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Senior Democratic officials are expressing serious concerns about the political risks posed by Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High tonight.

From the elaborate stagecraft to the teeming crowd of 80,000 cheering partisans, from the vagaries of the weather to the unpredictable audience reaction, the optics surrounding the stadium event have heightened worries that the Obama campaign is engaging in a high-risk endeavor in an uncontrollable environment.

A common concern: that the stadium appearance plays against Obama’s convention goal of lowering his star wattage and connecting with average Americans and gives Republicans a chance to drive home their message that the Democratic nominee is a narcissistic celebrity candidate.

"We already know he is a rock star; we already know he can bring 85,000 people together in a stadium. He has done it multiple times. He needs to talk to people who haven’t made up their minds yet," said Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen.

"It’s likely that the campaign would do it differently if it had to do it again because the decision was made before the European trip," said a senior Democratic elected officeholder who has worked closely with the Obama campaign.

The GOP narrative of Obama as celebrity took root during that trip, where the Illinois senator played to large crowds of adoring Europeans.

Obama campaign officials acknowledged the apprehension Wednesday.

"I have heard some of the concerns and criticism that it’s such a big venue," said a senior Obama campaign aide. "It’s no surprise that people could be a little nervous. We’re trying to do something new."

SAN FRANCISCO - The Olympic torch was rerouted away from thousands of demonstrators and spectators who crowded the city’s waterfront Wednesday to witness the flame’s symbolic journey to the Beijing Games.

The planned closing ceremony at the San Francisco Bay waterfront was canceled and another one was planned at San Francisco International Airport. Massive crowds had gathered at the waterfront to support and protest the flame.

The last-minute changes were made amid security concerns following chaotic protests over the torch in Paris and London.

Mayor Gavin Newsom told The Associated Press that the well choreographed fake-out was prompted by the size and behavior of the crowds amassing outside AT&T Park, site of the relay’s opening ceremony.

There was "a disproportionate concentration of people in and around the start of the relay," he said in a phone interview, while traveling in a caravan that accompanied the torch.

Less than an hour before the relay began, officials cut the original six-mile route nearly in half.

Then, at the opening ceremony, the first torchbearer took the flame from a lantern brought to the stage and held it aloft before running into a warehouse. A motorcycle escort departed, but the torchbearer was nowhere in sight.

Officials drove the Olympic torch about a mile inland and handed it off to two runners away from protesters and media, and they began jogging toward the Golden Gate Bridge, in the opposite direction of the crowds awaiting its passing. Further confusion followed, with the torch convoy apparently stopped near the bridge before heading southward to the airport, where a closing ceremony on the tarmac was planned.

As the flame traveled toward the airport, news slowly dribbled through the crowds of more than 10,000 spectators and protesters gathered at the waterfront that the torch would not be headed there.

Spectator Dave Dummer said he was disappointed.

"That upsets me," Dummer said. "My back hurts from standing around on this lumpy sidewalk. … This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and other people messed it up by protesting."

There were signs of tension even before the torch relay began. Pro-Tibet and pro-China groups were given side-by-side permits to demonstrate, and representatives from both sides spilled from their sanctioned sites across a major street and shouted at each other nose to nose, with no visible police presence to separate them.

At least one torchbearer decided to show her support for Tibetan independence during her moment in the spotlight. After being passed the Olympic flame, Majora Carter pulled out a small Tibetan flag that she had hidden in her shirt sleeve.

"The Chinese security and cops were on me like white on rice, it was no joke," said Carter, 41, who runs a nonprofit organization in New York. "They pulled me out of the race, and then San Francisco police officers pushed me back into the crowd on the side of the street."

Farther along the planned route, about 200 Chinese college students mobbed a car carrying two people waving Tibetan flags in front of the city’s Pier 39 tourist destination. The students, who arrived by bus from the University of California, Davis, banged drums and chanted "Go Olympics" in Chinese.

"I’m proud to be Chinese and I’m outraged because there are so many people who are so ignorant they don’t know Tibet is part of China," Yi Che said. "It was and is and will forever be part of China."

The torch’s 85,000-mile, 20-nation global journey is the longest in Olympic history, and is meant to build excitement for the Beijing Games. But it has also been targeted by activists angered over China’s human rights record.

Hundreds of pro-China and pro-Tibet demonstrators blew whistles and waved flags as they faced off near the site of the relay’s opening ceremony. Police struggled to keep the groups apart. At least one protester was detained, and officers blocked public access to bridge leading to the ceremony site across McCovey Cove from the ballpark.

