BREVITAS

Recovered History - Last May, Jake Tapper of ABC News noted that 17 countries had offered help with the BP oil spill but that the Obama administration had only accepted assistance from two of them.

Slashdot - Trintech writes with this quote from an article at Ars Technica: "Music labels and radio broadcasters can't agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics. The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage. 'The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity,' thundered CEA president Gary Shapiro. Such a move is 'not in our national interest.' 'Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do.' But the music and radio industries say it's a consumer-focused proposition, one that would provide 'more music choices.'"

Seth Hoy, Alternet - The Pew Hispanic Center recently released a report which estimated that 340,000 of the 4.3 million children born in the United States in 2008 had at least one unauthorized parent. . . . Numerous news articles ran with the Pew report's estimate as though both parents were undocumented. The truth is that majority of immigrants come to the U.S. to work, to reunite with their families, or to flee persecution-not to have children. Some immigrants do, in fact, have children in the U.S. and some of those families are mixed status families, but suggesting that undocumented immigrants anchor themselves here through childbirth is just false. . . Denying birthright citizenship is not a solution to illegal immigration-it will not discourage unauthorized immigrants from coming to the U.S., and it will not encourage those already here to leave. Furthermore, it would force all American parents-not just immigrants-to prove the citizenship of their children through a cumbersome and expensive bureaucratic process

Robert Schlesinger, US News - Despite what you might have heard, a 13-story mosque is not going to be built at ground zero in lower Manhattan . For that matter, a 13-story mosque is not going to be built within a few blocks of ground zero. Rather a 13-story building is going up which will contain, among other things, a mosque. . . The building in question is planned to be a Muslim community center, a sort of YMCA (or, I suppose, YMMA). The plans are for it to have fitness facilities (swimming pool, gym, basketball court), a 500-seat auditorium, a restaurant and a cooking school, exhibition space, a library, art studios, a 9/11 memorial. . . And it's also going to house a mosque. But calling the entire building a mosque is a bit like referring to the Empire State Building as a 103-story Walgreens because the pharmacy chain has a store on the ground floor.

CNN - President Obama's comments on a plan to build a mosque [sic] in the shadow of ground zero are not only giving opponents an opportunity to attack him but also reveal a messaging problem from the White House, a communications expert said. "The danger here is an incoherent presidency," said David Morey, vice chairman of the Core Strategy Group, who provided communications advice to Obama's 2008 campaign. "Simpler is better, and rising above these issues and leading by controlling the dialogue is what the presidency is all about. So I think that's the job they have to do more effectively as they have in the past [in the campaign]."

Source: http://prorevnews.blogspot.com/2010/08/brevitas_18.html