Why I Don't Want an iPad for Christmas

Exactly my thoughts.

Why I Don't Want an iPad for Christmas
By BRETT ARENDS

Everyone wants an iPad this Christmas, right?

Apple's tablet computer is this year's hottest adult toy. Sales are booming. James Cordwell, an analyst at Atlantic Securities, expects the company to sell six million this quarter, half of them here in the U.S. It's driving the company toward what will probably be yet another blowout Christmas period.


Apple is expected to sell millions of its popular iPad tablet computer this holiday season but Brett Arends has several reasons why he's not willing to join the masses and buy one for Christmas.

But you can count me out. I don't want an iPad for Christmas, thanks very much.

Sacrilege!

Why? Here are my reasons.

1. It'll be cheaper next year.

How dumb are people? Apple is coming out with iPad II in 2011. (Mr. Cordwell predicts April.) That means fanatics won't be seen dead with this year's model, and you'll be able to get it much cheaper. Try eBay or buy it "refurbished" direct from Apple. Price deflation in technology is a wonder to behold. Remember the first iPhones? The 8-gigabyte models cost $599. A few months later they cost $399. Now they're paperweights. The average middle-class American earns maybe $16 an hour after taxes. So if you save, say, $150 on a product, that's more than nine hours' extra work. Of course, if you love your job so much you like putting in an extra day for free, go ahead.


2. It's going to be better next year.

The next iPad will have new features—allegedly including video conferencing and maybe a better screen. This year's model will be so over. When Steve Jobs unveiled the second iPhone in 2008 he actually made fun of the slow first model—the same product that he had hailed a year earlier as the eighth wonder of the world. The audience yukked it up. Me? I'm not a fan of buying a product for $500 from a guy who's going to deride it a few months later.

3. Check out those profit margins!

OK, I admit it: I've been wrong about Apple stock lately. After correctly turning bullish at $85 two years ago, I turned cautious waaay too early. My mistake? This isn't a technology company. It's a luxury brand, like Hermès or Tiffany. And it's wooed customers so they'll pay almost anything for its products. Last Christmas, Apple's gross margins were 41%. That's incredible. It's good for Apple, good for stockholders—but not so good for shoppers. Me, I don't want to support someone else's 60% markups with my own dollars. Generally speaking, the smarter move is to invest in the Tiffanys of the world—and shop at the Wal-Marts.

4. Competitors are coming.

Right now the iPad has just one serious rival, the Samsung Galaxy Tab. So no wonder it's doing so well. But all that will change in just a few months. New tablets, many running on the Android platform, are expected to hit the market as soon as March. These will give you a much wider choice of size, style and operating system. And when these companies duke it out for market share, you know you'll be able to get a deal. So why would I buy now?

5. No Flash.

Do you want to watch video clips on the Web? On a boring old laptop or PC, you can do that for free. On the amazing new iPad? Only sometimes. Most Web video runs on Adobe Flash, and the iPad can't—or rather, won't—handle Flash. So there are plenty of video clips you won't be able to watch. And plenty of others you will have to pay to watch, either by renting them from Apple's iTunes, or by paying for a subscription service like Hulu Plus. Mr. Jobs had a very public bust-up with Adobe over Flash this year. I have sympathy for his position, as Flash can be unstable. But it's still the software most Web video clips use, and I want that choice.

6. The cost of the add-ons.

The iPad starts at $499 plus tax. That's nearly twice as much as a netbook. And I know if I get the cheapest iPad I'll regret it. It has only 16 gigabytes' storage. And it can only go online when you are in a WiFi hotspot, like at home or in Starbucks. A lot of the iPad's best features need an Internet connection. So if I want to use them wherever I go, I'll want the model with a 3G data plan that works everywhere. And those start at $629, plus at least $15 a month. Total cost: at least $809, plus tax, in the first year, and $989 over two years. This I don't need.

7. The games.

Yes, they're great. But that's the problem. Computer games are as addictive as cigarettes. And this is a habit everyone is taking up, not quitting. This is why I dumped my iPod Touch. Am I alone? Maybe. But I don't think so. I know lots of people with horror stories about addiction to immersive games. Someone I know—now, as it happens, a British member of parliament—once sat down to play Civilization, a role-playing game, on a PC one Saturday evening and didn't finish until three o'clock ... Thursday morning. (He stopped when he ran out of cigarettes.) And that was on an old PC. Games on the iPad are more intense than ever. A friend recently showed me some of the serious news apps on his iPad. I noticed that to get to them he first had to "wave" us past several screens of games. Is he really using his iPad to read that article about the Indonesian economy, or is he playing Angry Birds? Hmmm. You make the call.

