...hopelessly outgunned presidential campaign as if it was a business, not even spending more money than he had in hand. C'mon now, how laughable is that in this day and age in modern America that someone who wants to run the federal government should live within his own campaign means? Just like normal people who live on a real budget with no ability to vote themselves a pay raise and a higher debt ceiling when no one is watching C-SPAN!
When the ultimate Democratic winner, in league with the extraordinary gentleman Harry Reid and the tough-talking San Francisco grandma who's House speaker, has decided to spend a gazillion more dollars than any non-federal calculator has digits to display.
These people, for Nancy's sake, are already spending the income taxes of the unborn grandchildren of those 4,000 babies that Paul delivered. A shocking realization that may be helping to fuel the recent re-examination of Ron Paul, who never met a federal dollar that needed spending -- unless it was going back to his district near Houston.
Ron Paul came within something like 1,000 delegates of catching John McCain for the Republican nomination in St. Paul. But when he finally gave up, Paul still had about $5 million left over. He's been investing it traveling around the country to speak and helping like-minded RFR's (Republicans For Real) organize all over. And, who knows, maybe sell a few books.
But now, just as his fierce supporters fearlessly predicted all along, many in American politics are coming around to think that maybe RP's crazy ideas, for example, of auditing and controlling the Federal Reserve, are maybe not quite so crazy.
Our news colleague in Washington, Don Lee, details the sea-change in opinion in a comprehensive look at the old guy's rebirth for weekend print editions, which we're sharing here this morning as a distinguished guest post for Ticket readers around the world.
And for any surviving Ron Paulites, who won't dare leave their typically snippy comments below because that would require them acknowledging that their favorite fiction about a MSM conspiracy to ignore the old guy is fiction.
-- Andrew Malcolm
Because no federal funds are involved, Ron Paul would want you to click here for Twitter alerts of each new Ticket item. Or follow us @latimestot. Or join us over here on The Ticket's new Facebook FAN page.
Here's Lee's reported news item:
For three decades, Texas congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul's extreme brand of libertarian economics consigned him to the far fringes even among conservatives. Not a few times, his views put him on the losing end of 434-1 votes on Capitol Hill.
No longer. With the economy still struggling and political divisions deepening, Paul's ideas not only are gaining a wider audience but also are helping to shape a potentially historic battle over economic policy -- a struggle that will affect everything including jobs, growth and the nation's place in the global economy.
Already, Paul's long-derided proposal to give Congress supervisory power over the traditionally independent Federal Reserve appears to be on its way to becoming law.
His warnings on deficits and inflation are now Republican mantras.
And with this year's congressional election campaign looming, the Texas congressman's deep-seated distrust of activist government has helped fuel protests such as the tea-party movement, harden partisan divisions in Washington and stoke public fears about federal spending and the deficit.
"People are wondering what went wrong. And they're not happy with what the....
....government is offering up," said James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, offering an explanation for why seemingly wonkish arguments over interest rate policy and the money supply are spilling over onto ordinary Americans.
Some of Paul's most extreme views are still beyond the pale for most economists. Despite the eroding value of the dollar, no one expects the U.S. to return to the gold standard, as Paul advocates; most economists think that could wreck the economy.
In their less drastic forms, however, Paul's ideas are being welcomed by conservatives and viewed with foreboding by liberals. For conservatives, runaway inflation constitutes the biggest potential threat to the nation's future. Liberals worry that cutting back stimulus efforts too soon could slow or even halt the current recovery.
The debate over that question -- what the basic thrust of U.S. economic policy should be -- is likely to dominate the coming elections and Washington policymaking.
And so far, Paul and his fellow conservatives are on the offensive. President Obama and congressional Democrats are repeatedly pledging not to increase the deficit and to begin cutting back soon.
"I think we're going to be in for more revival of fiscal responsibility," said William Niskanen of the Cato Institute, who headed the Council of Economic Advisors under President Reagan.
Niskanen sees the Texas Republican's increasing influence as stemming from the continued economic weakness. "To this extent, Ron Paul gains voice," he said.
Paul would go a lot further in cutting back the government's role than even free-marketers like Niskanen support. If Paul had it his way, for instance, he would do away with the Fed entirely. In his bestselling book "End the Fed," he lambasted the central bank as an "immoral, unconstitutional . . . tool of tyrannical government."
Such rhetoric might once have been dismissed as extremism.
But Paul's anti-Fed message has drawn broad support because of the central bank's failure to restrain the flood of cheap money and excessive risk-taking in the years leading up to the financial crisis.
