A look at South Carolina's tough presidential campaign ads
January 20, 2012

A biting 60-second cartoon and a controversial 28-minute movie are just two reasons South Carolina is no place for thin-skinned presidential candidates this week.
Ahead of Saturday's primary, the state's airwaves are packed with attack ads not only from the official campaigns, but also - and especially - from super PACs that have spent millions of dollars for South Carolina alone.
Attack ads aren't novel, but South Carolina combines a narrowed GOP field - front-runner Mitt Romney is now battling just four major rivals, all furiously trying to keep him from winning his third straight primary or caucus - with the relatively new super PACs.
The super PACs, created after federal court decisions in 2010, are allowed to receive unlimited campaign contributions from corporations, labor unions and individual donors. Traditional political action committees and candidates' campaigns may receive only limited contributions.
Super PACs, which according to federal records have spent at least $6 million on South Carolina's primary so far and $26 million on the 2012 presidential race overall, aren't allowed to coordinate with candidates' campaigns. This has sometimes led candidates to shrug their shoulders at rivals' complaints about the ads' accuracy, asserting that they have no control over the super PACs that support them and can't legally tell them directly to make any changes.

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Search for survivors suspended after wrecked cruise ship shifts
January 19, 2012

Italian rescue workers suspended operations Wednesday after a stricken cruise ship shifted slightly on the rocks near the Tuscan coast, creating deep concerns about the safety of divers and firefighters searching for the 22 people still missing.
Premier Mario Monti has offered his first comments since the grounding of the cruise ship off Tuscany, saying such a disaster "could and should" have been avoided and assuring that all precautions were being taken to ensure there is no fuel leak.
Monti also thanked the residents of the tiny island of Giglio, which has a wintertime population of about 900, for opening their doors to to the 4,200 cruise ship refugees who washed ashore Friday night when the Costa Concordia grounded and capsized.
In response to a question at a press conference in London, Monti acknowledged Wednesday concern about a potential leak of the 500,000 gallons of fuel aboard the ship. He says authorities had made limiting and preventing leaks a priority, as well as caring for victims.
The $450 million Costa Concordia cruise ship had more than 4,200 passengers and crew on board when it slammed into the reef Friday off the tiny Italian island of Giglio after the captain made an unauthorized maneuver.
The bodies of five adult passengers -- four men and one woman, all wearing lifejackets -- were discovered in the wreckage Tuesday, raising the death toll to 11. Their nationalities were not immediately released.

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SOPA and PIPA bills: old answers to 21st-century problems, critics say
January 19, 2012

In the face of an Internet rebellion, both senators and members of the House of Representatives are backing away from two anti-piracy bills now making their way through Congress.

But the protests of Internet giants such as Google and Wikipedia, with some essentially shutting down for a day, go beyond the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), consumer activists and academics say. The protests are a call for Congress to reconsider the way it fights digital thievery.

In short, critics say, Congress is looking for a 20th-century answer to a 21st-century challenge.

The intent of the SOPA and PIPA bills is to cut off access to sites that distribute copyrighted material illegally. But critics say it is a heavy-handed solution that won't solve the problem and could quash the sharing and collaboration that fuel innovation on the Internet.

The deeper problem, they suggest, is that the music and film industries simply haven't adapted quickly enough to the new realities of the online world, and are instead trying to use Congress to prop up outdated practices.

"Consumers want easy access to content and many are willing to pay for it - so the onus is on businesses to meet these demands," says Anjelika Petrochenko, general manager at LiveJournal.com, a site that hosts online bloggers, journals, and discussion threads.

While there are exceptions, she says, "SOPA/PIPA legislation is a poorly written excuse for intellectual-property owners to hide their own inability to adapt."

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Marines inch toward charges over desecration video
January 18, 2012

The Marine Corps took a first, formal step on Friday toward possible charges against four troops who, in a video widely circulated on television and the Internet, appear to be urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters.

The Corps named a lead investigating officer whose job would include deciding what charges, if any, would be brought against the four men - all of whom have been identified, a Corps official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

None of the suspects have been detained, the official said. At least two are still part of the same unit involved in the video - the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, based out of Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, a second official told Reuters.

That unit served in Afghanistan's Helmand province from March until September of 2011, the second official said.
Marine Corps Commandant General James Amos said in a statement on Friday he would not "rest until the allegations and the events surrounding them have been resolved."

