Twitter
Twitter is an American online news and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Tweets were restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, this limit was doubled for all languages except Chinese and Korean. Registered users can post and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface, through Short Message Service or its mobile-device application software. Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco and has more than 25 offices around the world. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Evan Williams and launched in July of that year; the service gained worldwide popularity. In 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet"; as of 2018, Twitter had more than 321 million monthly active users.
Since 2015 Twitter has been a hotbed of debates and news covering politics of the United States. During the 2016 U. S. presidential election, Twitter was the largest source of breaking news on the day, with 40 million election-related tweets sent by 10:00 p.m. that day. It was a source of information on Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination and the 2018 United States midterm elections. Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group; the original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was partly due to the fact that the domain twitter.com was in use, it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to Twitter.
The developers considered "10958" as a short code, but changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability". Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 p.m. Pacific Standard Time: "just setting up my twttr". Dorsey has explained the origin of the "Twitter" title:...we came across the word'twitter', it was just perfect. The definition was'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and'chirps from birds', and that's what the product was. The first Twitter prototype, developed by Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber, was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo, together with its assets — including Odeo.com and Twitter.com — from the investors and shareholders. Williams fired Glass, silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.
Williams provided insight into the ambiguity that defined this early period in a 2013 interview: With Twitter, it wasn't clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn't replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we described as status updates and a social utility, it is that, in part, but the insight we came to was Twitter was more of an information network than it is a social network. The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive conference. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. "The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways streaming Twitter messages," remarked Newsweek's Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters.
Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, the bloggers in attendance touted it." Reaction at the conference was positive. Blogger Scott Beale said. Social software researcher danah boyd said. Twitter staff received the festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less, and we just did!"The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010. By late November 2010, an average of a dozen updates per day were posted on the astronauts' communal account, @NASA_Astronauts. NASA has hosted over 25 "tweetups", events that provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants' social networks to further the outreach goals of NASA. In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain from News Corp.'s Fox Audience Network as president of revenue. The company experienced rapid initial growth, it had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007.
This grew to 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008. In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day. By March 2010, the company recorded over 70,000 registered applications; as of June 2010, about 65 million tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter. As of March 2011, about 140 million tweets posted daily; as noted on Compete.com, Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press. It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, as well as describing usage in its many variations throughout the world; the second edition, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes, was published in 1989. Work began on the dictionary in 1857, but it was only in 1884 that it began to be published in unbound fascicles as work continued on the project, under the name of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. In 1895, the title The Oxford English Dictionary was first used unofficially on the covers of the series, in 1928 the full dictionary was republished in ten bound volumes. In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as twelve volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989.
Since 2000, compilation of a third edition of the dictionary has been underway half of, complete. The first electronic version of the dictionary was made available in 1988; the online version has been available since 2000, as of April 2014 was receiving over two million hits per month. The third edition of the dictionary will most only appear in electronic form: the Chief Executive of Oxford University Press has stated that it is unlikely that it will be printed; as a historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary explains words by showing their development rather than their present-day usages. Therefore, it shows definitions in the order that the sense of the word began being used, including word meanings which are no longer used; each definition is shown with numerous short usage quotations. This allows the reader to get an approximate sense of the time period in which a particular word has been in use, additional quotations help the reader to ascertain information about how the word is used in context, beyond any explanation that the dictionary editors can provide.
The format of the OED's entries has influenced numerous other historical lexicography projects. The forerunners to the OED, such as the early volumes of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, had provided few quotations from a limited number of sources, whereas the OED editors preferred larger groups of quite short quotations from a wide selection of authors and publications; this influenced volumes of this and other lexicographical works. According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to "key in" the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread them, 540 megabytes to store them electronically; as of 30 November 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained 301,100 main entries. Supplementing the entry headwords, there are 157,000 bold-type derivatives; the dictionary's latest, complete print edition was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. The longest entry in the OED2 was for the verb set, which required 60,000 words to describe some 430 senses.
As entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the longest entry became make in 2000 put in 2007 run in 2011. Despite its considerable size, the OED is neither the world's largest nor the earliest exhaustive dictionary of a language. Another earlier large dictionary is the Grimm brothers' dictionary of the German language, begun in 1838 and completed in 1961; the first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca is the first great dictionary devoted to a modern European language and was published in 1612. The official dictionary of Spanish is the Diccionario de la lengua española, its first edition was published in 1780; the Kangxi dictionary of Chinese was published in 1716. The dictionary began as a Philological Society project of a small group of intellectuals in London: Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, Frederick Furnivall, who were dissatisfied with the existing English dictionaries; the Society expressed interest in compiling a new dictionary as early as 1844, but it was not until June 1857 that they began by forming an "Unregistered Words Committee" to search for words that were unlisted or poorly defined in current dictionaries.
In November, Trench's report was not a list of unregistered words. The Society realized that the number of unlisted words would be far more than the number of words in the English dictionaries of the 19th century, shifted their idea from covering only words that were not in English diction
Harry Frankfurt
Harry Gordon Frankfurt is an American philosopher. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, where he taught from 1990 until 2002, taught at Yale University, Rockefeller University, Ohio State University. Frankfurt was born on May 1929, in Pennsylvania, he obtained his B. A. in 1949 and Ph. D. in 1954 from Johns Hopkins University. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University and has taught at Yale University, Rockefeller University, Ohio State University, his major areas of interest include moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and action, 17th-century rationalism. His 1986 paper On Bullshit, a philosophical investigation of the concept of "bullshit", was republished as a book in 2005 and became a surprise bestseller, leading to media appearances such as Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. In 2006 he released a companion book, On Truth, which explores society's loss of appreciation for truth. Among philosophers, he was for a time best known for his interpretation of Descartes's rationalism.
His most influential work, has been on freedom of the will based on his concept of higher-order volitions and for developing what are known as "Frankfurt cases" or "Frankfurt counterexamples". Frankfurt is the leading living Humean compatibilist, developing Hume's view that to be free is to do what one wants to do. Frankfurt's version of compatibilism is the subject of a substantial literature by other philosophy professors. More he has written on love and caring, he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Sciences. He has been a Visiting Fellow of Oxford University. Demons and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes's Meditations. Princeton University Press. 2007. ISBN 978-0691134161; the Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge University Press. 1988. ISBN 978-0521336116. Necessity and Love. Cambridge University Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0521633956; the Reasons of Love. Princeton University Press. 2004. ISBN 978-0691126241. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press. 2005. ISBN 0-691-12294-6.
On Truth. Random House. 2006. ISBN 0-307-26422-X. Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right. Stanford University Press. 2006. ISBN 0-8047-5298-2. On Inequality. Princeton University Press. 2015. ISBN 978-0691167145.'The Necessity of Love' in Alex Voorhoeve Conversations on Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-921537-9 American philosophy List of American philosophers Bischof, Michael H.. Kann ein Konzept der Willensfreiheit auf das Prinzip der alternativen Möglichkeiten verzichten? Harry G. Frankfurts Kritik am Prinzip der alternativen Möglichkeiten. In: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, Heft 4. Frankfurt, Harry. "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility". In Reason & Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy, edited by Joel Feinberg and Russ Shafer-Landau, 486-492. California: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008. Princeton Faculty Listing 2007 Harry Frankfurt Video Feature Interview on The Alcove with Mark Molaro
Lie
A lie is an assertion, believed to be false used with the purpose of deceiving someone. The practice of communicating lies is called lying, a person who communicates a lie may be termed a liar. Lies may serve a variety of instrumental, interpersonal, or psychological functions for the individuals who use them; the term "lie" carries a negative connotation, depending on the context a person who communicates a lie may be subject to social, religious, or criminal sanctions. A barefaced lie is one, a lie to those hearing it. "Bold-faced lie" can refer to misleading or inaccurate newspaper headlines, but this usage appears to be a more recent appropriation of the term. A big lie which attempts to trick the victim into believing something major which will be contradicted by some information the victim possesses, or by their common sense; when the lie is of sufficient magnitude it may succeed, due to the victim's reluctance to believe that an untruth on such a grand scale would indeed be concocted. To bluff is to pretend to have a capability or intention one does not possess.
