Sunday fun reading – A couple of UK students are planning a two weeks, 18.000 miles trip this summer in US in an attempt to break about 45 dumb laws in several states, doing stuff like riding a a bike in a swimming pool and curse on a crazy-golf course in California or going whale-hunting in Utah (sic!). (via Boing Boing)

President Bush is asking Congress to set up a $400 million fund to reward nations that have taken political and economic risks to join U.S.-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan. One administration official said the fund was designed to provide help to Eastern European nations, such as Ukraine, Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states. Bush is meeting March 9 at the White House with Traian Basescu, the president of Romania, which has an estimated 700 troops in Iraq.

Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says the fund is indicative of the administration’s inability to attract more well-to-do nations to the coalition at the start of the conflict and that the administration had no choice but to offer them help because their societies and national budgets can’t afford the cost of being in Iraq for extended periods of time.

Via Baltimore Sun

Following up on a previous post I guess there’s yet another thing to be mentioned in subjects like free vs. paid media. According with an Associated Press report mentioned at editorweblog.org it seems that some news websites, Southeast European Times and in North Africa are basically sponsored by the US Army and they are designed to counter what the Pentagon considers misinformation circulating in the international news media. Well it’s a free media world, as such I totally agree with such tactics, but meanwhile I have to be circumspect related with the whole news content published on that site. The article mentioned before, US Army: controversial payments to reporters overseas, has pretty much the same conclusion: The Pentagon’s use of the web sites has raised questions about blurring the lines between legitimate news and what some may consider government propaganda.

January

January 4: NASA’s Spirit Rover powers up its systems for a pioneering three-month operation to Mars. Later in the month, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory send their second Mars rover, Opportunity, to the red planet

January 29: The MyDoom worm wreaks more havoc after becoming the biggest Internet virus ever.

February

February 29: Faced with an armed rebellion and mounting international pressure, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide leaves the troubled Caribbean nation. The US deploys a contingent of Marines to Haiti as violence erupts in the wake of Mr Aristide’s departure.

Parmalat’s accounting and bankruptcy scandal rocks Italy’s financial industry.

March

March 11: More than 170 people are killed and around 600 injured in a series of blasts which rip through Madrid railway stations. The number of dead later climbs to more than 200. While initial blame for the blasts in Spain are attributed to the Basque separatist group ETA, it later emerges that an Al Qaeda-related group is responsible. Days later the Socialists win the national election, an outcome attributed to the party’s policy of bringing the troops home from Iraq

US space agency Nasa successfully launched an experimental hypersonic jet which travelled at 5,000mph – smashing the world speed record for an aircraft

April

NATO expands to include 7 former Warsaw pact nations.

April 29: Images of US soldiers allegedly abusing Iraqi prisoners at a notorious jail near Baghdad have sparked shock and anger.

May

May 1: EU newcomers welcomed to the club. The EU is now the world’s largest trading bloc. The 15 old members welcomed in Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia at midnight.

June

June 7: Tens of thousands of Allied veterans who survived the D-day campaign of World War II are honoured in poignant ceremonies 60 years after the battle.

After a long battle with Alzheimer’s Disease, former US President Ronald Reagan died.

June 18: A European constitution has been agreed, creating a landmark new EU rulebook, after marathon talks in Brussels.

European Union leaders agreed to appoint Portuguese prime minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso as EC president.

June 28: The US-led coalition has handed over sovereignty to the new Iraqi government, two days earlier than expected.

July

July 23: A national commission probing the September 11 attacks in the US finds “failures of imagination, policy, capabilities and management” by the United States government and recommends a sweeping overhaul of intelligence services.

A ceremony marked the beginning of construction of the new Freedom Tower at the World Trade Centre site

Claims about Iraq’s WMD that led to the war were wrong and based on false CIA analyses, said a US Senate report

August

August 5:Even 5 months past its release date, many enterprises are holding off on installing Windows XP Service Pack 2, but Microsoft is pushing its deployment by eliminating security fixes for older operating systems such as Windows 2000. SP3’s firewall, browser and system-service modification make the free SP2 a worthwhile upgrade, but it needs thorough testing to avoid application-compatibility issues.

August 13: The Olympic Games return to their birthplace of Athens. The Games of the 28th Olympiad are opened in a spectacular ceremony, which bring the myths of Ancient Greece to life through the magic of 21st century technology.

August 19: Google Inc. initial public offering. The shares innitialy offered at $85 topped $200 briefly this fall before settling to approximately $170.

