Danaher Management Discusses Q3 2013 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

Danaher (DHR) Q3 2013 Earnings Call October 17, 2013 8:00 AM ET

Executives

Matt R. McGrew - Vice President of Investor Relations

H. Lawrence Culp - Chief Executive Officer, President, Director, Member of Finance Committee and Member of Executive Committee

Daniel L. Comas - Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President

Analysts

Charles Stephen Tusa - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division

Scott R. Davis - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Steven E. Winoker - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC., Research Division

Nigel Coe - Morgan Stanley, Research Division

Jeffrey T. Sprague - Vertical Research Partners, LLC

Jonathan P. Groberg - Macquarie Research

Shannon O'Callaghan - Nomura Securities Co. Ltd., Research Division

Julian Mitchell - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division

S. Brandon Couillard - Jefferies LLC, Research Division

Deane M. Dray - Citigroup Inc, Research Division

Ross Muken - ISI Group Inc., Research Division

Operator

Good morning. My name is Debbie, and I will be your conference facilitator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Danaher Corporation Third Quarter 2013 Earnings Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Matt McGrew, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. McGrew, you may begin your conference.

Matt R. McGrew

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. On the call today are Larry Culp, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Dan Comas, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.

I'd like to point out that our earnings release, a slide presentation supplementing today's call, our third quarter Form 10-Q and the reconciling and other information required by SEC Regulation G relating to any non-GAAP financial measures provided during the call are all available in the Investors section of our website, www.danaher.com, under the heading Financial Information, Quarterly Earnings, and will remain available following the call.

The audio portion of this call will be archived on the Investors section of our website later today under the heading Investor Events and will remain archived until our next quarterly call. A replay of this call will also be available until October 24, 2013. The replay number is (888) 203-1112 in the U.S. and (719) 457-0820 internationally. Confirmation code is 1705356.

During the presentation, we'll describe certain of the more significant factors that impacted year-over-year performance. Please refer to the supplemental materials and our third quarter Form 10-Q for additional factors that impacted year-over-year performance. Unless otherwise noted, all references in these remarks and accompanying presentation of earnings, revenues and other company-specific financial metrics relate to the third quarter of 2013 and relate only to the continuing operations of Danaher's business. And all references to period-to-period increases or decreases in financial metrics are year-over-year.

I'd also like to note that we may make some statements during the call that are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities law, including statements regarding events or developments that we believe or anticipate will or may occur in the future. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our SEC filings. It is possible that actual results might differ materially from any forward-looking statements that we make today. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date that they are made, and we do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events and developments or otherwise.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Larry.

H. Lawrence Culp

Matt, thanks. Good morning, everyone. Another very good quarter for Danaher. Our team continues to execute well, taking advantage of the strength of our portfolio and the Danaher Business System to deliver solid core growth, margin and cash flow performance.

Revenues grew 5.5% to $4.7 billion with core revenues up 3%. Acquisitions increased revenues by 3% while currency translation decreased revenues by 0.5 point. The investments we've been making in new product development and sales and marketing initiatives, particularly the rapidly expanding digital world, are driving growth and share gains across many of our businesses. Radiometer, Leica Biosystems, ChemTreat, Gilbarco, Leica Microsystems and Videojet are among the businesses that we believe increased their relative market share this quarter.

From a geographic perspective, high-growth markets grew mid-single-digits. China delivered low single-digit growth led by our Dental, Water Quality and Life Sciences & Diagnostics platforms. Most of our industrial businesses continue to see sales declines in China. Developed markets improved sequentially from the first half of the year, while year-over-year, Japan grew mid-single-digits, the U.S. was up low single-digits and Western Europe was slightly positive.

Our gross margin was 51.9% and gross profit improved $145 million. This increase, along with our holding G&A essentially flat, allowed us to grow our combined R&D and sales and marketing investments faster than our sales growth rate. We delivered outstanding margin expansion this quarter with our core operating margin increasing 110 basis points and reported operating margin improving 30 basis points to 17.4%. Our free cash flow to net income conversion was 139% in the quarter and we're still driving towards $3 billion of free cash flow for the full year.

We remain active and optimistic on the M&A front. During the first 9 months of the year, we closed more than $850 million of acquisitions, primarily in our Environmental, Industrial Technologies and Life Sciences & Diagnostics segments. We've had a number of constructive conversations with companies across all of our growth platforms and remain confident in our ability to deploy the $8 billion of potential M&A capacity available through 2014 in a strategic yet disciplined way.

Turning to our 5 operating segments. Test & Measurement core revenues were flat as growth in our mobile tool distribution business was offset by modest declines in both our instruments and communications platforms. Both core growth -- both core and reported operating margin decreased 90 basis points, primarily due to the impact of targeted growth spending, including the expansion of our network monitoring systems for next-generation LTE networks and our DdoS security offerings for our enterprise and service provider customers. Instruments core revenues declined slightly.

At Fluke, core revenues were flat as increased demand for our industrial products in the U.S. and Western Europe was offset by pockets of weakness in certain high-growth markets. Fluke has generated more than $100 million of revenue from new products introduced since the beginning of last year, including additions to our power quality thermography and calibration lines. These new products, along with productivity and cost-reduction initiatives, helped drive more than 100 basis points of gross margin expansion in the quarter. At Tektronix, core sales declined slightly as low single-digit growth in developed markets was more than offset by weakness in our China export business where we primarily serve the technology sector.

Communications core revenues declined at a low single-digit rate as strong demand for security applications in North America and Western Europe was more than offset by a decline at our network management solutions business in the same regions. Encouragingly though, bookings were up double-digit in the quarter and we expect core growth rates to accelerate in the fourth quarter. New products introduced within the last 18 months, including Arbor's Pravail enterprise security software and Fluke Networks' TruView network performance monitoring solution, accounted for more than 25% of the total third quarter platform revenue and are steadily building momentum. During the quarter, Arbor closed the acquisition of Packetloop, a developer of big data security and forensic analytics used to provide enterprises with enhanced advanced threat detection during cyber attacks. Packetloop's capabilities complement Arbor's Pravail and Peakflow products, further extending our DdoS-centric solutions toward a broader suite of advanced threat analytics.

Turning to our Environmental segment. Revenues increased 10% with core revenues up 4.5%. The segment core operating margin improved 60 basis points with reported operating margin down 80 basis points due to the dilutive effect of recent acquisitions. Our Water Quality platform's core revenues increased at a mid-single-digit rate, in part due to an improvement in North American municipal project activity at both Hach and Trojan. Hach has now seen 3 sequential quarters of U.S. municipal spending increases. Sales in China continued to grow at a double-digit rate.

Trojan's orders were up high single-digits due to several large wastewater project wins, including the city of Chicago, one of several large U.S. cities now deploying UV technology in their treatment facilities. At ChemTreat, we continue to grow faster than the market and achieved another milestone as quarterly revenue surpassed $100 million for the first time. Gilbarco Veeder-Root's core revenues grew at a mid-single-digit rate, led by demand for our payment solutions, which grew more than 25% in the quarter due to significant customer wins in Asia and Australia.

During the quarter, we expanded our highly popular Encore product line with a new compressed natural gas dispenser, which allows us to help retailers capitalize on the growing trend toward alternative fuels while also delivering superior safety features and seamless monitoring. In the quarter, we acquired Teletrac, further building out our smart transport business. Teletrac complements the previous acquisition of Navman Wireless by providing increased access to the U.S. market and key verticals, including long-haul trucking.

