Untreated groundwater from two of three Madison wells sampled for the study… turned up five different viruses, that one public health director says ***could*** cause serious illness.
There are differing opinions about how serious this is.
Madison’s Director of Public Health says we are all exposed to viruses and bacteria every day so there is no reason to be concerned. But the Board of Water commissioners questioned the director of public health from the Marshfield Clinic, who did the water study, he had a very different answer.
Category: Politics
Madison Common Council Paid Sick Leave Summary
Kristian Knutsen summarizes last night’s vote (filed at 3:22a.m.):
In what might be its most highly anticipated meeting of 2006, the Madison Common Council will be hearing testimony, deliberating, and voting upon the proposed ordinance to require employers in the City of Madison to provide mandatory sick leave for their employees.
The coalition that organized the proposal held a rally on the steps of the City-County Building immediately preceding the meeting, in large part to attract public registrants to speak in favor of the proposal at the meeting. Following four hours of public testimony and one hour of debate among the alders, it fails with a vote of 9 ayes and 10 nos.
La Femme: French Politics = Madison’s Political Climate?
There’s a reason that the leaders of France’s Socialist Party are called “elephants”: They live forever. Among the elephants now vying to become the party’s candidate for president in next year’s election are Laurent Fabius, who served as prime minister 22 years ago, and Lionel Jospin, who served as Socialist Party leader a quarter-century ago and suffered a defeat in the last presidential election so devastating, both for himself and for the party, that you would have thought prudence alone would dictate political retirement. But in France, politics is a profession; once you arrive, you stay.
No one has thought to call Ségolène Royal an elephant. For one thing, it would be unbecoming, since she is a woman — and a woman who, when she works her smile up into her eyes, bears a passing resemblance to Audrey Hepburn. Royal is, remarkably enough, the first truly présidentiable woman in French history. But what is most striking about her candidacy, which so far consists of a highly orchestrated media seduction, is not the fact that she is a woman but rather that she has positioned herself as a nonelephant, indeed, almost an antielephant. She is, in effect, running against France’s political culture, which is to say against remoteness and abstraction, ideological entrenchment and male domination itself. And that culture, which is embodied by her own party, has struck back, ridiculing her as a soap bubble borne aloft by a momentary gust of public infatuation.
I was struck by the similarities between the French “Establishment” and the local political establishment vis a vis newcomers/challengers.
Follow the Money: How Advertising Dollars Encourage Nuisance and Harmful Adware and What Can be Done to Reverse the Trend
The Center for Democracy & Technology [pdf]:
Unwanted advertising software or “adware” has evolved from an annoyance into a serious threat to the future of Internet communication. Every day, thousands of Internet users are duped into downloading adware programs they neither want nor need. Once installed, the programs bog down computers’ normal functions, deluging users with pop-up advertisements, creating privacy and security risks, and generally diminishing the quality of the online experience. Some users simply give up on the Internet altogether after their computers are rendered useless by the installation of dozens of unwanted programs.
One of the most troubling aspects of this phenomenon is that the companies fueling it are some of the largest, best-known companies in the world. In the following pages, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) details how advertising dollars from major, legitimate companies are fueling the spread of nuisance and harmful adware1 and how those companies can help to combat the online scourge by adopting and enforcing good advertising placement policies.
Short Term Fix for the AMT
David Lazarus updates us on the most recent tax bill, including its short term fix for the very large AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) problem.
Meanwhile, the Nashville Songwriters Association International lobbied for and won a special tax break that will give songwriters a lower rate when they sell their catalog, or body of work. “Our lawyers here in town wrote the legislation,” says Debi Cochran, the association’s legislative director.
Perhaps we should organize some sort of parents or bloggers special tax break initiative.
Red Bank, NJ: More Telco Fun
Verizon infamously hired an ‘astroturfing’ company to send faxes to the mayor of Red Bank proclaiming to be from local residents. Mayor McKenna sensing something afoot with these faxes did a little research and called Verizon out. Verizon wanted it to appear that there was a real grass roots effort in support of them being undertaken by the residents of our small town; but there wasn’t. It was all made up and it backfired miserably.
NSA and the Greek mobile phone tapping scandal
Let me ask you first of all, there has been a lot of discussion here in Greece about this lawful interception software, explain to me what it is, and whether the US put pressure on worldwide companies to install that after 9/11 especially?
JB: Well the software is basically used to attach to commercial communication facilities, like the AT&T in the US, or whatever commercial company it is, and anything that goes over these communication facilities gets picked up, whether it is e-mail, or telephone calls and divert it to the US Government, whoever attached the equipment.
— Is it your understanding that most of the hardware companies around the world, that provide mobile telephone companies with equipment, had this installed at some point?
JB: Well in the US there was a lot of requiring that US companies do it, but around the world I think there was pressure by the US for a lot of the friendly countries to the US, allied countries to do as much as they can in terms of domestic eavesdropping and this type of equipment is most useful for that.
Colbert’s White House Correspondent’s Speech
An excerpt from the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner. Comedian Stephen Colbert made humorous … all » remarks about various current events and the relationship between the press and the White House. He also presented a video of a mock press conference which ended in a chase scene featuring long-time correspondent Helen Thomas.
More on Colbert.
William Gibson on the NSA Domestic Wiretapping
I can’t explain it to you, but it has a powerful deja vu. When I got up this morning and read the USA Today headline, I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed. Now we’ve all got some…
The interesting thing about meta-projects in the sense in which I used them [in the NYT editorial] is that I don’t think species know what they’re about. I don’t think humanity knows why we do any of this stuff. A couple hundred years down the road, when people look back at what the NSA has done, the significance of it won’t be about terrorism or Iraq or the Bush administration or the American Constitution, it will be about how we’re driven by emerging technologies and how we struggle to keep up with them…
Large Telco Liability based on USA Today Facts?
This morning, USA Today reported that three telecommunications companies – AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth – provided “phone call records of tens of millions of Americans” to the National Security Agency. Such conduct appears to be illegal and could make the telco firms liable for tens of billions of dollars. Here’s why: