Thank dear old La Niña all you like for the more than tolerable mild weather that has blessed so much of the country this winter, but we prefer to give credit where credit is due -- to our beloved politicians. For the climate would not be anywhere near so congenial were they stricken with lockjaw and unable to vent their thermal logorrhea into the atmosphere. Just think if you will of the impact of the collective emissions within a few days of the president's State of the Union Address, the Fed chairman's spiel, Congress back in business after a brief interlude for fund raising and other patriotic activity and the never-ending blistering debates by the aspirants for the GOP nomination. If it weren't so hot in here we'd be shivering.

It took Mr. Obama more than his allotted hour to recount his charming fantasy of a nation on the mend through his heroic efforts from the horrors visited on it by, natch, his predecessor, who happened to be a Republican. And he also unfolded a glittering gift list he had worked up for the lucky citizenry in the new year, which just happened to coincide with a presidential election.

A very heated battle meriting notice are the clashes between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich as their platform shifted from South Carolina to Florida. Mr. Romney armed himself with a talk coach and struck a more pugnacious pose. He also opened his latest tax return to public scrutiny and it proved beyond cavil both that he's not in want, as he readily admits, and is filthy rich, as Mr. Gingrich graciously describes him.

As for Newt, he outdid himself by unveiling a lunartic plan to build an American colony on the moon within eight years once he gets past the preliminary nuisance of being elected president. Cynics were quick to seize on the fact that he made the announcement in Cocoa, Fla., in the heart of NASA country, where there's a heap of unhappiness because of layoffs from a much-reduced space program as evidence that the scheme was brazenly political.

But we think that's unfair. For one thing, Newt's indisputably spacey. For another, he's already promised the moon to the voters so there's no reason to doubt his desire to give them a colony on that celestial body as well.

The populace seemingly got a kick out of Barack Obama's shedding his trademark tempered demeanor and assuming a declaratory stance as he rattled off what he had done for the nation in his first term as president and how much more he was going to do in his second term. The dog fights between Mitt and Newt were a big hit on TV. For investors, though, what Ben Bernanke and his cohorts at the Fed Open Market Committee had to say may not have ranked very highly as entertainment but was deserving of their full attention.

For one thing, the Fed's take on the economy was a lot more measured than that of the cheering squads on the Street. (Fair to guess that Ben had an advance peek at the vaguely depressing GDP performance in last year's final quarter.) It dubbed the economy's growth as "modest," a notch down from its previous assessment of "moderate." And it was quite subdued in its forecast for the next few years and, accordingly, extended its intention to keep interest rates in the basement into the better part of 2014, or about a year longer than its blueprint had been calling for.

Moreover, both Ben at a press conference and the FOMC in its confab raised the possibility of trying to goose the economy with another round of quantitative easing. The betting is that will happen sometime before midyear, but in any case, it looks like a sure thing comfortably before Nov. 6.

THE STOCK MARKET LAST WEEK obviously had a lot to swallow and a goodly slice of it on the bitter side. It reacted by the Dow, which had been sailing along to new highs since last May, turning tail on Friday on its way to its first losing week of this still infant year. Why do we have a feeling it won't be the last? After all, we haven't even mentioned Greece's slippery path to avoid default and the severe headaches such a dire event would inflict on us as well as Europe.

In short, equities have been on a roll that somehow doesn't quite square with the surprising weakness in GDP. As the sharp-eyed Stephanie Pomboy, who runs Macro Mavens, exclaimed in a brief communiqué last week, "disappointing as the GDP headline turned out to be, the details were even worse."

She reports that fully 1.94 percentage points of the 2.8% GDP number came from an inventory build (just the kind of hefty involuntary rise, we might add, that often is followed by a contraction as companies trim their excessive stocks of goods). That means, Stephanie says, that real final sales were up a feeble 0.8%. And that figure benefited significantly from a big jump in auto purchases that all by itself chipped in 0.3 percentage point to GDP.

The GDP figures also pointed up an unwelcome softening in final demand, dragged down by less-ebullient consumer spending, which edged up a skimpy 2%. Kevin Logan of HSBC attributes that largely to the unyielding decline in government (federal, state and local) spending and prophecies more of the same this year and next. Of course, this is an election year when through hook or crook office holders tend to find a way to keep the dough coming.

Given the less than inspiring news from the business front and no shortage of uncertainties, what's the poor investor -- or the rich one, for that matter -- to do? Well, proceeding with all due caution or if impelled by an overpowering itch to bid, consider gold, now a tad above $1,700 an ounce and on its way to $2,000 before this year calls it quits.

FISHING FOR A BOTTOM is one of the more frustrating and dangerous exercises known to investing man. Inveterate market-bottom fishers can grudgingly confirm that homely little aperçu, but they're never noticeably perturbed, certainly not sufficiently to abandon the practice -- as witness their periodic rushes to scoop up the shares of home builders ever since the great housing bubble went poof three or four years ago, only to come up poorer if no wiser when the "recovery" that triggered the buying proves a mesmeric product of wishful thinking.

