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WASHINGTON

Of course, McCain’s lower classes said no such thing. But their actions told you all you needed to know.

McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden wholly subjected themselves to tough questioning on the regular Sunday news programs. Palin was the sole no-show. And it’s not just the Sunday interviews. She has not opened herself to any serious questioning since McCain picked her to have being next in line for the presidency.

McCain’s advisers clearly don’t trust Palin to answer questions about policy, and don’t meagreness her to answer many of the questions that have been raised about her tenure as governor of Alaska.

Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, gave the prey away when he said onward “Fox News Sunday” that she would not meet with reporters until they showed a willingness to treat her “with some level of respect and deference.”

Deference? That’s a word used in monarchies or aristocracies. Democracies don’t give “submission” to politicians. When bring forth McCain, Obama, Biden or, beneficial to that matter, Hillary Clinton asked for deference?

A not many hours later came the announcement that Palin would grant an interview to ABC News’ Charlie Gibson. Recall that Gibson was the co-host of each ABC News combat for last April during which Obama faced a relentless pounding. Here’s hoping that a sense of fairness will exist the commander Gibson to be comparably tough on Palin this week. If he treats her more deferentially than he did Obama, we will know that McCain’s war on the media is working.

From the moment Palin was picked, reporters immediately began to ask questions, a portion of them. Because she was so little known outside Alaska, her views on many persons issues, particularly foreign policy, are a mystery. Voters also need to comprehend how McCain went about reaching the most important determination he behest make betwixt now and Election Day.

A week ago, Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times cited McCain sources questioning “how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.” She reported that Palin had been selected “with more haste than McCain advisers initially described.” (She also mistakenly reported that Palin belonged to the Alaskan Independence Party. It was her save Todd who had been a member.)

McCain’s people trashed Bumiller, saying she had opted to “make up her own version of events.” Steve Schmidt, McCain’s supreme strategist, said the Times had written “an absolute work of fiction” in an opposite direction the vetting process while Karl Rove told his Fox News viewers that the Times “got it incorrectly.”

It turned gone out that the McCain side misled journalists. Bumiller was right about the vetting. The lesson is that McCain’s counselors are not interested in fair handling, and they are certainly not interested in the verity.

If the media cave to McCain’s pressure, it will be the third part time this decade that conservative attacks led reporters to tilt to the right.

During the 2000 battle through the whole extent of Florida, Al Gore’s perfectly defensible efforts to win a hand recount ran into a murmur saw of review from nonpartisan commentators, many of whom urged Gore to recant “gracefully.” In the buildup to the Iraq War, the Bush administration and its supporters savaged the national spirit of many who raised questions about its strategy and its plans. Now, McCain hopes Palin will skate through the nearest two months without somewhat real scrutiny or questioning.

It is hugely unprosperous that the at the outset big story about Palin

Of course Palin’s handlers are being hypocritical: They want to focus on her family life and her identity as a hockey mom whereas doing so helps them, and push out of the character any story that mars this perfect picture. Conservatives are always against identity political affairs until they are for it.

Nonetheless, what matters is not Palin’s personal life, goal whether she is prepared to take on the presidency if called upon. The actions of McCain’s lieutenants suggest that they discern the answer. And they are doing everything they can to keep the media from finding it.

postchat@aol.com

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008167115_dionne09.html?syndication=rss

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Microsoft faces a tough challenge in keeping a lid on the updates to its line of digital music players. The corporation has to get the devices out to the retailers who sell them to consumers and apparently those retailers don’t always abide Microsoft’s schedule.

“Precision execution at retail nationally is impossible,” said Adam Sohn, director of Zune PR. “The channel is getting ready with their stock of devices, some of what one. are new [more are not], so that bit’s happening right now and the devices are out there.”

The company intended to lay out its Zune update — including significant new software features — upon the body Sept. 16. Instead, many of the details were discovered late Sunday on a proceeds listing for a blue 8 gigabyte Zune at Frys.com. It was spotted first through Zunerama, which last week brought us news of a 120 gig Zune.

So, on to details of the latest Zune update, which we can corroborate because we were briefed through Sohn on Friday. Worth noting: None of the updates described here elect have existence live until the 16th.

– The form factors are staying largely the corresponding; of like kind, but they’re getting other containing power. A 120 gig impenetrable disk legend is being added ($250), in the same form commission merchant as the current 80 gig. A flash memory 16 gig device ($200) joins the existing lineup of 4 and 8 gigs, once more in the same form factor. The 80 and 4 gig devices are being discontinued. Microsoft is also adding some new colors: Blue with a silvern back and black with a black back.

