Markey and Lynch Outline Visions in Vying for Mass. Senate Seat

BOSTON â€" The declared candidates in Massachusetts’ special Senate election, Representative Edward J. Markey and Representative Stephen F. Lynch, gave Democrats a first glimpse into their primary contest Thursday night, with Mr. Lynch casting himself as a candidate who can appeal to political moderates, while Mr. Markey focused on his liberal stands.

The two separately addressed a meeting of the state’s Democratic State Committee, held at the Boston Teacher’s Union in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, bookending a joint appearance by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator John Kerry.

Mr. Kerry was his final hours on the job before he becomes Secretary of State, creating the vacancy Mr. Lynch and Mr. Markey are vying to fill. Also present was William “Mo” Cowan, who earlier this week was appointed to fill Mr. Kerry’s seat until the special election for the seat in June.

Speaking first, Mr. Lynch, who formally announced his candidacy at a union-hall rally in South Boston earlier on Thursday, made an appeal to to a political establishment that initially seemed eager to avoid a primary after Mr. Markey announced his candidacy in December.

Drawing on his record as a moderate Democrat, Mr. Lynch argued that he would be better suited than Mr. Markey to defeat Scott P. Brown, t! he former Republican senator who won his seat in a special election in 2010 but lost to Ms. Warren in November, and who is considered a likely candidate for the Republican nomination in the race. Mr. Lynch recalled how Mr. Brown made a concerted effort to reach out to independent voters and presented himself as an everyman with working-class roots.

“I think if there’s anyone that can take away that base, that formula from Scott Brown, that can take away the regular-guy, the working-family mantra away from Scott Brown, I think it’s myself,” said Mr. Lynch, who said he would be better suited than Mr. Markey to court independent voters. “I think I offer the Democratic Party an opportunity.”

“Look, I had a pickup truck too,” he continued, referring to the vehicle that rgularly made appearances on the campaign trial with Mr. Brown. “I was an ironworker for 19 years and I know what it’s like to stand in an unemployment line.”

Mr. Markey spoke after Mr. Kerry bid farewell to the group, and he came out swinging, eliciting cheers from the crowd as he declared his support for women’s rights, gay rights and action on climate change, making a general-election-style argument that broadly pitted Democratic ideals against Republican ones.

“The Obama agenda is going to be on the table in a referendum in June in the state of Massachusetts,” Mr. Markey said, echoing a campaign theme frequently used by Ms. Warren, who often highlighted the national implications of her race against Mr. Brown. “I ask that you send a signal to the U.S.A., to Karl Rove, to the Koch Brothers.”

Mr. Marke! y has $3 ! million in campaign funds to Mr. Lynch’s $750,000, and has high-profile endorsements, while Mr. Lynch has none. He did not acknowledge Mr. Lynch by name, and made only a single, curt mention of the primary election.

“The primary, believe it or not, is in 90 days,” said Mr. Markey. “You wanna know something about the Democrats in Massachusetts They do not agonize, they organize.”

Mr. Lynch played up his underdog status at his rally earlier in the day, using his biography to present himself as both a political outsider and an committed Democrat.

“It’s uphill,” he told reporters. “If the election were held today, I would lose, I admit that, but the election’s not today. That’s what the campaign’s going to be about.”

His “everyman” message seemed to resonate with the hundreds of mostly male supporters â€" many of whom were part of some 26 unions, according to Mr. Lynch’s speech â€" who turned out for rally in South Boston, which is part of his Congressiona district.

“Down in his soul, he is a solid, blue-collar kid,” said Jim Regan, a plumber who took the train there from Braintree, Mass., and who is a registered Democrat. “I’m a blue-collar guy, and he understands my family. A guy like this going for the Senate is a win for the working man.”

Mr. Markey has his first major campaign rally planned for Saturday.

Republican Committee Begins Midterm Election Cycle in the Black

The Republican National Committee, which started the 2012 campaign cycle in deep financial distress, will begin the current period without any debt and with $4.7 million in cash on hand.

“We have important work to do, guided by the upcoming recommendations of the Growth and Opportunity Project, as we take our message of economic opportunity to every state and community,” Reince Priebus, the chairman of the committee, said in a statement to be released Thursday evening. “With the continued support of our donors and sound financial stewardship, we will move swiftly to renew our party and grow our ranks so that we can win more elections â€" in 2013, 2014 and beyond.”

The party committee raised about $2.3 million in December, following the presidential election. The R.N.C. raised a total of $378 million during the presidential campaign cycle, from 2010 to 2012, officials will report.

Republicans started the last campaign season in 2011 in a $24 million hole after financial difficultis under Michael S. Steele, the previous chairman. The intensity of the presidential campaign helped the committee erase the debt.

That financial position will help in the coming two years, as Republicans battle during the midterm elections for a majority in the Senate and to retain control of the House.

It will also help provide Republicans some of the resources they will need to confront what the leadership has said are deficiencies in the party’s ground operation and turnout efforts.

President Obama’s campaign proved to be far more effective at identifying voters and getting them to the polls, using sophisticated technology that Republicans have admitted they do not have. Building that infrastructure ahead of the 2016 campaign will be critical â€" and costly.

The Democratic National Committee has not yet reported its fund-raising for the end of last year. In the future, some of the Democratic donors may choose to contribute to a new, nonpro! fit grass-roots organization called Organizing for Action, set up by Mr. Obama’s former campaign advisers.

Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.

In Massachusetts, House Democrats Vie to Replace Kerry in Senate

BOSTON â€" Representative Stephen Lynch began his first day as a candidate for the Senate on Thursday by casting himself as a workingman of humble origins who could connect with average voters better than his fellow Democrat, Representative Edward J. Markey, whom he will face in a primary in April.

A new 60-second campaign video introduces Mr. Lynch, 57, a former ironworker from South Boston, to voters as someone who pulled himself up by the bootstraps.

“He has never forgotten where he came from,” the narrator says, noting that Mr. Lynch voted against the Wall Street bailout. The video ends with this tag line: “He’ll go to Washington to stand up, not fit in.”

In advace of a three-city announcement tour Thursday, Mr. Lynch indicated in a radio interview with WBUR that the workingman image was a central part of his campaign strategy.

He said he was running because he could bring that perspective to the exclusive Senate club. He described himself as having “slapped on a pair of work boots” and growing up in housing projects.

“I’ve struggled with a lot of the things that average people struggle with,” Mr. Lynch said, suggesting that Mr. Markey, 66, had not.

Mr. Lynch, who started in Congress in 2001, suggested that Mr. Markey’s 38 years in Washington had distanced him from average people.

“I’m not sure he’s ever had a connection with the private sector or worked at a job that most people relate to, and I think there’s something missing,” Mr. Lynch said of Mr. Markey. “I don’t think electing someone who’s been in! Washington for 38 years is going to provide that connection to average people.”

Mr. Markey has about $3 million saved up for the race as well as the backing of much of the Democratic establishment, including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Mr. Lynch enters the race with about $750,000 on hand and no major endorsements.

Mr. Lynch indicated that he would try to use Mr. Markey’s “advantages” against him.

“I’m not going to try to purchase the election,” he said, “I’m going to try to earn it.”

As for Mr. Markey’s backing by the national Democrats, Mr. Lynch said he thought the people of Massachusetts would want to pick their own senator rather than have the Washington establishment pick it for them.

“Shame on us to allow someone to clear the field, box out all the other candidates and buy the election,” Mr. Lynch said in Springfield on Thursday morning as he began his announcement tour.

Mr. Lynch is the most conservative member of he state’s Congressional delegation and has a record of voting against abortion rights. Aware that most voters in deep-blue Massachusetts support abortion rights, Mr. Lynch suggested he would not try to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. “I’ve never viewed attacking Roe v. Wade as part of any solution, and I certainly wouldn’t do that in the United States Senate,” he said. He said he supported the use of birth control.

