Perry stresses personal opposition to gay marriage (AP)

DENVER – Potential Republican presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry of Texas repeated his personal opposition to gay marriage in a speech to conservatives in Denver Friday.

But Perry didn't backtrack on his statement last week in Aspen that New York's recent decision to allow gay marriage is "their business." That's despite a direct attack earlier in the evening from a rival GOP presidential hopeful, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who took Perry to task for the comment.

"There are some in our party who say, `Well, if someone in New York wants to have gay marriage, that's fine with me.' ... States do not have the right to destroy the American family," Santorum said to applause from many of the 1,000 conservatives gathered at the Western Conservative Summit.

Perry, who spoke after Santorum, simply told the crowd that the traditional definition of marriage "suits Texas and this governor just fine."

He repeated his advocacy for states' rights. "Washington needs a refresher course on the 10th Amendment," Perry said.

Last week Perry told a Republican crowd gathered for as fundraiser for the Republican Governor's Association that he was an "unapologetic social conservative" but didn't mind the New York decision.

"That's New York, and that's their business, and that's fine with me," he said.

On Friday, Perry spent more time talking about the debt ceiling debate going on in Congress, blasting Congress for the showdown without naming names.

"They're so addicted to the spending, they spend their time debating raising the debt ceiling instead of making cuts," Perry said. He also blasted the Obama administration, saying they have a "mix of arrogance and audacity" that threatens the nation.

Perry accused the president of resenting Texas' best-in-the-nation jobs numbers.

"I think it causes them great consternation that we're being as successful as we are," he said.

Perry has not declared his candidacy but is widely expected to join the presidential race.

The event raised money for a right-leaning think-tank in suburban Denver, the Centennial Institute. Attendees paid between $80 and $250 a plate for the dinner, part of an annual weekend of conservative speeches. A third possible Republican presidential candidate, Georgia businessman Herman Cain, planned to address the summit Sunday.

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Follow Kristen Wyatt at http://www.twitter.com/APkristenwyatt

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Online:

http://www.ccu.edu/centennial/events/wcsummitlive.asp

Moody's expects to affirm U.S. rating, negative outlook (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The United States will likely keep its top-notch credit rating from Moody's for now, despite the "limited magnitude" of the deficit reduction plans being discussed in Washington, the ratings agency said on Friday.

But Moody's warned in a report that the confirmation of the Aaa credit will likely come with a negative outlook, meaning there is a risk of a downgrade in the medium term.

That decision will depend on the U.S. economic performance in 2012 and prospects for future deficit-reduction measures, Moody's analyst Steven Hess said.

"If we're convinced that the economy takes off in 2012 and shows very strong growth, that makes the whole process of fiscal consolidation somewhat easier," Hess told Reuters in an interview.

The report from Moody's came four days before the United States says it will run out of cash to pay all of its bills.

In Washington, the House passed a deficit plan that likely will die in the Senate, and President Barack Obama told lawmakers before the vote to stop wasting time and find a way "out of this mess."

Moody's issued the report to clarify its position on the U.S. debt situation, its Chief Risk Officer Richard Cantor said in the same interview.

"Sometimes there is confusion and all the ratings agencies are grouped together," he said.

Standard & Poor's has threatened to cut U.S. ratings in the next few months if the lawmakers fail to come up with a meaningful plan to cut the nation's deficit.

Both agencies seem to agree that deficit-reduction measures of around $4 trillion would be enough for the United States to avoid a rating downgrade.

The difference is that, while S&P has indicated it may downgrade the United States by mid-October if it doesn't see a meaningful deficit-reduction plan in place now, Moody's is willing to give the government more time before making that decision.

PRIORITIZING DEBT PAYMENTS

Moody's expects the government will continue to honor bond payments even if lawmakers fail to raise the debt ceiling before August 2.

"If the debt limit is not raised before August 2, we believe that the Treasury would give priority to debt service payments and could thus postpone a potential debt default for a number of days," Moody's said in its report.

"Revenues would be more than adequate for some period of time to meet those payments, although other outlays would be severely reduced as a result."