It has stirred rallies on college campuses and supportive commentaries from Wall Street pundits. More than 300 representatives in Congress have embraced Paul's ideas for reining in the Fed.
The response "is even more than I ever dreamed," Paul said in an interview, reminiscing about one evening during his 2008 White House run when University of Michigan students chanted "End the Fed" and burned dollar bills.
Paul, a skinny 74-year-old with a hangdog expression, understands that historical circumstances have thrust his ideas to the fore. "An intellectual fight is going on," he said.
Paul traces his economic views to his frugal upbringing in Pittsburgh at the tail end of the Depression. He saved pennies from delivering newspapers and helping out his father's small dairy business.
And his first economics class at Gettysburg College was an eye-opener, Paul said. When a professor explained how banks keep only a tiny part of their deposits on hand and earn money by lending out the rest, Paul discovered one of the "tricks" of the financial system.
Beyond that, Paul's ideas are grounded in the work of economic thinkers from an earlier era who focused on problems similar to those besetting the U.S. today.
In particular, Paul is a disciple of Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian theorist born at the end of the 19th century who contended that government intervention in an economy would fail because free markets were better at allocating resources and fueling growth.
Having lived through Germany's devastating hyperinflation in the early 1920s, which helped pave the way for Hitler, Mises wrote long before the Great Depression that over-generous credit policies would encourage excessive borrowing, creating a boom and then a bust.
Mises' ideas became central to what is known as the Austrian School of economics, which emphasized tight controls on credit and money supply, a strategy that discouraged financial ups and downs but tended to slow growth.
By 1940, when Mises arrived in America, most Western economists had embraced the competing theories of Britain's John Maynard Keynes, who called for government to stimulate the economy by spending on infrastructure and cutting interest rates.
Obama has largely followed the Keynesian script, as President George W. Bush did when the economic crisis broke.
Paul's once-lonely espousal of the Austrian School's ideas has gotten new impetus from conservative economists and Republican political strategists.
"A lot of good ideas were shoved aside because of the Depression and the rise of the Keynesian view of the world," said George Selgin, an economics professor at the University of Georgia.
Paul contends that Austrian economics explains the most recent financial meltdown: "It says if you inflate too much, if you have no restraint on monetary authorities, you're going to bring on a crisis." Now, Paul says, administration policies are leading the country toward disaster.
Selgin and many mainstream economists agree that pumping too much money into the economy can lead to trouble, but they say Paul goes too far.
In the 1930s, say Selgin and many other economists, including Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the U.S. economy began pulling out of the Depression thanks to federal easing of monetary policy.
The economy tipped back into depression after the reins were tightened too soon.
"In this aspect of the monetary system, he's just blown it," Selgin said of Paul.
However, like Mises, whose portrait hangs on his Washington office wall, Paul is intransigent, and that has earned him an ardent following.
"His views are strong and hardheaded, but you've got to stand firm or you'll get blown over in this world," said Mark Skousen, editor of the newsletter Forecasts & Strategies and a former economics professor at Columbia University.
-- Don Lee
Photo: Larry Downing / Reuters; Orlin Wagner / Associated Press; Associated Press (Paul argues with Mike Huckabee in a GOP primary debate).
GroupMe, a service that lets users start a group chat using text messages, announced today that it has raised $10.6 million in its second round of funding — but it won’t be generating any kind of revenue any time soon.
The startup lets phone owners create a single phone number for a group chat. Whenever anyone sends a text message to that number, it’s sent out to everyone else in the group. It works for conference calls as well — anyone can dial into the number and start a group chat.
The first version of GroupMe was built over a weekend in May during a hackathon, a type of programming contest which challenges developers to swiftly create a working Web service, sponsored by TechCrunch, the technology blog now owned by AOL. Its creators famously drew offers for funding as soon as they left the stage.
GroupMe is built on top of a service provided by Twilio, a San Francisco-based startup which provides easy access to voice and text-messaging services which might otherwise be out of reach to small companies. Twilio has seen projects that use telephones to do anything from play tic-tac-toe to initiate group text messaging, has been particularly popular and even has its own seed funding program to go with it.
Right now, GroupMe doesn’t even generate any revenue — the service is completely free for users. Twilio, on the other hand, charges two cents to send or receive a text message, with potential volume discounts. Whatever GroupMe’s paying Twilio, it’s a cost that GroupMe appears to be bearing on its own for now. The development group doesn’t have any plans to try to develop a revenue-generating model in the near future. GroupMe has a few ideas like creating sponsored texting groups and brand groups. But that’s all they are for the time being — just ideas — said co-founder Jared Hecht.
“We compressed our 18-month road map into 9 months and we’re still finishing that up before we even consider thinking about revenue,” he said. “Obviously we are not focused on generating revenue right now.”
That didn’t stop Khosla Ventures or any of its other investors from throwing some cash their way. The group raised $850,000 in its first seed round of fundraising from the likes of Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Lerner Ventures. The most recent round of funding was led by Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and First Round Capital.
GroupMe brought on some pretty heavy-duty talent along with the funding as well. Jeremy Schoenherr, a former developer of Hot Potato and iPhone operating system iOS development expert, has come on board to help develop GroupMe’s mobile applications. Steve Cheney, a former writer with TechCrunch, also joined the team as a business development consultant.
Now that the “distracting” fundraising process is done and the company doesn’t have to worry about making any money for a while, it is turning its entire focus on improving the application, Hecht said.
“Now it’s product time, and it’s buckling down and spinning it out before we even consider finding a revenue,” he said.
Next Story: Access 360 Media raises $40 million-plus for outdoor digital advertising Previous Story: Consumer electronics market expected to grow 10 percent in 2011
John Roberts Leaves CNN for Fox <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com
Executives at CNN confirmed Monday that John Roberts, who served as the morning anchor for the network since April 2007, would be joining Fox News as a national correspondent.
Apple's iOS market share tops Android, RIM | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
iOS is leading Google's Android and RIM's BlackBerry operating system in U.S. market share, but Nielsen says the race may be to close to call. Read this blog post by Jim Dalrymple on Apple.
500 More Red-Winged Blackbirds Found Dead in Louisiana - AOL <b>News</b>
Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.
robert shumake detroit
John Roberts Leaves CNN for Fox <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com
Executives at CNN confirmed Monday that John Roberts, who served as the morning anchor for the network since April 2007, would be joining Fox News as a national correspondent.
Apple's iOS market share tops Android, RIM | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
iOS is leading Google's Android and RIM's BlackBerry operating system in U.S. market share, but Nielsen says the race may be to close to call. Read this blog post by Jim Dalrymple on Apple.
500 More Red-Winged Blackbirds Found Dead in Louisiana - AOL <b>News</b>
Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.
robert shumake
...hopelessly outgunned presidential campaign as if it was a business, not even spending more money than he had in hand. C'mon now, how laughable is that in this day and age in modern America that someone who wants to run the federal government should live within his own campaign means? Just like normal people who live on a real budget with no ability to vote themselves a pay raise and a higher debt ceiling when no one is watching C-SPAN!
When the ultimate Democratic winner, in league with the extraordinary gentleman Harry Reid and the tough-talking San Francisco grandma who's House speaker, has decided to spend a gazillion more dollars than any non-federal calculator has digits to display.
These people, for Nancy's sake, are already spending the income taxes of the unborn grandchildren of those 4,000 babies that Paul delivered. A shocking realization that may be helping to fuel the recent re-examination of Ron Paul, who never met a federal dollar that needed spending -- unless it was going back to his district near Houston.
Ron Paul came within something like 1,000 delegates of catching John McCain for the Republican nomination in St. Paul. But when he finally gave up, Paul still had about $5 million left over. He's been investing it traveling around the country to speak and helping like-minded RFR's (Republicans For Real) organize all over. And, who knows, maybe sell a few books.
But now, just as his fierce supporters fearlessly predicted all along, many in American politics are coming around to think that maybe RP's crazy ideas, for example, of auditing and controlling the Federal Reserve, are maybe not quite so crazy.
Our news colleague in Washington, Don Lee, details the sea-change in opinion in a comprehensive look at the old guy's rebirth for weekend print editions, which we're sharing here this morning as a distinguished guest post for Ticket readers around the world.
And for any surviving Ron Paulites, who won't dare leave their typically snippy comments below because that would require them acknowledging that their favorite fiction about a MSM conspiracy to ignore the old guy is fiction.
-- Andrew Malcolm
Because no federal funds are involved, Ron Paul would want you to click here for Twitter alerts of each new Ticket item. Or follow us @latimestot. Or join us over here on The Ticket's new Facebook FAN page.
Here's Lee's reported news item:
For three decades, Texas congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul's extreme brand of libertarian economics consigned him to the far fringes even among conservatives. Not a few times, his views put him on the losing end of 434-1 votes on Capitol Hill.
