andrew malcolm

From PA (I inserted some good stuff, I couldn’t help myself):

• Libya: “Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi remained at large Monday, and loyalist forces still held pockets of the city, stubbornly resisting the rebels’ efforts to establish full control, but there was little doubt that the Libyan leader’s four-decade grip on power was ending.”
• The Gaddafi regime is collapsing sooner than anticipated, forcing Western countries to scramble to put together post-conflict plans for Libya.
• Egyptian/Israeli tensions reach their highest point in three decades: “Diplomats scrambled to avert a crisis in relations between Egypt and Israel on Saturday, and the Israeli government issued a rare statement of regret for the killing of three Egyptian security officers by an Israeli warplane.”
• Iran: “Two American hikers imprisoned in Iran for more than two years have been convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years in jail, according to a news reports.”
• The world probably didn’t need an easier way to enrich uranium, but General Electric has developed a successful new laser-enrichment technique.

• President Richard M. Nixon started a radical program to control inflation on this date in 1971. Wage and price freeze. It sort of worked.
• The Keystone XL pipeline, which would “carry diluted bitumen — an acidic crude oil — from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to the Texas Gulf Coast,” is generating controversy.
• Juan Cole has an interesting item noting the “top 10 myths” about the war in Libya.
• A long-awaited memorial honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.opened to the public today, near the Washington Mall.
• Not suspicious at all: “The e-mail accounts of Rick Scott and most of the governor-elect’s transition team were deleted soon after he took office, potentially erasing public records that state law requires be kept.”
• Rick Perry wrote this very extremist book and now people are saying him about it. It seems that he doesn’t like or believe the ideas in the book which he wrote.
• This whole economy has me worried.
• Gas prices look like they are going to fall for the next several months. That’s good news.
• Something’s wrong with this picture: “[T]he total cost of tuition, room, and board at Amherst College, for instance, is $53,370 a year. Even relatively affluent people can’t easily manage to shell out $53,000 at one time. And so Amherst uses a company called Tuition Management Systems to help make tuition payments more affordable. But TMS charges a 2.99 percent fee for every credit charge transaction. That’s $1,595 a year.”

HP just killed the TouchPad and WebOS

• For those who believe that business always gets things right, I present to you HP’s touchpad. HP had the pad market and did little if anything with it for years. They bought Compaq and Palm several years ago and Compaq had those little devices that were almost useful. The iPad comes out of nowhere. Apple kicks everyone’s butt. HP retools. They rework the OS and present a flop. I don’t understand how you spend all of that time and effort and come out with garbage. Engadget said it best, “Oh, happy day, when one first receives a device that’s been eagerly anticipated for months. Sad, sad day when that device fails to live up to one’s expectations. We all wanted the TouchPad to really compete, to give us a compelling third party to join the iOS and Android boxes on the ballot. But, alas, this isn’t quite it.”