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Tuesday, October 15, 2002 |
Bush League Economics From its earliest months, as part of the effort to sell its tax cut, the Bush administration issued -- and then irrationally stuck by -- upbeat estimates about revenues, economic growth, and employment. By the spring of 2002, the surplus projected for the years 2002-11 had eroded to just $336 billion from $5.6 trillion the year before. But this stunning 94 percent decline didn't cause the administration to rethink any of its plans. [Daypop Top 40]
8:40:06 AM 
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White House Secrecy Shows Contempt for Public This is not just about whether journalists have access. This is about the Bush administration's utter contempt for your right to know what the government is doing in your name. Press grousing is normal. What's abnormal now is the cult of secrecy Bush is pushing in Washington. I wonder what the Republicans who are in lockstep with Bush would have been saying if Clinton was pulling this kind of stuff. No, I don't wonder -- they'd be screaming from the rooftops about the sleazy Clintonian power grab. Hypocrites. Dangerous hypocrites. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
8:25:53 AM
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News.Com: The copyright conundrum. This renewed interest in copyright law could be a very good thing. The reason: More and more of what people do in real life--trading files on peer-to-peer networks and descrambling DVDs, for instance--has become illegal. [Tomalak's Realm]
8:21:41 AM
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Microsoft "regrets" Mac-to-PC ad. The software giant's "Confessions of a Mac to PC convert" was a short-lived conversion. The ad, which took a cue from Apple, is already dead. [CNET News.com]
This is so typically Microsoft. Instead of doing something genuine (there are people who like their products), they make it up. A stock photograph, and a profile of someone at a PR firm they've hired. It reminds me a lot of their video demonstration in their antitrust trial, where they faked the evidence. (Why someone didn't go to jail for perjury I don't know.)
8:19:48 AM
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Microsoft paid for a group of bloggers to attend its Mobius 2002 product briefings this weekend. This raises a serious ethical question. I am not implying it is necessarily unethical for a blogger to accept a trip to Microsoft, just that it requires some thinking about the way companies might manipulate the blogger to get favorable coverage. Before this gets confrontational, I am not saying that bloggers are rank amateurs and that you should pay attention only to professional journalists, who, as a general rule, would not accept a trip at the expense of a company they were covering.
8:15:19 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Michael Alderete.
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