No longer. With the economy still struggling and political divisions deepening, Paul's ideas not only are gaining a wider audience but also are helping to shape a potentially historic battle over economic policy -- a struggle that will affect everything including jobs, growth and the nation's place in the global economy.
Already, Paul's long-derided proposal to give Congress supervisory power over the traditionally independent Federal Reserve appears to be on its way to becoming law.
His warnings on deficits and inflation are now Republican mantras.
And with this year's congressional election campaign looming, the Texas congressman's deep-seated distrust of activist government has helped fuel protests such as the tea-party movement, harden partisan divisions in Washington and stoke public fears about federal spending and the deficit.
"People are wondering what went wrong. And they're not happy with what the....
....government is offering up," said James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, offering an explanation for why seemingly wonkish arguments over interest rate policy and the money supply are spilling over onto ordinary Americans.
Some of Paul's most extreme views are still beyond the pale for most economists. Despite the eroding value of the dollar, no one expects the U.S. to return to the gold standard, as Paul advocates; most economists think that could wreck the economy.
In their less drastic forms, however, Paul's ideas are being welcomed by conservatives and viewed with foreboding by liberals. For conservatives, runaway inflation constitutes the biggest potential threat to the nation's future. Liberals worry that cutting back stimulus efforts too soon could slow or even halt the current recovery.
The debate over that question -- what the basic thrust of U.S. economic policy should be -- is likely to dominate the coming elections and Washington policymaking.
And so far, Paul and his fellow conservatives are on the offensive. President Obama and congressional Democrats are repeatedly pledging not to increase the deficit and to begin cutting back soon.
"I think we're going to be in for more revival of fiscal responsibility," said William Niskanen of the Cato Institute, who headed the Council of Economic Advisors under President Reagan.
Niskanen sees the Texas Republican's increasing influence as stemming from the continued economic weakness. "To this extent, Ron Paul gains voice," he said.
Paul would go a lot further in cutting back the government's role than even free-marketers like Niskanen support. If Paul had it his way, for instance, he would do away with the Fed entirely. In his bestselling book "End the Fed," he lambasted the central bank as an "immoral, unconstitutional . . . tool of tyrannical government."
Such rhetoric might once have been dismissed as extremism.
But Paul's anti-Fed message has drawn broad support because of the central bank's failure to restrain the flood of cheap money and excessive risk-taking in the years leading up to the financial crisis.
It has stirred rallies on college campuses and supportive commentaries from Wall Street pundits. More than 300 representatives in Congress have embraced Paul's ideas for reining in the Fed.
The response "is even more than I ever dreamed," Paul said in an interview, reminiscing about one evening during his 2008 White House run when University of Michigan students chanted "End the Fed" and burned dollar bills.
Paul, a skinny 74-year-old with a hangdog expression, understands that historical circumstances have thrust his ideas to the fore. "An intellectual fight is going on," he said.
Paul traces his economic views to his frugal upbringing in Pittsburgh at the tail end of the Depression. He saved pennies from delivering newspapers and helping out his father's small dairy business.
And his first economics class at Gettysburg College was an eye-opener, Paul said. When a professor explained how banks keep only a tiny part of their deposits on hand and earn money by lending out the rest, Paul discovered one of the "tricks" of the financial system.
Beyond that, Paul's ideas are grounded in the work of economic thinkers from an earlier era who focused on problems similar to those besetting the U.S. today.
In particular, Paul is a disciple of Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian theorist born at the end of the 19th century who contended that government intervention in an economy would fail because free markets were better at allocating resources and fueling growth.
Having lived through Germany's devastating hyperinflation in the early 1920s, which helped pave the way for Hitler, Mises wrote long before the Great Depression that over-generous credit policies would encourage excessive borrowing, creating a boom and then a bust.
Mises' ideas became central to what is known as the Austrian School of economics, which emphasized tight controls on credit and money supply, a strategy that discouraged financial ups and downs but tended to slow growth.
By 1940, when Mises arrived in America, most Western economists had embraced the competing theories of Britain's John Maynard Keynes, who called for government to stimulate the economy by spending on infrastructure and cutting interest rates.
Obama has largely followed the Keynesian script, as President George W. Bush did when the economic crisis broke.
Paul's once-lonely espousal of the Austrian School's ideas has gotten new impetus from conservative economists and Republican political strategists.
"A lot of good ideas were shoved aside because of the Depression and the rise of the Keynesian view of the world," said George Selgin, an economics professor at the University of Georgia.
