they called “vocal fry.”

A classic example of vocal fry, best described as a raspy or croaking sound injected (usually) at the end of a sentence, can be heard when Mae West says, “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me,” or, more recently on television, when Maya Rudolph mimics Maya Angelou on “Saturday Night Live.”

Not surprisingly, gadflies in cyberspace were quick to pounce on the study — or, more specifically, on the girls and women who are frying their words. “Are they trying to sound like Kesha or Britney Spears?” teased The Huffington Post, naming two pop stars who employ vocal fry while singing, although the study made no mention of them. “Very interesteeeaaaaaaaaang,” said Gawker.com, mocking the lazy, drawn-out affect.

Do not scoff, says Nassima Abdelli-Beruh, a speech scientist at Long Island University and an author of the study. “They use this as a tool to convey something,” she said. “You quickly realize that for them, it is as a cue.”

Other linguists not involved in the research also cautioned against forming negative judgments.

“If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid,” said Carmen Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. “The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.”

The idea that young women serve as incubators of vocal trends for the culture at large has longstanding roots in linguistics. As Paris is to fashion, the thinking goes, so are young women to linguistic innovation.

“It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people,” said Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, “and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males on average.”

Less clear is why. Some linguists suggest that women are more sensitive to social interactions and hence more likely to adopt subtle vocal cues. Others say women use language to assert their power in a culture that, at least in days gone by, asked them to be sedate and decorous. Another theory is that young women are simply given more leeway by society to speak flamboyantly.

But the idea that vocal fads initiated by young women eventually make their way into the general vernacular is well established. Witness, for example, the spread of uptalk, or “high-rising terminal.”

Starting in America with the Valley Girls of the 1980s (after immigrating from Australia, evidently), uptalk became common among young women across the country by the 1990s.

In the past 20 years, uptalk has traveled “up the age range and across the gender boundary,” said David Crystal, a longtime professor of linguistics who teaches at Bangor University in Wales. “I’ve heard grandfathers and grandmothers use it,” he said. “I occasionally use it myself.”

Even an American president has been known to uptalk. “George W. Bush used to do it from time to time,” said Dr. Liberman, “and nobody ever said, ‘Oh, that G.W.B. is so insecure, just like a young girl.’ ”

The same can be said for the word “like,” when used in a grammatically superfluous way or to add cadence to a sentence. (Because, like, people tend to talk this way when impersonating, like, teenage girls?) But in 2011, Dr. Liberman conducted an analysis of nearly 12,000 phone conversations recorded in 2003, and found that while young people tended to use “like” more often than older people, men used it more frequently than women.

And, actually? The use of “like” in a sentence, “apparently without meaning or syntactic function, but possibly as emphasis,” has made its way into the Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition — this newspaper’s reference Bible — where the example given is: “It’s, like, hot.” Anyone who has seen a television show featuring the Kardashian sisters will be more than familiar with this usage.

“Like” and uptalk often go hand in hand. Several studies have shown that uptalk can be used for any number of purposes, even to dominate a listener. In 1991, Cynthia McLemore, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, found that senior members of a Texas sorority used uptalk to make junior members feel obligated to carry out new tasks. (“We have a rush event this Thursday? And everyone needs to be there?”)

Dr. Eckert of Stanford recalled a study by one of her students, a woman who worked at a Jamba Juice and tracked instances of uptalking customers. She found that by far the most common uptalkers were fathers of young women. For them, it was “a way of showing themselves to be friendly and not asserting power in the situation,” she said.

Vocal fry, also known as creaky voice, has a long history with English speakers. Dr. Crystal, the British linguist, cited it as far back as 1964 as a way for British men to denote their superior social standing. In the United States, it has seemingly been gaining popularity among women since at least 2003, when Dr. Fought, the Pitzer College linguist, detected it among the female speakers of a Chicano dialect in California.

A 2005 study by Barry Pennock-Speck, a linguist at the University of Valencia in Spain, noted that actresses like Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon used creaky voice when portraying contemporary American characters (Ms. Paltrow used it in the movie “Shallow Hal,” Ms. Witherspoon in “Legally Blonde”), but not British ones in period films (Ms. Paltrow in “Shakespeare in Love,” Ms. Witherspoon in “The Importance of Being Earnest”).

So what does the use of vocal fry denote? Like uptalk, women use it for a variety of purposes. Ikuko Patricia Yuasa, a lecturer in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, called it a natural result of women’s lowering their voices to sound more authoritative.

It can also be used to communicate disinterest, something teenage girls are notoriously fond of doing.

“It’s a mode of vibration that happens when the vocal cords are relatively lax, when sublevel pressure is low,” said Dr. Liberman. “So maybe some people use it when they’re relaxed and even bored, not especially aroused or invested in what they’re saying.”

But “language changes very fast,” said Dr. Eckert of Stanford, and most people — particularly adults — who try to divine the meaning of new forms used by young women are “almost sure to get it wrong.”

“What may sound excessively ‘girly’ to me may sound smart, authoritative and strong to my students,” she said.

Several of Rush Limbaugh’s Advertisers Pull Out After His Latest Outburst

All Hail Twitter… or at least in part as it was an outpouring across the network that may have  caused Some advertisers to reconsider or even pull out of advertising on Rush Limbaugh’s Show .

Several of Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers announced Friday that they were pulling their commercials from his radio show in the wake of Limbaugh’s incendiary comments about a female law student and contraception.

After being bombarded on Twitter, mattress store Sleep Train said that it would no longer advertise during Limbaugh’s top-rated show following days of outrage over Limbaugh’s statements about Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown student who was denied a chance to speak at a Congressional hearing about birth control.

“We are pulling our ads with Rush Limbaugh and appreciate the community’s feedback,” the company wrote in a tweet.

Later on Friday, another mattress company, Sleep Number, announced through a spokeswoman that it had also pulled its ads from Limbaugh’s show. So did companies Legal Zoom, Citrix and Quicken Loans.

All cited the nature of Limbaugh’s statements, as well as the vociferous complaints they were getting, as the reason for their withdrawal of the ads.

Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” saying that she was having “so much sex” that she wanted the government to pay for her contraception. Then, he went further, saying, ” if we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

The comments elicited fierce condemnation from politicians and pundits, and acampaign began on Twitter to ask Sleep Train to pull its commercials from Limbaugh’s show.

Sleep Train, one of the biggest mattress retailers in the country, has been targeted before for advertising on Limbaugh’s show. This time, though, the campaign worked.

Other advertisers are also fielding angry messages on Twitter. The company ProFlowers was besieged by tweets:

OMG I Never Knew Romney Had So Much Money… He Is So Humble About it

Why is someone who is so good at making money so bad at talking about it?

Mitt Romney is not the first presidential candidate who’s had trouble communicating with working-class voters: John Kerry famously enjoyed wind-surfing, and George Bush blamed a poor showing in a straw poll on the fact that many of his supporters were “at their daughter’s coming out party.”

Veritable battalions of Kennedys and Roosevelts have dealt with the economic and cultural gaps between themselves and the voters over the years without much difficulty. Not so Barack Obama, whose attempt to commiserate with Iowa farmers in 2007 about crop prices by mentioning the cost of arugula at Whole Foods fell flat.

Romney’s reference last week to the fact that his wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually” is not grounds in itself for a voter to oppose his candidacy. Neither was the $10,000 bet he offered to Rick Perry during a debate in December or the time he told a group of the unemployed in Florida that he was “also unemployed.”

But his penchant for awkward references to his own wealth has underscored the suspicion that many voters have about his ability to understand their economic problems. His opponents in both parties  are gleefully highlighting these moments as a way to drive a wedge between Romney and the working class voters who have become an increasingly important part of the Republican Party base.

The current economic circumstances have undoubtedly exacerbated the problem for Romney. Had Obama initially sought the presidency during a primary season dominated by concerns about the domestic economy rather than war in Iraq, his explanation that small town voters “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” might have created an opportunity for Hillary Clinton or even the populist message of John Edwards.

But Obama’s early opposition to the Iraq war gave him a political firewall that protected him throughout that primary campaign, while Romney has no such policy safe harbor to safeguard him from an intramural backlash.

OPINION

The Loyal Opposition: Memo to Mitt Romney: We Get It. You’re Rich.

The presidential aspirant can’t seem to stop reminding voters of his considerable wealth.

• Romney and Obama share a lack of natural affinity for this key group of swing voters, but it is Romney who needs to figure out some way of addressing this shortcoming if he wants to make it to the White House. It’s Romney’s misfortune that the voters’ prioritization of economic issues, his own privileged upbringing and his lack of connection with his party’s base on other core issues put him in a much more precarious position than candidate Obama ever reached.

By the time the 2008 general election rolled around, Obama had bolstered his outreach to these voters by recruiting the blue-collar avatar Joe Biden as his running mate. Should Romney win the Republican nomination this year, his advisers will almost certainly be tempted by the working-class credentials that a proletarian like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie or Florida Senator Marco Rubio would bring to the ticket.

Of more immediate concern to Team Romney should be how their candidate can overcome his habit of economic tone-deafness before Rick Santorum steals away enough working-class and culturally conservative voters to throw the Republican primary into complete and utter turmoil.

