The Senator, the Unemployed and the Millionaires

Read: "Congress lets unemployment benefits expire: 'What now' and six other questions


Senator Scott Brown blocked the extension of unemployment benefits for millions of Americans.

About 8,400 Americans will see their unemployment benefits cut off by the end of this week, according to the Labor Department. By the end of the third week of December, aid to 1.36 million Americans will be interrupted, the agency said.

Brown says that we can’t afford the extension and that we need to start focusing on “what is important,” the federal deficit.
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Academic Freedom Media Review-November 13-19, 2010

photo: Chris Hildreth


Compiled by Scholars at Risk
The Scholars at Risk media review seeks to raise awareness about academic freedom issues in the news. Subscription information and archived media reviews are available here. The views and opinions expressed in these articles are not necessarily those of Scholars at Risk.
Second Azerbaijani ‘Donkey Blogger’ Freed
Claire Bigg, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 11/19
Azerbaijani Activist Detained On Georgian Border
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 11/19
Nobel Winner’s Absence May Delay Awarding of Prize
Andrew Jacobs and Alan Cowell, The New York Times, 11/18
Law students march to support UP professors
ABS-CBN News, 11/18
SINGAPORE: Yale partnership to go ahead, NUS says
Stanislaus Jude Chan, University World News, 11/18
Law clinics that go beyond theory face attacks
Sarah Cunnane, Times Higher Education, 11/18
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Fox News Chairman says NPR Executives are Nazis, "of Course"

Fox News, a News Corp subsidiary


Honestly, I am think that Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and most at that network live in a reality that is different than mine.
I was just pointed to an interview with Howard Kurtz in which he said that President Obama “has a different belief system than most Americans” and that on his recent travels he “told by the French and the Germans that his socialism was too far left for them to deal with.”  I don’t know if Ailes believes this or if it is part of the continuing campaign of the right to paint the President as so radically different from us that he is somehow threatening, but the statements are not simply wrong, they are absurd.
President Obama is a capitalist and he believes in our system of representative, Constitutional democracy.  He has given no indication otherwise.  He would not have risen in the party system were that not the case and he certainly would not have got elected to the highest office in the land, either.  The Presidents differences with the the opposition are differences of degree, not belief systems.
As for France and Germany telling him that his socialism is to far left, well that is ridiculous.  Germany, France and the United States do have differences on approaches necessary to stimulate their economies because in a global economy what is done in one country impacts the others, but the questions concern the means and scale of intervention and have nothing to do with ideology.  France and Germany are also democratic, capitalist states, but both are fundamentally more socialist in character then the US.  Both have and have had for some time, state funded systems of education, government owned rail systems, universal health care, strong labor movements, etc.
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Academic Freedom Media Review, October 30 – November 5, 2010

The Scholars at Risk media review seeks to raise awareness about academic freedom issues in the news. Subscription information and archived media reviews are available here. The views and opinions expressed in these articles are not necessarily those of Scholars at Risk.
Singapore suppresses dissident
Drew Anderson, Yale Daily News, 11/5
Scholars at Risk Expresses Concern Over Professor Denied Entry to India
Scholars at Risk, 11/4
Iran Sets New Conditions For Employing Teachers
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 11/4
News of Government Guidelines on ‘Pluralism’ Alarms Israeli Academics
Matthew Kalman, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/4
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Frank v. Beilat, No Contest

The top mailing was meant to give me three reasons for firing Barney Frank, but in fact the mailings themselves were 3 reasons NOT to vote for Sean Beilat!


When I picked up my mail today I found a magazine, a fund raising appeal, and four political mailings relating to the elections next week, three of which were targeted against Congressman Barney Frank.  According to the first mailing, Americans for Limited Government believe he “no longer represents ‘us'” and that Nancy Pelosi “has him in the palm of her hand.”  Sean Beilat for Congress sent two mailings.  The first claims that Frank “and his “rich friends… live by a different set of rules,” and  the other that provides three reasons why voters should “fire Barney Frank on November 2,” claiming he caused the financial meltdown, bailed out friends in the financial sector, and accepted vacations from the people who got federal bail out money.
These claims are, at best, exaggerations, some of them outright falsehoods.  They are examples of some pretty intense negative campaigning and an obvious attempt to mislead the public.  Quotations are taken out of context, presented in the mailing to look like press clippings, and topped with the logos from the newspapers’ mastheads so they look like actual published news articles, when in fact they are taken from opinion pieces or editorials.  They are not objective analyses.
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More on Truth in Political Advertising

Reality for Men

One kind of truth in advertising

In the commercial sector there are legal requirements that mandate “truth in advertising.” General principles are outlined on Business.gov, the site of the US Small Business Administration.