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More bodies recovered from stricken cruise ship
January 18, 2012

Italian rescuers and divers continuing their perilous work Tuesday located a second "black box" and the remains of five people in the wreckage of the Costa Concordia cruise ship.
Eleven people were confirmed dead after the ship ran aground late Friday off a Tuscan island.
With nearly two dozen people still missing from the ship, which is lying on its side off Giglio, a judge allowed its captain to be held on house arrest pending a later decision on whether he should be released.
Capt. Francesco Schettino is under arrest and may face charges that include manslaughter, shipwreck and abandoning a ship when passengers were still on board, chief prosecutor Francesco Verusio said.
In dramatic transcripts of conversations between Schettino and the Italian coast guard, published by the Corriere della Sera newspaper, the captain gives conflicting accounts of what happened when the ship hit rocks Friday night just off Italy's western coast, leading to what passengers described as a chaotic and surreal scene as they rushed to evacuate.
At first, Schettino tells an official he had abandoned the vessel, according to the transcripts, which prosecutors say match those they are using in their investigation.
But as the official questions his decision, Schettino appears to reverse course and say he had not abandoned ship but was "catapulted into the water" at some point after the ship ran into a rock, began taking on water and started listing.
In a later conversation, an Italian coast guard official demands Schettino return to his ship, the transcripts show.
"You get on board! This is an order!" the coast guard official instructed Schettino.
"You have declared 'Abandon ship.' Now I'm in charge. You get on board -- is that clear?" the port official said.

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Newt Gingrich Suggests Rick Santorum And Rick Perry Should Drop Out
January 18, 2012

Newt Gingrich said Tuesday that he is the only Republican candidate capable of beating out Mitt Romney for the party's nomination, and suggested that the other candidates drop out so conservatives can unite behind him.
"If we win on Saturday, I think I will be the nominee," Gingrich said during a town hall meeting with voters here. "I'm the only conservative who realistically has a chance to be the nominee."
"So any vote for [Rick] Santorum or [Rick] Perry, in effect, is a vote to allow Romney to become the nominee, because we've got to bring conservatives together in order to stop him," Gingrich said.
The GOP's conservative base is currently split largely between Gingrich, the former House Speaker from Georgia, and Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator. Texas Gov. Perry is lagging but still receiving some support from the same pool of voters.
Gingrich's comments were driven by a recognition that with only a few days to go before the Palmetto State votes in its primary Saturday, a conservative splintering will likely allow Romney to win, which would make him very hard to beat from that point on.
"The challenge to me is to convince conservatives to come home and have a single candidate on Saturday, and I'm going to work very hard over the next four days to do that," Gingrich said.
Talking to reporters after the town hall meeting ended, Gingrich made a more detailed case for why he, and not Santorum, is the better conservative alternative to Romney, the former Massachusetts governor.
"Rick is a very good friend of mine and he's a nice man," Gingrich said. "He lost his state for reelection by the largest margin in the history of Pennylvania. There is no evidence that he could put together a national majority."
"I helped Reagan in '80, I helped Reagan in '84. I helped in '88 when Bush was down 19 points in May and we won by 6 in November ... I helped design the '94 campaign which had the largest one-party increase in an off year in American history."
"You could make a pretty good case I actually know how to design a national campaign," Gingrich said. "I don't think Santorum can win. It's not because he's not a nice guy, but he doesn't have any of the knowledge of how to do something like this."
A reporter asked Gingrich if Santorum should drop out. Gingrich did not explicitly say that he should, but suggested that that would be the best choice for the good of the "conservative movement."
"I'm respectful that Rick has every right to run as long as he feels that's what he should do," Gingrich said. "But from the standpoint of the conservative movement, consolidating into a Gingrich candidacy would in fact virtually guarantee victory on Saturday, and I'd be delighted if either Perry or Santorum would do that. They have to make that decision."

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Romney put on defense at South Carolina debate, as GOP rivals fight for edge in state primary
January 17, 2012

