As WebProNews reported During the 2004 presidential campaign, six times as many people used the internet to get political news as they did in 1996.
... The influence of newspapers dropped to 39 percent last year, from 60 percent in 1996, according to the joint, telephone-based survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
BusinessWeek reports Americans who got campaign news over the Internet were more likely to visit sites of major news organizations like CNN and The New York Times (43 percent) rather than Internet-only resources such as candidate Web sites and Web journals, known as blogs (24 percent).
You can see the bias of the media, in that when they identify major news organizations they just list extreme left wing sites like CNN and The New York Times.
Fifty-eight percent of political news users cited convenience as their main reason for using the Internet. This group was more likely to use the Internet sites of traditional news organizations or online services.
But one-third of political news consumers cited a belief that they did not get all the news and information they wanted from papers and television, and another 11 percent said the Web had information not available elsewhere. These individuals were more likely to visit blogs or campaign sites for information.
And blogs, Rainie said, likely had an indirect influence on what campaigns talked about and what news organizations covered.... Blogs "are having a modest level of impact on the voter side and probably a more dramatic impact on the institutional side," Rainie said. "Blogs are still a realm where very, very active and pretty elite, both technologically oriented people and politically oriented people go."
Monday, March 07, 2005
More People Turning To Online News
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Niger cancels 'free-slave' event
BBC News reports that The government of Niger has cancelled at the last minute a special ceremony during which at least 7,000 slaves were to be granted their freedom.
A spokesman for the government's human rights commission, which had helped to organise the event, said this was because slavery did not exist.
It is not clear why the government, which was also a co-sponsor of the ceremony, changed its position.
At least 43,000 people across Niger are thought to be in slavery.
Representatives of the slaves, the government and human rights campaigners had been due to attend the event at In Ates, near the border with Mali.
A local chief had agreed to the release after the introduction of a new law, which punishes those found guilty of slavery with up to 30 years in jail.
Anti-Slavery International had described the ceremony as a historic step forward.
The British-based campaign group said the people who had been due to be freed made up 95% of the local population.....
In a ceremony in December 2003, dozens of slaves were liberated, many of them shedding tears of joy as they were given certificates showing they were free.
Hat tip to D. Rogers at The New Editor
Wayback Machine
LGF just called my attention to a FANTASTIC tool, the Wayback Machine, a wonderful tool, containing more than 30 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. It’s a good place to look for sites that no longer exist on the web, if you know the site’s former address.
Drag this link to your browser's toolbar: Wayback and then when you are on a page and want to see earlier versions of that page, just click that link on your toolbar.
LGF used the Wayback Machine to discover a page which was apparently removed from the Internet some time around July 2001 with a map of "The United States of Islam".
Free Flow of Information Act of 2005
Michelle Malkin points out that Dan Gillmor indicated that H.R. 581 (the "Free Flow of Information Act of 2005") sharply circumscribes the definition of who's a journalist -- and appears to explicitly exclude bloggers and other non-traditional online journalists.
Who's get the protection? The legislation would give it to:
A) an entity that disseminates information by print, broadcast, cable, satellite, mechanical, photographic, electronic, or other means and that--
(i) publishes a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical;
(ii) operates a radio or television broadcast station (or network of such stations), cable system, or satellite carrier, or a channel or programming service for any such station, network, system, or carrier; or
(iii) operates a news agency or wire service;
(B) a parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such an entity; or
(C) an employee, contractor, or other person who gathers, edits, photographs, records, prepares, or disseminates news or information for such an entity.
In other words, bloggers need not apply unless they work for a major publication or broadcast.
See a pattern?
We're moving toward a system under which only the folks who are deemed to be professionals will be granted the status of journalists, and thereby more rights than the rest of us. This is pernicious in every way.
Mass media journalists and their bosses should be leading the fight against what's happening to bloggers. I fear they won't, because old media typically refuses to defend the rights of new entrants until the threats against the new folks directly threaten everyone.
beSpacific
points out that Rep. Mike Pence that introduced the Free Flow of Information Act of 2005 has .
Martin Stabe says Defining “journalism“ for the purposes of extending special protections is dangerous business — not because of who it protects, but, as we see here, because of who it excludes from that protection. and here he says Journalists should never forget that the First Amendment and the freedom of expression guarantees in other liberal democracies are not intended to protect and privilege professsional journalism, much less enterprises that sell commodified news.