Paul contends that Austrian economics explains the most recent financial meltdown: "It says if you inflate too much, if you have no restraint on monetary authorities, you're going to bring on a crisis." Now, Paul says, administration policies are leading the country toward disaster.
Selgin and many mainstream economists agree that pumping too much money into the economy can lead to trouble, but they say Paul goes too far.
In the 1930s, say Selgin and many other economists, including Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the U.S. economy began pulling out of the Depression thanks to federal easing of monetary policy.
The economy tipped back into depression after the reins were tightened too soon.
"In this aspect of the monetary system, he's just blown it," Selgin said of Paul.
However, like Mises, whose portrait hangs on his Washington office wall, Paul is intransigent, and that has earned him an ardent following.
"His views are strong and hardheaded, but you've got to stand firm or you'll get blown over in this world," said Mark Skousen, editor of the newsletter Forecasts & Strategies and a former economics professor at Columbia University.
-- Don Lee
Photo: Larry Downing / Reuters; Orlin Wagner / Associated Press; Associated Press (Paul argues with Mike Huckabee in a GOP primary debate).
GroupMe, a service that lets users start a group chat using text messages, announced today that it has raised $10.6 million in its second round of funding — but it won’t be generating any kind of revenue any time soon.
The startup lets phone owners create a single phone number for a group chat. Whenever anyone sends a text message to that number, it’s sent out to everyone else in the group. It works for conference calls as well — anyone can dial into the number and start a group chat.
The first version of GroupMe was built over a weekend in May during a hackathon, a type of programming contest which challenges developers to swiftly create a working Web service, sponsored by TechCrunch, the technology blog now owned by AOL. Its creators famously drew offers for funding as soon as they left the stage.
GroupMe is built on top of a service provided by Twilio, a San Francisco-based startup which provides easy access to voice and text-messaging services which might otherwise be out of reach to small companies. Twilio has seen projects that use telephones to do anything from play tic-tac-toe to initiate group text messaging, has been particularly popular and even has its own seed funding program to go with it.
Right now, GroupMe doesn’t even generate any revenue — the service is completely free for users. Twilio, on the other hand, charges two cents to send or receive a text message, with potential volume discounts. Whatever GroupMe’s paying Twilio, it’s a cost that GroupMe appears to be bearing on its own for now. The development group doesn’t have any plans to try to develop a revenue-generating model in the near future. GroupMe has a few ideas like creating sponsored texting groups and brand groups. But that’s all they are for the time being — just ideas — said co-founder Jared Hecht.
“We compressed our 18-month road map into 9 months and we’re still finishing that up before we even consider thinking about revenue,” he said. “Obviously we are not focused on generating revenue right now.”
That didn’t stop Khosla Ventures or any of its other investors from throwing some cash their way. The group raised $850,000 in its first seed round of fundraising from the likes of Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Lerner Ventures. The most recent round of funding was led by Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and First Round Capital.
GroupMe brought on some pretty heavy-duty talent along with the funding as well. Jeremy Schoenherr, a former developer of Hot Potato and iPhone operating system iOS development expert, has come on board to help develop GroupMe’s mobile applications. Steve Cheney, a former writer with TechCrunch, also joined the team as a business development consultant.
Now that the “distracting” fundraising process is done and the company doesn’t have to worry about making any money for a while, it is turning its entire focus on improving the application, Hecht said.
“Now it’s product time, and it’s buckling down and spinning it out before we even consider finding a revenue,” he said.
Next Story: Access 360 Media raises $40 million-plus for outdoor digital advertising Previous Story: Consumer electronics market expected to grow 10 percent in 2011
robert shumake
John Roberts Leaves CNN for Fox <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com
Executives at CNN confirmed Monday that John Roberts, who served as the morning anchor for the network since April 2007, would be joining Fox News as a national correspondent.
Apple's iOS market share tops Android, RIM | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
iOS is leading Google's Android and RIM's BlackBerry operating system in U.S. market share, but Nielsen says the race may be to close to call. Read this blog post by Jim Dalrymple on Apple.
500 More Red-Winged Blackbirds Found Dead in Louisiana - AOL <b>News</b>
Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.
robert shumake
John Roberts Leaves CNN for Fox <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com
Executives at CNN confirmed Monday that John Roberts, who served as the morning anchor for the network since April 2007, would be joining Fox News as a national correspondent.
Apple's iOS market share tops Android, RIM | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
iOS is leading Google's Android and RIM's BlackBerry operating system in U.S. market share, but Nielsen says the race may be to close to call. Read this blog post by Jim Dalrymple on Apple.