Moving to Life Sciences & Diagnostics. Revenues increased 10.5% with core revenues up 6%. Core operating margin was up 285 basis points, while our reported operating margin decreased 200 -- while our reported operating margin increased 250 basis points to 14.7%. Core revenues in Diagnostics grew mid-single-digits. At Beckman Coulter Diagnostics, core revenues were up low single-digits with growth in all major product lines, particularly clinical automation and immunoassay. We've seen low single-digit core growth or better for the last 6 quarters and the business is becoming more competitive each day.

As many of you know, during the quarter, we received FDA 510(k) clearance for the Access troponin assay for use on the DxI series of immunoassay systems. This clearance marks an important milestone for our customers and the Beckman Coulter team. For the first time since 2010, Beckman can offer the troponin assay to existing and new customers in the U.S. for use on all of our immunoassay and integrated chemistry and immunoassay systems.

With both troponin approvals received and many other regulatory and quality improvements made, we're better positioned to focus on retaining existing and winning new customers and to more effectively and actively increase growth investments in the business. We've launched several significant new products in the last year, including the AU 5800 and the DxH 600, and are investing in new product development and menu expansion to boost product vitality and ultimately, drive higher organic growth rates.

Radiometer's core sales increased at a low single -- at a low double-digit rate. Sales in high-growth markets were up more than 20%, led by China, which grew in excess of 35%. AQT, our cardiac care breakthrough, also had another terrific quarter, growing more than 30%.

At Leica Biosystems, core sales increased approximately 10% as advanced staining and core histology sales both grew low double-digits. Increasingly, we are finding opportunities to provide differentiated solutions to our customers. In this quarter, we had several meaningful wins as a result of the integration of our core histology capabilities with our advanced staining solutions to simplify overall pathology laboratory workflows.

Core revenues in our Life Sciences platform grew high single-digits with solid sales in most geographies, particularly Japan, China and Western Europe. AB SCIEX core revenues grew high single-digits, led by particular strength in pharma and in applied markets. The 6500 Triple Quad continues to build momentum and has generated more than $100 million in revenue since its launch last year.

AB SCIEX continues to expand its digital capabilities with multiple new and enhanced launches this year, including its new MasterView Software, which allows the mass spectrometer to be used for routine analysis in food safety, environmental and forensic toxicology laboratories with minimal training needed for lab personnel. This is just one of the many new applications introduced this year that simplify workflows and enable greater efficiency and cost savings for our customers. Of note, today, approximately half of AB SCIEX R&D associates are dedicated to software development, with nearly 1/3 of the total R&D spend focused on these digital efforts.

Leica Microsystems core sales increased mid-teens, with sales of our confocal microscopes up more than 30%. Our SP8 modular confocal laser scanning microscope has generated over $150 million of revenue since its launch last year and continues to be very well-received. We're very proud of the fact that all 3 winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine cited Leica microscopes in their publications during the period in which they carried out the work that contributed to their awards. This is the third year in a row that Leica microscopes have been cited in Nobel Prize-winning work in the field of physiology or medicine. We're pleased to support such important and pioneering work.

Turning to Dental. Segment revenues increased 4.5%, while core revenues were up 3.5%. Core operating margin increased 70 basis points and reported operating margin increased 60 basis points to 16.1%. This marks the first quarter Dental segment margins have exceeded 16%, evidence of our team's ability to drive and sustain improvements.

Dental consumables core revenues grew mid-single-digits with solid demand in most geographies and product lines. In particular, we saw outstanding traction in our implant business, growing over 20%. Revenues from products introduced during the last 18 months have doubled since the first quarter, as adoption ramps for our new products, including the Lythos Digital Orthodontic Impression System and our TF Adaptive endodontic file.

KaVo core revenues increased low single-digits as double-digit growth in the U.S. was partially offset by weakness in project business in Western Europe. During the quarter, KaVo launched the DIAGNOcam, a handheld, X-ray-free digital imaging system that uses light technology instead of radiation to provide doctors with unsurpassed imaging quality.

In Industrial Technologies, total revenues increased 1%, while core revenues decreased 1%. Due to a weak top line, core operating -- or despite a weak top line, core operating margin expanded 100 basis points and reported operating margin increased 80 basis points to 22.6%. Motion core revenues declined at a high single-digit rate. However, we have seen improvements in the North American industrial automation and distribution markets.

We've also had commercial success with several new design wins, including a contract from a major material handling company for critical motion control capability worth over $15 million annually at full volume production. The team's execution on the margin front has been excellent, as operating margin increased more than 100 basis points from the first 9 months of the year. Motion continues to transition out of some of their lower-margin business, negatively impacting sales performance in the short term but positioning us for better and more profitable growth longer term.

Core revenues in our Product Identification platform were flat as mid-single-digit growth at Videojet and X-Rite was largely offset by a significant nonrepeating consumer electronics laser order last year, which created a difficult prior year comparison. We believe the investments we've made in digital marketing lead generation and in innovation at Videojet, combined with our expanding commercial DBS capabilities, continue to drive relative outperformance. We're now deploying the same lead gen growth tools to many of our other businesses.

During the quarter, Esko announced their first acquisition as part of Danaher, acquiring CAPE Systems, a software developer that specializes in packaging design, pallet optimization and truck and container loading solutions. This acquisition expands Esko's capabilities to provide an end-to-end offering to its packaging customers from packaging design all the way through to point of sale.

So to wrap up, our team continues to execute well with the Danaher Business System, delivering solid core growth, operating margin expansion and cash flow performance. We believe our new product and go-to-market investments, our continued focus on productivity and efficiency initiatives and our optimism on the acquisition front position us well for the balance of 2013 and beyond.

We are initiating fourth quarter diluted net EPS guidance of $0.91 to $0.96 and confirming our full year adjusted diluted net EPS guidance of $3.37 to $3.42. We are assuming fourth quarter 2013 core revenue growth to be in the range of 2% to 3%.

Matt R. McGrew

Thanks, Larry. That concludes the formal comments. Debbie, we're ready to take some questions.

Earnings Call Part 2:

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/danaher-management-discusses-q3-2013-155008562.html
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Wall Street ends lower, futures fall after Fitch rating move

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stock index futures fell on Tuesday after Fitch Ratings placed the country's 'AAA' rating on rating watch negative, citing the impasse in Washington over raising the debt ceiling.

"Although Fitch continues to believe that the debt ceiling will be raised soon, the political brinkmanship and reduced financing flexibility could increase the risk of a U.S. default," the rating agency wrote in a statement.

S&P 500 futures fell 9.6 points while Dow Jones industrial average futures sank 60 points and Nasdaq 100 futures fell 7.5 points.

(Reporting by Ryan Vlastelica; Editing by Nick Zieminski)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/stock-futures-dip-citi-earnings-115931637--finance.html
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Harry Belafonte -- I Have A Dream -- To Sell Martin Luther King's Speeches

Harry Belafonte
I HAVE A DREAM
To Sell MLK's Speeches

Exclusive

Harry Belafonte wants to be free at last ... to sell original speeches penned by Martin Luther King, Jr., but King's Estate has mounted a challenge from the mountaintop ... so Belafonte is now suing.

Get this ... Belafonte has the notes that were in Dr. King's suit pocket when he was assassinated in 1968.  He also has a condolence letter written to Coretta King by President Lyndon Johnson.  And, he has various King speeches, including the outline for the famous "The casualties of the war in Vietman" speech.

Belafonte tried to sell the docs at a Sotheby's auction back in 2008, but the Estate objected and the auction was cancelled. 