The curious thing about Romney’s verbal missteps is how limited they are to this very specific area of public policy. He is usually quite articulate when talking about foreign affairs and national security. Despite his complicated history on social and cultural matters like health care and abortion, his explanations are usually both coherent and comprehensible, even to those who oppose his positions. It’s only when he begins talking about economic issues – his biographical strength – that he seems to get clumsy.

At this point, the Romney campaign has three options for dealing with this challenge. The first is for their candidate to stop saying peculiar things about financial matters. That’s not going to happen.

The second possibility would be for him to outline a series of proposals specifically targeted at the needs of working-class and poor Americans, not only to control the damage from his gaffes but also to underscore the conservative premise that a right-leaning agenda will create opportunities for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. But while that approach might help Romney in a broader philosophical conversation, it’s unlikely to offer him much protection from the attacks and ridicule that his unforced errors will continue to bring him.

The question is why Romney hasn’t embraced a third alternative – admitting the obvious and then explaining why he gets so tongue-tied when the conversation turns to money. Romney’s upbringing and religious faith suggest a sense of obligation to the less fortunate and an unspoken understanding that it isn’t appropriate to call attention to one’s financial success.

It wouldn’t be that hard for him to say something like:

I was taught not to brag and boast and think I’m better than other people because of the successes I’ve had, so occasionally I’m going to say things that sound awkward. It’s because I’d rather talk about what it takes to get America back to work.

Americans tend to gravitate toward candidates who are self-aware about their shortcomings. There’s no guarantee that this type of approach would work for Romney. But white working-class voters represent a critical support base for the Republican Party — and increasing numbers of them are shopping for an alternative with whom they feel some semblance of an emotional connection.

Culture Wars Inflamed by Rush Limbaugh’s Hubris .. Bad Day for GOP

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh today mocked President Obama for supporting a Georgetown law student who testified to Congress that birth control should be covered by health insurance, drawing out the culture war over contraception that has consumed the political world for the past week.

Shortly before the student, Sandra Fluke, gave an interview on the cable network MSNBC today, Obama called her to tell her that her parents should be proud of her for speaking out for women.

After learning of the president’s phone call during his radio show today, a day after he chided Fluke over her sex life, Limbaugh made a kissing noise with his lips and mocked Obama.

“That is so compassionate. What a great guy,” Limbaugh said. “The president called her to make sure she’s OK. What is she, 30 years old? Thirty years old, student at Georgetown Law who admits to having so much sex she can’t afford it.”

In response to a question from ABC News’ Jake Tapper, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Obama called Fluke to “express his disappointment that she has been the subject of inappropriate personal attacks and to thank her for exercising her rights as a citizen to speak out on an issue of public policy.”

Limbaugh replied by arguing that Obama should return the $1 million donation that the comedian Bill Maher gave his super PAC.

“Will President Obama now give back the $1 million that Bill Maher just gave his super PAC?” Limbaugh said on his show. “You want to get some of the tapes that Bill Maher has called Sarah Palin? The ‘c’ word over and over again?”

Limbaugh continued to focus on Fluke today, saying she “hilariously” testified to Congress that “she’s having so much sex” that health insurance should cover her birth control.

“Not one person says, ‘Well, did you ever think about maybe backing off the amount of sex you have?’” Limbaugh said.

He added that Democrats “want to blame me as being the person they should fear.”

Limbaugh first thrust himself into the center of the contraception debate on Wednesday when he called Fluke a “slut” on his radio show for arguing to Congress that the expense for her birth control should be covered by her employer’s health care plan.

As the Senate voted down a Republican effort that would have allowed employers not to cover contraception in their health plans, Limbaugh enraged the left by saying that Fluke was “having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills and she agrees that Obama should provide them, or the pope.”

Thursday night, a bomb squad was called to Limbaugh’s house to investigate a suspicious package that was determined to contain nothing harmful. Limbaugh said on his show today that “it would send chills up your spine if I were to tell you what the package actually contained.”

In an interview with Tapper, Fluke expressed great appreciation for support she’s gotten across the country. At her Georgetown campus, many students sided with her.

“I think everybody on campus, or pretty much everybody I know, was pretty horrified by them,” Hannah Dee, a senior, said of Limbaugh’s comments.

On Friday, Georgetown President John J. DeGioia praised Fluke’s “civil discourse” in a letter to the school and at the same time took a shot at Limbaugh’s stance, writing, “And yet, some of those who disagreed with her position — including Rush Limbaugh and commentators throughout the blogosphere and in various other media channels — responded with behavior that can only be described as misogynistic, vitriolic, and a misrepresentation of the position of our student.”

Limbaugh, who mocked DeGioia’s statement repeatedly on his show, appears to have suffered immediate backlash, at least financially. Two national advertisers – Sleep Number and Quicken Loans – say they have “suspended” their advertising on his show, and a third, ProFlowers, says it is “reevaluating” its marketing plan.

Democrats see the controversy over contraception funding as a major opportunity to paint the Republican Party as bogged down fighting social battles that mainstream America has moved past.

Before the Senate debated the legislation that would have repealed President Obama’s contraception mandate requiring employers or their insurance companies to cover the cost of contraceptives, Rick Santorum had emerged in the GOP primary largely because of his positions against birth control, women in combat, gay marriage and abortion.

In a letter to supporters Thursday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Democrats had raised more than $1 million in an effort to preserve what they say are women’s rights to contraception coverage. The party is also circulating a petition asking supporters to sign a request asking House Republicans to condemn Limbaugh’s tirade against Fluke.

House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman, Michael Steel, declined to say whether Boehner thinks Limbaugh should apologize. “The speaker obviously believes the use of those words was inappropriate, as is trying to raise money off the situation,” Steel said.

Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, also waded into the controversy when he told an Ohio reporter that he didn’t support the so-called Blunt amendment in the Senate, which would have undermined Obama’s proposed mandate, and then said shortly after that he did.

Romney’s reversal garnered widespread attention, despite his assertion in the same interview that he preferred not to talk about birth control.

“The idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, a husband and wife — I’m not going there,” he said in the interview.

“We’re going to hold him to these extreme positions that he’s staking out,” said a Democratic strategist who asked not to be named.

The furor was undoubtedly a pleasant event for Obama, who, even after drawing criticism last month for a rule that required religious groups to cover contraceptive services, has avoided the spotlight as the GOP and prominent conservative voices like Limbaugh focused on cultural matters rather than highlighting many Americans’ dissatisfaction about the state of the economy.

The willingness to move away from the economy conversation likely reflects the importance of key Southern states that will vote in the Republican primaries on “Super Tuesday” next week, where social issues remain important to conservative and religious voters.

The focus on divisive cultural issues is reminiscent of the political sparring over gay marriage during the 2004 presidential race that drove Republicans to the polls in many Southern states to oppose efforts to make it legal.

President Bush’s 2004 campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, who announced in 2010 that he is gay, said in an interview with Salon published today that he wished he “had spoken out against the effort” to enact an amendment banning gay marriage.

“As I’ve been involved in the fight for marriage equality, one of the things I’ve learned is how many people were harmed by the campaigns in which I was involved,” he said. “I apologize to them and tell them I am sorry. While there have been recent victories, this could still be a long struggle in which there will be setbacks, and I’ll do my part to be helpful.”

ABC News’s John Parkinson and Matthew Larotonda contributed reporting to this story.

Europe signs fiscal pact, hails Greek progress

Merkel says ECB buys time, but Europe must act to contain crisis

By William L. Watts, MarketWatch

FRANKFURT (MarketWatch) — European leaders on Friday signed a new fiscal pact aimed at strengthening budget rules across the euro zone, hailed progress by Greece toward finally receiving its second bailout and signaled a willingness to speed up the funding of the euro zone’s permanent bailout fund.

As expected, the leaders made no commitment to boosting the size of the euro zone’s firewall, but did agree to speed payments of capital into the region’s permanent rescue fund, the 500 billion euro European Stability Mechanism. The ESM will replace the temporary European Financial Stability Facility at midyear.

“As expected, the latest EU summit proved to be a non-event, and was characterized by a rare show of harmony. With the more difficult discussions centered on foreign policy issues, such as Syria, there was little to set the pulse racing on the economic policy front,” wrote strategists at Daiwa Capital Markets.

European Union leaders Friday signed the region’s new fiscal pact, adopting strict new rules on deficits and debts, David Roman reports on Markets Hub. (AP Photo/Francois Lenoir, Pool)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed what she described as a period of relative calm in the euro-zone crisis, but warned that European leaders must take further action.

“We don’t delude ourselves that the problem has gone away,” she said.

Merkel said the European Central Bank’s massive injections of long-term liquidity into the financial sector via its long-term refinancing operations had bought policy makers time. She also said that such measures wouldn’t be repeated once the crisis is past.

“We certainly will not resort to these types of measures again once this period is over,” she said. “Liquidity will be siphoned out of the market.”

It’s Merkel, however, who has faced pressure from world leaders and the European Union to move more quickly to shore up the region’s bailout fund.

