Obama returns to campaign trail to promote middle-class tax cuts

Negotiations on the fiscal cliff continue Tuesday as neither Republicans nor Democrats have been able to broker a deal.

By Christi Parsons




This post has been updated, as indicated below.

November 27, 2012, 8:47 a.m.

WASHINGTON — President Obama is heading back out on the campaign trail this week — this time to pressure Congress to extend the expiring middle-class tax cuts.
 
On Friday, Obama plans to travel to Hatfield, Pa., for an event at a toy factory that according to the White House “depends on middle-class consumers during the holiday season.”
 
Lest anyone miss the holiday spin of this public campaign, the White House issued an analysis Monday predicting how the automatic tax increases could hurt the winter shopping season. Obama is expected to mention its findings, including its estimate that the hike would put a $200-billion crimp in consumer spending in 2013.

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past 

Of course, Republicans are perfectly amenable to extending the Bush-era tax cuts as a complete package. But aides to Obama are reiterating that he won’t go along with a deal that extends the cuts for high earners.
 
Staffers on all sides are working now to come up with an agreement that will avert the expiration of the tax cuts as well as the federal government spending cuts set to take effect the end of the year.
 
Just how hard Obama plans to hit the “Grinch” message at this point in the talks isn’t clear. The politics of a deal call for a delicate balance of partisan interests — no easy task so soon after the acrimonious fall campaigns.
 
For much of this week, the campaign will take place behind closed doors. On Tuesday Obama is scheduled to meet with small retailers whose profits depend significantly on holiday sales.

QUIZ: How much do you know about the fiscal cliff?
 
On Wednesday, he has scheduled an event at the White House with middle-class Americans who responded to an email from senior advisor David Plouffe seeking accounts of how a tax increase would affect them. He’ll also meet that day with business leaders.
 
But on Friday, Obama is set to go to Pennsylvania to visit the 150 employees of the Rodon Group factory.
 
The facility makes toys for K’NEX Brands, whose products include popular items of Christmases past and present — Tinkertoys and Angry Bird Building Sets.

Republicans are planning their own public campaign on the tax fight. House members are planning events at small businesses to argue the merits of extending all of the Bush-era tax cuts.

"The target of the president’s rallies should be the congressional Democrats who want to raise tax rates on small businesses rather than cut spending," said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. "To draw attention to the irresponsible position of Democrats in Congress, House Republicans will be taking our message to small businesses across America."

[For the Record, 8:44 a.m. PST Nov. 27: This post has been updated to include Republican plans for a public campaign on taxes.]

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Nintendo says more than 400,000 Wii Us sold in US

NEW YORK (AP) — Nintendo has sold more than 400,000 of its new video game console, the Wii U, in its first week on sale in the U.S., the company said Monday.

The Wii U launched on Nov. 18 in the U.S. at a starting price of $ 300. Nintendo said the sales figure, based on internal estimates, is through Saturday, or seven days later.

The Wii U is the first major game console to launch in six years. It comes with a new touch-screen controller that promises to change how people play games by offering different people in the same room a different experience, depending on the controller used.

Six years ago, Nintendo Co. sold 475,000 of the original Wii in that console’s first seven days in stores, according to data from the NPD Group. The original Wii remains available, and Nintendo said it sold more than 300,000 of them last week, along with roughly 250,000 handheld Nintendo 3DS units and about 275,000 of the Nintendo DS.

At this early stage, demand isn’t the only factor dictating how many consoles are sold. Supply is, too. This means it’s likely that more people wanted to buy the Wii U in the first week than those who were able to. The original Wii was in short supply more than a year after it went on sale.

As of Monday afternoon, the website of Best Buy Co. was sold out of the Wii U. Video game retailer GameStop Corp. said there was at least a three day wait for a deluxe Wii U, which costs $ 350, has more memory and comes with a game called “Nintendo Land.” GameStop still had the basic, $ 300 version available.

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter estimates that Nintendo will ship 1 million to 1.5 million Wii Us in the U.S. through the end of January.

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Fla. man sues ex-Elmo puppeteer, claims NY abuse

NEW YORK (AP) — A Florida man has sued the ex-Elmo puppeteer who resigned amid a sex scandal, saying the voice actor met him in New York after trolling gay telephone chat lines seeking underage boys for sex.

The lawsuit seeking unspecified damages was filed in Manhattan federal court Tuesday by a man who remains anonymous.