One of the runners who planned to carry the torch dropped out earlier this week because of safety concerns, officials said. The torchbearers competed not only with people protesting China’s grip on Tibet, but its support for the governments of Myanmar and Sudan.

Local officials say they support the diversity of viewpoints, but tightened security following chaotic protests during the torch’s stops in London and Paris and a demonstration Monday in which activists hung banners from the Golden Gate bridge.

Vans were deployed to haul away arrested protesters, and the FAA restricted flights over the city to media helicopters, medical emergency carriers and law enforcement aircraft. Law enforcement agencies erected metal barricades and readied running shoes, bicycles and motorcycles for officers preparing to shadow the runners.

Peter Ueberroth, chairman of the United States Olympic Committee, said the U.S. had struck the right balance between preserving freedom of speech for protesters, providing an exhilarating experience for the torchbearers, and preventing a repeat of the chaotic demonstrations that accompanied the torch in London and Paris.

"As close as anybody can do in a free society, so far its looking very good," Ueberroth said. "Virtually anybody and everybody is being heard."

The Olympic flame began its worldwide trek from Ancient Olympia in Greece to Beijing on March 24, and was the focus of protests right from the start.

Although torchbearers in other cities have complained of aggressive behavior by paramilitary police in blue track suits sent by Beijing to guard the Olympic flame, there was no evidence of problems in California.

San Francisco was chosen to host the relay in part because of its large Chinese-American population.

IOC president Jacques Rogge met with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Wednesday to discuss preparations for the games, and "a range of games topics were discussed," the IOC said.

Rogge is to give more details at a news conference Friday, when the IOC’s executive board is to discuss Friday whether to end the remaining international legs of the relay after San Francisco because of widespread protest. The torch is scheduled to travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and then to a dozen other countries before arriving in China on May 4. The Olympics begin Aug. 8.

Rogge has refrained from criticizing China, saying he prefers to engage in "silent diplomacy" with the Chinese.

In an interview broadcast Wednesday on the VRT television network in his native Belgium, Rogge warned that pushing China too hard on Tibet and human rights would be counterproductive.

"If you know China, you know that mounting the barricades and using tough language will have the opposite effect," he said. "China will close itself off from the rest of the world, which, don’t forget it, it has done for some 2,000 years."

Carlsbad, CA (PRWEB) October 28, 2007 — Although 2007 saw little change in the federal income tax, TaxAttorneyHelp.com wants to prepare taxpayers for some upcoming changes. There will most likely be changes in the 2008 tax law regarding the so-called "kiddie law," higher standards for enforcement and continuing education for tax preparers. Congress is also discussing changes to the alternative minimum tax.

What many people refer to as the "kiddie law" involves parents of children with more than $1,700 in investment income. Under the current law, children under the age of 18 have their investment income taxed at the same rate as their parents, but their earned income is exempt from the tax. This is intended to keep parents from taking advantage of lower income tax on minors. Under the new law, dependents under 19 and dependent full-time students under 24 will be included, although children who provide more than half of their own support will be exempt.

The Tax Attorney Help lawyers, found online at www.taxattorneyhelp.com, also want to let people know about some new enforcement issues Congress has passed for the 2008 tax year. Paid tax preparers must now have reasonable belief that the positions they’ve taken on tax returns will more than likely hold up if challenged by the IRS, whereas the previous standard was a one-in-three likelihood of the position being correct.

It is also likely that Congress will pass a law going into affect in 2008 that will require tax preparers to obtain certification and to take continuing education classes. Congress is currently discussing some changes to the alternative minimum tax, as well. This law is enforceable for taxpayers who take so many write-offs that they pay little or no tax, but it has not been indexed for inflation. There are discussions of a sweeping tax bill to fix the alternative minimum tax permanently, rather than covering the problems associated with it with temporary provisions as was done in the past.

 By Michael J. Gill

 

"Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves."

It was a phrase so familiar to Andrew Carnegie during his childhood in Dunfermline, Scotland, that when asked to recite a proverb in school one day, those were the first words that came to mind.

They would become a blueprint for his rise from an impoverished childhood to railroad company executive, steel company mogul, and, eventually, the richest man in the world.

In his rise to power, Carnegie would preside over one of the darker chapters in American labor history. Later, the image would shift to that of great philanthropist, endowing libraries and concert halls for generations to come, giving away 350 million dollars in his lifetime.

His story is told in The Richest Man in the World, a two-hour documentary airing in January. It examines the life of Carnegie against the backdrop of the industrial revolution and the upheaval that transformed both Carnegie and the world he lived in.

