Dennis Metzcher: Blog.

Verizon is acquiring AOL for $4.4 billion in cash and will acquire its media companies, including Huffington Post, Engadget, and TechCrunch. The last time Verizon owned a media company, they allegedly banned their own reporters from writing about net neutrality and government surveillance.

"The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

“Since climate change has been identified [by the Pentagon] as a security threat, Obama should direct money from the Defense Department to NASA to make up for this shortfall. …” (read full comment)

We told you so.

**iPhone Photo of Hurricane Sandy Makes the Cover of Time** > When superstorm Sandy was approaching, New York photojournalist Ben Lowy, 33, didn’t grab his high-end camera equipment. He grabbed his iPhone 4S, put it in his pocket, and headed out on assignment for Time magazine. ([read more](http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/11/iphone-photo-of-hurricane-sandy-makes-the-cover-of-time))

All that wasted money could have been spent helping others. That's the real tragedy here. How many schools or hospitals could it have funded?

— Dennis Metzcher (@dmetzcher) November 6, 2012

(I snapped this photo of my TV screen to mark the occasion.)

**Obama to Romney: We Also Have Fewer Horses and Bayonets...**

**Mitt Romney Style (Gangnam Style Parody)**

President Barack Obama responding to Mitt Romney’s comments that Russia is the United States’ biggest geopolitical foe (Presidential Debate on Foreign Policy, 22 October 2012)

**Candy Crowley Fact-Checks Mitt Romney: Obama 'Did In Fact' Say Libya Attack Was Terrorism** This was my favorite part of the debate last night. The moderator (Crowley) understood that her job was not to simply ask questions (or have the audience ask them) and allow the two candidates to respond however they pleased. She also had a responsibility to correct the candidates or ask follow-up questions when she knew that they were either lying, dodging, or simply wrong on the facts. In this case, Mitt Romney was not telling the truth. Whether he knew it or not makes little difference. I especially love how President Obama, knowing where Romney was going with this, said, "Please proceed, governor." He let Romney walk right into it, and Crowley took it from there. This required an amazing amount of courage on Crowley's part. If she had been wrong, she would never -- ever -- have lived it down. It would have followed her for the rest of her life. **All journalists should be proud of the job she did.** This should be a lesson to Mitt Romney, and he needs to learn it fast, because he's only got one debate left. Lying, whether intentional or not, is not acceptable when you are presenting your case to the American people. The first presidential debate was filled with statements from Romney that all reputable fact-checkers rightly exposed as having been either false or half-true. The problem, during that debate, was that we had a moderator (Jim Lehrer) and an opponent (President Obama) who were unwilling to call Romney out. That was not the case last night.

**The Hunted and the Hated: An Inside Look at the NYPD's Stop-and-Frisk Policy** It is is a national disgrace that we allow this to happen. I found myself becoming more angry as each minute of this video passed. Stop-and-Frisk does two things, and neither of them are any good. 1. It turns young minorities against the police departments that exist *to protect them*. When police wonder why young people refuse to help them with an investigation, the Stop-and-Frisk policy, which is more correctly described as "racial profiling," is the reason. They don't trust the cops. How effective can police officers be in their communities if they don't have the trust and respect of those they have sworn to protect? 2. It turns otherwise good cops into bad cops, because it forces them, with a system of quotas and the thread of bad reviews, reassignment, and even demotion, to participate in a policy that they know is wrong. Stop-and-Frisk puts the careers of good cops at risk, and rewards bad behavior. Now, one might ask whether or not Stop-and-Frisk cuts down on crime by getting criminals off the streets. Aside from the fact that the answer to that question is _irrelevant_, because police are not allowed to violate a citizen's civil rights, even if there is a benefit, the truth is that numbers simply don't justify the waste of police time, nor the distrust in government that this policy breeds in local communities. [According to The Center for Constitutional Rights](http://ccrjustice.org/stopandfrisk): > In 2011, in New York City, 685,724 people were stopped, **84 percent of whom were Black and Latino residents — although they comprise only about 23 percent and 29 percent of New York City’s total population** respectively. 2011 is the highest year on record for stops. The number of stops represent an over 600 percent since Mayor Bloomberg came into office. In 2011, **88 percent of all stops did not result in an arrest or a summons being given. Contraband was found in only 2 percent of all stops. The NYPD claims their stop and frisk policy keeps weapons off the street – but weapons were recovered in only one percent of all stops.** These numbers clearly contradict that claim. Those numbers tell me two things. 1. **Stop-and-Frisk is racial profiling**, and that generates a mistrust of police officers that the cops themselves complain about. 2. **Stop-and-Frisk is not an effective policy** and wastes the time of police officers. [The New York City Council has *considered* creating an independent inspector general’s post to investigate Stop-and-Frisk complaints](http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/10/10/city-council-considers-new-rules-for-nypd-stop-and-frisk-policy), but they haven't actually done anything yet. So, there should be a federal investigation into this. The FBI should begin an inquiry into civil rights violations and make it clear that this policy is unconstitutional (because it *is*). We cannot expect the city of New York to handle this properly, as the city's leaders either believe that this policy is appropriate (the mayor and chief of police certainly do, and their statements about it speak for themselves), or they do not have the political will to get anything done about it.

**This is the paper's first endorsement of a democrat for president since 1964.** > [...] Obama has had a generally strong four years. He and Vice President Joe Biden form a seasoned, consistent ticket, one much more promising and reliable than that of Romney and his running mate, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. [...]

**Fox News Host Chris Wallace Calls Out the Romney Campaign for Their Impossible Tax Math** ...and Senior Romney campaign advisor, Ed Gillespie, still refuses to give any details on Romney's plan.