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Magazine|Democrat in Chief?
Democrat in Chief?
By MATT BAI JUNE 8, 2010
Obama still has a strong connection with voters. Whether this connection helps other Democrats get elected remains to be seen. Credit Luke Sharrett/The New York Times
A year and a half after they sat, shivering and awestruck, on a January morning and listened to the sounds of a million cheers careering off the marble walls of the Capitol, the Democrats who work under the dome can feel those same walls closing in fast. Throughout the dismal spring, it seemed as if every visiting delegation that drove up in a coach bus — Main Street merchants, family farmers, Rotarians and Elks — arrived with tales of angst and unrest back home. Every well-paid pollster who came through the door brought with him a stack of surveys and focus-group memos, each more dispiriting than the last, numbers portending an emphatic rejection of the majority in this fall's elections. Every new thickly bound jobs report landed with a sickening thud on the desks of committee chairmen — a reminder that, despite modest improvements, time was running out to change people's minds about the direction of the economy.
And then there was the president — their president — who for 17 months had cajoled them into taking tough votes on stimulus spending, on the trading of carbon emissions, on health care. Barack Obama, the postpartisan president. He continued to go out and shake his head disbelievingly at "the culture of Washington," which to the Democrats in the House sounded as if he were saying that his own party was the problem, as if somehow the Democratic majorities in Congress hadn't managed to navigate the bulk of his ambitious agenda past a blockade of Republican vessels, their ship shredded by cannon fire. And all this while the president's own approval ratings fell below 50 percent — an ominous sign, historically speaking, for a majority party.
This frustration among Democrats was bound to find an outlet, and that's what happened at a meeting in Nancy Pelosi's conference room at the end of April to discuss the party's election-year message. Around three sides of the table were close to a dozen Democratic leaders in the House. On the remaining side sat David Axelrod, the president's senior adviser and message-molder, along with two other White House operatives: Jim Messina, the deputy chief of staff, and Stephanie Cutter, a senior aide to the president.
Chris Van Hollen, the Maryland congressman in charge of House campaigns this fall, and James Clyburn, the Democratic whip and an Obama ally, complained to Axelrod about the president's unrelenting assault on Washington rather than on Republicans specifically, according to three people who were in the room. "A 'Washington is broken' message doesn't help incumbents running for Congress," Van Hollen pleaded with the aides.
Axelrod said the House leaders needed to listen to what the president was actually saying out there — Obama was, in fact, drawing sharp contrasts between his party and the Republicans. But Axelrod also informed them that the president would continue to acknowledge the general discontent with Washington in his public comments, in the hope that he might help lessen what White House aides sometimes call the "toxicity" in the air. He would make the case for Democrats by reminding voters of all that he and his party had been able to accomplish legislatively, even without Republican help. Washington was broken, and if you told people what you were doing to fix it, then they would side with you. "You're not going to will it away — the discontent," Axelrod said. "The most important message is that we took on difficult problems, and they sat on the sidelines and rooted for failure."
This didn't satisfy the Congressional leaders, who thought the message had to be more about their "fighting for the middle class" versus the indifference of Republicans. They wanted Obama to go out there and tell the public that installing a Republican Congress would be like climbing into a time machine and teleporting right back to the Bush era. Privatizing Social Security, ending Medicare, repealing the health care law and reinstating tax cuts for the wealthy — that's what the Republicans were proposing, and the lawmakers said they needed Obama to drive that point home with the electorate.
Voices rose and drowned out other voices as the meeting grew tense. "The fact is," Pelosi said, addressing herself to Axelrod, "that the longer you say Washington is broken, and you've been saying that for 18 months, the more that becomes the story."
When the other lawmakers departed for a vote, Pelosi remained with the White House aides and some staff members. The speaker strolled down to Axelrod's end of the table and delivered the message bluntly. Obama, she insisted, needed to be cutting and clear about the choice between parties that he was asking voters to make. Did the president really think he could enhance his own standing with the public by criticizing his Democratic allies?
"Look, if the president could take 10 points off his numbers to give you 10 seats — " Axelrod began, referring to Obama's approval ratings.
"That's not what we want," Pelosi said, cutting him off. "That doesn't do any of us any good." In the end, Axelrod pointedly declined to say that the president would stop acknowledging the failures of both parties in Washington, but the message was received. In the weeks that followed, Obama intensified his rhetoric about Republicans, playing to his constituencies on the Hill as well as to the audiences he was addressing.
This was not only a conversation about the fall elections but also an airing of grievances that have been building slowly since the opening days of the administration, when Obama sided with Republicans by condemning some of the more easily caricatured provisions of the stimulus bill, like money for family planning and to restore the National Mall. Perhaps the most significant moment in Obama's State of the Union address came when, after chastising Congress for its extreme partisanship, he cut off applause from the Democratic side of the aisle. "I'm speaking to both parties now," Obama scolded.
For Democrats in Congress, what Obama does over the next several months — and how passionately he does it — will answer some unresolved questions about the kind of party leader he aspires to be. For most of George W. Bush's presidency, he and his resident Machiavelli, Karl Rove, made little secret of their grand plan to sculpture a partisan majority that would endure for decades, enabling Republicans to reshape American society. After Democrats took a sledgehammer to those ambitions in 2006 and 2008, expanding their own sphere of dominance from coastal cities into the suburbs of the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain states and even into the South, many of the party's leaders in Congress talked openly of their own lasting, Rooseveltian realignment.
Unlike his predecessor and some of his own political allies, however, Obama has never betrayed much interest in building political empires. Obama ran on the notion of transcending partisan distinctions, rather than making them permanent, and the political identity that enabled him to draw millions of new voters into the process two years ago is both intensely personal and self-contained. It's not clear that Obama can translate his appeal among disaffected voters into support for a party and its aging Washington establishment. Nor is it clear, as he looks ahead to 2012, how hard he's going to try.
It is difficult to overstate the role that 1994 plays in the tormented psyche of the Democratic Party. For those who went through them, those midterms were less a bunch of elections than a single, sudden event that they never saw coming until it was on them, like something out of "War of the Worlds." Most of the Democrats who woke up firmly in control of American government on Nov. 8, 1994, had no memory of a time when they didn't make all the laws, and they couldn't really conceive of it; by nightfall, 40 years of near-total Democratic dominance in both houses of Congress had been washed away. The costs, for years afterward, were too painful to fully contemplate. Without the voter uprising of 1994, there would have been no Speaker Gingrich, no impeachment and almost certainly no George W. Bush, who, by winning election as the governor of Texas, found himself swept into office that year along with a lot of other political neophytes who might otherwise have disappeared into political obscurity.
Republicans in 1994 gained a net total of 54 House seats and 8 Senate seats and emerged with a majority of governors for the first time in more than 20 years, and state legislatures for the first time in a half century. This year, they need to gain 40 House seats and 8 Senate seats to regain control. Taking back the House is eminently doable; taking the Senate is remote but hardly unthinkable. Contempt for Washington — personified by incumbent candidates in both parties — is everywhere, as evidenced by this year's early primaries in May, in which two sitting senators (Robert Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania) were knocked off and a Republican senatorial candidate in Kentucky who had the blessing of the national party was sunk. The glimmer of hope here for Democrats is that the antiestablishment fervor in a wide number of Republican primaries is likely to yield more than a few nominees who are on the extreme end of the ideological spectrum (Rand Paul in Kentucky, say), making the Republican alternative a harder sell for a lot of moderate and unaffiliated voters.
Meanwhile, Democratic governors are bracing for their own losses. The effect of a drubbing at the state level, while likely to garner less attention than what happens in Washington, could be devastating for Democrats, just as it proved to be 16 years ago. Governors have generally proved to be the intellectual catalysts for both parties, and it's not incidental that four of the five presidents immediately preceding Obama sprang from their ranks. Parties that fail to hold governors' mansions also fail to develop compelling candidates for national office.
NEW POLITICKING On behalf of the Democratic Party, Obama is expected to shake hands with donors and tour factories. But the business of politics is somewhat at odds with his brand. Credit Luke Sharrett/The New York Times
No matter how similar conditions throughout the country now may seem, 2010 really isn't all that comparable to 1994, if only because the underlying forces that are endangering Democrats this year — that is, the structural trends in the electorate — are quite different. The 1994 elections marked the culmination of a decades-long transformation. For 30 years before then, since the triumph of the civil rights agenda, Democratic strongholds in the South and in the working-class Midwest had been teetering toward the Republicans. Bill Clinton's missteps no doubt hastened this process, but so did redistricting based on the 1990 Census, after which Democrats were assured safe, urban seats in minority districts while whiter, more conservative districts were created in the suburbs. The 1994 campaigns were the first waged on this map in a nonpresidential election year, and it all but guaranteed that many longtime Democrats would lose.
This year's challenge for Democrats has more to do with the normal cycles of what you might call tidal politics. (And not the kind created by oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.) Think of presidential years as the high tide coming in. That is, a successful presidential candidate usually, though not always, carries with him a wave of Congressional seats, depending on the scale of the victory. During the off years, the tide generally goes out again, and the president's party is bound to lose some of those marginal seats. Only two presidents since 1862 have seen their parties gain House seats in their first midterm election. One was Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose Republican opponents were still reeling from that whole Great Depression thing. The other was George W. Bush, in part because of fears of terrorism, but also because he had been elected without a plurality of the popular vote in 2000, meaning he hadn't carried a wave of marginal congressmen into office to begin with. If the tide doesn't come in, then it doesn't go out, either.