Mr. Markey released a statement in the afternoon, saying, “I welcome Stephen Lynch into the race for U.S. Senate.” He said he hoped Mr. Lynch would join him in a ! pledge to! discourage outside special interests from running expensive ads in the campaign.

He also indicated that his strategy against Mr. Lynch would be to emphasize his own more liberal voting record, which he believes is more in line with the state’s Democratic tradition.

“We need a senator who continues to stand up for the progressive values that John Kerry and Massachusetts believe in and who’s focused on creating the jobs our economy needs,” Mr. Markey said in his statement. “That’s why I’m running for Senate.”

The primary is set for April 30. So far, no Republican candidate has announced for the Senate seat, which was vacated this week by John Kerry upon his confirmation as secretary of state. Former Senator Scott P. Brown could be the Republican candidate for the special election, set for June 25, but he has not indicated his intentions.

Biden Presses Senate Democrats to Support Gun Safety Agenda

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. visited with Senate Democrats on Thursday to encourage them to support President Obama’s agenda to curb gun violence, and insisted that the administration would continue to push renewal of an assault weapons ban even though such a measure faces considerable odds on Capitol Hill.

A day after the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to examine what, if any, measures could receive enough votes to pass both chambers of Congress, Mr. Biden said that the point of view on guns had been indelibly altered by themass shooting in Newtown, Conn., last month.

“There are things that we can do â€" demonstrably can do â€" that have virtually zero impact on your Second Amendment right to own a weapon for both self-defense and recreation that can save some lives,” Mr. Biden told reporters after a lunchtime meeting with Senate Democrats.

Mr. Biden said that he had met with scores of interest groups, from churches to gun rights organizations to law enforcement officials, and that he had seen a perceptible change in favor of some gun regulations. “The visual image of those 20 children being riddled with bullets” had traumatized the nation, he said.

On Immigration, a Glimpse of the Devilish Details

The devil is in the details, goes the cliché that has been trotted out repeatedly ever since a bipartisan group of eight senators unveiled on Monday a general set of principles for an overhaul of the immigration system.

And in a news conference Thursday afternoon, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and a member of the group, offered a glimpse of one of the more vexing details that still needs to be worked out. With Republicans insisting that a pathway to citizenship be contingent on a securing of the nation’s borders, who will decide when the borders are secure, and what metrics will used

Mr. Schumer first referred to the group’s bipartisan blueprint, which calls for “a commission comprised of governors, attorneys general and community leaders living along the Southwest border to monitor the progress of securing our border and to make a recommendatio regarding when the bill’s security measures outlined in the legislation are completed.”

“The purpose of that committee,” he said, “is to get input from them, to have them be part of the process, for them to understand we’re not trying to roll over them but get a great deal of input. But, as Senator McCain points out, it would be unconstitutional to delegate things to that committee, and what we’ve proposed is that the D.H.S. secretary, whomever it is, will have final say on whatever metrics we propose.”

Mr. Schumer continued, “Now we think those metrics will be quite objective.” He added: “There will be objectives so there’s not that much leeway. But what we envision is that, because they’d be objective, the committee, the advisory committee and D.H.S. will in all likelihood be agreed.”

Follow Ashley Parker on Twitter at @AshleyRParker.

White House Discontinues Jobs Council

President Obama has said creating jobs remains his No. 1 priority as he begins his second term. But on Thursday, the White House shut down an outside panel of corporate chieftains who advised Mr. Obama on ways to reinvigorate the job market.

The panel, known as the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, had a two-year mandate, which expired Thursday. The administration chose not to renew it, saying that the president would find new ways to reach out to business executives.

“The work of the job council was very valuable,” said Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, at his daily briefing. “While the president didn’t agree with all of itsrecommendations, he agreed with many of them and acted on a number of them.”

Mr. Carney said the White House has spoken directly to business executives about the need to reach a fiscal deal, as well as about the campaign to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws. Mr. Obama will hold more calls on those matters next week, Mr. Carney said.

Critics, however, said the White House never made use of the council. It met only four times in two years, the last time more than a year ago. They also noted that the White House was discontinuing it even though the nation’s jobless rate remained at 7.8 percent and the economy contracted slightly in the fourth quarter of 2012.

“To understand the abysmal nature of our economic recovery, look no further than the presid! ent’s disinterest in learning lessons from actual job creators,” Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner, said in a statement. “Whether ignoring the group or rejecting its recommendations, the president treated his jobs council as more of a nuisance than a vehicle to spur job creation.”

Mr. Carney disputed that characterization, noting that the administration had acted on proposals by the council to retrofit government buildings for commercial purposes. The council, he said, also set in motion a plan to give businesspeople streamlined access to information about how to obtain financing from the Small Business Administration.

The chairman of the council was Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric. Its members included Steve Case, the media investor; Kenneth I. Chenault, the chairman of American Express; Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook; and Penny Pritzker, a Chicago philanthropist who was a major fundraiser for Mr. Obama’s campaign and whose name has recently surfaced as a possible candidate for commerce secretary.

White House Discontinues Jobs Council

President Obama has said creating jobs remains his No. 1 priority as he begins his second term. But on Thursday, the White House shut down an outside panel of corporate chieftains who advised Mr. Obama on ways to reinvigorate the job market.

The panel, known as the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, had a two-year mandate, which expired Thursday. The administration chose not to renew it, saying that the president would find new ways to reach out to business executives.

“The work of the job council was very valuable,” said Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, at his daily briefing. “While the president didn’t agree with all of itsrecommendations, he agreed with many of them and acted on a number of them.”

Mr. Carney said the White House has spoken directly to business executives about the need to reach a fiscal deal, as well as about the campaign to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws. Mr. Obama will hold more calls on those matters next week, Mr. Carney said.

Critics, however, said the White House never made use of the council. It met only four times in two years, the last time more than a year ago. They also noted that the White House was discontinuing it even though the nation’s jobless rate remained at 7.8 percent and the economy contracted slightly in the fourth quarter of 2012.

“To understand the abysmal nature of our economic recovery, look no further than the presid! ent’s disinterest in learning lessons from actual job creators,” Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner, said in a statement. “Whether ignoring the group or rejecting its recommendations, the president treated his jobs council as more of a nuisance than a vehicle to spur job creation.”

Mr. Carney disputed that characterization, noting that the administration had acted on proposals by the council to retrofit government buildings for commercial purposes. The council, he said, also set in motion a plan to give businesspeople streamlined access to information about how to obtain financing from the Small Business Administration.

The chairman of the council was Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric. Its members included Steve Case, the media investor; Kenneth I. Chenault, the chairman of American Express; Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook; and Penny Pritzker, a Chicago philanthropist who was a major fundraiser for Mr. Obama’s campaign and whose name has recently surfaced as a possible candidate for commerce secretary.

In Virginia, Cuccinelli Makes a Conservative Case for Governor

One way to think of the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia is as Son of Santorum.

Ken Cuccinelli, the Commonwealth’s attorney general and presumptive Republican gubernatorial nominee, holds views on social issues and the malign effect of federal programs like Medicare that echo those of Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who was the last conservative standing in the way of Mitt Romney’s Republican presidential nomination last year.

In a forthcoming book, Mr. Cuccinelli portrays popular programs like Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid as reducing people to government dependents, a ploy that politicians use to amass power. He refers to citizens who receive benefits as “the ones getting the goodies,’’ an echo of Mr. Romney’s notorious “47 percent” comment.

