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Analysis: JFK's words in today's troubled times

WASHINGTON – Fifty years after John F. Kennedy summoned Americans to a new generation of leadership and patriotism, one thing is clear: This is no age of Camelot.

Were it uttered by a modern politician, Kennedy's famous "ask not" call to service might well be derided as a socialist pitch for more government. His idyllic clamoring for a united world to "explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths" could easily be dismissed by cynics as dreamy and lacking specifics.

Today's United States is a polarized land. But looking in on the country this week, exactly a half-century since Kennedy delivered perhaps the most famous inaugural address in American history, it's hard to keep from wondering: In the much-changed politics of 2011, which of his carefully crafted words still resonate?

"Unfortunately, in today's environment, speeches are more likely to say, `Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what you can do for your party,'" says Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to both Republicans and Democrats who recently helped establish the nonpartisan organization No Labels.

The 14-minute inaugural's Cold War-era content, shaped by a World War II veteran for a country on the brink of cultural upheaval, is certainly outdated. Here and most everywhere else, the political environment has changed.

Yet some of the most memorable imagery in Kennedy's story line — a torch being passed to a new generation, the trumpet summoning us again — remains potent in a nation searching for renewed purpose and vision.

A Knights of Columbus-Marist survey released Wednesday found people overwhelmingly saying that the dominant ideals Kennedy outlined — among them service and freedom — remain a focus of American citizens so many years later.

As do many of the fears and trepidations.

Americans still worry about their country's stature. Many still believe their nation was meant for something bigger. They still seek a road map to the future, fractured though their solutions may be.

"Kennedy was trying to write words for the ages," says Richard Tofel, author of "Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address." "Idealism and optimism are not always in style, but they continue to stand out and they continue to have real power."

The speech, Tofel argues, still resonates partly because of Kennedy's belief in "a deep commitment to the nobility of public service."

Is that a tough sell today, though? Economic recovery is sluggish, unemployment high. The country is fighting two wars and politicalamps are deeply, sometimes angrily divided. Confidence in political leaders to solve the nation's woes has ebbed. And change is coming ever more quickly in a nation again facing threats to its global dominance.

"It was just such a different time and a different audience with a different view on government," says Thurston Clarke, author of "Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America." "It could not be delivered now, given the way government is viewed."

There were several key differences back then:

_The threats were different. In Cold War 1961, the main concern was the Soviets. Now, it's terrorism from extremists who are scattered across countries and often owe allegiance to none. Also looming: the economic rise of China, India and other emerging powerhouses.

_Cynicism wasn't as overt. Mistrust didn't pervade America's politics to today's extent, in part because would-be complainers — and activists — lacked a readily available way to amplify their voices. Not everyone had a printing press or access to TV or radio. Now, technological advances give a megaphone to anyone with Wi-Fi.

_Less polarization. Popular politicians were more center-right, like Richard Nixon, and center-left, like Kennedy. Now, the far right and left dominate the public discourse, and the middle of the spectrum is more muted.

_Views on government. The Great Depression, World War II and the Interstate Highway System helped build the perception of government as a positive force. Now, after years of partisan gridlock, conservatives and many independents have soured on Washington and see federal expansion under President Barack Obama as a problem, not a solution.

"It was almost a naive confidence at that time that if the government set their mind to it, they can succeed," says John Murphy, a rhetoric expert at the University of Illinois who is writing a book about Kennedy's presidential speeches.

Now, he says, "people are hopeful, but they're also dubious about how government can solve all these problems."

Consider the evidence.

It's in the words of the millions of Americans who fret about a sickly economy and foreign competition. It's in the divided government that voters installed in November, forcing Obama to reach across the aisle for solutions to the nation's biggest problems.

It's in the debate over civility in the American political discourse. It is visible in how Americans of all political stripes, after the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, praised Obama's call for a more civil, honest dialogue.

Said Obama, "I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us."

