THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

• The Washington Post this morning reports: "President Obama is riding a wave of personal popularity into his second term, with his highest favorability ratings since his first year in office...Fully 60 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of Obama in the new poll, up slightly from October but a clear shift in opinion from an election year in which his ratings hovered in the mid-to-low 50s."
• What would make those polled so favorable toward Obama?  The economy better?  Climate change taken care of?  Wars over and military spending reduced?  Our civil liberties restored?  Guantanamo closed?  Banksters jailed? It appears that people's standards for success have dramatically fallen.
•  I occasionally correspond with a Catholic priest who lives and works in Brazil.  His recent letter included the following news:  "We are suffering the worst drought of the past 50 years here in the Northeast.  There were no crops of corn or beans.  Most of the dams are dry or very low on water.  There is very little in the way of forage for the livestock.  The cashew tree didn't even flower this year in this region.  A nearby municipality had a thriving industry of honey production.  Because there were so few flowering plants around, the hungry bees fled the hives for other regions.  We heard here that 60% of the USA, Canada, and Central America all suffered severe droughts too."
•  Long-time Global Network board member Karl Grossman has written an important article entitled Will the Internet Remain Free?   Worth checking out.
  

•  Increasingly we are hearing that the big Internet corporations want to make users pay for various levels of access to the world wide web.  That would mean that the wealthy could afford unlimited access to knowledge and communication while the poor would live inside a box. All Internet users should be able to access any web content they want, post their own content, and use any applications they choose, without restrictions or financial limitations imposed by their service providers. 

• McClatchy newspapers report:  

  In a letter last month to Obama and congressional leaders, 11 Democratic and 11 Republican lawmakers asked that Defense Department spending be put squarely on the table in the coming clashes over debt reduction..... Who are these unlikely partners?  Democrats who want to preserve social programs, tea party-backed Republicans focused on slashing the debt and libertarians aligned with Rep. Ron Paul – the Texas Republican and 2012 presidential candidate – who generally oppose U.S. military ventures abroad.... Some independent studies have indicated that Pentagon funding of big weapons systems has diminishing returns when it comes to job creation. Total federal money to the five biggest defense contractors – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon – increased by 10 percent from 2006 to 2011. But their combined number of employees dropped by 3 percent during the same period, according to a report last year by the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group in Washington.  See the full story here