Congress moves toward standoff over payroll tax (AP)

WASHINGTON ? Partisan to the core, Congress careened toward a holiday-season standoff Monday on legislation to prevent a Social Security payroll tax increase for 160 million workers on Jan. 1.

"It's time to stop the nonsense. We can resolve these differences and we can do it in a way that provides certainty for job creators and others," said Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. He said the House would reject a bipartisan two-month extension that cleared the Senate over the weekend and seek negotiations on a bill to renew the cuts through 2012.

In an acid response, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid accused Boehner of risking a tax increase for millions "just because a few angry tea partyers raised their voices." The Nevada Democrat ruled out new negotiations until the two-month measure is enacted.

That left the two parties approaching Christmas-week gridlock over an effort to pass core elements of President Barack Obama's jobs program ? renewal of the tax cuts and long-term unemployment benefits ? that Republican and Democratic leaders alike said they favored.

It was the latest and likely the last such partisan confrontation in a year of divided government that brought the Treasury to the brink of a first-ever default last summer, and more than once pushed the vast federal establishment to the edge of a partial shutdown.

This time, unlike the others, Republican divisions were prominently on display.

The two-month measure that cleared the Senate, 89-10, on Saturday had the full support of the GOP leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, who also told reporters he was optimistic the House would sign on. Senate negotiators had tried to agree on a compromise to cover a full year, but were unable to come up with enough savings to offset the cost and prevent deficits from rising.

The two-month extension was a fallback, and officials say that when McConnell personally informed Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of the deal at a private meeting, they said they would check with their rank and file.

But on Saturday, restive House conservatives made clear during a telephone conference call that they were unhappy with the measure.

Not surprisingly, the White House weighed in on the side of Obama's Democratic allies.

Spokesman Jay Carney said Boehner was for the two-month stopgap bill "before he was against it" ? a claim that the House speaker flatly denied.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Carney added, `'It is not our job to negotiate between him and Senate Republicans."

McConnell's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"We are witnessing the concluding convulsion of confrontation and obstruction in the most unproductive, tea party-dominated partisan session of the Congress in which I have participated," said Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, second-ranking member of the Democratic leadership.

Ironically, until the House rank and file revolted, it appeared that Republicans had outmaneuvered Obama on one point.

The two-month measure that cleared the Senate required him to decide within 60 days to allow construction on a proposed oil pipeline that promises thousands of construction jobs. Obama had threatened to veto legislation that included the requirement, then did an about face.

The president recently announced he was delaying a decision on the pipeline until after the 2012 elections, meaning that while seeking a new term, he would not have to choose between disappointing environmentalists who oppose the project and blue collar unions that support it.

The provision relating to the Keystone XL pipeline first surfaced in the House, where Boehner and the leaders had used it as an incentive to persuade conservatives to approve an extension of the payroll tax cut that many claimed had failed to create jobs.

The Senate-passed bill, as well as one that cleared the House last week, also would avert a threatened 27 percent cut in payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients.

There was no controversy on that provision, or much of one on anything but the duration of an extension.

Democrats gleefully distributed evidence of GOP disagreement, including comments from Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Richard Lugar of Indiana and others urging the House to approve the two-month measure.

But first-term House Republicans were unmoved.

"What they (the Senate) sent us over was an insult to the American people," said Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle, R-N.Y.

"I don't care about political implications" of letting taxes go up Jan. 1 for 160 million Americans, said Rep. Tom Reed, R-N.Y. "We will stay here as long as it takes in order to do what's right for the American people. That means working on Christmas, New Year's and other days. It's time to get the job done."

Professing a lack of concern about higher taxes was not a widely held position inside the party leadership, though. For both parties, the political implications seemed to matter hugely.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced it was sending automated phone calls into households in 20 targeted GOP-held districts demanding that lawmakers support the two-month extension, lest taxes go up.

Not to be outdone, the National Republican Congressional Committee issued a statement headlined "Vacation, All House Dems Ever Wanted" and claiming that Democrats wanted to raise taxes on the middle class.

It was unclear how much attention the political maneuvering would draw in a nation where consumers were in the final shopping countdown toward Christmas and the next national election was nearly a year away.