The era in which Kennedy delivered his inaugural address has receded. R. Sargent Shriver, the president's brother-in-law and a lion in his own right, died Tuesday. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy's counselor and speechwriter, died last fall. The final brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, is gone, and the family is absent from Congress for the first time since 1946.

Just two years ago, Obama began his presidency with support across the political spectrum and frequent comparisons to Kennedy — both for his eloquence and his vision of an exceptional America.

Next week, Obama faces one of his administration's landmark speeches — a State of the Union address halfway through his first term. Will he try to answer the questions that have haunted generations of Americans trying to understand the nation's place in the world? Will he punch through the static and come through with something memorable?

Fifty years after Kennedy's words, in the cacophony of the 21st century, can a single speech still make a difference?

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EDITOR'S NOTE — Liz Sidoti has covered national politics for The Associated Press since 2003.

FoodPolitik: Hypocrite Bloomberg behind latest salty Big Apple campaign

By now we’ve all heard about San Francisco’s Election Day decision to ban Happy Meals. And amid the usual ridicule, the line “only in San Francisco” no doubt emerged as the city once again shredded its credibilityљby embracing namby-pamby politics.

So here’s my question: Is New York City challenging San Francisco as the capital of Nannyland?

This week the city’s health department announced the release of a new ad campaign targeting a single ingredient: salt. Yes, that’s right, the city thinks the savory stuff is so bad that they’re spending six-figures to warn residents about this dreaded ingredient that has been essential to cooking for centuries.

The ad features a can of soup with mounds of salt pouring out from it. Really? So soup is now a public health threat? Maybe the city health commissioner has been watching too many Seinfeld reruns. (The amount of salt he wants New Yorkers to eat amounts to less than two-thirds of a teaspoon daily.)

Of course, it wouldn’t be a truly New York campaign without a nice shake of hypocrisy. Billionaire NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who some think will mount an independent bid for president in 2012) absolutely loves salt. Probably more so than the average New Yorker. According to the New York Times, Bloomberg reaches mouth-burning levels of salt on his popcorn and even adds salt as an extra pizza topping.

But forgetting the obvious “do as I say, not as I do” discussion, there’s no significant scientific evidence that reducing our sodium intake will make us any healthier.

Dr. Michael Alderman, editor of the American Journal of Hypertension, recently noted that almost half of the observational studies of salt intake and heart attacks or stroke found no association between salt and health. He thinks NYC’s ingredient tinkering amounts to “an experiment on a whole population.”

And a recent study in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology found that our brains naturally regulate our appetite for salt, meaning that for every spoonful of soy sauce people add to their food, their bodies go for less salty stuff later on.

But science isn’t exactly the Bloomberg administration’s strongest point in its constant scolding of what citizens choose to eat.

In some ways this anti-salt push is a step down from last year’s Big Apple ad campaign showing a man downing a soft drink — which turned into liquid lard. “Don’t drink yourself fat,” the ad warned.

But recently uncovered internal e-mails show that the city’s health commissioner received heavy criticism from nutrition experts — including some in his own department — before releasing this over-the-top gross-out ad.

One advisor warned: “CAUTION. As we get into this exacting science, the idea of a sugary drink becoming fat is absurd.” A Columbia University doctor cautioned that the ad was “misleading in that there is no reference to energy output changes.”

These experts all recognize the fact that calories from soft drinks are the same as calories from milk, juice, or bread. And calories from sugary beverages don’t make up that much of the average person’s diet — just 5.5 percent, according to the National Cancer Institute.

In the end, one nutritionist put it most succinctly: “What can we get away with?”љThat turned out to be the department’s guiding parameter over nutritional reality.

And where is Mayor Bloomberg in all of this soft drink mixed messaging? The cafeteria at his own company provides free soda to its employees. And I’ll bet there are some salt shakers available for your pepperoni and mushroom pizza.

Rick Berman is President of the public affairs firm Berman and Company. He has worked extensively in the food and beverage industries for the past 30 years. To learn more, visit .

