Analysis: Obama’s ad team used cable TV to outplay Romney

(Reuters) – As political experts assess Republican Mitt Romney‘s failed U.S. presidential bid, an analysis of how his campaign and President Barack Obama‘s winning team used cable TV to target ads at specific groups of voters may offer some valuable tips for the future.

During the final weeks before the November 6 election, with polls showing a tight race, Obama’s campaign exploited cable TV’s diverse lineup to target women on channels such as Food Network and Lifetime and men on networks such as ESPN.

The Obama team used the fragmentation of cable TV’s audience to its fullest advantage to target tailored messages to voters in battleground states.

Meanwhile, Romney’s campaign relied on a more traditional mass saturation of broadcast TV. The Romney camp was entirely dark on cable TV for two of the campaign’s last seven days.

“We don’t know why. This was a week before the election and you’re in the fight for your life,” said Timothy Kay, political director for NCC Media, a cable TV industry consortium.

The race had narrowed to key counties in several battleground states, the kind of isolation ideally suited for cable’s geographical targeting and niche-marketing capabilities.

Republican Party operatives dismayed by Romney’s defeat continue to debate what went wrong in a campaign awash in cash and run by a candidate with a business background. The former Massachusetts governor’s campaign, like Democrat Obama‘s, spent a record-setting amount of cash; in Romney’s case, it was $ 580 million in 20 months.

Obama’s campaign outspent Romney’s campaign on advertising by as much as $ 200 million, according to a Reuters analysis. But when spending by pro-Romney and pro-Obama outside groups is considered, Romney had the edge in overall TV advertising spending.

Republican consultants and advertising experts said Romney had enough money to compete with Obama’s final advertising effort. Yet Obama cruised to a commanding Electoral College victory after a final concentration on a small group of battleground states.

“In market after market, the Obama campaign ended up putting more ads on target than the Romney campaign did,” said Ken Goldstein, president of Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, a nonpartisan consulting firm that tracked political ads and worked with both campaigns.

Stephanie Kincaid, who managed Romney’s advertising campaign, declined to answer questions and referred inquiries to top Romney campaign officials Stuart Stevens and Russell Schriefer, her bosses at The Stevens and Schriefer Group, a political consulting firm. They did not respond to phone calls.

OBAMA’S ADVANTAGE

Cable television political advertising jumped from $ 136 million in 2006 to $ 650 million in 2012, although broadcast TV still garnered 80 percent of the campaign advertising spending last year.

Even with major broadcast networks and their affiliates, the Obama campaign appeared to out-perform the Romney camp.

A campaign spending review shows the Obama camp frequently spent far less than Romney for ads aired by the same stations during the same shows.

For example, a review of TV station filings with the Federal Communications Commission showed Romney, on the Sunday before Election Day, paid $ 1,100 for an ad aired during CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on WRAL in Raleigh, North Carolina. Obama paid $ 200 for a comparable ad on the same station during the same program.

Part of the reason for the Obama campaign’s pricing advantage is that the president faced no Democratic primary challenge and was able to buy autumn TV time months in advance when the slots – like airline tickets – were discounted. Romney faced a tough battle for the Republican nomination.

The Romney campaign also simply did not have enough bodies to handle the labor-intensive business of planning, negotiating and placing ads on hundreds of TV stations simultaneously, according to several Republican consultants and media analysts who asked not to be identified.

Obama’s campaign had 30 full-time media buyers. The Romney campaign relied heavily on a single person, Kincaid, with help from one or two others from time to time, according to sources close to the campaign. Senior officials with the campaign declined to discuss its advertising staffing.

“It’s the equivalent of having a budget the size of a Coca- Cola commercial campaign and having two people managing it, where a Madison Avenue agency might have 50 people,” said NCC’s Kay. Kincaid and her small staff were overwhelmed, according to numerous political vendors who dealt with them.

Jim Margolis, an Obama campaign senior adviser whose firm GMMB handled its advertising, said the campaign also took advantage of information provided by companies like Rentrak Corp, a Portland, Oregon-based company that monitors the digital boxes attached to TVs in households using satellite dishes.

EXPLOITING FRAGMENTATION

In the past, political advertisers relied on the major networks rather than cable TV in a quest to reach the most television viewers.

