The Republican lobby group Vets for Freedom is the 2006 equivalent of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the Republican 527 committee whose attack advertisements in battleground states helped sink John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race by smearing him a
A recent Harris Poll reports found that while “the U.S. and other countries have not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, surprisingly more U.S. adults (50%) think that Iraq had such weapons when the U.S. invaded Iraq. This is an increase from 36 percent in February 2005.”
I’m currently at the Citizen Journalism "unconference" at the Wikimania 2006 conference in Boston with a joint team from the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Media and Democracy.
The following news updates were among those added to Congresspedia in July 2006:
While in the Denver area for a conference, Center for Media and Democracy Associate Director Judith Siers-Poisson and I met with staff and board members of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center (RMPJC). We wanted to hear about RMPJC's fine work, especially on nuclear weapons issues, and to describe CMD's online resources to them. One offshoot of that meeting was the following article, which I wrote for RMPJC's newsletter.
The July 2006 issue of In These Times magazine carries an enlightening and overdue article about how the Left is funded, or not. The New Funding Heresies, written by Senior Editor Christopher Hayes, focuses on the relatively new group of very wealthy liberal and progressive funders called the Democracy Alliance. This group of close to one hundred donors has pledged to individually donate a minimum of $1 million over five years to organizations chosen from a docket that is vetted by the staff and board of the Alliance. In addition, each Democracy Alliance donor pays a $25,000 entry fee and annual dues of $30,000 to cover the operating expenses of the Alliance according to the article.
The morning shows and cable news outlets have been all over Steven Colbert's July 20 interview with Rep. Bob Wexler (D-Fla.) on the Colbert Report. We at Congresspedia think that Colbert's interviews are frequently hilarious and have created indexes of links to videos of the interviews that he and Jon Stewart have done with members of Congress. However, as we state at the top of the index pages, "It should be noted that the interviews often veer into pure comedy and should not be taken as on-the-record comments." So, when Colbert gets Rep. Wexler to discuss subjects like prostitutes and cocaine, we suggest you take Colbert's advice and recognize that, hey, "he's got a sense of humor."
We've now expanded our video link lists to include non-interview segments on both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report that pertain to Congress. Click through the above links to see them or read the rest of this blog entry for the list of interviews.
Exactly three years ago our book Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq was published. Our publisher pitched it this way: "Rampton and Stauber take no prisoners as they reveal - headline by headline, news show by news show, press conference by press conference - the deliberate, aggressive, and highly successful public relations campaign that sold the Iraqi war to the American public.
As a child I absolutely adored Cricket magazine, published by Carus Publishing. I now have a twelve-year old daughter who likewise enjoys their magazines for kids, but the May 2006 issue of Cobblestone Magazine floored me with its blatant pro-military marketing pitch to children.
Chances are, depending on your age, that either you or your children have read one of Carus’ publications at home, school, the library, or a doctor’s waiting room. For the smallest tykes—those under seven years old—they offer Ladybug, Babybug, and Click magazines. For six- to nine-year olds they put out Spider, Ask, and Appleseeds. And for the “tweens,” Calliope, Cobblestone, Cricket, Dig, Faces, Muse, Odyssey, and Cicada.
Breast cancer. Genital abnormalities. Distortion and damage of genetic material.
Common ingredients in cosmetic products have been linked to these hazards. As further research is conducted into the long-term and cumulative effects on cosmetics users, their children and the water supply that products are washed off into, more questions arise. Not that you'd know it by listening to the cosmetics industry.
An important underlying issue is that the industry is largely self-regulated. While interstate trade in "adulterated or misbranded cosmetics" is prohibited, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not review new cosmetics before they are marketed and cannot order recalls of hazardous cosmetics. "Cosmetic firms are responsible for substantiating the safety of their products and ingredients," reads the FDA's own explanation.
The industry's trade group, the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association (CTFA), likes this hands-off approach. CTFA has 600 member companies, including Aveda, Clairol, L'Oréal and Unilever, and standing committees on government relations, public affairs and international issues. Its website says CTFA promotes "industry self-regulation and reasonable governmental requirements." But reasonable to who?
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