8. The waste.

The scarcest resource in life isn't money, land, fresh water or gold. For singles under 25, the scarcest resource is sex, and for the rest of us it's time. And the biggest waste of time I've ever discovered—after games (see above)—is the Web. Nothing comes close. It's a total black hole. Do I want to carry a device that lets me surf the Web endlessly wherever I am? That's easy. It's amazing how much time I have to read now that I never look at Facebook.

9. It'll get boring.

I just read this article on my iPad via my WSJ subscription via 3G sitting in a restaurant listening to some Christmas music on iTunes. Darn this infernal machine!
—Geoffrey Cox

This year's totem is next year's meh. Economists call this "the hedonic treadmill." Human beings quickly get bored of each new item. We always want the buzz from something newer, better, bigger, faster or fancier. But the treadmill never stops. Think of how amazing the first Palm Pilots seemed back in the 1990s. Look at them now. The iPad may look like the eighth wonder of the world today. Soon it will seem so old.

10. The whole Apple cult is starting to creep me out.

OK, I already knew about the fans. Last summer, three-quarters of the people standing in line so they could buy the new iPhone the moment it went on sale already owned an iPhone. But now it's the company, too. Look at how it reacted last spring, when a Silicon Valley blogger scooped an early iPhone 4: Next thing he knew he was being handcuffed on his lawn in front of his wife while police ransacked his house. And think of Steve Jobs, complaining that news coverage of the iPhone 4's troubled aerial had been "blown so out of proportion that it's incredible." Hmmm, out-of-proportion media coverage—you sure you want to go there, Steve? This is the guy marketing a new telephone under the slogan "This changes everything. Again." Maybe this stuff shouldn't matter to me, but I have to confess it's turning me off.

Write to Brett Arends at brett.arends@wsj.com

(BN) My Wife's Cancer Holds Lesson for Health Care: David Klein

We, the human race, have done so much. But not enough.

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My Wife's Cancer Yields Lessons for Health Care: David H. Klein

Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) -- In July 2008, my wife Linde was diagnosed with advanced squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity. Her subsequent treatment has led me to view U.S. medical care from a different perspective. What Linde and I have learned over the past two years has broadened my fundamental beliefs about medicine. In sum, while amazing advances have been made and miracles are occurring, medicine remains very much an art.

I've spent almost 40 years on the business side of the health-care industry, including the last seven as chief executive officer of a health plan. I believed my network of contacts would serve us well. I presumed there were unambiguous answers to questions about the best treatment plan and the best providers.

What I learned was that for uncommon diseases like Linde's, if not all diseases generally, clear answers often don't exist. I will never forget one doctor telling me that the information I sought wasn't available and that I would have to trust my gut. This is pretty incredible when you think about how much as a society we spend on health care.

The new federal health-care reform law promotes the adoption of health-information technology and supports comparative effectiveness research to understand the marginal contributions of new drugs, devices and procedures. But what we learned with Linde's treatment is that data on innovations, especially for less common diseases, isn't sufficient to broadly create evidence-based medicine.

Risk Adjustments

Often medical research, even when coordinated and summed across the industry, doesn't have enough patients suffering with a particular disease to test alternative treatments using scientific -- trial and error -- methods. I can't tell you how many times I heard from physicians that every patient is different.

The same deficiency exists for assessing a practitioner's expertise with a particular treatment for a disease. To evaluate a doctor or treatment, it's necessary to risk adjust for differences in patients. Generally, it's more challenging to care for an older patient than a younger one. Similarly, treating patients with diabetes is more difficult than those without. There are myriad risk factors and standardizing for them is difficult if not impossible.

This has implications for what we consider the best places to receive care and how doctor performance should be reported. We really don't want clinicians to avoid riskier cases to achieve better grades.

Work in Progress

In the face of these limitations, clinicians often rely on their understanding of underlying disease processes to decide the best course of action. Leading medical organizations convene panels of experts to provide opinions about the most effective approach for diagnosis and treatment. The work of these panels is important, but sometimes their opinions are later found to be wrong.

