Although many of the performances were geared towards younger audiences—Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, and the Jonas Brothers belted out their signature songs—last night the Recording Academy doled out five Grammy awards to the critically-acclaimed collaboration between one-time Led Zeppelin lead singer Robert Plant and bluegrass chanteuse Alison Krauss. The duo claimed Record and Album of the Year for Raising Sand. Rapper Lil Wayne claimed four trophies for Tha Carter III and had a memorable New Orleans-inspired performance. Coldplay took home a Song of the Year trophy and two others for “Viva la Vida,” while British soul songstress Adele was heralded as Best New Artist. The show was overstuffed with 22 musical performances from U2, Jennifer Hudson, Katy Perry, and a very pregnant M.I.A., whose due date was last night.
Archive for February 9th, 2009
Grammy Winners!!!!
idiot!!!!
Jennifer Figge, a 56 year-old extreme athlete from Boulder Colorado, has become the first woman to swim the Atlantic Ocean, the Guardian reports. She swam the 2,000 miles from Cape Verde Islands to Trinidad over 24 days, although she only swam for 19 of those days due to rough seas. She made the journey inside a 19-foot by 14-foot cage to protect her from sharks, which she did not encounter during the trip. Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926, inspired Figge, who kept Ederle’s picture on board. Frenchman Benôit Lecomte holds the record for swimming 3,716 miles from Cape Cod to Brittany in 73 days in 1998.
Stimulus
resident Obama took the fight for his economic stimulus package to the American heartland today, traveling to Elkhart, Ind., for a town hall meeting in a city where unemployment has soared to 15.3 percent, twice the national average.
“The situation we face could not be more serious . . . ,” Obama told his audience in Elkhart, which has suffered as companies such as the Monaco Coach Corp. and Keystone RV Co. have cut their payrolls. “So we can no longer afford to wait and see and hope for the best. We can no longer posture and bicker and resort to the same failed ideas that got us into this mess in the first place — and that the American people rejected at the polls this past November.”
Obama’s proposal for a massive government spending program is headed for a crucial test vote in the Senate today, and the administration is hoping that an intensive push will help win approval in the upper chamber.
Following the town hall in Elkhart, the president this evening will have a prime-time news conference to urge leaders of the Senate and House to come to terms quickly on a final version of the stimulus plan.
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Officials at the U.S. Treasury, meanwhile, postponed until tomorrow plans to unveil a new rescue package for the financial industry, instead focusing their energy on lobbying for the broader stimulus proposal pending on Capitol Hill.
The Senate has scheduled a procedural vote late this afternoon on the stimulus package to determine whether a compromise struck this weekend, which removed about $100 billion in spending from the bill, will persuade enough Republicans to support the measure.
Even if senators approve the bill, which carries an $827 billion price tag, they face the daunting task of negotiating a final bill with the House, which passed its own version last week with far more spending proposals and fewer tax cuts. Democratic aides warned yesterday that it could be difficult to get the stimulus to the president’s desk by Congress’s self-imposed deadline of Friday.
The administration’s top economic officials said yesterday that, as negotiations on the stimulus bill progress, Obama is interested in restoring support for education and for cash-strapped state and local governments — measures that were stripped out in the Senate version of the plan.
To persuade enough moderate Republicans to vote for the measure, leaders also added tax credits for home and auto purchases, and provided relief from the alternative minimum tax.
Still, the administration downplayed differences between the House and Senate measures, saying it was critical that Congress act swiftly.
“The most important thing is to get this done for the sake of an economy that lost 600,000 jobs in one month,” Lawrence H. Summers, director of the National Economic Council, said yesterday on ABC’s “This Week.”
The plan has come under intense criticism from many Republicans, who have called it unfocused and wasteful. They also have complained that they have been locked out of the bill-writing process, despite Obama’s public efforts to reach out to Republicans.
“I know we’re in trouble. I know America needs a stimulus. We need tax cuts. We need to spend money on infrastructure and on other programs that will immediately put people to work. But this is not it,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“You need to get it right. You don’t want to spend these precious taxpayer dollars in the wrong way,” Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Christina D. Romer, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, warned that if a large stimulus plan were not enacted, it would have a “catastrophic” impact on the economy. “I feel very strongly it’s in our hands, that if we can get this package through, we can turn it around and be back on the road to growth,” Romer said on CBS.
“The center of this stimulus bill is massive, unaccountable government spending, and the American people are tired of it,” countered Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) on NBC.
Administration officials have emphasized that the economy needs both the stimulus package, which is aimed at creating millions of jobs and reviving consumer spending, and the financial system rescue plan, which is supposed to loosen the credit markets that provide the loans for homes, cars and businesses.
The rescue plan will lay out how the government intends to spend the second half of the $700 billion that Congress approved in October. It will attack the core issue facing banks: the toxic assets backed by failing mortgages and other loans that are weighing down their balance sheets and freezing up the lending markets. The administration will aim a one-two punch at this problem by insuring the losses on some of the bad assets while providing incentives for private investors to buy others, sources in contact with the administration said.
The rescue package is also expected to expand a Federal Reserve program to aid the trading of assets that finance the commercial real estate and residential mortgage markets. In addition, it will lay out a way for the government to invest in banks through bonds or preferred shares that could eventually give the government partial ownership if the banks don’t pay back the aid. Administration officials are expected to detail clear guidelines for how financial firms can get this money, as well as how the government will expand oversight.
But the administration is not as far along on the part of the rescue plan that would spend $50 billion to $100 billion to help homeowners and may reveal only the broad outlines of that tomorrow.
One idea being considered is to have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac set standards for how and when lenders should modify loans for homeowners facing foreclosure, according to two industry sources familiar with the matter. These sources cautioned, however, that the plan was highly fluid.
Washington post