Freedom of expression is intended for all citizens to discuss politics in public without threat of intimidation. The fact that the prohibitively high cost of participating in the public sphere has until recently confined the exercise of that right to professional journalists and moneyed publicists is purely incidental — a disfunction of liberal democracy arising out of economic reality not an intentional privilege to be defended.
Italy Rejects U.S. Version of Iraq Shooting
Yahoo! News says Italy Rejects U.S. Version of Iraq Shooting. Italian hostage Giuliana Sgrena, shot and wounded after being freed in Iraq, said Sunday U.S. forces may have deliberately targeted her because Washington opposed Italy's policy of dealing with kidnappers. She offered no evidence for her claim, and could the fact that she is a reporter for a Communist daily Il Manifesto have influenced her recall? Sgrena's newspaper, Il Manifesto, has been a fierce opponent of the war. Could that have had an affect as well? Also she remembered her captors' words, when they warned her "to be careful because the Americans don't want you to return." Could they have caused the Italian driver to ignore the soldier's signals to stop at the check point?
Sgrena claimed the soldiers fired between 300 and 400 bullets at if from an armoured vehicle.
Update: 3/8
LGF initially showed a photo of that AP identified as being the car, but subsequently they learned that it was not the car, and LGF quickly corrected the record.
I showed the photo initially in this article, but with LGF's retraction, I have removed it.
New era in Middle East
Australian Prim Minister credited the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a catalyst for Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon and other promising democratic developments in the Middle East.
As Syria confirmed at the weekend that all of its forces in Lebanon would move to the border with Syria, Mr Howard said democracy was beginning to emerge in the Middle East.
He pointed to the 59 per cent turnout in Iraq, the election of Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian leader and the "real prospect of some settlement" with Israel. Municipal elections in Saudi Arabia and a multi-candidate race for Egypt's presidency were also promising developments, he said.
"Now, these things wouldn't have been remotely possible a year ago," he told Channel Seven's Sunday Sunrise program.
"I have no doubt that one of the reasons - I am not saying all the reasons, but one of the reasons - is of course, or was, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."
Charles Krauthammer said in the Washington Post Revolutions do not stand still. They either move forward or die. We are at the dawn of a glorious, delicate, revolutionary moment in the Middle East. It was triggered by the invasion of Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and televised images of 8 million Iraqis voting in a free election. Which led to the obvious question throughout the Middle East: Why the Iraqis and not us?
To be sure, the rolling revolution began outside the Middle East with the Afghan elections. That was followed by the Iraqi elections. In between came free Palestinian elections that produced a moderate, reform-oriented leadership, followed by an amazing mini-uprising in the Palestinian parliament that rejected an attempt to force corrupt cronies on the new government.
And it continued -- demonstrations in Egypt for democracy, a shocking rarity that led President Hosni Mubarak to promise the first contested presidential elections in Egyptian history. And now, of course, the "cedar revolution" in Lebanon, where the assassination of opposition leader Rafiq Hariri led to an explosion of people power in the streets that brought down Syria's puppet-government in Beirut.
Revolution is in the air.
Netscape 8.0
Netscape, the browser that dominated the Web in the 1990s until Microsoft’s Internet Explorer took over, has faded into obscurity since it was acquired by America Online in 1998.
But AOL is hoping for a Netscape comeback, starting today. The company is releasing a beta, or prerelease, version of an all-new edition of the storied browser, called Netscape 8.0. This new Netscape, which works only on Windows, sports some unusual features designed to help bolster security and compatibility on the Web.
We reported earlier how Firefox was gaining on IE in popularity. Firefox is based on Mozilla, which in turn was based on an earlier version of Netscape which was released to the Public Domain as open source software.
What goes around comes around, because Netscape 8.0 is based on Firefox, but it adds two major new features. First, Netscape rates every Web site for trustworthiness. This includes whether the site is genuine, and not a fake created by crooks for so-called "phishing" schemes; and whether it can be trusted not to secretly load spyware or other malicious programs onto your PC.
