Friday, October 15, 2004
TODAY we're doing this??
Shouldn't we have done this a long time ago?
The United States on Friday ordered a freeze on assets of the militant group led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which has claimed responsibility for a series of bombings, kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq.
The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control added Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad group to its list of suspected terrorists and terrorism financiers.
(via Atrios.)
posted by chris at 1:53 PM
The frogs always go first
Amphibians are experiencing a precipitous decline across the globe, according to the first comprehensive world survey of the creatures, which include frogs, toads and salamanders. As many as 122 species have disappeared since 1980, and 1,900 are in danger of becoming extinct.
The rapid drop -- the equivalent of tens of thousands of years' worth of extinctions in just a century -- is being caused by a range of factors that include deforestation, pollution, habitat loss and climate change, researchers said. But they added that the phenomenon also tells a disturbing tale of broad environmental degradation that may ultimately threaten humans and other animals, as well. Amphibians are often considered "canaries in the coal mine" because their permeable skin makes them especially sensitive to environmental changes.
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The survey found that 32 percent of all amphibian species face extinction, compared with 12 percent of bird species and 23 percent of mammal species. The three-year $1.5 million study, which involved more than 500 scientists from more than 60 countries, is being published today in the journal Science.
More.
posted by chris at 1:47 PM
Prozac isn't candy
The federal government today ordered that all anti-depressant drugs be sold with a prominent "black-box" to warn doctors that the medications increase the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior among children and adolescents, officials announced today.
The decision is a reversal of the agency's long-standing position on the drugs and could significantly alter how they are marketed, prescribed and used.
Controversy has dogged anti-depressants such as Prozac for more than a decade, but most psychiatrists have maintained that suicidal thoughts and behavior are the result of patients' psychiatric illness, not their medications.
Story.
posted by chris at 1:43 PM
Republicans don't want you to vote
Paul Krugman compiles that latest incidents:
Some of these, like the actions reported in Nevada, involve dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party's phone banks.
But many efforts involve the abuse of power. For example, Ohio's secretary of state, a Republican, tried to use an archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate thousands of new, heavily Democratic registrations.
That attempt failed. But in Wisconsin, a Republican county executive insists that this year, when everyone expects a record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than it got in 2000 or 2002 - a recipe for chaos at polling places serving urban, mainly Democratic voters.
And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular.
Florida's secretary of state recently ruled that voter registrations would be deemed incomplete if those registering failed to check a box affirming their citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the same thing elsewhere on the form. Many counties are, sensibly, ignoring this ruling, but it's apparent that some officials have both used this rule and other technicalities to reject applications as incomplete, and delayed notifying would-be voters of problems with their applications until it was too late.
Whose applications get rejected? A Washington Post examination of rejected applications in Duval County found three times as many were from Democrats, compared with Republicans. It also found a strong tilt toward rejection of blacks' registrations.
You can sign a petition calling on Milwaukee to print more ballots. More information about all the incidents is available here.
posted by chris at 1:19 PM
Is no one accountable in this administration?
The Pentagon plans to promote Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former head of military operations in Iraq, risking a confrontation with members of Congress because of the prisoner abuses that occurred during his tenure.
Senior Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have privately told colleagues they are determined to pin a fourth star on Sanchez, two senior defense officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said this week.
Rumsfeld and others recognize that Sanchez remains politically "radioactive," in the words of a third senior defense official, and would wait until after the Nov. 2 presidential election and investigations of the Abu Ghraib scandal have faded before putting his name forward.
Top Pentagon strategists do not have a specific four-star job in mind for Sanchez, and the officials conceded that the appointment would probably not occur if Bush were defeated in his reelection bid by Democratic rival Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who has made his criticism of the conduct in the war a centerpiece of his campaign.
...Among his duties in Iraq, Sanchez oversaw all detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib prison.
More.
posted by chris at 1:16 PM
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Thursday, October 14, 2004
Osama who?
Bush, at the debate last night:
"Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations.
"Of course we're worried about Osama bin Laden. We're on the hunt after Osama bin Laden. We're using every asset at our disposal to get Osama bin Laden."
Bush, at a press conference, March 13, 2002:
"Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."
Josh Marshall has more.
posted by chris at 1:42 PM
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Wednesday, October 13, 2004
America Votes Voters Outreach, but only for Republicans
Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash.
Anyone who has recently registered or re-registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store or even government building may be affected.
The I-Team has obtained information about an alleged widespread pattern of potential registration fraud aimed at Democrats. The focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes.