The International Monetary Fund and the Group of 20 have pressed Europe to boost the size of its firewall. G-20 finance ministers last week said an increase in funding for the IMF’s crisis fighting efforts can come only after Europe takes action to boost its own rescue resources.

Analysts said markets paid little heed to developments in Brussels. The euro EURUSD -0.04%  traded at $1.3208 versus the dollar, down 0.9% from Thursday.

On Thursday, euro-zone finance ministers indicated Greece was on track to receive its 130 billion euro ($173 billion) bailout once it completes its bond swap with private creditors.

Ministers agreed to release funds needed to facilitate Greece’s bond swap with private investors and said further funds would be released once remaining actions demanded by the country’s troika of international lenders — the European Union, International Monetary Fund, and European Central Bank — were completed.

Greece “undertook decisive and swift legislative action in the areas of fiscal consolidation, revenue administration, pension reform, financial sector regulation and supervision and growth-enhancing structural reforms,” said Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who chairs meetings of euro-zone finance ministers.

Investors must respond to Greece’s debt-swap offer by March 8. Market participants will be watching to see how many investors take up the offer and whether collective action clauses that would force reluctant bondholders to participate will be activated.

Leaders from all but two EU countries — Britain and the Czech Republic — on Friday signed a new fiscal treaty that aims to enshrine tough new budget rules. The pact is a German-led effort to address the lack of fiscal integration and tough budget surveillance seen by some as a root cause of the euro zone’s debt crisis.

A few hours later, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced that the country was lifting its deficit target for 2012 from 4.4% of gross domestic product to 5.8%. The move, which could cause friction with Brussels, had long been rumored and comes after the 2011 deficit came in above target at more than 8%. 

Spain indicated it intends to stick to its 2013 deficit target of 3%. 

Can “The Hunger Games” become the New “Lord of the Flies”??

Now that the hoopla around the Oscars is settling down, Hollywood is getting ready for its next big spectacular–the March 23 opening of The Hunger Games. If you haven’t heard of the movie yet, you will. It’s based on the book by the same name, with 23.5 million copies in print in the U.S., and when tickets went on sale on Feb. 22, the movie set the record for first-day advance sales on Fandango, edging out Twilight. The movie’s official Twitter feed has more than 17,000 followers.

It’s safe to say that most of those ticket buyers and Twitter followers are teens and tweens. But there are probably a sprinkling of stock analysts in there, too. David Joyce, an analyst with Miller Tabak, has upgraded the stock of Lionsgate (LGF), the studio that made the movie, to “buy.” “We think investor enthusiasm for the late-March theatrical release of The Hunger Games, which could generate more than $170 million at the North American box office, should help the shares,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. (Lionsgate is on a bit of a roll lately. Its stock was at $8.71 a share on January 12, the day before it announced an acquisition of Summit Entertainment, of Twilight fame, and was at $13.79 on March 1.)

The Hunger Games takes place in the “ruins of what once was North America,” according to the movie’s officialwebsite. It depicts a world in which teenagers are chosen to fight each other to the death as a form of government intimidation. In the wince-worthy trailer, a young girl is chosen for this gruesome competition, and is none too happy about it. Her older sister–our heroine, played by Jennifer Lawrence–steps in to take her spot. It’s very, very scary and that’s probably a big reason why teens can’t wait to see the movie, which also stars Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson, and Donald Sutherland. One eighth grader, who claims she will attend a midnight showing on the day it opens, says she likes the story because “They take real people and put them in unreal situations. You can relate to these people. They are just like us.” (Full disclosure, the two-syllable word “Mom” was removed from that quote.)

That sentiment makes Hunger a natural successor to theLord of the Flies, the classic published in 1954 which became a required read in many schools and ultimately two movies. Both stories show the savagery people are capable of and prompt teens to ask themselves what they would do in that situation. Some schools are beginning to assign The Hunger Games to students, and there is talk that it will begin to replace Lord of the Flies in the middle school curriculum. When a teacher suggested replacing Flies withHunger in a blog post on the education website Bright Hub, expecting to be pursued with pitchforks, several teachers responded that they had already started using it in class, or intended to.

Anna Soter, a professor of Literacy and Language Education at Ohio State University, thinks that‘s a good idea. She points out that one problem with teaching Flies is that all the characters were boys. With Hunger, “we have the relevance in terms of gender representation,” she says. Tales of “an individual in the heartless system” have had relevance since ancient times, she says, and prompt teens to explore decisions about what’s right and wrong, and the boundaries of ethical behavior. “It’s full of issues that students need to talk about,” she says, and they usually “don’t have role models for this anymore.”

But don’t look for those messages in the onslaught of publicity and advertising that will soon assault almost everyone. Lionsgate is launching an eight-city Mall Tour that will allow fans to meet the stars and vie for the chance to win a limited-edition Hunger Games HP Folio PC from the Microsoft Store, a sponsor, and other Hunger Gamesbranded stuff. The studio also co-operated with People magazine, which is publishing a special collectors edition devoted to the movie. People had “tremendous luck” with similar editions for Twilight,  says executive editor Liz Sporkin. “We could tell Hunger Games was going to be another phenomena,” she says, acknowledging that the story is “very bleak.”  The movie’s Facebook page  has been “liked” more than 2.4 million times.  And then there are the multiple fan pages, one of which featured a fan chat on what to wear to the movie that had been viewed over 3,750 times.

Lord of the Flies, of course, had none of those publicity advantages, but has managed to stay in print and in classrooms 58 years. How long  The Hunger Games holds up is anyone’s guess. But if you ask the fans, it will be a long, long time.

Latest Reason to Be Against Romney… Eric Cantor

Yes it is True…. Eric Cantor…. one of the main people who have helped destroy my Republican Party has endorsed Mitt Romney on Meet The Press this morning…. and then he went on to do the  thing he does best that makes independents go against republicans and that is the HARD LINE RADICAL RIGHT WING rhetoric he is known for.. and the promulgation of lies and misinformation….IT HAS TO STOP!!!!

DAMN IT..  I WANT MY REPUBLICAN PARTY BACK .. the one that had values and principles and  knew  what it was the american public wanted and needed and was willing to work to  make it happen…

Has Israel Wrongly Accused Iran for Recent Bombings??

Who was behind the Delhi bombing?

The bombing of an Israeli diplomat’s car in India isn’t consistent with Iranian or Hezbollah involvement.

Washington, DC - The magnet bomb that exploded on an Israeli Embassy diplomat’s car in Delhi on February 13 seemed on the surface to be consistent with an Iranian-sponsored action. 

It was carried out with same method by which Israel’s Iranian proxy, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, had assassinated an Iranian scientist in mid-January. It occurred on the anniversary of the 2008 assassination of Hezbollah operations chief Imad Mugniyeh, which Hezbollah had vowed to avenge. And it happened at the same time as what appeared to be attempted bombings in Bangkok and Tbilisi.

But a review of the evidence uncovered thus far makes the link to Iran begin to look very dubious. Instead, it points to the distinct possibility that the Israelis planned a carefully limited bomb attack that was not intended to cause serious injury to Israeli diplomatic personnel, but that would advance the larger Israeli narrative on the need to punish Iran.

The evidence surrounding that bomb itself indicates a series of decisions by the terrorist team that is fundamentally inconsistent with an Iranian-Hezbollah revenge bombing. The preliminary forensic analysis of the bomb itself had estimated it to be 250-300 grams of explosives, but sources in the investigation later reduced the estimate to 200-250 grams. The 250-gram bomb that exploded near the Delhi High Court in May 2011 did not even damage the car under which it had been placed and was characterised by Police Commissioner B K Gupta as a ”low-intensity and mild blast”.

Burning questions

The main damage to the Israeli diplomat’s car was not from the explosion but from the fire, which burned so slowly that the occupants suffered no burns. 

If the bomb had been filled with shrapnel of iron filings, nails or glass, or if it had been attached underneath the fuel tank or on the door next to the passenger, that bomb would have seriously injured or killed the passenger, Tal Yehoshua-Koren, the wife of the Israeli Defense Attaché. But Delhi police were able to determine that the bomb contained no such potentially deadly shrapnel. And an examination of the videos and photos of the car after the bombing revealed that the bomb had been attached instead to the rear of the vehicle, where it would have the least impact on the occupants. 

Indian investigators obtained a fourth piece of evidence bearing on the intentions of the planners from their interview with Yehoshua-Koren. She told them the bomb did not go off for 30 to 40 seconds after she felt a bump from the rear of the car and saw the motorcyclist go past her window. Indian investigators had assumed that the bomb had operated on a five- or 10-second delay, like other magnet bombs with which they were familiar – only enough time for the motorcyclist to get far enough away from the blast. 

Yehoshua-Koren did not get out of the car before the bomb went off, and suffered what the Israeli Defense Ministry called ”moderate” wounds – evidently from metal fragments from the rear hatch. She was nevertheless able to exit the car and get to the Israeli Embassy without any assistance.

Israeli commentary on the bombing suggested that the Iranian-sponsored terrorist team had simply proven to beineffective in carrying out the bombing. But the combination of these four distinct indicators strongly suggests that the operation was planned so that the passenger in the car would not be injured. 