The man says he met Kevin Clash on a chat line when he was 16 years old in 2000 and exploring modeling opportunities in New York.

The lawsuit says Clash had numerous Elmo dolls in his apartment when he met the teen for sex. The man, now 29, is the third to make claims against Clash, who resigned from "Sesame Street" last week after 28 years.

A spokeswoman says Clash "believes this lawsuit has no merit."

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Imaging Shows Progressive Damage by Parkinson’s

For the first time, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report, brain imaging has been able to show in living patients the progressive damage Parkinson’s disease causes to two small structures deep in the brain.

The new technique confirms some ideas about the overall progress of the disease in the brain. But the effects of Parkinson’s vary in patients, the researchers said, and in the future, the refinement in imaging may help doctors monitor how the disease is affecting different people and adjust treatment accordingly.

The outward symptoms and progress of Parkinson’s disease — tremors, stiffness, weakness — have been well known since James Parkinson first described them in 1817. But its progress in the brain has been harder to document.

Some of the structures affected by the disease have been buried too deep to see clearly even with advances in brain imaging. An important recent hypothesis about how the disease progresses was based on the examinations of brains of patients who had died.

Now, a group of scientists at M.I.T. and Massachusetts General Hospital report that they have worked out a way to combine four different sorts of M.R.I. to get clear pictures of damage to two brain structures in people living with Parkinson’s. In doing so, they have added support to one part of the recent hypothesis, which is that the disease first strikes an area involved in movement and later progresses to a higher part of the brain more involved in memory and attention.

Suzanne Corkin, a professor emerita of behavioral neuroscience at M.I.T. and the senior author on the paper published online Monday in The Archives of Neurology, said that this progression was part of the hypothesis put forward in 2003 by Heiko Braak, a German neuroscientist, based on autopsies.

But, she said, because of the limits of brain imaging, “nobody could test this in living patients.”

David A. Ziegler, who was at M.I.T. when the research was done, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, said that the study, of 29 patients with Parkinson’s and 27 healthy patients of roughly the same age, showed that the peanut-sized substantia nigra lost volume first, and another structure called the basal forebrain, involved in memory and attention, was struck later.

Glenda Halliday, a neuroscientist at Neuroscience Research Australia and the University of New South Wales, who was not involved in the study, said the paper confirmed “the progression of degeneration in two important affected brain regions in people with Parkinson’s.”

Dr. Corkin, Dr. Ziegler and their colleagues developed a way to use four different varieties of M.R.I. — each using different settings on the same machine — to come up with four different images that could be used to form one image that showed structures deep in the brain like the substantia nigra, long known to be important in Parkinson’s.

The disease kills brain cells, shrinking the parts of the brain that it affects, and the comparative study showed that the reduction in size of the substantia nigra showed up in early stage Parkinson’s patients, compared with a healthy group.

The reduction in size in the basal forebrain, compared with the healthy group, did not show up in the patients in the early stage, but was clear in patients in the later stage.

“This is a project we’ve been working on in our lab for years,” she said. A next step, already in progress, is to correlate damage to specific brain structures with symptoms.

Parkinson’s, she said, is a disease that shows the same broad outlines of development in most patients, but with considerable variation. Dementia may arrive early or may not appear. The M.R.I. technique described in the paper, she said, might help tease out what is going on in the brain in subgroups of Parkinson’s patients that show different symptoms and could influence treatment.

One important difference between the two brain structures is that damage to the substantia nigra decreases production of the neurotransmitter dopamine, while a smaller basal forebrain would reduce the production of a different chemical, acetylcholine.

The research is just one step, Dr. Ziegler said. One of the “big outstanding questions,” he said, is whether all patients will eventually get dementia.

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SolarCity pegs IPO at $13 to $15 a share, or up to $151 million

SolarCity Corp., a Bay Area solar energy company, is looking to raise as much as $151 million in its initial public offering, widely considered to be the most anticipated renewable-power IPO coming down the pike.

The San Mateo business – which helps residential, commercial and government customers including Wal-Mart, eBay and the U.S. military set up solar power-generating systems – said it expects its shares to price between $13 and $15 each.

The company is selling 10 million shares, and current shareholders are offering 65,012 shares, SolarCity said in an amended filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company expects its stock to trade under the SCTY ticker on Nasdaq.