The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.
Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.
But this isn't an isolated incident. America Votes Voters Outreach of America is doing this in several other key states as well. And where do they get their funding? That's right:
The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee.
These people play DIRTY.
UPDATE: Edited for accuracy.
posted by chris at 4:52 PM
The pickle story
A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic's gallon jar of pickles.
Wal-Mart priced it at $2.97--a year's supply of pickles for less than $3! "They were using it as a 'statement' item," says Pat Hunn, who calls himself the "mad scientist" of Vlasic's gallon jar. "Wal-Mart was putting it before consumers, saying, This represents what Wal-Mart's about. You can buy a stinkin' gallon of pickles for $2.97. And it's the nation's number-one brand."
Therein lies the basic conundrum of doing business with the world's largest retailer. By selling a gallon of kosher dills for less than most grocers sell a quart, Wal-Mart may have provided a ser-vice for its customers. But what did it do for Vlasic? The pickle maker had spent decades convincing customers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Wal-Mart was practically giving them away. And the fevered buying spree that resulted distorted every aspect of Vlasic's operations, from farm field to factory to financial statement.
Indeed, as Vlasic discovered, the real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us "every day low prices." It's the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. That story can be found floating in a gallon jar of pickles at Wal-Mart.
There's much more. This is an excellent examination of how Wal-Mart has reshaped the retail landscape as well as the distribution chain for all consumer products. Everyone should read this.
posted by chris at 3:42 PM
$10 CDs from Wal-Mart
Wal-mart wants every CD you buy to cost less than ten bucks. And the nation's largest retailer -- which moved a quarter of a trillion dollars' worth of goods last year -- usually gets its way. Suppliers who don't accede to Wal-Mart's "everyday low price" mantra often find their products bounced from the chain's stores, excluded from being sold to the 138 million people who shop at a Wal-Mart store every week.
In the past decade, Wal-Mart has quietly emerged as the nation's biggest record store. Wal-Mart now sells an estimated one out of every five major-label albums. It has so much power, industry insiders say, that what it chooses to stock can basically determine what becomes a hit. "If you don't have a Wal-Mart account, you probably won't have a major pop artist," says one label executive...
...Less-expensive CDs are something consumers have been demanding for years. But here's the hitch: Wal-Mart is tired of losing money on cheap CDs. It wants to keep selling them for less than $10 -- $9.72, to be exact -- but it wants the record industry to lower the prices at which it purchases them. Last winter, Wal-Mart asked the industry to supply it with choice albums -- from new releases from alternative rockers the Killers to perennial classics such as Beatles 1 -- at favorable prices. According to music-industry sources, Wal-Mart executives hinted that they could reduce Wal-Mart's CD stock and replace it with more lucrative DVDs and video games.
"This wasn't framed as a gentle negotiation," says one label rep. "It's a line in the sand -- you don't do this, then the threat is this." (Wal-Mart denies these claims.)
CDs for $10 sounds great, huh? But it's a not that simple. It hurts the smaller stores, limits the availablity of indie music and brings up issues of censorship.
No one in the music business ever expected Wal-Mart to become the most powerful force in record retailing. In the past, the business was shared among smaller local and regional chains such as Musicland, which once had an estimated ten percent of the market. But as Wal-Mart and other national discount operations such as Target and Best Buy have grown -- approximately half of all major-label music is sold through these three -- an estimated 1,200 record stores have closed in the past two years, according to market-research firm Almighty Institute of Music Retail. Last February, Tower Records, with ninety-three stores, declared bankruptcy and is now up for sale; Musicland has already changed owners, with many local outposts shuttered.
Wal-Mart is like no traditional record seller. Unlike a typical Tower store, which stocks 60,000 titles, an average Wal-Mart carries about 5,000 CDs. That leaves little room on the shelf for developing artists or independent labels. There's also scant space for catalog albums, which now represent about forty percent of all sales. At a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Thorton, Colorado, for example, there were no copies of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street or Nirvana's Nevermind. While most of the latest hits were priced at $13.88, some records -- from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack to the latest by Yellowcard -- were displayed for $9.72. Says Severson, "Paying fifteen dollars for a piece of music is a difficult value equation for customers."
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Today, before any new album is released, someone at each label is charged with asking, "Do we have any Wal-Mart issues?" If an advisory sticker is placed on an album, the label will put out a clean version about ninety percent of the time. Since the edited version of a hit record usually averages only about ten percent of a record's total sales, they do it mostly to keep Wal-Mart happy.
posted by chris at 3:28 PM
Indymedia servers confiscated
Freedom of expression worldwide has been under threat since agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) last week seized two Internet servers hosting websites of the Independent Media Centers. In Latin America, Indymedia Brazil and Uruguay are directly affected.
