Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Outsourcing as a way of life
From Misleader.org:
Misleader compared the companies that outsource the most U.S. jobs with the president's campaign finance records. The analysis shows that the president's campaign has pocketed more than $440,000 and his party more than $3.6 million in just 4 years. These companies have a direct stake in the president publicly supporting outsourcing and doing everything he can to water down or oppose legislation to curb the practice.
The breakdown of campaign contributions is as follows:
TOP OUTSOURCER: American Express
Contributions directly to the President Bush: $39,000
Soft Money contributions to the Republican Party: $422,405
TOP OUTSOURCER: Bechtel
Contributions directly to President Bush: $10,300
Soft Money contributions to the Republican Party: $465,150
TOP OUTSOURCER: Convergys
Contributions directly to President Bush: $7,500
Soft Money contributions to the Republican Party: $5000
TOP OUTSOURCER: Dell Computer
Hard Money to Bush: $40,250
Soft Money contributions to the Republican Party: $793,550
TOP OUTSOURCER: Delphi Automotive
Contributions directly to President Bush: $10,950
TOP OUTSOURCER: Fidelity
Contributions directly to President Bush: $164,908
Soft Money contributions to the Republican Party: $574,270
TOP OUTSOURCER: Ford
Contributions directly to President Bush: $76,200
Soft Money contributions to the Republican Party: $268,257
TOP OUTSOURCER: General Electric
Contributions directly to President Bush: $49,125
Soft Money contributions to the Republican Party: $756,987
Etc.
posted by chris at 9:30 PM
The liberal media? No, the lazy media
A new study of how the media has covered the issue of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), released today, concludes, "Many stories stenographically reported the incumbent administration's perspectives on WMD, giving too little critical examination of the way officials framed the events, issues, threats and policy options."
The other three main conclusions of the study conducted by the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) and the University of Maryland: Too few stories offered alternative perspectives to the "official line" on WMD surrounding the Iraq conflict; most journalists accepted the Bush administration linking the "war on terror" inextricably to the issue of WMD; and most media outlets represented WMD as a "monolithic menace" without distinguishing between types of weapons and between possible weapons programs and the existence of actual weapons.
The complete study, directed by Susan Moeller and titled "Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction," is available at the CISSM Web site.
The authors of the study state that, "Poor coverage of WMD resulted less from political bias on the part of journalists, editors, and producers than from tired journalistic conventions." They also declare that the British media "reported more critically on public policy than did their American colleagues."
More.
posted by chris at 6:01 PM
Maybe they're lying about that whole abstinence thing
American teenagers who take the pledge to remain virgins until they marry have almost the same rate of sexually transmitted disease as other young people, a new study of adolescent behaviour says.
The finding destroys a key rationale for the abstinence crusade - that it prevents disease - and poses a strong challenge to a social engineering project that has been embraced by the White House.
The eight-year study of 12,000 young people by two American sociologists found that the graduates of abstinence programmes were nearly as likely as other young people to catch sexually transmitted infections such as gonorrhoea or chlamydia.
-clip-
Even so, Dr Bruckner said she was initially surprised to discover that there was virtually no statistical difference in their susceptibility to infection. That was because such teenagers are less likely to use condoms, and are less aware of sexually transmitted infections, largely because they have been indoctrinated to believe they are not going to have sex.
So, how do you contract sexually transmitted diseases if you're not having . . . ooooh . . . I get it . . . (apparently they do too! ha!)
posted by chris at 8:29 AM
------------------
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Picture Perfect
Go here or here for an excellent depiction of the Bush administration's job growth speculation vs. the job growth reality.
posted by chris at 4:56 PM
Making progress
President Bush will answer privately all questions raised by a federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the White House said Tuesday, softening its insistence that Bush's testimony be limited to an hour.
-clip-
It was the administration's latest change of heart about the commission. Bush originally had opposed the panel's creation. Then he had opposed its request for a two-month extension of its work but eventually relented. Bush is intent on protecting his standing with Americans on the war on terror, which in polls is his best issue with voters.
Geez. It's like pulling teeth with this guy!
posted by chris at 4:47 PM
------------------
Monday, March 08, 2004
Puuuuure wataaaaaaahhhh
It made for great headlines, but the fact that the UK version of Coca-Cola's Dasani brand bottled water comes out of the London public supply should hardly have come as a surprise.
-clip-
Figures from independent beverage research company Canadean show that at least two out of every five bottles of water sold around the world are, like Dasani, "purified" waters, rather than "source" waters which originate from a spring.
Most of the supermarket own-label bottled waters consist of treated mains water. They may be dechlorinated, filtered further, purified using ultraviolet light and have minerals either added or subtracted. They may also be carbonated.
In short, they are subjected to many of the same treatments that source waters undergo to satisfy public health requirements after being pumped up from the ground.
But generally speaking, anything that doesn't say "source" or "spring" on the label is just fancy tap water.
Evian spelled backwards is "naive."
UPDATE: Scott points out that bottled water may not be as pure as the marketers would like us to think.