In 2006 and 2008, Democrats did something that had not been done in American politics since the Great Depression, which is to string together two consecutive "wave" elections — roughly defined as a gain of at least 20 seats in the House of Representatives. They gained a total of 55 House seats and 12 seats in the Senate; the tide came in twice and with unusual strength. That means that some significant number of the Democrats elected in the last two cycles, to put it bluntly, really don't have much business holding their seats in the first place. Either their districts normally trend Republican — 49 Democratic House members were elected from districts that voted for John McCain — or they themselves probably wouldn't have cleared the threshold for a successful candidacy in a more conventional election year. (Eric Massa, the former Democratic representative from New York who admitted to the intense tickling of a staff member at a birthday party, comes to mind.)
Neither Obama nor any other Democratic president was ever going to keep the tide from leaving the beach in 2010, and certainly not with the economy lurching slowly from awful to just plain bad. The only question is whether the Democrats will lose control in at least one chamber of Congress, an outcome that might paralyze Obama's presidency and thrust his party into a prolonged depression of its own.
Of the five living Americans who have served as president, Obama is the only one who never worked as some kind of party strategist. George H. W. Bush oversaw the Republican National Committee for a time, and his son, George W. Bush, played a pivotal role in the headquarters of his father's failed re-election bid in 1992. Bill Clinton got his start in politics helping to run George McGovern's campaign in Texas. Even Jimmy Carter, who was thought to disdain tactical politics, was the chairman of the Democratic Party's national midterm campaign in 1974. These men rose through their party organizations (in Bush's case, this was more about a famous name than it was about holding a series of jobs), and they were intimate with the relatively cozy world of organizers, donors and local power brokers, the few thousand activists who control the workings of a political party.
Obama did his door-to-door campaigning as a community organizer, but he never worked in party politics until he ran for office, and as a presidential aspirant he never bothered with trying to remake his party or modernize its message in the same way that Reagan (a spokesman for the conservative movement) or Clinton (a leader of the centrist New Democrats) did. Other than to assert (dubiously, perhaps) that he wasn't a "triangulator" like the Clintons, Obama did not run against the party establishment, as other candidates had before, but with indifference toward it.
In this way, as in many others, Obama is emblematic of the generation that found its political consciousness in the years after Vietnam and Watergate, when the ruling classes of both parties lost their credibility. Carter, Clinton and George W. Bush were presidents rooted in their parties who went out of their way to cultivate outsider pedigrees. Obama, a good 15 years younger than our last two boomer presidents, is the opposite; he is a genuine outsider who spends a fair amount of energy reassuring Democrats that he really does care about the organization.
"Fundamentally, I just think he wants to be bigger than that," says Cornell Belcher, who was one of Obama's pollsters during the 2008 campaign. "It gets back to being a transformational leader. A party leader isn't about transformation."
Obama's advisers have spoken of his brand, which is a stand-in for the party identity that defined other presidencies. Obama's brand is about inclusivity, transcendence, a generational break from stale dogmas. Inevitably, Obama's brand management runs up against the culture of his party. State activists are sometimes told their requests for the president to appear at a typical political event, in some ballroom with room dividers or at the local labor hall, aren't going to fly. Aides know that if they bring that kind of thing to Obama, he'll ask, "Can't we do any better than that?" As a rule, Obama no longer speaks at the traditional Jefferson-Jackson dinners where state Democratic parties gather to raise money from the faithful. "For what?" a senior aide responded when I asked why. "To talk to the same people he already has?" Obama prefers venues, preferably outdoors or in large theaters, where he can reach voters who aren't party regulars. He generally refuses to do "robo-calls," those ubiquitous, recorded messages in which a politician asks you to go out and vote for the party. "He's got a practical objection to them, which is that they're irritating," Axelrod explained to me.
While Obama attended four times the number of fund-raising events that Bill Clinton did during his first year in office, he garnered a fraction of the contributions. "He is the worst Washington fund-raiser in the history of presidents," a White House aide proudly admitted to me a few months back. All of this exasperates operatives on the Hill who are obsessed with keeping other Democrats in office, and who think maybe Obama should be a little more obsessed with it too. "When you go to the D.N.C., his picture is on that wall," a longtime strategist who is working for a Congressional campaign told me. "There's a reason."
Unlike other modern presidents, Obama, who was elected largely on the strength of an unprecedented outpouring of small-dollar contributions, has no Terry McAuliffe, someone whose unspoken job it is to make sure the party's donors are kept happy and engaged. David Plouffe is his strategist, Axelrod a message guy, Valerie Jarrett a kind of ambassador and protector — but none of them have raised huge sums of cash from big contributors, and none of them are nearly as devoted to the party's prospects as they are to the president. In fact, Obama seems to have outsourced much of the traditional party-leadership role to Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden, the two principal Washington insiders in his administration, both of whom seem better suited to the role.
Unlike Clinton, who loved the game of politics almost as much as the governance, Obama doesn't pore over polling data or study the shaded zones on electoral maps. For that he has Emanuel, his chief of staff, who was the chief strategist behind the Democratic takeover of the House in 2006 and who knows as much about the individual Congressional districts in play as any operative in town. Because of this history, Emanuel occupies a unique position in the West Wing and one that places him apart from the close circle of loyalists who have been alongside Obama from the first day of his presidential campaign. Emanuel, too, is devoted to the president, but he also maintains close relationships with dozens of the House members he recruited, and friends say he anguishes, more than Obama or other White House advisers, about the possibility of losing their seats.
He's also not above getting involved in party primaries; it was Emanuel, according to the White House's own report last month, who initiated the effort to try to nudge Joe Sestak, the Pennsylvania congressman, out of the race for the Democratic Senate nomination in that state so that Arlen Specter could run unopposed. Sestak, of course, stayed in the race and won. Stories about potential job offers to Sestak and another primary challenger, Colorado's Andrew Romanoff, have attracted attention from the news media and from Republicans, which speaks to the importance of the Obama brand in this election year. Such informal overtures are a standard and predictable part of politics in both parties (Karl Rove was relentless in trying to clear certain primary fields during the midterm elections of 2002). But Obama has cast himself above such things, which is why stories of tawdry favor-swapping have a resonance in Washington that they would not otherwise have.
Meanwhile, although Obama has to this point headlined only a handful of fund-raising events dedicated to House members, Biden has happily attended more than 15 of them, with more on the calendar. This is partly because the loquacious vice president has yet to meet the podium he doesn't want to fling himself upon, but also because, in a lot of the more conservative, working-class districts in the South and Midwest, Obama's approval ratings are considerably lower than they are in national surveys. In these parts of the country, Biden — plain-talking, profane and nobody's idea of a closet Muslim — may not only be a more enthusiastic partisan than the president but a more persuasive one as well.
If the president isn't going to be his party's chief strategist or its most prolific fund-raiser, then aides say there are two things he will do for his party that are, ultimately, more important — and that are, not coincidentally, in keeping with the brand. The first is to remind voters that Democrats didn't create the current economic morass. As Rahm Emanuel told me when we sat down in April, "The American people know overwhelmingly that he inherited a" — and here Emanuel used a word I can't repeat — "sandwich." (Suffice it to say the sandwich wasn't pastrami.) "They know that. They don't need to be educated. I believe it's worth reminding them of the scale, size and scope of the" — that word again — "sandwich we got.
"Ultimately," Emanuel went on, "everything about politics — everything, everything — is about choice. The choice is not about what we did versus the ideal. The choice is about what we did versus what we inherited. We inherited George Bush's Great Recession, and we broke its back." Emanuel is fond of talking about breaking the body parts of things — backs, necks, etc. "We inherited the financial ruins of Wall Street, and we fixed them. We inherited a country in the worst fiscal condition it has ever been in, and we are in the beginning stages of finding a consensus to turn that around. But the option of going back is not an option, and we're in the early stages of digging out of the ditch we got handed."
Credit Luke Sharrett/The New York Times
Emanuel said that Obama would continue to spend a block of every month on the road, as he has since January, when voters in Massachusetts elected Scott Brown, a Republican, to what had been Ted Kennedy's seat in the Senate. "We're getting him out of here, out of Washington," he said. "I want him less here and more in the country, and when he's out in the country, more in touch with people."
The second thing Obama can do for Democrats, in the view of the White House, is to change the way they run their campaigns. Democrats running for the House and the Senate, like the party's presidential candidates, have generally relied almost exclusively on the unions and other constituency groups to get out the vote, using paid phone banks and door-knockers. Starting out, Obama didn't have that option. His party's existing organizational structure was largely beholden to Hillary Clinton through the 2008 primaries, so Obama recruited an army of volunteers, many of them previously uninvolved in any kind of party politics, who ended up organizing blocks and precincts in their towns, lobbying neighbors door to door on Obama's behalf and squeezing out the vote on Election Day. It was, in effect, much like the volunteer-driven network employed by Bush's campaign in 2004, although less centralized and more Internet-focused.
Obama emerged from the campaign having assembled what was essentially an alternative apparatus to the party itself — a closely guarded, state-by-state list of more than 10 million names, many of them door-knockers, phone-bankers, letter-writers and small-dollar donors. This network, loyal to the president but not necessarily to his party, helped Obama amass upward of $300 million for the general election and registered millions of new voters for him. The shorthand for all this, in Obama's orbit, is "the new politics," meaning that what Obama created is the replacement for the special-interest politics of the last century. The new politics are tactical, encompassing no specific ideological agenda, although most of the more ardent adherents tend to consider themselves more liberal than the party establishment. Obama's advisers say they believe they can, at least in some measure, bequeath the new politics to the party itself. And their message to Congressional Democrats running this year is that if they don't adopt the tactics of the Obama campaign, they're probably going to lose.