Unclear patterns

Israel claimed that the evidence links the Delhi bombing to other alleged Iranian-Hezbollah plots in Tbilisi and Bangkok. Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon declared, ”It is the same pattern, the same bomb, the same lab, the same factory”.

That information led investigators in Delhi to conclude that the operations in Delhi and Bangkok were ”unrelated”.But it turns out that there was no similarity whatsoever among the bombs found in the three capitals. The one in Tbilisi was described as a grenade in a plastic bag taped to the bottom of the car, which hardly suggests a serious terror plot. Delhi police discovered that the two magnet bombs found in the house in Bangkok, where an accidental explosion had occurred, contained the much more powerful C-4 explosive as well as shrapnel – both of which were absent from the Delhi bomb. And, even more interesting, the Bangkok magnet bombs timed for only a five-second delay.

Despite the fact that a group of Iranian passport-holders were clearly involved with highly lethal bombs in Bangkok, there is good reason to doubt that they were working for Iran’s IRGC or Hezbollah. They spent their first three days in the country with Thai prostitutes at Pattaya. That profile suggests Iranian mercenaries, like the former kickboxer hired by Mossad to assassinate Iranian scientist Massoud Ali Mohammadi in January 2010, rather than Iranian or Hezbollah operatives.

India’s importance

In the larger context, it is very difficult to believe that Iran would have chosen New Delhi as the location for revenge against Israel, given the importance of India as a buyer of Iranian oil and India’s delicately balanced political-diplomatic position in the larger conflict.  

India had just replaced China as Iran’s single biggest crude oil customer, having increased its imports to roughly 550,000 barrels a day in January, which compensated for a drop in sales to China. And the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had resisted pressure from the United States and Europe to reduce its purchases from Iran, even working with Iran to find ways to get around the planned sanctions against Iran’s National Bank. India’s Commerce Ministry was planning a large business delegation to Iran to discuss increased trade.

India had thus taken on the role of potential ”spoiler” in the Western sanctions strategy against Iran. This central geopolitical reality prompted New Delhi’s “Economic Times” to ask, ”Why would Iran go and poke its finger in the eye of its best customer, especially knowing full well that Israel will use even the flimsiest excuse to put the blame on it?”

Indeed, it was Israel, not Iran that stood to gain politically from the terrorist car bomb in Delhi. Israel was well aware that a terrorist bombing in Delhi that could be blamed on Tehran was a potential lever to change India’s policy toward Iran. As an Israeli official told the Wall Street Journal, if India were to adopt Netanyahu’s position that Iran was responsible for the bombing, it would take the India-Iran relationship to “a whole different level”.

Nearly two weeks before the bombing, Israel acted to ensure that Indians would assume that a terrorist attack in Delhi on that date had been carried out by Iran. A letter to the Delhi police on February 1 signed by the Israeli Deputy Chief of Mission in Delhi and the First Secretary responsible for security expressed concern that Iran and Hezbollah would take revenge on the anniversary of the Mugniyeh assassination by carrying out terrorist actions against Israelis. It also referred to the possibility of Iranian revenge for the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist Mustafa Ahmadi Roshan on January 11. Although the letter did not specify that an attack might take place in Delhi, Mossad chief Tamir Pardo led a delegation of intelligence officials on a visit to Delhi around the same time and turned over alist of 50 Iranian nationals with the request that they be kept under surveillance.

The Israeli letter referred to an alleged Hezbollah terror plot against Israelis that had been broken up in Bangkok in January. But the idea of a Hezbollah plan to kill Israelis in Thailand had come only from Israeli intelligence - not from any local sources. The Thai police detained Hussein Atris, a Swedish-Lebanese, in January only because Israeli intelligence officials had told them they “suspected” that he and two other Lebanese, whom they claimed were linked to Hezbollah, might carry out terrorist attacks at tourist sites popular with Israelis.

Atris admitted to owning large supplies of urea fertiliser and ammonium nitrate, which are ingredients in bombs, but Thai investigators concluded that they were not connected to any terror plot in Thailand, because of the absence of any other bomb components. The head of Thailand’s National Security Council, General Wichean Potephosree, a former chief of police, expressed doubt that Atris was a terrorist, as Israel had claimed.

After the Bangkok explosion, the Israelis renewed the claim of an Iran-Hezbollah terror threat in Bangkok, alleging that the bombs found in in all three capitals in mid-February were ”exactly the same kind of devices”. But we now know that was not the case. 

We may never be able to establish with certainty what happened in Delhi, Bangkok and Tbilisi earlier this month, but the evidence that has come to light thus far doesn’t support the widely accepted notion that Iran and Hezbollah were behind it. That evidence is consistent, however, with a clever Israeli “false flag” car bombing operation that would not injure the passenger but would serve its broader strategic interests: dividing India from Iran and pushing US public opinion further towards support for war against Iran.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian journalist on US national security policy with a PhD in South-east Asian studies from Cornell University. He has taught international studies at City College of New York and American University and has written several books on Vietnam, including Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War (University of California Press, 2005). He has also written on war and diplomacy in Cambodia, Korea and the Philippines.

Egyptian NEW Elected Political Power’s Upset Over Military Allowing 15 Accused NGO Foreigners to Leave

(Reuters) – A senior Egyptian politician spoke out on Saturday against “flagrant interference” behind Cairo’s decision to lift a travel ban on American pro-democracy activists accused of receiving illegal funds, echoing growing anger over the move.

The decision to allow the eight Americans – part of a group of 15 foreigners – to fly out of Cairo on Thursday defused the first diplomatic standoff in decades between the United States and Egypt, but raised questions from politicians over possible pressure by the ruling military on judges.

Saad al-Katatni, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, vowed on Saturday that all those involved in the decision would be held accountable.

A special parliamentary inquiry on March 11 would summon the prime minister and other government officials to investigate the circumstances surrounding the decision, he said, as the two houses of parliament convened to draw up the criteria to pick an assembly to write Egypt’s constitution.

“We do not accept any form of foreign interference in Egypt’s internal affairs, under any justification,” said Katatni, who is also a leading official in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party.

“We will not allow anyone, regardless of who it is, to impact the sovereignty of this country and its institutions.”

Mohamed ElBaradei, the former chief of the U.N nuclear watchdog and an influential opposition activist, warned interference in the judiciary was a “fatal blow to democracy.”

Egyptian authorities had accused the campaigners, including the son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, of working for groups receiving illegal foreign funding and prevented them from leaving the country. Their departure came after days of behind-the-scenes negotiations between Washington and Cairo.

Critics accused the generals, who have ruled the country since Hosni Mubarak was ousted last year, of bowing to American pressure while others say the domestic credibility of officials and the judges who have led the criminal investigation into pro-democracy non-profit groups was increasingly in doubt.

ACCOUNTABLE

“It is within parliament’s role to stand up to this crime and to hold all those involved accountable, regardless of who they are and what their positions may be,” said Katatni.

“This was a flagrant interference into the judiciary’s work.”

The foreigners were among 43 people charged with working for groups receiving illegal foreign funds. Among the 15 who left Cairo were three Serbs, two Germans, one Norwegian and one Palestinian, Egypt’s official news agency said.

Airport sources said they left on a U.S. plane sent to get them. The group later arrived in Cyprus, where they were met by U.S. embassy staff.

Katatni questioned how a U.S. military plane had landed in Cairo’s airport before the ban was lifted and why the judge in the case had stepped aside just days before the decision.

A number of influential judges have slammed the decision, with the former head of the Alexandria Appeals Court, Ahmed Mekky, saying the decision highlighted “how the judiciary was not independent and subject to political pressure.”

Some defense lawyers, however, argue the decision to lift the ban was legal because imposing the ban in the first place had breached regulations. The U.S. state department said it paid $300,000 bail for each defendant.

The case against the activists remains open and a new court will start the trial on Thursday, March 8, said Judge Abdel Moez Ibrahim, head of the Cairo Appeals Court who appoints judges to the case.

Ethics and Morality Issues plague SNC-Latvin Group in Libya

As engineering giant SNC-Lavalin Group (SNC) struggles to contain a growing scandal about its links to Libya’s Qaddafi family, it’s fascinating to consider the tipping points. Investors have long accepted the fact that SNC made good money under the Qaddafi regime–some 6 percent of sales or C$440 million ($445 million) came from Libyan projects in 2010. That meant SNC’s decision in 2011 to suspend those projects amid the revolt that led to dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s death in October was bound to affect its bottom line.

And yet it was a Feb. 28 announcement that the $6.3 billion-a-year company is investigating some $35 million in mysterious payments that sliced almost a quarter off SNC’s stock price. Are investors suddenly shocked that doing business with the Qaddafis might have meant that dubious payments changed hands? Was SNC’s admission that 2011 net income might be 18 percent lower than forecast such a shock to the system? The bigger worry may be that the ongoing trickle of bizarre news points to a deeper moral corrosion that extends beyond the firm’s dealings in North Africa.

SNC spokeswoman Leslie Quinton said in a March 1 email that the company has no comment on the matter for now beyond its press release.

