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49 years ago today: Here’s The Times’ front-page coverage of the JFK assassination (this is our A1 from the following day, November 23, 1963). 

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I mean, really…

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This is gorgeous.

Alexander Wells.

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Everyone should take the time to watch Prime Minister Julia Gillard savage Opposition Leader Tony Abbott in Parliament. It was one of her best performances since she formed government two years ago.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Prime Minister of Australia kicking ass and taking names (mostly Tony Abbott’s). [x]

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Mitt Romney has been keeping the fact-checkers busy since last week’s debate.

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Pass it on.

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Backstage in Fairfax, Virginia today.

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Time Magazine:

Apple has replaced its home page today with a short video in honor of the one-year anniversary of Jobs’ death. The video includes black and white photographs of Jobs throughout his years with the company he founded and features audio from his biggest product announcements–the iMac G3, the iPod and the iPhone. Set to Yo-Yo Ma’s rendition of the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, the video captures Jobs’ charm and dedication to his company. (Ma played at Jobs’ memorial service one year ago.)

A message from current Apple CEO Tim Cook appears on the home page once the video ends.

“I’m incredibly proud of the work we are doing, delivering products that our customers love and dreaming up new ones that will delight them down the road,” it says. “It’s a wonderful tribute to Steve’s memory and everything he stood for.”

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Obama's unspoken advantage

The New Yorker:

A presidential debate is a performance in dialects. There is the dialect of preconceived zingers. There is the dialect of argumentative policy talking points. There are miniaturized thematic speeches, also rehearsed. And there are a handful of spontaneous exchanges in ordinary language. These usually occur when the moderator says or asks something that startles one or both candidates, forcing them to stop flipping through the memorized file cards in their heads.

There wasn’t much unrehearsed speech during last night’s debate at the University of Denver. The moderator, Jim Lehrer, bears much of the responsibility for this. Lehrer is an affable and admirable journalist at the end of a very distinguished career, but most of the sounds he emitted last night seemed to be fragmentary sputters, as he tried unsuccessfully to interrupt the candidates and maintain control of the discussion. He did not ask forceful or original questions to challenge either candidate’s assumptions or misleading statements on the trail. Instead, he again and again asked President Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney simply to clarify their differences—a civic-minded sort of request, but about as far from Ted Koppel’s biting inquiry in the heyday of “Nightline” as it was possible for a moderator to move in such an important forum.

Left largely on their own, the candidates spoke in their rehearsed dialects in a random, repetitive pattern. They almost seemed disoriented by the lack of control. “Jim—I—you may want to move on to another topic,” Obama declared after twenty-one consecutive minutes of dense, mostly opaque exchanges about tax policy at the start of the debate.

Later, during an exchange about the Affordable Care Act, Lehrer asked Romney, “Governor, tell the—tell the President directly why you think what he just said is wrong about ‘Obamacare.’” But Romney had just done so. Even Obama appeared to recognize that they would have to self-regulate:

ROMNEY: Well, I did, with my first statement.

OBAMA: You did.

ROMNEY: But I’ll go on.

OBAMA (with irony): Please elaborate.

ROMNEY (picking up the joke): I’ll elaborate. Exactly right.

This morning, news Web sites around the world are displaying headlines declaring that Romney “won” the debate. It is easy enough to understand why insta-pundits and insta-polls rated the event that way. Scoring a television debate performance is like scoring figure skating: if nobody falls down, and if neither one finds a way to trip the other, then you are looking for energy, commitment in the turns, and a sense of verve. Romney had more of that, and for once, he managed not to seem goofy or out of touch.