To understand why this might just be true, it helps to revisit the tactics that made Obama only the fourth Democratic president in history — Jackson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Obama — to claim more than 51 percent of the vote. There were, roughly speaking, two ways in which Obama managed to change the electoral calculus for Democrats. First, if exit polls can be believed, he carried 52 percent of independent voters, outpacing John McCain by eight points. The other major component was to simply create more voters — and this is where the new politics were especially important. Obama's campaign team maintains that its volunteers had a lot to do with getting some 15 million to 20 million first-time voters out to the polls, and about 7 in 10 of those voters cast their ballots for Obama. The campaign pulled more black voters, Hispanic voters and white college-age voters into the process than most analysts previously thought possible, which made a crucial difference in more conservative states like Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia.
Twenty months later, if independents haven't deserted the party altogether, then they certainly seem to be gathering their things and saying their goodbyes. The progressive policy group Third Way, analyzing exit-poll data from last year's governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey and the special Senate election in Massachusetts in January, found that only about a third of independents in all three states voted Democratic, compared with about 54 percent who voted for Obama in 2008. According to the latest polling from the Pew Research Center, Obama's standing among independents has dropped from a high of 63 percent early in his presidency to about 47 percent now.
That would seem to leave only one way for Democrats to avoid being swept away on the receding tide, and that's to turn out some sizable portion of those first time-voters from 2008 — the "surge voters," as his aides like to refer to them. This was hard enough to do in a presidential year, but in a midterm cycle, when generally only the most reliable voters bother to participate, it feels almost wishful. The disappointing turnout among these younger, more educated and minority voters in New Jersey and Virginia in 2009 jolted a lot of Democrats who assumed, after 2008, that Obama's victory somehow permanently changed the electoral math.
"What we've seen over the course of Obama's time in office so far is that his constituencies have been relatively sleepy compared to his opposition," Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center, told me. "Voting is a habit. The problem with these people" — meaning the surge voters — "is that they came out for the first time, and so they're nonhabitual voters. Not only does Obama have to do what he did back in '08 in terms of getting them to come out in greater numbers, but he has to get them to shake off their drowsiness."
The chief architect and spiritual leader of the new politics is David Plouffe, who retains a kind of mystical aura among Obama's campaign confidants, probably because he was the only member of the inner circle to decline a role in the administration. His record remains unsullied by the inevitable failures of governance. This is why, days after Scott Brown's victory, the White House let it be known that Plouffe would be coming back as an "outside adviser" for the midterms. The announcement of Plouffe's return was meant to head off a panic among jittery congressmen and senators who worried that the president had lost control of the political environment. Plouffe personified the notion (true or not) that Obama really did have a plan for 2010, and absent that, it might have been much harder to get a lot of vulnerable Democrats to cast difficult votes for health care reform.
At 43, Plouffe is a boyish-looking, somewhat-reclusive operative who makes little secret of his disdain for Washington. When I visited him in April at the K Street building where he rents a one-room office but rarely actually visits, he seemed intent on dispelling the impression that the White House itself wanted to create last January. "I think my role was described in a way that was sort of overheated after Massachusetts," Plouffe told me. "You know how Washington is. It's always, what kind of change is going to happen in the aftermath of a setback? That's just kind of a ritual in Washington. And so in this case, me spending a little more time on things became part of that.
"We're not running these campaigns," Plouffe declared, lightly pounding a conference table, surrounded by signed posters of Obama. "It's the candidates, most important, the consultants and the staff — they're running the campaigns. They're allocating the resources. They're executing their strategy every day. And the notion that the White House was going to come in and take over the running of these campaigns is just asinine. It's just not grounded in reality."
Even so, Plouffe says he has been thinking about how to hold the surge voters since the day Obama was elected. Within weeks after the campaign ended, Plouffe took the grass-roots campaign organization known as Obama for America and renamed it Organizing for America, moving the entire operation into the first floor of the renovated Democratic National Committee building, in the space set aside for the party's nominee during presidential campaign years. The idea was to transform Obama's list of activists and small-dollar contributors into a neighborhood-by-neighborhood organization that could be mobilized to support his policy agenda, starting with energy and health care.
The job of integrating O.F.A., as it is known, into the Democratic National Committee fell to Tim Kaine, then the governor of Virginia, whom Obama named party chairman in January 2009. Kaine was an early endorser of Obama's and is a devotee of the new politics, and anyone who spends much time in the national headquarters today will quickly realize that, under his direction, O.F.A. has virtually supplanted the party structure. O.F.A. is sending some 300 paid organizers to the states — several times the number the national party hired for the 2006 midterms under Kaine's predecessor, Howard Dean. When Democratic officials inside the headquarters say "we," they are more often than not talking about O.F.A. rather than the party organization that existed before.
The transition from being an outside-the-establishment campaign organization to being an inside-the-establishment policy promoter has not been an easy one for O.F.A. The first year was marked by widespread frustration, as volunteers tried to get their heads around the arcane changes in, say, the health care bill as it meandered its way through Congress, while simultaneously being urged not to attack members of their own party who wavered on the agenda. "Sometimes the lack of tangibility can be distressing for people," Plouffe told me. "Because they'll go out there and say: 'I worked hard. I had a press conference. I had all these people write letters to the editor. And my member of Congress voted against health care. It didn't seem to matter.' That's reality, unfortunately.
"That's what's good about elections," Plouffe added — that volunteers know how they can affect the outcome. "If they go out there and talk to 10 new voters, and 4 of them say yes, they're inclined to vote, then you can take that to the bank, because you know that's important, and you understand how that fits into the whole thing." The mission for O.F.A. in this election year, Plouffe told me, is to re-energize enough of Obama's base to subtly shift the math in enough competitive districts to minimize Democratic losses. Volunteers will do this one phone call and one door-knock at a time, armed with voter files containing the names of those first-time registrants who might be compelled to vote again. Kaine announced in April that the party was making a $50 million commitment to its Congressional, Senate and gubernatorial candidates, but only about $20 million of that money will come in cash, to be divided among the various campaign committees. The rest will be transferred in kind, through on-the-ground organization — and, in that way, Plouffe and his team may end up directing more of the midterm campaigns than he'd like to admit.
"I'm not going to suggest we're going to change the electorate like we did in 2008," Plouffe said, tamping down expectations again. "But I think we can have some impact on the electorate in November. So perhaps it's a shade younger, or perhaps it's a little more African-American than it's been in past off years."
For Plouffe, the unstated goal is to lay the groundwork for Obama's re-election campaign in 2012. By trying to build up volunteer networks in states like Indiana and Virginia and Colorado, all states where Democrats have crucial Congressional and Senate races this fall, Plouffe and his operatives are looking not just to protect their Congressional majorities but also to reconnect with the surge voters whom Obama brought into the process, in hopes that they won't just get bored with politics and wander away in the years between presidential campaigns, never to return.
This time, however, O.F.A. volunteers won't be asking their friends and neighbors to vote for a young, electric, racially transcendent presidential candidate. Instead, in a lot of districts, they'll be asking their friends and neighbors to vote for some aging member of Congress who has been on the ballot 10 times already, which is a considerably harder sell. "Let's be clear — these are not Democratic voters," Cornell Belcher, the Obama campaign pollster, cautioned me. "They're Obama voters." The lesson that Plouffe and his operation took away from the dismal 2009 elections is that Obama can act like a matchmaker of sorts, introducing the party's candidates to new voters and vouching for their intentions, but it's only going to matter if the candidates themselves embrace the so-called new politics. What that means, practically speaking, is that the White House is urging candidates to divert a fair amount of their time and money — traditionally used for buying TV ads and rallying core constituencies — to courting volunteers and voters who haven't generally been reliable Democrats.
This is not what members of Congress or their campaign managers are trained to do, and it has created something of a cultural chasm between the White House and the party apparatus. There is a strong generational component here. With some exceptions, Obama's passion for organizing finds more enthusiasm among candidates closer to the president's age and newer to politics (candidates like Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado), while older Democrats have a harder time imagining that a bunch of volunteers and a dozen virtual town-hall meetings are going to matter more than labor endorsements and some killer 30-second spots. Longtime party strategists also point out, fairly, that Obama raised such an absurd amount of money during his presidential campaign that he never had to choose between, say, TV ads and door-to-door canvassers in any given state; he had both, and in record numbers. Few, if any, House or Senate candidates will have that kind of good fortune, which means, for most Democrats, that embracing the new politics also means cutting back on other bedrock campaign tactics.
One respected Democratic Senate aide who is skeptical of the Plouffe strategy suggested to me that Obama's emphasis on O.F.A., like the controversial "50-state strategy" that Howard Dean pursued as party chairman, was just the latest fad to distract the party headquarters from its more fundamental mission of raising cash and airing ads. "The D.N.C. has allowed itself to become a Rorschach test of whatever politics is at the time," the aide told me. " 'We are whatever you want us to be' is the new politics. What we've gotten away from is being there for the campaigns."