Read more stories from The Daily Caller

Stuxnet may be part of Iran atom woes: ex-IAEA aide

VIENNA (Reuters) – Iran has been experiencing years of problems with equipment used in its uranium enrichment program and the Stuxnet computer virus may be one of the factors, a former top U.N. nuclear inspections official said.

Olli Heinonen, who stepped down in August as head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog's inspections worldwide, said there may be many reasons for technical glitches that have cut the number of working centrifuges at Iran's Natanz enrichment plant.

"One of the reasons is the basic design of this centrifuge ... this is not that solid," Heinonen, a former deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and now a senior fellow at Harvard University, told Reuters on Friday.

Asked about the Stuxnet virus, he said: "Sure, this could be one of the reasons ... There is no evidence that it was, but there has been quite a lot of malfunctioning centrifuges."

Security experts have said the release of Stuxnet could have been a state-backed attack on Iran's nuclear program, which Tehran says is designed to produce electricity but which Western leaders suspect is a disguised effort to develop nuclear bombs.

Any delays in Iran's enrichment campaign could buy more time for efforts to find a diplomatic solution to its stand-off with six world powers over the nature of its nuclear activities.

Iran has tentatively agreed to meet with a representative of the powers early next month, for the first time in over a year.

Earlier this week, experts said new research showed definitively that Stuxnet was tailored to target the kind of equipment used in uranium enrichment, deepening suspicions its aim was to sabotage the Islamic Republic's nuclear activities.

Centrifuges are finely calibrated cylindrical devices that spin at supersonic speed to increase the fissile element in uranium so that it can serve as fuel for nuclear power plants or, if refined to a much higher degree, for atomic bombs.

EQUIPMENT PROBLEMS

The Islamic state's P-1 centrifuges, adapted from a smuggled 1970s European design, have been plagued by breakdowns since a rapid expansion of enrichment in 2007-08. In September, an IAEA report said the number of producing centrifuges had fallen to 3,772 from 3,936 a few months earlier. It did not give a reason.

But Iran is testing an advanced, more durable model able to refine uranium two or three times faster, and says it intends to introduce the model for production in the near future.

Heinonen said the P-1 centrifuge was quite brittle and prone to outages. He also cited other quality problems and "poor workmanship" as possible factors.

"They have some problems but you don't know what the real reason is for those problems and there may be many reasons."

Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm of unknown origin that attacks command modules for industrial equipment, is described by some experts as a first-of-its-kind guided cyber missile.

New research by cyber security company Symantec unearthed evidence that apparently supports the enrichment sabotage theory, pointing to tell-tale signs in the way Stuxnet changes the behavior of equipment known as frequency converter drives.

A frequency converter drive is a power supply that can alter the frequency of the output, which controls the speed of a motor. The higher the frequency, the higher the motor's speed.

"They have had some problems with the frequency converters ... but that is a way back," Heinonen said, citing Iranian media information from a few years ago.

(Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Brinked.com Introduces the Fastest Youtube Ringtone Creator on the Web

Offers Facebook App and Embeddable Website Widget

Brooklyn, NY (PRWEB) November 17, 2010

Brinked.com, one of the most popular free online ringtone makers, announced the release of the 2.0 version of its online ringtone maker today. The enhanced ringtone utility is available at.

As the first online ringtone maker to allow users to make ringtones from YouTube videos, Brinked.com now offers a faster way to make these ringtones from YouTube, beating the competition in speed, simplicity, and functionality.To make a ringtone from a YouTube video only requires a simple copy and paste of the video URL into the YouTube video field on the free ringtone maker. From there, a Brinked.com script downloads and converts the video, which then allows the user to edit, add effects, and customize the ringtone.

William Heinitz, founder of Brinked.com, said, “All the enhancements found in the 2.0 version of our innovative ringtone maker utility are based on what customers told us they would like to see. This means that they have an easier and faster way to access existing ringtones as well as make ringtones from whatever they can find on YouTube.”

Heinitz added, “In fact, we have tested the speed of our new version and it appears to have surpassed the competition by delivering a download of seconds versus the others that take anywhere from one to three minutes. And, no ringtone user wants to wait that long, so our ‘download and go’ option offers a unique value proposition amongst all the competition.”

