1. American Music Awards 2011: Taylor Swift wins artist of the year
Taylor Swift accepts the favorite country album award onstage at the 2011 American Music Awards on Nov. 20, 2011, in Los Angeles.
(Credit: Getty)
(CBS/AP) LOS ANGELES - Updated 11:49 p.m. EDT
Taylor Swift reigned supreme at Sunday night's American Music Awards.
The 21-year-old pop-country star won artist of the year, nabbing the top trophy for the second time in her young career. She also won the awards for favorite country album and favorite country female artist.
"This is so crazy!" the country superstar said after beat such contenders as Adele, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry to capture all three awards that she was nominated for at Sunday's ceremony.
Pictures: American Music Awards red carpet
Pictures: AMA show highlights
Pictures: AMA press room
Read More: "60 Minutes" visits with Taylor Swift
Special section: Awards season
Pictures: AMA show highlights
Pictures: AMA press room
Read More: "60 Minutes" visits with Taylor Swift
Special section: Awards season
Nicki Minaj, who kicked off the fan-favorite ceremony by sporting a pair of speakers on her much-talked about posterior, picked up two awards - she was later honored as favorite rap/hip-hop artist, besting a group that included mentor Lil Wayne, and won favorite rap/hip-hop album for "Pink Friday."
"There's so much love in this room," the pink-loving hip-hop diva beamed. She also thanked Swift, a big fan of her "Super Bass" hit.
Adele had been the leading nominee with four awards, but didn't have much of a presence at the show: She was absent from the ceremony because she is recovering from recent throat surgery. She tied Swift with three awards: favorite pop/rock female artist, adult contemporary artist and pop/rock album for her chart-topping "21."
Other winners included Maroon 5 as favorite pop-rock band/duo/group, Blake Shelton as favorite country male artist, Lady Antebellum as favorite country band/duo/group, Beyonce as favorite soul/R&B female artist, Rihanna for favorite soul/R&B album for "Loud" and Hot Chelle Rae as new artist of the year.
The ceremony inside the Nokia Theatre in an unusually rainy Los Angeles was dripping with more musical performances than winners.
Justin Bieber got in the holiday spirit with "Under the Mistletoe," and Kelly Clarkson, wearing a glittery red gown with her hair swept to the side, delivered a swinging rendition of her "Mr. Know It All" as back-up dancers dressed as 1930s-era photographers snapped the original "American Idol" champion.
Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony shared custody of rapper Pitbull, who joined the former couple in a pair of separate performances. Lopez performed essentially a live version of a car commercial starring the "Idol" judge set to "Papi" before launching into her hit "On the Floor." Pitbull later returned to the stage and joined Anthony for "Rain Over Me."
"It's been up and down and just exciting and overwhelming and so many things," Lopez reflected on the past year after beating out her ex for the favorite Latin music artist award.
There were several other collaborations, too. Christina Aguilera joined Maroon 5 for their duet "Moves Like Jagger," and then Maroon 5 lead singer Adam Levine teamed with Gym Class Heroes for their hit "Stereo Hearts."
The Band Perry crooned an emotional "If I Die Young," a pink-haired Katy Perry accompanied herself on guitar for "The One That Got Away" and a platinum-blonde Chris Brown simply sang "All Back" before being joined by a troop of helmet-clad back-up dancers for a flashy interpretation of "Say It With Me."
Perry also received an achievement award for getting five No. 1 singles from her album "Teenage Dream." She's the first female artist to reach that milestone from a single album.
The ceremony closed with a performance of LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem" that included Justin Bieber in animal print pants and David Hasselhoff stripping down to smiley-face underwear.
2. The Pledge: Grover Norquist's hold on the GOP
Watch the Segment »
Steve Kroft takes a look at Grover Norquist, the man many blame for holding up the deficit-reduction process because of the anti-tax pledges he has obtained from nearly all the Republican politicians in Washington.
(CBS News)
As head of Americans for Tax Reform since 1986, Grover Norquist has transformed a single issue - preventing tax hikes - into one of the key platforms of the Republican Party. As Steve Kroft reports, his biggest coup was getting more than 270 members of Congress, and nearly all of the 2012 Republican presidential primary candidates, to sign a pledge promising never to vote to raise taxes. But some opponents say the pledge may be hindering a solution to America's debt crisis.