500 More Red-Winged Blackbirds Found Dead in Louisiana - AOL <b>News</b>
Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.
robert shumake
Making money with your digital camera isn't the easiest thing to do. Everybody wants to go pro these days, but most don't have what it takes. Just having a new digital camera and an idea about framing isn't going to be enough. You need to be cut from a certain kind of cloth.
The question is this: are you cut out for it?
Even though being a professional photographer is hard, it isn't impossible. Besides, anything worth having is worth busting your hump for.
But you don't want to chase your dream like an idiot, wasting time on things that don't bring you closer to your goal. You want to stick to principles that have worked for others in the past that wanted what you want now.
But outlining all of those principles would take more than one article. So consider this a primer, something to get you walking down the right road. Really, it's more of a brain dump: applicable ideas you can use to go from amateur with a camera to pro making money from their craft:
1. Taking pictures should be as natural to you as blinking. Start taking pictures all of the time. This is how you capture those truly unique and valuable moments.
2. Learn to feel out the situations around you. You need to be where the action is. Getting your timing down as a photographer takes time, but it's what separates the killers from the wannabes. Get a feel for being in the right place at the right time, with your camera ready and pointed.
3. To play in this game, you have to stay sharp. Not a single day should go by when you aren't taking shots and improving your craft. The minute you take a break is the minute the guy next to you takes your plate. You better be hungrier than that guy if you want to make photography into a career.
4. Use forums online and live events to network and start building relationships. Just like any other venture in life, it's all about who you know. The more folks that know you and what your work is all about, the better chance of landing paying gigs.
5. There are websites that will pay you to submit quality photographs for their clients to buy. Some that come to mind include iStock and Associated Content. While the pay isn't extraordinary, it's a start. And everything needs a start.
6. Alternatively, you can leverage the exposure that free websites bring to your photos. Places like Flickr and Photobucket are great for this since they have built in communities. More than one photographer has built up a strong enough following on these kinds of sites to lead to other, more lucrative opportunities.
Bottom line is this: If you have a genuine passion for photography, there is money to be made. Thousands of others no more talented than you have broken the chains of a 9 to 5 to live their dreams. Maybe it's your turn. But it won't be given to you... you have to take it.
robert shumake detroit
John Roberts Leaves CNN for Fox <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com
Executives at CNN confirmed Monday that John Roberts, who served as the morning anchor for the network since April 2007, would be joining Fox News as a national correspondent.
Apple's iOS market share tops Android, RIM | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
iOS is leading Google's Android and RIM's BlackBerry operating system in U.S. market share, but Nielsen says the race may be to close to call. Read this blog post by Jim Dalrymple on Apple.
500 More Red-Winged Blackbirds Found Dead in Louisiana - AOL <b>News</b>
Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.
robert shumake detroit
robert shumake detroit
...hopelessly outgunned presidential campaign as if it was a business, not even spending more money than he had in hand. C'mon now, how laughable is that in this day and age in modern America that someone who wants to run the federal government should live within his own campaign means? Just like normal people who live on a real budget with no ability to vote themselves a pay raise and a higher debt ceiling when no one is watching C-SPAN!
When the ultimate Democratic winner, in league with the extraordinary gentleman Harry Reid and the tough-talking San Francisco grandma who's House speaker, has decided to spend a gazillion more dollars than any non-federal calculator has digits to display.
These people, for Nancy's sake, are already spending the income taxes of the unborn grandchildren of those 4,000 babies that Paul delivered. A shocking realization that may be helping to fuel the recent re-examination of Ron Paul, who never met a federal dollar that needed spending -- unless it was going back to his district near Houston.
Ron Paul came within something like 1,000 delegates of catching John McCain for the Republican nomination in St. Paul. But when he finally gave up, Paul still had about $5 million left over. He's been investing it traveling around the country to speak and helping like-minded RFR's (Republicans For Real) organize all over. And, who knows, maybe sell a few books.
But now, just as his fierce supporters fearlessly predicted all along, many in American politics are coming around to think that maybe RP's crazy ideas, for example, of auditing and controlling the Federal Reserve, are maybe not quite so crazy.
Our news colleague in Washington, Don Lee, details the sea-change in opinion in a comprehensive look at the old guy's rebirth for weekend print editions, which we're sharing here this morning as a distinguished guest post for Ticket readers around the world.
And for any surviving Ron Paulites, who won't dare leave their typically snippy comments below because that would require them acknowledging that their favorite fiction about a MSM conspiracy to ignore the old guy is fiction.