The current scandal didn’t start in Libya, where Montreal-based SNC had operated for more than three decades and was working on Qaddafi-backed projects like a prison it defended as “the first to be built according to international human rights standards.” Instead, it began in Mexico on Nov. 10 of last year when a Canadian consultant was arrested for allegedly leading a plot to smuggle members of Qaddafi’s family into the country. SNC had hired Cyndy Vanier, a self-employed mediator from a tiny town in Ontario and paid her more than $100,000 to travel to Libya and act as a third-party advisor on SNC’s operations. Never mind that Vanier, who is still jailed in Mexico, specialized in handling disputes among Canada’s indigenous groups. Somehow, SNC executives decided she was the right person to defend the company’s interests amid Libya’s violent civil war.

That has since led to the firing of a few executives and Tuesday’s cryptic announcement from the company that it was investigating $35 million in irregular payments and “certain other contracts.” Certain other contracts? Like, say, the links that SNC might have with Syria? Among those who have been fired in recent weeks is Nawaf Al Dandachi, an estimator who sent an invitation to a rally last June in support of Syrian leader Bashar Assad. While SNC has no projects in Syria, a spokeswoman says the company has a $13.5 million contract to design a pipeline that will run through the country. Then there’s the news, reported by CBC, that another SNC executive had been given power-of-attorney over some property held by the son-in-law of Tunisia’s deposed president, Ben Ali. And investors have also learned, courtesy of the CBC, that Canada’s former ambassador to Tunisia now works for SNC, while the husband of the country’s ambassador to Libya was hired to work on the human-rights-friendly prison.

Taken together, it paints a picture that many investors might find too grim. Whether SNC and its executives broke any laws is a matter for the courts. But investors have enough information to wonder how far the company is willing to go to drum up business with dubious regimes.

Banks Hamstring Profitable Small Businesses.. The New Economy.

Turns out customizing video game controllers for gaming addicts who want to shoot faster can be a decent business. Tim Erven says his five-year-old venture, Custom Gaming in Whippany, New Jersey, has been profitable since he started it, with revenue around $300,000 in 2011, and some 250 orders a week now, mostly through its Amazon storefront.

To keep up with demand, the 22-year-old has been trying to get banks to lend him as little as $10,000 to improve his website and rent a warehouse near his home. The six banks he’s approached have rejected his applications because of his age and because he hadn’t gotten a business loan before, even though his tax returns show profits and his parents were willing to put up their home as collateral. “From what the banks told me, asking for 10 percent of my annual revenue was reasonable, and what tends to be conventional, but even by decreasing the amount I was seeking I was still unable to obtain approval,” says Erven, who juggles balances on six credit cards to manage cash flow.

Erven’s situation isn’t unusual for small business owners navigating post-crisis banking. A recent National Federation of Independent Business study shows that even while demand for credit is on an upward trajectory, the number of small employers able to land a bank loan has not moved in parallel. Bank credit for small firms (defined as businesses with annual sales of less than $50 million) has been ticking up, slightly, since the third quarter of last year, according to the Federal Reserve’s quarterly surveys of senior loan officers and other government data. “But it should be much stronger at this point in the economic recovery,” says Paul Merski, chief economist at the Independent Community Bankers of America in Washington. (Community banks make nearly 60 percent of outstanding loans to small businesses, according to the trade group.)

Before lending will rebound, of course, consumer spending and real estate prices have to improve. And tempering new underwriting rules is crucial, too, says Merski. At a community banking conference last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke urged bank supervisors to strike a “delicate balance” between encouraging lending and avoiding a race to the bottom in loan standards.

Erven isn’t waiting for bankers to nail that balancing act. He plans to meet with Chinese private investors about raising capital from them and moving some of his production to China. “I’m either going to have to give a portion of the company or pay a high [interest rate],” says Erven. “I’d be able to get a much lower rate [from a bank], but that’s the reality of what I have to do to get the funding.”

UPSCALE GYMS Find Financial Gains by Adding retail and Other Services

When Erin Wright arrived for dinner at Philadelphia’s hip El Vez Mexican restaurant one night recently, her two friends—along with the table’s waitress—immediately demanded that she tell them where she’d bought her short black dress with its eye-catching, asymmetrical hem and sexy back cutout.

Her answer surprised them: “The gym.”

You’ve heard of boutique fitness clubs—such as the popular Manhattan-based group-cycling chains SoulCycle and Flywheel—but the luxury workout places are increasingly ramping up their emphasis on “boutique.” They have ventured beyond wick-away T-shirts and water bottles and plunged headlong into the fashion business, offering clothing, jewelry, and accessories, much of it not even designed for workouts. Busy urban professionals—who flock to exclusive designs that are easily grabbed en route to the gym—are driving the trend.

Wright, a 34-year-old Web news producer, frequents Lithe Method, a boutique fitness brand whose trademark “cardio-cheer-sculpting” (yes, that’s “cheer,” as in “cheerleading”) inspires long waitlists at its four studios. “I’m at Lithe four to five times a week, and I can grab this and not look sloppy when I leave,” she says of her dress, a sold-out $125 spandex-and-mesh Hotstepper, part of a 14-piece “Lithe Wear” line that also includes $95 faux-leather leggings with lace patches.

Lithe founder Lauren Boggi Goldenberg says her six-year-old company’s foray into nonfitness clothing is a natural step. “My company’s vision is for people to be fit, hip, and healthy,” says Goldenberg, a former University of Southern California cheerleader who based the dress on an old uniform of hers. “Did I ever think I would end up in the fashion business? No. But Lithe has become a lifestyle, and my clients want to be dressed for it.”

At just 10 months old, Lithe Wear already accounts for 10 percent of the company’s revenue, according to Goldenberg. The International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association has also recognized the rising trend: “Non-dues sources of revenue [are] something that just about all clubs are trying to grow,” notes Meredith Poppler, the group’s vice president for industry growth.

New York’s Bari Method, which specializes in an exercise that is equal parts dance class and boot camp, offers leather bracelets with engraved silver plates featuring the studio’s “word of the month” (such as “love” or “discipline”), and a $75 limited-edition tote bag designed by its seasonal artist in residence, whose work adorns the Tribeca studio. (An artist in residence at a gym? “Art is something we’re interested in,” explains director Sarah Michelina. “Our goal is to be a place you want to come and hang out. That’s why we have a sofa.”)

SoulCycle, the eight-studio cycling chain that’s a celebrity favorite, sells $88 leggings that have been worn by such celebrities as Karolina Kurkova, a $42 grapefruit-scented candle (a collaboration with designer Jonathan Adler), and a $225 Swarovski crystal-encrusted iPhone case emblazoned with the Swarovski logo. Every month, SoulCycle offers a new collection of items and says it has expanded 119 percent each year since 2008 and now accounts for 10 percent of total chain revenue—not bad for an effort that previously relied on guerrilla marketing.

“We couldn’t afford even a half-page ad in Hamptonsmagazine, so we thought, ‘If we could just get 100 people to walk around wearing a wheel [SoulCycle’s logo], it probably would be worth a lot more,” remembers co-founder Julie Rice. The first $26 yellow camouflage T-shirt (“It sounds a little tacky, but it wasn’t,” Rice says) was so beloved, clients turned up years later for a farewell party at the original studio wearing it. According to Rice, SoulCycle’s online shop receives orders from around the country, from places hundreds of miles from the nearest studio.

Like Goldenberg, Rice says the retail operation expanded organically. “You get a deeper understanding of how people feel about this workout from the clothes they’re helping us choose—powerful, strong, sexy,” she says. Bari’s Michelina adds, “Our goal is something bigger. It’s not just a workout. We want to give people something to carry around with them that reminds them they’re part of a movement.”

It may sound lofty, but it’s smart strategy. “Crafting a brand is really important for longevity in fitness, because you can’t protect your [intellectual property] to any real degree,” says Brynn Jinnett, 28, a Harvard-educated ballerina who founded New York City’s The Refine Method in 2010. Jinnett, who plans to introduce her own line, has watched closely as New York boutique chains find success in retail. “Creating a full lifestyle line contributes to the equity of their brand,” she says.

Last year, Equinox Health Clubs introduced a private label featuring what Wendy Low, the company’s senior director of retail, calls “fashionable basics.” These include a $168 double zip, cowl-neck black jacket, which quickly sold out. The company last year participated in Fashion’s Night Out, the late-night shopping extravaganza created by Vogueeditor Anna Wintour. Some recent offerings: multistrand bracelets and an ultrasoft Hudson jean, an exclusive collaboration with the denim company. Equinox declined to release figures, but Low said the private label items “were one of our highest-performing vendors.”

Equinox’s filter for its private label offerings is “to and from” the gym. Low acknowledges the lines are so blurred these days, that leaves a lot of leeway. “Our customers want more than performance pieces. They want fashion that’s convenient, that they can leave the gym in and go to lunch or dinner and still look great. That’s where the demand is.”