Second, Netscape has the capability to render a Web page in two ways: as Firefox would present it or as Internet Explorer would. This is useful because some Web sites don’t work properly in Firefox and rely upon special features available only through Internet Explorer. With the new Netscape, you can see the Internet Explorer version of a page without launching Internet Explorer.
If a site is considered trustworthy, Netscape automatically renders it using the Internet Explorer method, for maximum compatibility. Internet Explorer’s method for rendering Web pages opens security vulnerabilities that Firefox’s doesn’t. Netscape figures that, at trusted sites, it’s OK to take that risk.
On the other hand, if Netscape isn’t sure about the trustworthiness of a site, it uses the Firefox method for rendering the pages, which is safer but might have compatibility issues.
Netscape 8.0 beta can be downloaded here or here or here.
A Washington Post review said Netscape's new browser crashed twice during our four-hour test. Worse, it was painfully slow, taking much longer than Internet Explorer or Firefox to render streamlined sites such as Google News.
Another flaw is how America Online has cluttered the top toolbar and left-margin sidebar with links to AOL's own Web content, including CNN, MapQuest, Netscape News and AOL Yellow Pages.
The links across the top toolbars are the most annoying, because it is not as easy to change them as it should be. Users may have to dig deep into the help file to decipher how to add and delete links from this new, multi-level toolbar.
There are a number of comments from users that have tried the beta at BetaNews.
Friday, March 04, 2005
Only closed minds wanted
Hat tip to JackLewis.net for bringing to our attention that in Government schools the motto apparently is Only closed minds wanted.
An Atlanta judge has ruled that open mindedness, careful study and critical consideration are religious practices and therefore have no place in taxpayer funded schools.
Judge Clarence Cooper ruled against the Cobb County School District in January, ordering the immediate removal of all stickers. However, the school district appealed the decision, seeking a hold on the removal until the appeal is heard. Judge Cooper’s latest ruling will allow the stickers to remain throughout the school term, minimizing the disruption of classes.
While Judge Cooper acknowledged that the stickers clearly served a ‘secular purpose’, an “observer may interpret the sticker to convey a message of endorsement of religion.”
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to rule on the appeal by the end of the year.
CNN said "Due to the manner in which the sticker refers to evolution as a theory, the sticker also has the effect of undermining evolution education to the benefit of those Cobb County citizens who would prefer that students maintain their religious beliefs regarding the origin of life," Cooper wrote in his ruling.
Cooper said he was ruling on the "narrow issue" of the case, brought against the Cobb County School District and Board of Education by four parents of district students, was whether the district's stickers violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
His conclusion, he said, "is not that the school board should not have called evolution a theory or that the school board should have called evolution a fact."
"Rather, the distinction of evolution as a theory rather than a fact is the distinction that religiously motivated individuals have specifically asked school boards to make in the most recent anti-evolution movement, and that was exactly what parents in Cobb County did in this case," he wrote.
"By adopting this specific language, even if at the direction of counsel, the Cobb County School Board appears to have sided with these religiously motivated individuals."
The sticker, he said, sends "a message that the school board agrees with the beliefs of Christian fundamentalists and creationists."
"The school board has effectively improperly entangled itself with religion by appearing to take a position," Cooper wrote. "Therefore, the sticker must be removed from all of the textbooks into which it has been placed." .....
According to the AP, the schools placed the stickers after more than 2,000 parents complained the textbooks presented evolution as fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life.
What? The First Amendment provides Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
It does not say "Government can't appear to take a position indicating it agrees with religiously motivated individuals."
There were many different stickers, and the one used depended on what was said in the textbook to which it was attached. See this page to see the stickers.
Student suspended for telling the truth
As reported in Zero Intelligence Addison Ryan, a 10th grade student at North Mecklenburg High School in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg School District was suspended for telling the truth. Deb Ryan, Addison's mother, reports that on December 17th there was a "Code Green" fire drill at the school. A classmate asked what a Code Green was.
My son replied, "It's a bomb threat", speculating on the cause of the drill believing that to be the case. A teacher overheard his response and filled out a disciplinary referral form from which he was charged with making a False Warning and immediately dismissed from school.
He was immediately suspended from school pending a disciplinary hearing. Punishment for giving a false alarm is a minimum of long term suspension and a maximum of expulsion. This occurred during exam preparation time. The disciplinary hearing could take up to three days, encompassing not only the review but the exams themselves.