– The company is seizure advantage of Zune’s FM radio tuner and the additional information transmitted by means of some stations (such as song and artist information) to start a “Buy-from-FM” feature. You can click adhering the song and offer it in a shopping cart on the device to be purchased the next time you sync it by the Zune software on a computer. Fifty percent of Zune users turn on the radio at smallest once a week, Sohn before-mentioned.

– With each subsequent generation, Microsoft has added uses for Zune’s Wi-Fi capabilities. The latest: the device can connect openly to the Internet from many people Wi-Fi hot spots to stream or download songs. A software keyboard is being added to the device to set in passwords and look into for titles. It takes about a minute to download a song over a good Wi-fi connection, Sohn uttered.

– The Zune software itself, that runs without ceasing a PC and is free to use regardless of whether you own a Zune, is getting several recently made known features designed to help people discover new music:

* New music channels programed around the Billboard Top 100; Seattle’s KEXP; popular songs in specific genres based on the usage patterns of other Zune listeners; custom tastes of eddish. user based on what other listeners with similar tastes are playing.

* A new of the sight display of artists and albums connected to the psalm currently playing, including an artists’ influences and other musicians he or she influenced.

* Graphics, images and data related to the song currently playing. It is drawn from album art, painter biographical complaint and statistics, such as amount to of plays, drawn from other Zune users.

– The devices themselves are getting reinvigorated firmware features including Hexic, a geometry game, and Texas Hold ‘Em and a clock.

Original text: http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/techtracks/2008/09/08/zune_firmware_software_updates_leak_out_ahead_of_s.html

The job numbers keep getting worse—and at a quickening manner of walking. What does that sorry for investors?

by Ben Steverman

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Americans are losing their jobs at a steady clip. According to a Labor Dept. report released Sept. 5, the unemployment rate hit 6.1% in August, and U.S. payrolls dropped 84,000—with both numbers worse than economists were expecting.

After every initial decline, U.S. stocks seemed to shrug off the bad news by posting unpretending gains on Sept. 5. Nonetheless, there are plenty of reasons a weakening labor market should apprehension investors.

For one thing, it’s just more bad news for a stock market that already has had its fill. "It’s the psychological effect of bad word," says Quincy Krosby, chief investment strategist for the sake of the Hartford.

The unemployment rate crossed the 6% threshold to reach its highest of the same rank since 2003. Many market experts said the of the same height of unemployment wasn’t as disturbing as the rapid gait at which it has moved higher: The standard was 4.8% as newly as February. The data "points to a re-acceleration in the compute of declines" in jobs, says Keith Hembre, chief economist at First American Funds.

Bad Sign For Profits?

That weakens the case conducive to bullish investors, who hope the U.S. can forbear recession. "While I’m not conceding we’re in recession, it appears we’re getting closer to one," says Peter Cardillo, leading market economist at Avalon Partners.

Many optimists were hoping a resilient economy would pass over higher corporate profits in 2009. Recent facts on the U.S. gross domestic product bolstered those expectations, with U.S. GDP registering a 3.3% increase in the second quarter.

"Investors esteem been teased by data over the last month or two that was suggesting we would skip a recession entirely," says Chris Johnson of Johnson Research Group. "There was some hope out there."

Now, those hopes have been, if not crushed, for this reason gravely deflated.

Different Sort of Recession

In the stock place of traffic, the in the greatest degree obvious victim of higher unemployment is consumer stocks. More than 600,000 people have been dropped from payrolls so far this year, but it’s not just the unemployed who cut back their spending at restaurants and retailers. Workers remaining on payrolls become vigorous about their jobs, and economists expect them to influence smaller raises.

John Merrill, principal investment officer at Tanglewood Capital Management, believes the U.S. is in "an unusual recession." Rather than a quick debasement, Merrill expects a "lengthy era of job losses."

"Problems in the economy are spreading to other areas," Merrill says. "It’s creating a sluggishness [limit] not a steep drop-off in [economic] activity." More and more groups of consumers are pulling end their expenditure—and more companies, such as Starbucks (SBUX), respond to slower spending by means of sharp back prop, he says.

Stress in Finance, Too

It’s not just companies instantly affected by consumer expenditure that be conscious of being the try thoroughly. Unemployment also has an effect on problems in the pecuniary sector.

"At the heart of the belief crunch is the housing mart," says the Hartford’s Krosby. A weak labor place of traffic raises worries about Americans’ qualification to pay their mortgages and other debts, and it makes them less likely to want to buy new houses, she says.

So why did U.S. stocks regain the former state slightly on Sept. 5? The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 32.73 points, or 0.29%, higher at 11,220.96, though the broader S&P 500 gained 5.48 points, or 0.44%, to 1,242.31.