SolarCity describes its business as selling renewable energy to power consumers at prices below utility rates – or roughly 15 cents per kilowatt hour on average. After customers sign multidecade contracts, SolarCity handles the entire process from permitting through installation with limited upfront charges, the company said.

Brothers Lyndon and Peter Rive founded the company in 2006. Their cousin, Tesla Motors and SpaceEx boss Elon Musk, is chairman.

SolarCity operates in 14 states and plans to expand internationally. It has raised $1.57 billion from backers such as Google, PG&E Corp. and U.S. Bancorp.

The company hopes to take advantage of rising energy prices – a trend that Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory predicts will cause the U.S. energy-efficiency service sector to grow more than four-fold from 2008 to 2020.

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SEC chief Mary Schapiro to step down

WASHINGTON -- Mary Schapiro said Monday she will step down as chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission next month.

Schapiro, who has headed the Wall Street watchdog since 2009, had been widely expected to depart the commission after the presidential election. She announced that her last day would be Dec. 14.

“It has been an incredibly rewarding experience to work with so many dedicated SEC staff who strive every day to protect investors and ensure our markets operate with integrity,” Schapiro said in a written statement.

 “Over the past four years we have brought a record number of enforcement actions, engaged in one of the busiest rulemaking periods, and gained greater authority from Congress to better fulfill our mission,” she said.

Her five-year term does not expire until January 2014, but it's rare for chairs to serve more than four years. The SEC noted that Schapiro has served longer than 24 of the previous 28 chairs.

Schapiro, the first woman to serve as a non-interim chair of the agency, has headed the SEC during a volatile period. The SEC has grappled with the fallout from the Bernard Madoff ponzi scheme.

And it has launched cases stemming from the financial crisis and has had to implement dozens of new rules from the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

The SEC chairwoman also serves on the new Financial Stability Oversight Council, a panel of top regulators that monitors the financial system for threats to the broader economy.

Democratic Commissioner Elisse Walter has been mentioned as a possible successor. The New York Times reported that Mary J. Miller, assistant Treasury secretary for domestic finance, and Sallie L. Krawcheck, a former executive at Bank of America and Citigroup, also are under consideration.

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Yes, the Government Can Still Spy on Your Digital Life (for Now)

Ahead of a controversial Senate debate on digital privacy this week, the battle over warrantless cell-phone and Internet searches is beginning to take shape — even as law-enforcement agencies continue to carry out the searches anyway. Judges across the country have thrown out cases that used tracked digital American lives without warrants, but others haven’t, reports The New York Times‘s Somini Sengupta. A DC court, for example, compared text messages to voicemail messages, which because they can be overheard are not protected by state privacy laws, argued one judge. A Louisiana court is deciding if cell-phone records are like business records. Another court ruled that GPS cell phone tracking without a warrant was fine, too. Others, however, argue that cell phones are more than just a paper trail. One judge called cell phones “raw, unvarnished and immediate, revealing the most intimate of thoughts and emotions,” as in something that is subject to higher privacy standards. Meanwhile, we see the same inconsistencies with Internet protections, reports The Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Pallazolo. A federal court recently ruled that people who use their neighbors’ WiFi without permission forfeit privacy, opening up government officials to warrantless searches. The same ruling other courts have made for IP addresses. However, the law isn’t that clear-cut, either, argues George Washington University professor Oren Kerr. 

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Without clear rules, government agencies have continued investigations with warrantless searches. As people have started using cell phones more often and for more than just calling, law enforcement agency requests for cell-phone information have increased, reported The New York Times‘s Eric Lichtblau earlier this year. AT&T gets more than 700 requests a day from various agencies, triple what it got in 2007, he notes. Last year, the total number of requests came in at at least 1.3 million. At the same time, the application for wiretapping warrants declined 14 percent last year to 2,732, according to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. A curious pattern considering the requests for information have gone up. Though these wireless carriers say they require a search warrant, a court order or a formal subpoena to release information, “in cases that law enforcement officials deem an emergency, a less formal request is often enough,” writes Lichtblau. Or, it’s possible that law enforcement has opted for other forms of tracking that don’t require warrants, at least not according to some judges. 