By Democratic Party standards, this is a relatively muted internal disagreement. But it nonetheless points to the emergence of rival schools of thought within the party when it comes to Obama's importance as a party leader. Some see him as having transformed both the electorate and the nature of campaigning in what could be a lasting and fundamental way, meaning that things are possible now — both in terms of liberal governance and winning elections — that did not seem possible before. Others view 2008 mostly as a cathartic election that had more to do with conditions in the country than with Obama's peculiar magic, and they don't think the party should assume that there are millions of new voters out there who can be tapped if you just knock on the right doors. These two worldviews coexist uneasily among the party's elected officials and candidates, young and old, in every part of the country — sometimes just hours apart.
Virginia's second Congressional district winds around the state's easternmost shore and leaps across the Chesapeake Bay to Virginia Beach and Norfolk, home to the largest Naval basein the world. In 2008, Obama carried the district by a mere two points on his way to an impressive victory in the state. If you get on the road and drive about 100 miles due west, you'll hit the fifth Congressional district, which encompasses the fading manufacturing cities of Martinsville and Danville, along with a lot of old tobacco towns and some of the highest unemployment rates in the state. Here the election tilted the other way, but again it was close, with McCain winning by about the same two-point margin. In both districts, however, the surge vote in 2008 was strong enough to unseat Republican representatives and replace them with a pair of novice Democrats whom no one had given much of a chance until the final weeks: Glenn Nye in the second district and Tom Perriello in the fifth.
On paper, Nye and Perriello were remarkably similar candidates. Both men were just 34 when they ran, their birthdays exactly one month apart. Nye is a Georgetown graduate who worked for the federal government in the Balkans and Iraq. Perriello is a product of Yale's law school and a former human rights lawyer in West Africa. Both won in mostly white, historically conservative districts with sizable African-American voting blocs and similar per-capita incomes. Both Nye and Perriello will tell you that the voters who elected them are tired of ideological barriers and voted for a new kind of pragmatism.
"They wanted to get away from the model of just voting the party line and doing what the party leadership says," Nye told me during a recent conversation in his Washington office. "When I talked to people back home, what I heard consistently is that we'd really like someone who uses their own conscience and their own mind to make decisions that they think are best for the district." Perriello told me much the same thing when I visited him in his district, as we slogged through a mix of mud and manure at a dairy farm to show how stimulus money was being used to make energy out of dung. "There was a decidedly anti-ideological component to the vote," Perriello said. "It was a reaction to the ideological extremism of the Bush administration, replacing it with someone who didn't fit a traditionally liberal space but who represented a more pragmatic approach."
And yet, Nye and Perriello have very different ideas about what pragmatism means. Nye, who practices moderation in the mold of a Southern blue-dog Democrat, voted for the stimulus package early on, but since then he has broken with Obama on some of the administration's most pressing domestic initiatives, including the energy plan and health care reform. Perriello, whose 727-vote margin of victory in 2008 was the tightest in the country, has instead been one of the more tireless advocates for Obama's agenda. When he has criticized the president and his advisers, it has been because Perriello sees the White House as insufficiently courageous in taking on Wall Street and unemployment.
The distance between Nye and Perriello on the Obama agenda can be explained, in part, by some of the mundane realities of politics. Obviously the two congressmen harbor some different ideological convictions. And their districts are shaded a bit more differently than they appear on paper; Nye's district is stamped with a military kind of conservatism that stresses national security and self-reliance, while Perriello's leans more toward the populist variety. But there's something deeper going on here, too, a localized version of the greater confusion that surrounds the party two years after Obama's election. When all those Obama surge voters flooded the polling places and voted for change, what exactly were they voting for? Did postpartisanship and pragmatism mean the less ideological, more fiscally responsible vision of government that Nye thought it meant? Or was it about the progressive, ambitious approach that Perriello represents?
It's no accident that even those who surfed in on the Obama wave should have such different notions of what it signified. Obama himself never really settled the point. During the campaign, he alternated seamlessly between two sides of his political persona: the postpartisan reformer and the progressive revivalist. On one hand, reaching out to disaffected and independent voters, he vowed to dispense with the culture wars and leave behind the 20th-century orthodoxies of both parties. At the same time, he inspired a hopeful frenzy among liberals who assumed that he was, at heart, one of them. Propelled through the fall campaign by a cratering economy and his opponent's weak campaign, Obama was never really compelled to reconcile these two ideals. The vague notion of "change," whatever kind of change that meant, seemed good enough for an anxious electorate.
Throughout his first year in office — perhaps out of necessity, given the near depression he inherited, but also under pressure from older leaders in his own party who spoke openly of another New Deal — Obama tilted toward progressive revival. Since the Massachusetts vote, however, Obama seems to be pushing back in the other direction, moving to reclaim his reformist appeal. In recent months, he has renewed his overtures to Republican lawmakers, thrown his support behind nuclear power and, most significant, established a commission on fiscal reform — all of which probably amounts to an acknowledgment that he can't continue to hemorrhage confidence among the independent voters who were an integral part of his election.
In a sense, the 2010 elections, like pretty much all midterm elections, represent the coda to the presidential vote that preceded them. What happens in closely contested Congressional districts this fall — whether the Obama voters of 2008 will come out again to show their support for a Tom Perriello, whether they will re-elect a Glenn Nye, whether they will punish either man for his decisions — will go a long way toward clarifying which of the two Obamas, the reformer or the revivalist, most voters really thought they were getting. And that, in turn, will give Plouffe and the rest of the president's inner circle a clearer sense of where the country is heading toward 2012, as they prepare to break out the maps and fire up the e-mail lists for what they expect to be the final campaign of Obama's brief and improbable career.
Even given the strong possibility that Democrats could lose control of at least one chamber of Congress this fall, Obama's aides seem confident about his re-election, in part because they are drawing some inspiration from another midterm election year that isn't quite yet ancient history — not 1994, but 1982. According to Gallup, Ronald Reagan's average approval rating during the fifth quarter of his first term — the period between January and April 1982 — was 46.3 percent, just south of Obama's average mark of 48.8 percent over the same period in 2010. Reagan's ratings, too, fell in close relation to the nation's rising unemployment rate during his second year in office, as the economic recovery he had promised took hold sluggishly. The voters punished Reagan's party in the 1982 midterm elections, but in a far less catastrophic way than they did during Clinton's first term.
Obama's advisers say it is only a matter of months before voters begin to feel in their daily lives the steady, if unspectacular, improvement that has been showing up in recent economic reports — and by which time, presumably, the leak off the Louisiana coast should be plugged. The question no one can answer is whether a lift in public optimism might come in time for Democrats to reap any benefit in November. Just about every strategist of either party in Washington will tell you that the best indicator of whether the voters are growing less skeptical — and, thus, of whether Democrats can survive the November elections intact — can be found in the president's approval rating. There is a political theorem that illustrates this, supported by data from past elections and often repeated by Democrats now, and it goes like this: If the president's approval rating is over 50 percent in the fall, then his party will suffer only moderately. If his rating is under 50 percent, however, then the pounding at the polls is likely to be a memorable one.
There is a corollary to this theorem, which Rahm Emanuel explained to me when we talked in April. For every point that Obama's approval rating dips below 50 percent, Emanuel said, there are probably four or five more House districts that will swing into the Republican column, and vice versa. Emanuel reeled off a series of polls from that week — some that had the president just under 50 percent but one, from The Washington Post and ABC News, that put the number at 54 — in a way that made it clear that he was, if not obsessed with these numbers, then clearly transfixed by them. "It does matter where he is," Emanuel told me. "For the midterms, if you're at 50, that's a different scenario for the president then if you're at 47."
The thing about political theorems, unlike mathematical theorems, is that they are predictive until the moment they aren't. There are cultural and social departure points in the life of a country, markers between one period and the next, that can be fully appreciated only in hindsight, and that render old formulas suddenly obsolete. And Obama represents nothing if not a cultural departure point. As is often the case with Obama, then, the old formulas may not apply. After all, while it's certainly not unusual for presidents to register much higher approval ratings than Congress, that divide has been particularly pronounced during Obama's presidency; in April, while approval for the Democratic Congress was registering in the Pew poll at 25 percent, its lowest point in the 24-year history of the survey, Obama's own approval rating remained close to 50 percent. What this disconnect means, perhaps, is that, while higher approval ratings for the president might still mean more votes for Democrats in the midterm elections, every point up or down could have less of an impact than it has in the past.
Obama seems to exist on a separate plane from his party's other elected leaders, somehow deflecting much of the anti-Washington fervor that threatens to dispatch the rest of them. This is probably not only because voters see him as a more inspiring leader than Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, but also because they don't see him as a party leader at all, at least in the traditional sense. It's not simply how Obama came to govern that creates this impression. It's also a simple matter of who he is. Whatever you may think of Obama's policies or his politics, after all, his brand represents — by the very nature of his age, his life story and the color of his skin — a subversive force inside the governing establishment, and that's his advantage in this tea-party moment. Washington is, in fact, broken — or at least most people believe it is, even if Obama stops saying so in his speeches. Voters may yet see Obama, in the years ahead, as disappointing or transformative or neither. But the one thing he will never really embody is the status quo.
Matt Bai is a national political columnist for The Times and a regular contributor to the magazine.
A version of this article appears in print on June 13, 2010, on Page MM34 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: DEMOCRAT IN CHIEF?. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Letters: Democrat in Chief? JUNE 25, 2010