The Ryans got help from the Children's Law Center, a non-profit firm in Charlotte. Their lawyers were able to make a plea deal with the school to return Addison to class after a two day suspension for "disruptive behavior" (of an earlier incident that had not been severe enough for discipline when it happened but now that they needed an excuse it was big enough to warrant a two day suspension.
Zero tolerance equals zero intelligence.
The Other Side of the FEC
Redstate indicated that the problem reported in The coming crackdown on blogging MAY not be as serious as we all thought.
Trevor Potter, a former attorney in the Reagan Justice Department and former Chairman of the FEC, issued a response tonight to Brad Smith.
Commissioner Smith's interview does a good job at providing misinformation on the subject of the Internet and the FEC, as it was obviously intended to......
After a Federal judge threw out these Smith-supported exclusions for paid advertising on the Internet, the FEC was ordered to open a rulemaking on the question of advertising on the Internet. The Commission has NOT yet even put out any options for consideration--when they do so there will be opportunity for lots of public comment. The Commission will have plenty of opportunity in the course of the rulemaking to distinguish between political candidate or party Internet expenditures (which should be subject to federal campaign finance law like any other expenditure they make, or which is coordinated with them), and completely unregulated activity by bloggers, Internet news services, and citizens acting on their own.
There is NO REASON AT ALL that this FEC rulemaking should attempt to regulate bloggers, Internet-based news entities, or average citizens sitting at their PCs, and I have great faith it will not.......
For more information on the history of FEC regulation and deregulation of the Internet, see my Chapter in the Brookings Institution's New Campaign Finance Sourcebook here at Chapter Nine.
Update:
See Michelle Malkin for further information
Texas Radio Stands With Blogosphere
I reported earlier about The coming crackdown on blogging
CQ reports the Lone Star Times, the blog for independently owned Houston, TX talk-radio station KSEV 700 AM indicates we believe that we enjoy the "broadcast exemption" that prohibits the federal government from regulating our speech in the manner they are proposing for "mere" citizen bloggers.
While we still need to talk to some sharp lawyers and nail down the details, if these restrictions come to pass, KSEV and LST are committed to working out a legally sound way in which individual bloggers– of every ideological persuasion and partisan affiliation– can somehow register with us and be credentialed as a press representative of KSEV and LST.
Like Raoul Wallenberg handing out passports, we will start issuing press credentials to any blogger that asks for one.
Pentium 4 to be replaced by dual core processors
Xinhua said Intel will start rolling out Pentium D & Extreme Edition processors to replace Pentium 4 processor, the move seeking to give Intel a lion's share of the dual core processor market.
Now that Intel has almost reached the economic limit of technology in terms of increasing core speeds, the only way for it to deliver increased performance at an acceptable cost is to increase the number of cores per processor package.
Dual-core chips offer two cores on a single silicon die, offering users more performance without significantly ramping up energy consumption or heat gneeration. In his keynote speech, outgoing CEO Craig Barrett said dual-core technology offered Intel, of Santa Clara, Calif., a way of continuing Moore' Law without having to increase the chip's frequency.
Pentium D & Extreme Edition are the first in line of nearly 15 dual- and multicore projects under way at Intel's R & D. The difference between the two is that the Pentium D's twin cores don't have Hyperthreading enabled, so a Pentium D will appear to the operating system as two processors. Pentium Extreme Edition, however, does have Hyperthreading and so will appear as four processors. The new Extreme Edition will appear in the second quarter of this year.
The Pentium 4 will move to 65nm fabrication in 2006 when it will be used as the basis for the 'Presler' multi-chip package. Intel said that the processor would continue to be available in its present form for the next two years. Intel expects Multicore products to eventually permeate its entire range, from notebook CPUs to the Itanium server chip.
John Dvorak said Intel nearly put all its eggs in a new architectural basket some years back when it announced the roadmap for the Itanium processor and nearly lost control of the industry it invented. This time it's not trying to reinvent the wheel in such a drastic manner. It simply decided to make a better wheel, not a newer wheel.
What makes it so important at this juncture is that clock speeds have peaked and until now increasing clock speeds has been the primary methodology for improving performance. Despite the fact that the chip makers would promote all sorts of important design changes, it was always clock speed that seemed to matter. If you could double the clock speed you'd make everything inside the chip do things at double speed thus doubling the performance. It was that simple.
