Archive - Jun 23, 2006

Date

Divide and Conquer the Voters

From a NY Times editorial of the same name from a couple weeks back:

President Bush devoted his Saturday radio speech to a cynical boost for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. It was depressing in the extreme to hear the chief executive trying to pretend, at this moment in American history, that this was a critical priority.

Mr. Bush's central point was that the nation is under siege from "activist judges" who are striking down anti-gay-marriage laws that conflict with their own state constitutions. That's their job, just as it is the job of state legislators to either fix the laws or change their constitutions...

All this effort to divert the nation's attention to issues that divide and distract would be bad enough if the country were not facing real, disastrous problems at home and abroad. But then, if that weren't the case, Mr. Bush probably wouldn't feel moved to stoop so low.

How Many Chinese Engineers

Via the Kyivmission blog: here's an interesting article from The Washington Post about a case of fact-check neglect. It had been widely reported in may different sources that 600,000, 350,000 and 70,000 were the numbers of new engineers produced in 2004 in China, India, and the US, respectively...evidence that the US is falling behind in the technology race. It turns out that the realistic numbers are more like 352,000, 112,000, and 137,000. That means, per million residents, the rate of engineer production is higher in the US.

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