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A Senate debate beginning Thursday to make changes on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act might bring some clarity to these issues. However, it’s unclear if the revised bill will give the government more or less power, and it doesn’t sound like the vote will apply to all cell phone or Internet data. An early draft of the bill reportedly allowed warrantless e-mail searches, reported CNET’s Declan McCullagh. Since, Senator Patrick Leahy, who is spearheading the bill, has denied that the updates to the regulation will do that, however. Instead, the revised bill will require search warrants to get into email no matter how old, says Sengupta. That should presumably apply to some of our smartphone and Internet data, too. But it doesn’t address text messages or location information, other concerns of consumers.

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Danish theater cancels Amy Winehouse play

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Amy Winehouse's father has stopped the performance in Denmark of a play about the late British singer, declining permission for the use of her music and photos in the production, officials said Monday.

The play "Amy," which was to have opened on Jan. 30 in a 220-seat theater in central Copenhagen, was based on interviews, concerts, Winehouse's letters and newspaper articles. Denmark's Royal Theater had earlier been granted a permit to perform the play by the Danish copyright agency Koda.

"We acted in good faith when we gave them the permission for the performance. We believed that the format — a theater play — was OK," Koda spokesman Nicolaj Hylten-Cavallius said. "We were told by her father and the lawyers around him that we can forget all about the rights for the music, the photos, branding and everything."

Koda said that Amy Winehouse's father, Mitch Winehouse, objected to the use of any of her music, photos or belongings but gave no reason why, Hylten-Cavallus said.

"Amy," written by a group of 11 Danish playwrights, depicted her life and relationship with drugs and alcohol.

The Grammy-winning British soul singer, known for her beehive hairdo, died from alcohol poisoning in July last year at the age of 27.

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Agency Investigates Deaths and Injuries Associated With Bed Rails

Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black’s mother died in her bed at a care facility.

In November 2006, when Clara Marshall began suffering from the effects of dementia, her family moved her into the Waterford at Fairway Village, an assisted living home in Vancouver, Wash. The facility offered round-the-clock care for Ms. Marshall, who had wandered away from home several times. Her husband Dan, 80 years old at the time, felt he could no longer care for her alone.

Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black, visiting her mother’s grave in Portland, Ore. She has documented hundreds of deaths associated with bed rails and said families should be informed of their possible risks.

But just five months into her stay, Ms. Marshall, 81, was found dead in her room apparently strangled after getting her neck caught in side rails used to prevent her from rolling out of bed.

After Ms. Marshall’s death, her daughter Gloria Black, who lives in Portland, Ore., began writing to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. What she discovered was that both agencies had known for more than a decade about deaths from bed rails but had done little to crack down on the companies that make them. Ms. Black conducted her own research and exchanged letters with local and state officials. Finally, a letter she wrote in 2010 to the federal consumer safety commission helped prompt a review of bed rail deaths.

Ms. Black applauds the decision to study the issue. “But I wish it was done years ago,” she said. “Maybe my mother would still be alive.” Now the government is studying a problem it has known about for years.

Data compiled by the consumer agency from death certificates and hospital emergency room visits from 2003 through May 2012 shows that 150 mostly older adults died after they became trapped in bed rails. Over nearly the same time period, 36,000 mostly older adults — about 4,000 a year — were treated in emergency rooms with bed rail injuries. Officials at the F.D.A. and the commission said the data probably understated the problem since bed rails are not always listed as a cause of death by nursing homes and coroners, or as a cause of injury by emergency room doctors.

Experts who have studied the deaths say they are avoidable. While the F.D.A. issued safety warnings about the devices in 1995, it shied away from requiring manufacturers to put safety labels on them because of industry resistance and because the mood in Congress then was for less regulation. Instead only “voluntary guidelines” were adopted in 2006.

More warnings are needed, experts say, but there is a technical question over which regulator is responsible for some bed rails. Are they medical devices under the purview of the F.D.A., or are they consumer products regulated by the commission?

“This is an entirely preventable problem,” said Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, who first alerted federal regulators to deaths involving bed rails in 1995. The government at the time declined to recall any bed rails and opted instead for a safety alert to nursing homes and home health care agencies.

Forcing the industry to improve designs and replace older models could have potentially cost bed rail makers and health care facilities hundreds of million of dollars, said Larry Kessler, a former F.D.A. official who headed its medical device office. “Quite frankly, none of the bed rails in use at that time would have passed the suggested design standards in the guidelines if we had made them mandatory,” he said. No analysis has been done to determine how much it would cost the manufacturers to reduce the hazards.

