Monday, July 10, 2006

Tucker bashes Anderson

But was it a gay bashing?

Greg Tinti at Outside the Beltway says, “I’m dying for this to turn into a no holds barred cable news anchor catfight. C’mon frosty locks, what you got?”

I’ve missed the Anderson bandwagon but still my money’s on Cooper. Tucker looses on points: “It’s impossible to be both at the some time. You’re either Ed Murrow or you’re Pat O’Brien from The Insider. Pick one.”

Uh, anyone remember Person to Person?

Oh, and, is it just me or was Tucker dog-whistling to any homophobes who happen to be in his audience?

Google News spam

FixingEmail tells us spam is up 6.9 percent since May, but it’s 7.8 percent below levels reached during June last year.

So it’s the same? All these numbers tell me nothing!

They also point to this Ringtone Spam In Google News:

Apparently, since Google hasn’t figured out yet that indexing the message boards of Vibe Magazine is an awful idea (and completely against the purpose of Google News), spammers are hitting that board hard with “free ringtone” spam. Take a look (and, if Google does fix it, check out Jeremy’s screenshot).

There are lots of problem sources in Google News. If Google would just have one person whose job, even 20% of the time, was to do searches on highly spammable words like phentermine, they’d notice that News includes sources like livearticles.org, which has none of the high-quality news articles Google is supposedly looking for.

Gay rights are good business. Again

In April it was reported that 80% of Fortune 500 companies ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Today we read that 50 percent offer domestic-partner benefits:

Recently, the nation’s largest equal-rights organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people released a report showing that, for the first time, more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 countries in the United States offer domestic-partner benefits.

It works out to 253 of the 500 companies that give essentially the same health-care or other benefits to domestic partners as to married couples. If that number comes as a surprise, you are not alone. [...]

We can argue the effects and causes for days, but there is no debate about the direction this trend is headed. In 1999, a Human Rights Campaign report shows, just 96 Fortune 500 companies had domestic-partner benefits. Four years later, that total had doubled. In the last two years, more than 30 of the nation’s top companies have signed on.

That’s quite a change from 1992, when exactly one of the Fortune 500 offered benefits. That company was San Francisco’s Levi Strauss & Co. Robert Haas, the former CEO, and the great-great-grandnephew of the original Levi Strauss, recalls when the decision was made.

Here’s the report.

Is Jim Marshall too liberal for Georgia?

Morning Edition did a story on Macon’s Jim Marshall this morning. Marshall’s not too liberal for Georgia. If he looses, here’s why:

Georgia’s Eighth District is a narrow slip, stretching from the Atlanta suburbs south, to nearly the Florida border. The district’s boundaries changed in 2006, a move by state Republicans to add more GOP voters. That leaves Marshall, a Democrat, in the minority. [...]

Thanks to the new district’s boundaries, the race promises to be a tight one, with both national parties pumping lots of money into the campaigns. The big question as the race unfolds will be if Jim Marshall, a decorated war veteran, a politician who supports oil drilling and opposes flag burning, is just too liberal for Georgia’s Eighth district?