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Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Laurie Kellman contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111219/ap_on_go_co/us_congress_rdp

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LaVar Young: Still Waiting: Black Male Achievement in America

The gap in achievement between black males and their white counterparts isn't news -- it's common knowledge, generally accepted, and only sometimes bemoaned. But it seems to me that we should be more alarmed -- four hundred years after arriving in America aboard slave ships, and they have yet to reach academic or socio-economic parity with their white peers. Does anyone see a problem here?

It's hard to believe that four hundred years have passed since slavery ravaged America beginning in the 1600s, and even harder to believe that it's been four hundred years of African Americans fighting unsuccessfully for full equality.

And now that schools and public places are no longer segregated, and legislation exists against discrimination in employment, voting and education, the fight has changed. In the 1950s and 60s, efforts towards equality coalesced into a national movement of sit-ins, bus boycotts, mass voter registrations and marches. Now, the once national response has been replaced by an array of individual and community-specific efforts, which, however beneficial, are too isolated to affect large-scale, national change.

The reality is that the inequalities of the 21st century aren't as explicit as Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, and the law does not sanction them -- which means there is no obvious fix. But, the statistics are tangible and certainly disturbing, and they start immediately at birth. For one, black infant mortality rates are more than twice that of whites, in a country that already has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world.

As they grow into toddlerhood and childhood, the evidence mounts. Two-thirds of black children live in single parent households, which is three times that of white children. And one-third live in poverty, compared with one tenth of their white counterparts.

In school, black males score lower on standardized tests, are nearly twice as likely to drop out of high school, three times as likely to be suspended from school and less likely to go on to a two-year or four-year college.

The unemployment rate is more than twice that for blacks than for whites, 16.7 and 8 percent respectively. And it's been double that of whites since the government started keeping tabs in 1972. And while the unemployment rate surged to its highest since 1984, the white unemployment rate actually dropped slightly.

Fortunately, some leaders are refusing to accept the status quo any longer, and efforts at a large-scale national response are mounting. Back in September, I attended a conference hosted by the Open Society Foundations , where a national call to action was set in motion. Since then, Newark and twenty-five cities throughout the country participated in a Day of Action, where black leaders discussed various solutions to the problem.

And recently, Dr. Warren Farrell proposed the creation of a White House Council on Boys to Men, in response to President Obama's 2009 Executive Order creating a similar council for women, which was written up in Forbes magazine. In his proposal, the Council would focus on the fives areas in which boys are in crisis: education, jobs, emotional health, physical health, and fatherlessness. For Farrell, a national response is imperative, because "the best solutions are holistic ones."

Clearly, some leaders have the right idea. But our society's current laissez faire attitude suggests either apathy, or an assumption that the issue will resolve itself over time. Neither are appropriate responses. We have to decide if we are willing to accept these statistics as a permanent fixture of American society, and if not, what needs to be done. We must make an effort, not only as individuals and communities, and but collectively as a society.

For the first time in history, we have a black president in office. And while his election challenged society's latent bias, the buck doesn't stop there. We must take this opportunity to turn our attention towards the appalling discrepancies in black male achievement on a grander scale.

I've always felt that the absence of legally sanctioned discrimination meant that a national movement was no longer possible. I've since changed my mind -- the statistics I've shared are tangible, appalling, and worthy of a national response. The onus is now on the nation to set the agenda for change. Fifty years after the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and equality among black males is still only a dream. I think it's time to make it a reality.

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Follow LaVar Young on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@LaVarYoung

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lavar-young/black-male-achievement_b_1121379.html

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How to Completely Anonymize Your BitTorrent Traffic with BTGuard [BitTorrent]

If you're using BitTorrent without taking special measures to hide your activity, it's just a matter of time before your ISP throttles your connection, sends you an ominous letter, or worst case, your ISP gets a subpoena from a lawyer asking for your identity for a file-sharing law suit. Here's how to set up a simple proxy to keep your torrenting safe and anonymous.

We've talked about how to boost your BitTorrent privacy before, but those measures aren't quite enough anymore to keep you anonymous, because copyright holders are getting more vigilant at tracking down people who share their content. Heck, you don't even need to be doing anything illegal, either. Maybe you just want to keep Big Brother out of your business and throttling your connection. Either way, if you really want to keep your activity private, your best bet involves routing your BitTorrent connection through an external service. BTGuard is a BT-focused proxy server and encryption service, and it's my service of choice. Below, I'll explain what it does, how it works, and how to set it up to privatize and anonymous your BT traffic.