Recognizing the importance that ringtone users put into social media and online channels, Brinked.com also offers a Facebook app version of the utility found at . The other new feature found in the 2.0 version is an embeddable widget, which allows users to embed the Brinked.com widget on their website so that visitors to that site can easily search Brinked.com for ringtones or even make ringtones right from the widget. The widget is also available at the company’s website: .

About Brinked.comBrinked.com is an online ringtone service that offers the latest free music ringtones updated weekly across a wide number of genres, including the week’s top charted hits in rock, rap, country, pop and more. Brinked.com works with any phone or carrier that supports media files (mp3, wav, and m4r), including Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and the iPhone. For more information, please visit .

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William HeinitzBrinked888-229-6289Email Information

U.N. says preparing possible troop increase in Sudan

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Tuesday the United Nations hopes to boost the number of peacekeepers in Sudan amid fears that Africa's largest country by area could be headed for a new civil war.

Voter registration began on Monday for a January 2011 referendum on whether oil-producing southern Sudan should secede from the north.

The plebiscite is the climax of a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of north-south conflict -- Africa's longest civil war that was fought over ethnicity, religion, ideology and oil and killed 2 million people. Analysts and diplomats expect the south to choose independence from Khartoum.

"We are working with both parties (north and south) on options for a possible augmentation of additional U.N. troops to increase referendum and post-referendum security," Ban told a special U.N. Security Council debate on Sudan chaired by British Foreign Secretary William Hague.

Ban said the increase in the 10,000-strong force that monitors compliance with the 2005 peace deal would also be to increase its capacity to "verify and monitor possible ceasefire violations and to protect civilians."

It was not immediately clear how many troops the world body could muster before the January 9 referendum, although U.N. officials told Reuters it would likely be in the hundreds.

"It will not be enough to prevent the return to war should widespread hostilities erupt," Ban said.

Any troop increase will require Security Council approval.

South Sudan had asked the council to approve a full-scale U.N.-monitored buffer zone across the entire north-south border, but council diplomats said UNMIS will only be able to offer a strengthened presence in hotspots along the frontier.

SOUTH PREDICTS ON-TIME REFERENDUM

Preparations for the southern vote, as well as a separate plebiscite on whether the oil-rich Abyei region should remain under Khartoum or join the south, are behind schedule. Although both the north and south say they do not want war, analysts fear that a delay of the southern vote could lead to violence.

Pagan Amum, secretary-general of the south's ruling Sudan People's Liberation Movement said, "All signs point to the fact that the people of southern Sudan are likely to vote for independence in January," he said.

"We call on the council and on all U.N. member states to respect the choice of the people of southern Sudan," he said.

Amum was optimistic about the voter registration process now under way. "The turnout was impressive and peaceful. This is a clear sign that the southern Sudan referendum will take place on time on January 9, 2011," he said.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated that the United States was prepared to take steps to remove Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and normalize relations with Khartoum if it "chooses the path of peace."

But she also had a warning for Khartoum, which critics have charged is reluctant to accept the loss of its oil-rich soil. "If it chooses conflict, the government of Sudan will face consequences in the forms of additional pressure and deeper isolation," she told the 15-nation council.

Clinton repeated that Washington can ease its sanctions against Khartoum and help work on ways to ease its national debt "consistent with international debt relief practices."

Sudan has previously called for its nearly $38 billion in debt to be forgiven to strengthen prospects for peace. Most of that debt is in arrears, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The Security Council issued a statement calling for an end to illegal weapons transfers throughout Sudan, including to the conflict-torn Darfur region where a U.N. arms embargo has been in place since 2005. It also suggested Khartoum has been slow in funding the South Sudan Referendum Commission (SSRC).

Khartoum's foreign minister, Ali Karti, denied Sudan had been withholding funds. "The government of the Sudan honored its commitments as agreed," he said.

(Reporting by Louis Charbonneau, Editing by Anthony Boadle)