The following is a script of "The Pledge" which aired on Nov. 20, 2011. Steve Kroft is correspondent, Frank Devine, producer.
The Joint Congressional Committee on Deficit Reduction has just three days to reach a deal eliminating at least $1.2 trillion from the nation's debt using some combination of cutting spending and raising taxes.
The person at the heart of those negotiations - and some would say the person responsible for the deadlock - is neither a member of Congress nor the holder of any public office. He is a lobbyist and a conservative activist named Grover Norquist who, over the years, has gotten virtually every Republican congressman and senator to sign an oath called "The Pledge." It's a promise that they will never, under any circumstances, vote to raise taxes on anyone. And so far Grover Norquist has held them to it, controlling 279 votes, including the speaker of the House, the Senate minority leader and all six Republican members of the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction.
Steve Kroft: A lot of people think you're the most powerful man in Washington.
Grover Norquist: The tax issue is the most powerful issue in American politics going back to the Tea Party. People say, 'Oh, Grover Norquist has power.' No. Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform focus on the tax issue. The tax issue is a powerful issue.
Grover Norquist is trying to be modest. Since creating Americans for Tax Reform at Ronald Reagan's behest back in 1985, Norquist has been responsible, more than anyone else, for rewriting the dogma of the Republican Party.
Norquist: The Republicans won't raise your taxes. We haven't had a Republican vote for an income tax increase since 1990.
Kroft: And this was your doing?
Norquist: I helped. Yeah.
It began with the simple idea of getting Republicans all over the country to sign an oath called the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," promising their constituents that they would never, ever vote for anything that would make their taxes go up.
[Norquist: This is Speaker Gingrich's tax pledge back in 1998...]
And once they sign the pledge, Grover Norquist never forgets. The more signatures he's collected, the more his influence has grown.
Norquist: I think to win a Republican primary-- It is difficult to imagine somebody winning a primary without taking the pledge.
The signatories not only include more than 270 members of Congress, but all of the Republican presidential candidates, with the lone exception of John Huntsman.
All that leverage has made Norquist's Wednesday breakfast meetings a must-attend event for Republican operatives fortunate enough to get an invitation. David Keene, the president of the National Rifle Association, was there the day we attended along with conservative columnist John Fund.
John Fund: This is the Grand Central station of the conservative movement.
We were told it was the first time cameras have ever been allowed into the weekly off-the-record strategy session.
[Steve Law (American Crossroads): Our approach is going to be to just simply drill away every day.]
Norquist: It's people from Capitol Hill, House and Senate, think tanks, Tea Party groups, business groups. Everybody who wants the government to be smaller and everybody who wants the government to leave them alone.
[Norquist (at Seattle Tea Party event): I intend to win. I intend to be part of the whole effort to crush the other team.]
Grover Norquist has been called both the "dark wizard of the right's anti-tax cult" and "the single most effective conservative activist in the country." He is a libertarian ideologue who believes that Washington is controlling our lives through the taxes it raises to fund big government. And he's said that he wants to shrink it to a size where it could be drowned in a bathtub.
Kroft: You wanna drown it in the bathtub?
3. Depleted Texas lakes expose ghost towns, graves
A child's grave site, normally at least 20 to 30 feet underwater, has joined other remnants of old Bluffton, Texas, resurfacing as the drought shrinks the state's largest inland lake. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
(AP)
BLUFFTON, Texas - Johnny C. Parks died two days before his first birthday more than a century ago. His grave slipped from sight along with the rest of the tiny town of Bluffton when Lake Buchanan was filled 55 years later.
Now, the cracked marble tombstone engraved with the date Oct. 15, 1882, which is normally covered by 20 to 30 feet of water, has been eerily exposed as a yearlong drought shrinks one of Texas' largest lakes.
Across the state, receding lakes have revealed a prehistoric skull, ancient tools, fossils and a small cemetery that appears to contain the graves of freed slaves. Some of the discoveries have attracted interest from local historians, and looters also have scavenged for pieces of history. More than two dozen looters have been arrested at one site.
"In an odd way, this drought has provided an opportunity to view and document, where appropriate, some of these finds and understand what they consist of," said Pat Mercado-Allinger, the Texas Historical Commission's archeological division director. "Most people in Texas probably didn't realize what was under these lakes."