But another way to view Mr. Cuccinelli, who is in a dead heat in polls with his Democratic rival nine months before the election, is as an insurgent challenger to the leaders of the Republican Prty.

Many party leaders have disavowed Mr. Romney’s secretly recorded remark - about Americans so dependent on government they would not vote for him - as divisive and a factor in his defeat by President Obama. At recent party conclaves and in Congress, many Republicans have expressed an inclination to compromise on immigration and tax increases and to seek an inclusive tone on issues of concern to women and gay Americans, in hopes of minimizing future electoral losses.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s old-time religion is either a reminder of last year’s road to ruin or a call to return to grass-roots basics.

He has never hidden his brand of conservatism. He brought an early state lawsuit against Mr. Obama’s health care law, supported a Constitutional amendment to rescind the citizenship of children born to illegal immigrants and told Virginia’s public universities they could not ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The appeal of such view! s in a post-Romney world will be tested in a battleground state this year that twice elected Mr. Obama - although turnout in an off-year likely will be much different.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s views are laid out in a new book he co-wrote, “The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty,’’ to be published on Feb. 12. Excerpts appeared on Thursday in news accounts, including Mr. Cuccinelli accusing George W. Bush of using taxpayer dollars “to buy seniors’ votes” in his 2004 re-election by expanding Medicare benefits.

“Sometimes bad politicians set out to grow government in order to increase their own power and influence,’’ Mr. Cuccinelli writes, according to an excerpt quoted by The Washington Post. “This phenomenon doesn’t just happen in Washington; it happens at all levels of government. Th amazing this is that they often grow government without protest from citizens, and sometimes they even get buy-in from citizens â€" at least from the ones getting the goodies.’’

In a Quinnipiac University poll in mid-January, Mr. Cucinelli was supported by 39 percent of registered Virginia voters, compared with 40 percent for his expected Democratic rival, Terry McAuliffe, a longtime fund-raiser and adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton. The poll found that neither candidate is well known to voters yet.

Follow Trip Gabriel on Twitter at @tripgabriel.

Introducing Hagel, Nunn and Warner Raise Specter of Tower Hearings

John Duricka/Associated Press John Tower testifying before the Senate Armed Service Committee in 1989.

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since the Southern drawls of Senators Sam Nunn and John W. Warner echoed through a Senate hearing room as an embattled defense secretary nominee fought for his job.

In 1989, the two icons of the Armed Services Committee brawled over the nomination of John G. Twer to lead the Pentagon. Accused of womanizing and excessive drinking, Mr. Tower, himself a former chairman of the committee, was rejected by the full Senate along party lines.

But on Thursday, Mr. Warner, a Republican and former senator from Virginia, and Mr. Nunn, a Democrat and former senator from Georgia, returned to the committee room to urge the confirmation of Chuck Hagel as defense secretary.

Sitting on either side of Mr. Hagel, the two former colleagues hailed his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam and a senator for 12 years. They both said the Senate should confirm him swiftly.

“I know that Chuck Hagel has a clear worldview and that it aligns with the mainstream of U.S. foreign and defense policy,” Mr. Nunn said, adding that “No one is perfect. We all know that. But Chuck Hagel comes as close as anyone I know to hav! ing all of these qualities.”

Mr. Warner offered what he called “a few words from the heart” about Mr. Hagel.

“Certain men are asked to take the point, which means to get out and lead in the face of the enemy,” Mr. Warner said. “Chuck Hagel did that as a sergeant in Vietnam. If confirmed, Chuck Hagel will do it again, this time not before a platoon but before every man and woman and the their families in the armed services.”

The return of the two men recalled the only time in more than 50 years that the Senate has formally rejected a president’s cabinet nominee.

President George Bush nominated Mr. Tower, a Texan, to run the Defense Department, but the nomination quickly became controversial amid repeated allegations of what was termed “hard drinking” and “sexual behaviors” that were documente in an F.B.I. investigation report.

During the hearing in February 1989 when the Armed Services Committee recommended that the Senate reject Mr. Tower by a vote of 11 to 9, Mr. Warner called the accusations “a cobweb of fact, fiction and fantasy.” Mr. Nunn, the chairman of the committee, called the allegations “serious” and said “the record of alcohol abuse by the nominee cannot be ignored.”

Another Democratic senator on the panel at the time, Carl Levin of Michigan, voted against Mr. Tower, citing conflict of interest problems and saying that, “I believe that it would be very difficult for Senator Tower to effectively address the serious revolving door and conflict of interest problems at the Department of Defense.”

More than two decades later, Mr. Levin is the chairman of the committee. He opened the hearing on Mr. Hagel’s confirmation by calling him an “old friend” and saying he is a person willing to give “unvarnished advice, a person of integrity and one who has a personal understanding of the consequences of decisions relative to the use of military force.”

In the years since Mr. Tower was rejected by the committee â€" and later, by the full Senate â€" defense secretaries have been approved without opposition in all but one occasion: President George W. Bush‘s nomination of Robert M. Gates, who was confirmed by a vote of 95 to 2.

This year is likely to be very different.

Several Republican senators have already pledged to vote against Mr. Hagel. On Thursday, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the committee, called Mr. Hagel “the wrong person to lead the Pentagon at this perilous and consequential time.”

Mr. Hagel has spent the last several weeks meeting privately with senators in the hopes of swaying a handful of Republicans before the full Senate votes.

Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.

Live Video of the Hagel Nomination Hearing

Live Video: Chuck Hagel appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

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President Obama’s nominee for secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, is appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday morning for what is likely to be a combative confirmation hearing focusing on Iran, Israel and the American military’s role in the world. White House officials say they remain confident about his prospects.

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Tip of the Week: Use Word on the Web

Even if you do not have Microsoft Word installed on your computer, you can edit and collaborate on Word documents others have sent or shared with you just by using your Web browser. One way to do this is with Microsoft’s free SkyDrive cloud service â€" and its included Office Web Apps versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. To open and edit the document, just log into your SkyDrive account through your Web browser and upload the file; SkyDrive users can also share files through the service.(If you use the SkyDrive desktop program, you can also drag the file into the SkyDrive folder to upload it.

Next, open the document from within the browser and click the Edit Document option in the SkyDrive menu bar. You can choose to edit the file in Microsoft Word (if you have it installed) or edit the document in the Word Web App â€" which is not as versatile as the full Word program, but can handle basi editing functions. Microsoft has more information on using SkyDrive and Office on its site.

Those using Gmail and Google can collaborate on Word files by using the Google Drive and Google Docs services or by opening Google Docs files in Microsoft Word. If you do not want to convert the Word file to the Google Docs format and only want to read it, you can view the document in its original format with the Google Drive Viewer. Google Drive Viewer can also preview more than 15 different file types, including Apple Pages documents, Ad! obe Illustrator artwork and AutoDesk AutoCAD files.

Kerry Says Goodbye to the Senate

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts bade a long and emotional farewell to the Senate on Wednesday, as he prepared to leave it after 28 years to become the secretary of state.

With his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, looking on from the gallery overhead, Mr. Kerry, 69, spoke on the chamber floor for 50 minutes about his career, which began on a wave of anti-war activism and included a failed 2004 presidential run against President George W. Bush.

“Eight years ago, I admit I had a very different plan, a slightly different plan anyway, to leave the Senate,” he said. “But 61 million Americans voted that they wanted me to stay here with you. And so, staying here I learned about humility and I learned that sometimes the greatest lesson in life comes not from victory but from dusting yourself off after a defeat and starting over when you get knocked down.”

Noting that his credibility as the nation’s top diplomat depends partly on what hppens in Washington, Mr. Kerry encouraged his soon-to-be-former colleagues to build bipartisan relationships to counter the gridlock gripping the Senate.