September

September 1: Armed militants attack a school in the southern Russian province of North Ossetia near Chechnya and hold teachers, school children and parents hostage. The siege, in the town of Beslan, ends three days later with more than 300 people killed.

October

October 1: US light crude settled at $50.12 a barrel, up 48 cents, the first time it closed above $50 in its 21 years of trade on New York’s Mercantile Exchange

October 4: The rocket plane SpaceShipOne has shot to an altitude of more than 100km for the second time inside a week to claim the $10m Ansari X-Prize

October 28: Australian scientists announce the discovery of a new human species after remains of a small bodied hominid are found on the Indonesian island of Flores. The creature is quickly dubbed the ‘hobbit’ and heralded as one of the biggest finds since the discovery of the Neanderthal man more than a century ago.

November

November 2: The US election is held and Republican President George W Bush is re-elected to govern for a second term defeating Democrat candidate Senator John Kerry.

November 9: Somewhat unexpectedly, browsers became a hot issue in 2004 as security problems plagued MS’s Internet Explorer. Rather than keeping up to date on a constant stream of security patches, some IT managers switched to the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser.

November 11:Yasser Arafat, who triumphantly forced his people’s plight into the world spotlight but failed to achieve his lifelong quest for Palestinian statehood, has died aged 75.

November 22: Tens of thousands of protesters have rallied to contest the official victory for Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, amid Western concern over the vote.

Today in Rome the draft of EU Constitution was signed by EU members and candidates. The treaty is the result of 28 months of debate between the 25 EU governments and now faces ratification in national parliaments. At least nine EU nations also plan to put it to a referendum.

Ratification by all 25 EU members is expected to be a protracted affair, with countries setting their own timetables. But they must ratify it within two years – before Bulgaria and Romania join as planned in 2007.

Here are some of the key points of the Constitution:

– It establish the role and responsability of each EU Institution. In addition it also creates the position of a European Council President. The president would be elected by the Council — the heads of state or government of the member states — for a 2.5 year re-newable term. The European Commission would also be streamlined

– The constitution also creates an office of the European Union Foreign Minister aiming to a common foreign policy but states must agree foreign policy unanimously.

– One key point of the constitution is that it eliminates current veto rights in broad policy areas and replaces them with qualified majority votes. It would require that a majority of EU member states vote in favor of a law and that those votes represent 60 percent of the entire EU population.

– The constitution further strengthens the European Parliament by providing it with a “co-decision with the Council of Ministers,” or vote, on most future laws important to the EU.

– In an effort to fight cross-border crime in the EU, the constitution also would create a European Public Prosecutor Office.

– For the first time, the constitution would also lay out the process by which a country could leave the European Union.

You can find the PDF (752Kb) Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe or you can view the HTML version here.

It’s well known France is one of Romania’s biggest supporters regarding the country’s EU accession. Well, we should know by now that everything has a price, including the love France showed us lately.

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin arrived in Romania yesterday for a two-day visit. Next to the adoptions issues to be discussed, he is here to sign three contracts worth more than 900 million euros (US$ 1.1 billion).

We’re talking about the €60M Alcatel contract with the Romanian Railways company and the €480M Vinci contract for the construction of a 37-kilometre (23-mile) section of motorway between Bucharest and Brasov.

And last but not least (and this is the one that I love most) is the “privatisation” of Romanian natural gas distributor Distrigaz Sud, that was sold to the state owned (sic) Gas de France for €150 million for a 30% stake in Distrigaz Sud. The French company will increase its stake in Romanian gas distributor to 51% after the acquisition. It was estimated that up to €400 million will be invested in Distrigaz after the sell-off.

I said I will not write about it, but still, I feel I have to. Just the conclusions after all these days happenings. I couldn’t help myself not reading the follow-up’s on these elections and the news in the day after.

So, Bush won by 3.5 million votes, a 52% majority. This is dramatically higher than what former President Clinton could claim in ’92 and ’96 and it’s the first popular vote majority since 1988 and most votes in election history. Also, Bush is the first president of either party since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 to be re-elected while gaining seats in both houses. Considering all these, whether we like it or not, the things are way much clear that everybody expected (including Bush here, I suppose).

On the other hand looking at the CNN National Exit Polls we can draw up some conclusion as well as understand a little bit what happened.

Looking at the voting pattern the top issue (21%) was “moral values”; 78% of those who cared about that went for Bush, 19% for Kerry. Next: economy/jobs at 20%; 81% preferring Kerry, 17% Bush. So Kerry got much better marks on the economy. Terror comes in third at 18%; 85% preferring Bush, 15% Kerry. That’s the one that is amazing in the importance voters gave. Bush ran on terrorism which wasn’t No. 1 in the minds of voters. Iraq comes in next at 15%; 75% preferring Kerry, 24% Bush.

Now getting in the maths of the votes, there’s a lot to tell. (An impresive analysis on this can be found in an article called Understanding people which I’ll actually quote a lot from here on)

We already saw this year an increase in the voters turnout. As such, Kerry got 4 million more votes than Gore, but Bush increased his popular vote by 8 million. Bush got the same huge majority of votes from the rural America, while Kerry, as well as Gore, got the big cities. In this case, what made the difference, was the sububurbs. In 2000, Bush beat Gore in the suburbs by a very small margin, this time Bush made it.

So who are they? What does the suburban demographic look like? Disproportionately white, disproportionately middle to upper-middle class, higher home ownership and a consumer debt load nearly twice what it was in 2000, low-density, single-family home. They own more, and owe a lot more, than the average American, so they have a lot more to lose.

* they depend on both incomes, and are fearful and stressed out about money

* they are insulated and isolated from other people, especially people from other cultures.

* they are more concerned about crime than city dwellers, for example, even though they have a much lower probability of being its victims.

* they are disproportionally fond of guns, although unlike other Americans, their guns are unlikely to ever be used.

* they are disproportionately evangelical in their religious beliefs.

* they read very little non-fiction

* they know almost nothing about what’s going on in the world outside their own country and Iraq (and they don’t know much about them
either).

* they are worse off than they were four years ago.

Now let me quote again from Understanding people:

Yesterday (November, 2nd) eight million anxious, fearful white American suburbanites, male and female, who didn’t vote in 2000, pried themselves out of their isolated, insulated, heavily-mortgaged, two-income-trap homes, and voted for the devil they knew over of the devil they didn’t. And then they went home and prayed.

Well, after all, the difference was made, and it was huge. Us, who expected a fresh start, we can only hope, that Mr. President will learn something out of it, and will stop making the same mistakes.

Because, after all, whose moral values are we talking about?

UPDATE: Another interesting point of view about How George Bush won the elections?

The big day just came and the results look closer than ever. Will US have another Florida case this year? Here are two links to the live-up-to-the-minute coverage (exit polls, preliminary results etc.) from the two contradictory sources of the last elections results announcements: CNN and FoxNews.

CNN 2004 Elections Results

Fox News- Track Your Races

UPDATE: As for this moment (4.00ET), Ohio became the Florida of this year, even though it seems the things are a little bit more clearer in 2004 and Bush is to remain president for another 4 years. No further comment on this.

UPDATE 2: Well, I said no more comment on this, but everything has actually come to an end with Sen. Kerry calling President Bush to concede the election. I still feel like there is more to be discuss on this, but I will really try to stop here. We can focus now on Romanian elections, huh.

A recent study for the Cato Institute, When Ignorance Isn′t Bliss, is making a deep analysis of the Americans voting habits. Surprisingly as it may seem, things are not so far away from the ones we see here in Romania.

The study finds the voters abysmally ignorant of even very basic political information. The statistics are backing up the theory:

In 1996, The Washington Post reported that 67 percent of Americans couldn’t name their congressman and 94 percent had no idea that William Rehnquist was the chief justice of the United States. Only 26 percent knew that senators serve six-year terms

Gallup found in January 2000 that while 66 percent of the public could name the host of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” only 6 percent knew the name of the speaker of the House. Last year, a Polling Company survey found that 58 percent of Americans could not name a single federal Cabinet department.

Also what is more alarming, is that the tens of millions of non-voting adults are the tens of millions of adults who do vote despite knowing next to nothing about the candidates and the issues.

You can come to see pretty much the same patterns and habits in Romania if you read the Public Opinion Barometer or The Romanian Public Opinion Before Campaign released by Gallup earlier this month. As these studies find 70% of Romanians consider that Romania needs a change in this year elections, 67% of them are completely or dissatisfied enough by the Government performance or 53% don′t know a name of a parliament member elected in their county, yet more than 30% of them consider the actual political party in power as the most trustable and more than 40% of them will go and vote for them.

As for more reading material here are the links to both materials:

Public Opinion Barometer (545Kb, PDF file, Romanian only)

When Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatens Democracy (337Kb, PDF file)

Also as further reading here are the political programes of the two major competitors in this autumn Romanian elections: Social Democrat Party and DA Alliance (Romanian only)

UPDATE: For romanian readers only, Dilema Veche and Euractiv.ro just released a comprehensive study of the two political programmes, mentioned above, Who am I voting for?