Belafonte apparently was stewing over this for years, and now he's made his move by filing a lawsuit asking a judge to confirm he's the rightful owner.  And get this ... Sotheby's is holding all the docs until a court decides who owns the priceless stuff.

As for how Harry gained possession of the docs, he had a long relationship with King during the Civil Rights movement.  In fact, King worked at Belafonte's NYC apartment and Belafonte even provided King with financial support.

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Source: http://www.tmz.com/2013/10/15/harry-belafonte-martin-luther-king-speeches-lawsuit-sothebys/
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Philly schools to get $45M to ease money crisis

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Philadelphia schools learned Wednesday they will get an extra $45 million from the state as the district struggles with its worst financial crisis in memory and questions about a student's death after an apparent asthma attack at a school without a nurse on site.

Gov. Tom Corbett announced the state aid to Pennsylvania's largest school district at an unrelated news conference in his Capitol offices and did not take questions afterward. However, he said his decision came a day after a letter from the Philadelphia school superintendent, William Hite, convinced him that district officials had made enough progress toward the governor's educational and financial goals for improvements in the 134,000-student district.

Corbett also said he and his wife sent their sympathies to the family of 12-year-old Laporshia Massey, although a spokesman for Corbett later said the release of the money and the girl's death were not connected.

Still, Corbett's acting education secretary, Carolyn Dumaresq, said Wednesday her department will review the circumstances of Massey's death and will try to determine whether she had an inhaler with her the day she died and whether she was able to self-administer it. Dumaresq also said her department would review the district's emergency plans and staffing, and correct any problems it finds.

Dumaresq said it is not unusual for a smaller public school to be without a nurse on site each day because the state requires that the caseload of school nurses must not exceed 1,500 students per nurse. Sometimes one nurse covers two buildings, Dumaresq said.

Because of the funding problems, the district cut its nursing staff district-wide two years ago; the smaller school that Massey attended had a nurse on duty two days a week.

Hite said Wednesday the money would allow the state-controlled district to restore sports and music for the full year and rehire about 400 people, including guidance counselors, assistant principals and teachers. However, he said he did not plan to rehire any nurses, as union officials and a parent's organization urged, because the district has met the state's caseload standard.

Holding six weeks of classes without the money has been "detrimental," he said.

The district approved a budget of nearly $2.4 billion, and the extra money helps close the gap from the prior year's nearly $2.7 billion budget.

The state Legislature had approved the money in July, although it gave the secretary of education the power to first demand improvements to fiscal stability, educational improvement and operational control.

Initially, Corbett, a Republican, had sought significant concessions from the teachers union, but Corbett's budget secretary, Charles Zogby, said Hite's letter summarizing steps taken, such as managing teacher assignments and closing schools, were satisfactory, even though negotiations with the teachers' union continue without a contract.

Layoff notices that went out in June to nearly 4,000 employees wiped out 20 percent of the district's employees. A pledge by Mayor Michael Nutter to borrow $50 million against future sales tax receipts prompted the rehiring of some laid-off staff and encouraged Hite to back off a threat not to open the schools Sept. 9.

Philadelphia officials had been harshly critical of the administration's decision to withhold the money, and the death of Massey, a sixth-grader at Bryant Elementary, renewed an outcry over conditions in the district. A parents' group, Parents United for Public Education, said the district's lack of money is "dangerous and it is unsustainable. It has put children and families directly in harm's way."

Massey died Sept. 25 after initially reporting that she was unable to breathe at school, her father's lawyer, Ronald S. Pollack, said. Some details remain unclear, but she did not come home from school with her inhaler, Pollack said. She died later at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, he said.

School nurse Eileen Duffey, who was helping to organize a Thursday vigil in Laporshia's honor, said there's no guarantee that Laporshia would be alive had there been a nurse in the building

"But I do know that school nurses, such as myself, we are trained to assess children," Duffey said.

___

Associated Press writer Maryclaire Dale in Philadelphia contributed to this report. Matheson reported from Philadelphia.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/philly-schools-45m-ease-money-crisis-222334392.html
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Here's A Reason To Love Disco Again: Stopping Food Waste

Tristram Stuart, founder of Feeding the 5000, is helping to organize several disco soup events across Europe for World Food Day. Stuart is shown here in New York, where he attended the first U.S.-based disco soup event in September.

Courtesy of Feeding the 5000

Tristram Stuart, founder of Feeding the 5000, is helping to organize several disco soup events across Europe for World Food Day. Stuart is shown here in New York, where he attended the first U.S.-based disco soup event in September.

Courtesy of Feeding the 5000

Wednesday is World Food Day, an occasion food activists like to use to call attention to world hunger. With 842 million chronically undernourished people on Earth, it's a problem that hasn't gone away.

This year, activists are trying to make the day a little spicier with pots full of disco soup to highlight the absurd amount of food thrown away that could feed people: one-third of all the food produced every year.

What is disco soup, you ask? It's the tasty outcome of a party designed to bring strangers together to cook food that would otherwise end up in the trash. Oftentimes, the soup is donated to the hungry. Oh, and as the name suggests, there's music involved, too.

The first disco soup party was held in Germany in early 2012 by some folks affiliated with the Slow Food Youth Network Deutschland. The organizers collected discarded fruits and vegetables from a market, blasted some disco music and made a huge pot of soup.

Two months later, a group in France threw a disco soup party, and attracted 100 people. More parties followed, in Australia, South Korea, Ireland and beyond. You can check out an earnest little video of another French disco food event here:

The idea eventually caught the attention of Tristram Stuart, a British food waste activist and writer who started Feeding the 5000, a campaign named for an event held in London in 2009 and 2011, where 5,000 members of the public were given a free lunch made with perfectly edible ingredients bound for the rubbish bin.

Stuart is adamant that consumers and businesses in the developed world have a moral obligation to reverse "the global scandal" of food waste. In addition to throwing events to cook up blemished but edible produce, his campaign is also working to change European Union legislation on feeding food waste to pigs through the Pig Idea project.

For World Food Day, Feeding the 5000 is hosting a "flagship" disco soup party in Brussels. And the group says more pots full of disco soup will be bubbling away today in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Greece and Macedonia. The event hub is the Disco Anti Food Waste Day Facebook page.

And what if you don't like disco? Can you still have a disco soup event?

"We play anything that gets people dancing as they peel and chop the vegetables and fruit," Dominika Jarosz, event coordinator for Feeding the 5000, tells The Salt in an email.

While there are no disco soup events scheduled for Oct. 16 in the U.S., Feeding the 5000 says disco soup is starting to get traction here. The first U.S. disco soup event was held on Sept. 20 in New York, with the support of Slow Food NYC, the Natural Gourmet Institute, chef Paul Gerard of the East Village restaurant Exchange Alley and the United Nations Environment Program.

In advance of the soup blitz, Stuart visited local farms in New York and New Jersey and gleaned blemished tomatoes, over-sized watermelons, squash, eggplants and other fresh produce that the farmers were unable to sell. A rotating crew of DJs provided a soundtrack at the soup-making party at the Chelsea Super Pier, and most of the food was donated to the Bowery Mission. Such events, he says, help raise awareness among food donors like grocery stores and farmers and help them forge long-term relationships with organizations that feed the hungry.

Americans may be getting more motivated to address food waste, but we have to hand it to the Europeans, who do seem to be out in front on the issue. It was a group of Austrians, after all, who started a reality cooking show centered around Dumpster diving.