Obama wasn’t listless, but as was the case during his convention speech in Charlotte, he seemed prosaic until the last minutes, when he sounded more like his elevating self. Clearly, Obama’s campaign made a deliberate, front-running, and perhaps complacent choice not to provoke Romney by rerunning his “forty-seven per cent” remark, reminding voters of the low tax rates Romney has paid on his large income, or criticizing his time at Bain Capital. Presumably, this was a poll-vetted, focus-grouped decision. But the President missed other opportunities that carried no risk of making him seem too harsh. In response to Romney’s criticism, he did not talk confidently enough about economic recovery, private-sector job creation, the domestic-energy boom that is underway, or the revival of manufacturing jobs he has overseen. He allowed Romney to define the jobs debate. He never said, “In my second term, I will…”

Yet Romney could not avoid embracing positions about Medicare, taxes, Wall Street regulation, and the role of government that most Americans oppose. He acknowledged proudly that he would pull the plug on “Sesame Street”’s Big Bird; surely there is a less emotionally fraught, child-unfriendly example buried in the federal government’s long list of budget line items that he would cut. Romney’s rehearsed zingers were also lame and poorly chosen. “Mr. President, you’re entitled, as the President, to your own airplane and to your own house, but not to your own facts—all right?” That is a questionable choice of imagery about your opponent while you are building a private house in La Jolla that has an elevator in it for cars.

It feels dull and familiar by now to point out that these two candidates—and the parties that have nominated them—have ideas about taxes and the social-safety net that are more starkly opposed than at any time since the presidential election of 1980, when the top marginal-income-tax rate was seventy per cent, and Ronald Reagan proposed to cut it dramatically. (It fell to fifty per cent in 1982.) To reduce federal debt, Obama said last night that his starting position was to seek one dollar in new tax revenue (by raising tax rates on families earning more than $250,000 per year to the rates that prevailed during the Clinton Administration) for every two and a half dollars in spending cuts. Romney acknowledged, if obliquely, that his position is that he will seek a balanced budget by raising zero new taxes while taking an axe to federal spending across the board—except defense.

Obama’s most effective moment, on this critical substantive difference, came when he reminded the audience of an answer Romney gave during a Republican primary debate, when he was asked the sort of pointed question that was absent last night:

When Governor Romney stood on a stage with other Republican candidates for the nomination, and he was asked, would you take ten dollars of spending cuts for just one dollar of revenue, and he said “No.” Now, if you take such an unbalanced approach, then that means you are going to be gutting our investments in schools and education. It means that—Governor Romney talked about Medicaid and how we could send it back to the states, but effectively this means a thirty per cent cut in the primary program we help for seniors who are in nursing homes, for kids who are with disabilities.

Romney dissembled when he said repeatedly that he would not reduce taxes on the rich. What he meant was that he would not reduce the proportion of total taxes they paid into a smaller pool, not that their federal tax bills wouldn’t go down.

As to where money to fund deficit reduction, Medicare, and Social Security would come from, without any new taxes, Romney said, “The revenue I get is by more people working, getting higher pay, paying more taxes.” But that is the same theory of deficit reduction that has been discredited by the dismal fiscal record that followed George W. Bush’s tax cuts. The polls may move against Obama some over the next week or two, but the polls also show an enormous gap in voters’ attitudes toward the candidates on basic questions about the social contract, such as who will better protect Medicare, who will manage tax policy more fairly, and who will look out for the middle class. Last night’s debate obscured these differences more than it should have; it seems likely, still, that voters won’t be fooled.

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Media Matters:

Since June, the major TV news outlets have devoted seven full segments to Paul Ryan’s physical fitness and P90X workout routine, and only one to Arctic sea ice loss. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC have each covered Paul Ryan’s workout routine as much or more than Arctic sea ice loss. In total, TV outlets have discussed Ryan’s fitness 66 times - more than three times as much as Arctic sea ice.

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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York.

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U.S. economy added 386,000 more jobs in past year than we thought

The Washington Post:

At 8:30 a.m. on the first Friday of each month, political and financial analysts across the country begin refreshing their browsers maniacally. That’s when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly jobs numbers — one of the most closely-watched indicators of the state of the U.S. economy. 

Yet it turns out that the monthly numbers are often wrong. In fact, over the past year, they’ve been off by quite a lot. On Thursday, BLS released newly revised data showing that the U.S. economy appears to have added 386,000 more jobs between April 2011 and March 2012 than the monthly reports had been showing. That would suggest that, in the last year, those monthly BLS reports have been understating job growth by roughly 32,000 jobs per month, on average.