“The Senate runs on relationships,” he said, recalling his evolution from a liberal activist to a lawmaker who built bipartisan relationships. He spoke at length about his friendship with Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, formed when they visited the cell in Vietnam where Mr. McCain had been held during the war there, and those of other political odd couples who reached across party lines to advance common policy interests.

“If we posture politically in Washington, we weaken our position across the world,” Mr. Kerry said. “If democracy deadlocks here, we raise doubts about democracy everywhere.”

Mr. Kerry rejected the notion offered by lawmakers who departed before him that the Senate was irreparably broken. But he warned that three challenges â€" the decline of comity, a deluge o! f money and a disregard for facts â€" threatened to leave the Senate “irreversibly poisoned, unless we break out.”

Mr. Kerry, a veteran of the Vietnam war, said there were “whispers of progress” among a new generation of senators, whom he praised for being vocal and ambitious. He also noted how the Senate, which was exclusively made up of heterosexual white men when he entered in 1985, now included 20 women and its first openly gay member.

He said he felt a wistfulness about leaving the Senate. He choked up twice during a speech in which he thanked the 561 staff members and 1,393 interns who have worked in his office, as well as everyone who makes the Senate work â€" from the Capitol subway operators to the Capitol police â€" and reporters who have weathered changes in their industry to “dutifully document the first drafts of American history.”

“They are really the glue and we couldn’t function without them,” he said.

Mr. Kerry said that testifying before the SenateForeign Relations Committee last week completed a journey that began 42 years ago in front of that same committee when he testified as an activist opposed to the war in Vietnam.

“It completed a circle which I never could have imagined drawing, but one our founders surely did, that a citizen voicing his opinion about a matter of personal and national consequence could one day use that voice as a senator, as the chairman of that same committee before which he had once testified as a private citizen and then as the president’s nominee for secretary of state,” he said.

“That is a fitting representation of what we mean when we talk about a government of the people, for the people and by the people.”

Mr. Kerry’s resignation takes effect at 4 p.m. on Friday, after which he will be sworn in as the 68th secretary of state. Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts appointed his former chief of staff, William Cowan, to replace Mr. Kerry in the Senate until a special election is held.

Coming Soon: An Android Game System From Nvidia

What do you get when you cross an Xbox controller with a five-inch Android tablet with beefy stereo speakers Nvidia’s new touch-screen portable gaming system, code-named Project Shield. The handheld game system was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show this month in Las Vegas, and it could spell more bad news for the Sony Vita, Nintendo 3DS or any other entry in the mobile gaming market. Why Because it further stretches how consumers can buy and experience video games.

Besides being a complete stand-alone Android gaming system, the chunky controller can also stream games that have already been loaded on a Windows PC, providing users are sharing the same Wi-Fi router and the computer i equipped with a recent Nvidia graphics processor (specifically a Kepler-based GeForce GTX 650 or better). Even hard-core gamers take breaks, right So now you can carry your game of Assassins Creed around the house with you. Other features include a set of standard game controls and 5- to 10-hour rechargeable batteries.

The stand-alone mode is based on the Jelly Bean version of the Android operating system. An Nvidia representative promised that it was “pure, unfiltered Android that can run anything you can download from the Google Play app store.” Games that have been modified for gamepads and five-inch landscape displays will work better.

One cannot help but notice the potential of this device for playing videos or music, thanks to the clear screen and speakers that are much better than average. Nvidia promises an SD card slot, but will not say how much internal storage the device has. Also up in the air are the final name and the price. All of that will be determined by late sprin! g, which is the earliest consumers will be able to buy one.

64 Gigabytes Can\'t Be Wrong: Elvis USB Drives

Mimoco, the company known for its Mimobot flash drives made to resemble geek-friendly characters like Boba Fett, Captain Kirk and Batman, has added a figure from a distinctly different sphere of pop culture, Elvis Presley.

Why Evis suits the tech audience isn’t clear, but fans will have a choice between a limited edition G.I. Blues-era Elvis or a jump-suited 1973 Aloha From Hawaii Elvis.

Each Elvis is priced similarly and available in four storage sizes, from 8GB at $20 to 64GB at $70. Both are USB 3.0 capable and come with digital extras already loaded, like wallpapers, screen savers and other Mimobot Elvis icons.

There is even audio, but don’t expect to hear the King taking care of business. It’s the preferred sound-alike of Elvis Presley Enterprises, Jamie Aaron Kelley, crooning lines like, “I’m savin’ the last file fer meeee.”

There is some actual Elvis video, an interview before the 1973 concert, and one from when he mustered out of the army.

The USBs are the size of a good luck charm, 2.5- by 1- by 0.5-inches. Pop off Elvis’s pompadour to plug into a USB port.

If these USBs sell well, the company said it might produce other figures from well-known performances. Who could r! esist locking their data in a Jailhouse Rock Elvis

Certainly thumb drives come in handy for many uses, but if it’s intended for backup, shouldn’t there be Mimobot Jordanaires

An App That May Overshare on Facebook

EyeEm shares not only the photos you take, but the photos you view.

Since its copyright blunder last month, Instagram, the wildly popular photo sharing service, has been beset by rivals claiming to give users better control and privacy.

One such rival is EyeEm, a free app that, like Instagram, offers photo filters and lets you follow favorite photographers and look at popular shots from around the world.

It even offers a simplified sign-up process hrough Facebook, which owns Instagram. Therein lies the problem. When you set up your EyeEm account through Facebook, it automatically shares not only the photos you take, but the photos you view.

Let me repeat that. It lets other people see what photos you have been viewing.

Now, not all of the photos on EyeEm are work-appropriate. And if you want to view those, it’s your business â€" unless you signed up through Facebook and haven’t changed the standard privacy settings, in which case it could be many people’s business.

There are people who have had what they thought was their private viewing exposed to their friends, spouses and children on Facebook through EyeEm.

I’m sure EyeEm explains this feature somewhere, but I can’t find where. When you sign up, you get a pop-up message that reads in part, “You can now share your EyeEm activity on your Facebook timeline. Give it a try!” You have a choice of “No, thanks!” or “Enable.”

I don’t think this ! is clear enough about what you will be sharing, but maybe that’s just me.

So in the meantime, unless you want everyone to see what you have looked at, sign up for EyeEm using your e-mail address, not your Facebook account.

Once you have joined, go into your privacy settings and make doubly sure you have your privacy set to the level you want.

Please, let’s avoid oversharing, unintentional and otherwise.

Q&A: Tweeting in Public or Private

Q.

Can someone you block on Twitter still see your tweets

A.

Blocking another Twitter user prevents the person from following your account and automatically seeing your posts in his or her Twitter feed. Your tweets may still be visible, however, if you have not turned on certain privacy controls in your account’s settings.

Twitter allows you to have a public account, where anyone on the Web can see your posts on your Twitter profile page, or a protected account, where only the people you approve as followers can see your tweets. You can adjust this visibility on Twitter in your account’s settings, as explained in the site’s help guide.

Immigration Shifts Could Provide Opening for Compromise

In many ways it seems like 2007 all over again when it comes to addressing illegal immigration. Senator John McCain of Arizona is trying to build a bipartisan compromise. Rush Limbaugh is inveighing against amnesty. The White House - in this case President Obama rather than President George W. Bush - has staked considerable capital on reaching an agreement.

But much is different this time around, and not just in the Republicans’ newfound urgency to get a deal or risk watching Democrats cement the allegiance of Hispanic voters for a generation or more. By some key measures, the underlying problems - the pressures that have sent Mexicans northward for decades in search of jobs and a better life and the challenges for the United States of securing its borders  - have diminished relative to where they were even six years ago when Congress last tried to confront the issue and failed.