Dave Rovelli, managing director of equity trading at Canaccord Adams says stocks bounced back a bit as they had already fallen so plenteous in the days before the job notice. On Sept. 4, greater indexes fell almost 3% (BusinessWeek.com, 9/4/08).

Mirror of the Past

Also, employment figures are often seen as a lagging indicator for the arrangement and stock market. In other words, they document the kind of has happened in the past. And in the past, Krosby notes, stocks have rallied on the expectation of good times ahead even as the jobless rate continued to rise and payrolls kept shrinking.

Unemployment, however, can be seen as a leading indicator of one trend, says First American Funds’ Hembre: a send down in inflation. A unguarded childbirth emporium tends to cut off sundry of the trends pushing prices higher, he says.

A drop in inflation, in round, allows the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low. Hembre believes the Fed might even be able to cut rates eventually.

"If inflation stays in check and unemployment keeps going up, the Fed is not going to raise rates," Rovelli says.

Vulnerable Exports

That might be the only silver lining in recent job losses: Financial firms and U.S. homeowners extremity vulgar interest rates to get exhausted from under the credit crunch.

Lower rates might help, but experts sound increasingly anxious about the state of the U.S. economy. Several cited a slowdown in other economies, from Asia and Australia to Europe. That threatens to blur over the rare bright spot in the U.S. economy—strong exports overseas by American companies.

"You’ve got downward pressure from labor markets…but no identifiable offset from other sectors of the economy," says Hembre. He cites weak stock and credit markets, a continuing financial and housing crisis, low confidence among business executives, and topical and state governments squeezed by declining tax revenue.

As recent job figures show, the U.S. economy finds itself in increasingly choppy waters—and no lifelines within easy reach.

Original text: http://www.businessweek.com/investor/peace/sep2008/pi2008095_656148.htm?campaign_id=rss_null

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That question, or a alteration in continuance the theme, has been swirling around American politics for a year, reaching its highest pitch in the in conclusion brace weeks with the nomination for president of a fortify four years out of the Illinois state senate and towards vice president of a woman four years to the end of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Indeed, to the degree that recently as 2000, Barack Obama was so obscure a figure he couldn’t demand or borrow a floor pass to that year’s Democratic National Convention, and Sarah Palin was mayor of the old trapping and mining town of Wasilla, a community that at that time had fewer residents than Carnegie Mellon University has undergraduates.

The true question was posed in 1960 by Harry S Truman nine days before the opening of the Democratic National Convention, and it was pointedly addressed to Sen. John F. Kennedy, who had served four more years in Congress than Truman had served when the modern became president in 1945.

All year the Kennedy camp had been expecting that question, and when it arrived the president’s counselor, Theodore C. Sorensen, had a file noted "youth and age" stuffed full of rebuttal important. When it came confinement for Kennedy to answer — exactly a week before the opening gavel — he was convenient. If "14 years in major elective office is insufficient experience, that rules out all but three of the 10 names put forward by Truman, all but a handful of American presidents, and every president of the 20th century — including Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman."

Kennedy wasn’t finished. If the kind of matters is age, not actual observation, he said, then that "would regard kept Jefferson from writing the Declaration of Independence, Washington from commanding the Continental Army, Madison from fathering the Constitution … and Christopher Columbus from even discovering America."

In truth, both Truman’s question and Kennedy’s answer are a bit facile. But both make a point. The presidency is the most powerful office on Earth, the mostly prized gift in American political affairs, and the challenges it presents in all eras — custody the Union together, fighting the Kaiser or the Axis powers, holding off the Soviets, battling al-Qaida — are so daunting that logic suggests the value of an experienced hand. At the same time, some men and women are in the same state gifted that their talents bring them to the fore unusually early, and sometimes the match of the man and the woman with the times is just right, in fact, not to be dispensed with.

Nelson Mandela’s presidency of South Africa unavoidably came at age 75, and it is arguable that three-quarters of a century worth of privation and struggle was necessary to give him the view and moral weight of evidence he needed. (This would be an argument that Sen. John S. McCain, a onetime prisoner like Mr. Mandela, would find especially congenial.) Then again, could anyone imagine that someone older than 17 would have had the skill and determination that Joan of Arc displayed at the Siege of Orleans in the 15th hundred?

Mandela and St. Joan are special cases, of course, and I am not arguing in this put at interest that Mr. McCain is a (slightly) junior version of Mandela, nor that Mr. Obama or Ms. Palin are modern-day versions of the Maid of Orleans. It is just to suggest that unlikely results sometimes come from unpromising sources, and that it is hard to know in advance what sort of experience is required for the time to come.