For those who remembered him for the horrors of the industries he owned, there were others who remembered him for his largesse. And for every worker who considered him a villain, there was a mother who wanted her son to grow up to be just like Andrew Carnegie.

Born in 1835, Carnegie experienced a life of poignant contrasts. He was twelve when new steam-powered looms arrived in his hometown. The looms, which could mass-produce fabric at a cost far below that of the handworkers like his father, drove the family into poverty. Carnegie’s mother mended shoes to feed and clothe the family. The Carnegies looked for escape to America.

Young Andrew became a stoker in a Pittsburgh textile factory at age thirteen, then a telegraph messenger; by age seventeen he was making the princely sum of thirty-five dollars a month as assistant to a superintendent on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

When there was a train wreck while his boss was away, Carnegie assumed command, wrote orders, and signed them with his superior’s initials. Althought the boss scowled at first, he was actually pleased with the lad’s showing initiative, and with that, Carnegie began to implement his ideas even more freely, climbing the company ladder by cutting costs.

He pioneered the practice of burning derailed train cars rather than salvaging them; it cleared the tracks more quickly and soon became common practice. He pushed for bigger cars, more powerful locomotives, longer trains, and bigger loads. He foresaw the need to replace wooden bridges with iron bridges to carry the heavier trains; so he formed a company to build them.

By 1881 he was wealthy enough to return with his widowed mother in triumph to Dunfermline, riding through the streets in a showy coach.

But Carnegie found life less than complete. He vowed to work only two more years and then begin to give his wealth away. It was to take much longer, however. A newly developed process for making steel caught Carnegie’s eye and would keep him building his fortune over the next thirty-two years.

The Bessemer process, Carnegie realized, meant that steel could be mass-produced. The age of iron was over, and the puddlers who had formed steel by hand were about to become as obsolete as his own father had.

The film follows Carnegie through his introduction of large- scale steel production and through the notorious Homestead strike, which left seven strikers and three company-hired Pinkerton guards dead, and left the steel workers largely unorganized for the next forty years.

Carnegie retreated to the Scottish highlands, eventually purchasing a castle called Skibo. Meanwhile, his plants thrived. By 1900 his American factories were producing more steel than all of Great Britain.

When Wall Street financier J.P. Morgan began mounting competition for Carnegie, Carnegie felt he could prevail. The question was whether he wanted to. At sixty-five, Carnegie wanted to start to make good on his promise to give his fortune away. In 1901, he sold his steel company to Morgan for 480 million dollars, clearing the way for Morgan to create U.S. Steel and making Andrew Carnegie the richest man in the world.

With that sale, the second phase of Carnegie’s life began– that of philanthropist. A man who dies rich, Carnegie said, dies in shame. He gave money to build thousands of libraries across the United States. He provided private pensions for numbers of people, ranging from unknown boyhood friends to celebrities such as Rudyard Kipling and Booker T. Washington. He endowed the Carnegie Teachers Pension Fund with $10 million.

Still, his fortune kept growing. In 1911, with $125 million, he established the Carnegie Corporation "to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge among the people of the United States." On his seventy-fifth birthday in 1910, he gave $10 million to create the Carnegie Endowment "to hasten the abolition of war." His dream of peace was to be shattered, however; in a few short years World War I broke out. Carnegie lived to see the war’s end. He died in 1919 at the age of eighty-three.

The film, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, opens the ninth season for WGBH-Boston and The American Experience series.

WGBH executive producer Austin Hoyt, who wrote and directed the Carnegie documentary, says: "Having done the presidential portraits, we chose to do this one because between the Civil War up until Roosevelt, the important people were not presidents but industrial statesmen, or the robber barons, depending on your perspective."

To capture the flavor of the industrial revolution, the film uses both stills and contemporary footage to give movement to events that occurred before the age of video. At one point, for instance, as the documentary describes Carnegie’s introduction to the Bessemer process, the footage is of a present-day Bessemer mill in Russia.

"When you’re portraying history," senior producer Margaret Drain adds, "you also have to give people context. "Otherwise, people don’t have anything to refer to. People wouldn’t know that before Carnegie there weren’t machines to do most work. Or if you’re describing the building of the transcontinental railroad, you have to make it clear that the rails were laid by hand without jackhammers. The closer you get to our time, the less you have to explain."

With few photographs available, filmmakers of historical documentaries face a particular challenge. "You have to piece together in a very artful way little snippets of archival film," Drain says. "We also use old photographs which, oddly enough, are very evocative." She adds, "A camera moving over a still photo is actually preferable to film. Stills are evocative. The old portraits capture every emotional wave."