"The incident resembles a Kafka novel," Pablo Ortellado of Indymedia Brazil told IPS in an e-mail interview. "Our equipment was seized and we don't exactly know when, by whom or why."
The servers confiscated on Oct. 7 were located in the UK premises of Rackspace, a U.S.-based company, and hosted 21 sites.
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Until now, nobody seems to know why Indymedia was targeted. The seizure could be related to the publication of pictures on one of its French sites, showing Swiss undercover police photographing protestors. If this suspicion is confirmed, says Ortellado, we will have witnessed the violation of civil rights on a global scale.
"Swiss police, protesting against news on a French website hosted on an English server get the American government to seize the server and take more than 20 independent media sites off-line," he says.
More.
posted by chris at 2:18 PM
Chip implants
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved an implantable computer chip that can pass a patient's medical details to doctors, speeding care.
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It's the first time the FDA has approved medical use of the device, though in Mexico, more than 1,000 scannable chips have been implanted in patients. The chip's serial number pulls up the patients' blood type and other medical information.
With the pinch of a syringe, the microchip is inserted under the skin in a procedure that takes less than 20 minutes and leaves no stitches.
Silently and invisibly, the dormant chip stores a code - similar to the identifying UPC code on products sold in retail stores - that releases patient-specific information when a scanner passes over the chip.
Story. (Thanks, Jason).
posted by chris at 1:56 PM
This is the sugarconspiracy, after all
The rumours are flying:
Was President Bush literally channeling Karl Rove in his first debate with John Kerry? That's the latest rumor flooding the Internet, unleashed last week in the wake of an image caught by a television camera during the Miami debate. The image shows a large solid object between Bush's shoulder blades as he leans over the lectern and faces moderator Jim Lehrer.
The president is not known to wear a back brace, and it's safe to say he wasn't packing. So was the bulge under his well-tailored jacket a hidden receiver, picking up transmissions from someone offstage feeding the president answers through a hidden earpiece? Did the device explain why the normally ramrod-straight president seemed hunched over during much of the debate?
This site has all the pictures. Conspiracy theorists are claiming that the bulge is the answer to the President's stop-stutter speech pattern, as well as his strange behavior in the first Presidential debates. And then there's this:
Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN broadcast appeared to pick up -- and broadcast to surprised viewers -- the sound of another voice seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush repeated them.
The lastest update from Salon is here. Or visit the clearinghouse for it all. Fun stuff.
posted by chris at 11:21 AM
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Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Corporate giveaway passes House and Senate
Just in time for the elections.
The Senate on Monday approved $137 billion in tax breaks for corporations and special interests over 10 years, including a $10 billion buyout for tobacco farmers. The giveaways were needed to win votes for otherwise unpopular legislation intended primarily to end a trade fight over illegal U.S. subsidies to export industries.
The measure passed 69-17. The House of Representatives passed the bill on Oct. 7 by 280-141. President Bush is expected to sign the bill before Election Day.
Supporters hailed its passage as critical to creating jobs while opponents called the measure a massive corporate giveaway. It includes tax breaks for Alaskan whalers, natural gas companies, the timber industry, Hollywood filmmakers and cruise-ship companies.
posted by chris at 5:21 PM
Playing politics with our soldier's lives
This is shameful:
The Bush administration plans to delay major assaults on rebel-held cities in Iraq until after U.S. elections in November, say administration officials, mindful that large-scale military offensives could affect the U.S. presidential race.
Although American commanders in Iraq have been buoyed by recent successes in insurgent-held towns such as Samarra and Tall Afar, administration and Pentagon officials say they will not try to retake cities such as Fallouja and Ramadi — where the insurgents' grip is strongest and U.S. military casualties could be the highest — until after Americans vote in what is likely to be an extremely close election.
"When this election's over, you'll see us move very vigorously," said one senior administration official involved in strategic planning, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"Once you're past the election, it changes the political ramifications" of a large-scale offensive, the official said. "We're not on hold right now. We're just not as aggressive."
posted by chris at 2:03 PM
The right direction?
The LA Times looks at the increasing risk that working families face in today's "free market" economy.