We've had more than one occasion of late to sound the tocsin on the folly of mistaking some stray and transitory freakish data for concrete evidence of a turn in housing. Investors who have done so cheerfully ignored cautions from the likes of Wells Fargo, which credited "abnormally warm and dry weather as well as year-end building-code changes" (both of which in our jaundiced view fall into the "extraordinary items" category) as most likely responsible for much of the recent apparent gains in starts and permits.

If only because some of our best friends hold mortgages that are deeply underwater (we tried to console them by sending them wetsuits for Christmas), it gives us no satisfaction to note that the latest tally by the Commerce Department validated our misgivings, and then some.

The report showed new-home sales in December weighed in at a miserable 307,000, some 7.32% fewer than the corresponding year-earlier month. Worse still, it put the finishing touch on a super-punk performance for 2011 as a whole, with the annual rate of new homes sold last year sinking to 302,000, a new low since 1963, when Uncle Sam's minions first began to crunch the numbers.

As that ace real-estate watcher Mark Hanson observes, one would expect that with mortgage rates at record lows, extraordinarily accommodating weather, distressed sales being, as he puts it, "actively metered" by the banks and home-builder sentiment spiking, December results would have been a heck of a lot better. Instead, Mark asserts, "net-net this market segment continues to worsen."

The low end of the price range, he points out, continues to be where the action is, "while anything over $300,000 [and here, if we may interject, exaggeration serves for emphasis] is dead." Moreover, the months ahead do not look very promising for the bulls on housing, since he envisions more distressed supply coming to market as foreclosure completions spiral up to a multi-year high by the end of this quarter.

Robert Campbell, who publishes "The Campbell Real Estate Timing Letter," and like Mark is savvy in the ways and wiles of the housing industry and has the record to prove it, is also in the bearish camp. Most particularly, he believes that home prices will plunge further this year, despite the lowest mortgage rates ever and the highest affordability levels in over two decades.

Housing prices, Bob contends, remain pressured by the pocketbook pinch on consumers burdened by weakening median income and heavy indebtedness, along with the formidable inventories of distressed properties that relentlessly batter the re-sale market.

He reckons inflation-adjusted home prices will have to drop another 10% to 15% before they stabilize. And he warns that even when they finally stop declining, prices are likely to bounce along the bottom for years before we see anything resembling a real bull market in housing. Investors, take heed.

Honestly, we don't mean to pick on the home builders. But no economic recovery within memory ever amounted to all that much with housing flat on its back. And we fear this one is destined at best to continue to labor along until that critical industry shows reliable signs of righting itself.

In a historic shift last week, the Federal Reserve removed all mystery about its plans for interest rates, declaring its intent to maintain the current "exceptionally low" target of near zero percent for the key federal-funds rate "at least through late 2014."

The surprising announcement of the extension of this policy—from a previously anticipated end date of mid-2013—came Wednesday after the two-day meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, which also brought forth new and lower projections for economic growth. The release (available at http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/fomcprojtabl20120125.pdf) also included its expected path for gross domestic product, unemployment and inflation.

In addition, the central bank provided charts of rate expectations of all 12 of the Fed district presidents, plus members of the Fed's board of governors, which currently has two vacancies among its seven spots. Their names were left off the numbers to provide the last cloak of secrecy.

WHAT'S APPARENT FROM THE TABLES and charts is that, while the Fed expects GDP to expand in 2012 to 2014 at rates above the longer-term tendency of 2.3%-2.6%, it will hold the fed-funds rate target near zero as long as unemployment remains well above its 5.2%-6% longer-run potential and while inflation remains at or below the 2% "central tendency." The FOMC expects the jobless rate to come down only grudgingly, from the current 8.5%, to 6.7%-7.6% by 2014. It also expects the personal consumption expenditure inflation measure to remain comfortably below 2% through 2012-2014.

Having literally run out of basis points on the short end of the debt market, the Fed has been trying to push down longer-term rates, indirectly and directly. It followed last year's declaration to keep the funds rate near zero through mid-2013 with its program to lengthen its holdings of Treasury securities and to reinvest its principal payments from its agency debt and mortgage-backed securities issued by federal agencies such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in agency MBS.

By extending its zero-rate target for fed funds through 2014, the Fed aims to alter expectations to induce more buying of longer-term securities.

The market didn't cooperate entirely, however. Intermediate-term Treasuries were the biggest beneficiaries of the FOMC's rate announcement, while long T-bonds barely budged. Meanwhile, the dollar fell while gold rallied strongly, suggesting the markets saw longer-term inflation risk—despite the Fed' s benign sub-2% inflation outlook.

THE BIG WINNER WAS THE FIVE-YEAR T-note, whose yield plunged to a record-low 0.75% Friday, down a hefty 14 basis points on the week. The benchmark 10-year note's yield slid 10 basis points, to 1.90%, but the 30-year bond ended unchanged at 3.07%. Among exchange-traded funds, the normally staid iShares Barclays 7-10 Year Treasury ETF (ticker: IEF) gained 1.2% last week, versus 0.7% from the usually volatile Pimco 25+ Year Zero Coupon US Treasury ETF (ZROZ).