The recently developed human genome provides promise for gaining disease process insight, but it's a work in progress.

Bottom line, there isn't as much hard science as one would like.

So, what do we do? I wish there was an answer that offered real value. After all, I'm a business executive who runs a health plan providing benefits to thousands of employers. I'm also a taxpayer who supports government programs. Unfortunately, there are no such assurances, but there are steps we can take.

Best Course

As a society, we need to be honest about treatment limitations. Patients should be well informed about what the industry knows and doesn't know. There should be candor about the likelihood that care will make them worse instead of better. Patients should be empowered to be the treatment decision makers.

In recognition of the uncertainty patients face, we need to compassionately acknowledge their pain and fear. We need to counsel that aggressive intervention isn't always the best course of action.

I share these conclusions not to suggest dissatisfaction; Linde and I are grateful for her care. Her clinicians included the country's most respected doctors who did what they were trained to do -- aggressively seek a cure.

Rather, these observations are offered to challenge the U.S. health-care industry to be more explicit about medical treatment being as much an art as a science and to provide emotional and spiritual support to improve patient and caregiver experience.

Course of Disease

There may be an economic benefit to this. As patients learn more about the limits of medicine, some may choose less intensive and costly care. As a nation, our health-care spending increases as patients near the end of life.

Since its onset, Linde's cancer has come back twice. The first time, she continued a courageous and valiant fight. The second time, she learned that further treatment would be painful, risky and probably leave her partially disabled and deformed. She was further told that the likelihood of having an extended, high quality life was remote.

With this knowledge, she opted for palliative care favoring quality of life over extending life. My acceptance of her decision, while difficult, was the best way I could show my love and support.

Linde commends her clinicians for being great teachers. They were candid, patient, used non-clinical terms, and shared their uncertainty about the effectiveness of suggested treatment. Their support of her as the decision maker was wonderful.

Linde and I have opted to share our journey because we hope the understanding of medicine we have developed will be helpful to others.

(David H. Klein is president and chief executive officer of Excellus BlueCross BlueShield in Rochester, New York. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: David H. Klein at david.klein@excellus.com

To contact the editor responsible for this column: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net

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When it comes to defining 2010, one story stands out as the most newsworthy: WikiLeaks.

One put his family jewels on the chopping board. The other is just doing something someone else would have done anyway and gotten rich too. You know what I think of TIME's decision.


By Jon Friedman, MarketWatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — When it comes to defining 2010, one story stands out as the most newsworthy: WikiLeaks.

The WikiLeaks furor underscored the dark side of the digital revolution. The mass-scale disclosures of proprietary documents — said to threaten America’s national security — showed us the pitfalls and dangers of the Internet. We understood the chilling implications of a world in which someone — anyone — could easily post highly sensitive information worldwide.

WikiLeaks is, of course, a high-profile example of the Internet serving as the vehicle for spreading classified information about our nation’s diplomatic relations and foreign policies. It is also a case that people can relate to.


Reuters

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
What if someone posted damaging information about you on the Web and you were helpless to stop the distribution, just as the Obama administration is unable to halt the flow of data coming from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange?

WikiLeaks and its arrogant, don’t-mess-with-me image is personified by Assange.

Then we have the most popular story of 2010: Facebook. It’s largely an inspiring saga. Facebook is terrific. It provides the masses with what the media have provided all these years: news, information, commentary and entertainment. Facebook is a gigantic escape for millions of people.

It does one more thing that the media have failed to do: provide a community for its users. If newspapers and magazines had done this years ago, they wouldn’t be in so much trouble today.

WikiLeaks and Assange versus Facebook and its founder, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, who is so interesting that Hollywood made a successful major motion picture about his rise, “The Social Network.” Facebook versus WikiLeaks. Good versus evil, right?

Time magazine (TWX 31.84, +0.19, +0.60%) , which takes great pride in its annual Person of the Year ballyhoo, made its opinion clear last week. It selected Zuckerberg to be its Person of the Year for 2010.

On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with the choice. Yes, Zuckerberg sure did have a year that any entrepreneur dreams of. He is a billionaire. He is famous. He is charismatic (well, for a dweeb, anyway). He is a noted philanthropist, too, having donated $100 million to Newark, NJ.