But cable TV’s increasing popularity has brought dramatic fragmentation to television viewership. In many markets, cable offers a hundred or more channels, giving advertisers a chance to target specific demographics.

For instance, the Obama campaign identified zip codes surrounding Ohio tire-manufacturing plants and purchased cable ads touting Obama’s efforts to block tire imports from China.

Obama ran 600,000 cable ads to the Romney’s 300,000 around the nation during the campaign, said NCC’s Kay. Obama’s cable TV push started in April. Romney’s began in September.

Obama’s team also mixed and matched its messages to sharpen the appeal in key counties.

“My impression was there was much more examination and analytics done with the Obama campaign,” Kay said. “The Romney campaign had the same rigid schedule in every state.”

(Reporting by Marcus Stern in Washington and Tim McLaughlin in Boston; Editing by Claudia Parsons, Marilyn W. Thompson and Will Dunham)

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The New Old Age: Murray Span, 1922-2012

One consequence of our elders’ extended lifespans is that we half expect them to keep chugging along forever. My father, a busy yoga practitioner and blackjack player, celebrated his 90th birthday in September in reasonably good health.

So when I had the sad task of letting people know that Murray Span died on Dec. 8, after just a few days’ illness, the primary response was disbelief. “No! I just talked to him Tuesday! He was fine!”

And he was. We’d gone out for lunch on Saturday, our usual routine, and he demolished a whole stack of blueberry pancakes.

But on Wednesday, he called to say he had bad abdominal pain and had hardly slept. The nurses at his facility were on the case; his geriatrician prescribed a clear liquid diet.

Like many in his generation, my dad tended towards stoicism. When he said, the following morning, “the pain is terrible,” that meant agony. I drove over.

His doctor shared our preference for conservative treatment. For patients at advanced ages, hospitals and emergency rooms can become perilous places. My dad had come through a July heart attack in good shape, but he had also signed a do-not-resuscitate order. He saw evidence all around him that eventually the body fails and life can become a torturous series of health crises and hospitalizations from which one never truly rebounds.

So over the next two days we tried to relieve his pain at home. He had abdominal x-rays that showed some kind of obstruction. He tried laxatives and enemas and Tylenol, to no effect. He couldn’t sleep.

On Friday, we agreed to go to the emergency room for a CT scan. Maybe, I thought, there’s a simple fix, even for a 90-year-old with diabetes and heart disease. But I carried his advance directives in my bag, because you never know.

When it is someone else’s narrative, it’s easier to see where things go off the rails, where a loving family authorizes procedures whose risks outweigh their benefits.

But when it’s your father groaning on the gurney, the conveyor belt of contemporary medicine can sweep you along, one incremental decision at a time.

All I wanted was for him to stop hurting, so it seemed reasonable to permit an IV for hydration and pain relief and a thin oxygen tube tucked beneath his nose.

Then, after Dad drank the first of two big containers of contrast liquid needed for his scan, his breathing grew phlegmy and labored. His geriatrician arrived and urged the insertion of a nasogastric tube to suck out all the liquid Dad had just downed.

His blood oxygen levels dropped, so there were soon two doctors and two nurses suctioning his throat until he gagged and fastening an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.

At one point, I looked at my poor father, still in pain despite all the apparatus, and thought, “This is what suffering looks like.” I despaired, convinced I had failed in my most basic responsibility.

“I’m just so tired,” Dad told me, more than once. “There are too many things going wrong.”

Let me abridge this long story. The scan showed evidence of a perforation of some sort, among other abnormalities. A chest X-ray indicated pneumonia in both lungs. I spoke with Dad’s doctor, with the E.R. doc, with a friend who is a prominent geriatrician.

These are always profound decisions, and I’m sure that, given the number of unknowns, other people might have made other choices. Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide; I could ask my still-lucid father.

I leaned close to his good ear, the one with the hearing aid, and told him about the pneumonia, about the second CT scan the radiologist wanted, about antibiotics. “Or, we can stop all this and go home and call hospice,” I said.

He had seen my daughter earlier that day (and asked her about the hockey strike), and my sister and her son were en route. The important hands had been clasped, or soon would be.