The Fed's other aim is to narrow credit spreads, writes John Lonski, chief economist of Moody's Capital Markets Research Group. He posits that the central bank wants spreads of less than five percentage points for high-yield bonds and less than 125 basis points for high-grade issues. The market mostly complied, with the iShares iBoxx $Investment Grade Corporate ETF (LQD) gaining 1.5% on the week and the iShares iBoxx $High Yield Corporate ETF (HYG) adding 1.4% on the week. But while the investment-grade ETF rallied to a record-high price Friday, the junk ETF eased off its highs in tandem with the flat stock market. Investors are heeding the Fed's call to take more risk, but not too much more.  

Lunar Colonies, Lunacy and Losses

By CHARLES M. BLOW

Newt Gingrich is spaced-out. Literally.

Anyone who remembers him from his days as speaker of the House in the ’90s remembers how erratic, unpredictable and off-the-wall he could be, but, so far, this campaign season he has managed to conceal his many absurdities and eccentricities.

Furthermore, many Republican primary voters seem willing to forgive and forget his past. Others seem not even to remember it. He has been able to pass himself off as a wise elder statesman — a historian without a history — able to capture the anger and anxiety of the right and articulate it with force, lucidity and gravitas.

Oh, it is to laugh! That is if you’re on the left.

But for those on the right with firsthand knowledge of working with Gingrich when he was in Washington, this is a nightmare scenario. The outside possibility that Gingrich could win the nomination and wreck the party scares them to death. Their panic over this has reached a fever pitch.

And this is not without merit.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released this week found that Gingrich now enjoys a 9-point lead nationally among registered Republican likely primary voters. However, Gingrich fared worse than all other Republican candidates when tested against Obama. The poll suggested that Obama would trounce Gingrich by 18 points.

(Luckily for Mitt Romney, Gingrich’s surge in Florida may be fizzling. A Quinnipiac poll of likely Republican voters in that state found that Romney leads Gingrich by nine percentage points. If that holds, Romney and the establishment Republicans will have dodged a bullet like Neo in “The Matrix.” A Romney loss in Florida would call his candidacy into question and send the party scrambling for a more attractive replacement.)

One of the latest establishment Republicans to try to avert the Gingrich catastrophe is former Senator Bob Dole, who wrote a letter to the Romney campaign on Thursday saying: “I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich, but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late.” It only got better from there. Dole continued, “hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him, and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice.”

Dole’s concern in his statement, and the concern of countless others, is: “If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state and federal offices.”

As Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster, told MSNBC, “Gingrich is Goldwater.” He continued, “In the general election, Gingrich not only takes down his ship, he takes down the whole flotilla.”

Part of the reason for this is Gingrich is thoroughly unlikable among the electorate at large and utterly nonsensical in his approach to real problem-solving. The fact that he has convinced some primary voters that he is an intellectual is one of the best electoral sleights of hand I can recall. As Dole said of Newt when he was in Washington: “Gingrich had a new idea every minute, and most of them were off the wall.”

To that point, Gingrich told a crowd on Florida’s so-called Space Coast on Wednesday that “by the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the Moon. And it will be American.” And he said that he would push for the introduction of a “Northwest Ordinance for Space” so that when the number of colonists reached 13,000, they could petition for statehood.

(By the way, I find it interesting that Gingrich didn’t insist on answering the question about Puerto Rican statehood at Thursday’s debate, yet he’s advocating for a state on the Moon. Earth to Newt: phone home.)

In the speech, Gingrich implied that he was “bold” and “romantic” and called himself “visionary” and “grandiose” in the vein of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and the Wright brothers. Gingrich is a virtual supernova of megalomaniacal madness.

In a way, the space speech made sense. Gingrich was doing what he does: tossing out random ideas like darts at a board, hoping to score. He was repackaging the idea of Manifest Destiny for the Moon and appealing to an area of the country whose pride and purpose were wounded by the ending of the space shuttle program.

But, on the other hand, this is exactly the kind of election-year lunacy that establishment Republicans have been worrying about. Florida has one of the highest state unemployment rates in the country and has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. The last thing that people who can’t hold on to their jobs and houses here on Earth want to hear about is a colony on the Moon. The whole thing bespeaks a man detached from the real world concerns of real people.

As Dole’s statement went on to say, “In my opinion, if we want to avoid an Obama landslide in November, Republicans should nominate Governor Romney as our standard-bearer.”

The truth is that the Republican Party has no good choice at this point. It only has bad choices and worse choices. And the American public is beginning to recognize that. As the Republican courtiers of incompetence beat up each other, knock down each other and reveal each other’s flaws, a number of recent surveys have found that President Obama’s poll numbers on a number of metrics have begun to trend upward.

That’s because an election is a choice, a zero-sum game — the worse the Republican field looks, particularly if Gingrich is at the front of it, the better President Obama looks by comparison, regardless of one’s misgivings about his first term.