Boutique gyms like to claim, as fitness impresario David Barton has, that people spend more time there than in their own living rooms. Many plush gyms already offer cult bath products (some members confess to taking more showers there than in their own bathrooms), in addition to health food, Wi-Fi, and now clothing. What’s next—home décor? Well, SoulCycle is introducing its own cheery yellow spin bike for home use. Time will tell if it doubles as a clothing rack.

Foreign Buyers Use Miami Housing Market As Currency Hedge

Sporting an olive blazer and a hard hat that’s too big for his head, Martin Melo proudly looks up at his almost-finished condo tower. Brandishing a roll of blueprints, the 33-year-old Argentine developer declares, “This is Miami. We are 10 minutes from the airport, 10 minutes from South Beach. We found—some would say we ‘stole’—good land.” Melo says he acquired the 28,000-square-foot waterfront parcel in late 2010 for $1.4 million. A bit more than a year later his family-owned company, Grupo Melo, is about to complete the 18-story building, marketed as 23 Biscayne Bay. It’s sold out. “Now,” says a breathless Melo, “is the time for people who know how to win!”

In 2008 and 2009, with prices and the economy tanking, Miami’s new high-rises ended up with so many condos in foreclosure—and unoccupied—that a fishing boat captain said the city looked like a luxury war zone. Today the canyons of downtown, South Beach, and route A1A are hot again as international buyers rush to acquire pied-à-terre in what has long been considered the gateway to Latin America. Across the city, home sales jumped by a record 46 percent last year, the Miami Association of Realtors reports. And median monthly rents are up by 30 percent from 2009, to $1.97 per square foot, according to Condo Vultures, a Miami real estate consulting firm.

 

 

Photograph by John Loomis for Bloomberg Businessweek

The Melos: Martin, Jose Luis, and Carlos

 

 

Last summer, Melo’s 23 Biscayne Bay made local headlines when it raised Miami’s first condo construction crane in nearly three years. For their launch party the Melos skipped bubble-era excesses such as flame jugglers and stone-crab claws, opting instead for a more subdued evening of light appetizers and a gentle sales pitch. The event drew 50 people, almost all of them South Americans. Within weeks, says Melo, more than 70 percent of the yet-to-be-built tower’s 96 units were under contract to individuals who put down half the $250,000-plus price in cash. In August the Melos broke ground on 23 Biscayne, with move-in scheduled for this July.

At least two dozen condo projects have been announced in the past 10 months, says Peter Zalewski, a principal at Condo Vultures. The 27-floor Bellini on Williams Island is taking orders for its 70 condos, each with elevators that open directly into the unit. The 65-floor, 1,000-unit Resorts World Miami, featuring a lagoon, casino, shopping mall, and six towers, is expected to be ready for occupancy in 2014. The Mansions at Acqualina, by local developer Jules Trump (no relation to the Donald), will have 79 villas with ocean views and a 16,000-square-foot, $50 million Palazzo di Oro penthouse. Trump says the project registered $200 million in sales in its first month.

 

 

 

 

Latin Americans, Europeans, and Asians, who Zalewski says represent as much as 80 percent of new buyers in the area, are willing to plunk down deposits of more than three-quarters of the price. At Trump Hollywood, another superluxury complex (by the Donald, not the Jules, and the Related Group), 58 percent of buyers are South Americans, 22 percent Canadians, and 7 percent Russians. Apogee Beach, a new Related Group condo 20 miles north of the city, presold 87 percent of its units to Argentines, Venezuelans, and Mexicans—and only 5 percent to Americans, the developer says. “When we saw that foreigners were again buying condos here, we rapidly adapted,” says Jorge Pérez, Related’s chief executive officer.

Zalewski predicts that Miami’s downtown condo market will reach full occupancy early next year, compared with 8 percent vacancy now—even as 4,500 new condos become available across South Florida. “The speculator seeking riches has always been the common thread in South Florida’s boom-bust cycles,” he says. “The only change today is the extent of foreign investors with strong currencies flooding in.”

 

 

 

 

The booming economies in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru are driving the sales. Argentines and Venezuelans, worried about political turmoil and government overreach, are also helping boost the market. The Melos spent much of their wealth developing Miami condos in 2002 just as Argentina’s economy was collapsing. Now, Melo says, Venezuelans tell him they are increasingly worried that ailing ruler Hugo Chávez will make it harder for property owners to evict delinquent tenants. “Latin Americans don’t trust their banks or governments,” Melo says. “Of course, they can hold cash or gold and get robbed. If you buy a place in Miami and rent it out, it’s like a safe.”

 

The bottom line: After three fallow years, Miami’s condo market is bouncing back, with foreigners accounting for more than 80 percent of sales.

Side Note: Here is a school System in Desperate Need of Quality teachers and the Cost of living for Housing alone is too much for the salary the schools can pay. Bottom Line.. A worsening school system.

A BULL Market with MAJOR Insecurities and Reservations.

Next week marks the third anniversary of the current bull market cycle in U.S. stocks. Back on March 9, 2009, a day not easily forgotten in the annals of wealth destruction, theS&P 500 sank to a 12-year low of 676, the bottom of the worst bear market since the Great Depression. Since then, the S&P has more than doubled. In fact, this bullish run in stock prices is in the top 10 in terms of duration (1088 days) and so far has delivered a bigger pop in share price appreciation (102 percent) than the 96 percent gain during the long upswing in stocks that lasted from July 23, 2002 to October 9, 2007—just before the economy and the U.S. financial system became a heaving mess.

So if things are so much improved in the U.S. stock market, not to mention the broader economy, why does this bull market have all the raw energy of a performance by Lana Del Ray? Investors for the most part are still curled up in the fetal position, preferring to put their money in bonds and money market accounts rather than stocks. Investors have pulled more money out of  U.S. domestic mutual funds than they’ve put in for five straight years. They withdrew$134 billion last year, according to the Washington-basedInvestment Company Institute. Trading volume in S&P component stocks, at near comatose levels this year, is down 20 percent through Feb. 21, year-on-year, according to Deutsche Bank.

 

Illustration Courtesy Bespoke Investment Group

 

You know things are bad when Wall Street firms such as Blackrock, the world’s biggest asset-management firm, start taking out multiple-page ads in the financial press urging investors to rethink the cost of cash. At a Feb. 29 speech in New York, Blackrock Chief Executive Officer Laurence Fink said: “I have said many times that I would personally be 100% in equities.” But many investors don’t see it that way, even though stocks are still reasonably priced, despite the big run-up during the last three years, says Kent Daniel, a finance professor at the Columbia Business School. “There really is still a mood of pessimism,” he says. “There are a lot of individual investors that are terrified and sitting out for a while.”

Until that changes, this bull market is not going to be much of a party. It won’t improve the wealth of a broad segment of investors, as past rallies have. It may take a while longer for the post-trauma syndrome of the 2008-2009 financial crisis to lift.

and people in general have misgvings about how or why the market has grown:

1. Loads of objective data to support the fact that the Dow has lost all missive credibility…. there is no “win” in win when it’s all based on gross manipulation.
2. There are enough shadows out there to scare any investor into the frozen in the head light stance.  Cash is obviously a good state for them.  Those who want that cash but don’t pay or provide a good return why feel sorry for them.  The market for stocks is rigged by the machine traders why participate as a bit player.  let them eat cake.
3. Until the new tech stocks can prove that it has a steady revenue stream, it’s all speculation.  That is, until it all comes crashing down again.
4. Taking a look at one slice of the equity market, the tech-heavy NASDAQ composite is at its highest point since it began crashing in 2000. Some stocks may still be reasonably priced, but there is still reason to be concerned about overvalued equities.
5. Further, I bet stocks from some of the blue chips from across the markets haven’t changed hands lately because smaller cap stocks have risen faster in this three-year run. Haven’t looked at data on that yet, but just a thought

Still Feel like the market is a safe bet??? NOT ME!!!

Electrical Power from FABRIC?? Yes It Has Been Invented

Go into a sporting goods store and there’s no end of performance fabrics on display: garments that promise to repel moisture or else wick it away, to insulate but breathe, to stretch, to compress, to reflect light, to devour body odor.

A new fabric being developed at Wake Forest’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials, however, has the potential to make Gore-Tex seem about as high-tech as sackcloth. Called Power Felt, it generates electricity from heat. Wrap your cell phone in Power Felt and it could feed off your body heat to recharge while it’s in your pocket. Line the inside of a roof with it and, especially in the summer, it could power a household’s appliances. Lay it on the floor of a car and it could use the heat from the motor to run the air conditioning and radio—if it’s an electric car or hybrid, the Power Felt might even boost the mileage.

The challenge, according to David Carroll, the head of the team that created the fabric, was to make something that was electrically conductive—the way metal is—and thermally insulating—the way cloth can be. The solution Carroll’s team devised was to imprint carbon nanotubes onto a woven mat of plastic fibers. And since it takes relatively few carbon nanotubes to give the fabric thermoelectric properties, that can keep costs down. Carroll estimates that, at large scale, Power Felt could be fabricated for as little as a dollar for a swatch big enough to cover a cell phone.

“Thermoelectrics is a huge area of research,” he says, “but most people are looking at very expensive materials that produce a lot of power in a very compact form.” Power Felt is the opposite: It produces a relatively small amount of power, but because it’s so cheap, designers could use huge amounts of the very thin cloth, folding it over on itself many times to increase the current created.