Mitt Romney was put on defense out of the box at Monday night's Republican presidential primary debate -- answering questions about his record at private venture firm, Bain Capital; distancing himself from super PAC ads against fellow candidates; defending his record as Massachusetts governor, and dodging demands that he release his tax records.
But Romney fired back against the onslaught, saying he is proud of his record in business and as governor.
"We were fortunate to have an unemployment rate by the time I left office of 4.7 percent. Sounds pretty good today," Romney said. "And I was also proud of the fact that we balanced the budget every year I was in office. We reduced taxes 19 times, put in place a rainy day fund of over $2 billion by the time I left."
Still, with his rivals running out of time to make the case they are a viable and "conservative" alternative to the front-runner, the attacks were fast and furious.
Rick Perry accused Bain of sweeping into Georgetown, S.C., and closing a steel mill.
"They picked that company over, and a lot of people lost jobs there," Perry said.
Romney replied that Bain actually invested in two steel mills and invested for seven or eight years, but the mills closed because of actions beyond Bain's control.
"Ultimately, what happened from abroad, dumping steel into this country, led to some 40 different steel mills being closed," Romney said. "I understand what happens when China cheats, or when others cheat and dump products into this country. That's one of the reasons I'm running, is to make sure we crack down on cheaters."

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Italy disaster could hit cruise industry
January 17, 2012

The spectacular cruise liner accident off the coast of Italy is not just a disaster for the ship's owners, but could inflict wider damage on an industry already facing stiff headwinds.
The Costa Concordia, with more than 4,000 people on board, flipped on its side after hitting a rock on Friday night close to the beautiful island of Giglio, off Italy's west coast.
At least five people died in the accident.
The luxury 114,500-tonne ship was operated by Costa Crociere, a unit of Carnival Corporation & Plc, the world's largest cruise company. The stricken vessel was one of the group's main assets in the lucrative European cruise market.
"This is a PR (public relations) nightmare for the Costa brand," said Jaime Katz, equity analyst from investment research company Morningstar in Chicago.
"The question is, when that's been stripped out, whether the Carnival brand will be tarnished."

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Rick Perry defends Marines accused of urinating on Afghan corpses
January 16, 2012

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) on Sunday defended the four Marines who were depicted in a viral video last week urinating on the corpses of three Taliban insurgents, arguing "what's really disturbing to me is just, kind of, the over-the-top rhetoric from this administration and their disdain for the military."
"Obviously, 18, 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often, and that's what's occurred here," the Republican presidential candidate told Candy Crowley on CNN's "State of the Union." "But, you know, when you're in war, and history kind of backs up - there's a picture of General Patton doing basically the same thing in the Rhine River. And although there's not a picture, Churchill did the same thing on the Siegfried line."
As The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol notes, a 1945 photo captured General George S. Patton urinating into the Rhine River in full view of his soldiers. And Winston Churchill, too, is reported to have urinated on the Siegfried Line, the German World War II defensive line. But neither man was known to have urinated on human corpses.
U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions forbid the desecration of dead bodies. But Perry argued Sunday that the three Marines' alleged actions did not amount to a crime.
"I mean, these kids made a mistake, there's not any doubt about it," he said. "They shouldn't have done it. It's bad. But to call it a criminal act, I think, is over the top."

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Romney back on top in new national poll
January 16, 2012

It's amazing what back to back wins can do for your poll numbers.
One-time Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney is back on top in the race for the GOP nomination, according to a new national survey.
A CNN/ORC International poll, conducted on Wednesday and Thursday after the New Hampshire primary, also indicates that the former Massachusetts governor's support nearly doubles in hypothetical one-on-one match-ups against his strongest rivals.
According to the survey, 34% of Republicans and independents who lean towards the GOP say they're likely to support the former Massachusetts governor for the nomination, with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 18%, and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania each at 15%. Texas Gov. Rick Perry stands at 9% in the poll, with former Utah Gov. and former ambassador to China Jon Huntsman at 4%.
Romney and Gingrich were tied at 28% support in CNN's last national survey, which was conducted in mid-December, before Romney's narrow victory in last week's Iowa caucuses and his big win Tuesday night in the New Hampshire primary. Romney became the first non-incumbent to win Iowa and New Hampshire back to back.
Gingrich finished out of the money in Iowa and New Hampshire. Romney edged up six points while Gingrich dropped ten points since the last poll. Paul, who came in third in Iowa and a strong second in New Hampshire, has inched up a point, while Santorum, who lost to Romney by just eight votes in Iowa before coming in fifth in New Hampshire, is up 11 points.
"Romney's increased support has come entirely from conservative Republicans, and mostly at Gingrich's expense. Romney has actually lost support among moderate Republicans," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "And most of Romney's newfound strength has come among higher-income categories - he has gained only three points among GOPers with less than $50,000 but 11 points among those who make more than that amount."
The poll also looks at hypothetical two-man matchups for the GOP nomination, with Romney leading Gingrich 59-37%, beating Santorum 60%-37%, and topping Paul 67-31%.

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