Food waste was also a talking point for world leaders who spoke up on World Food Day. "Reducing food waste is not, in fact, only a strategy for times of crisis, but a way of life we should adopt if we want a sustainable future for our planet," Nunzia De Girolamo, Italy's minister for agriculture, food and forestry policy, said at a ceremony Wednesday at the Food and Agriculture Organization's headquarters in Rome.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/10/16/235355021/turning-food-waste-into-disco-soup?ft=1&f=1053
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The Fiscal Fight's Winners And Losers

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell arrives at the Capitol on Wednesday. The Kentucky Republican helped forge a late-hour deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to sidestep financial chaos.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell arrives at the Capitol on Wednesday. The Kentucky Republican helped forge a late-hour deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to sidestep financial chaos.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

The White House is insisting, publicly at least, that nobody emerged victorious from the government shutdown/debt crisis debacle.

"There are no winners here," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday after Senate leaders announced they had a deal to end the budget impasse.

"And nobody's who's sent here to Washington by the American people can call themselves a winner," Carney said, "if the American people have paid a price for what's happened."

Well, yes and no.

As the curtain comes down on the latest, but certainly not the last, partisan convulsion, there's no question that the shutdown and debt crisis will affect the political calculus in Washington.

Here's our list of winners and losers. Let us know if you have suggestions of your own.

Winners

Kentucky's Senators

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the state's wily senior senator, and his junior GOP colleague, Sen. Rand Paul, both emerged from their party's awful interlude with reputations intact, if not enhanced. McConnell employed his sharp political instincts, and once again forged a late-hour deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to sidestep financial chaos. And Paul astutely tended to his 2016 presidential ambitions by largely steering clear of the doomed defund-Obamacare-or-else strategy embraced by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

GOP Sen. Ted Cruz

The Texas senator held a fake filibuster, persuaded like-minded House members to jump off the shutdown/debt crisis ledge, harvested Tea Party cash and gathered names for fundraising lists. Wednesday's Pew Research Center poll results show his popularity among Tea Party Republicans soaring — and he's solidified his role as the undisputed face of the Obamacare resistance and the voice of a motivated and aggravated slice of the party's base.

GOP Speaker John Boehner

In allowing his more conservative members to drive a losing battle, the Ohio Republican has enhanced his standing with that faction and solidified his hold on the GOP conference. Boehner on Tuesday looked every inch the blundering loser; by Wednesday, his speakership remained secure, and he was basking in the praise of some of the hardliners who have been making his life so difficult.

GOP Rep. Tom Graves

Graves, a conservative from north Georgia, emerged from national obscurity to win notice as a leader of the defund Obamacare movement in the House. He leveraged the crisis to go from "Representative Who?" status — he was first elected in a 2010 special election — to a seat at television talk show tables and a reputation as a leading Tea Party voice.

GOP Rep. Devin Nunes

The California Republican won national attention for his now-famous characterization of fellow party members willing to shut down government over Obamacare as "lemmings with suicide vests." After that memorable description, Nunes became a go-to Republican for the media because of his willingness to criticize his party's positions while remaining loyal to leadership.

Obamacare

How could we list the Affordable Care Act as a winner, when its rollout has been beset by such enormous problems? It's simple: think of all the "president's health care launch is an unmitigated fiasco" stories that weren't written, or received minor play, because the program start coincided with the government shutdown. Thus the administration has had cover while it hustles to fix the worst of the problems.

Senate Women

GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona was among those who gave props to his female colleagues for their role in leading a bipartisan group of 14 senators (it included six women) to help provide Reid and McConnell a framework for their deal to end the government shutdown. Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine won particular notice. "Leadership, I must fully admit," McCain said, "was provided primarily by women in the Senate."

Wall Street, Eventually

A late Wednesday headline on CNN said it all: "Debt Ceiling Deal Sends Stocks Soaring."

Senate Chaplain Barry Black

In Senate floor prayers during the crisis, the 64-year-old former Navy chaplain drew national attention — and inspired a Saturday Night Live skit — with his ardent pleas for reason and faith. "Save us from the madness," he prayed one day, "and deliver us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable while being unreasonable."

Robert Costa

No one covered the crisis with more consistency and insight than the National Review's Washington editor, Robert Costa. He used his must-read Twitter feed to break news, and provided deep, dispassionate insight into Republican strategy for his conservative publication. Costa, 28, was one of five conservative journalists who Obama invited to the White House for a private briefing.

Losers

(In addition to the American people, federal and government contract employees, tourists and those with businesses reliant on the visitors to the nation's national parks.)

GOP Sen. Ted Cruz

Yes, the Texas senator was both a winner and a loser. He's been excoriated by members of his own party over his approach, and Wednesday's Pew Research Center poll results show his popularity dropping among those not aligned with the GOP Tea Party wing. While he's established himself as a Tea Party force, Cruz lost the immediate battle, and may have fatally damaged his general election brand.

GOP Speaker John Boehner

Bad boy political columnist Roger Simon in a widely read piece this weak took aim at Cruz and Boehner for allowing, if not orchestrating, the shutdown and leading the nation to the brink of financial calamity. Boehner, he wrote, "does not bend to the will of his Kamikaze Caucus because he is an evil man. He does so because he is a weak man. To borrow a line from Theodore Roosevelt, I could carve a better man out of a banana." In allowing his more conservative members to drive a losing battle, Boehner looked weak, blundering and barely in control of his conference. And in the end, he opened the door to a deal that will likely require a majority of Democrats to get passed.

House GOP Hardliners

It took the Wall Street Journal to lay it out succinctly: "They picked a goal they couldn't achieve in trying to defund ObamaCare from one House of Congress," it editorialized Wednesday, "and then they picked a means they couldn't sustain politically by pursuing a long government shutdown and threatening to blow through the debt limit."

The Tea Party Brand

Pew Research Center poll results released Wednesday showed that unfavorable views of the Tea Party have nearly doubled since 2010. Negative opinions have accelerated in recent months, particularly among moderate and liberal Republicans, and now nearly half of the American public has an unfavorable view of the Tea Party.

Immigration Overhaul

Remember that? President Obama says he does, and this week told Univision's Los Angeles affiliate that he's going to push for House Speaker John Boehner to take up the Senate-approved immigration overhaul bill. But here's how one conservative House Republican framed the upcoming debate on Wednesday: "If the president is going to show the same kind of good faith efforts that he has shown in the last couple of weeks, I think it would be crazy for the House Republican leadership to enter into negotiations with him on immigration," said Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho. "He has tried to destroy the Republican Party and I think that anything that we do right now with this president on immigration will be with that same goal in mind, which is to destroy the Republican Party and not to get good policies."

Ken Cuccinelli

Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, was in a pretty close race with Democrat Terry McAuliffe before the Oct. 1 shutdown and impending debt crisis. But polls show that support for the social conservative has eroded in the past two weeks, driven in part by antipathy of many of the huge swath of federal workers living in the purple state Obama won twice.

Vice President Joe Biden

The garrulous vice president was a key player in brokering a bipartisan deal to avoid the nation's last almost-default two years ago. This time, he's been nowhere to be seen - except during a shopping trip Tuesday to the local Brooks Brothers. The White House insists he in the loop, and attended meetings with members of Congress. But it's been reported that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democrats weren't so crazy about former Sen. Biden's last deal, and preferred to go it alone.