Establishment Republicans understand this simple, painful truth: Romney is no guarantee of victory, but Gingrich is an absolute guarantee of defeat. At least here on Earth.

Censoring of Tweets Sets Off #Outrage

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

SAN FRANCISCO — It started five years ago after a young engineer in San Francisco sketched out a quirky little Web tool for telling your friends what you were up to. It became a bullhorn for millions of people worldwide, especially vital in nations that tend to muzzle their own people.

But this week, in a sort of coming-of-age moment, Twitter announced that upon request, it would block certain messages in countries where they were deemed illegal. The move immediately prompted outcry, argument and even calls for a boycott from some users.

Twitter in turn sought to explain that this was the best way to comply with the laws of different countries. And the whole episode, swiftly amplified worldwide through Twitter itself, offered a telling glimpse into what happens when a scrappy Internet start-up tries to become a multinational business.

“Thank you for the #censorship, #twitter, with love from the governments of #Syria, #Bahrain, #Iran, #Turkey, #China, #Saudi and friends,” wrote Björn Nilsson, a user in Sweden.

Bianca Jagger asked, almost existentially, “How are we going to boycott #TWITTER?”

Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, took the other side. “I’m defending Twitter’s policy because it is the one I hope others adopt: transparent, minimally compliant w/ law, user-empowering,” she wrote.

Twitter, like other Internet companies, has always had to remove content that is illegal in one country or another, whether it is a copyright violation, child pornography or something else. What is different about Twitter’s announcement is that it plans to redact messages only in those countries where they are illegal, and only if the authorities there make a valid request.

So if someone posts a message that insults the monarchy of Thailand, which is punishable by a jail term, it will be blocked and unavailable to Twitter users in that country, but still visible elsewhere. What is more, Twitter users in Thailand will be put on notice that something was removed: A gray box will show up in its place, with a clear note: “Tweet withheld,” it will read. “This tweet from @username has been withheld in: Thailand.”

Think of it as the digital equivalent of a newspaper responding to old-fashioned government censorship with a blank front page.

“We have always had the obligation to remove illegal content. This is a way to keep it up in places where we can,” said Alex Macgillivray, general counsel at Twitter. “We have been working on this awhile. We needed to figure out how to deal with this as a company.”

The majority of Twitter’s 100 million users are overseas and it has several offices abroad working to expand its business and drum up local advertising. Twitter’s president, Jack Dorsey, said this week that it would open an office in Germany, which prohibits Nazi material online and offline.

The announcement signals the choice that a service like Twitter has to make about its own existence: Should it be more of a free-speech tool that can be used in defiance of governments, as happened during the Arab Spring protests, or a commercial venture that necessarily must obey the laws of the lands where it seeks to attract customers and eventually make money?

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and author of “The Master Switch,” said the changes could undermine the usefulness of Twitter in authoritarian countries.

“I don’t fault them for wanting to run a normal business,” he said. “It does suggest someone or something else needs to take Twitter’s place as a political tool.”

Professor Wu urged the company to use discretion: “Twitter needs to be careful not to be in a position where it’s no longer helpful to a rebellion against oppressive governments. It needs to remain its old self in some circumstances.”

Twitter’s policy of allowing its users to adopt pseudonyms made it particularly useful to many protest organizers in the Arab world, and its chief executive went so far as to call it “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

But Professor Wu wondered aloud if the new policy would have allowed Egyptians to organize protests using the service.

Twitter insists its new system is a way to promote greater transparency, not less. The company says it will not filter content before it is posted. It will not remove material that may be offensive, only that which it thinks is illegal. And it said it would also try to notify users whose posts had been withheld by sending them an e-mail with an explanation.

The company identifies the locations of its users by looking at the Internet Protocol addresses of their computers or phones. But it also allows users to manually set their location or choose “worldwide.” Essentially that is a way to circumvent the blocking system entirely. A user in Syria can simply change her location setting to “worldwide” and see everything.

Jillian C. York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, successfully tried this herself after Twitter announced its new approach. “Unfortunately it is a necessary evil when offering a service in certain countries,” Ms. York said of the new system.

Critics on Twitter surmised that the company had been pressed to adopt country-specific censorship after a major investment by a Saudi prince, a theory that Mr. Macgillivray quickly dismissed..

Facebook also handles requests to remove content that is illegal in certain countries, though it does not explain what it removes and for what reason. In its search results, Google signals what it is required to redact under a certain country’s law — and in the case of YouTube, a Google product, it can block content country by country.

Twitter has followed in Google’s footsteps in another respect. It has opted to post some of the removal requests it receives on Chilling Effects, a site jointly run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several American universities. Mr. Macgillivray was previously on the legal team at Google and, as a student at Harvard, he worked on Chilling Effects.

“We have always tried to let people talk and tweet. That has not been good for despots,” Mr. Macgillivray said in response to the criticism. “There is no change in policy. What this does is it strengthens, when we are legally required to, our ability to withhold something and to let people know it has been withheld.”