The ratings agency warned, however, that a debt default would likely lead to a rating downgrade even if it was "swiftly cured and investors suffered no permanent losses."

Lawmakers in Washington were set to work through the weekend, with a recently-passed plan by Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner expected to die in the Democratic-controlled Senate on Friday night.

Wall Street on Friday ended its worst week in a year, and one equity strategist said the stock market's direction on Monday will rely on the weekend's outcome.

"It exclusively is a function of what does Congress do over the next 48 hours," said Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors. "If Speaker Boehner is able to get a deal through over the next two days, we trade higher. If we get nothing constructive and a series of more dueling press conferences we probably open lower."

Moody's noted that the first interest payment of $31 billion on U.S. Treasury debt is not due until August 15.

"This is the first date that a default on bonds could occur," the report said, highlighting that, this year, August is the month when the ratio of interest payments to incoming revenues is the highest.

The agency sees less chance of a default on August 4, when T-bills worth $59 billion mature because it is unlikely that the Treasury would not be able to find buyers to refinance them.

"Should the Treasury be unable to find buyers for an equivalent amount, a default might occur. This scenario seems extremely unlikely, given the role of the T-bill market in both domestic and global financial markets," Moody's said.

(Editing by Carol Bishopric)

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Apple’s iCloud: Data in Forefront, Devices in Background

• By John C Abell
• 
• June 6, 2011  | 
• 6:23 pm  | 
• Categories: The Cloud

The long, strange trip that has been Apple’s implementation of cloud computing seems to have finally hit the road Monday with a full-throttled embrace of a paradigm one might not expect from a hardware manufacturer: Your computing life is merely enabled by the devices you own, and should not be defined by them.

The unveiling of iCloud was telegraphed last week, and there were few surprises at the 2011 WorldWide Developers Conference. Cloud computing really just means one thing, and it’s a just a matter of how well you do it. The bottom line is that this is long overdue and utterly essential for the multidevice lifestyle that Apple has done so much to bring about.

It remains to be seen if Apple can deliver. But not trying to solve, in one fell swoop, the growing problem inherent in a distributed digital life might have been a drag on Apple’s core business. A massive mainstream is now the target audience for the mobile internet gadgets upon which Apple has staked its future. A perception that these things are complicated or don’t play nice with each other is toxic.

To be sure, iCloud doesn’t invent a single thing — except a new price point of zero (almost, more on that later) instead of the $100 a year for Apple’s current iteration of cloud storage called MobileMe. Music lovers will be disappointed: iCloud isn’t a repository to stream your music, and doesn’t one-up Music Beta by Google, Amazon Cloud Drive by much. And ? no real surprise here ? it’s only for Apple devices.

But Apple has lots of customers who now own maybe an iPhone and and iPad and a MacBook and have no patience for making any effort to make sure they’re all on the same page. The machine is starting to take a back seat now, by being a dreadfully easy to operate portal that makes your stuff available here and now.

And this is where Apple has the upper hand, why their cloud strategy could be a game changer: Like a tyrannical state, Apple can make decisions unilaterally, and impose them — no pesky cooperation from uneasy partner necessary, no buy-in from competitors, no dependencies.

You may not like the way Apple solves problems or — as in the case of the iCloud — believe that it’s about freaking time. But the sheer scale of this means that, if it’s as good as Apple says it will be, iCloud will refine how we think of computers and spur innovation from competitors in the still-vastly-larger Windows world.

For some the big question was how this would simplify iTunes, which essentially ties your music collection to a single computer. No more: Now your collection lives on a server farm and is available to any of your registered devices ? though not, sadly, as streaming files. And there’s a catch. For that $0 Apple will keep the music you bought from them safe and available to up to 10 devices (up from five). But it won’t do so for the music you didn’t buy from them — that’ll cost you $25 a year. The big innovation with the “matching” enhancement is that you won’t have to upload our collection, which nearly drove my colleague Dave Kravets nuts when he tried out Amazon Cloud Drive. Apple will just plop a another copy on the cloud.

