Millionaire Tax Now Likely, But President Obama Wants More

via forbes.com

In the fiscal cliff horse trading, President Obama wants a tax increase on anyone earning over $250,000. (However, here’s the latest update to this story: In Tax Hike Haggle, Obama at $400K, Boehner at $1M: Now What?) House Speaker Boehner and the Republicans? No tax increase, thank you. But now the Speaker has signaled that tax hikes on those earning over $1 million would be OK. See Fiscal Cliff Talks: GOP Poses Millionaire Tax-Rate Increase.

It’s compromise time as the fiscal cliff moved ever closer. And Mr. Boehner doubtless thinks the spending cuts he wants in return–and the need for some kind of deal–make it worthwhile. See Boehner Agrees To A Millionaire Tax–And Moves Closer To A Fiscal Cliff Deal. After all, the Bush Era cuts are expiring and there’s no patch in sight.

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Inside Obama's Meeting with Entrepreneurs on the Fiscal Cliff

via inc.com

When entrepreneur and Inc. 30 Under 30 alum Nikhil Arora received an email from the White House last Thursday to attend a small business meeting, he didn’t know exactly what to expect or even who from the Obama administration would be present.

He said it was only “one or two days” before the now highly publicized meeting took place Tuesday that he found out President Obama himself would lead a conversation on how to avoid the impending fiscal cliff with a group of 15 entrepreneurs.

“I didn’t expect that level of engagement from the administration,” said the co-founder of Back to the Roots, a company that makes mushroom growing kits from recycled coffee grounds. “This was not a presentation, it was an active back-and-forth discussion.”

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Obama Turns His Back On Silicon Valley

via businessinsider.com

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Silicon Valley tech businesses overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama with their dollars.

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Meet the Technologists that Helped win Obama the Election

via theatlantic.com

The Obama campaign's technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong.

Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else.

They were talking with people at Amazon Web Services, but all they knew was that they had packet loss. Earlier that day, they lost their databases, their East Coast servers, and their memcache clusters. Thayer was ready to kill Nick Hatch, a DevOps engineer who was the official bearer of bad news. Another of their vendors, PalominoDB, was fixing databases, but needed to rebuild the replicas. It was going to take time, Hatch said. They didn't have time.

They'd been working 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, trying to reelect the president, and now everything had been broken at just the wrong time. It was like someone had written a Murphy's Law algorithm and deployed it at scale.

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How Technology Will Fare In President Obama's Second Term

via readwrite.com

The long 18-month U.S. presidential election is finally over, and after the dust has settled, President Barack Obama has been elected to serve a second term in the highest office in the land.

The President will have a lot on his plate: dealing with the so-called fiscal cliff; keeping economic growth on track; working with the ever-complicated world outside U.S. borders; and tackling the problems surrounding the U.S. education system for starters.

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What Obama's Victory Means for Tech

via gizmodo.com

Barack Obama's victory last night has far-reaching fiscal, social, and military implications, all of which are familiar to anyone who kept at least one eye open during any of this year's debates. But what do four more years mean for tech? Turns out, a lot.

While Obama hasn't indicated that he'll dramatically change course on any of his technological policies and initiatives, it's useful to look a little closer at the ones he's got. Here's what we can expect.

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Obama vs Romney Mobile [Infographic]

via startapp.com

An informative infographic showing the mobile trends and statistics of this election.

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Trump to give $5 million to charity if Obama releases records

via news.yahoo.com

Donald Trump offered to pay $5 million to the charity of President Barack Obama's choice if Obama releases his college and passport records, the real estate mogul and television personality said on Wednesday.

"Frankly, it's a check that I very much want to write," Trump said in a YouTube video released via his Twitter and Facebook pages.

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Who Is Winning The Presidential Election On Facebook? Obama or Romney?

via socialfresh.com

It’s less than a month until Election Day and I’m a citizen of the great state of Florida. That means I’m inundated by political messaging nearly every minute of every day.

I also work for the top public affairs communication firm in the state, which means that I can’t get away from politics, whether at home OR at work.

So, as a professional in the social media industry, I find myself constantly analyzing each candidate’s messaging on Facebook.

Whether through advertising, search, messaging or community development, these two Presidential campaigns are pioneering the use of social media unlike ever before.

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How the Obama Campaign Uses Your Personal Information to Get Your Money and Your Vote

via gizmodo.com

In 2008, the Obama campaign enlisted the help of Facebook and Google bigwigs to help raise massive sums from a lot of small donors. Back then, the key was just a few pieces of data—today, that data mining effort has been expanded to a huge and very creepy degree.