Dual core changes the model for doubling the performance. You keep the clock speed the same and double the CPU itself. Put two of them within the chip. This will, of course, become four then eight in the years ahead.
Information Week said Intel anticipates about three-quarters of all its shipments by the end of 2006 will be dual-core versions.
Intel has more than 15 dual and multicore projects under way.
Slashdot said Tom's Hardware reports that AMD is planning to release both it's dual-core desktop and mobile chips at the same time.
Thursday, March 03, 2005
GOP drive to woo blacks alarms Brazile
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile is alarmed by GOP efforts to lure black voters into the party.
She says "It won't take much for the GOP to garner 12 percent to 15 percent of the black vote in future elections, as some blacks are starting to believe the community is not well-served when one party takes their votes for granted and the other party doesn't work to earn them"
She is right. The black community is not well-surved by the Democrats taking their votes for granted, and she is worried about the Republicans working to earn them.
And Bush's "Ownership Society" has appeal.
The Dems are also worried about younger voters liking Bush's proposal for allowing some of Social Security taxes to be directed into personal accounts.
Gee, are the Republicans being unfair to the Democrats? Too bad.
The coming crackdown on blogging
CNET News reports that Bradley Smith (one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission) says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over. In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.
Captain's Quarters reports In order for me to operate under those conditions, I will need to hire a lawyer and an accountant to guide me through the election laws and calculate my in-kind donations on almost an hourly basis. How many bloggers will put up with that kind of hassle just to speak their minds about candidates and issues? John McCain and Russ Feingold have effectively created an American bureaucracy dedicated to stamping out independent political speech, and the courts have abdicated all reason in declaring it constitutional.
Please contact your representative or Senator in Congress to get this terrible infringement on free political speech reversed. When the American government threatens to prosecute people for simply speaking their minds, we have truly lost our way.
Michelle Malkin reports Joshua Claybourn of In the Agora analyzes the campaign finance law absurdities and First Amendment infringements on bloggers here and Winfield Myers is on the same wavelength and discusses it here.
Professor Bainbridge says the oddity of campaign finance regulation is that we have ended up in a place in which pornographers apparently have greater constitutional protection than political bloggers. It's like we live in the First Amendment's Bizzaro World.
You can email John McCain here and Russ Feingold here. Please let them know that some of us still believe in free speech.
Reader Gary at RightWingNutHouse wonders if this could backfire Or it might be wedge that begins the reverse some of the ridiculous campaign finance laws. The internet is too dynamic to regulate this way.
Cut on the bias said I called my US Senators as soon as I learned of this, and I'll be calling my representative soon. I encourage all of you to do the same. In fact, I encourage each of you to contact your Senators, find out who on their staff handles these issues, and talk to them immediately. Follow it up with an email or letter with more details. If you do track them down, and you have a blog, list the name of the contact on your blog and let me know (biasblog -at- hotmail.com) - I'll link you here so we have a central resource to find out who to contact. and lists Alabama contacts for Senators and Representatives.
I hope everyone is wrong about this being a significant problem, but the MSM certainly is upset at bloggers, so they may be pushing it.
Update:
CQ has posted a An Open Letter To The United States Senate that I urge readers to check out, and use as a start for a letter you write to your Senators and Congressmen.
Dems wonder "What if Bush was right"
Mark Noonan learned from the Wednesday, March 2 posting by Tom Elia on The New Editor identifying a very interesting item on the left wing FunctionalAmbivalent entitled Bush, Greatness and the End of the Liberalism which raises the question So here's something I've been thinking about lately: What if President Bush ends up being remembered by history as a great President?
What if the Neocons were right about the Middle East, that it was at a tipping point just waiting for someone to give it a shove toward the modern world? What if Iraq really was the key?
He goes on to identify a number of additional "what if" dominoes, and then asks the question What do we do if President Bush was right? What do we do if the Mideastern dominoes start falling and President Bush goes down in history as Winston Churchill, while we go down as Neville Chamberlain, howling weakly that diplomacy works and military force is no longer necessary? What if our most conservative President goes down in history as a great contributor to the liberal ideals of freedom and tolerance, while we Democrats -- we liberals -- go down as cold-hearted and fearful, unconcerned about the suffering of our fellows while we sit contentedly in our affluence? If that happens, are we even liberals any more?