text:
using System;
using Untech.SharePoint.Common.CodeAnnotations;

namespace Untech.SharePoint.Common.Utils
{
	/// <summary>
	/// Represents container for instance singleton
	/// </summary>
	/// <typeparam name="T">Type of singleton instance</typeparam>
	[PublicAPI]
	public static class Singleton<T> where T : new()
	{
		// ReSharper disable once StaticMemberInGenericType
		[NotNull] private static readonly object Sync = new object();
		[CanBeNull] private static T _object;

		/// <summary>
		/// Gets signleton instance
		/// </summary>
		/// <returns>Intance of type <typeparamref name="T"/></returns>
		public static T GetInstance()
		{
			if (_object == null)
			{
				lock (Sync)
				{
					if (_object == null)
					{
						_object = new T();
					}
				}
			}
			return _object;
		}

		/// <summary>
		/// Gets signleton instance
		/// </summary>
		/// <param name="initializer">Instance initializer, i.e. action that will be called on first object access.</param>
		/// <returns>Intance of type <typeparamref name="T"/></returns>
		/// <exception cref="ArgumentNullException"><paramref name="initializer"/> is null.</exception>
		public static T GetInstance(Action<T> initializer)
		{
			Guard.CheckNotNull(nameof(initializer), initializer);

			if (_object == null)
			{
				lock (Sync)
				{
					if (_object == null)
					{
						var obj = new T();

						initializer(obj);

						_object = obj;
					}
				}
			}
			return _object;
		}
	}
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


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text:
Q: Find the Process run by nohup command I run a server executable in Centos using the following command "nohup server &". Now I need to kill the process "server". But I tried "ps -a" command to get the PID but I couldnt get the process. Now how to kill the "server" now?

A: There is no definitive way to catch the exact process with the help of ps command, but you can use the following:
ps -a | grep "server"

You will get a list of all the processes running with the name "server"
Or, you can use any other keywords as well to grep the ps output.

A: ps auxwww|grep -i 'server' should return all process which has server in them. Otherwise, server may have already stopped.
You should be able to determine the PID (and store it in a file) as follows:
nohup server &
print $! >> my_server.pid

A: If a nohup.out file was created, you may run in bash:
# lsof nohup.out

it will return the pid which created/is running the file
best regards!

A: The best way to launch a server in centos is with the service command.
So
service httpd start
There is a chance that you want to write your program as a daemon

A daemon (or service) is a background process that is designed to run
  autonomously,with little or not user intervention. The Apache web
  server http daemon (httpd) is one such example of a daemon. It waits
  in the background listening on specific ports, and serves up pages or
  processes scripts, based on the type of request.

See http://www.netzmafia.de/skripten/unix/linux-daemon-howto.html

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Home Featured Polls
Feedback wanted: What do you think of our new site design?
Last week, we unleashed our new look upon the world. And while it looked amazing at the time, there was still some work to be done. Now, after a grueling all-night pixel pushing session from our man, Nitish Saxena, we're happy to say we're at a point where everything is pretty well complete.
To be more specific, Nitish worked on our mobile optimization and got our sidebars and footers all set up and in proper order. I, for one, am in love with the end result, and proud to call this place my home. But it's not just about my satisfaction. In fact, it's less about mine and more about yours – our friends and family.
Mission accomplished: New design = compete
Now that the dust has settled from our recent site redesign, we need some feedback from you, guys and gals. Our aim in all of this was to create something visually appealing, fully-functional, and jam-packed with awesome content.
We want the desktop version of our site to look great, but as an Android website, it is vital for us to make sure the mobile version looks good enough to knock your socks off. And without tooting our own horn, I'd like to think we just took that leap.
That said, I'm opening up this poll and the comment thread to you as a way of having your voice heard by the Android Unfiltered Team. We want to know your thoughts on the new look.
Are there areas we can improve on? Are you happy with it just the way it is? Also, feel free to shoot us any suggestions on content you'd like to see here or questions you may have about us, our site, or about Android in general.
Thanks, as always, for stopping by. Without you, we'd have no reason to keep the lights on here at the Android Unfiltered HQ.
What do you think of Android Unfiltered's new look?
I love it just as is.
I like it, but it needs some work still. (Please elaborate in the comments!)
Nope. It's just not for me.
Previous articleReview: RND Fast Charge Wireless Charging Stand
Next articleCornie Icons Review: The Ultimate Shapeless Icon Pack
Fresh set of paint: Say hello to our brand new look!
Who's Martin Guay? Why is he writing at Android Unfiltered?
Editorial: The history of Android Unfiltered, where it's at today, and where I hope it goes
Zheano Blog September 24, 2017 at 10:44 AM
Not big fan of a logo…
Tony Simons September 25, 2017 at 1:36 AM
Awww! We love it! But as a designer, I can see where you may be slightly more critical of logos.
Either way, thank you for stopping by and for the feedback! We'll definitely keep it in mind.
Trygve Nomeland October 3, 2017 at 2:27 PM
Material design would be fitting, but the design is nice
Tony Simons October 3, 2017 at 2:29 PM
Thank you, Trygve! Material would certainly be nice but probably a bit more difficult to execute. I'm glad you like the current state, though!
CastNES is a new app that lets you play Classic Nintendo...
Bullet Hell Monday review: It's like Space Invaders on acid
Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition coming to Android; pre-registration live on...
How to change your Google Assistant voice to male
How to make phone calls on your Google Home smart speaker