Still, not long after the announcement, there were calls for a silent protest on Saturday — and naturally, a hashtag to go with it.

“I’m joining the #TwitterBlackout & won’t tweet tomorrow,” wrote a user identified as Omar Johani. “Time to go back to getting news 12 hours after it happened.”

Close Ties to Goldman Enrich Romney’s Public and Private Lives

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE, PETER LATTMAN and KEVIN ROOSE

No More Nice Guys: Fans Love ‘Nuclear Newt’

By TRIP GABRIEL

MOUNT DORA, Fla. — Newt Gingrich is happy to talk about Reaganomics or his plan for an “environmental solutions agency” and almost any other issue under the sun, or moon for that matter. But that is not really what his supporters come to hear.

“I think it’s about time the Republican Party put somebody up not because it’s their turn,” said Carroll Jaskulski, 63, who works in real estate, “but somebody who will get in the opposition’s face.”

For better or worse, Mr. Gingrich’s candidacy revolves around his personality, as evidenced by the disappointed reviews after a debate on Thursday in which his fires were uncharacteristically banked.

Supporters say what they love is the bombastic, take-no-prisoners candidate, the man whose signature moments were debates last week in South Carolina when he turned his cold fury on the news media.

“I got up out of my couch when he did what he did in South Carolina,” said Stephanie Garlin, 49, a real estate agent in Fort Lauderdale, recalling a standing ovation for Mr. Gingrich. “There’s something I feel about that man — that he has the strength and the ability and the forcefulness to win this election.”

Across Florida this week, Mr. Gingrich’s rallies drew thousands of chanting, vociferous supporters eager to embrace his insurgency against what he calls the party establishment, promising to unite the Tea Party and the conservative base. And while he does not regularly live up to the caricature of “Nuclear Newt,” erratic and prone to temper tantrums, he is sufficiently unscripted and blunt to provide a sharp contrast to Mitt Romney’s caution.

“I love his outspokenness,” said Rhonda Douglas, 49, a waitress who attended a rally in Coral Springs, Fla. “I’m tired of this sugar-coating nice guy,” she said, referring to Mr. Romney but also to every politician who seems packaged and scripted. “They don’t mean anything they say.”

Mr. Gingrich was at the top of his game on Wednesday, speaking in Florida on a topic that later became easy fodder for ridicule: his vision of a lunar colony by “the end of my second term” as president. With trademark self importance, he compared himself to the Wright brothers and John F. Kennedy’s promising to land a man on the moon.

But he also gleefully turned back earlier criticism that he was given to “grandiosity” and would not be a steady leader. “I accept the charge; I am American, and Americans are instinctively grandiose,” he told hundreds in a hotel ballroom on the Space Coast. The crowd offered rapturous applause.

“What has galvanized people is that they are absolutely convinced that he will be Obama’s worst nightmare in a debate,” said Michael Goldrick, a co-chairman of the Gingrich campaign in Hillsborough County.

But there is a thin line in politics between appealing bluster and self-destructive ego, and the same qualities that appeal to his supporters are the ones opponents cite in concluding that he is too hot-headed and undisciplined to win the Republican nomination, beat President Obama and be an effective president.

“He occasionally has a good idea,” said John H. Sununu, a former New Hampshire governor and White House chief of staff who is backing Mitt Romney, “but if you’re dealing with the presidency, where important decisions count like nuclear exchanges, batting .500 is not a good percentage.”

Nothing these days drives Mr. Gingrich closer to apoplexy than the way the Republican establishment and conservative commentators have closed ranks to oppose him for fear that a Gingrich nomination will be a debacle for the party. The latest to join the stop-Gingrich brigade was Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, who urged Republicans to act “before it is too late.”

Mr. Gingrich’s outspokenness was on full display here, linking Mr. Romney to a Washington-Wall Street axis of money and power — he dropped the name “Goldman Sachs” several times — that is threatened by his populist appeal.

“They count on us being too stupid or too timid,” he thundered. “Of course, if I mention anything about them, the entire establishment jumps up and says, ‘That’s cheating! How can you tell the truth, don’t you know that’s politically incorrect?’ ”

“Remember, the Republican establishment is just as much an establishment as the Democratic establishment,” he said, “and they are just as determined to stop us.”

Afterward one voter, Ronnie Kimble, 66, a retired shipyard analyst, said Mr. Gingrich reminded him of Huey P. Long, the 1930s Louisiana governor who rose on fiery populist rhetoric and ultimately succumbed to corruption. “I’m really getting tired of hearing the Republicans fighting against Republicans,” he said.

Mr. Gingrich’s battle with Mr. Romney and the “establishment” is more than ideological; it is cultural and also personal. Mr. Gingrich rarely misses a chance to contrast his early years teaching at unpretentious West Georgia College with Mr. Romney’s and Mr. Obama’s Harvard graduate-school educations.