He knew what hospice meant; its nurses and aides helped us care for my mother as she died. “Call hospice,” he said. We tiffed a bit about whether to have hospice care in his apartment or mine. I told his doctors we wanted comfort care only.

As in a film run backwards, the tubes came out, the oxygen mask came off. Then we settled in for a night in a hospital room while I called hospices — and a handyman to move the furniture out of my dining room, so I could install his hospital bed there.

In between, I assured my father that I was there, that we were taking care of him, that he didn’t have to worry. For the first few hours after the morphine began, finally seeming to ease his pain, he could respond, “OK.” Then, he couldn’t.

The next morning, as I awaited the hospital case manager to arrange the hospice transfer, my father stopped breathing.

We held his funeral at the South Jersey synagogue where he’d had his belated bar mitzvah at age 88, and buried him next to my mother in a small Jewish cemetery in the countryside. I’d written a fair amount about him here, so I thought readers might want to know.

We weren’t ready, if anyone ever really is, but in our sorrow, my sister and I recite this mantra: 90 good years, four bad days. That’s a ratio any of us might choose.

---

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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'Ones to Watch' in 2013

Tom Ricketts will try to finally clinch a deal to improve Wrigley Field with some taxpayer support.

Andrew Mason will fight for his legacy, and his job, at Groupon.

And Lewis Campbell hopes to turn around Navistar to the point that his services are no longer needed.

Tribune editors and reporters identified some of the Chicago business executives most likely to make news in 2013. Here are the "Ones to Watch."

Tom Ricketts

Title: Chairman, Chicago Cubs

Why we're watching: Expect City Hall to cut a deal with the Ricketts family, owner of the Cubs, in 2013 to help finance a $300 million renovation of Wrigley Field.

No one's talking specifics. Ricketts last proposed using $150 million of city amusement tax revenue to help pay for it. He would raise the remaining $150 million by extracting additional revenue from relaxed rules on advertising and concerts at the ballpark.

But that level of public subsidy is entirely off the table, according to a source close to the team. Asked whether Ricketts would accept less taxpayer assistance in exchange for greater freedom from historic preservation and other regulations, he said "probably," but that my description of the trade-off was "oversimplified."

"We have to compete against rooftops every day that … undercut us on price," Ricketts said. "We have limits on what we can do to our stadium and inside our stadium. We have limits on what time we can hold games and when we can host events. Our position is: Let us run our business. And if we can do that, we can unlock a lot of economic potential."

The Lake View Citizens' Council reportedly is open to more night games and concerts in exchange for contributions from the Cubs to community projects and traffic- and parking-related protections. Still, Ald. Tom Tunney, whose district includes Wrigley, said he opposes a Cubs request to open Sheffield Avenue for "family-fun entertainment" during games, among other issues.

"There will be some decisions made on a community level, on a zoning level," said Tunney, who called 2013 a "pivotal" year for the team. "As for the public financing, that's bigger than me."

Ricketts said he had not spoken in the past six months with either Mayor Rahm Emanuel or the city's chief financial officer, Lois Scott. "Our teams talk to each other," Ricketts said. "And that's not necessarily unusual. It's not like we can just not talk to the city. But no matter when or what a final deal looks like, everyone has got incentives to get that done in 2013."

Andrew Mason

Title: Founder and CEO, Groupon

Why we're watching: One year from now, will Mason still be CEO of Groupon?

In November, within days of a tech conference and a company board meeting, a source close to Groupon's board anonymously suggested to an influential tech journalist that the board might fire Mason at its meeting.

If the leaker had been Groupon chairman Eric Lefkofsky, Mason would have been out of a job by now.

Mason's future hinges on his relationship with Lefkofsky. In addition to being Mason's boss, Lefkofsky is the daily deal company's largest shareholder. He also gave Mason $1 million to launch the company.

And Mason always has spoken of Lefkofsky with reverence and affection. At the height of Groupon's euphoria, he shared credit with the veteran entrepreneur at every turn, telling me in 2010: "Eric's creative and unbelievably smart and if I'd never met him, I'd never been able to be the CEO of a lemonade stand."