Carroll is in talks with multiple investors about producing the fabric commercially, and it remains to be seen whether anyone else sees the same potential for his technofelt. But fabrics in general are one area where the sometimes hyperbolic early claims made for nanotechnology are being borne out. Engineers have been able to use things like nanopores and nanowhiskers to make fabrics that kill bacteria, clean themselves, and protect against hazardous chemicals.

Carroll believes one area of promise for Power Felt is in powering mobile sensors—electronics worn on the body, perhaps embedded in clothing, that allow doctors to track patients’ health remotely. Of course, even the consumer electronics we already carry around need plenty of energy, and it’s not easy or cheap for engineers to get more power into batteries.

When I spoke with Carroll, he was driving and on his cell phone. “While I’ve been talking to you, the back of my phone has gotten hot,” he says. “Our $1 piece of fabric would give you the same amount of boost as a $50 battery would.”

Programmers become BROgramers

Danilo Stern-Sapad writes code for a living, but don’t call him a geek. He wears sunglasses and blasts 2Pac while programming. He enjoys playing Battle Shots—like the board game Battleship, but with liquor—at the office. He and his fellow coders at Los Angeles startup BetterWorks are lavished with attention by tech industry recruiters desperate for engineering talent. “We got invited to a party in Malibu where there were naked women in the hot tub,” says Stern-Sapad, 25. “We’re the cool programmers.”

Tech’s latest boom has generated a new, more testosterone-fueled breed of coder. Sure, the job still requires enormous brainpower, but today’s engineers are drawn from diverse backgrounds, and many eschew the laboratory intellectualism that prevailed when semiconductors ruled Silicon Valley. “I don’t need to wear a pocket protector to be a programmer,” says John Manoogian III, a software engineer and entrepreneur.

 

 

 

 

At some startups the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that it’s given rise to a new “title”: brogrammer. A portmanteau of the frathouse moniker “bro” and “programmer,” the term has become the subject of a Facebook group joined by over 21,000 people; the name of a series of hacker get-togethers in Austin, Tex.; the punch line for online ads; and the topic of a humorous discussion on question-and-answer site Quora titled “How does a programmer become a brogrammer?” (One pointer: Drink Red Bull, beer, and “brotein” shakes.) “There’s a rising group of developers who are much more sociable and like to go out and have fun, and I think brogramming speaks to that audience,” says Gagan Biyani, co-founder and president of Udemy, a startup that offers coding lessons on the Web.

There’s also an audience that feels left out of the joke. Women made up 21 percent of all programmers in 2010, down from 24 percent in 2000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Anything that encourages the perception of tech as being male-dominated is likely to contribute to this decline, says Sara Chipps, founder of Girl Develop It, a series of software development workshops. “This brogramming thing would definitely turn off a lot of women from working” at startups, says Chipps.

A poster recently displayed at a Stanford University career fair by Klout, a social media analytics company, tried to woo computer science graduates by asking: “Want to bro down and crush code? Klout is hiring.” Says Chipps: “No. I don’t want to bro down. I can’t imagine that a girl would see that and say ‘I totally want to do that, it sounds awesome.’ ” Klout CEO Joe Fernandez says the sign was just a joke and “definitely not meant to be an exclusionary thing,” and that the company hired a female programmer at the fair. At the University of Pennsylvania, a computer science club had to back down from plans to wear T-shirts saying “Brogrammer” to a school festival when female members objected to it.

 

 

Illustration by Neil Swaab

 

 

In business, the brogramming culture seems to be confined to smaller outfits, says Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, the first female engineer at mobile ad startup AdMob. When the company was bought by Google (GOOG) in 2010 she was surrounded by a more diverse team of programmers. “The frat boy mentality among engineering men is a little more pronounced in the startup world than in the more mature organizations,” she says.

While a few startups like BetterWorks (engineer population: 14 men, one woman) may be overrun by bros, at most others the trend is confined to a few. At Santa Monica (Calif.)-based Gravity, engineering director Jim Plush is referred to as the “resident brogrammer” and has affixed his computer monitor to a treadmill so he can exercise two to three hours a day while programming. At Justin.tv, in San Francisco, co-founder Justin Kan rides a motorcycle to work and listens to Swedish dubstep music on his headphones. “It’s not like a frat house,” says Kan. “My desk is the brogramming lounge.”

Brogramming‏ @withthebrogram

 Follow

There’s an article titled “The Rise of the Brogrammer”. The guy must’ve been dunk for the past months to notice us, brogrammers, only today.

 The bottom line: The fratty “brogramming” meme is on the rise, but some female computer scientists feel the phenomenon is sexist and it alienates them.

What do brogrammettes look like?

Ginger Starr Tetreault, Entrepreneur (Marketing) and a wanna …

They wear Lululemon for comfort, tend to walk everywhere to fit in exercise, always carrying a laptop bag as there may be wireless to fit in some work wherever they may be, they’re more organized than a Brogrammer by nature, they don’t care who sees them wearing outdated eyewear/glasses and no makeup and tend to be very untidy while working….coffee cups piled high, granola bar wrappers strewn everywhere and they are only willing to speak to anyone if they are answering a question they have – otherwise, you are an irritant Lol…

 

The EU and Euro’s Greatest Threat is Democracy.. Just ask any Greek.

As a politician, you know you’re in a pickle when the thing you fear most is public opinion. Europe’s political and financial elites are still strongly committed to the euro. But the people of Europe are far less enthusiastic about the tighter integration that will be required to preserve the 17-nation common currency. Creditors, such as the Germans, don’t like opening their wallets and debtors, such as the Greeks, don’t like submitting to the dictates of the people with the money. So pretty much no one is happy.

The latest democratic threat to the euro comes from the Irish, who have a history of acting up. Prime Minister Enda Kenny said Feb. 28 that the government will name a date for a ballot in the coming weeks on ratifying the new European fiscal compact. Optimistically, he said it would give the Irish people a chance to reaffirm the nation’s commitment to the euro. Of course, it’s also possible that the vote will be “no.” Bloomberg’s Finbarr Flynn and Joe Brennan quotedThomas Costerg, an economist at Standard Chartered in London, who said, “This referendum carries huge risks. … It may increase nervousness about the future of the euro area’s perimeter.”

There is one bright spot for Kenny. To make sure the Irish vote yes, the European powers may sweeten Ireland’s bailout program. “It does give the government some leverage,” Liam Dunne, an analyst at Bloxham in Dublin, told Bloomberg’s Flynn.

The dilemma for the officials who are striving to hold the euro zone together is that the more concessions they make to the likes of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, the more they will enrage voters in Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland. And, of course, vice versa. Not a fun time to be a eurocrat.

Yes It Is TRUE. The USA is a NET EXPORTER of Gasoline.

You hear all the time that America is too dependent on foreign oil. For the better part of the past 50 years, the U.S. has imported the majority of its crude. But that dependance is quickly diminishing. According to the Energy Information Administration, crude oil imports fell to 8.9 million barrels a day in 2011, the lowest level in more than a decade. Since 2005, foreign imports have dropped from 60 percent of U.S. consumption to 45 percent last year, according to U.S. Department of Energy data.

In December 2011, for example, the U.S. imported 1.3 million barrels a day from Saudi Arabia, compared with 1.6 million in December 2007. The decline in imports fromVenezuela has been even steeper—just 860,000 barrels per day compared with 1.3 million four years earlier, although Venezuela’s declining production capacity has also been a factor in the drop.

 

 

 

While the U.S. is becoming less reliant on foreign crude, the world is becoming more reliant on gasoline and diesel fuel refined in the U.S. This week, we learned that in 2011, the U.S. became a net exporter of gasoline, diesel and other fuels for the first time since 1949. Such refined products were the top U.S. export in 2011, beating out such staples of U.S. manufacturing as Detroit’s autos and Boeing’s (BA)airplanes.

“We have become the China of refined products,” says Fadel Gheit, a senior energy analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. “We’re dumping product into other countries’ backyards.”

Just as Chinese manufacturers are able to make many products for a cheaper price due to lower material and labor costs, U.S. refiners have two key competitive advantages over foreign rivals: cheaper natural gas and access to a cheap, abundant supply of oil. Natural gas is a key raw material for refineries, which use it predominantly as a source of fuel to operate. Since last summer, the price has fallen 50 percent in the U.S., while hydraulic fracturing methods have significantly increased the supply of natural gas in the U.S.

More importantly, the price of the crude oil that most U.S. refineries process has been trading at a steep discount to the international supplies of crude that foreign refineries have to use. Most foreign refineries buy oil that’s pegged to the price of Brent crude, which has risen more than 25 percent in the past year due to the uprisings in Libya and Egypt and recent concern over Iranian oil disruption. Meanwhile, U.S. refineries in the Midwest and Gulf Coast process crude that’s pegged to the price of West Texas Intermediate, which has stayed low, thanks to all the oil gushing out of North America. Since 2009, North Dakota has more than doubled its monthly oil production to 16 million barrels as of December 2011, surpassing the output of Ecuador late last year. That supply has kept WTI-priced oils cheap, while the cost of Brent-priced oils has skyrocketed.