Reuters

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg is the ultimate feel-good story, and Time likes feel-good tales. It’s ironic how Zuckerberg, who was portrayed as a villain for much of this year because of controversy over Facebook’s privacy policies, has been recast as a good guy in contrast to Assange.

Still, Time blew it this time. Time could’ve and should’ve opted for Assange because he stands for something — yes, it might be sordid, evil, even, but Assange is the more compelling figure. If the digital revolution was the dominant story of the year, Time should have recognized the person behind the news.

Time’s choice says plenty about the way high-profile awards are often handed out in America. Too often, institutions take the safe route. That may be why the traditional media are in such distress today. They have remained stagnant while digital operations have usurped them.

Time did the same thing in 2001, as well. The story of that year, we remember grimly in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, was terrorism in the U.S. The magazine chose New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to personify the story and the news year — not Osama bin Laden, who had masterminded the heinous events of Sept. 11.

Giuliani earned his stripes by energetically rallying New York — and the world — in the wake of the disaster. Time conveniently forgot that Giuliani was a rather unpopular mayor on Sept. 10, 2001 — and the tragedy gave him an opportunity to salvage his reputation.

In 2001, Time made the call to reward good instead of recognizing evil. Does that ring a bell? Light over darkness. (Don’t get me wrong: I’m not comparing Assange, who is being portrayed as a sinister individual, to bin Laden.)


What Net neutrality rules mean
The FCC has approved rules that would give the federal government authority to regulate Internet traffic and prevent broadband providers from selectively blocking Web traffic. WSJ's Amy Schatz explains what the new rules really mean.

You could even draw parallels in other prominent awards, such as, say, the Best Picture Oscar. Take a few examples: “Dances with Wolves” over “Goodfellas” in 1990, “Rocky” trumping “Network” (and “Taxi Driver”) in 1976 and the most galling case of all, “Forrest Gump” topping “Pulp Fiction” in 1994.

To be fair, Time has sometimes made difficult choices. In 1938, it named Adolf Hitler as its most newsworthy subject. Joseph Stalin received the honor twice, in 1939 and 1942. The last time Time went out on a limb was 1979, when it tapped Ayatollah Khomeini. Read more about Time’s past choices.

Time’s editors bristle at any notion that they took the easy way out. Of course, nobody at the magazine truly minds much because a controversy — even a contrived one like this — is bound to be good for business. Any time someone criticizes the Person of the Year choice, he or she implicitly is publicizing the award. As the line goes, all publicity is good publicity.

I realize that I, too, am playing into Time’s hands by writing about the Person of the Year award, even as I criticize the selection here. That’s OK. I just wish Time had gotten it right.

MEDIA WEB QUESTION OF THE DAY: Did Time make the right decision by picking Zuckerberg?

Jon Friedman is a senior columnist for MarketWatch in New York.

Microsoft is just awaiting The Day unless it comes up with a new strategy...

Microsoft needs to develop, urgently, a parallel OS afresh, while it still can. This will not be based on something like Google Chrome. The new OS needs to be clean and using 21st Century development techniques. It needs to be flexible and customisable, like the andriod for PCs.

(BN) Google Aims Twin Daggers at Microsoft's Heart: Rich Jaroslovsky

I'm not a ms fan, but am willing to bet the cloud concept never will cut it. There must be some processing power at the end user side.

Bloomberg News, sent from my iPad.
Google Aims Twin Daggers at Microsoft's Heart: Rich Jaroslovsky

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Forget about Google Inc.'s struggle with Facebook for eyeballs and programmers. Pay no attention to its fight with Apple Inc. over smartphones, or to any other tech rivalry.

The search giant's war with Microsoft Corp. is The Big One, the confrontation that will determine what kind of future Microsoft has, and maybe if it even has a future. And the two new weapons Google unsheathed last week carry an unmistakable message of mortal peril.

First came the Nexus S, the new Google-labeled smartphone and the first to run "Gingerbread," Google's latest Android operating system. Then came a plain black laptop called the Cr- 48, the first computer to run the company's Web-based Chrome Operating System.

On the surface, neither seems particularly menacing. The Nexus S, made by Samsung, is the successor to one of the most hyped and least successful products of 2010, the lovely and ill- fated Nexus One. And the Cr-48 isn't even for sale. It's a generic prototype that Google is making available to thousands of developers, companies and others to get them familiar with the concept of the new operating system before commercial versions from manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics Co. and Acer Inc. show up next year.