There is som debate about whether the changes are permanent or would be reversed again in the event of another sharp economic downturn in Mexico or across Latin American - or a strong rebound in economic growth and demand for labor in the United States.

But for now the bottom line is that the population of undocumented immigrants in the United States fell to 11.1 million in 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available, from a peak of 12 million in 2007, the Pew Hispanic Center said in a report on Tuesday.  By one new estimate, the number of people who managed to come over the Mexican border and make it illegally into the United States fell to 85,000 in 2011, down from 600,00 five years earlier.

With the scale of the problem stabilizing for the moment, or even shrinking, some experts say, there i! s more room for political compromise than the last time around.

“We are at a moment when the underlying drivers of what has been persistent, growing illegal immigration for 40 years have shifted,” said Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service who is now a fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a research group.  “There are some fundamental new realities.”

One of them is economic. Mexico’s economy, while still riddled with inefficiency and inequality, is nonetheless humming along at a healthy rate, outpacing the United States by some standards and driving Mexico’s unemployment rate down even as post-recession job creation north of the border remains modest. The result has been to diminish both the push and the pull of illegal immigration.

Another is demographic. In Mexico, the source of bout 6 in 10 undocumented immigrants in the United States, fertility rates having plummeted over the last few decades, and the pool of young workers - those most likely to seek a better life by emigrating - is dwindling quickly.  More Mexican children are remaining in school and getting high school degrees, an indication that they see their future at home as a middle class takes root.

Mexico’s population growth has fallen from a 3.2 percent annual rate to 1.1 percent in the first decade of this century, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The population of people under 15 years old is already declining in Mexico, and the population of people aged 15 to 29 will start doing so in coming years, an important shift given that most illegal immigrants arrive in the United States before age 30.

At the same time, one of the most contentious elements in previous battles over the issue - border security - has also b! ecome les! s of a partisan flash point.

Reflecting in part the deterrent effect of tighter border patrols as well as the economic and demographic shifts, the number of apprehensions along the border has fallen sharply. Those people who have gotten through are being caught and deported in record numbers.

Some analysts say the drop in apprehensions reflects not so much greater control of the border as a recognition on the part of potential immigrants that the chances of finding a job in the United States have fallen over the last few years. But even among border-state Republicans there is optimism that the billions of dollars spent in recent years on fences, additional agents, surveillance drones and other measures are having a real effect.

“Yes, there’s been improvement in border security and yes, it helps a lot,” Mr. McCain, the Arizona Republican, said when asked whether the politics of gettig a deal this time around are easier because of stepped-up enforcement.

The changes have all developed gradually. They do no alter the most compelling fact of the debate to both sides, which is that there are 11 million undocumented people already living in the United States whose status must be addressed in any comprehensive legislation.

But even though the economic and demographic changes have remained largely in the background of the debate so far, analysts say they could give more reassurance to conservatives in particular that legalizing those undocumented immigrants already in the United States would not simply produce another wave of them.

“The immigration debate in recent years, as it has played out in the last two presidential campaigns, has not kept pace with the facts on the ground,” said Paul Taylor, the director of the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Center. “I do sense that the nature of the debate is changing and catching up with the reality.”

There is! no assur! ance of course that another sharp economic downturn in Mexico or across Latin American would not spur more illegal migration to the north.  The prolonged weakness in the American labor market also makes it harder to draw long-term conclusions about the relative attraction of coming to the United States. And many Republicans continue to view Mexico warily, seeing in the government’s difficulties controlling the violence and general lawlessness created by drug cartels a dangerous instability that could create deeper cross-border troubles.

“Mexico is on fire and about to blow up,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a supporter of the bipartisan package, expressing concern about whether the positive trends in illegal immigration from across the border are permanent.

Follow Richard W. Stevenson on Twitter at @dickstevenson.

Reid\'s Tone May Hint at Senate\'s Path on Guns and Immigration

Sometimes in politics, tone is everything.

When President Obama pledged on Tuesday to pursue broad changes in the nation’s immigration system, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, was effusive in his praise for the effort.

“In Nevada, I have seen firsthand how the hardships imposed by our broken immigration system have hurt families and strained our economy,” Mr. Reid said in a statement that implicitly acknowledged how important Hispanic voters are to Mr. Reid’s political future.

“I am personally committed to resolvingthis issue,” Mr. Reid vowed. “With the president’s leadership and members of both parties working together in the Senate, the momentum toward a solution is real, and I will work tirelessly to make reform a reality in the Senate.”

Mr. Reid’s help is crucial to the president’s hopes for passing legislation that offers a pathway to citizenship for nearly 11 million illegal immigrants. White House officials and immigration activists are pushing for an overwhelming bipartisan vote in the Senate in the hopes of putting pressure on Republicans in the House to follow suit.

The legislative battle is likely to be fierce. But with Mr. Reid’s eager assistance, the president might just achieve it.

Compare that situation with the situation faced by gun control advocates. Mr. Obama promised this month to pursue aggressive new measures to limit gun violence in the wake of the school massacre in Newtown, Conn. Advocates plan to start the fight in the Senate, where - like immigration - they hope they can secure passage of key legislation before moving on to even tougher fights in the House.

But Mr. Reid’s reaction to the president’s gun control plans was anything but eager.

“I am committed to ensuring that the Senate will consider legislation that addresses gun violence and other aspects of violence in our society early this year,” Mr. Reid said - essentially promising no more than a simple hearing. He added: “All options should be on the table moving forward.”

Mr. Reid is no fan of gun control, in part because he comes from a western state with a gun-loving culture. In his long Senate career, Mr. Reid has not been a strong supporter of new restrictions on gun ownership, and his tone has not changed much recently.

Gun control dvocates have noted with some hope that Mr. Reid has made some mildly supportive statements in the last several weeks, including one from the Senate floor that “we need to accept the reality that we are not doing enough to protect our citizens.” On Tuesday, he went a little further.

“I’m going to do everything within my power to bring legislation dealing with guns, with violence generally, to the floor,” Mr. Reid said.

But he did not say whether proposals to ban types of assault weapons and their high-capacity ammunition magazines would be among the legislation he would allow for votes on the Senate floor. Those measures are among the most derided by the National Rifle Association and gun owners.

In the end, the majority leader may push both of Mr. Obama’s priorities! with gus! to, concluding that his interests are better served by helping the president succeed on the two biggest agenda items of his second term.

But the betting among those who watch Mr. Reid closely is that he will do only as much as he has to on guns, reserving the bulk of his political capital for the fight he really wants to have: passage of legislation to revamp the nation’s immigration system.

On guns, Mr. Reid says he is “committed” to a hearing. On immigration, he says he is “personally committed” to the cause and will work “tirelessly” to make passage a reality.

Tone matters.

Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.

The Early Word: Borders

In Today’s Times

• In pushing for Congress to act swiftly to overhaul the nation’s immigration rules, President Obama has offered some proposals that expose potential conflicts in the current debate. Mark Landler writes that Mr. Obama’s speech on Tuesday and a framework offered Monday by a bipartisan group of eight senators were opening steps in a complicated effort to move forward on an issue that the president and both parties agree needs to be addressed.

• Julia Preston writes that Mr. Obama’s proposals for an immigration overhaul offered lawmakers “carrots and sticks,” but also left vague many potentially divisive issues. The speech he gave on Tuesday positioned him to be “involved in the debate as it unfolds in coming months in ongress, while also staying distant enough to be able to force the action in the direction of policies he favors, if he finds it necessary.”.

• Jennifer Steinhauer explains the changed political, demographic and economic dynamics pressuring Congress as lawmakers gear up to refight policy battles on immigration and gun violence. The rising political influence of Hispanics, a reduced flow of undocumented immigrants into the country and increased border security have improved prospects for immigration reform, but tighter gun controls appear less likely because lawmakers in gun-friendly districts are positioning themselves for the 2014 elections.