-- Andrew Malcolm
Because no federal funds are involved, Ron Paul would want you to click here for Twitter alerts of each new Ticket item. Or follow us @latimestot. Or join us over here on The Ticket's new Facebook FAN page.
Here's Lee's reported news item:
For three decades, Texas congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul's extreme brand of libertarian economics consigned him to the far fringes even among conservatives. Not a few times, his views put him on the losing end of 434-1 votes on Capitol Hill.
No longer. With the economy still struggling and political divisions deepening, Paul's ideas not only are gaining a wider audience but also are helping to shape a potentially historic battle over economic policy -- a struggle that will affect everything including jobs, growth and the nation's place in the global economy.
Already, Paul's long-derided proposal to give Congress supervisory power over the traditionally independent Federal Reserve appears to be on its way to becoming law.
His warnings on deficits and inflation are now Republican mantras.
And with this year's congressional election campaign looming, the Texas congressman's deep-seated distrust of activist government has helped fuel protests such as the tea-party movement, harden partisan divisions in Washington and stoke public fears about federal spending and the deficit.
"People are wondering what went wrong. And they're not happy with what the....
....government is offering up," said James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, offering an explanation for why seemingly wonkish arguments over interest rate policy and the money supply are spilling over onto ordinary Americans.
Some of Paul's most extreme views are still beyond the pale for most economists. Despite the eroding value of the dollar, no one expects the U.S. to return to the gold standard, as Paul advocates; most economists think that could wreck the economy.
In their less drastic forms, however, Paul's ideas are being welcomed by conservatives and viewed with foreboding by liberals. For conservatives, runaway inflation constitutes the biggest potential threat to the nation's future. Liberals worry that cutting back stimulus efforts too soon could slow or even halt the current recovery.
The debate over that question -- what the basic thrust of U.S. economic policy should be -- is likely to dominate the coming elections and Washington policymaking.
And so far, Paul and his fellow conservatives are on the offensive. President Obama and congressional Democrats are repeatedly pledging not to increase the deficit and to begin cutting back soon.
"I think we're going to be in for more revival of fiscal responsibility," said William Niskanen of the Cato Institute, who headed the Council of Economic Advisors under President Reagan.
Niskanen sees the Texas Republican's increasing influence as stemming from the continued economic weakness. "To this extent, Ron Paul gains voice," he said.
Paul would go a lot further in cutting back the government's role than even free-marketers like Niskanen support. If Paul had it his way, for instance, he would do away with the Fed entirely. In his bestselling book "End the Fed," he lambasted the central bank as an "immoral, unconstitutional . . . tool of tyrannical government."
Such rhetoric might once have been dismissed as extremism.
But Paul's anti-Fed message has drawn broad support because of the central bank's failure to restrain the flood of cheap money and excessive risk-taking in the years leading up to the financial crisis.
It has stirred rallies on college campuses and supportive commentaries from Wall Street pundits. More than 300 representatives in Congress have embraced Paul's ideas for reining in the Fed.
The response "is even more than I ever dreamed," Paul said in an interview, reminiscing about one evening during his 2008 White House run when University of Michigan students chanted "End the Fed" and burned dollar bills.
Paul, a skinny 74-year-old with a hangdog expression, understands that historical circumstances have thrust his ideas to the fore. "An intellectual fight is going on," he said.
Paul traces his economic views to his frugal upbringing in Pittsburgh at the tail end of the Depression. He saved pennies from delivering newspapers and helping out his father's small dairy business.
And his first economics class at Gettysburg College was an eye-opener, Paul said. When a professor explained how banks keep only a tiny part of their deposits on hand and earn money by lending out the rest, Paul discovered one of the "tricks" of the financial system.
Beyond that, Paul's ideas are grounded in the work of economic thinkers from an earlier era who focused on problems similar to those besetting the U.S. today.
In particular, Paul is a disciple of Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian theorist born at the end of the 19th century who contended that government intervention in an economy would fail because free markets were better at allocating resources and fueling growth.
Having lived through Germany's devastating hyperinflation in the early 1920s, which helped pave the way for Hitler, Mises wrote long before the Great Depression that over-generous credit policies would encourage excessive borrowing, creating a boom and then a bust.
Mises' ideas became central to what is known as the Austrian School of economics, which emphasized tight controls on credit and money supply, a strategy that discouraged financial ups and downs but tended to slow growth.