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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NIH scientists urge pursuit of universal coronavirus vaccine
By NIH News Feed on Thursday, December 16, 2021.
A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that novel coronaviruses will continue to have potential to emerge as a threat to humans.
Medical Equipment Company Owners Sentenced to More Than 12 Years for $27 Million Fraud Scheme
By US Department of Justice, News on Thursday, December 16, 2021.
A Texas woman and an Austrian national were sentenced yesterday to 151 months in prison for a $27 million Medicare kickback conspiracy.
SEC Proposes Rules to Prevent Fraud in Connection With Security-Based Swaps Transactions, to Prevent Undue Influence over CCOs and to Require Reporting of Large Security-Based Swap Positions
By SEC Press Releases on Wednesday, December 15, 2021.
The Securities and Exchange Commission today voted to propose rules to prevent fraud, manipulation and deception in connection with security-based swaps, to prevent undue influence over the chief compliance officer (CCO) of security-based swap dealers…
Four Charged in $35 Million COVID-19 Relief Fraud Scheme
By US Department of Justice, News on Wednesday, December 15, 2021.
A federal grand jury in Houston returned a superseding indictment, which was unsealed today, charging four additional individuals for fraudulently obtaining and laundering millions of dollars in forgivable Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration (SBA) under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. In total, 15 individuals across two states have now been charged in the conspiracy.
United States and Australia Enter CLOUD Act Agreement to Facilitate Investigations of Serious Crime
The United States and Australia today signed a landmark agreement that will facilitate access to electronic data for investigations of serious crime, including terrorism and child sexual abuse.
Court Permanently Enjoins Three Vietnamese Residents from Continuing to Operate a Pandemic-Related Fraud Scheme
A federal court in Florida permanently enjoined on Friday three residents of Vietnam from operating a pandemic-related scam that targeted American consumers, the Department of Justice announced.
New D.C. legislation signals strong state AG position on harmful algorithms
By Global Regulatory Enforcement Law on Tuesday, December 14, 2021.
Last week, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine announced new D.C. legislation aimed at holding "companies & organizations accountable if their algorithms harm vulnerable communities." The bill was introduced by the Chair of the City Council at the request of the AG. This comes on the heels of a meeting held in Washington, D.C. last week...… Continue Reading
HHS Encourages Hospitals to Implement Patient Safety Best Practices to Improve Maternity Care and Outcomes
By HHS News releases on Tuesday, December 14, 2021.
HHS, through CMS, is taking critical steps to ensure pregnant and postpartum individuals have access to equitable, comprehensive maternity care.
Former Louisiana Police Chief and Current City Councilmember Indicted for Alleged Vote Buying Scheme
By US Department of Justice, News on Tuesday, December 14, 2021.
An indictment issued by a federal grand jury in New Orleans, Louisiana, was unsealed charging former Amite City Police Chief Jerry Trabona and current Amite City Councilmember Kristian Hart with criminally violating federal election laws as part of a scheme to pay for votes in a federal election.
Texas Man Arrested for COVID-19 Relief Scheme
A Texas man was arrested today for allegedly fraudulently obtaining over $3.3 million in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration (SBA) under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
Virginia Business Owner Charged with $1.5 Million Employment Tax Fraud
By US Department of Justice, News on Monday, December 13, 2021.
A federal grand jury in Roanoke, Virginia, returned an indictment on Thursday charging a Virginia man with employment tax fraud.
New Jersey Man Sentenced to 12 Years in Prison for Promoting Tax Fraud Scheme
A New Jersey mortgage underwriter was sentenced today to 12 years in prison for helping others file false tax returns claiming large refunds from the IRS, obstructing the IRS's efforts to recover those illegal refunds and failing to file a tax return.
Georgia Woman Pleads Guilty to Promoting Nationwide Tax Fraud Scheme
A Georgia woman pleaded guilty today to conspiring to defraud the United States by promoting a nationwide tax fraud scheme and preparing false tax returns for the scheme's participants.
Justice Department Statement on Supreme Court Decision Regarding Texas SB8
By US Department of Justice, News on Friday, December 10, 2021.
The Department of Justice today released the following statement from spokesman Anthony Coley following the Supreme Court's decision in Whole Woman's Health et al. v. Jackson:
Florida Man Pleads Guilty to Promoting Nationwide Tax Fraud Scheme
A Florida man pleaded guilty today to conspiring to defraud the United States by promoting a tax fraud scheme to more than 200 individuals in at least 19 states. He also pleaded guilty to attempting to obstruct the IRS.
Federal Jury Convicts Florida Man for Role in Defrauding FDA and Distributing Designer Anabolic Steroids Labeled as Dietary Supplements
On Dec. 9, a federal jury in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, convicted James Boccuzzi, 37, of Boca Raton, Florida, of one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and one count of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances.
Former NFL Player Sentenced to More Than Three Years in Prison for COVID-19 Relief Fraud
A former National Football League (NFL) player was sentenced today to 37 months in federal prison for fraudulently obtaining over $1.2 million through a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan guaranteed by the Small Business Administration (SBA) under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
Former Aerospace Outsourcing Executive Charged for Key Role in a Long-Running Antitrust Conspiracy
The U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut unsealed a criminal complaint accusing a former aerospace outsourcing executive of participating in a long-running conspiracy with managers and executives of several outsource engineering suppliers (Suppliers) to restrict the hiring and recruiting of engineers and other skilled laborers among their respective companies.


text:
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Walt Disney World: New Look at Epcot's Guardians of the Galaxy Attraction
Jenna Anderson
Disney is set to unveil a slew of new details for its upcoming projects at this weekend's D23 Expo, and that will include quite a lot about what's coming to Disney Parks. In addition to some pretty major new information about Disneyland's Marvel experience, which is officially named "Avengers Campus", the company teased how the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise will play into a significant multi-year transformation of Epcot. In addition to promo art for an already-announced Guardians of the Galaxy roller coaster, it was announced that a Xandarian outpost will be part of the park. You can check out concept art and a scale model for the outpost below.
(Photo: Brandon Davis / ComicBook.com)
A Guardians-themed Epcot ride was first rumored in 2017 and was later confirmed to be in the space once held by the Universe of Energy attraction. The ride is expected to be among the world's longest enclosed roller coasters and will be the first roller coaster to make its way into Epcot.
"As we build upon its core mission of optimism and hope to inspire the world, the real will become fantastic and the fantastic will become real — in whole new ways at Epcot," Bob Chapek, Chairman of Walt Disney Parks & Resorts, said in February of 2018.
Concept art and test footage of the coaster later surfaced online last November, with the goal to launch the coaster sometime in 2021.
"This will be a coaster unlike anything you've ever experienced before," Chapek said at the time. "We call it a storytelling coaster. But on this attraction, each individual cab will be programmed to direct your eye to the story happening around you. Instead of whizzing by the action, you'll be fully immersed in the story from the minute you launch."
This marks the second Guardians ride to make its way into Disney Parks after the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror was refurbished into Guardians of the Galaxy -- Mission: BREAKOUT in 2017.
What do you think of the new look at Disney's Guardians of the Galaxy roller coaster? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
Marvel's Newest Villain is MCU Fans' Favorite Hero
Marvel's The Eternals to Film Big Action Sequence in London This Week
Hugo Weaving Reveals Why He Really Didn't Return as Red Skull in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame
Marvel Fan Art Has Us Wanting Scarlett Johansson Playing Loki
New The Eternals Set Video Teases Chaos and Destruction


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Cards Corp. is the developer of the andCards app, a community platform built upon the initial idea of digital business cards. Cards Corp. is one of the winners of K-Startup Grand Challenge 2017, Infinity Challenge at Startup Festival 2017, and Global Startup Expo in Seoul.
Korean Startup Cards Corp. was founded in April of 2017 by Igor Dzhebyan and Rostyslav Khanas. Igor, who was part of the investment group of POSCO for 6 years met Rostyslav, a former software engineer in Korea.
Igor and Rostyslav realized that the culture of exchanging paper cards was deeply rooted in the Korean culture. This is why Cards started to focus on where people actually met and found out quickly that most exchange cards at co-working hubs and events.
They developed their product into a complete solution for organizations such as co-working spaces as well as for event organizers.
Cards software is based on the latest technology across all platforms. At this moment Cards supports up to 6 platforms (IOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and The Web App).
Event organizers can set up events with the essential information such as name and location.
Visitors will then receive a link to the event and they can share it with their network.
Once visitors click on the link, they will be redirected to Cards Corp's website.
They will directed to a registration form where they will input their details.
A card will be automatically created for them which contains their information. Not only will they get their own cards but they can see other visitor's cards and set up meetings.
The goal is to make a smooth user experience for attendees of conferences and co-working centers to network. Users can make multiple digital cards in different languages and exchange without the hassle of carrying them. Searching for business cards is also now easier than ever because of the search function.
Igor Dzhebyan, CEO at Cards Corp.
With the number of events lined up in 2018 by 500V2, Cards can be utilized to facilitate meetups, grow networks, and promote the events.
It will be interesting to see how Cards can adapt to conferences on a larger scale, while remaining user-friendly and innovative as it is currently. Those interested in experiencing what Cards has to offer, keep a look out for upcoming events organized by 500v2.


In this fun, messy, and easy experiment, create a chemical reaction that produces a toothpaste-like foam that is big enough for elephants!
This can get quite messy with large amounts of foam rapidly overflowing from the bottle, so conduct this experiment on a washable surface, outside, or place the bottle on a tray.
Before starting the experiment, ensure everyone conducting it is wearing their safety goggles and gloves.
Hydrogen peroxide can harm skin and eyes so put on your safety goggles and rubber gloves and ask an adult to pour the hydrogen peroxide into the bottle.
Add the food colouring to the bottle.
Add the washing up liquid to the bottle and swish the bottle around to mix everything together.
In the small cup, combine the warm water and yeast and mix for 30 seconds.
Pour the yeast mixture into the bottle and embrace yourself for foam!
Yeast is a catalyst that speeds up the decomposition and breaking down of hydrogen peroxide molecules, causing it to release oxygen gas molecules and water. These oxygen gas molecules get trapped by the washing up liquid and rapidly grow to create fluffy foam, which is comprised of water, soap, and oxygen (not actually toothpaste). The foam looks for an escape route and erupts out of the top of the bottle.
You will also notice that the bottle gets warmer. This is because the reaction produced is an exothermic reaction, which means that heat is released.