• As Senator John Kerry prepares to take on his next role as secretary of state, Michael R. Gordon writes, it! is unclear how he will approach the range of difficult issues that he will inherit. Mr. Kerry, who will be sworn in after Hillary Rodham Clinton steps down on Friday, will be charged with handling the diplomatic response to conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, bloody battles in Egypt and Syria, and deteriorated relations with Russia.

• Lawmakers’ push to withhold their own paychecks until Congress passes a budget might seem noble until one considers how wealthy members of Congress are. Jeremy W. Peters points out that lawmakers’ net worth is more than 14 times that of the average American household, cushioning all but the poorest members from the pinch of a few missed paychecks. There are also questions about whether such a proposal runs afoul of a constitutional amendment regulating lawmakers’ pay.

Happenings in Washington

• conomic reports due on Wednesday include one on the fourth-quarter gross domestic product at 8:30 a.m.

• The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a long-awaited hearing on gun violence at 10 a.m.

• At 1:45 p.m., Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will hold a final town-hall-style meeting with Department of State personnel.

• Federal Reserve policymakers will conclude a two-day meeting on Wednesday, with a statement expected at 2:15 p.m.

• Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who will become secretary of state, will give his farewell speech on the chamber floor at 2:30 p.m.

In Limbaugh Interview, Rubio Charms the Host

WASHINGTON â€" Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, continued his conservative media tour Tuesday with an afternoon telephone interview on Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show. The back and forth went so well, from Mr. Rubio’s point of view, that at 6 p.m. his office was still tweeting out highlights from the exchange.

That Mr. Rubio was there to woo Mr. Limbaugh, who has been a constant opponent of an immigration compromise, became clear at the outset, when Mr. Rubio said he had been listening to Mr. Limbaugh’s chatter for a long while.

“I remember the TV program,” Mr. Rubio said. “Do you remember your TV program”

Mr. Limbaugh did indeed, laughing, “That’s way back,” he said. “That’s 20 years.”

Mr. Rubio laid out his broad principles for immigration legislation, including a precondition, popular with Republicans, than any pathway to citizenship could come only after additional border security and an employment verification program are instituted.

When Mr. Limbaugh worried aloud that real border security wouldn’t happen, Mr. Rubio quickly agreed. “This is going to be a challenge,” he said.

“If, in fact, this bill does not have real triggers in there, if there is not language in this bill that guarantees that nothing else will happen unless these enforcement mechanisms are in place, I won’t support it,” Mr. Rubio continued. “But the principles clearly call for that. Now, obviously, we have to make sure the law does, too.”

Mr. Rubio also sought to explain his decision to join a bipartisan group of eight senators pushing for immigration legislation as a politically savvy move. When Mr. Limbaugh warned that he thought President Obama and Democrats planned to use immigration as a wedge issue, “to continue to beat the Republicans up for two more years in hopes of winning the House,” Mr. Rubio acknowledged the possibility, before adding that it was one of the reasons he wanted to ge! t out ahead on an immigration overhaul.

“That’s precisely why I thought it was important that our principles be out there early,” Mr. Rubio said. “They can try to sell that,” he said, referring to Democrats, “but I doubt people are going to buy it because the reality is we have put something that is very common sense and reasonable. If you take our principles, 70 percent of the American people would agree, if not more, with the general principles that we have outlined. And if they want to go further than that, then I think they’ve got a problem because they can’t argue that we haven’t tried to do our part to come up with something reasonable here, which has always been our point.”

He continued, “Our point has always been we understand we have to fix this problem, but just because we’re not for what you’re for doesn’t mean that we’re anti-immigrant and anti-immigration.”

Mr. Rubio cast himself as the politician for the job â€" “Someone whose family are imigrants, married into a family of immigrants, my neighbors are immigrants,” he said. “I’ve grown up around it my whole life. I didn’t read about this in a book. I live this every day.”

Echoing a point he made at a news conference Monday, Mr. Rubio said, “I’ve seen the good that legal immigration has done for our country, and I see the strain that illegal immigration places on our country.”

By the end, Mr. Limbaugh seemed downright smitten.

“Well, what you are doing is admirable and noteworthy,” Mr. Limbaugh said. “You are recognizing reality. You’re trumpeting it, you’re shouting it. You have a difficult job ahead of you because you are meeting everybody honestly, forthrightly, halfway. You’re seeking compromise.”

Then, the talk radio host sent Mr. Rubio off with some well-wishes: “The country really does hinge on it, I think, so the best to you, and good luck.”

LaHood to Leave Transportation Department

Ray LaHood, the former Republican Congressman who has run the nation’s transportation department under President Obama, will not serve a second term, he told department employees in a letter Tuesday.

“I’ve told President Obama, and I’ve told many of you, that this is the best job I’ve ever had. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to work with all of you,” Mr. LaHood wrote in the letter. He cited the department’s efforts to curb distracted driving and to increase the efficiency of automobiles by raising emissions standards.

As the transportation secretary, Mr. LaHood was at the center of efforts to reduce fatigue among pilots and called for reater investment in high-speed rail. He also pushed for large fines against Toyota for safety problems and for a new transportation bill in Congress.

“We have made great progress in improving the safety of our transit systems, pipelines, and highways, and in reducing roadway fatalities to historic lows,” he said. “We have strengthened consumer protections with new regulations on buses, trucks, and airlines.”

Mr. LaHood’s decision makes him the latest in a series of members of the president’s original cabinet to announce their departure in the last several weeks.

In a statement, Mr. Obama praised Mr. LaHood, the sole Republican to serve in his first term Cabinet, as a public servant who has been more interested in practical solutions than in part! isan politics.

“Years ago, we were drawn together by a shared belief that those of us in public service owe an allegiance not to party or faction, but to the people we were elected to represent,” the president wrote. “And Ray has never wavered in that belief.”

Several people have been mentioned as possible replacements for Mr. LaHood at the transportation department. Among them: Antonio Villaraigosa, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles; Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania; Debbie Hersman, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board; and Jennifer Granholm, the former Democratic governor of Michigan.

Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.

Q&A: Reading Google Books on an iPhone

Q.

I know Apple has its own e-book store, but can I download and read the free stuff from Google Books on an iPhone, or do I need an Android phone

A.

You do not need an Android device to get e-books from the Google Play store. You just need the Google Play Books app installed on your iPhone and a Google account, both of which are free. The Google Play Books app is available in Apple’s App Store and you can sign up for a Google account on the Web, or through the books app.

Unlike Apple’s own iBooks app and online iBookstore, you cannot browse and buy books directly through the Google Play Books app. To get new e-books on your phone, open the iPhone’s Safari Web browser and go to this site. From here, you can bowse Google’s collection and select the books (free or paid) you want to download and read on your phone. After you log into the Web store with your Google account, your books appear in the Google Play Books app on the iPhone.

Google has full instructions for using its books app here. You can get books from Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s e-book stores on the Web with the Kindle and Nook apps for iPhone, which are also available free in the App Store.

Q&A: How to Set Up Twitter Lists

Q.

Is there a way to filter my Twitter feed to see all of the sports-related people and sites I follow into one group

A.

Twitter lets you create “lists” of the people and sites that you follow, and you can organize these lists by topic â€" like sports, weather, humor, news and so on. When you select a list you have made, you just see tweets from the people you specifically added to it, and not from everybody on your main Twitter feed.

To set up a list, log into your Twitter account on the Web. On the left side of your profile page, click Lists and then click the Create List button. Give your list a name and save it.