How BTGuard Works

When you download or seed a torrent, you're connecting to a bunch of other people, called a swarm, all of whom?in order to share files?can see your computer's IP address. That's all very handy when you're sharing files with other netizens, but file sharers such as yourself aren't necessarily the only people paying attention. Piracy monitoring groups (often paid for by the entertainment industry either before or after they find violators) also join BitTorrent swarms, but instead of sharing files, they're logging the IP addresses of other people in the swarm?including you?so that they can notify your ISP of your doings. A proxy (like BTGuard) funnels your internet traffic?in this case, just your BitTorrent traffic?through another server, so that the BitTorrent swarm will show an IP address from a server that can't be traced back to you instead of the address that points to your house. That way, those anti-piracy groups can't contact your ISP, and your ISP has no cause to send you a harrowing letter.

But wait, can't the piracy groups then go to the anonymizer service (BTGuard) and requisition their logs to figure out that you're the one downloading the new Harry Potter? Theoretically, yes, but the reason why we chose BTGuard is because they don't keep logs, so there's no paper trail of activity leading back to you. All the piracy monitors see is BTGuard sharing a file, and all your ISP sees is you connecting to BTGuard?but not what data you're downloading, because it's encrypted.

If you subscribe to an ISP that throttles BitTorrent traffic (click here to see the worst offenders), and aren't using an anonymizer service, you have an additional problem. Your ISP can still see what you're doing, and if they detect that you're using BitTorrent?even if you're using it for perfectly legal purposes?they'll throttle your connection so you get unbearably slow speeds. When you encrypt your BitTorrent traffic, your ISP can't see what you're using your connection for. They'll see that you're downloading lots of information, but they won't be able to see that it's BitTorrent traffic, and thus won't throttle your connection. You still have to be careful of going over your ISP's bandwidth cap, however, if that exists.

BTGuard offers you both a proxy (to combat spying) and encryption (to combat throttling)?though many torrent clients have encryption built-in as well.

Sounds great, right? Now the caveats: First, BTGuard isn't free. At $7/month (as little as $5 if you pay for a year in advance), it isn't very expensive, and we think it's well worth it if you want to torrent anonymously. A law suit settlement, if it comes to that, will cost you at least a couple thousand dollars, which equals a couple decades of BTGuard subscriptions, so keep that in mind, too. The other potential downside is that piping your downloads through another service may decrease your upload and download speeds. How much depends on what torrent you're downloading, who from, and a lot of other factors, but just know that it's a possibility. In my experience, more popular torrents stayed at their top speed of 1.4 MB/s (my bandwidth cap) with a proxy, while other less popular torrents (which flew at 1.4MB/s without a proxy) would fluctuate around 200 or 300 kB/s with BTGuard in place. Again, though, a little longer wait on downloads is well worth the protection you get.

Lastly, proxies aren't supported by every client, which means you'll have to use one with more advanced features. uTorrent (for Windows) and Vuze (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) both support proxies, but sadly Mac and Linux favorite Transmission does not. (If you're absolutely stuck with a client that doesn't support proxies, check the end of this article for some alternative solutions to the anonymity problem.)

How to Set Up BTGuard

BTGuard has a one-click install process, but we're going to show you how to do it the manual way, since it works in any BitTorrent client that supports SOCKS5 Proxy?not just the ones supported by BTGuard's installer. It'll also give you a better sense of what exactly BTGuard does, so if you run into problems, you'll have a better idea of how to fix it.

Step One: Sign Up for BTGuard

First, sign up for an account over at BTGuard.com. It'll just take a minute, and then you can get to configuring your client. Their BitTorrent proxy service costs $6.95 a month, but you can get discounts by buying multiple months at a time (up to a year's service for $59.95). Once you're done, you should receive an email telling you that BTGuard is ready to go.