A key NRDC finding is that bottled water regulations are inadequate to assure consumers of either purity or safety, although both the federal government and the states have bottled water safety programs. At the national level, the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for bottled water safety, but the FDA's rules completely exempt waters that are packaged and sold within the same state, which account for between 60 and 70 percent of all bottled water sold in the United States (roughly one out of five states don't regulate these waters either). The FDA also exempts carbonated water and seltzer, and fewer than half of the states require carbonated waters to meet their own bottled water standards.
Even when bottled waters are covered by the FDA's rules, they are subject to less rigorous testing and purity standards than those which apply to city tap water (see chart below). For example, bottled water is required to be tested less frequently than city tap water for bacteria and chemical contaminants. In addition, bottled water rules allow for some contamination by E. coli or fecal coliform (which indicate possible contamination with fecal matter), contrary to tap water rules, which prohibit any confirmed contamination with these bacteria. Similarly, there are no requirements for bottled water to be disinfected or tested for parasites such as cryptosporidium or giardia, unlike the rules for big city tap water systems that use surface water sources. This leaves open the possibility that some bottled water may present a health threat to people with weakened immune systems, such as the frail elderly, some infants, transplant or cancer patients, or people with HIV/AIDS.
Maybe we should all just drink beer.
posted by chris at 4:16 PM
The new big bad wolf
Since we found a dishelved Saddam that had been living in a hole for several months and probably hadn't conducted much in the way of armed insurgency and we can't seem to find that Osama guy (wait for October . . . wait for it . . .), the US needs a new Bad Guy to personify the War against Terra.
Iraqi and U.S. leaders call Zarqawi the mastermind of an eight-month wave of attacks in the country, most recently the multiple bombings at Shiite Muslim shrines that killed as many as 271 people last week.
Almost every day, U.S. officials here display a confiscated letter, allegedly written by Zarqawi, that claims responsibility for 25 suicide attacks and lays out a blueprint for plunging Iraq into sectarian chaos. There is a $10-million price on his head.
But the U.S. has provided little evidence implicating Zarqawi. In one case coalition officials say he plotted, the car bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad that killed 22 people last year, a U.S. counter-terrorism official said little progress had been made in identifying the culprits.
Although Zarqawi has been identified as a central figure in a multiethnic network whose tentacles reach across Europe and the Middle East, his anointment as an all-powerful kingpin troubles some investigators and experts, who say it distorts the nature of the insurgency in Iraq.
An Iraqi anti-terrorist police commander dismissed the claim in the purported Zarqawi letter that he has carried out 25 "martyrdom operations," which would encompass most major attacks here since the fall.
"They are always exaggerating about Al Qaeda," said Col. Dhia Hussein of the Baghdad anti-terrorism unit. "No witnesses have come and talked to me about Zarqawi. The only thing is that he is mentioned in the newspapers. And a $10-million reward. Who is this man? ? Maybe he exists ? such characters exist. But to complete these operations and we don't know, it's impossible."
Die-hard loyalists of the former Iraqi regime represent a bigger threat than Zarqawi, Hussein said. The suicide bombings in Baghdad are the work of different groups, he said, including the loyalists, recently arrived freelance Islamic extremists and foreign fighters who came to Iraq before the war.
The focus on Zarqawi is part of a political strategy to portray the terrorism threat as essentially foreign and rooted in the Al Qaeda network, thereby downplaying the significance of Iraqi insurgents, critics say. But outsiders could not operate in Iraq's "hostile tribal environment" without local allies, said Mustafa Alani, an Iraq-born expert on terrorism.
"The Americans want to say that the only people fighting them are supporters" of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, said Alani, who is based at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank affiliated with the British Defense Ministry. "Everybody blames Zarqawi, but I think it's a series of assumptions. It's of great publicity value to say he is trying to stir a civil war. With all the attacks they blame him for, he's either a superman or a myth."
Zarqawi has been in the spotlight before. His real name is Ahmed Fadhil Nazzar Khalailah, and U.S. officials identify him as a Palestinian Jordanian. His prewar presence in Iraq served as the basis for U.S. accusations tying Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein ? allegations that remain unproven. The current depiction of Zarqawi as supreme chief of a terrorist army assaulting Iraq may reflect a U.S. perspective that differs from European and Arab views.
U.S. officials tend to personify the threat in a notorious individual, European investigators say, while Europeans and Arabs regard Islamic networks as loose and anarchic. American officials are also quick to group Zarqawi and other terrorists under the label of Al Qaeda, though the network is an increasingly dispersed constellation of groups, experts say.
"There's this image of a super-villain who's behind everything," said Claude Moniquet, a terrorism expert at a Brussels think tank, who believes that the claim of 25 attacks attributed to Zarqawi is exaggerated. "These people don't work like that. What you always have to remember about the Islamic movements is that they are little, very independent cells, not all connected. There's no hierarchy."
posted by chris at 2:03 PM
Flip-flops
"Flip-flops" is already in the early running for most annoying campaign buzzword. Anyway, while Bush is accusing Kerry of flip-flopping, here's a quick list of some of Bush's own flip-flops. Some of them may actually be "lies and deceptions" rather than "flip-flops", but really, who's counting at this point?
posted by chris at 1:30 PM
------------------
|