Despite earning $3.1 million last year, Mr. Gingrich, friends and close associates said, still identifies with his roots as an Army brat from Hummelstown, Pa., whose family once lived over a gas station. He sees Mr. Romney as born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

To Mr. Gingrich, both Wall Streeters and complacent party elders are part of the “elites” he wants to vanquish. He feels a lack of gratitude from the many leading Republicans who are backing Mr. Romney, even though Mr. Gingrich was the one who led the party to its first majority in the House in four decades.

“The way Newt looks at it, he helped these guys for many years,” said a top aide, adding that Mr. Gingrich felt betrayed that they were backing a candidate who once repudiated Ronald Reagan. “Newt is genuinely astonished, maybe a little bit hurt,” the aide said.

Even Rick Santorum, a onetime protégé of Mr. Gingrich’s who is now a rival for the nomination, has raised the attack on his personality, warning that if Mr. Gingrich were in the White House the country would worry “that something’s going to pop.”

But that may be closer to a caricature than reality. Although Mr. Gingrich can be withering in an argument, dialing up his speech to bombastic intensity, he never seems to lose his temper.

A heckler baited him through most of his speech at a rally in a parking lot on Wednesday, shouting at close range, “Newt, you worked for the people at Freddie Mac!” and “That’s what you say!” Others tried to shout her down. “Shut up, you moron!” one man yelled. Mr. Gingrich was unruffled. “Now, now,” he told supporters, “this is a free country, and people are allowed to come and be noisy.”

January 27, 2012, 3:03 pm/NYTIMES

Gingrich Unleashes Ad Attacking Romney

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

N.Y. Airports Account for Half of All Flight Delays

By JAD MOUAWAD

Delays are a fact of life at New York’s three main airports.

Each day, thousands of passengers are stuck on planes at the airports — Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark Liberty International — sitting in line behind a dozen other planes waiting to take off or circling overhead until they get clearance to land.

And the delays persist, despite changes in procedures and schedules by the airlines, airports and Federal Aviation Administration over the years. (In the latest move, the F.A.A. last fall created new flight paths out of Kennedy to speed up departures.) Even a significant drop in the number of flights since the economy slowed has not helped much. Flight delays last year in New York were as bad as they were five years ago.

In the first half of 2011, the region’s airspace — defined as the big three airports, plus Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, which caters to corporate jets, and Philadelphia International Airport — handled 12 percent of all domestic flights but accounted for nearly half of all delays in the nation. In the same period in 2005, they represented just a third of all delays, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

These delays ripple across the country. A third of all delays around the nation each year are caused, in some way, by the New York airports, according to the F.A.A. Or, as Paul McGraw, an operations expert with Airlines for America, the industry trade group, put it, “When New York sneezes, the rest of the national airspace catches a cold.”

Delays come from a variety of causes, including mechanical problems with planes, late crews, missing passengers or misplaced bags. In many cases — though the exact share is impossible to estimate precisely — weather plays a big role. Snow or fog can ground planes for hours in the winter, while summer storms frequently send airline schedules into disarray.

According to the Department of Transportation, a flight is considered on time if it leaves or arrives at its gate within 15 minutes of its schedule. But even that statistic can be misleading. To minimize late arrivals, airlines have long padded their schedules, counting flight times as longer than necessary. One study, by the Senate Joint Economic Committee, concluded that huge delays in 2007, which affected 320 million passengers, cost the economy $41 billion that year. That figure includes losses to the airlines, wasted time for passengers and the overall cost to the economy.

The New York area airports, of course, are not the only ones that suffer from chronic delays, but they are consistently ranked among the worst in the nation. According to the report by the G.A.O., 80 percent of all delayed flights late in 2009 happened at just seven airports — La Guardia, Kennedy, Newark, San Francisco, Atlanta, Philadelphia and O’Hare in Chicago.

At Kennedy, a quarter of all flights did not leave on time in the first 10 months of 2011, the latest period of data available, with delays averaging 67 minutes. That is up from 58 minutes in 2006. Similarly, in Newark, more than a quarter of all flights did not leave on time, and just 66 percent arrived on time, according to data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. That was the worst performance of all the major airports in the nation last year.

The region’s challenges are unique and daunting for air traffic managers. There are four airports within a 30-mile radius, heavy traffic and little room to build a new runway anywhere convenient. Complicating matters further, such proximity means that what happens at one airport has an effect on the operations of the other airports.

A change of winds at Kennedy, for instance, can affect what runway is used at La Guardia so that planes heading into either airport do not cross paths. In turn, that can affect how traffic is directed into Newark Liberty and Teterboro.

“You have to think about it as one giant airport,” said Robert Maruster, the chief operating officer of JetBlue Airways, one of the top operators at Kennedy Airport.

To address this chronic problem, which goes back decades, the F.A.A. has set up a system of quotas, called slots, at the New York airports that effectively limit airlines from scheduling more flights than airports can handle — a cause of widespread delays in previous years. As part of a decade-long redesign of the region’s airspace, the F.A.A. is also seeking to smooth traffic flows among the airports so that flights landing at Kennedy do not restrict departures at La Guardia. Last October, it introduced a new takeoff route out of Kennedy — which it calls the “J.F.K. wrap” — that takes planes headed west on a northern loop over Nassau and Westchester Counties before sending them onto the traditional highways in the sky that guide planes to cities like San Francisco or Denver.