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McHenry County judge picked for Vanecko case

McHenry County Judge Maureen P. McIntyre was selected today to preside over the politically charged involuntary manslaughter trial of former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's nephew.

Michael Sullivan, chief judge of McHenry County Circuit Court, was tasked with naming a judge from his circuit last month after the Cook County judge originally picked to preside over the case stepped aside because of connections to Daley.

At the request of the special prosecutor who brought the charge against Richard Vanecko, Cook County's chief judge asked the Illinois Supreme Court to appoint a judge from outside the county to avoid the appearance of impropriety. The state’s highest court asked Sullivan last month to select a judge on his court to oversee the trial.

McIntyre is currently the presiding judge of the court's Family Division, hearing mostly cases of juvenile abuse and neglect, delinquency, and adoption.

Sullivan announced the appointment of McIntyre in a one-page order released this afternoon.

McIntyre was retained by voters in November to a six-year term. She has been on the bench in McHenry County since 1996.

Dan Wallace, administrator of the McHenry County Circuit Court, told the Tribune on Thursday that whichever judge was selected will travel to Cook County to preside over the criminal case against Vanecko, who was indicted in the 2004 death of David Koschman after a quarrel in the Rush Street bar district

Koschman, 21, of Mount Prospect, had been drinking in the Rush Street night life district early on April 24, 2004, when he and friends quarreled with a group that included Vanecko. During the altercation, Koschman was knocked to the street, hitting the back of his head on the pavement. He died 11 days later.

Last year, Cook County Judge Michael Toomin appointed veteran attorney Dan Webb as special prosecutor after an investigative series by the Chicago Sun-Times raised questions about whether authorities intentionally concealed evidence for political reasons.

In announcing the indictment against Vanecko in December, Webb said a special grand jury continued to probe how police and prosecutors handled the original investigation.

jmeisner@tribune.com

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“GameStick” Will Be the Size of a USB Memory Stick, Plug into Your TV

When the Ouya game console (scheduled to launch in April) made headlines last year, it was for three reasons. One, its size and price — the $ 99 box, which plugs into a TV, is the size of a Rubik’s cube. Two, its choice of operating system — it runs the same Android OS which powers smartphones and tablets. And three — its rise to fame on Kickstarter, where it shattered records and received millions of dollars in funding not from venture capitalists, but from gamers who wanted to see it made.

Now GameStick, “The Most Portable TV Games Console Ever Created,” is preparing to make a name for itself in exactly the same ways. Except that in some of them, it surpasses the Ouya.

Not even a set-top box

Up to this point, pretty much all home game consoles have been a box that sits on your shelf and plugs in to your TV. (Some PCs even do this these days.)

The GameStick, on the other hand, is about the size of a USB memory stick or a tube of lip balm. It plugs into a TV’s HDMI port, and connects to a wireless controller (or even a mouse and keyboard) via Bluetooth. It “works with any Bluetooth controller supporting HID,” and will come with its own small gamepad, which features twin analog sticks and a slot to put the GameStick itself inside when not in use.

Do we know if it works yet?

GameStick’s creators showed off pictures of a nonworking “Mark 1 Prototype Model,” and posted video of a “Reference Board” actually playing games while plugged into a television. This was a roughly USB-stick-sized circuit board, which lacked an outer case.

The reference unit had wires coming out of it, but the GameStick FAQ explains that on new, “MHL compliant TVs” it can draw power straight from the HDMI port, in much the same way that many USB devices are powered by a USB connection. A USB connector cable will be supplied with GameStick just in case, and “there will also be a power adapter.”

What about the games?

The GameStick reference unit was playing an Android game called Shadowgun, an over-the-shoulder third-person shooter which is considered technically demanding by Android device standards.

GameStick’s creators say “We have some great games lined up already,” and AFP Relax confirms that it has roughly the same internal specs as the Ouya, plus a lineup at launch of about a dozen games including several AAA Android titles.

How much will it cost, and when will it be out?

GameStick is available for preorder now from its Kickstarter page for $ 79. (The price includes the controller as well.) It has an estimated delivery date of April if the project is fully funded — and with 28 days to go, it had more than reached its $ 100,000 goal.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.

