Kim Murphy:

On the edge of the Nebraska sand hills is Lake McConaughy, a 22-mile-long reservoir that in summer becomes a magnet for Winnebagos, fishermen and kite sailors. But officials here in Keith County, population 8,370, imagined this scene: An Al Qaeda sleeper cell hitching explosives onto a water-skiing boat and plowing into the dam at the head of the lake.

The federal Department of Homeland Security ago gave the county $42,000 to buy state-of-the-art dive gear, including full-face masks, underwater lights and radios, and a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar capable of mapping wide areas of the lake floor.

Up on the lonely prairie around Cherry County, population 6,148, got thousands of federal dollars for cattle nose leads, halters and electric prods – in case terrorists decided to mount biological warfare against cows.

Dan Levinthal:

Lobby shops and their clients are fast realizing that a full frontal assault on Congress’s budget-slashing supercommittee may not be a fruitful strategy — particularly as some committee members and senior congressional staffers suggest that K Street won’t be terribly welcome at their negotiating table.

K Street’s worry is that it won’t be business as usual in Washington, where lobbyists famously enjoy open access to lawmakers.

Such a scenario may force lobbyists to use indirect techniques to impress clients’ messages upon supercommittee members and their yet-to-be-solidified staffers.

“They’re going to have a little bit of a firewall — that’s exactly what’s going to happen,” said Dave Wenhold of Miller/Wenhold Capitol Strategies and a former American League of Lobbyists president.

Wenhold, whose clients include municipal governments, public colleges and construction companies, said to expect creativity. “Grass-roots, grass-tops — don’t just approach the D.C. office, go to the district offices, too. There will be a media aspect to it — you’re going to see some interesting campaigns,” he said. “The more facets of a diamond, the more opportunity for the sparkle to get noticed.”

Location:Lobbying the Budget SuperComittee

Kathleen Miller:

Electronic health record vendors Epic Systems and Cerner may face competition from a joint patient information-sharing network being developed by the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments, analysts said.

Prompted by President Obama’s push for medical facilities to adopt electronic records, hospitals may pay companies to modify the open-source code likely to power the government-developed system, rather than buying commercial systems, said Ed Meagher, former Veterans Affairs deputy chief information officer.

Anne Gowen:

Washingtonians now enjoy the highest median household income of any metropolitan area in the country, and five of the top 10 jurisdictions in America — Loudoun, Howard and Fairfax counties, and Falls Church and Fairfax City — are here, census data shows.

The signs of that wealth are on display all over, from the string of luxury boutiques such as Gucci and Tory Burch opening at Tysons Galleria to the $15 cocktails served over artisanal ice at the W Hotel in the District to the ever-larger houses rising off River Road in Potomac.

But nowhere is the region’s wealth more concentrated than the place where Talwar purchased her 15,000-square-foot white-brick estate home: Great Falls, a once-rural enclave of about 15,000 residents 17 miles west of the White House.

Sixteen percent of Great Falls households earn $500,000 or above a year, and more than half make at least $250,000, according to Nielsen Claritas. By comparison, 11 percent of households in Potomac earn $500,000 or more, and McLean and Bethesda each boast 10 percent at that level.

Eli Saslow and David Nakamura:

President Obama had made this exact trip before, flying in secret from the White House to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to stand on the tarmac and salute the dead. He was a new president back then, in the fall of 2009, and he was weighing a decision to send more U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan. He traveled to Dover because he wanted to witness the consequences of war firsthand.

Almost two years later, after so many decisions and so many consequences, Obama arrived at Dover again Tuesday afternoon. Nothing about his presidency felt new anymore; he looked tired, solemn and gray as he stepped onto the tarmac. Since his last trip, 874 more Americans have died in Afghanistan, and Obama has signed 874 handwritten condolence letters. The war is fully his now. This time, he went to Dover to greet the charred and dismembered remains of Americans he had ordered to Afghanistan himself.

Andrew Hill:

We love robots – tireless, productive workhorses of the modern assembly line. But we also hate robots – sinister mechanical simulacra of the human workers they make redundant.

In the latest episode in our complicated relationship with automatons and automation, it is appropriate that Foxconn should have a lead role. The Taiwanese company manufactures the chattering classes’ favourite piece of science fiction come true, the Apple iPad, as well as devices for Nokia and Sony. It employs 1m people in China. It was the epicentre last year of concern about pressure on low-paid young workers, following a series of suicides at its Shenzhen factories. It is, in short, iPad users’ window on to dilemmas of assembly-line politics and management that the developed world last grappled with on this scale decades ago.

In developed economies, Lynda Gratton writes in her new book The Shift, “when the tasks are more complex and require innovation or problem solving, substitution [by machines or computers] has not taken place”. This creates a paradox: far from making manufacturers easier to manage, automation can make managers’ jobs more complicated. As companies assign more tasks to machines, they need people who are better at overseeing the more sophisticated workforce and doing the jobs that machines cannot.

Lex @ Financial Times

How valuable is the exorbitant privilege? The ratings downgrade of US sovereign debt has not erased the dollar’s special position – as the numeraire of international transactions, the currency of choice for storing trade surpluses and the instinctive home for money in troubled times. But it is a forceful reminder that the special status could some day be lost.

The main beneficiaries of the privilege are US government bonds and the dollar. The former’s gain can be estimated with a global return forecasting factor (GFF), as set out in a paper by Rebecca Hellerstein of the New York Federal Reserve. She used clever statistical techniques to isolate the effect of global risk appetite on the gap between short- and long-dated US Treasury yields. The result: at times of cross-border investor confusion or stress – including all of the last year – the GFF has shrunk this gap by 25-50 basis points. In other words, if investors with worries and countries with trade surpluses stopped considering US Treasuries to be safe, yields on 10-year would be as much as half a percentage point higher.

Mark Hujerk:

He was constrained by a number: 140, the maximum characters a Twitter message can contain. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, it was US President Barack Obama’s own, self-imposed limit. Obama was hosting a “Twitter Town Hall Meeting” in the East Room of the White House, where he hoped to explain his policies through the new medium.

It’s a challenge for a politician to restrict his comments to 140 characters, especially during a budget crisis in which anger and shouting seemed to prevail over actual arguments.

“I’m going to make history here as the first president to live tweet,” Obama said with an amused smile, as he walked up to a laptop adorned with the presidential seal. These were big words for a particularly insignificant event.

Obama has always managed to win over Americans with big words. He used big words to raise expectations and establish a mood of change in the 2008 presidential election campaign, when he inspired the country with his slogan “Yes, we can.”

AFP:

BERLIN — Body scanners being tested at Germany’s Hamburg airport have had a thumbs down from the police, who say they trigger an alarm unnecessarily in seven out of 10 cases, a newspaper said Saturday.

The weekly Welt am Sonntag, quoting a police report, said 35 percent of the 730,000 passengers checked by the scanners set off the alarm more than once despite being innocent.

The report said the machines were confused by several layers of clothing, boots, zip fasteners and even pleats, while in 10 percent of cases the passenger’s posture set them off.

Bruce Schneier has more.

John Kass:

That’s because Allesina has created a computer model that can determine the frequency of nepotism in hiring. He applied it to academic life in Italy, but the same model could just as easily be applied to political hiring here.

“I wanted to keep it simple so anyone with a laptop can repeat it,” he told us. “What I wanted to show was that it’s not a few bad apples. I wanted to show the magnitude.”

His findings, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, proved that nepotism is widespread among academics in Italy, and now the Italian media are all over it. But what about Chicago?