By 1940, when Mises arrived in America, most Western economists had embraced the competing theories of Britain's John Maynard Keynes, who called for government to stimulate the economy by spending on infrastructure and cutting interest rates.
Obama has largely followed the Keynesian script, as President George W. Bush did when the economic crisis broke.
Paul's once-lonely espousal of the Austrian School's ideas has gotten new impetus from conservative economists and Republican political strategists.
"A lot of good ideas were shoved aside because of the Depression and the rise of the Keynesian view of the world," said George Selgin, an economics professor at the University of Georgia.
Paul contends that Austrian economics explains the most recent financial meltdown: "It says if you inflate too much, if you have no restraint on monetary authorities, you're going to bring on a crisis." Now, Paul says, administration policies are leading the country toward disaster.
Selgin and many mainstream economists agree that pumping too much money into the economy can lead to trouble, but they say Paul goes too far.
In the 1930s, say Selgin and many other economists, including Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the U.S. economy began pulling out of the Depression thanks to federal easing of monetary policy.
The economy tipped back into depression after the reins were tightened too soon.
"In this aspect of the monetary system, he's just blown it," Selgin said of Paul.
However, like Mises, whose portrait hangs on his Washington office wall, Paul is intransigent, and that has earned him an ardent following.
"His views are strong and hardheaded, but you've got to stand firm or you'll get blown over in this world," said Mark Skousen, editor of the newsletter Forecasts & Strategies and a former economics professor at Columbia University.
-- Don Lee
Photo: Larry Downing / Reuters; Orlin Wagner / Associated Press; Associated Press (Paul argues with Mike Huckabee in a GOP primary debate).
GroupMe, a service that lets users start a group chat using text messages, announced today that it has raised $10.6 million in its second round of funding — but it won’t be generating any kind of revenue any time soon.
The startup lets phone owners create a single phone number for a group chat. Whenever anyone sends a text message to that number, it’s sent out to everyone else in the group. It works for conference calls as well — anyone can dial into the number and start a group chat.
The first version of GroupMe was built over a weekend in May during a hackathon, a type of programming contest which challenges developers to swiftly create a working Web service, sponsored by TechCrunch, the technology blog now owned by AOL. Its creators famously drew offers for funding as soon as they left the stage.
GroupMe is built on top of a service provided by Twilio, a San Francisco-based startup which provides easy access to voice and text-messaging services which might otherwise be out of reach to small companies. Twilio has seen projects that use telephones to do anything from play tic-tac-toe to initiate group text messaging, has been particularly popular and even has its own seed funding program to go with it.
Right now, GroupMe doesn’t even generate any revenue — the service is completely free for users. Twilio, on the other hand, charges two cents to send or receive a text message, with potential volume discounts. Whatever GroupMe’s paying Twilio, it’s a cost that GroupMe appears to be bearing on its own for now. The development group doesn’t have any plans to try to develop a revenue-generating model in the near future. GroupMe has a few ideas like creating sponsored texting groups and brand groups. But that’s all they are for the time being — just ideas — said co-founder Jared Hecht.
“We compressed our 18-month road map into 9 months and we’re still finishing that up before we even consider thinking about revenue,” he said. “Obviously we are not focused on generating revenue right now.”
That didn’t stop Khosla Ventures or any of its other investors from throwing some cash their way. The group raised $850,000 in its first seed round of fundraising from the likes of Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Lerner Ventures. The most recent round of funding was led by Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and First Round Capital.
GroupMe brought on some pretty heavy-duty talent along with the funding as well. Jeremy Schoenherr, a former developer of Hot Potato and iPhone operating system iOS development expert, has come on board to help develop GroupMe’s mobile applications. Steve Cheney, a former writer with TechCrunch, also joined the team as a business development consultant.
Now that the “distracting” fundraising process is done and the company doesn’t have to worry about making any money for a while, it is turning its entire focus on improving the application, Hecht said.
“Now it’s product time, and it’s buckling down and spinning it out before we even consider finding a revenue,” he said.
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John Roberts Leaves CNN for Fox <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com
Executives at CNN confirmed Monday that John Roberts, who served as the morning anchor for the network since April 2007, would be joining Fox News as a national correspondent.
Apple's iOS market share tops Android, RIM | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
iOS is leading Google's Android and RIM's BlackBerry operating system in U.S. market share, but Nielsen says the race may be to close to call. Read this blog post by Jim Dalrymple on Apple.
500 More Red-Winged Blackbirds Found Dead in Louisiana - AOL <b>News</b>
Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.
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