Michelle Obama's Garden

The nation's most famous vegetable plot has gone to seed, literally, during the shutdown. With no groundskeepers or gardeners working to keep up the garden and White House grounds, vegetables on the 1,500-square-foot plot are rotting, weeds are taking over, and critters are having a ball, reports the blog Obama Foodorama.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/10/16/235612260/the-fiscal-fights-winners-and-losers?ft=1&f=
Category: nfl   tibetan mastiff  

Watch: Zac Efron Bares His Bum In The Red Band Trailer For ‘That Awkward Moment’

"Just get horizontal"

Posted by: Trent on October 16, 2013|

Zac Efron has got a new movie coming to theaters in January that I think some of you might be interested in seeing. In the just-released red band trailer for the film That Awkward Moment, Zac gets completely nekkid. I mean, duh, that’s the obvious draw but once you get past the nekkid part of the trailer, you see that the movie actually looks kind of funny. Believe me, I know it’s very difficult to get past the notion of a nekkid Zac Efron to think of anything else regarding this movie (like plot, co-stars, etc.) but … trust me, the movie looks funny. It probably won’t help matters if I reveal that Efron also gets his, ahem, “cock out” in the trailer so … why don’t we just click below, watch the NSFW red band trailer and see what all the hubbub is about.

First things first … here is nekkid Zac Efron with his ass in the air:

With that out of the way, here’s the red band trailer for That Awkward Moment in full:



Okay, you laughed out loud, right? I know I did. Yes, when I learned that Zac is bare assed in the trailer I watched the trailer only to see that scene but I unexpectedly enjoyed the rest of the trailer, too. That Awkward Moment won’t hit theaters until January but it looks like it’ll be worth the wait. Does this look like a movie that you would enjoy seeing in theaters? If so, I’ll prolly see you there ;)

[Source]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pinkisthenewblog/~3/gdzmI4nsp8Q/watch-zac-efron-bares-his-bum-in-the-red-band-trailer-for-that-awkward-moment
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Successful Children Who Lost A Parent — Why Are There So Many Of Them?

She was 9 when it happened. She says she was at school, in the school yard at recess, standing by the fence, when a thought passed through her "like the barest shadow of a mood." All of a sudden, and for no clear reason, she found herself thinking of her "Papi," her father, who'd been drunk, self-destructive and difficult for as long as she could remember.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

It turns out, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor found out later, that as she was having that thought, her Papi, lying in a nearby Bronx hospital, was dying. He died that same afternoon. "Deep down," she writes in her autobiography, "I'd known for awhile that this is where Papi was heading." Drink killed him, and perhaps, the hint of him in her head was his "saying goodbye." When she got home, she says she "ran down the hall and threw myself on the bed. I was sobbing, pounding my fists, when [her aunt] entered the room. 'Sonia, you have to be a big girl now. You have to be strong ... ' " For her, that was a turning point. Without a father, with a mother numb from grief, she writes, "the only way I'd survive was to do it myself."

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

There's a similar story in The New York Times this week. This one is about Bill de Blasio, now running to be mayor of New York City. His father, Warren Wilhelm, was also an alcoholic, also difficult. From him, de Blasio says, "I learned what not to do." His father was constantly drunk, often angry. The two didn't get along. When Bill graduated high school he changed his last name from Wilhelm to de Blasio-Wilhelm, to honor his mother's side of the family. Then, when his dad killed himself at a motel in Connecticut (Bill was 18), Bill dropped his dad's name entirely.

'Eminent Orphans'

Losing a parent is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a child. The world goes topsy-turvy. The psychologist Felix Brown reports that prisoners are two to three times more likely to have lost a parent in childhood than the population as a whole.

But for some people, Malcolm Gladwell points out in his new book, the death of a mother or father is a spur, a propellant that sends them catapulting into life. Because they are on their own, they are forced to persist, to invent, to chart their own way — into a curious category Gladwell dubs "eminent orphans."

There are, he reports, a lot of them. Historian Lucille Iremonger discovered that 67 percent of British prime ministers from the start of the 19th century to the start of World War II lost a parent before the age of 16.

Almost A Third Of Our Presidents

Twelve presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — lost their fathers while they were young.

A psychologist, Marvin Eisenstadt, poured through a number of major encyclopedias, looking for people whose biographies "merited more than one column" — and of 573 people, Gladwell reports, "a quarter had lost at least one parent before the age of 10. By age 15, 34.5 percent had had at least one parent die, and by the age of 20, 45 percent. Even for the years before the 20th century, when life expectancy due to illness and accidents and warfare was much lower than it is today, those are astonishing numbers."

Cause Or Correlation?

Gladwell doesn't come out and say that losing a parent early increases one's chances of success later. But in study after study, among those who have succeeded, the incidence of "eminent orphans" is oddly high. The correlation shows up for scientists here and here. It shows up in a study of "father absence" among eminent poets here.

This is a touchy subject. Nobody wants to say that catastrophe is a career booster; common sense says the opposite, that children with intact families get more love, protection and support, which ought to be an advantage later on. But it's also true that kids with missing parents need extra muscles, grit and self reliance — also ingredients for success.

The surprise here is the proportion of highly successful people who lost a parent early. Their achievements, of course, may have little or nothing to do with how many parents they had at home, but looking through Gladwell's footnotes, it is puzzling to see so many of them at the top of their professions. This suggests, ever so slightly, that pain trumps love at the start of the race. That's a notion that makes me wince.

Is later eminence worth such a price? Because the price is high. Gladwell ends his book with a short sketch of a remarkable French war hero, Andre Trocme, who refused to turn Jewish refugees over to the Nazis during the occupation, who defied them openly, to their faces, even when he was under arrest. His refusal to lie, to back down, to even bend a little is a puzzle, but Gladwell offers this hint of explanation.

'It's Because You Left Me ... '

When Trocme was 10 years old, he was in a car accident. His father drove too fast, the car spun out of control and his mother was thrown through the air and landed, lifeless, 30 feet from the wreckage. Andre saw the body and suffered a hurt so great, the pain, the unfairness of it all, gave him a dark, almost black courage. He had seen the worst. After that, nothing frightened him.

Many years after the accident, he wrote a letter to his dead mother, a confession:

"If I have been a fatalist, and have been a pessimistic child who awaits death every day, and who almost seeks it out, if I have opened myself slowly and late to happiness, and if I am still a somber man, incapable of laughing whole-heartedly, if it's because you left me that June 24th upon that road.

"But if I have believed in eternal realities ... if I have thrust myself toward them, it is also because I was alone, because you were no longer there to be my God, to fill my heart with your abundant and dominating life."

Parents, we all know, can hurt. But losing them hurts more. The hurt is there. It's how we handle it that makes the difference.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/10/15/234737083/successful-children-who-lost-a-parent-why-are-there-so-many-of-them?ft=1&f=1007
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Amazon reportedly making smartphones with HTC's help

Amazon may not be developing its first smartphones by its lonesome. The Financial Times claims that the online retail pioneer is teaming up with HTC on three handsets, one of which is at an "advanced stage of development." It's not clear if or when these devices would ship, according to tipsters. None of the involved companies are commenting on the rumored smartphones, but they would continue a familiar strategy for HTC. The company has a history of partnering with web giants like Facebook and Google as they experiment with official devices; when Amazon is already comfortable with offering its own hardware, it's a natural fit for an HTC deal.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/15/amazon-reportedly-making-smartphones-with-htc-help/?ncid=rss_truncated
Category: fiona apple   eric decker   paulina gretzky   Erbie Bowser   Baby I Ariana Grande  

Voting error could shake up results on next 'DWTS'

TV

Michael Maloney
TODAY contributor

10 hours ago

Kelsey McNeal / ABC

Viewer votes count on "Dancing With the Stars" — but the question is who do they count for?