Expectant mothers and new parents throughout Essex County gathered at Berkeley College in Newark, NJ, for the fourth annual Parenting Palooza on June 2, 2017. The event was co-sponsored by Berkeley College, Amerigroup, Horizon NJ Health, New Jersey State Federation of Women's Clubs, and Project LAUNCH.
The goal of the event, presented by the Essex Pregnancy & Parenting Connection, a program of Prevent Child Abuse – New Jersey, was to engage and share educational resources with the community's new mothers and their families.
Workshops pertained to topics ranging from nutrition to stress management. Mothers also participated in activities such as yoga and music classes, with their infant children.
"Berkeley College was honored to host this event, and looks forward to building on this collaboration with the Essex Pregnancy & Parenting Connection to raise awareness about the resources available to expectant mothers and parents in the community we serve," said Earl Brown, Berkeley College Campus Operating Officer, Newark, NJ.
Attendees also had the opportunity to meet representatives from the New Jersey Department of Children and Families, the Zufall Health Center, the KinderSmile Foundation, Programs for Parents, the Essex County Council for Young Children, the Statewide Parent Advocacy Network, the Youth Consultation Service, the Partnership for Maternal & Child Health of Northern New Jersey, FAMILYConnections, the Youth Advocate Programs' New Jersey Fatherhood Healthy Relationships Initiative, and the Newark Public Library.
Photo Captions: (Top) Families throughout Essex County gather at Berkeley College in Newark, NJ, for the fourth annual Parenting Palooza on June 2, 2017.
(Above, L to R) Earl Brown, Berkeley College Campus Operating Officer, Newark; Laurie McFadden, Director, Berkeley College Library, Newark; Karen Benjamin, Northeast Area Director, Prevent Child Abuse New Jersey; and Rayna Brown, Academic Advisor, Berkeley College, at the fourth annual Parenting Palooza.
The Essex Pregnancy & Parenting Connection, a program of Prevent Child Abuse – New Jersey, is part of the New Jersey central intake initiative that connects Essex County families before and during pregnancy, infancy and early childhood to services in the community. The goal is to provide successful connections between families and services that promote health and safety. For more information, visit: www.EssexPregnancyAndParenting.org.


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text:
Author: Desperado
The price of the Xbox Series X would not be unveiled at the July Showcase Games
By Desperado
According to the reports, the price of the Xbox Series X will not be revealed when presenting the July Show Games presentation. Following the announcement of a Livestream Xbox Games Showcase on July 23, the fans began to speculate that Microsoft could reveal the cost of their next generation console.
According to Tom Warren de The Verge, however, Microsoft only plans to show its potential range of game launch.
Responding to the Senior Niko Partners, Daniel Ahmad on Twitter, Warren revealed that the coming live broadcast would only focus on the upcoming games on the Xbox Series X.
Warren has already revealed the specifications of the Xbox Series X. There is no reason to doubt its latest information extract. In the absence of rumors about a potential price that led before live broadcast, there is even more reason to believe that we will not tell us how much the Xbox Series X later this month.
The official Xbox Twitter account revealed that the next presentation of Microsoft will take place on Thursday, July 23 at 9:00 am. The event will be the first time we will see something important Helo Infinite since its trailer E3 2019, well Whether we know that The Banished, Helo Wars 2 antagonists will appear to a certain extent.
Other exclusives in the Xbox Series X console should also be presented, including theHellblade II: Senua_ and Mépris saga. Expect some unannounced titles launched during the presentation, which is part of the Digital Summer Festival Geoff Keighley.


The Manhattan Beds are tailored using the finest colour coordinated designer fabrics.
The external cover can be unzipped and removed for machine washing in cold water.
The reversible cushion is also machine washable in cold water.


Everyone wants their home to feel like theirs. And, why shouldn't this be the case even if you are only renting? No, you can't knock down partition walls or remodel the kitchen. But there are still tons of ways that you can make the house more personal to you, and reflect your tastes and personality. Here are some of the rules, though, when decorating in a rental.
First things first, know that you've got to get written permission for any changes you make that include anything other than rearranging furniture. Second, know that you'll be spending your own money toward decorating. Your landlord isn't going to reimburse you. If you want to change the faucets, or cabinet knobs, ask the landlord. If t hey say O.K. then you've got the green light. But they aren't going to pay you back for those cabinet pulls. Landlords are also looking to save money, and they aren't going to spend it on new cabinet hardware.
This is the time to bring your your thrifty, DIY side. Don't feel like everything you have in your house has to be expensive in order to look expensive. You'll find that people with money love to mix expensive items with non-expensive items. Find a great second-hand furniture store; you'll be amazed at the pieces you'll find there. Go to garage sales to find books that you can use to fill your bookshelves.
Do be careful when you buy any upholstered furniture. Bugs live everywhere. You don't want to end up with someone else's bed bugs. If you buy upholstered furniture, you should buy it from a store. If you buy it on Craigslist, or at a garage sale, that's fine. But you need to re-upholster it. You never know who's been sitting on it.
Add accessories! Lighting fixtures (even lamps), area rugs, flowers, and brand new hardware can transform a home from dated, to trendy. If the apartment you've rented has old, accordion blinds, hide them with gorgeous curtains. Of course, if you remove any fixtures that are the landlords, keep them in a closet, or somewhere where you won't lose them. When you move out, you're going to have to put everything back the way it was when you rented it.
Do not use wallpaper. Yes, this one might upset you. But your landlord is likely not going to approve you wall-papering the house. Wallpaper is a very personal thing. People have strong personal preferences to wallpaper. Your landlord might find it hard to rent the apartment to someone else when you move out, depending on what wallpaper you've c hosen.
Never paint the baseboards, or any other wood in the home. If you've got a bare-wood fireplace and you want to paint it, don't. There are some things you've just got to accept about your rental. Most landlords are going to let you paint the walls, and almost any color that you'd like to. Sometimes they will require you to paint them back when you leave, but most of the time, not. Again, you'll be paying for this expense. The landlord doesn't care that you love green walls. If there's nothing wrong with the walls, they aren't going to put money toward fixing something that's not broken.
Lastly, embrace your apartment! Don't spend the whole lease wishing some aspect or other was different. Savor your renting days. They're great stories and memories for when you look back, when you own your home. You'll miss these days!
You can DEFINITELY decorate even if you live in a rental! I've painted walls, I've painted kitchen cabinets. I've done a million things. However, I've ALWAYS asked the landlord for permission. Some landlords were more lenient than others. It just depends on who you've got as a landlord. Some of them are very particular about their properties, so you'll be limited in some apartments.
Hi Erica! Great response 🙂 I once had a landlord that prohibited me from hanging any artwork. The only things that could be hung were small pictures that used only the tiny nails. And I mean really tiny! Some landlords are very restrictive.


Welding Technology — CTE: It's Working!
Time will be spent in the Welding Lab at MMCC. Students should have good oral and written communication skills, as well as the ability to work well with others. Students will spend their first semester focused on welding safety and an introduction to the welding field. Students will use Moodle as a learning management tool to access lecture materials while working hands-on in a laboratory setting.
When it comes to job prospects for the near future, it's simple: America needs welders. Employers in manufacturing and fabrication of many different varieties are looking for ambitious, knowledgeable welders, so if you enjoy making things, working with your hands, working with machines and taking pride in your work, consider this high-demand class the first spark of a bright future career.
Students will learn the art and technology of joining metals together with heat, using special equipment to perform different welding processes such as oxy-fuel cutting and brazing, gas metal arc and shielded metal arc welding. They will also learn to accurately fabricate a project, work from blueprints, repair broken parts, problem-solve a welding dilemma and use math and measurement skills to set up and lay out the parts used for the welding project. This is a welding course that applies many of the major processes used in major industries. From Day One, you'll be learning about safety. You'll be getting dirty. You'll be making sparks. Because this is a dual enrollment class with MMCC, it's a great opportunity to take advantage of the whole CTE experience. There are a ton of job opportunities in all 50 states for welding, meaning this is a career that has boundless opportunities in the job market, locally and nationally.
Students who successfully complete the coursework for the welding program are earning college credit toward a credential, certificate or degree from Mid Michigan Community College. The welding program pathway is designed so that students can ladder their education and begin earning credit toward a welding certification while a junior in high school.
Students may earn the state-required fourth-year math-related course credit through this program. Local high schools will award credit upon successful completion of this program. The CTE Certificate of Completion will be awarded to students who successfully complete their programs. In addition, students can earn college credits upon successful completion of their courses, ultimately leading toward a credential, certificate or degree.