Enormous Threat

Still, the two devices represent an enormous threat to Microsoft and its chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer. The success of Android is rapidly foreclosing Microsoft's growth prospects as more computing is done on mobile devices. Meanwhile, Chrome OS takes dead aim at its great twin cash cows: the Windows and Microsoft Office franchises.

Of the two new offerings, the Nexus S is the one most visible to consumers. The phone went on sale in the U.S. yesterday at Best Buy Co. stores and online for $199 on a two- year contract from Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile USA, and for $529 with no contract.

The phone, a variation on Samsung's popular Galaxy S line, comes with a gorgeous four-inch touch screen, front- and rear- facing cameras for video chatting and a passel of Google apps and services. Its potential killer application is Near Field Communication, a technology that allows it to read encoded information from special chips that can be embedded in signs, on T-shirts or other objects.

Mobile Payments

Putting NFC support into Android is the biggest step yet toward using the mobile phone as a way of paying for things. And it comes at a time when Microsoft is still playing catch-up. Having frittered away its early strength in smartphones, it suffered a series of stumbles, including a line of youth- oriented phones called Kin that it introduced this year and pulled from the market after less than two months. Its latest effort, the Windows Phone 7 operating system, is a great improvement -- but still lacks such basics as cut-and-paste functionality.

It's possible for Google and Apple to both succeed in mobile phones. It's harder to imagine Google and Microsoft both thriving. Google's business model, which calls for getting manufacturers to use its operating system, is far closer to Microsoft's than to Apple's strategy of making money on the sale of proprietary hardware. And, of course, Google offers Android to manufacturers at a price that Microsoft can't beat: free.

While Android is all about limiting Microsoft's future, Chrome OS takes dead aim at its present: the Windows and Office businesses that, in the quarter that ended Sept. 30, earned $6.7 billion of the company's $7.1 billion in operating income.

In the Cloud

At first glance the Cr-48 -- Cr being the symbol for the element chromium -- looks like a basic laptop. The differences become evident once you turn it on. With no large programs or device drivers to load, it boots in 15 seconds. The operating system is, essentially, just a Web browser that you can never close. Forget about a hard drive: Everything you use, all your programs and all your data, reside in the cloud, on Google's distant servers. And it uses not a bit of Microsoft software.

Nor is Microsoft the only one threatened. What kind of chip powers the Cr-48? Who cares? For the record, the Cr-48 has an Atom microprocessor from Intel Corp., but it's no more relevant than what kind of chip powers your smartphone. How about makers of flash memory chips, like Toshiba? A Chrome OS machine needs little -- the Cr-48 has only 16 gigabytes -- since nothing is stored on the computer itself.

Useless Brick

Chrome completely commoditizes the hardware; the only things that count are being connected to the Internet, and at what speed. For now, that's Chrome's biggest weakness. While the Cr-48 works either over a Wi-Fi network or its built-in Verizon Wireless 3G service, you can't always count on getting a connection. On a cross-country flight this week, the Cr-48 was a useless, inert brick.

On the other hand, that isn't likely to be a permanent condition as Internet connections become ever more ubiquitous. Some airlines, such as Virgin America Inc., have already started rolling out onboard Wi-Fi.

Since Chrome OS, like Android, is free, it's logical to ask what Google gets out of it. Company executives talk about the benefits of tying users to Google services and gaining valuable data to help refine its search algorithms. It remains to be seen whether those users will be troubled by the privacy implications and whether Google's business model will work for manufacturers.

You can't help thinking that the real point of Chrome is the threat it poses to Windows. From its founding, Google has defined itself as the anti-Microsoft. Its "don't be evil" corporate mantra never needed to specify what it meant by "evil," because everyone already knew. The fact is, Google doesn't actually need Chrome OS to succeed. Microsoft, though, desperately needs it to fail.

(Rich Jaroslovsky is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Rich Jaroslovsky in San Francisco at rjaroslovsky@bloomberg.net .

To contact the editor responsible for this column: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net .

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(BN) Bureaucrats Score Big at Citigroup, General Motors: David Pauly

I cringe when i read such stuff with absolute lack of any intelligent analysis. Anyone who bought in 08 would have made money.