The wrap, which avoids more congested airspace south of the airport, is meant to get flights out of the Kennedy airspace faster and reduce delays in the process. Airlines, however, are unenthusiastic because the route forces them on a slightly longer flight, which raises their fuel bill.

“Managing air traffic in and around New York is challenging because so many aircraft want to fly there and the airports are so close together,” David Grizzle, the F.A.A.’s air traffic chief operating officer, said in a statement.

Improvements have also been made on the ground. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the New York airports, recently expanded one of Kennedy’s four runways and added more taxiways so that airplanes can get on and off the runways faster.

It also set up a program that provides departing airplanes a more precise time frame to leave their gate so they can reduce their time on the taxiways, and cut delays before takeoff.

But after all that has been done to reduce delays, the biggest drop has been because of the airlines’ reductions in the number of scheduled flights since 2007. They have also switched from frequent flights with smaller planes to fewer flights on larger ones. Last year, 81 percent of the domestic flights departed on time, according to the Department of Transportation.

Some airports are building more runways to increase takeoff and landing capacity. In recent years, new runways have been built in Seattle, Charlotte, Chicago and at Dulles International in Washington. Philadelphia has planned an expansion that would add a fifth runway. That plan, however, is being challenged by US Airways, the airport’s biggest operator, which fears its investment in the project would be too high.

Chicago once had the worst airspace in the country. But after O’Hare completed a 3,000-foot extension of its busiest runway in 2008, the airport experienced the largest drop in delayed flights among the nation’s top airports. The new runway enabled O’Hare to accommodate 9 percent more flights than the previous summer, which meant 16 more hourly arrivals in optimal weather. In poor weather — the litmus test for any airport — O’Hare can land 84 planes an hour, compared with the 68 to 72 before the new runway.

On-time departures from O’Hare jumped to 77 percent in 2010 from 68 percent in 2008. The airport is building another runway, which it plans to complete by the end of 2013. It will be able to accommodate larger planes, and further cut congestion. Even so, the airport still ranks as having among the most delays in the nation.

One measure that could help is increasing the use of more precise navigation tools like GPS to fly more direct routes. Those procedures, part of a wholesale modernization of the nation’s airspace over the next decades, will eventually give air traffic controllers a much better picture of where airplanes are flying and allow them to fly closer together. According to the F.A.A., this technology will also allow the system to operate as smoothly in bad weather as in good. In New York, the F.A.A. is about to start testing new arrival and departure routes at both La Guardia and Kennedy that would require airlines to perform more precise landing routes.

“There is a lot of wasted space that has to be factored in because of safety,” said Susan M. Baer, the director of aviation at the Port Authority.

“Radar is not as precise as GPS. You can be in a cab in Manhattan with GPS and you are dealing with more sophisticated technology than is being used by the F.A.A.”

Pursuing iPhone Thief, Officer Knew Right Buttons to Push

By C. J. HUGHES

As crime-solving tools go, it may not have the same pedigree as, say, the oversize magnifying glass. But with apologies to Sherlock Holmes, an iPhone — specifically, the iPhone 4 — proved quite useful in helping police officers track down a robber on Thursday in Manhattan.

And at a pace that may shock any reader of a long-winded Victorian detective novel, it was all wrapped up within a half-hour.

The case involved the robbery of a similar iPhone from a handbag store. On Friday, the arresting officer, Robert Garland, shared details about how the low-level crime occurred, and how the high-tech arrest was made.

At about 7 p.m. on Thursday, a cashier at Tuci Italia, at 1393 Avenue of the Americas, near West 57th Street, was taking a break near the entrance of the shop and watching videos on YouTube, Officer Garland said, noting she was wearing headphones.

Then, a man came into the shop, pointed a gun at her, grabbed her iPhone and fled, she told the police.

When Officer Garland and Sgt. Richard Coan arrived, they found the woman crying, but Mr. Garland reassured her. “I told her when I walked in, ‘I’m going to find your iPhone,’ ” he said.

The ace up the sleeve of Officer Garland, an avid Apple consumer — he and his wife own iPhones, iPads and Macintosh computers — was something called “Find My iPhone,” a free 5.4-megabyte piece of software, or app, that he had on the iPhone in his pocket.

Punching in the victim’s Apple ID, which is the log-on people use to buy, say, songs from iTunes, he quickly determined by the location of a small gray phone icon on a digital map that the robber was near Eighth Avenue and 51st Street.

As Officer Garland and his partner drove there, the signal source shifted, closer to Eighth Avenue and 49th Street. There, a man later identified by the police as George Bradshaw, 40, of New Lots, Brooklyn, stepped outside a Food Emporium.

Officer Garland pushed the “Play Sound” button on his phone. Instantly, a pinging beep — not unlike the sound of a submarine’s sonar — began emitting from Mr. Bradshaw, 20 feet away.