Bluffing is an act of deception, seen as immoral when it takes place in the context of a game, such as poker, where this kind of deception is consented to in advance by the players. For instance, a gambler who deceives other players into thinking they have different cards to those they hold, or an athlete who hints they will move left and dodges right is not considered to be lying. In these situations, deception is acceptable and is expected as a tactic. Bullshit does not have to be a complete fabrication. While a lie is related by a speaker who believes what is said is false, bullshit is offered by a speaker who does not care whether what is said is true because the speaker is more concerned with giving the hearer some impression, thus bullshit may be either true or false, but demonstrates a lack of concern for the truth, to lead to falsehoods. A cover-up may be used to deny, defend or obfuscate a lie, embarrassing actions or lifestyle, and/or lie made previously. One may deny a lie made on a previous occasion, or one may alternatively claim that a previous lie was not as egregious as it was.
For example, to claim that a premeditated lie was "only" an emergency lie, or to claim that a self-serving lie was "only" a white lie or noble lie. Not to be confused with confirmation bias in which the deceiver is deceiving themselves. Defamation is the communication of a false statement that harms the reputation of an individual person, product, government, religion, or nation. To deflect is to avoid the subject that the lie is about, not giving attention to the lie; when attention is given to the subject the lie is based around, deflectors ignore or refuse to respond. Skillful deflectors are passive-aggressive, who when confronted with the subject choose to ignore and not respond. Disinformation is intentionally false or misleading information, spread in a calculated way to deceive target audiences. An exaggeration occurs when the most fundamental aspects of a statement are true, but only to a certain degree, it is seen as "stretching the truth" or making something appear more powerful, meaningful, or real than it is.
Saying that someone devoured most of something when they only ate half would be considered an exaggeration. An exaggeration might be found to be a hyperbole where a person's statement is meant not to be understood literally. Fake news is a type of yellow journalism that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media. A fib is a lie, easy to forgive due to its subject being a trivial matter. Fraud refers to the act of inducing another person or people to believe a lie in order to secure material or financial gain for the liar. Depending on the context, fraud may subject the liar to criminal penalties. A half-truth is a deceptive statement; the statement might be true, the statement may be true but only part of the whole truth, or it may employ some deceptive element, such as improper punctuation, or double meaning if the intent is to deceive, blame or misrepresent the truth. An honest lie can be identified by verbal statements or actions that inaccurately describe history and present situations.
There is no intent to misinform and the individual is unaware that their information is false. Because of this, it is not technically a lie at all since by definition, there must be an intent to deceive for the statement to be considered a lie. Jocose lies are lies meant in jest, intended to be understood as such by all present parties. Teasing and irony are examples. A more elaborate instance is seen in some storytelling traditions, where the storyteller's insistence that the story is the absolute truth, despite all evidence to the contrary, is considered humorous. There is debate about whether these are "real" lies, different philosophers hold different views; the Crick Crack Club in London arranges a yearly "Grand Lying Contest" with the winner being awarded the coveted "Hodja Cup". The winner in 2010 was Hugh Lupton. In the United States, the Burlington Liars' Club awards an annual title to the "World Champion Liar."Lie-to-children i
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government created by statute to regulate interstate communications by radio, wire and cable. The FCC serves the public in the areas of broadband access, fair competition, radio frequency use, media responsibility, public safety, homeland security; the FCC was formed by the Communications Act of 1934 to replace the radio regulation functions of the Federal Radio Commission. The FCC took over wire communication regulation from the Interstate Commerce Commission; the FCC's mandated jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Territories of the United States. The FCC provides varied degrees of cooperation and leadership for similar communications bodies in other countries of North America; the FCC is funded by regulatory fees. It has an estimated fiscal-2016 budget of US $388 million, it has 1,688 federal employees, made up of 50% males and 50% females as of December, 2017. The FCC's mission, specified in Section One of the Communications Act of 1934 and amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is to "make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or sex, efficient and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges."