Bloomberg News, sent from my iPad.
Bureaucrats Score Big at Citigroup, General Motors: David Pauly

Dec. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Turns out the meddlesome bureaucrats whom bailed-out bankers and carmakers complained about so much were pretty good managers.

Intrusive U.S. officials this week sold the last of the government's common shares in Citigroup Inc. -- and now show a profit of about $12 billion from the 2008 rescue of the nation's third-largest bank in terms of assets. Last month, against the odds, these same irksome folks pulled off an almost perfect initial public offering of General Motors Co., recovering about $13.5 billion for taxpayers.

The government's remaining 2.4 billion Citigroup shares were sold for $10.5 billion. The price was $4.35 a share, 10 cents below the market price. The discount proved wise. The bank's stock rose after the sale, easing concern the trade -- totaling 8.3 percent of the bank's shares -- would depress the stock price.

In the end, the U.S. Treasury had sold all of its 7.7 billion Citigroup shares at an average price of $4.14, making about 89 cents a share on the transactions. The total profit on the shares came to $6.85 billion. The U.S. has also received preferred stock dividends and other money from the bank.

Taxpayers stand to make more from their Citigroup investment. The government still owns warrants to buy 465 million of the bank's shares and $800 million of preferred securities.

Pandit's Response

Citigroup Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit, who has been working for $1 a year during the crisis, did have the grace to say he was "thankful" for the government's support.

Washington-based bureaucrats handled the GM deal adroitly from the outset though the IPO market was unpromising. GM executives and their government overseers hoped the IPO would raise several billion dollars even though no other public offering this year raised even $1 billion, according to Bloomberg data. In the same week that GM had its stock sale, Harrah's Entertainment Inc. canceled its IPO.

Government officials forced underwriters to cut their fees to less than 25 cents a share. By contrast, the underwriting costs in the IPO of Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp., the consulting firm, was a bit more than $1 a share.

Then the folks from Government Motors boosted GM's common price offering to $33 a share, after earlier estimating about $29.

Flippers Squelched

That $33 price was a boon to the taxpayers. It meant they got most of the money rather than speculators who might have benefited from a big gain after the IPO.

The stock rose to $35.99 during the first day of trading last month and closed yesterday at $34.45.

Taking GM public eventually brought in a total of $23.1 billion. The Canadian government and the UAW Retirees Medical Benefits Trust also sold common shares and General Motors itself sold preferred stock.

Not bad for government work. Maybe if these companies had hired some meddlers like these a few years back, disaster might have been averted.

(David Pauly is a columnist for Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his.)

To contact the writer of this column: David Pauly in Normandy Beach, New Jersey dpauly@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this column: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net

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Chavez wants Clinton, 'other delinquents' to quit over leaks

well, he will be well advised to start finding some cowdung to hide his face when wikileaks leaks HIS correspondences....




Published December 1, 2010
 
Chavez wants Clinton, 'other delinquents' to quit over leaks


(CARACAS) Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez on Monday called on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to resign after the leak of embarrassingly candid US diplomatic correspondence by WikiLeaks.
 
Angry reaction: Mr Chavez (above) says somebody should study the mental stability of Mrs Clinton  
'The empire stands naked . . . Mrs Clinton should resign,' Mr Chavez said in a speech, using his favourite description of the United States.

'It's the least you can do: resign, along with those other delinquents working in the State Department.'

Mr Chavez zeroed in on a diplomatic cable with a request to the US embassy in Argentina for information on President Cristina Kirchner's 'mental health'. The message asked if she was taking medication for 'nerves and stress'.

'Somebody should study Mrs Clinton's mental stability,' said Mr Chavez.

'I believe somebody should resign. I don't mean it should be (US) President (Barack) Obama, but the whole structure over there should fall apart, if only through embarrassment,' he added.

The United States 'attacks . . . disrespects' other governments, including its allies, and keeps tabs on other presidents, Mr Chavez said.

'Whatever was left of its mask has finally dropped away,' he said, praising WikiLeaks for 'its courage'.

Adding her voice to the debate with criticism directed at the US administration, Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate, accused Mr Obama on Monday of not having done enough to prevent the leaks, in a message on her Facebook page.

Of WikiLeaks director Julian Assange, she said: 'He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.' - AFP