 

Michael J. Gill is a freelance writer from North Olmsted, Ohio.

The Richest Man in the World is to air January 20 on public television. It received major support from the Division of Public Programs.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo Inc.’s board will reject Microsoft Corp.’s $44.6 billion takeover bid after concluding the unsolicited offer undervalues the slumping Internet pioneer, a person familiar with the situation said Saturday.

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The decision could provoke a showdown between two of the world’s most prominent technology companies with Internet search leader Google Inc. looming in the background. Leery of Microsoft expanding its turf on the Internet, Google already has offered to help Yahoo avert a takeover and urged antitrust regulators to take a hard look at the proposed deal.

If the world’s largest software maker wants Yahoo badly enough, Microsoft could try to override Yahoo’s board by taking its offer — originally valued at $31 per share — directly to the shareholders. Pursuing that risky route probably will require Microsoft to attempt to oust Yahoo’s current 10-member board.

Alternatively, Microsoft could sweeten its bid. Many analysts believe Microsoft is prepared to offer as much as $35 per share for Yahoo, which still boasts one of the Internet’s largest audiences and most powerful advertising vehicles despite a prolonged slump that has hammered its stock.

Yahoo’s board reached the decision after exploring a wide variety of alternatives during the past week, according to the person who spoke to The Associated Press. The person didn’t want to be identified because the reasons for Yahoo’s rebuff won’t be officially spelled out until Monday morning.

Microsoft and Yahoo declined to comment Saturday on the decision, first reported by The Wall Street Journal on its Web site.

Yahoo’s board concluded Microsoft’s offer is inadequate even though the company couldn’t find any other potential bidders willing to offer a higher price.

Without other suitors on the horizon, Yahoo has had little choice but to turn a cold shoulder toward Microsoft if the board hopes to fulfill its responsibility to fetch the highest price possible for the company, said technology investment banker Ken Marlin.

"You would expect Yahoo’s board to reject Microsoft at first," Marlin said. "If they didn’t, they would be accused of malfeasance."

But by spurning Microsoft, Yahoo risks further alienating shareholders already upset about management missteps that have led to five consecutive quarters of declining profits.

The downturn caused Yahoo’s stock price to plummet by more than 40 percent, erasing about $20 billion in shareholder wealth, in the three months leading up to Microsoft’s bid.

Seizing on an opportunity to expand its clout on the Internet, Microsoft dangled a takeover offer that was 62 percent above Yahoo’s stock price of just $19.18 when the bid was announced Feb. 1. Yahoo shares ended the past week at $29.20.

Led by company co-founder and board member Jerry Yang, Yahoo now will be under intense pressure to lay out a strategy that will prevent its stock price from collapsing again. What’s more, Yang and the rest of the management team must convince Wall Street that they can boost Yahoo’s market value beyond Microsoft’s offer.

Yahoo’s shares traded at $31 as recently as November, but have eroded steadily amid concerns about the slowing economy and frustration with the slow pace of a turnaround that Yang promised last June when he replaced former movie studio mogul Terry Semel as Yahoo’s chief executive officer.

This isn’t the first time that Yahoo has spurned Microsoft. The Redmond, Wash.-based company offered $40 per share to buy Yahoo a year ago only to be shooed away by Semel, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person didn’t want to be identified because that bid was never made public.

Yahoo now may want that Microsoft to raise its price to at least $40 per share again. That would force Microsoft to raise its current offer by about $12 billion — a high price that might alarm its own shareholders.

Microsoft’s stock price already has slid 12 percent since the company announced its Yahoo bid, reflecting concerns about the deal bogging down amid potential management distractions, sagging employee morale and other headaches that frequently arise when two big companies are combined.

Although it isn’t involved directly in the deal, Google is the main reason Yahoo is being pursued by Microsoft.

Yahoo has struggled largely because it hasn’t been able to target online ads as effectively as Google.

Microsoft believes Yahoo’s brand, engineers, audience and services will provide the company with valuable weapons in its so far unsuccessful attempt to narrow Google’s huge lead in the lucrative Internet search and advertising markets.

As it examined ways to thwart Microsoft, Yahoo considered an advertising partnership with Google — an alliance long favored by analysts who believe it would boost the profits of both companies. It was unclear Saturday if Yahoo’s plans for boosting its stock price include a Google partnership, which would probably face antitrust issues.

A Microsoft takeover of Yahoo would also be scrutinized by antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe. The antitrust uncertainties could be cited as one of the reasons that Yahoo’s board decided to spurn Microsoft.

Yahoo: http://info.yahoo.com/

Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com