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Helen Mirren “happy” her Hollywood star next to Colin Firth’s

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Oscar-winning actress Helen Mirren finally got her wish on Thursday, receiving a star along the Hollywood Walk of Fame right next to dashing fellow Briton Colin Firth.

“I couldn’t be prouder and more happy that I’m actually going to finally lie next to Colin Firth, something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time,” Mirren said wryly.

Mirren, 67, who won the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth in 2006′s “The Queen,” was honored with the iconic terrazzo and brass star along Hollywood Boulevard in the historical heart of the U.S. film industry.

Mirren’s star, the 2,488th since the Walk of Fame began in 1958, serves as a de facto lifetime achievement award for those in the entertainment industry.

Firth, who received his Walk of Fame star in 2011, won an Oscar as best actor for his portrayal of Britain’s King George VI in 2010′s “The King Speech.”

“Well I’m very pleased and proud and I think it’s very good for the British monarchy that here on Hollywood Boulevard, the King and the Queen are going to actually sleep together, for the rest of history,” said Mirren said at the unveiling.

The actress posed for photographers lying on her side next to her star and blew kisses to the crowd.

Writer and director David Mamet introduced Mirren.

“Helen’s performances reap higher praise than being praised, they’re loved,” Mamet said.

“And by one who’s had the absolute kick of working with her, I want to say as (British poet) Rupert Brooke said, somewhere there will be a little piece of foreign ground that is always a bit of England, and that’s right there,” Mamet said.

Mirren is starring alongside Al Pacino in Mamet’s upcoming TV film about troubled music producer Phil Spector’s murder trial.

The Hollywood Walk of Fame is administered by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

(Reporting by Alan Devall, writing by Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Sandra Maler)

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The New Old Age: Murray Span, 1922-2012

One consequence of our elders’ extended lifespans is that we half expect them to keep chugging along forever. My father, a busy yoga practitioner and blackjack player, celebrated his 90th birthday in September in reasonably good health.

So when I had the sad task of letting people know that Murray Span died on Dec. 8, after just a few days’ illness, the primary response was disbelief. “No! I just talked to him Tuesday! He was fine!”

And he was. We’d gone out for lunch on Saturday, our usual routine, and he demolished a whole stack of blueberry pancakes.

But on Wednesday, he called to say he had bad abdominal pain and had hardly slept. The nurses at his facility were on the case; his geriatrician prescribed a clear liquid diet.

Like many in his generation, my dad tended towards stoicism. When he said, the following morning, “the pain is terrible,” that meant agony. I drove over.

His doctor shared our preference for conservative treatment. For patients at advanced ages, hospitals and emergency rooms can become perilous places. My dad had come through a July heart attack in good shape, but he had also signed a do-not-resuscitate order. He saw evidence all around him that eventually the body fails and life can become a torturous series of health crises and hospitalizations from which one never truly rebounds.

So over the next two days we tried to relieve his pain at home. He had abdominal x-rays that showed some kind of obstruction. He tried laxatives and enemas and Tylenol, to no effect. He couldn’t sleep.

On Friday, we agreed to go to the emergency room for a CT scan. Maybe, I thought, there’s a simple fix, even for a 90-year-old with diabetes and heart disease. But I carried his advance directives in my bag, because you never know.

When it is someone else’s narrative, it’s easier to see where things go off the rails, where a loving family authorizes procedures whose risks outweigh their benefits.

But when it’s your father groaning on the gurney, the conveyor belt of contemporary medicine can sweep you along, one incremental decision at a time.

All I wanted was for him to stop hurting, so it seemed reasonable to permit an IV for hydration and pain relief and a thin oxygen tube tucked beneath his nose.

Then, after Dad drank the first of two big containers of contrast liquid needed for his scan, his breathing grew phlegmy and labored. His geriatrician arrived and urged the insertion of a nasogastric tube to suck out all the liquid Dad had just downed.

His blood oxygen levels dropped, so there were soon two doctors and two nurses suctioning his throat until he gagged and fastening an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.

At one point, I looked at my poor father, still in pain despite all the apparatus, and thought, “This is what suffering looks like.” I despaired, convinced I had failed in my most basic responsibility.

“I’m just so tired,” Dad told me, more than once. “There are too many things going wrong.”