It may be that the simple experience of being Barack Obama — son of the pair a Kenyan and a Kansan, reared in Indonesia and Hawaii — may be in actual possession of existence the kind of the age requires. It may also be that the simple experience of essence Sarah Palin — ingesting all that a period of life of moosemeat stew and the pregnancy of a teenaged daughter offers to a woman whose appeal to Mr. McCain was as a great deal of what she lacked (an establishment impulse) as what she possessed (a coast honesty) — may be especially well-suited to the vice presidency.

John Kennedy, who resisted Truman’s defining of experience, did in the end rely on a cult of experts known today as the "best and the brightest." We also know today that they were architects of a gloomy policy in Vietnam. A group of experts also drew him into the Bay of Pigs.

The lesson here isn’t that experts are bad. The censure is that experts are good if you are looking for expert advice. But it remains only that: advice. The corollary is that the voice of actual observation is precious if you understand the limits of experience.

But Kennedy, confronted through the subject-matter that most world leaders in 1960 were born in the 19th century, had an intriguing answer: "Who is to say how successful they take been in improving the fate of the world?" He argued, according to Mr. Sorensen’s account in his 1965 biography of Kennedy, that the emerging nations of the 1960s, in Asia and Africa, had in one’s teens leaders "who can cast off the old slogans and delusions and suspicions."

Kennedy then quoted Lincoln, who had run for president exactly a centenary earlier and who had flat less experience than his compeer emigre to Illinois, Mr. Obama: "I see the storm coming, and I be sure that His give is in it. If He has a place and work for me — and I think He has — I believe I am commodious."

Both Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon were in their 40s when they opponent each other for president. Eight of our presidents, including Bill Clinton, have sat in the Oval Office for the period of their 40s. Some, like James K. Polk, were fortunate, and some, like Ulysses S. Grant, were not.

Age is a test of longevity, not of character, and it is telling that the man who is seeking to become the first chief charged with execution to take office in his 70s — and who selected a 44-year-old governor as his running mate — has been arguing all year that the measure of a president is … character.

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Original text: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/oped/*http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucds/20080908/cm_ucds/presidentsthroughtheages

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Overall, the influence is a determinate for banks around the world, including Citigroup Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co. and UBS AG that invested in U.S. mortgages, according to Daniel Alpert, managing director at the investment bank Westwood Capital. And in electronic commercial Monday morning, futures for the major U.S. stock indexes rose more than 2 percent.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that this will stabilize the mortgage market,” Alpert said.

The government’s resolution Sunday to take control of the two companies — which hold or insure about moiety the nation’s mortgage debt — removes a colossal cloud that has been hovering over skittish markets.

Global investors cheered the move, sending stock markets soaring. Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index surged 3.4 percent, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng integral part advanced 4.3 percent and South Korea’s Kospi index jumped 5.2 percent.

In morning trading in Europe, Britain’s FTSE 100 was up 3.7 percent, Germany’s DAX climbed 3.4 percent and France’s CAC 40 was up 4.6 percent.

Still, many investors likely will want to lo near evidence of home prices bottoming ahead of they jump back into stocks wholeheartedly. They’re also going to subsist asking that which the government will do next to help distressed homeowners pay their mortgages and get people to set out buying houses again.

“Right now, Fannie and Freddie are the mortgage market, and that has been choked. If this helps to clear the way for the housing market to recover, it will filter through to the rest of the market,” declared Quincy Krosby, chief investment strategist at The Hartford. “Anything that helps obtain a bottom to housing prices, helps put in a gain the better of, is going to be a boon for the overall market.”

Stock markets around the globe be in actual possession of been extremely volatile and directionless lately. The Dow Jones industrial average is still above its mid-July lows, but remains down else than 20 percent from the record it reached last October.

Companies have struggled as credit has gotten more expensive — or unattainable to obtain. Chrysler Financial, for example, was recently solely able to rejuvenate $24 billion of its $30 billion in credit lines, time the clothing retailer Steve & Barry’s LLC blamed its inability to borrow currency as it sought bankruptcy court protection in July.

A big reason for the volatility had been the uncertainty over the fate of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, what one. the U.S. Treasury placed into a conservatorship.

“The clarity and certainty it will provide to the status of the two institutions should have a stabilizing effect on the markets, banking system and the pledge industry,” Federal Insurance Deposit Corp. Chairman Sheila C. Bair related in a statement.

The bailout itself does have its negatives — notably, diluting Fannie’s and Freddie’s belonging to all and preferred shares to near-worthless levels.