Step Two: Configure Your Client

Next, open up your torrent client of choice and find the proxy settings within its preferences. In uTorrent, for example, this is under Preferences > Connection. Your client may have them in a different place (Google around to find out where), but no matter your client, your settings should look like this:

• Proxy Type: Socks v5
• Proxy Host: proxy.btguard.com
• Proxy Port: 1025
• Username: Your BTGuard username
• Password: Your BTGuard password

You'll also want to make sure you're using the proxy for hostname or tracker lookups as well as peer-to-peer connections, so check all boxes that say anything like that. You'll also want to disable connections or features that could compromise the proxy, so check all the boxes under uTorrent's "Proxy Privacy" section, or anything similar that your client may have. Hit Apply, exit the preferences, and restart your client. Your proxy should now be active.

Step Three: See If It's Working

To ensure that it's working, head over to CheckMyTorrentIP.com. This site can tell you what your IP address is, and compare it to the IP address of your torrent client, which will let you know whether your proxy is working correctly. To test it, hit the "Generate Torrent" button, and open the resulting torrent in your client. Then, go back to your browser and hit the Refresh button under the "Check IP" tab. If it's the same as your browser IP?which you'll see next to the Refresh button?then your proxy isn't working, and you'll want to double-check all of the above settings. If it shows a different IP address (often from another country like Germany or Canada), then BTGuard is successfully tunneling all your traffic for you.

Step Four (Optional): Enable Encryption

If you want extra security (or if you're trying to protect your connection from being throttled), you'll also want to encrypt all that traffic. Many clients have this feature built-in. In uTorrent, for example, just head to Preferences > BitTorrent and look for the "Protocol Encryption" section. Change your outgoing connection to Forced encryption, and uncheck the "Allow incoming legacy connections" box. From there, you should be good?your ISP shouldn't throttle your connection after this is enabled.

If your client doesn't support encryption, or you want a more powerful encryption behind your torrenting, BTGuard offers an encryption service as well. Just head to their Encryption page, download the software, and install it to C:\BTGUARD (this is very important; don't change the installation directory). Then, start the BTGuard Encryption program (accessible from the Start menu), and open up your BitTorrent client. Change your proxy server from proxy.btguard.com to 127.0.0.1, restart your client, and you're golden. Again, this isn't necessary if your client already supports encryption, but it is an extra layer of protection if you really want to keep everything private.

Other Alternatives

Lastly, while this is our preferred BitTorrent privacy solution, it won't work for everyone. For example, if you're stuck with a specific client that doesn't support proxies, you'll need something different. Here are a few of your other options:

A full VPN: If your client doesn't support proxies, you'll want a full VPN service that anonymizes all your traffic, not just BitTorrent. You can use one of these great VPN services to protect your traffic, but it's likely you could still experience speed decreases?though this time, they'll affect all your browsing. If you only use it when torrenting, that's fine, but this isn't good for those that want to seed those torrents afterwards. You should also make sure that the VPN service you choose doesn't keep logs of your activity, because if they do, that defeats the purpose of using them at all.

A Seedbox: If you want to contribute back to the community (or if you're on a private tracker that requires you seed to a certain ratio), you'll want to try a seedbox. A seedbox is essentially a dedicated server in another country that does all the torrenting for you, using their very high speed connection. Once a torrent is downloaded, you can then connect to your seedbox via FTP or something similar and download your files from them that way. It's more expensive than a simple proxy (ranging from entry-level boxes at $10 or $20 a month to fast boxes with more storage at $50 or even $100 a month), but it allows you to keep seeding at very high speeds. There are a lot of good seedbox providers. Bytesized and ExtremeSeed come highly recommended, but a bit of searching can probably find you a lot of different options. Shop around and see which one's best for you.

Usenet: Your last alternative is totry a new filesharing service entirely, like Usenet. It offers encrypted connections and doesn't connect to peers, so others can't track what you're doing. It doesn't always have the selection that BitTorrent has (depending on what you're downloading), but it offers a ton of other advantages, most notably higher speeds and more privacy. Check out our guide to getting started with Usenet to see if it's right for you.

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BitTorrent isn't the safe place it once was, and if you're going to use it to share and download files, we highly recommend getting some sort of protection from the services above so you can avoid DCMA notices and throttled speeds.Got any other tips for keeping your file sharing on the down low? Share them with us in the comments.

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You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/sZvjEM9Z1yQ/how-to-completely-anonymize-your-bittorrent-traffic-with-btguard

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