Hasta La Gadget!

For the first day of I/O, Google dropped a long, action-packed keynote on us, complete with the Nexus tablet unveiling, the Android Jelly Bean reveal, and parachuters jumping out of planes wearing the company’s futuristic augmented reality glasses. If you weren’t able to tune in, we’ve got you covered, with the entire two and a half hour talk condensed into 90 seconds in the above clip. More »

The media prepared to pour all its resources into coverage of tomorrow’s healthcare ruling or, as we’re calling it, “news dump-palooza.” A New Hampshire lawmaker is convinced that kindergarten is responsible for a great deal of crime in his district, meaning people were WAY MORE upset about losing nap time than we originally thought. And members of the House Progressive Caucus are ready to introduce a single-payer healthcare bill, thrilling liberals and masochists alike. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Wednesday, June 27th, 2012:

THOUSANDS MAY LOSE ACCESS TO CRAPTASTIC PROGRAM IF JOHN BOEHNER GETS HIS WAY – House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) vowed Wednesday that Republicans would repeal whatever parts of health care reform remain standing following Thursday’s highly anticipated Supreme Court ruling — even if doing so would jeopardize insurance coverage for thousands of people. “We’ve made it pretty clear and I’ll make it clear one more time: If the court does not strike down the entire law, the House will move to repeal what’s left of it,” Boehner said. A House Republican leadership aide confirmed that Boehner would not spare the law’s fledgling high-risk pool program. The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, as it is formally known, is a Republican-inspired component of the Affordable Care Act currently insuring 67,000 Americans. A similar high-risk pool program formed a major plank of the GOP alternative to health care reform in 2009. “The White House did a truly craptastically lousy job designing their high-risk pools,” the Republican aide said. “If we do something on this topic, it would be based on our better policy solutions, like the one in the House Republican alternative during the debate in 2009. So starting with repealing everything is the best option.” [HuffPost]

INSIGHT FROM MUDCAT – “We are pussies, good God you can quote me on that,” said David “Mudcat” Saunders, the longtime Democratic consultant. “There is nothing wrong with having a fine car and a fine house and living the American dream. But the greed! Bain Capital is about greed. … It stinks morally.” [HuffPost]

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Nora Ephron’s novel “Heartburn,” a roman à clef loosely based on her discovery of husband Carl Bernstein’s affair and its aftermath, was published in 1982. That same year, the U.S. divorce rate was higher than it had ever been.

Though splits were becoming increasingly common, women were still discouraged from openly discussing their divorce experiences. “I think that men were allowed to write about their marriages falling apart, but you weren’t quite supposed to if you were a woman,” Ephron told the Academy of Achievement in 2007 about her experience writing the book. “You were just supposed to curl up into a ball and move to Connecticut.”

Ephron, of course, did no such thing. Despite Bernstein’s request to keep their personal life private, Ephron used her “Heartburn” protagonist, cookbook writer Rachel Samstadt, to expose the heartbreak — and the dark humor — of his affair and their subsequent divorce. Ephron’s willingness to write candidly about her experiences made “Heartburn” especially poignant: Intentionally or not, her book encouraged other women to share their own stories. Without her, would we have writers like Erica Jong, Candace Bushnell and Julie Powell?

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WASHINGTON — A slew of new battleground state polls released this week lend credence to the Obama campaign’s argument -– often offered to reporters in private — that attacks on Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital are a winning strategy.

While President Barack Obama maintains a small lead nationally, in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere his margins are larger. The reason offered — at least in the NBC/Wall Street Journal survey — is the negative focus on Romney’s private sector career.

For a presidential campaign that endured days of second-guessing over its decision to attack Bain Capital at the general election’s onset, the numbers are being treated as nothing short of vindication. And for those Democrats who watched as their colleagues in the Northeast Corridor openly fretted about attacks on wealth, it was a chance to wonder aloud about the party’s backbone.

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Who says innovation is only for tech companies? Not Tadashi Yanai!

The CEO and founder of clothing company Uniqlo says innovation is absolutely key to the world’s fourth-largest clothing retailer. “We are not a fashion company,” he insists in a recent Fast Company profile by Jeff Chu. “We are a technology company.” Yana’s attitude is similar to many successful tech startups that have chosen to go big or go home when it comes to new ideas.

“The most serious flaw would be if someone doesn’t have the courage to try new things,” Yanai says of his employees. “At least if we fail, we will fail miserably. At least we can say we were bold.”

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