There are some very interesting comments and trackbacks to his interesting post. Some are the normal "angry left" sort of responses one usually finds on Daily Kos or Atrios but there are some that seem to indicate that Tom (the poster of the question) may not be the only Democrat that can think and reason.
I believe that Bush was right, and that the dominos are falling, and when they finish falling I hope that the loud Bush Haters will be so stunned that reasonable Democratic voices like Tom's will be able to be heard.
To answer Tom's question, yes you will still be liberals, but hopefully once the dominos have fallen, and the loud Bush Haters are stunned into silence, I hope that we can have some reasonable discussions, because there are a number of things that need to be accomplished on a bi-partisan level, that just can't be accomplished with the Bush Haters screaming so loudly.
Google AutoLink Questioned
The Google Toolbar is a useful addition to Internet Explorer. It will not work with other browsers, although there is an independently developed Googlebar that Firefix and Mozilla can use.
Google just recently came out with Toolbar 3.0 beta with support for AutoLink that adds hyperlinks Google deems useful to the Web pages you visit. The idea is to automate the process of jumping from a street address to, say, a map, sparing users having to retype or copy the address.
An article in the Washington Post points out that there is a controversy about whether Google has the right to add links to pages authored by others. For now, AutoLink works in only four categories: street addresses (whisking you to Google Maps by default, but you can switch to MapQuest or Yahoo Maps); ISBN numbers (linking to Amazon.com book pages); package tracking numbers (pointing to DHL, FedEx, United Parcel Service and the U.S. Postal Service); and vehicle identification numbers (jumping to car history reports at CarFax.com), but what would be the case if Google started selling ads for keywords, and whenever that keyword appeared in a page you authored, and if they suddenly converted that keyword into a hot link to the page of the person who bought the ad. Generally a web page designer likes to decide what hot links to include in his page, and where they should link to, and most web page designer would not be happy to know that Google was going to "modify their work" and add links to some page of someone that paid Google money to have their page linked to.
See JackLewis for links to more Blogs discussing this.
Voter Apathy
As the AP reported:
If no one votes in a referendum, does the measure pass or fail? That was the question facing local officials after no one voted in Tuesday's local option sales tax election in Jesup. A small part of the town is in Black Hawk County. The rest is in Buchanan County.
Voters everywhere else in Black Hawk County voted to extend the tax another five years.
But in Jesup, officials were wondering if it passed or failed since none of the 27 registered votes who live on the Black Hawk County side voted.
Phyllis Peters, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Secretary of State's Office, said Wednesday the measure failed.
"Unless there are more votes for 'yes' than 'no', it's doesn't pass," Peters said.
Revenues from the 1-cent local option sales tax would have been used for water and sewer services in Jesup.
Jesup officials declined comment.
Your vote counts
Jesup residents lucked out this time, but just think about it.
If you like lower taxes, ifone person had voted for the tax, all 27 residents would have had to pay for it.
If you wanted to see the water and sewer services improved, if one person had voted for the tax, it would have passed.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Tulsa is among the best at saving cardiac victims
Yahoo! News reports Tulsa is among the USA's best at saving cardiac victims
I am not sure where to find the 2003 study, but in 2001 this shows both Tulsa and Oklahoma City were in the first tier.
This indicated Tulsa had a 26% survival rate; average call-to-shock: 8 minutes, 48 seconds. Oklahoma City had a 27% rate; average call-to-shock: 7 minutes, 36 seconds, and Seattle had a 45% survival rate, highest among the nation's 50 biggest cities. On average, Seattle's emergency crews took 8 minutes 46 seconds to shock victims of sudden cardiac arrest. That time includes 90 seconds of CPR, in accordance with city protocol.
In late 2003 USA Today said Other cities — including Milwaukee, Tulsa, San Francisco, Houston and Kansas City — save more than twice the national average by following the same steps and closely measuring performance.
And another article indicated Tom Wagner, chief operating officer of Oklahoma City and Tulsa's Emergency Medical Services Authority, which provides care for 1.1 million residents in Oklahoma. "We looked at the top two and said, 'What do they do?' " (Ok City was 3rd in that study) and Today, Oklahoma is pouring money and manpower into two key areas that the top cities — Seattle and Boston — view as priorities.