“This cheaper supply of crude has given U.S. refineries a tremendous competitive advantage over their competition,” Gheit says. “Just like China, we are using cheaper raw materials to sell a product priced in a global market.”

Although a number of unprofitable refineries on the East Coast have had to close because they lacked access to cheaper WTI-priced oil, those in the Midwest and Gulf Coast are expanding. Even though a new refinery hasn’t been built in the U.S. since the 1970s, refining capacity in the U.S. has been steadily increasing, climbing 0.8 percent, to 17.7 million barrels a day in December from a year earlier. Marathon Petroleum has finished a $3.9 billionexpansion of its refinery in Garyville, La., and Total (TOT)completed a $2.2 billion expansion of its refinery in Port Arthur, Tex., which can now process a wider range of crude. In 2011, the Garyville refinery more than doubled the amount of diesel products it exports, to 27.6 million barrels, says Marathon Petroleum spokesman Shane Pochard.

Refineries should continue to export more of their product rather than sell it inside the U.S., where demand remains close to a 15-year low thanks to more fuel-efficient cars and a greater share of ethanol in our tanks. This points to a future where an increasing share of the world’s refined fossil fuels come with a sticker: Made in the U.S.A.

Europe’s Conundrum: How to Cut Spending and Still Grow

European leaders are looking for ways to get growth going again, but tough deficit-reduction rules prevent them from using the most obvious tool: government stimulus. The Europeans could learn from the Obama administration, which despite the occasional misstep has gotten the recovery formula correct: Gas now, brakes later.

Europe is choking off its own recovery by insisting on premature austerity. The first mistake was to agree on unrealistically tough deficit-reduction targets. The second mistake was—rather, is—to insist on compliance with those targets even though they are doing serious damage to Europe’s economy.

“For the credibility of the whole operation, I think it is necessary that we maintain these budgetary targets,” European Union President Herman Van Rompuy said on Mar. 2 at a summit meeting in Brussels. “If we don’t do that in a consistent fashion, then we will be punished by the markets.”

Rompuy, a true believer in a strong union, was elected to a second 2 1/2-year term at the summit. But the organization’s hard line, far from pulling nations together, is splitting them apart. Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy waited until the summit was over to announce that he was raising Spain’s budget-deficit target for this year to 5.8 percent from 4.4 percent. Spain’s deficits are rising because the economy is weak—the latest unemployment rate is 23 percent. But after what were politely described as “talks”with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, Rajoy changed his tune again and said Spain would stick to the EU goal. Rajoy, a People’s Party representative elected in December, didn’t completely back down. He said Spain will unveil a “reasonable” spending plan on Mar. 30 based on “prudent” forecasts.

Europe did better than the U.S. in the early stages of the financial crisis. But it did too little to strengthen its banks, and it dialed back on stimulus too soon. Now the policies followed by the U.S. look good by comparison—the U.S. unemployment rate fell in January to 8.3 percent. Europe’s 27 countries had a blended rate of 10.1 percent in January.

Europe’s most indebted countries don’t have the financial wherewithal to stimulate their economies, but creditor nations such as Germany do. Instead, they are joining in the austerity—compounding the problem instead of alleviating it. Germany managed to slash its budget deficit to 1 percent of GDP last year.

No country can run big budget deficits forever. But by aiming for fiscal rectitude when the economy is weak, Europe is causing an economic contraction that depresses tax revenue, forcing governments to cut spending even further in a lethal downward spiral.

A Falling Jobless Rate Can Mean Bad News

When is good news bad news? When we’re talking jobs. In the upside-down logic of the labor market, a falling unemployment rate can sometimes be a worrisome sign, if it indicates that people have permanently given up looking for work. If you’ve quit looking for work you’re no longer considered part of the labor force. And if you’re not in the labor force, you’re technically not unemployed. So the jobless rate, now at 8.3 percent, falls for the worst of reasons.

Many economists have been arguing that as the U.S. economy recovers, a flood of people who had left the labor force will become encouraged to start seeking work again, so the unemployment rate will start rising even as the economy adds jobs at a good clip. But a new report by economists at Barclays Capital argues that that will not happen–most people who left the labor force aren’t coming back. The notion that they are, says Barclays (BCS), “is something of an urban legend.”

The Barclays conclusion may be good news for people who are hunting jobs–less competition! But it’s bad news for society as a whole, because it means that a smaller corps of workers will be supporting a bigger army of non-workers, including retirees, the disabled, children, prisoners, etc.

The report by Barclays economists Dean Maki, Troy Davig, and Peter Newland isn’t all discouraging. It does say that people who continued looking for work will be more likely to find it as the economy gains speed. It makes these points:

–The retirement of baby boomers has played a bigger role than the cyclical downturn in lowering labor force participation.

–Only a third of the drop in labor force participation is accounted for by those who say they want a job. Only 15 percent of the drop is accounted for by those who say they want a job and are also of prime working age: 25 to 54.

–History shows that re-entrants into the labor force “have played, at best, a tangential role in unemployment rate dynamics.” And there’s no reason to expect that this time will be different.

The Barclays’ bottom line:  ”We expect the unemployment rate to continue falling.” In fact, they expect it to fall to about 7 percent by the end of 2013. But the employment-to-population ratio will still be about 4 percentage points below its pre-recession peak, they say.

THERE WAS NO BOWLES-SIMPSON COMMISSION REPORT

Dean Baker protests:

There Was No Bowles-Simpson Commission Reports: The New York Times badly misled readers by repeatedly referring to a report of the deficit reduction commission led by former Senator Alan Simpson and Morgan Stanley Director Erskine Bowles. There was no report from this commission. The “report”… was exclusively the [draft mark] of the co-chairs. It did not receive the necessary support of 14 members of the commission that would have made it an official commission report, a point noted only in passing toward the end of the piece.

This mis-characterization is extremely important in the context of the piece, because the main point of the article is that President Obama ignored the report of a commission he appointed. Since this commission did not approve a report, the premise of the article is wrong….

It is also worth noting that much of the projected long-term deficit would disappear if the Affordable Care Act is as successful in containing costs as projected by the Medicare Trustees.

Dancing the Debt Dance in Washington

President Obama says regularly that the US needs to more look like Europe in terms of our social compact, that our social nets need to emulate those of France. Italy. Spain. Etc. He looks past the disaster that is Europe, the same disaster that is threatening our own meager recovery, a disaster caused by excessive social spending and inadequate revenue generation.

Has he not heard the recent interview with Mario Draghi, Chief of the Europe Central Bank? Draghi says that the “spending days” are over. He talks about the huge debts that have been amassed and that are crippling economies. Draghi pointedly talks about Spain, a country with unemployment that is nearing 50 percent among the young who are unable to find employment. Draghi’s message: “Europe — Austerity Is Your New Reality”. So much for Europe’s vaunted social compacts, which have helped to wreck its economies.

Hearing that “Austerity” is the new model is a tough message for any politician but Draghi is not a politician; he is the man who runs the bank that has to watch over the messes that are the economies of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and soon to be next, France. He has to be the realist in the European room. He has to deliver the tough news to the politicians in nearly every European country. The exception is Germany, whose people are being expected to finance the cleanup of other’s messes.

Here in the US, we think that we are far from being one of “those.” We aren’t. Our actual debt now exceeds our Gross Annual Product, soon by even more; this indebtedness on the books is projected to increase a trillion and a half this coming year. Ignoring this indebtedness blissfully forgets about all of the past IOU’s written out of Social Security and all of the promises for future payments linked to Medicare, Medicaid, and the Prescription Drug Program, programs which are partially or totally unfunded by revenue. We swim merrily along funding our country on borrowed money, money that comes to the US only because the bonds of so many other nations are now junk. Surprise! Our bonds have been downgraded a notch, too, and there will be more of that to come

How long will this continue? What will it take to turn our politicians away from the old social services model of most failed and failing European economies, toward the social responsibility model of Germany? Neither political party talks about this. Both parties give, and give, and give away. There is little reason to choose between Democrat or Republican because the politicians who represent those parties are indistinguishable the one from the other; their lack of attention is ruining our country. Who we vote for no longer matters because our votes result in the same spendthrift behavior by the same giveaway artists.

We are now in the middle of the Republican primary season. None of the news we hear is about the economy, about the cost of things; it is about social issues. What happened? Where and how did Clinton’s message of “It’s the economy, stupid” get lost?

Two and a half years ago on this page I expressed my dismay about the mess that is our economy. Two and a half years later we are $5 trillion deeper in debt, and looking at no end to this downward slide. As I said back then, I will not be around to pay the piper when this absurd indebtedness dance ends; but, I continue to weep for my grandchildren, who will be stuck tomorrow with what we are allowing to happen today.

Read more: Ellsworth: Washington DC’s dance with debt – Wayland, MA – Wicked Local Wayland http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opinions/letters_to_the_editor/x413534873/Ellsworth-Washington-DC-s-dance-with-debt#ixzz1o4eNWLKn