Those extra jobs can add up: If the U.S. economy had in fact been adding, on average, 194,000 new jobs each month over that period instead of 162,000, then the country would be on pace to get back to full employment by 2021 rather than after 2025, according to the Hamilton Project’s calculator. (Though that’s still a slow, anemic recovery by either measure.)

Economist Justin Wolfers wonders why these revisions aren’t generating nearly as much fanfare. “Amazing how much attention a 30k miss on a monthly jobs number gets,” he writes, “and how little follows when 386k more jobs are found in a re-benchmark.” Wolfers adds that this revision could help explain why the U.S. unemployment rate has been nudging downward despite the seemingly weak jobs growth.

According to the new BLS numbers, the United States has shed 67,000 more government jobs than thought as of March 2012. Private-sector jobs, by contrast, grew by 453,000 more than originally calculated.

What explains the change? Once a year, the BLS creates a “benchmark” for its jobs numbers by poring over tax records from companies across the country to find out how many people were actually working in March 2012. This helps the agency generate more accurate numbers, but the process takes about 10 months to complete. So, for the monthly reports, the BLS simply relies on smaller, less accurate surveys of businesses. The agency will publish its final benchmark revisions Feb. 1, 2013.

Bill McBride of Calculated Risk provides a table of previous BLS benchmarks revisions going back to 1979. The changes can often be quite dramatic — in both directions. In 2009, for instance, the economy actually lost 902,000 more jobs than the monthly jobs reports had initially suggested.

The fact that these large revisions occur every year suggests that we could all probably stand to put less emphasis on the monthly jobs reports. They’re almost never the last word on how the economy’s actually performing.

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Labour is united, but now the party needs to speak to voters

New Statesman:

Ed Miliband returns to Manchester, the scene of his victory in the Labour leadership election two years ago, in a stronger position than many of his detractors and even his supporters expected. After the bitterness and factionalism of the New Labour years, he has succeeded in uniting the party and faces no threats to his leadership. Having received just 29 per cent of the vote in the 2010 general election, its second-worst result since 1918, Labour now regularly polls between 40 and 45 per cent, with a double-digit lead over the Conservatives (it needs a lead of just 1 per cent on a uniform swing to win a majority in 2015). Mr Miliband’s personal ratings remain below those of David Cameron, but at a time when the haughty disregard for the police by the Tory Chief Whip, Andrew Mitchell, has confirmed voters’ worst sus­picions about the snobberies of Mr Cameron’s inner circle, his essential decency and integrity are likely to earn him the growing respect of the public.

The Labour leader’s stated ambition is not just to return his party to power but to remake capitalism in an age of austerity. The financial crisis and years of declining living standards (11 million people have had no rise in their real incomes since 2003) are, for him, symptoms of an economic model that is not merely defective but broken. In his essay on page 38, Jon Cruddas, the MP leading Labour’s policy review, offers an intellectual route map for a new era.

There is much to commend in his analysis. He is right to argue that, in view of the fiscal constraints a Labour government will face (based on the most recent forecasts, it will inherit a deficit of £96bn), it will not be able to rely on redistributive tax credits to narrow inequality. The old days of tax and spend are over. Instead, Labour must place a greater emphasis on that vexed word, “predistribution”, and, through policies such as a living wage, seek to ensure fairer outcomes before the state intervenes. Although casually dismissed by sections of both left and right, this approach has succeeded in other developed countries, notably Japan, where inequality has fallen as pre-tax incomes have risen. Similarly promising is Mr Cruddas’s patriotic call to “rebuild Britain”: Labour should be a party of change but also of preservation; of radicalism and conservatism. It should defend and harness support for existing national institutions such as the NHS and the BBC while building support for new ones such as a British Investment Bank, which would have powers to borrow and spend.

