Bushies: Outsourcing American Jobs is Good!

I’m sure that hundreds of thousands of Americans whose jobs have left the country couldn’t agree more:

The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said Monday.
The embrace of foreign outsourcing, an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and has become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president’s annual report to Congress on the health of the economy.
“Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade,” said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, which prepared the report. “More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that’s a good thing.”

Granted, the world economy evolves, change is inevitable, jobs will move around the world–I get that. But this is an extremely sterile view of people’s livelihoods. It almost sounds as if the administration is a corporate unit calculating U.S. employment as the cost of doing business–wait, maybe it is.
Senator Edwards summed things up very succinctly:

“These people,” he said of the Bush administration, “what planet do they live on? They are so out of touch.”

Postmortem Marriage

‘Till death another death do us part:

NICE, France — Dressed in a demure black suit, a 35-year-old Frenchwoman married her dead boyfriend Tuesday, an exchange of vows that required authorization from President Jacques Chirac.
Under French law, Christelle Demichel became both bride and widow in the ceremony, which was performed at Nice City Hall on the French Riviera. The groom, a former policeman identified as Eric, was killed by a drunk driver in September 2002.
Demichel told LCI television she understood “it could seem shocking to marry someone who is dead,” but her feelings for him had not dimmed. His body was not present for the ceremony.
Such marriages are legal if the living spouse can prove the couple had intended to marry before the other died. The French president must also authorize it.

Per CNN TV, I understand that the widow was pregnant and in the car during the accident, but only she survived.
That’s sad.
I wonder what “proof” a wedding applicant has to have under this law, and why it took a year and a half to go through with the wedding. Maybe that’s when it was originally scheduled.

Update Time

This is familiar:

Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday a “critical” flaw in most versions of its flagship Windows operating system could allow hackers to break into personal computers and snoop on sensitive data.
Although no computers were reported to have been compromised, the world’s largest software maker warned that Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 were at risk. Microsoft announced the flaw in its monthly security bulletin.
The company offered software updates to fix the software flaw, which it assigned its most severe rating of “critical.”

However, I found this kind of curios:

Marc Maiffret, co-founder of eEye Digital Security, the company that discovered the flaw, criticized Microsoft for taking more than six months to come up with a patch to fix the problem.
. . .
“We contacted Microsoft about these vulnerabilities 200 days ago, which is insane,” he said. “Even the most secure Windows networks are going to be vulnerable to this flaw, which is very unique.”

I’m not a computer expert, nor will I play on the blog. But 200 days seems like a long time to come up with a fix.
Download Patch.

Conspiracy Heaven

Imagine if a third party presidential candidate mysteriously disappeared in Canada for a few days. Mix in a murder trial, an ex-patriot tycoon bankroller, an alleged terrorist, and theories that the government blew up apartment buildings to justify a war.
They sure have some funny stuff going on in Russia.

Is There No Justice?

“ Woman withdraws suit over breast flash”
A Knoxville woman who took her convictions to court is withdrawing a proposed class-action lawsuit over singer Janet Jackson’s breast-baring performance at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show.
Terri Carlin is dismissing the lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court against Jackson, Justin Timberlake, MTV, CBS and Viacom. The lawsuit stemmed from the now-infamous exposure of one of Jackson’s breasts when Timberlake ripped off part of her costume during their duet at the Houston event.
According to the notice of dismissal filed in federal court, Carlin wants to wait to see if “remedial measures recently announced by the corporate defendants, the potential (Federal Communications Commission) sanctions and perhaps the passage of stronger enforcement provisions will prevent further similar conduct.”

What about “the outrage, anger, embarrassment and serious injury”? What of the damage to the “standing and credibility” of the United States? Americans have been hurt. We can’t let big media get away with this.