After Monday night's show, some voters may have inadvertently thrown their support behind couples that aren’t their favorites due to an error.

“There were technical difficulties with posting the voting numbers during the East Coast broadcast; we are reviewing the data and will determine the best course of action,” ABC said in a statement following the East Coast and Central time zone broadcast. “The errors were fixed for both Mountain and West Coast broadcasts.”

So, how did the error play out on the show?

“Somebody came up to us and said there was a system error, and Bill (Engvall's) number got switched (on the screen) with Elizabeth Berkley’s,” Engvall's partner, Emma Slater, told TODAY after the show. “So the East Coast got the two numbers wrong. I don’t know how that happened.”

“I’m not going to worry about,” Engvall told us. “After you call, there’s a recorded message that says, ‘Hey, thanks for voting for (the name of your couple),' so they’ll know (something’s amiss) after they make their first call.

“Emma and I have gone so much further than I thought we’d go,” the standup comedian offered. “Each week, we’re living on gravy.”

Corbin Bleu and pro Karina Smirnoff embraced the snafu with a bit of humor when they learned their voting number had been switched with the one for former "Jersey Shore" star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi and her partner Sasha Farber.

“Hey, I used to live in New Jersey,” Smirnoff said. “I love New Jersey!”

“You can’t control it,” Bleu philosophized. “Fans have the numbers. It’s one of those scary things. If something goes on with either of us (as a result of the snafu) you have to roll with the punches and let God take you were you gotta go!”

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” Engvall added. “You hope that people who’ve been voting for you for five weeks (will use the same, correct numbers). We’re going to tweet out the right numbers.”

After the shocking elimination of Christina Milian and Mark Ballas on Monday night, Bleu emphasized how important voting for favorites really is.

“To have Christina and Mark get the first 10 of the season and be the top-scoring couple of the night and still be sent home shows us that no one is safe,” he said.

Source: http://www.today.com/entertainment/voting-error-could-shake-results-next-episode-dancing-stars-8C11397316
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War-related deaths near 500,000 in Iraq

Washington (AFP) - Nearly half a million people have died from war-related causes in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003, according to an academic study published in the United States on Tuesday.

That toll is far higher than the nearly 115,000 violent civilian deaths reported by the British-based group Iraq Body Count, which bases its tally on media reports, hospital and morgue records, and official and non-governmental accounts.

The latest estimate by university researchers in the United States, Canada and Baghdad in cooperation with the Iraqi Ministry of Health covers not only violent deaths but other avoidable deaths linked to the invasion, insurgencies and subsequent social breakdown.

It also differs from some previous counts by spanning a longer period of time and by using randomized surveys of households across Iraq to project a nationwide death toll from 2003 to mid 2011.

Violence caused most of the deaths, but about a third were indirectly linked to the war, and these deaths have been left out of previous counts, said lead author Amy Hagopian, a public health researcher at the University of Washington.

Those included situations when a pregnant woman encountered difficult labor but could not leave the house due to fighting, or when a person drank contaminated water, or when a patient could not get treated at a hospital because staff was overwhelmed with war casualties.

"These are all indirect deaths, and they are significant," Hagopian told AFP.

The aim of the study was to provide a truer picture of the suffering caused by war, and hopefully to make governments think twice about the harm that would come from an invasion, she said.

"I think it is important that people understand the consequences of launching wars on public health, on how people live. This country is forever changed."

The research team from the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, Simon Fraser University and Mustansiriya University conducted the work on a volunteer basis using pooled internal resources instead of seeking outside funds.

Their tally was compiled by asking adults living in 2,000 randomly selected households in 100 geographic clusters across Iraq if family members had died, when and why.

Researchers used the survey data, which was completed by 1,960 of those chosen, to calculate the death rate before the war and after. When multiplied by the whole population, they returned a number that represented "excess deaths."

Researchers estimated there were 405,000 excess Iraqi deaths attributable to the war through mid-2011.

They also attempted to account for deaths missed because families had fled the country, and estimated 55,805 total deaths, bringing the total to nearly 461,000.

About 70 percent of Iraq deaths from 2003-2011 were violent in nature, with most caused by gunshots, followed by car bombs and other explosions, said the study.

Coalition forces were blamed for 35 percent of violent deaths; militias were blamed for 32 percent. The rest were either unknown (21 percent), criminals (11 percent) or Iraqi forces (one percent).

Heart conditions were the most common cause of non-violent death from 2003-2011 -- indicating a key role of stress in war-related deaths -- followed by chronic illness and cancer.

In a perspective article accompanying the PLoS Medicine study, Salman Rawaf, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center at Imperial College London, said the latest research would likely be called into question, as have other estimates before it, with most "perceived as being politically motivated, deliberately either over-reporting or suppressing the number of deaths."

"This estimate carries substantial uncertainty, and undoubtedly the methodology and findings of this latest study will be controversial and debated," he wrote.

However, the attempt to quantify the catastrophe created by war is "valuable" in the context of understanding the health consequences of war, he said.

"Living in Iraq today is no longer about how many have died, but how future deaths should be prevented."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/war-related-deaths-near-500-000-iraq-212646036.html
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'Captain Phillips' And The Terrible Excitement Of Real Action

Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdirahman share close quarters in Captain Phillips.

Columbia Pictures

Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdirahman share close quarters in Captain Phillips.

Columbia Pictures

Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass' tense movie about the April 2009 hijacking of the freighter Maersk Alabama by four Somali pirates, is a love song to the patience-through-overwhelming-fire-superiority of the U.S. military.

Unless, of course, it's a Dog Day Afternoon-style chronicle of the final days of a few sympathetically inept criminals who want money, not blood, but who end up dead anyway. What's empirical is that the film spends more screen time on the hapless, teenage pirates than on any of its other characters, save for Richard Phillips himself — played by America's everydad, Tom Hanks, whose next role will be that of Walt Disney.

Like last year's Zero Dark Thirty, Greengrass' new movie is Based On A True Story and climaxes with a successful operation by Navy SEALs, those precision instruments that we rightly revere. And while Captain Phillips tells a far simpler story, covering days rather than years, both films strike me as Rorschach blots onto which anyone can project individual beliefs about how and when America swings its big stick.

Except­ — and I'll label this paragraph as a spoiler, mostly because Dana Stevens considered it as such in her Slate review — Captain Phillips doesn't quite end with the SEALs grimly/awesomely taking care of business. It takes an extra few minutes, after the Navy has rescued Phillips from his captors, to show us see how exhausted, frightened, and sickened he is by the ordeal — and no one is likely to mistake that response for ingratitude. Maybe those tears Jessica Chastain shed in the last shot of Zero Dark Thirty were for our national soul (I doubt it), but I don't think this pair of scenes, wherein Phillips is too drained to speak, walk unassisted or do anything other than howl and weep is intended as a metaphor for anything.

Unlike the concurrent Gravity, which brilliantly sustains tension by never cutting away from its protagonist, Captain Phillips lets us in on the turning of wheels to which neither Phillips nor his opponent/captor, the pirate leader Abdulwali Abdukhad Muse (Barkhad Abdi, giving a performance at least as persuasive as Hanks'), are privy. That lower left-hand corner of the screen keeps flashing datelines. Interchangeable Naval personnel give and receive orders via radio. We see the SEALs board their plane in Virginia to fly halfway around the world and skydive into the Indian Ocean, where three naval warships have converged to block the pirates from escaping to Somalia with Phillips as their hostage. (The SEAL team leader is played by Max Martini, whose freakishly right-angular jaw has damned him to be cast only as soldiers or cops. It's a weird problem for a guy whose name literally means "peak capacity fancy cocktails" to have.)