Mr Cruddas calls for “a national system of high-quality childcare”, “new institutions of social care” and “access to vocational education and skills training”, all of which will need to be paid for. But he does not mention the urgent need for tax reform. Labour should follow the lead of the Liberal Democrats and explore ways of increasing taxes on unearned wealth, such as land and property, and at the same time, where possible, reducing those on earned income and consumption (VAT, at 20 per cent, remains too high in a recession). Wealth taxes are harder to avoid than those on income, and benefit the economy by shifting investment away from unproductive assets and towards wealth-generating industries. With tax-avoidance schemes under ever greater scrutiny, Labour should also capture the popular mood and call for all tax returns to be made public, as in Norway, Finland and Sweden. A culture of greater transparency can “nudge” people into changing their behaviour and attitudes.

In a series of speeches, Mr Mili­band has outlined the concepts – “the squeezed middle”, “respon­sible capitalism”, “predistribution” – that will shape policy formation in the years ahead, but he has yet to define these themes in terms accessible to the voters. Party activists complain that they are being sent “naked on to the doorstep”.

Margaret Thatcher, whose rise to power Mr Miliband’s team has studied closely, built popular support for her programme of bold reform through emblematic policies such as the right to buy council houses and confronting the power of the trade unions. At the Labour party conference in Manchester, Mr Miliband must begin the process of outlining his own, equivalent policies in ways that voters can understand. As Vernon Bogdanor writes on page 44, south of the Severn-Wash line, outside London, Labour holds just ten of 197 seats. How does the party propose to win back some of these as well as appeal to the aspirational voters who supported Tony Blair but abandoned the party in 2010?

Through effective opposition, Mr Miliband has convinced voters of the flaws of the government. He must now convince them that it is right to support Labour.

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The New York Times:

After 30 years on the front lines, Donna Ferrato is ready to write the final chapter of her crusade against domestic abuse.

Ms. Ferrato has been making raw, intimate photos of domestic violence since 1981. She has also been organizing, speaking publicly, counseling and even offering victims shelter at her New York City apartment.

The photographs in her book “Living With the Enemy” helped make the problem brutally real. The images helped create and strengthen laws against domestic violence and raised public awareness of the issue. But domestic violence is still rampant, and women continue to return to their abusers.

It has not been an easy path for Ms. Ferrato. While she has published books on other topics, “Love and Lust” and “TriBeCa,” she is continually drawn back to photographing abuse.

“It’s really depressing,” Ms. Ferrato said. “I don’t want to do this anymore, but I see a lot of these women, and sometimes men, going back and getting beaten up again or killed, and I feel I have to show something more. I have to show the solution to stopping violence to women and children.”

So she has started an uplifting campaign, called “I Am Unbeatable,” that she believes can affect the problem. By celebrating women who have successfully left their abusers and forged new lives for themselves and their children, she hopes to encourage battered women everywhere to leave.

“It’s about finding people who have been able to stand up to abusers and get out before that relationship destroyed them” Ms. Ferrato said. “It’s about learning from people who have real courage and are not going to take being abused, verbally, psychologically, sexually, physically. They’re just not going to take it anymore.”

To begin this campaign, Ms. Ferrato is undertaking a three-month bus tour through the United States to find and document women who have left their abusers and created new lives for themselves. She will be accompanied by a small crew of filmmakers and bloggers.

The trip will result in a film, a Web site and a new book by Aperture that will include the original material from “Living With the Enemy,” but will also have a new section of the photographs and interviews from the bus trip. This could turn out to be the final chapter that Ms. Ferrato was looking for. She is raising money to pay for the bus trip on Indiegogo.

While getting women to leave their abusers might seem like an obvious strategy, the situation is complex and dangerous. Ms. Ferrato said that the domestic violence movement has not focused enough on pushing women to leave their abusers.

“The whole vernacular, the whole language of the battered women’s community is to not to put responsibility on the woman, not to blame her for her partner’s abuse,” she said. “They might suggest to her to leave, they won’t make it forceful because they know that a women will likely go back and forth between the shelter and her abuser seven or eight times until she realizes that if she returns to him one more time, she’ll end up dead. They have to keep her trust.”

Counselors must also take into account that a woman trying to leave could be killed, Ms. Ferrato said.