Yesterday USA Today reported Tulsa stands on the opposite side of this great theoretical divide from Oklahoma City, which is increasing its paramedics corps.
The two cities, 100 miles apart, save about the same percentage of cardiac arrest victims — 26% in Tulsa and 27% in Oklahoma City. But their fire departments have different views on how many paramedics they need.
In Tulsa, each resident spends $3.29 per year in taxes for 128 paramedics. In Oklahoma City, residents each pay $11.40 for 226 paramedics.
In Tulsa, five of 30 fire engines have paramedics. In Oklahoma City, almost half of its fire engines have paramedics — 17 of 35.
FOX Is Killing Them
Dirty Harry at Stranded On Blue Islands pointed out that these ratings (PDF file) shows Not only is FOX winning primetime handily but it's non-primetime shows are beating ALL the other's primetime shows. In other words FOX's morning and afternoon shows are beating Paula Zahn, Aaron Brown, Lou Dobbs, and Chris Matthews. Yeah, Linda Vester gets better ratings than Paula Zahn. The sole exception is Larry King. Unbelievable.
Actually Fox's Hannity & Colmes is on opposite CNN's Larry King and if we compare them:
| HH | HH | P2+ | A25-54 | A18-34 | A18-49 | |
| COV AA% | AA (000) | AA (000) | AA (000) | AA (000) | AA (000) | #Tlc |
| 1.4 | 1,222 | 1,617 | 442 | 134 | 366 | 19 |
| 1.0 | 864 | 1,017 | 265 | 58 | 208 | 20 |
We see that Hannity & Colmes beat Larry King in every category except Tic (whatever that is).
And if you check a comparison of Feb 04 and 05 ratings we see Hannity & Colmes came up 19% and Larry King Live went down 23%:
4 to 5pm: FNC, Your World, +3% vs CNN, Inside Politics/Crossfire, -19% and MSNBC, Lester Holt Live, -39%
5 to 6pm: FNC, The Big Story, +12% vs CNN, Wolf Blitzer Reports, -17% and MSNBC, Connected Coast to Coast, -19%
6 to 7pm: FNC, Special Report, +20% vs CNN, Lou Dobbs Tonight, -17% and MSNBC, Abrams Report, -28%
7 to 8pm: FNC, The Fox Report, +2% vs CNN, Anderson Cooper 360, 2% and MSNBC, Hardball, -20%
8 to 9pm: FNC, The O'Reilly Factor, +9% vs CNN, Paula Zahn Now, -17% and MSNBC, Countdown, -22%
9 to 10pm: FNC, Hannity & Colmes, +19% vs CNN, Larry King Live, -23% and MSNBC, Investigates/Reports, +6%
10 to 11pm: FNC, On the Record, +37% vs CNN, NewsNight, -26% and MSNBC, Scarborough Country, -17%
Variety says CNN flops in February as Fox News surges FNC only cable news network to see gains in primetime
Bait and Switch Salazar
Senator Ken Salazar urged President Bush yesterday to "withdraw all of his renominated judicial candidates"
Matt at BlogsForBush said Meyers has as many as 58 votes according to Arlen Specter, and as Matt said today If Salazar thinks Bush should withdraw the nomination of someone who not only has enough votes to be confirmed but is also near-filibuster proof, then there was never any hope for Salazar... he's just a freshmen obstructionist who thinks President Bush's nominees should be held hostage by the minority party in the Senate. Salazar must be insane if he thinks re-nominating judicial candidates who would be confirmed if they were given the chance to have up-or-down votes makes Bush the divisive one.
Captain's Quarters said Salazar appears to have perfected the bait-and-switch so common to those who want to appeal to the center during a general election and then suck up to the money the rest of the time. (See Hillary Clinton as another example.) The Coloradans who voted for Salazar over the GOP's Pete Coors figured that the two didn't have much difference in policy and that Salazar had more experience. Perhaps they should have checked into Salazar's character a little more closely instead.
As Dirty Harry at Stranded On Blue Islands said Just when you think you've found a reasonable Democrat he exposes himself to be another lying, backstabbing, smarmy, snake oil salesman willing to do or say anything to get elected..
