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16 March 2004

Just one-third of Arabs say the war liberated rather than humiliated Iraq

That's what the headline of this ABC news blast could have read. Instead, it trumpted how well things are going for Iraqis since the U.S. invasion.

But is the poll extremely flawed because of the "face to face" sampling methodology? In a time and land where it's threatning to even venture outside for many. Sounds like a big bit of PR to me. Seems to violate just about every tenet of balanced statistical sampling. If I stand outside a corner and ask people passing by their perspective even here in the U.S., it's hardly representative of the population as a whole.

Also, note the big gap between Arabs and Kurds in outlook: a majority of Arabs believe invasion was wrong, feel by a 2 to 1 margin occupation is wrong and most alarming, 1 in 5 think attacks on coalition forces are acceptable. But if you just read the headlines, you remain ignorant of these numbers.
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10 March 2004

Selling novelty T-shirts is not a replacement for a decent paying job with health benefits

Thomas Friedman, the globalist hack who's found it profitable to shill for the corporatists, is at it again. That is, engaged in the act of playing a dunce and then suffering a smackdown for his blatherings. On Sunday, Friedman, the New York Times foreign correspondent penned another column gushing over the gooey goodness of global outsourcing.
I just read about a guy in America who lost his job to India and he made a T-shirt that said, `I lost my job to India and all I got was this [lousy] T-shirt.' And he made all kinds of money." Only in America, she said, shaking her head, would someone figure out how to profit from his own unemployment. And that, she insisted, was the reason America need not fear outsourcing to India: America is so much more innovative a place than any other country.

Friedman bloviates further, using the T-shirt anecdote to tout American superior innovation that renders these outsourced job losses as trivial.

But once again, the reality detached scribe is exposed again. This time, famed progressive cartoonist Tom Tomorrow got the straight dope on Friedman's "Americans profiting from their unemployment" spiel. It turns out, that the savvy entrepreneur highlighted in Friedman's piece is neither American nor unemployed.

Then, Friedman fired off a missive to the skeptical cartoonist in defense of his corporatist claptrap:

First, all one has to do is Google that phrase and you will discover that it is not only a British Web site offering this t-shirt for sale, but that a U.S.-based Web site, indeed one located in Palo Alto where so many jobs have been lost, has been selling the same T-shirt for some time. It is the online design-your-own t-shirt and apparel store, Zazzle.com

Mr. Tomorrow treaded on and located the enterprising zazzle.com proprietor, eager to discover if his tech career unemployment had led to new found riches. Here is how Mr. Gary Young answered the query:

Wow! So that WAS my shirt Friedman was talking about. I had seen the article and laughed...

1. No, I didn't lose my job YET. My department has been told month after month for the last 6 months that we'd be next in line to be offshored. Several peers at my work have had their jobs sent to India, and my partner had his job offshored.

2. Have I made all kinds of money? This is where I laughed the hardest. I've made about $10 profit total.