The Act furthermore provides that the FCC was created "for the purpose of the national defense" and "for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communications."Consistent with the objectives of the Act as well as the 1999 Government Performance and Results Act, the FCC has identified four goals in its 2018-22 Strategic Plan. They are: Closing the Digital Divide, Promoting Innovation, Protecting Consumers & Public Safety, Reforming the FCC's Processes; the FCC is directed by five commissioners appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate for five-year terms, except when filling an unexpired term. The U. S. President designates one of the commissioners to serve as chairman. Only three commissioners may be members of the same political party. None of them may have a financial interest in any FCC-related business. † Commissioners may continue serving until the appointment of their replacements. However, they may not serve beyond the end of the next session of Congress following term expiration.
In practice, this means that commissioners may serve up to 1 1/2 years beyond the official term expiration dates listed above if no replacement is appointed. This would end on the date that Congress adjourns its annual session no than noon on January 4; the FCC is organized into seven Bureaus, which process applications for licenses and other filings, analyze complaints, conduct investigations and implement regulations, participate in hearings. The Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau develops and implements the FCC's consumer policies, including disability access. CGB serves as the public face of the FCC through outreach and education, as well as through their Consumer Center, responsible for responding to consumer inquiries and complaints. CGB maintains collaborative partnerships with state and tribal governments in such areas as emergency preparedness and implementation of new technologies; the Enforcement Bureau is responsible for enforcement of provisions of the Communications Act 1934, FCC rules, FCC orders, terms and conditions of station authorizations.
Major areas of enforcement that are handled by the Enforcement Bureau are consumer protection, local competition, public safety, homeland security. The International Bureau develops international policies in telecommunications, such as coordination of frequency allocation and orbital assignments so as to minimize cases of international electromagnetic interference involving U. S. licensees. The International Bureau oversees FCC compliance with the international Radio Regulations and other international agreements; the Media Bureau develops and administers the policy and licensing programs relating to electronic media, including cable television, broadcast television, radio in the United States and its territories. The Media Bureau handles post-licensing matters regarding direct broadcast satellite service; the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau regulates domestic wireless telecommunications programs and policies, including licensing. The bureau implements competitive bidding for spectrum auctions and regulates wireless communications services including mobile phones, public safety, other commercial and private radio services.
The Wireline Competition Bureau develops policy concerning wire line telecommunications. The Wireline Competition Bureau's main objective is to promote growth and economical investments in wireline technology infrastructure, development and services; the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau was launched in 2006 with a focus on critical communications infrastructure. The FCC has eleven Staff Offices; the FCC's Offices provide support services to the Bureaus. The Office of Administrative Law Judges is responsible for conducting hearings ordered by the Commission; the hearing function includes acting on interlocutory requests filed in the proceedings such as petitions to intervene, petitions to enlarge issues, contested discovery requests. An Administrative Law Judge, appointed under the Administrative Procedure Act, presides at the hearing during which documents and sworn testimony are received in evidence, witnesses are cross-examined. At the co
Humbug
A humbug is a person or object that behaves in a deceptive or dishonest way as a hoax or in jest. The term was first described in 1751 as student slang, recorded in 1840 as a "nautical phrase", it is now often used as an exclamation to mean nonsense or gibberish. When referring to a person, a humbug means a fraud or impostor, implying an element of unjustified publicity and spectacle. In modern usage, the word is most associated with the character Ebenezer Scrooge, created by Charles Dickens in his novella A Christmas Carol, his famous reference to Christmas, "Bah! Humbug!", declaring Christmas to be a fraud, is used in stage and television versions and appeared in the original book. The word is prominently used in The Wizard of Oz, in which the Scarecrow refers to the Wizard as a humbug, the Wizard agrees. Alternative root based on Millers Fly Leaves: During continental war in the 1700’s many false reports and lying bulletins were fabricated in Hamburg, Germany; the phrase ‘this is Hamburg’ was in Britain shortened to ‘Humbugs’.