Last week, we looked at data from the latest MG B2B Marketing Benchmark Report showing the undeniable relationship of a documented marketing strategy and plan and overall marketing success. So knowing that you need to have one is great, but where do you get started?
I have a stack of pristine, unopened Wall Street Journals sitting on the table in my office. Just yesterday someone asked why. It's simple really. I have no time to read in the morning as I'm waking up the house, getting breakfast and lunches ready, dogs fed, and kids out the door to school. So, as I roll out of the driveway at 6:45 am, I pick the paper up and bring it here to the office on the off chance that I get even five minutes during my day to scan the "What's News" column on the front page. It rarely happens, hence my beautiful pile.
Where Are Our Visionaries? Can You Become One?
This is the last of our five blog posts in a series discussing the implications of the Annual Global Utility Evolution Benchmarking Study.
Is the Digital Power Clock a Blinking Countdown?
This is the fourth of five blog posts in a series discussing the implications of the Annual Global Utility Evolution Benchmarking Study.
Oh snap. It's that morning moment we all dread. The clocks are blinking. The power went out and time's running out on getting the kids to the bus stop or making that morning meeting at work. No time to match socks today! For those of us who haven't made the "shift" to battery storage already via alarms set by smart phone, this is a scene that we all dread.
Here Comes the Sun. There goes the Utility?


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RUSSIAN MEDIA
RUSSIA'S HUMAN RESOURCES
SCENARIOS OF THE FUTURE
Central European Populists Haunted By Kremlin Links
by Ivan Preobrazhensky|Published 21.11.2018
A mysterious kidnapping in the Czech Republic and a Russian spy scandal in Austria are posing awkward questions for Russia-friendly populist governments in both countries.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis is on the brink of being forced to resign. The opposition and even his partners in the ruling coalition from the Social Democratic Party want him out. Babis is accused of ordering the kidnap of his own son, who reportedly ended up hidden in the annexed Crimea. At the same time, in neighboring Austria, the government has had to adjust its foreign policy towards Russia. The reason for this forced change is the identification of Russian spies in the Ministry of Defense and Intelligence of Austria.
Today's Czech and Austrian authorities are alike not only through their common past — that is, the long joint presence of the two countries within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Their present politics have a similar thrust. Both states are controlled by populist governments and parties. The Austrian People's Party is traditionally center-right, but under the leadership of current Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz, they have taken on a more populist complexion.
In its turn, the ANO (Yes) party of the Czech Prime Minister, billionaire Andrej Babis is a classic populist party with no clear ideology. But, like the Austrian People's Party, ANO is positioning itself as center-right, while in practice they are boosting welfare commitments and introducing new benefits — policies that were once the preserve of the center-left. The second thing that unites both parties is their negative attitude towards migration and the promulgation of a staunch anti-immigrant agenda as a major talking point.
It is significant that only three countries in the EU refused to sign the UN migration pact: Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, whose leader, permanent Prime Minister Viktor Orban, is sometimes called the only dictator within the European Union.
However, what's important for us here is the third theme that unites Austria and Czech Republic (as well as Hungary), that is the loyalty of their ruling parties towards Russia. Victor Orban's friendship with Moscow has long been quite evident. The current Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz spoke in favor of the abolition of EU anti-Russia sanctions when he was foreign minister and his partners in the ruling coalition, the far-right nationalist Austrian Freedom Party, signed a cooperation agreement with United Russia in 2016. Most recently, Vladimir Putin danced at the wedding of one of the leaders of this party, Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl.
As for the Czech Republic, the consensus view used to be that the truly pro-Russian politician in the country is President Milos Zeman, who is highly valued in the Kremlin. He spoke earlier for recognizing the annexation of Crimea if Russia pays compensation to Ukraine, and also consistently opposed European sanctions against Russian legal entities and individuals. Recently, he has been actively lobbying for a new tender for the completion of the Temelin nuclear power station, in which the Russian state company Rosatom has every chance of success.
However, the situation is changing with the latest scandal involving Andrej Babis, Jr. the son of the Prime Minister from his first marriage, who according to his own words was hidden in Russia and Crimea from Czech law enforcement agencies investigating the illegal receipt by his father's company of European subsidies for small business. The key point in this story is not only the possible abduction and concealment of Andrej Babis Jr. in Crimea, but also the participation in this operation of Peter Protopopov, husband of the psychiatrist Vita Protopopova, member of the Prime Minister's party and Babis Jr.'s doctor who diagnosed him with schizophrenia. At her request, Protopopov, who the media claims is a citizen of Russia, allegedly isolated the son of the head of the government somewhere in the annexed Crimea.
This allowed the Czech opposition to speak not only about the attempts of Andrej Babish Sr. to conceal a potential witness from the investigation and kidnap his own son, but also about the possible connections of the head of the Czech government with the Russian secret services. Without their knowledge, and perhaps even assistance, the Czech opposition press suggests, it would be impossible to hide a foreign citizen on the annexed territory, over which the increased control of Russian law enforcement and intelligence agencies is established.
"Russophobia" of democratic institutions
Thus, at once, two governments connected to Russia in Central Europe came under an unexpected blow and are experiencing serious reputational difficulties that could lead to their reformatting or even resignations. Of course, one can approach the problem in a conspiratorial manner, as does Babis, who speaks of a planned politically motivated attack on himself.
But in fact, it is a question of political institutions responding to the imbalance of a political system weighed down by populists. In Austria, it is the courts that fear pressure from the new authorities and are therefore supportive of the opposition; and the secret services, who were previously highly involved in preventing the activities of right-wing activists, have since come under pressure once some of these same activists joined the government.
Under pressure alongside these institutions are the national news media and president Alexander Van der Bellen, who, as a member of the Green Party, opposes the government of Sebastian Kurtz. The security services, responding to the government's attempt to mute the spy scandal, apparently provided information to the press; the president expressed concern and the courts were ready to support him and the security services. Thus the government had no choice but to cancel the visit of the minister of foreign affairs to Moscow and make loud statements about espionage. Otherwise, most likely, in the near future, we would have started talking about the resignation of the cabinet of ministers or its individual members. By the way, this possibility isn't gone entirely yet.
As for the Czech Republic, a different grouping has united here against the government of Babis. The president acts rather on the side of the Prime Minister, but the upper house of parliament, the Senate, is categorically against him. The ANO party lost the Senate elections in the fall of 2018, while the senators are well aware that Babis is in favor of liquidating the upper house of parliament altogether, calling its function of controlling the democratic processes in the country "redundant".
The Prime Minister controls the largest media company in the country and is known for his criticism of the press. The majority of the media that remain beyond his control have united against him. Finally, the majority of parliamentary parties have united against him; however they do not have the sufficient majority in the lower house of the national legislative assembly to dismiss the cabinet of ministers without the help of the Social Democrats, now in the government coalition. Some Social Democrats on the other hand have already started to demand the resignation, but not of the entire cabinet – only Babis, who, according to their proposal, should be replaced by someone from their party.
Thus, despite the fact that what is happening is a rather usual interparty struggle, behind it we can notice a rebellion of democratic institutions against a populist government that is restricting freedom of the press, intending to dissolve the Senate, increase the role of referendums and introduce direct elections for municipal leaders, threatening the constitutional order in the country.
Anti-migrant populist political regimes associated with Russia in Central Europe almost simultaneously face resistance from democratic institutions that protect both their corporate interests and, of course, democracy in their countries as a whole. Thus, it can be said that the scandals in the Czech Republic and Austria, paradoxically, are not a sign of the weakness of democracy in these countries, but, on the contrary, its rootedness and resilience — proof of the existence of political actors interested in its preservation and sufficiently influential to put pressure on the government.
Photo: BUNDESMINISTERIUM FÜR EUROPA, INTEGRATION UND ÄUSSERES
Russian-speaking Germans: Who are they?
Germans with a post-Soviet migration background are a diverse grouping who are poorly represented in German politics and scarcely understood by the national news media. This has led to some dangerous misconceptions over the last few years.
The First World Cyberwar
Why Russia won't lay down its arms, even if it wants to
German-Russian Relations After Merkel
How will Germany's relations with Russia change after Angela Merkel resigns from high-level politics?
How Russia Gets To Build Its Most Controversial Pipeline
EU disunity, support from key energy companies, and Trump's acquiescence will see Nord Stream 2 completed
Ivan Preobrazhensky
Political analyst, PhD of Political Sciences. «Moscow political club» coordinator, european observer for the independent news agency "Rosbalt" and Deutsche Welle columnist.
Russia - West sociology army protest human rights putin army modernization protests regions EEU oil gas elections propaganda USA
The Anti-Air Ambassadors
Why Russian television is tuned to conspiracy theories
In the Name of the Russian Federation!
The Politics of Chinese Loans in Russia
How Russia's Military Makes Its Own Headlines
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Millennials (Generation Y), or the generation of people now 18 to 34 years old, represent the consumer market of the future. U.S. Millennials already account for an estimated $1.3 trillion in direct annual spending.
Millennials engage with brands far more personally, thoroughly, and emotionally – and in very different ways – than have other generations.
Offer chat for customer services and sales to millennials.
Be present on social media, networking sites, especially Facebook and Twitter.
Incorporate video into your social media channels and website/blog.
How do you target the Generation Y?