To add users you already follow, click the Following link to see the full list of accounts you have added to your Twitter feed. Click the drop-down menu next to a username and select “Add or remove from lists.” In the box that appears, turn on the checkbox next to the name of the list you just created and then close th box.

When you have finished adding all the accounts you want on a list, you can see the finished collection by clicking the Lists button on your Twitter page and selecting the name of the list. Standalone Twitter programs for the computer usually have a List button in the toolbar or menus for viewing your user compilations. On the Twitter app for Android or iOS, tap the Me icon, flick down the screen and tap Lists to see your groupings.

Lists can be private (meaning only you can see them) or public so that others can share and subscribe to them. Twitter has detailed instructions for using lists on its site.

The Early Word: Gamble

Today’s Times

• Republicans are betting that the deep-seated resistance to immigration overhaul from their party’s base will have less impact because of the dire electoral consequences of continuing to take a hard line on the issue, Michael D. Shear reports.

• Four senators will introduce a bill on Tuesday that would address one dysfunctional aspect of the immigration system: a shortage of visas for highly skilled immigrants working in science and technology fields, Julia Preston writes. Lawmakers who have shied away from the issue in recent years are now offering proposals that they are framing as practical solutions to fix a failing system.

• An announcemnt from the State Department appears to signal that the Obama administration does not currently see the closing of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a realistic priority, despite repeated statements that it still intends to do so, Charlie Savage reports.

 Around the Web

• The 2012 Democratic National Convention gave Charlotte, N.C., an economic boost of $163.3 million, making it the largest event in the city’s history, Politico reports.

• Fox News paid Sarah Palin more than $15 per word, Smart Politics reports.

 Happenings in Washington

• Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer ! and rights activist from China, will receive the Tom Lantos Human Rights Prize at a ceremony at the Capitol Visitor Center attended by the actor Richard Gere who is on the advisory board of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice.

Obama Speech Expected to Embrace Immigration Plan

WASHINGTON - President Obama is expected to embrace an ambitious proposal by a bipartisan group of senators to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, using a speech in Las Vegas Tuesday as a call to arms for one of his top legislative priorities.

Mr. Obama differs with the group on some key issues, notably whether to make a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants conditional on further tightening the nation’s borders.

But administration officials said Monday evening that the principles in the Senate proposal were largely consistent with those in Mr. Obama’s 29-page blueprint for immigration reform, which he issued in My 2011 and made a plank of his re-election campaign.

The president’s goal, the officials said, will be less to underline differences with the bipartisan plan than to marshal public support behind immigration reform. Mr. Obama, having failed to achieve that in his first term, has put it at the top of his second-term agenda.

With the senators pledging to pass a law by this summer, the White House has shelved, for now, plans to introduce its own immigration bill, the officials said. Indeed, after two years of nearly constant feuding with Congress, Mr. Obama finds himself in rare alignment with Democratic and Republican lawmakers on a major issue.

That could make Mr. Obama’s speech, at a high school in Las Vegas, a novelty in his polarized presidency: a pat on the back to Congress and a pledge to work toward a shared goal.

On Monday, the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, went out of his way to say the president welcomed the senators’ plan, even though they rushed their efforts to get in front of his speech.

The four pillars in the bipartisan proposal - border security, employer enforcement, provisions for granting entry to farm workers and highly skilled engineers, and the pathway to citizenship - mirror the main components of Mr. Obama’s blueprint.

Administration officials said Mr. Obama would push for a clear path to citizenship from the outset for the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States, suggesting he would reject any attempts to link that to improved border security. The White House insists it has already tightened the nation’s borders.

Plenty of other hurdles remain. Republican senators including Marco Rubio of Florida are putting together their own immigration proposals that are likely to be more restrictive than the plan put forward by the bipartisan group.

House Republicans are expected to resist the concept of offering a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, though there was talk on Monday of attempts to find a bipartisan approach in the House as well.

In his address, Mr. Obama is expected to fill in the details of his own plan, though the officials declined to give specifics in advance. They said the speech would be the first step in a months-long campaign to build public support for immigration reform.

The president’s choice of Nevada as the locale for the speech underlines the political threat that immigration poses to Republicans. Mr. Obama beat his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, by more than six percentage points in the state, though Nevada’s economy was devastated by the housing collapse. Much of the President’s was due to a surge of support from Hispanics.

Q&A: Fixing Flash Player Settings

Q.

Games won’t work when I use Facebook with Firefox. Is there a problem with that browser

A.

If Facebook games will not work in Firefox, make sure you have the most recent version of the browser, as well as the most recent version of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in that handles animation and interactivity for some sites. You can see the version of the Flash player installed on the computer by clicking the Adobe Flash Player Help/Find Version page here.

The page has instructions for updating the software if you need to, but if your system is already up to date, you may just need to change the Flash player settings so it saves game information on your computer. To do that, right-click (or hold down the Control key and click) the animated Flash movie at the top of the Find Version page and choose Global Settings from the menu.

In the list of sites that appears, select www.facebook.com and use the pop-up menu under Storage Access to change the setting from Block to either Ask Me or Allow. Close the Flash Player settings box, restart Firefox and try the Facebook game again.

App Smart Extra: More Ways to Record With Your Smartphone

Last week’s App Smart topic was audio recording apps that can turn your smartphone or tablet into a digital voice recorder handy for business or personal use, and that even audio professionals may find useful.

There are many of these apps available in the different smartphone app stores.

One very simple iOS app is iTalk Recorder (free on iTunes). The recording interface centers around a very large red button to start a recording. From the menu bar above the recording section you can edit the file name you want for each recording. This is where you can also select the recording quality from “good” through “better” to “best” â€" bearing in mind what purpose you need each recording for, and that higher quality files take up much more space in your device’s memory.

Audio recordings are displayed in the app as a list, and there’s a promnent search box that will be useful for finding the file you need if you record many audio sessions. You can even add notes to files by tapping on them. Buying the “premium” version of the app (for $2 in iTunes) removes ads from inside the app and adds the ability to record in the background. This feature may be handy if you find yourself needing to Google a fact during an interview, for example. The paid-for app also includes the ability to email bigger files and share quickly through the separate cloud-based Dropbox and Soundcloud file storage systems.

An alternative free iOS app I’ve used a lot in the past is Quick Voice Recorder. This app is useful because of its extremely straightforward design, which basically has all the app’s controls for recording audio, listing and playing previous recordings, and editing a recording’s title on a single page. As a journalist who needs to record interviews I find its simplicity a bonus because it doesn’t distract me while I’m chatting. It! ’s not among the most sophisticated audio recording apps, but it is free.

Similarly on the Android platform the free app PCM Recorder is an extremely unfussy audio recorder that records in the high quality PCM audio format. The app is also basically a single-page design. This means that recordings are simple to make or playback, and it’s easy to glance through your list of previous recordings. It’s also very straightforward to adjust the file name of a recording to jog your memory about its contents â€" perhaps the subject of the meeting you’re having at work, and so on.

Quick call

Outfit 7 makes very popular interactive character apps that will amuse your children, and there is a new free Android app, Talking Angela, in the series. Angela is a cute cat who reacts with different animations if you pat her image, and you can even chat to her in English about a variety of topics â€" and listen to her chat back to you.

The Early Word: Overhaul

Today’s Times

• A bipartisan group of senators will unveil a set of principles on Monday for a sweeping overhaul of the immigration system, Julia Preston reports. The blueprint will allow them to stake out their position before the opening of what lawmakers expect to be a protracted and contentious debate over the issue in Congress.

• Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, was lying low after the Republicans’ election losses in 2012, but he is reasserting his presence in the Capitol with a new track for his party, Jonathan Weisman writes. He is hoping to lay out a second, softer message that goes beyond the constant cycle of budget showdowns and deficit talks.