This is a statement of disbelief I.e. Bah Humbug. If one says ‘you had that from Hamburg’, it is an expression of incredulity. We don't know; this explanation was taken from ‘A Treatise on humbug by a Manchester Man’, volume 1, 1866. Another use of the word was by John Collins Warren, a Harvard Medical School professor who worked at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Warren performed the first public operation with the use of ether anesthesia, administered by William Thomas Green Morton, a dentist. To the stunned audience at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Warren declared, "Gentlemen, this is no humbug." The oldest known written uses of the word are in ii. 41, where it is called "a word much in vogue with the people of taste and fashion", in Ferdinando Killigrew's The Universal Jester, subtitled "a choice collection of many conceits... bon-mots and humbugs" from 1754. There are many theories as to the origin of the term, none of, proven: Charles Godfrey Leland mentions the idea that the word could be derived from the Norse word hum, meaning'night' or'shadow', the word bugges, a variant of bogey, meaning'apparitions'.
The Norse word hum mentioned, or hume means'dark air' in Old Norwegian. From the other Scandinavian languages based on Old Norse, there is húm in Icelandic which means'twilight', hómi in Faeroese which means'unclear', humi in Old Swedish which means'dark suspicion', documented back to 1541. From this word is derived the Swedish verb hymla, still in use, which means'to conceal, not commit to the truth'. According to the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose, 1731–1791, to hum in English indeed meant'to deceive'. To combine this early medieval Scandinavian word with bugges from the English Bible of a date may seem far-fetched; the word bug is derived from the Middle English Bugge, in turn a cognate of the German word bögge and the Norwegian dialect word bugge meaning "important man". The Welsh bwg could be connected, was thought in the past to be the origin of the English term however more recent studies indicate that it is a borrowing from the much older Middle English word. With bug meaning ghost or goblin, the use of the term applies in Dickens' novel about the Christmas ghosts.
In Etym. Diet. of 1898, Walter Skeat proposed a similar theory, although using contemporary versions of the words, where hum meant to murmur applause, bug being a spectre. It could come from the Italian uomo bugiardo, which means'lying man'. There was considerable Italian influence on English at the time. Uim-bog is supposed to mean'soft copper' in Irish, worthless money, but there is no evidence of a clear connection to the term; the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica suggests that it is a form of "Hamburg", where false coins were minted and shipped to England during the Napoleonic wars, inaccurate as the Napoleonic wars occurred 50 years after the word first appeared in print. A modern conception is that it refers to a humming bug—i.e. Something small and inconsequential, such as a cricket, that makes a lot of noise. In Norton Juster's novel The Phantom Tollbooth, there is a large beetle-like insect known as the Humbug, hardly right about anything; the word has been used outside anglophone countries for well over a century.
For instance, in Germany it has been known since the 1830s, in Sweden since at least 1862, in France since at least 1875, in Hungary, in Finland
1980 United States presidential election
The 1980 United States presidential election was the 49th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on November 4, 1980. Republican nominee Ronald Reagan defeated incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter. Due to the rise of conservativism following Reagan's victory, some historians consider the election to be a realigning election that marked the start of the "Reagan Era". Carter's unpopularity and poor relations with Democratic leaders encouraged an intra-party challenge by Senator Ted Kennedy, a younger brother of former President John F. Kennedy. Carter defeated Kennedy in the majority of the Democratic primaries, but Kennedy remained in the race until Carter was nominated at the 1980 Democratic National Convention; the Republican primaries were contested between Reagan, who had served as the Governor of California, former Congressman George H. W. Bush of Texas, Congressman John B. Anderson of Illinois, several other candidates. All of Reagan's opponents had dropped out by the end of the primaries, the 1980 Republican National Convention nominated a ticket consisting of Reagan and Bush.