Let me abridge this long story. The scan showed evidence of a perforation of some sort, among other abnormalities. A chest X-ray indicated pneumonia in both lungs. I spoke with Dad’s doctor, with the E.R. doc, with a friend who is a prominent geriatrician.

These are always profound decisions, and I’m sure that, given the number of unknowns, other people might have made other choices. Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide; I could ask my still-lucid father.

I leaned close to his good ear, the one with the hearing aid, and told him about the pneumonia, about the second CT scan the radiologist wanted, about antibiotics. “Or, we can stop all this and go home and call hospice,” I said.

He had seen my daughter earlier that day (and asked her about the hockey strike), and my sister and her son were en route. The important hands had been clasped, or soon would be.

He knew what hospice meant; its nurses and aides helped us care for my mother as she died. “Call hospice,” he said. We tiffed a bit about whether to have hospice care in his apartment or mine. I told his doctors we wanted comfort care only.

As in a film run backwards, the tubes came out, the oxygen mask came off. Then we settled in for a night in a hospital room while I called hospices — and a handyman to move the furniture out of my dining room, so I could install his hospital bed there.

In between, I assured my father that I was there, that we were taking care of him, that he didn’t have to worry. For the first few hours after the morphine began, finally seeming to ease his pain, he could respond, “OK.” Then, he couldn’t.

The next morning, as I awaited the hospital case manager to arrange the hospice transfer, my father stopped breathing.

We held his funeral at the South Jersey synagogue where he’d had his belated bar mitzvah at age 88, and buried him next to my mother in a small Jewish cemetery in the countryside. I’d written a fair amount about him here, so I thought readers might want to know.

We weren’t ready, if anyone ever really is, but in our sorrow, my sister and I recite this mantra: 90 good years, four bad days. That’s a ratio any of us might choose.

---

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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U.S. unemployment holds at 7.8%

CBS News business and economics correspondent Rebecca Jarvis talks to Norah O'Donnell and Anthony Mason about the final jobs report of 2012 to be released later today.

The pace of hiring by U.S. employers eased slightly in December, pointing to a lackluster pace of economic growth that was unable to make further inroads in the country's still high unemployment rate.

Payrolls outside the farming sector grew 155,000 last month, the Labor Department said on Friday. That was in line with analysts' expectations and slightly below the level for November.

Gains in employment were distributed broadly throughout the economy, from manufacturing and construction to health care.

That should reinforce expectations that the economy will grow about 2 percent this year, unlikely to quickly bring down the unemployment rate or make the U.S. Federal Reserve rethink its easy-money policies, which have been propping up the recovery.

"It's not a booming economy, but it is growing," Jim O'Sullivan, an economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York, said before the data was released.

The jobless rate held steady at 7.8 percent in December, down nearly a percentage point from a year earlier but still well above the average rate over the last 60 years of about 6 percent.

The Labor Department raised its estimate for the unemployment rate in November by a tenth of a point to 7.8 percent, citing a slight change in the labor market's seasonal swings.

Most economists expect the U.S. economy will be held back by tax hikes this year as well as by weak spending by households and businesses, which are still trying to reduce their debt burdens.

Friday's data nonetheless gave signals of growing momentum in the labor market's recovery from the 2007-09 recession. Many economists had expected December's payroll gains to be padded by one-time factors like the recovery from a mammoth storm that hit the East Coast in late October.

The government had said last month the storm had no substantial impact on the November data, and many economists expected the government to recant by revising downward in Friday's report its estimate for payroll gains in November. Instead, the government revised its estimate for November payrolls upward by 15,000.

"There is some evidence that underlying jobs growth has improved," Paul Dales, an economist at Capital Economics in London, said before the report was released.

AUSTERITY'S BITE

Despite the signs of some momentum in hiring, a wave of government spending cuts due to begin around March loom over the economy.

Many economic forecasts assume the cuts - which would hit the military, education and other areas - will ultimately be pushed into next year as part of a deal sought by lawmakers to reduce gradually the government's debt burden.

Initially, the cuts were planned to have begun this month as part of a $600 billion austerity package that also included tax hikes. Hiring in December may have been slowed by uncertainty over the timing of the austerity, economists say.