Bed rails are metal bars used on hospital beds and in home care to assist patients in pulling themselves up or helping them out of bed. They can also prevent people from rolling out of bed. But sometimes patients — particularly those suffering from Alzheimer’s — can get confused and trapped between a bed rail and a mattress, which can lead to serious injury or even death.

While the use of the devices by hospitals and nursing homes has declined as professional caregivers have grown aware of the dangers, experts say dozens of older adults continue to die each year as more rails are used in home care and many health care facilities continue to use older rail models.

Since those first warnings in 1995, about 550 bed rail-related deaths have occurred, a review by The New York Times of F.D.A. data, lawsuits, state nursing home inspection reports and interviews, found. Last year alone, the F.D.A. data shows, 27 people died.

As deaths continued after the F.D.A. warning, a working group put together in 1999 and made up of medical device makers, researchers, patient advocates and F.D.A. officials considered requiring bed rail makers to add warning labels.

But the F.D.A. decided against it after manufacturers resisted, citing legal issues. The agency said added cost to small manufacturers and difficulties of getting regulations through layers of government approval, were factors against tougher standards, according to a meeting log of the group in 2000 and interviews.

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Fiscal cliff warning sends stock market lower

Traders came back to work on Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend to the same old worries about the fiscal cliff and the European debt crisis.

The stock market fell in midday trading as Washington lawmakers and business groups bickered over the proper rates for taxing and spending. In Europe, leaders tried to cobble together another bailout loan for Greece.

The Dow Jones industrial average was down 91 points at 12,919 as of noon. The Standard & Poor's 500 was down eight at 1,401 and the Nasdaq composite index slipped seven points to 2,960.

Overall it was a quiet morning, with no major economic reports due in the U.S. and no major companies scheduled to make big announcements.

“The themes seem about as recycled as Thanksgiving turkey,” David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Funds, wrote in a note to clients. He expected a better read on the economy later this week, with reports on consumer confidence on Tuesday and unemployment claims and third-quarter economic growth on Thursday.

Scott Carmack, co-portfolio manager at Leader Capital in Portland, Ore., said the decline was all but inevitable given how the market soared last week. It was one of the best weeks for the Dow all year and followed four weeks of decline. Positive economic news from Germany and China, as well as initial reports Friday that holiday shopping had gotten off to a strong start helped push the market higher.

That made Monday a good day to cash out on last week's gains, Carmack said, especially because traders aren't sure how the fiscal cliff will affect the market for the rest of the year.

“Monday is a good day to take profits,” Carmack said. “No one was in on Friday, so they're doing it Monday.”

It's still difficult to gauge how this holiday shopping season will wind up for retailers, who rely heavily on the Christmas season. The National Retail Federation reported that 247 million shoppers visited stores and shopping websites during the long Thanksgiving weekend, up 9 percent from a year ago. They spent an average of $423, up 6 percent.

Some worry that the momentum won't last. Retailers like Macy's, Target and Saks were down in early trading. Macy's fell $1.55 to $40.17. Saks was down 41 cents to $10.11. Abercrombie & Fitch was an exception, rising 37 cents to $44.77.

Blame the disconcerting overhang of the fiscal cliff. That's when both higher taxes and cuts to government programs, like unemployment benefits and Social Security, will kick in at the end of the year unless Congress and the White House work out a compromise before then.

A government report released Monday warned that a sudden increase in taxes would crimp the spending of middle class families next year, and some analysts wondered if the uncertainty might hurt spending earlier, throughout the rest of the holiday season.

The report, by President Barack Obama's National Economic Council and his Council of Economic Advisers, estimated that a married couple earning between $50,000 and $85,000 with two children would see a $2,200 increase in their taxes.

To be sure, the fiscal cliff fighting could be mostly grandstanding. Lawmakers often fight over budget issues until the 11th hour, then work out a compromise at the last moment.

In Europe, leaders of European Union countries engaged in their own battle, trying to hammer out a deal to lend more money to debt-crippled Greece. But ailments in Greece no longer sicken the U.S. markets as readily as they used to, as many analysts have already baked European problems into their market estimates.

“Most of these uncertainties have been with us for quite some time,” Sam Stovall, chief equity strategist at S&P Capital IQ, wrote in a note Monday, “and are now regarded by many as annoyances to resolve rather than obstacles to fear.”

One company that did make news was McGraw-Hill, which announced it would sell its textbook publishing unit to a private equity firm. The company's stock rose $1.16 to $52.85.

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