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Leadership According to Obama and Romney

via inc.com

President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney tackled this election cycle's hot-button issues--from job creation to tax cuts--in separate 60 Minutes interviews that aired Sunday night.

But besides meticulous planning and a command of policy details, what else does it take to run the country? The candidates candidly shared their thoughts on the requirements for a commander-in-chief. (We've got the highlights here; scroll down to watch the longer video segments.)

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Obama And Romney Respond To Colorado Tragedy

via buzzfeed.com

The two presidential candidates take time out of their contentious campaign to unite in their grief and shock over the mass shooting in Colorado.

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Romney Responds to Obama's Crazy Statement about Business Owners

via foxnews.com

Mitt Romney hammered President Obama on the stump Tuesday over the president's recent comments on the relationship between government and business, saying his opponent wants Americans to be "ashamed of success."

The Republican presidential candidate seized on Obama's gaffe Friday in which he suggested businesses owe their success in large part to government investment and said to business owners, "you didn't build that."

Romney, speaking to a crowd outside Pittsburgh, worked the comments into his campaign theme that Obama represents a big-government approach harmful to business. He called the comments "startling and revealing," returning to them repeatedly throughout his address.

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Here Are The New Obamacare Taxes

via businessinsider.com

Well, Obamacare is now official, which means that a lot more people in the United States will have health insurance.

And it also means a lot more people will be paying more taxes.

(You didn't think Obamacare was free, did you?)

Here are some of the new taxes you're going to have to pay to pay for Obamacare...

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Dear America: You Should Be Mad As Hell About This...

via businessinsider.com

In November, Americans will have a chance to speak their minds.

And there's one thing everyone should agree on:

America just isn't working right now.

It's not just Americans who aren't working. It's America itself, a country whose economy once worked for almost everyone, not just the rich.

In the old America, if you worked hard, you had a good chance of moving up.

In the old America, the fruits of people's labors accrued to the whole country, not just the top.

In the old America, there was a strong middle class, and their immense collective purchasing power drove the economy for decades.

No longer.

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Obama Ordered Devastating Cyberattacks Against Iran

via gizmodo.com

In June of 2010, a security firm in Belarus called VirusBlokAda reported the first known citing of what we know now as Stuxnet. It was, simply put, the most advanced malware of all time. Its target? Iran. Its origin? Unknown. Until now.

The New York Times is reporting today that the source of the worm so advanced some thought it was alien weapon was us. And it wasn't the first.

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Obama vs. Romney: The Social Showdown

via mashable.com

With Newt Gingrich suspending his campaign today, Mitt Romney will finally be considered the presumptive Republican nominee. Only one person stands between him and the White House: President Barack Obama.

The two will wage electoral war from now until November, but how do their social profiles compare?

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'Obama Vs. Romney' Could End Up Being A Lot Like 'Mac Vs. PC'

via businessinsider.com

The juxtaposition between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama couldn’t have been starker.

Romney delivered a solid, if perfunctory, victory speech. Later in the night, President Obama appeared on Jimmy Fallon.

One one hand, this was not remarkable. Even Richard Nixon appeared on “Laugh In.” And Romney was on the ballot in five states — of course he was going to deliver a political speech.

But nothing happens in politics by accident. Obama didn’t have to go on Fallon Tuesday night. And so, perhaps the dichotomy can serve as a signal — a sort of microcosm — of the coming general election.

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President Obama Has a Higher Tax Rate than Mitt Romney

via theatlanticwire.com

President Obama's Federal income tax rate is 20.5 percent, which is actually higher than Mitt Romney's 15.4 percent despite making around $20 million less than the Republican frontrunner. Obama and his team have released his 2011 Federal income and gift and tax returns today. (You can find them here.) Obama and the First Lady are paying that rate on an adjusted gross income of $798,674, which is $20.1 million less than what reportedly Romney made in 2011. Of course, Romney paid around $3.2 million on that handsome sum, and the Obamas are paying $162,074.

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Obama Administration Plans to Drop $200 Million on "Big Data" Research

via gizmodo.com

The White House announced today plans to better utilize the torrent of data produced by agencies like the departments of Energy and Defense. The administration intends to invest $200 million in developing systems to better share and dissect large bodies of information.

The Big Data Research and Development Initiative encompasses six federal agencies including DARPA, the National Institute for Health, and the National Science Foundation and will fund projects designed to "extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data," according to a press release.

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