Congress this week passed legislation to avoid most of the tax hikes and postpone the spending cuts.

Even with the last-minute deal to avoid much of the "fiscal cliff," most workers will see their take-home pay reduced this month as a two-year cut in payroll taxes expires.

That leaves the Fed's efforts to lower borrowing costs as the main program for stimulating the economy.

The Fed has kept interest rates near zero since 2008, and in September promised open-ended bond purchases to support lending further. On Thursday, however, minutes from the Fed's December policy review pointed to rising concerns over how the asset purchases will affect financial markets.

Analysts ahead of the report expected some of the strength in job creation in December would be due to the Fed's policies.

"Despite the end-of-year angst over the ‘fiscal cliff,' financial conditions remained supportive of job growth in December," economists at Nomura said in a note to clients earlier in the week.
 

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House chooses Boehner as speaker

The House has re-elected embattled Republican John Boehner speaker. The Ohio lawmaker won a second, two-year term as leader with 220 votes, losing just a handful of votes in the Republican-controlled chamber. (Jan. 3)

David Lawder and Thomas Ferraro




Reuters

2:03 p.m. CST, January 3, 2013

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Despite a rocky few weeks during the "fiscal cliff" fight, John Boehner won re-election as speaker of the House of Representatives on Thursday and will lead Republicans as they take on the White House over federal spending.

Boehner beat Democratic Minority LeaderNancy Pelosi by 220-192 in the speakership vote on the first day of a new Congress.

A possible rebellion against Boehner from conservatives upset at his handling of the fiscal crisis never emerged and only a handful of Republicans voted against him.

Some Republicans have criticized the Ohio congressman for dragging his feet on aid for storm Sandy victims in the Northeast and for backing tax hikes on the wealthy sought by PresidentBarack Obama to avert the "fiscal cliff" of steep tax increases and spending cuts.

New fights loom over spending cuts for military and domestic programs as well as the "debt ceiling" limit of how much the federal government can borrow.

"Being speaker today is no bargain, I tell you," Republican Representative Peter King said on morning TV talks shows on Thursday.

King, of New York, was among those who slammed Boehner on Wednesday for postponing an anticipated vote on a $60 billion aid package for victims of Sandy.

Under pressure, Boehner, 63, agreed later in the day to vote on Friday on $9 billion in relief and on January 15 for another $51 billion in aid.

(Editing by Alistair Bell and Vicki Allen)

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Samsung and Apple are still the only winners in the mobile market

The duopoly of the U.S. mobile market intensified dramatically in 2012. Despite increased efforts from Motorola, LG (066570), HTC (2498), Nokia (NOK) and Microsoft (MSFT) to gain market share, Samsung (005930) and Apple (AAPL) continue to steal customers away from every other company. During a three-month period ending in November, comScore found that Samsung’s lead in the U.S. smartphone market increased 1.2 percentage points for a controlling 26.9% share. Apple’s smartphone market share grew from 17.1% to 18.5%, gaining 1.4 points following the launch of the iPhone 5. Rounding out the top-five were LG, Motorola and HTC, all of which saw their market shares decrease from August. LG fell 0.7 points to 17.5%, Motorola dropped 0.8 points to 10.4% and HTC’s market share decreased from 6.3% to 5.9%.

[More from BGR: Samsung confirms plan to begin inching away from Android]

[More from BGR: ‘iPhone 5S’ to reportedly launch by June with multiple color options and two different display sizes]

The research firm found that 123.3 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the period, an increase of 6% since August. A majority of devices, 53.7%, were powered by Google’s (GOOG) Android operating system, which saw growth of 1.1 percentage points. Apple’s iOS market share increased 0.7 percentage points to 35%.

2012 was a transitional year for Research in Motion (RIMM) and Microsoft. Both companies spent most of the year preparing new operating systems. RIM will unveil its BlackBerry 10 operating system later this month and devices powered by Windows Phone 8 launched this past November. As a result, both companies saw lost share toward the end of 2012; RIM’s BlackBerry platform ranked third with a 7.3% share, down from 8.3% in August, and Microsoft’s operating system dropped 0.6 percentage points to a 3% share of the market.

This article was originally published by BGR

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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