However, those securities have plummeted so much over the past year that holders esteem already seen the most of their losses. Moreover, the FDIC’s Bair pointed out that only a few small institutions be delivered of significant exposure to Fannie and Freddie’s stock, and that regulators will moil closely with those banks to develop capital-restoration plans.

Questions remain around whether fiscal institutions are valuing their debt-related possessions correctly, according to Westwood Capital’s Alpert.

But the polity’s decision to inject more money into the debt place of traffic — a multi-trillion-dollar source of funding for the world’s businesses — by buying Fannie and Freddie securities should save sound bank’s losses. Soaring mortgage defaults led to a seize-up last summer in the fault market that has without more worsened as home prices desire continued to fall. The credit critical situation has caused the financial industry to write into disgrace the value of its assets by greater quantity than $300 billion, and lose hundreds of billions of dollars more in actual credit losses.

However, Alpert added, it will take more than a bailout of Fannie and Freddie to fix the housing crisis, caused by different years of loose lending standards that permit clan put self-same little money down to buy a to one’s home. He said the prompt might modestly reduce mortgage rates for potential homebuyers, but that “mortgage rates aren’t indeed the issue.”

The economy has lost jobs for eight straight months.

“You don’t buy houses if you don’t acquire confidence,” said Krosby, who said the market resoluteness likely view the Treasury’s takeover as a positive move but not a cure-all.

“This is an important step, but it has be part of an overall program to get buyers to get to in and step into the covering market,” he said. “You’re going to need other elements, other packages, to get it going again.”

Original text: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/business/*http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080908/ap_on_bi_ge/mortgage_giants_wall_street

TAIPEI, Taiwan A Taiwanese fisher who claimed to have been stranded on an Indian Ocean island on this account that 27 years turned out to have being a convicted killer and sex offender instead of a skillful survivor, a Taiwanese newspaper reported Monday.

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When Hu Wen-hu returned to Taiwan in mid-August, he told court officials his boat dropped him on Reunion Island by accident in 1981. He declared he had returned to Taiwan to beget identification papers so he could apply for a residence permit for Reunion - which is French province - and marry a local woman.

Taiwanese media hailed him for the reason that a modern-day Robinson Crusoe, after the fictional shipwrecked castaway, and carried detailed reports about his purported romances with three Reunion women.

But under which circumstances Daniel Defoe’s 17th centenary hero was washed up upon a virtually uninhabited Caribbean island, Reunion, east of Madagascar, has a inhabitants of 700,000 and is fully plugged into the modern world.

On Monday, Taiwan’s United Daily News, citing the Web site of the French-language Le Journal de la Reunion, reported that Hu served five years in jail for killing a man in 1985 and served 18 months for a sex offense involving a 7-year-old girl in 2006.

UDN reported Hu acknowledged he was jailed for murder but denied the allegation of sexual assault.

“I did not intend to hide anything but I was too embarrassed to tell,” Hu was quoted as dictum.

Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau said it would seek the serve of the French government on Hu’s reported crimes before deciding how to advance with him.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008165282_aptaiwanmissingfisherman.html?syndication=rss

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Microsoft may have made a mistake by settling antitrust charges with the European Union last year after losing an EU court prevalent. The software maker didn’t know it was one promised away from winning.

Judges voted 7-6 against Microsoft last Sept. 17, according to two people with not equivocal knowledge of the outcome.

They declined to be identified because EU court votes are trusty.

Microsoft should have appealed to try to end the European Commission’s case towards once and with regard to all, said Toan Tran, an analyst at Morningstar in Chicago.

Microsoft had sought to overturn a $719 the public fine stemming from a 2004 judgment that it failed to occur rivals access to some data.

The corporation didn’t know about the divided vote until May, according to a person familiar with Microsoft’s enclose.

Retail

Issue-focused paper to be at Starbucks

On Thursday, Starbucks will begin oblation a free paper from the magazine Good in its stores. Called the Good Sheet, each week it will attack one election topic, like carbon emissions, health be troubled or education. Starbucks hopes it will breed people talking.

“We had been looking at ways to bring a little bit of those conversation-starters into the Starbucks environment,” said Terry Davenport, the senior vice president for marketing at Starbucks.

Good has an editorial emphasis put on philanthropy and activism. Some of that is translated into the Good Sheet, a folded work of newsprint that presents notice and statistics in a big graphic.

The sheet on health care, concerning example, gives a story of government health-care programs, statistics in regard to health-care spending, and suggestions about solutions, including notes on those that John McCain and Barack Obama endorse.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2008165189_btbriefs08.html?syndication=rss