Of course $25 isn’t a lot. But it’s a pretty significant asterisk on the “free” spin Apple will tout. Just about everybody’s collection includes non-iTunes music, so this means that Apple will get $25 from just about everybody who doesn’t want to get into a potentially nightmarish housekeeping problem that cloud computing is supposed to erase.

But, big picture: Apple’s cloud services have been a mess, and overpriced. I’ve subscribed to MobileMe for years, including the $150 family plan for our posse’s three iPhones, three Apple computers and one iPad. And I barely use it: I go to Google for e-mail and calendars, and use DropBox to share files among devices. Now, for 1/6th what people like me have been paying, they will get what sounds like effortless, seamless syncing in the background, and a huge digital hub in the sky.

That is, assuming iCloud isn’t more of the same in the problems department.

“You might ask, why should we believe them, they?re the ones that brought us MobileMe,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs knows the stakes told the WWDC audience. “We learned a lot.”

See Also:

• Apple Snips the Cord on iTunes, Reveals iCloud Strategy
• Steven Levy on the Perils of Cloud Computing
• Why Cloud Computing Still Doesn?t Work and How Google Will Fix it
• Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today
• Why Apple Might Be Your Best Bet for This ?Cloud Music? Thing

John is the Wired.com's New York Editor and directs coverage of disruptive business and media. He used to be a Reuters hack and a media critic and has always loved juicy quotes.
Follow @johncabell and @epicenterblog on Twitter.

Tags: Apple

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NATO bombs Libyan state TV transmitters (AP)

TRIPOLI, Libya – NATO warplanes bombed Libyan state TV satellite transmitters in Tripoli overnight because they were being used to incite violence and threaten civilians, the military alliance said Saturday.

A series of loud explosions echoed across the capital before dawn. There was no immediate comment from Libyan officials on what had been hit, but state TV was still on the air in Tripoli on Saturday morning.

NATO said the airstrikes aimed to degrade Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's "use of satellite television as a means to intimidate the Libyan people and incite acts of violence against them."

"Striking specifically these critical satellite dishes will reduce the regime's ability to oppress civilians while (preserving) television broadcast infrastructure that will be needed after the conflict," the alliance said in a statement posted on its website.

It said Gadhafi's inflammatory TV broadcasts were intended to mobilize his supporters.

The attempt to silence the government's TV broadcasts comes at a sensitive time for the rebels, who appeared to be in disarray after the mysterious death of their chief military commander. Abdel-Fattah Younis' body was found Thursday, dumped outside the rebels' de facto capital of Benghazi, along with the bodies of two colonels who were his top aides. They had been shot and their bodies burned.

NATO too has been increasingly embarrassed by the failure of its bombing campaign, now in its fifth month, to dislodge Gadhafi's regime. With the fasting month of Ramadan due to start in August, there is growing realization within the alliance that the costly campaign will drag on into the autumn and possibly longer.

NATO had originally hoped that a series of quick, sharp strikes would quickly force Gadhafi to give up power.

Eight NATO members have been participating in air campaign in Libya: the U.S., Britain, France, Belgium, Canada, Norway, Denmark and Italy. They have carried out a total of more than 6,500 strike sorties.

But this coalition has been gradually fraying amid growing public opposition in Europe to the costs of the campaign — estimated at more than a billion euros — at a time of budget cuts and other austerity measures.

The United States was the first to limit its participation, deciding to only provide support to the European allies. Then Italy withdrew its only aircraft carrier and part of its air force contingent. Meanwhile, Norway has announced it will pull all of its F-16 warplanes out of the operation by Monday.

Senate Republicans say will block Reid debt bill (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – All 43 Republicans in the Senate have signed a letter, released on Saturday, saying they will not vote for a Democratic plan to raise the debt limit in a sign that the measure does not have the support it needs to advance in Congress.

Democrats need at least seven Republican votes to clear a procedural vote in the 100-seat chamber. That vote is scheduled for 1:00 a.m. EDT on Sunday.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan)