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.