The SEALs' arrival by parachute is as it happened in real life. Still, it must be expensive to film a parachuting sequence, and this one is brief and unspectacular — so why is it in the movie? Is Greengrass trying to underline the vast expense the U.S. will accept to send the message that if you mess with one 55-year-old Merchant Marine seaman from Vermont, you mess with us all? Or, more likely, that disruption of the shipping lanes will not be tolerated? This incident was the first (briefly) successful hijacking of an American ship in 200 years. Few that get taken have the benefit of such a response, a fact the film seems to acknowledge with a single line, conveyed via radio from an Admiral whose face we never see.

When the eroding hostage negotiation is suddenly resolved by three snipers' bullets in three pirates' heads, Greengrass presents it as a moment of horror, not of triumph. It plays like a moral counterweight to news reports like this one, which celebrated the SEALs' marksmanship as a feat of athleticism — which, let's not kid ourselves, it was. (The lifeboat Phillips was taken captive in is on display at the Navy SEAL museum in Fort Pierce, Florida.)

Nothing about Captain Phillips smacks of exploitation. By casting Hanks as the curt but honorable captain, Greengrass has spared us any further intervention to make the "character" more "likeable." Still, I'm never sure how much I'm supposed to enjoy depictions of recent tragedies, even ones as seriously and well-made as this.

Greengrass has earned the freedom to do more or less what he wants, having made the second and third films in the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too Bourne series — high-end popcorn movies that at once condemn and delight in mayhem. (As the soulfully amnesiac super-assassin Jason Bourne, Matt Damon never looks like he's enjoying all that kneecap shattering and windpipe punching, which makes us feel better about enjoying it.) He started his career as a documentarian, and he continues to make documentary-ish films like this one.

I doubt this can be said of Greengrass' United 93 — despite its sterling critical reputation, I've never been able to bring myself to watch it — but Captain Phillips offers substantial entertainment value. I don't recall any jokes, but there are a couple of expertly staged action scenes. A sequence wherein the crew of the Maersk Alabama uses fire hoses and evasive maneuvers to try to prevent the pirates from affixing a ladder to the hull and climbing aboard, is, with apologies to John Woo and my beloved James Bond franchise, the only exciting boat chase in any movie, ever. Surely it's okay to feel caught up in moments like these.

Ridley Scott's film Black Hawk Down was the first film I can recall to trigger this queasiness. Based on Mark Bowden's superb nonfiction book about the a botched 1993 attempt to capture a Somali warlord—resulting in an all-night firefight that left 18 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Somalis dead — the movie was made before, but released soon after, 9/11. Like the book, the film expresses awe at the talents of U.S. Special Forces operators (the Army's Delta Force in this case, not the SEALs), even as it depicts a failed mission. The film retains some of Bowden's observations about the workplace culture of the elite sections of the Army, and a little bit of his geopolitical analysis. But it's overwhelmingly a war movie, an action movie. In translating Bowden's 486-page prose account to the most visceral story medium, Scott can't help but trivialize the event somehow.

Captain Phillips doesn't do that. There's something appealingly 1970s-like in its refusal to editorialize. It can afford its humanism because Phillips lived to write a book. It has patience, albeit through overwhelming fire superiority.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/10/15/234676998/captain-phillips-and-the-terrible-excitement-of-real-action?ft=1&f=1008
Category: st louis cardinals   Derrick Thomas   9 news   Wentworth Miller   NSYNC VMA 2013  

GOP mulls Trump as best to say 'You're fired!' to New York's Gov. Cuomo

Donald Trump for governor?

The New York Post is reporting that GOP bigwigs in the Empire State want the Donald to run against Gov. Andrew Cuomo in next year's New York state election.

Via the New York Post:

So far, Trump, who only recently learned of the effort, which is backed by state GOP Chairman Ed Cox and other party leaders, hasn’t said a flat “no.’’

Asked for comment by The Post, Trump left open the possibility of entering the race and blasted Cuomo, and even Cuomo’s dad, ex-Gov. Mario Cuomo, for their records in office.

The Post's article was apparently the first Trump heard of the GOP's desire to get him to mount an election campaign. The effort is being backed by state GOP Chairman Ed Cox and other party leaders.

Speaking on "Fox and Friends" on Monday, Trump said, "Well, I think my initial reaction is I haven't even thought about it. It's a first. It would be very interesting. I mean, New York has some very serious problems. We have taxes that are through the roof; we have energy sitting in our ground that we are not getting. We have a lot of problems, but it's not something that is of great interest to me."

News10NBC in Rochester spoke with Assemblyman Bill Nojay, whose memo about Trump's electability sparked the discussion.

Nojay said that while there are other Republicans who would make a great governor, Trump is "ready to go now. He'd be a great candidate in 2014."

Nojay also spoke to the Post about the possibility of getting the host of "The Apprentice" to run. "“If Donald Trump wants to be remembered as a successor to FDR and not Alex Trebek, he should run,” Nojay said.

Your move, Donald.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gop-wants-trump-to-run-for-ny-governor-132303230.html
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Senate leads hunt for shutdown and debt limit deal

WASHINGTON (AP) — Racing the calendar and the financial markets, Senate leaders have taken the helm in the search for a deal to end the partial government shutdown and avert a federal default.

"This should be seen as something very positive, even though we don't have anything done yet, and long ways to go," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Saturday, describing his opening conversation hours earlier with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

"The real conversation that matters now is the one taking place between McConnell and Reid," said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., were also involved in the high-level bargaining.

Sunday marked the 13th day of a federal shutdown that has continued to idle 350,000 government workers, left hundreds of thousands of others working without pay and curtailed everything from veterans' services to environmental inspections.

More ominously, Thursday drew another day closer, the day the Obama administration has warned the U.S. will deplete its borrowing authority and risk an unprecedented federal default. Economists say that could send shockwaves throughout the U.S. and global economies.

The pressure was on both parties but seemed mostly on Republicans, who polls show are bearing the brunt of voters' wrath over the twin standoffs. And though the financial markets rebounded strongly late last week on word of movement in the talks, lawmakers of both parties were warily awaiting their reopening this week.

No. 2 Senate Democratic leader Dick Durbin of Illinois said the financial markets did better last week because they assumed that "eventually the damsel will be plucked from the tracks."

Referring to the approach of Thursday's deadline, he added: "As we start hearing the train whistle, I think that there may be a different view. I don't want to see it happen because it's going to hurt a lot of innocent people."

Republicans are demanding spending cuts and deficit reduction in exchange for reopening the government and extending its borrowing authority. President Barack Obama and other Democrats say they want both measures pushed through Congress without condition and would agree to deficit reduction talks afterward.

Out of play, for now, was the Republican-led House, where Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told GOP lawmakers early Saturday that his talks with the president had ground to a halt.

Though the Senate was leading the search for a deal, the House and its fractious Republicans remained a possible headache in the coming week.

"At the end of the day, whatever they do still has to come through here," said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who is close to House leaders.

Also sidelined, at least for now, was an effort by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to assemble a bipartisan coalition for a plan to briefly fund the government and extend the $16.7 trillion debt limit, in exchange for steps like temporarily delaying the medical device tax that helps fund the health care law.

Democrats said Collins' plan curbed spending too tightly and Reid said it was going nowhere. Collins said she would continue seeking support for it.

Senate Republicans dealt Democrats an expected setback on Saturday by derailing a Democratic measure extending the debt limit through 2014 without any conditions. The vote was 53-45 to start debating the Democratic measure — seven short of the 60 votes needed to overcome GOP obstruction tactics.