• Government used to provide substantial help in coping with joblessness. In the mid-1970s, jobless workers could collect up to 15 months of unemployment compensation. By last December, Congress had pared the program to just six months. Additionally, federal legislation in 1978 and 1986 effectively reduced the value of benefits by making them taxable. And state eligibility restrictions imposed in the late 1970s and early '80s shrank the fraction of the workforce entitled to collect benefits from about one-half to a little more than one-third. Of the 8 million people who were unemployed last month, only 2.9 million were collecting benefits.
• The minimum wage was once the government's chief means of ensuring that "work pays" — that those willing to head to a job each day would make enough to live on. For decades, Democratic and Republican administrations alike maintained the minimum wage at about half of average hourly earnings in the U.S. But starting in the early 1980s, the minimum wage was allowed to slip. At $5.15, it is now only one-third of average hourly earnings, its lowest level in 50 years.
• Welfare was created to protect poor women and children, but starting in the late 1970s a growing chorus of analysts complained that the system had backfired by fostering a culture of dependency. In 1996, President Clinton and a Republican-controlled Congress approved a "work first" law that has cut welfare rolls by one-half and reduced inflation-adjusted welfare spending by at least one-third, or about $10 billion a year. On balance, the changes appear to have benefited people who can find jobs and hold them. But those who can't work or have lost their jobs can often find themselves in far worse shape. Twenty-five years ago in California, a mother of two who depended on welfare collected about $15,000 in cash assistance and food stamps. By last year, a woman in the same circumstances brought in $3,300 less, in inflation-adjusted terms.
• Twenty-five years ago, almost 40% of the nation's private full-time workforce was covered by traditional pensions, under which the employer bears the risks and pays the benefits. That number has fallen to 20%. In the place of pensions have come defined-contribution plans such as 401(k)s, under which an employer may kick in some funds — typically about half what would have been spent previously — but employees alone bear the burden of ensuring that they have enough money to retire on.
• A similar shift is underway in health insurance. As recently as 1987, employers provided health coverage for 70% of the nation's working-age population, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute in Washington. By last year, that had dropped to 63%. The change translates into nearly 18 million people who would have been covered under the old system scrambling to make their own arrangements. What's more, even when employers continue coverage, they increasingly push more of the costs onto employees. Since 2000 alone, employers have raised the premiums their workers must pay by an average of 50%, or about $1,000 a family, according to a recently released study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust.
posted by chris at 1:08 PM
Priorities, priorities
The Detriot News examines how the Bush tax cuts are affecting the working poor:
The Bush administration and Congress have scaled back programs that aid the poor to help pay for $600 billion in tax breaks that went primarily to those who earn more than $288,800 a year.
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Meanwhile, the Bush tax breaks for the richest 10 percent this year alone will total $148 billion.
That is twice as much as the government will spend on job training, $6.2 billion; college Pell grants, $12 billion; public housing, $6.3 billion; low-income rental subsidies, $19 billion; child care, $4.8 billion; insurance for low-income children, $5.2 billion; low-income energy assistance, $1.8 billion; meals for shut-ins, $180 million; and welfare, $16.9 billion.
The reduction in government assistance that accompanied the tax cuts couldn’t come at a worse time.
The number of Americans living in poverty has risen 10 percent since 2000, after falling in the late 1990s. Nearly 36 million Americans — one in eight — now live in poverty and tens of millions more are considered working poor.
The economy has lost nearly a million jobs — 241,000 in Michigan alone — since it slid into recession in March 2001.
That has increased the demand for government programs from millions of Americans who are now more likely to know hunger, homelessness and chronic need.
posted by chris at 11:55 AM
Incredible
The conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose television outlets reach nearly a quarter of the nation's homes with TV, is ordering its stations to preempt regular programming just days before the Nov. 2 election to air a film that attacks Sen. John F. Kerry's activism against the Vietnam War, network and station executives familiar with the plan said Friday.
Sinclair's programming plan, communicated to executives in recent days and coming in the thick of a close and intense presidential race, is highly unusual even in a political season that has been marked by media controversies.
Sinclair has told its stations — many of them in political swing states such as Ohio and Florida — to air "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," sources said. The film, funded by Pennsylvania veterans and produced by a veteran and former Washington Times reporter, features former POWs accusing Kerry — a decorated Navy veteran turned war protester — of worsening their ordeal by prolonging the war. Sinclair will preempt regular prime-time programming from the networks to show the film, which may be classified as news programming, according to TV executives familiar with the plan.
Story. And what you can do about it here.
UPDATE: Sign the petition to the FCC.
posted by chris at 10:37 AM
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