• President Obama and Secretary of State Hillar Rodham Clinton sat down for a rare interview at a time when Mr. Obama has run his last election and Mrs. Clinton is contemplating one more, Peter Baker writes.

• Much of Mr. Obama’s early second-term energy seeks to simply preserve the status quo as he continues the fiscal battle with Congressional Republicans, John Harwood writes.

Happenings in Washington

• Mr. Obama will welcome the N.B.A. championship team, the Miami Heat, to the White House.

Obama Seeking \'Political Conquest\' of G.O.P., Ryan Says

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the former vice-presidential candidate, said Sunday that President Obama was ignoring the nation’s problems, choosing instead to focus on the “political conquest” of the Republican Party.

“When you saw his speech, say, at the inauguration, it leads us to conclude that he’s not looking to moderate, that he’s not looking to move to the middle,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.” “He’s looking to go farther to the left, and he wants to fight us every step of the way politically.”

Mr. Ryan, in his first major interview since the November election, also warned that more partisan gridlock was in store as lawmakers prepared to renew debate over balancing the budget and raising the country’s debt limit.

His remarks echoed those of other Republican leaders including John A. Boehner, the House speaker, who last week said Mr. Obama was seeking to “annihilate” the Republican Party.

Repulicans were put on the defensive after Mr. Obama’s inauguration speech, in which he laid out a starkly liberal vision for his second term, declaring his support for gay marriage and gun restrictions and for changes in immigration laws.

With his stature increased within the party, Mr. Ryan, who chairs the House Budget Committee, will increasingly be expected to set the tone for Republicans, particularly on fiscal issues.

In a speech at a National Review Institute conference on Saturday, Mr. Ryan urged his Republican colleagues to “stick together and carefully pick our fights with President Barack Obama.”

“We can’t get rattled,” he said. “We won’t play the villain in his morality plays.”

On Sunday, in a stinging rebuke to Mr. Obama, he said that had Hillary Rodham Clinton beat him to win the Democratic nomination in 2008 and gone on to win the presidency, “we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now.”

“I don’t think that the president thinks that ! we actually have a fiscal crisis,” he said. “He’s been reportedly saying to our leaders that we don’t have a spending problem, we have a health care problem. That just leads me to conclude that he actually thinks we just need more government-run health care.”

But he acknowledged that the Republican Party needed to reach out to a broader cross section of Americans, and he signaled a willingness to compromise on some issues.

“We obviously have to expand our appeal,” he said. “We have to show how our ideas are better at fighting poverty, how our ideas are better at solving health care, how our ideas are better at solving the problems that arise in people’s daily lives.”

On immigration, he said he was hopeful that some kind of legislation could be passed this year, if Mr. Obama did not “play politics.”
“Immigration is a good thing,” he said. “But we need to make sure it works.”

He also said he supported background checks to keep guns out of the handsof criminals, but called for an approach that did not simply ban certain kind of weapons.

Asked what he thinks about a presidential run in 2016, he said, “I don’t.”

“I’ll decide later about that.”

App Smart Extra: On the Slopes

Apps that add a technological edge to your skiing or snowboarding vacation were the subject of a recent App Smart column. But the column could barely make a dent in discussing all the apps available to help winter sports enthusiasts. Here are some more suggestions.

One class of app that can be both helpful and fun is those apps that link you to the different Web cams that many resorts now have on the mountainsides. The Ski Webcams app, free on iTunes or $1.59 on Android, is one of the best of these. It can link you to resort Web cams either near your location or from a very extensive list or, just for fun, to random cams from around the world. It’s a very no-frills app. But it does tell you when each image was collected so you can see how up-to-date the picture is. And you can zoom into the images, which is useful for high-res video feeds.

For adifferent type of ski app experience, you may love the free iOS app SloPro. It’s a video editing app that offers a rather cool trick: the ability to slow a movie clip down to super slow motion, like the effects you get in sports videos shown on TV. These effects happen through image processing inside the app, so they’re not as eye-catching as using a slow-motion camera to film a skier making a jump, for example. But the effects are impressive, once you’ve mastered the app’s slightly tricky interface. And if you’re on a snow vacation with some friends, then you may be able to achieve some amazingly dramatic film clips.

There are also many apps available that are resort-specific, but since these come from different app developers their quality varies. For example the Val d’Isère Ski Guide app for Android, for the very popular French ski resort, has a pretty basic and uninspiring interface but offers detailed information on up-to-the-minute events, weather and facilities in the town. ! The $1 iOS app Live North Lake Tahoe is more graphically clever, and thus a little easier to navigate. It also offers a few niceties like a piste map and road cameras so you can plan your journey around traffic or difficult weather. But it does cost soemthing, and offers you services you could get for free by downloading one or two other free apps.

It’s definitely worth spending some time checking out what’s available for your chosen resort before you head off on a ski trip.

Quick call

Delta Airlines has released a free iPad app that has many typical services like destination maps and social networking tools. But it also has a “Glass Bottom Jet” option in-flight that shows an image of the ground underneath your aircraft’s flight path, assuming you’re hooked up to the airline’s in-plane Wi-Fi network.

Sunday Breakfast Menu, Jan. 27

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

The Sunday shows will mull over a number of issues in headlines this week, particularly guns, female service members and President Obama’s cabinet nominees.

Gun violence continues to generate debate, with Senator Dianne Feinstein appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” and CNN’s “State of the Union” to share her perspective. Ms. Feinstein, Democrat of California, introduced legislation Thursday to ban more than 150 kinds of semiautomatic weapons and some high-capacity magazines.

Joining Ms. Feinstein to discuss guns will be Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner; Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee; and Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker. The program will also feature Stephanie Cutter, a former Obama deputy campaign manager, and Kevin Madden, a former Romney adviser.

Retired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the former United States commander in Afghanistan, and retired Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, will also be on CNN to talk about the Pentagon’s decision to allow women to serve in combat zones.

Mayor Mia Love of Saratoga Springs, Utah; Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia; Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin; and Carlos M. Gutierrez, a former commerce secretary and Romney adviser, will discuss on CNN the Republican Party’s efforts to reach out to minorities.!

Also weighing in on the subject of female service members in combat are Martha McSally, a retired Air Force colonel who recently ran for Congress, and retired Lt. Col. William G. Boykin, a former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, will be on “Fox News Sunday.”

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, and Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, will discuss on Fox the Benghazi hearing with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry’s confirmation hearings to be her successor.

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and former vice presidential nominee, joins NBC’s “Meet the Press” for his first live interview since the election, talking about the coming Congressional battles over spending and the president’s second term.

Jim DeMint, a former South Carolina sentor and the incoming president of the Heritage Foundation, and Ben Jealous, the president and chief executive of the N.A.A.C.P., will be on NBC’s roundtable.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a member of the Armed Services Committee, and Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, are on ABC’s “This Week” to talk about Mr. Obama’s cabinet nominees.

Representative David Schweikert, Republican of Arizona, and Mark Boal, the screenwriter and producer of the film “Zero Dark Thirty,” will also be on ABC.

C-Span’s “Newsmakers” talks defense issues with Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the new ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee.

Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor, is on Bloomberg’s “Political Capital.”

Hilda L. Solis, the for! mer labor! secretary, will discuss Mr. Obama’s second term on TV One’s “Washington Watch.”

Telemundo’s “Enfoque” talks to Representative Luis Gutiérrez, Democrat of Illinois, about Congress’s progress toward reforming immigration laws.

Representative Juan Vargas, Democrat of California and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Representative Joe Garcia, Democrat of Florida and a member of the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration and border security, will discuss immigration reform and gun control with Univision’s “Al Punto.” Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, will also be on the program.