___

AP Special Correspondent David Espo contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/senate-leads-hunt-shutdown-debt-limit-deal-084229391--politics.html
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A Company's Tweets Can Help Make It Creditworthy

Courtesy of Kabbage

Courtesy of Kabbage

For many online and other small businesses, getting a loan or a big cash advance is tough. Banks and other traditional lenders are often leery of those without years of financial statements and solid credit scores.

But some lenders and other financial services companies are beginning to assess credit risk differently — using criteria you might not expect.

Jeffrey Grossman is an acupuncturist in Bellingham, Wash. He's also a small businessman. He creates media marketing materials for other acupuncturists hoping to expand their practice.

Over the years, Grossman has borrowed money from family and from bank lines of credit, but recently, he needed a quick infusion of extra cash. He turned to a company called Kabbage, an online financing firm for small businesses.

He found the concept interesting, but the application also made him skeptical. "They wanted all this information about QuickBooks [accounting software] and UPS accounts and all this stuff," he says.

Such details, says Kathryn Petralia, a co-founder of Kabbage, allows the company to "effectively build a financial statement." The firm provides financing to small businesses — such as online merchants — that banks typically don't lend to. Petralia says Kabbage uses real-time and verifiable data from things like UPS shipments, eBay and PayPal accounts to assess creditworthiness.

"We can see historical data and current data, and we can see tomorrow's data. And we are looking at information that could be as detailed as what people are actually buying from you," Petralia says.

And she says that can be more useful than static financial documents that banks and other traditional lenders typically rely on.

“ Are customers saying that you are doing a good job? Are consumers complaining about you?

- Christine Pratt, financial services analyst

"If you see that the customer's business is changing over time — they're selling different products, they're changing their price points, transaction volume is going up or down — you get a lot more visibility and insight into that business than a pure financial statement's going to give you," Petralia says.

To be clear, small businesses that get money from Kabbage give the company permission to view their online accounts. Christine Pratt, a senior financial services analyst at Aite Group, says Kabbage's use of this real-time transaction data is smart. She also likes the fact that Kabbage looks at companies' social media pages.

"Are customers saying that you are doing a good job? Are consumers complaining about you?" Pratt says.

Kabbage looks at a small business' Twitter account and its Facebook page. The company knows the information there isn't foolproof but says it can add insight into how a company is relating to its customers — and at the margins it can be helpful.

"They use that information to be able to look ahead, to see whether or not your business not only is doing very well right now but can also sustain that business and grow," Pratt says.

She says the use of social and real-time data is growing. Some traditional lenders are starting to embrace it, and Amazon is quietly mining its own data to find retailers it wants to make loans to.

Back in Bellingham, Wash., Grossman, the small businessman, decided to take the plunge and gave Kabbage access to some of his online accounts.

"I think we were funded probably within like minutes," he says.

But he has words of caution to would-be borrowers: The company's fees can be steep.

"I don't want to say you're doing business with the devil, but sometimes when you're a small business, if the banks aren't able to give you the money and if you need some cash flow, you kind of have to bite the bullet and do it," he says.

Grossman was approved for up to $25,000 and says the funds he got have helped him grow his business and for that he remains grateful.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/14/234031395/a-companys-tweets-can-help-make-it-creditworthy?ft=1&f=
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Miner Gives $62M To West Australia Universities

PERTH, Australia (AP) — Mining magnate Andrew Forrest pledged on Tuesday to give 65 million Australian dollars ($62 million) to university education in his home state in one of Australia's largest philanthropic donations.

The chairman of iron ore miner Fortescue Metals Group said AU$50 million will be used to establish the Forrest Foundation to fund scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships at all five universities in Western Australia state.

Another AU$15 million will build a residence for rising star researchers called Forrest Hall at St. George's College at the University of Western Australia.

Forrest, a 52-year-old entrepreneur who graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1983 with an economics degree, said Australia needed to develop a higher-profile philanthropic culture.

"Let us all never forget that only education can be the final key to eliminate poverty in the world and raise the universal standard of living, ultimately to increase the nobility of the human cause," Forrest said in a statement.

Forrest and his wife Nicola are the first Australians to join "The Giving Pledge" movement founded by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett, the head of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. The pledge commits billionaires to donate most of their wealth to charity.

Anna Draffin, deputy chief executive officer of the charity umbrella group Philanthropy Australia, described the Forrest gift as the biggest ever philanthropic donation from an Australian.

Only Irish-American businessman and philanthropist Chuck Feeney has been more generous in Australia, donating AU$500 million toward mostly higher education and medical research projects.

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=234468028&ft=1&f=
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SF Area transit strike averted _ at least for day

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A major San Francisco Bay area transit strike was averted for at least a day after two labor unions extended contract talks beyond a midnight deadline and agreed not to walk off the job Monday to allow more contract negotiations.

The deal announced late Sunday about an hour before Bay Area Rapid Transit workers were set to go on strike gives the two sides a chance to work out a labor contract and hundreds of thousands of commuters at least a temporary reprieve from scrambling to find alternative ways to get around.

But the unions warned that workers will go on strike at midnight Monday if an agreement isn't reached by then.

"We are not going to go on strike because the public deserves to have a riding system that works. We will give the (transit agency) one more day to get it together," said Antonette Bryant, leader of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, one of the two unions in talks with BART.

The 11th hour announcement came after weekend-long talks to avert a second commute-crippling strike in less than three months.

BART workers went on strike for nearly five days in July and were set to do so again Friday when a cooling-off period ordered by Gov. Jerry Brown ended, but they agreed to negotiate through the weekend.

But the Bryant complained that BART presented a last, final offer Sunday afternoon just as the parties came close to reaching a full agreement.

The executive director of the other union involved in the talks, Service Employees International Union Local 1021, said the parties made progress on pay, pension and health care benefits but were still at odds on issues related to work rules.

BART General Manager Grace Crunican said the "last best and final offer" presented to the unions Sunday is $7 million higher than the one presented Friday and includes a raise of 3 percent a year. She said the unions have two weeks from Sunday to accept the deal before it is taken off the table.

"We are open to any ideas over those two weeks that they may have, we will try and keep that conversation open," she said in a statement. "It is time to bring this to a close. The Bay Area is tired of going to bed at night and not knowing if BART will be open or not."

Nearly 370,000 riders take BART every weekday, and its 104 miles of track make it the nation's fifth-largest commuter rail system.

In a sign of how seriously another shutdown is looming over the region, state lawmakers from the Bay Area and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom dropped by the talks Sunday to encourage the two sides to reach a resolution.

Newsom, a former San Francisco mayor, told reporters he believed a deal was close.

"It would be preposterous for both sides at this stage when you're getting this close to put, at risk, your reputation and the economy of the entire region," he said.

Sticking points in the 6-month-old negotiations include salaries and workers' contributions to their health and pension plans. BART workers currently pay $92 a month for health care and contribute nothing toward their pensions — generous benefits BART management is seeking to curtail.

The unions, which represent 2,375 mechanics, custodians, station agents, train operators and clerical workers, want a raise of nearly 12 percent over three years, while BART has proposed a 10 percent increase over four years. Workers from the two unions now average about $71,000 in base salary and $11,000 in overtime annually, BART said.

Labor leaders were also pressing demands to make stations safer, such as better lighting in tunnels, bulletproof glass in agents' booths and improved restroom access.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/sf-area-transit-strike-averted-least-day-080017868--finance.html
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