Tour guide Tim Mohan stands on the concrete foundation of an old cotton gin in the old town of Bluffton, Texas.
(Credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Texas finished its driest 12 months ever with an average of 8.5 inches of rain through September, nearly 13 inches below normal. Water levels in the region's lakes, most of which were manmade, have dropped by more than a dozen feet in many cases.
The vanishing water has revealed the long-submerged building foundations of Woodville, Okla., which was flooded in 1944 when the Red River was dammed to form Lake Texoma. A century-old church has emerged at Falcon Lake, which straddles the Texas-Mexico border on the Rio Grande.
Steven Standke and his wife, Carol, drove to the old Bluffton site on a sandy rutted path that GPS devices designate not as a road but the middle of the 22,335-acre lake, normally almost 31 miles long and five miles wide.
"If you don't see it now, you might never see it again," said Carol Standke, of Center Point, as she and her husband inspected the ruins a mile from where concrete seawalls ordinarily would keep the lake from waterfront homes.
Old Bluffton has been exposed occasionally during times of drought. The receding waters have revealed concrete foundations of a two-story hotel, scales of an old cotton gin, a rusting tank and concrete slabs from a Texaco station that also served as a general store. The tallest structure is what's left of the town well, an open-topped concrete cube about 4 feet high. Johnny Parks' tombstone is among a few burial sites.
A rusting tank and concrete slabs from a Texaco service station, normally at least 20 to 30 feet underwater.
(Credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Local historian Alfred Hallmark, whose great-great-great grandfather helped establish Bluffton, said his research showed 389 graves were moved starting in 1931 when dam construction began. That's the same year Bluffton's 40 or 50 residents started moving several miles west to the current Bluffton, which today amounts to a convenience store and post office at a lonely highway intersection serving 200 residents.
Residents had to leave their ranches and abandon precious pecan trees, some of which produced more than 1,000 pounds of nuts each year. "It was devastating," said Hallmark, 70, a retired teacher, of the move. "They had no choice."
Other depleted lakes across Texas are revealing much older artifacts. More than two dozen looters have been arrested at Lake Whitney, about 50 miles south of Fort Worth, for removing Native American tools and fossils that experts believe could be thousands of years old.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees Lake Whitney, is patrolling a number of areas that contain artifacts, including some rock shelters once filled with water, said Abraham Phillips, natural resources specialist with the agency.
At Lake Georgetown near Austin, fishermen discovered what experts determined was the skull of an American Indian buried for hundreds or thousands of years. It's not clear what will become of the skull, said Kate Spradley, a Texas State University assistant anthropology professor who is keeping it temporarily in a lab. Strict federal laws governing American Indian burial sites bar excavations to search for other remains.
No such restrictions exist for the nearly two dozen unmarked graves discovered this summer in a dried-up section of a Navarro County reservoir. Some coffin lids are visible just under the dirt. Crews plan to excavate the site about 50 miles south of Dallas and move the remains to a cemetery, said Bruce McManus, chairman of the county's historical commission. He said the area of Richland-Chambers Lake is on property formerly owned by a slave owner.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime find ... and maybe the only silver lining in the ongoing drought," McManus said.
Source:http://www.cbsnews.com/
1) The super committee was expected to tackle the UCB extension and extend the payroll tax cut. Since is looks like the committee has failed, the payroll tax cut may not be extended and the taxes could be increased to the regular amount in January 2012. This will cut the amount of spendable money these people will have. The UCB extension is also in jeopardy of not being extended. 1.8 million people will be cut off in January 2012. If these two extensions are not agreed upon this could throw the country further into recession and set back any progress made.
2) The New York police have had a terror suspect under surveilence for the last two years. Today he was arrested and being held on bail. His name is Jose , and he is an alkidha sympathizer and was planning several bombs in the New York area. He had plans to bomb the post office and homes of returning soldiers.
3) Again there is rioting in Egypt. After overthrowing the dictatorship in February 2011, the country has been struggling to establish a democratic government. A temporary government run by the generals as a measure to give the country some stability until a democratic election could be held in the fall. The people have seen very little process made in setting up the elections for the democratic government and the people are rioting. The people have feared that the generals have gotten comfortable with their power. There have been fighting in the streets and the soldiers have been injuring many civilians. Millions of egyptians have lost faith that the election will take place.
source: CBS Evening News
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