One of her subjects, Hedda Nussbaum, epitomizes the case for women to leave. In a trial that received national attention, Ms. Nussbaum was repeatedly and brutally battered by her common-law husband, Joel Steinberg, who killed their illegally adopted daughter, Lisa, in 1987. He served 16 years in prison and was released in 2004.

“Hedda is sort of the poster girl for why women have to find it in themselves to just leave their abuser. If she had left, her beautiful daughter might be alive.“

Because of her work on domestic abuse, Ms. Ferrato was able to gain access to Ms. Nussbaum as she underwent lengthy physical and psychological rehabilitation.

“She had these cauliflower ears, her nose was broken in multiple places, and she had that vacant look in her eyes,” Ms. Ferrato said about Ms. Nussbaum. “One eye was shut, there were tears oozing out of her eyes, she had gangrene legs and honestly, no one had ever seen a battered woman who looked like that, ever.”

In addition to making photographs, Ms. Ferrato recorded Ms. Nussbaum, and made a short video which is now online.

In the 1980s, domestic violence was often still a dark secret of family life and love relationships that few wanted to acknowledge. Mr. Steinberg’s killing of the couple’s daughter enraged New Yorkers. Ms. Ferrato remembers that women in particular were most angry at Ms. Nussbaum, spitting on her in supermarkets. Many women felt that it was one thing to let someone beat you, but failing to protect a child was unforgivable.

“I think that women see themselves in Hedda, but they don’t want to think they can be brought down that low,” Ms. Ferrato said. “We women know what we’re capable of. We know our powers to be resilient, stand up for ourselves and survive. So for a woman to go as far down as Hedda did is a very scary thing for women. We could all be battered. We could all be beaten.”

Many of the women Ms. Ferrato photographed in “Living With the Enemy” did permanently leave their abusers and create new lives. With her current campaign, she wants to encourage more people to leave, before they are killed or end up killing their abusers.

After she documents her new subjects, Ms. Ferrato will have them write about their abusive relationships, how they got out and what their lives have been like since.

“I want them to become the stars: to take us to the next place where we can really learn how to live without violence and not be so dependent on someone controlling our mind and our body.”

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Hillary Clinton deserves a shot at the presidency in 2016

The Guardian:

Love the Clintons or hate them, but give them their due.

As the former president Bill Clinton reminded us during his Face the Nation performance, few American politicians are as adept at the Washingtonian art of launching a well-crafted speculation balloon into the media winds. His claim to have "no earthly idea" what Hillary might decide to do about a 2016 run, followed only by his declaration that "I've never met anybody I thought was a better public servant" was the kind of master move that pundits and chess players alike should study for months to come.

This past year's strategically engineered reconciliation between the former president and the current one positioned Clinton to mend some bridges with the Obama 2012 camp before he came out swinging for his wife's potential 2016 bid. So did his stellar performance on Barack Obama's behalf at the Democratic National Convention: arguably, he made a better case for the administration's record than it has ever been able to make for itself. And the Clinton camp's decision to limit his Face the Nation comments to four or five soundbites created a powerful echo chamber that's still resonating 700 news items later with the same strong messaging about her skills and his support.

Hillary Clinton should have her chance at the presidency in 2016. Not only because a lot of the public would like certain parts of the 1990s back – the economy, the comparably healthier state of constitutional rights (including human, civil, and reproductive rights), most of which have gone into serious decline over the past 12 years under two different administrations. Or because Clinton's track record includes true bona fides when it comes to building consensus and bringing opposing sides to the table while standing tough and refusing to give away the farm.

She deserves a shot because she possesses three skills crucial to the office of the president: making lemonade out of life's many lemons, learning from her mistakes and taking the heat. Case in point: she was demonised as the political wannabe who killed healthcare reform; she was publicly humiliated as a cuckolded spouse from one of the most visible perches in the world; she was kicked to the curb during the 2008 presidential primaries by the senior white guys in her party, the ones who had never succeeded in becoming president themselves, but would be damned if they'd ever see her do it either (with all due respect to the late Ted Kennedy). And yet she took it all in stride.

Plenty of stones can legitimately be thrown Clinton's way. Yep, she lied about having been under enemy sniper fire in Bosnia-Herzegovina, voted for the Iraq war, allowed her campaign to engage in some nasty race baiting and belongs to a political family whose willingness to sacrifice the poor for the sake of consensus has led to some ugly results (think welfare "reform"). Still, this truth stands: that few among us would ever uncurl from the fetal position after the gauntlet she ran during the 1990s, let alone pull it together to become a highly visible and popular secretary of state with better approval ratings than her boss.

She'll need that kind of toughness, and not just because obstructionism is practically a plank in the Republican party platform. The mere 17% of women in Congress speaks to the prejudices and difficulties that keep women from office and will continue to bedevil Clinton. Despite all that's been written about the centrality of the women's vote in swing states like Virginia, for example, the major political parties still don't set much store by mentoring or supporting women candidates; nor is there much reason to believe that women voters will vote for their own sex. Then there's the media, where women candidates continue to be smeared, ridiculed and belittled in every corner from left to right. During the 2008 presidential primaries, Clinton was, as Jessica Wakeman reminds us, "targeted for everything from her tone of voice and her style of dress, to her eyes welling up with tears and her credentials as a senator".

It remains to be seen whether Clinton will be willing to endure all that, yet again, for a shot at this country's highest office. Surely no one can blame her if she takes Bill's current route and pursues some global initiative that allows her to advance her interests without having to contend with Congress or the press. For now, all we can do is track the progress of the speculation balloon that Bill has floated – bearing in mind all the while the Clintons' proven powers of political resurrection.

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Denver debate do-or-die for Mitt Romney

Politico:

The kickoff presidential debate Wednesday in Denver is shaping up as do-or-die time for Mitt Romney, with the pressure intensifying this week after a flurry of swing-state polls showed President Barack Obama opening up a sizable lead.

Republicans, fretting about dwindling days for Romney to turn around his campaign, fear that if their nominee doesn’t come away with a decisive first-debate victory, he’ll continue to spiral downward and lose his last, best shot for a comeback.

The fear among donors and strategists: a break-even or so-so performance would subject Romney to a self-reinforcing cycle of criticism and pessimism in his own party that will send other Republicans fleeing and make it difficult for Romney to project a closing argument against Obama over the drumbeat of why-are-you-losing questions.

So the Mile High face-off has gone from merely important to critical for a challenger in need of a break.

“It went from being important to being life-sustaining,” said GOP pollster Steve Lombardo, who worked for Romney in 2008. “Both from a fundraising perspective, to keep the money coming, and just a political perspective it’s huge. Romney can’t just do well and hold his own — he has to win and win decisively. If he’s at parity with the president, I don’t think that’s enough.”

Asked if it was time to sound the alarm over the listing Romney campaign, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in an interview that it depends on Denver.

“I believe that we won’t know until after the first debate,” Gingrich explained.

But as with any campaign that’s trying to find traction, Romney is getting competing doses of advice from Republicans about just how he can emerge triumphant next week and win some momentum before the last two debates.

Some in the party are prescribing a forward-leaning assault on Obama’s record.

“As my wife put it to me the other day, if he is assertive and direct with Obama as he was to me in the two Florida debates, he’ll be fine,” Gingrich said, recalling the primary face-offs in which Romney unleashed a torrent of opposition research upon his rival. “And I think that’s a good way to think of it. He’s got to go in there and not be hostile, but be assertive, clear and direct and not back off.”

Suggested Gingrich: “He’s got to draw a sharp contrast between a Romney recovery and Obama stagnation. He’s got to say, ‘With all respect, Mr. President, this is the worst recovery since the Great Depression.’”

But other Republicans, eyeing the remaining swing voters who still retain some warm feelings for Obama, are counseling a Romney return to the more-in-sorrow-than-anger appeal he used against the president for much of this year.

“What Romney has got to do is follow through on the tone that he has set in the campaign, which is: ‘Look, the president gave it his best shot, you gave him the benefit of the doubt, now let’s turn the page,” said Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), a member of the House GOP leadership who represents a suburban Chicago district.