As the officers closed in, joined by another pair, the pinging stopped. Had Mr. Bradshaw been an Apple aficionado, he might have known how to disable the iCloud setting, which could have stopped the trace.

Instead, Officer Garland said, the suspect left the phone unchanged, and the officer hit “play” again, prompting another round of pings. Mr. Bradshaw was caught red-handed, or more specifically, with the stolen iPhone in his right sock, Officer Garland said. The victim later identified him as the robber, and the phone was recovered.

“She was ecstatic,” Officer Garland said.

Mr. Bradshaw, already facing charges in a cellphone theft last month, was charged with robbery and possession of stolen property.

Played: 3 | Download | Duration: 00:05:26

http://www.reuters.com/video/2012/01/27/reuters-tv-wikipedia-co-founder-talks-victory-in-so?videoId=229239682&videoChannel=117849

Ron Paul and the pink slip that could decide the election

By Jack and Suzy Welch/Reuters

January 26, 2012

Have you ever woken up in the morning knowing you have to let someone go and just felt sick to your stomach? It’s the worst part of work, isn’t it? Even when it’s absolutely necessary — the money isn’t there or the employee hasn’t been contributing for ages — the emotional pain and mess of sending someone home is every good leader’s bête noire.

To make matters worse, letting someone go is, without doubt the moment when every leader is the most likely to screw up. Really screw up. Because when you fire a person the wrong way — that is, without generosity and respect — you can be sure of two things.

You’ve hurt someone unnecessarily.

And you’ve set up your organization for a future relationship from hell. After all, terminated employees don’t just fade away. They usually reappear, and pretty rapidly, as customers, suppliers, distributors, or in the worst-case scenario, competitors with an ax to grind.

By the way, this is a column about Ron Paul.

Yes, Ron Paul, and here’s why. The maxims of business and politics don’t always overlap, but when it comes to parting ways, they sure do. In business, firing someone incorrectly is a disaster that can haunt you for years. Same in politics.

Now, the GOP isn’t technically going to “fire” Dr. Paul. But look, even Ron Paul knows he’s not going to unpack his suitcases in the Lincoln Bedroom. At some point, his wildly entertaining, Don Quixote-like campaign for the White House is going to run out of time.

And then?

And then, GOP, watch out! Sure, it appears Paul is unlikely to mount a third-party campaign — he’s said so himself. But he’s also unlikely to spend the next few months out on the stump for the nominee, or even in dutiful silence. In fact, you can easily imagine Paul as an outspoken TV commentator from now until November, basically running without running just to keep his ideas in the mix.

But Paul is not really the GOP’s problem. It’s his followers, perhaps as much as 15 percent of the general electorate, many of them young, vocal and highly energized. Like Paul himself, they’re not exactly party regulars. No, Paul and his followers promise to be a lot like that fired employee who, if “handled” incorrectly at farewell, will make it his life’s work to, if not bring your organization down, at least show you how very wrong you were to cut the cord.

The Republican Party would be flat-out careless to let that happen. Dr. Paul’s exit isn’t exactly going to be unexpected. Plus, the GOP leadership has an excellent example of how to correctly part ways right under its nose — in President Obama’s masterful handling in 2008 of Hillary Clinton, a bitter opponent right to the end, and Joe Biden, an early loser in the Democratic primary race. Both of these “terminated” rivals, along with Bill Clinton and his minions, could have easily spent Obama’s general-election campaign and his first term engaged in subterfuge, natter-nattering to the media about the Newbie-in-Chief’s every little misstep. Instead, Hillary Clinton was given a big job and a big jet and the opportunity to become the most popular woman in America. And rather than being trundled back to his commuter seat on the Amtrak to Delaware, the gaffe-ridden Biden was anointed vice-president and given the not-insignificant job of humanizing the more aloof Obama, a role he clearly relishes.

And so it must be with the RNC and Ron Paul. There can be no brush-off. No “Phew, he’s gone. Now let’s get down to business.” No booby prize. Ron Paul needs to be given a role that really means something to him –- a role with influence and voice.

The details of this role are not for us to identify — they can only emerge from the kind of good-faith negotiations that party officials should initiate soon with the candidate. All we can say is, in this kind of setting, as in the best-practice business parting, the “victor” must err on the side of bigheartedness and dignity. Whatever speaking role Dr. Paul wants at the convention, give it to him. If he wants some sort of advisory role in the new administration, the answer is: “Of course.” Like a business leader designing a severance package with a key player, the GOP leadership’s mindset must be: “When he walks out that door, Ron Paul is going to be a friend for life.”

Because if he isn’t, Ron Paul and his followers will make their unhappiness known. And for the mishandling of this defining moment, the GOP will deserve their ire.

Just like any leader who botches goodbye.

PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate U.S .Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) makes a point during the Republican presidential candidates debate in Jacksonville, Florida January 26, 2012. REUTERS/Scott Audette

January 27, 2012, 2:39 pm/NYTIMES

Twitter’s New Policy on Blocking Posts Is Attacked, and Defended

By J. DAVID GOODMAN