Anderson entered the race as an independent candidate, convinced former Wisconsin Governor Patrick Lucey, a Democrat, to serve as his running mate. Reagan campaigned for increased defense spending, implementation of supply-side economic policies, a balanced budget, his campaign was aided by Democratic dissatisfaction with Carter, the Iran hostage crisis, a worsening economy at home marked by high unemployment and inflation. Carter attacked Reagan as a dangerous right-wing extremist and warned that Reagan would cut Medicare and Social Security. Reagan won the election by a landslide, taking a large majority of the electoral vote and 50.7% of the popular vote. Reagan received the highest number of electoral votes won by a non-incumbent presidential candidate. In the simultaneous Congressional elections, Republicans won control of the United States Senate for the first time since 1955. Carter won 41% of the vote but carried just six states and Washington, D. C. Anderson won 6.6% of the popular vote, he performed best among liberal Republican voters dissatisfied with Reagan.
Reagan 69, was the oldest person to be elected president until Donald Trump's victory in 2016. Throughout the 1970s, the United States underwent a wrenching period of low economic growth, high inflation and interest rates, intermittent energy crises. By October 1978, Iran—a major oil supplier to the United States at the time—was experiencing a major uprising that damaged its oil infrastructure and weakened its capability to produce oil. In January 1979, shortly after Iran's leader Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled the country, Iranian opposition figure Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ended his 14-year exile in France and returned to Iran to establish an Islamic Republic hostile to American interests and influence in the country. In the spring and summer of 1979 inflation was on the rise and various parts of the United States were experiencing energy shortages. Carter was blamed for the return of the long gas lines in the summer of 1979 that were last seen just after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he planned on delivering his fifth major speech on energy, but he felt that the American people were no longer listening.
Carter left for the presidential retreat of Camp David. "For more than a week, a veil of secrecy enveloped the proceedings. Dozens of prominent Democratic Party leaders—members of Congress, labor leaders and clergy—were summoned to the mountaintop retreat to confer with the beleaguered president." His pollster, Pat Caddell, told him that the American people faced a crisis of confidence because of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.. On July 15, 1979, Carter gave a nationally televised address in which he identified what he believed to be a "crisis of confidence" among the American people; this came to be known as his "malaise" speech. Many expected Senator Ted Kennedy to challenge Carter in the upcoming Democratic primary. Kennedy's official announcement was scheduled for early November. A television interview with Roger Mudd of CBS a few days before the announcement went badly, however. Kennedy gave an "incoherent and repetitive" answer to the question of why he was running, the polls, which showed him leading the President by 58–25 in August now had him ahead 49–39.
Meanwhile, Carter was given an opportunity for political redemption when the Khomeini regime again gained public attention and allowed the taking of 52 American hostages by a group of Islamist students and militants at the U. S. embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979. Carter's calm approach towards the handling of this crisis resulted in his approval ratings jump in the 60-percent range in some polls, due to a "rally round the flag" effect. By the beginning of the election campaign, the prolonged Iran hostage crisis had sharpened public perceptions of a national crisis. On April 25, 1980, Carter's ability to use the hostage crisis to regain public acceptance eroded when his high risk attempt to rescue the hostages ended in disaster when eight servicemen were killed; the unsuccessful rescue attempt drew further skepticism towards his leadership skills. Following the failed rescue attempt, Carter took overwhelming blame for the Iran hostage crisis, in which the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini burned American flags and chanted anti-American slogans, paraded the captured American hostages in public, burned Carter in effigy.
Carter's critics saw him as an inept leader who had failed to solve the worsening economic problems at home. His supporters defended the preside