Advertising laws are aimed at protecting consumers by requiring advertisers to be truthful about their products and to be able to substantiate their claims. All businesses must comply with advertising and marketing laws, and failure to do so could result in costly lawsuits and civil penalties. So before you start an advertising campaign, it’s important you understand some basic rules.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is the main federal agency that enforces advertising laws and regulations. Under the Federal Trade Commission Act:

  • Advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive;
  • Advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims; and
  • Advertisements cannot be unfair.

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This means that if I were to start canning and marketing my mother’s spaghetti sauce, there are limits on what I can say to convince people to buy it instead of my competitors products.  I could talk about taste, because that is based on a subjective judgement. I could say all kinds of good things about my ingredients of cooking process.
But I couldn’t claim It was because I use garlic grown in the ashy soils of Mount Vesuvius, if that wasn’t the case. More importantly, I couldn’t promote my sauce based purely on the deficiencies in my competitors’ products, particularly if my claims were not based on fact. I couldn’t claim those other sauces cause cancer, use rat meat instead of beef, or are owned by people with ties to organized crime if none of it was true.
Any yet in political campaigns few such requirements exist.
If the charges made in a campaign are reckless enough, one could be sued or prosecuted under libel or slander laws, but there is considerable time, effort and costs involved, and the bar on what constitutes those offenses is pretty high, and even more so in an election season. Obviously candidates seek to undermine the credibility of one another to some degree.  It is an election, after all. Simply lying about your opponent is not enough.  
But it goes too far when you get advertisements like this:
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If You Spend Enough Money, Will People Believe Your Lie?

"Perry pushed for a law that lets insurance companies raise homeowners’ rates without having to justify the increase." Back to Basics, --Wednesday, September 8th, 2010.


Spending by interest groups, so-called Political Action Committees and Unions most notably, is up well over 5 times what it was in the 2006 midterms, according to an article in New York Magazine.  Spending is up on both sides of the aisle, but these third-party groups are putting most of their money behind Republican candidates by a huge margin, approximately 7 to 1, according to The Washington Post!  This was all made possible by last years Supreme Court decision saying that limits on spending were essentially the same as limits on free speech.
I have a problem with this because I don’t think a pharmaceutical corporation should have a stronger voice than a network of cancer survivor groups just because they can spend more on campaigns, but I suppose outside spending isn’t all that different than spending by the candidates themselves.  Nothing stops a multimillionaire candidate from using his own funds to vastly outspend opponents on advertising.  In a sense this is buying the election, but legally it’s not seen that way.
What is disconcerting is the out and out dishonesty of the campaigns.  I am not naive.  Politics has always been a dirty game.  But in this election it seems that the fact that the backers of those PACs with the patriotic names can remain anonymous has emboldened them.  Politifact.com, a non-partisan service that evaluates the claims of political discourse, evaluated 31 claims made in the advertisments of these third party groups in the current campaigns throughout the country.  Only 5 were rated “mostly true” and two “true.”
Think about that for a minute.  31 claims were made in the political ads of third party organizations analyzed by Politifact.com.  On 16% of those were claims were based substantially on fact, on only 6% were essentially true.  All others were significant distortions of the facts or outright lies.
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FactChecking ‘The Pledge to America'

Get a load of that title! Click for text, with pictures.


FactCheck.org is the website of a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics for voters

by monitoring the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

They are a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and not related to any political party.  They simply check facts.  In these midterm elections, they are a good place to turn for the truth behind the spin in any given campaign.  This post, for example, shows that both the Republican and Democratic candidates for Senator in Nevada are making false claims about each other.
So what about the Pledge to America that Republican Party leaders recently made?
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Academic Freedom Media Review, September 4-10

The Scholars at Risk media review seeks to raise awareness about academic freedom issues in the news. Subscription information and archived media reviews are available here. The views and opinions expressed in these articles are not necessarily those of Scholars at Risk.

Religious Scholar In Iran ‘Summoned To Court’
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 9/9

Into Africa
Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, 9/9

No-brainer: top British scientists may flee funding famine for feasts abroad
Simon Baker, Times Higher Education, 9/9

America’s tenure track derails
Sarah Cunnane, Times Higher Education, 9/9
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High-Speed Rail. The US v. the World

Check out this video. It contains so really eye-opening information about the expansion of high speed rail in the US, particularly in relation to other countries. It’s not the most exciting presentation, but the chart lays out some surprising facts.

Below is a screen capture of the chart for reference. Now let me add some context. The US has a land mass of 3,717,813 sq.miles and Japan about 145,883. In spite of that vast difference in size, the US is literally many hundreds of miles behind the US in terms of the expansion of high speed rail. The US has an inconsequential amount of high speed rail currently in operation and it looks like less than 1,000 miles planned to be in operation by 2025. Japan has approximately twice that already in operation and is still planning modest expansion.
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