Birds of a Feather, flock together

NPR came on the clock radio this morning with a tear jerking piece.  Since the sequester, civil servants have been taking furloughs, not getting raises, having to conserve office supplies, having more work to do and fewer people to do it.  Awful.
  And morale is down.  No raises, and lots of criticism is just crushing the tender egos of the gov'ment workforce.
  And it's all the fault of that nasty sequester.
  And all of the civil servants interviewed for this piece were government union representatives.
  It's just terrible that the civil servants, who enjoy better salaries, benefits, and retirement than ordinary working stiffs, have to forgo a raise.  It's a good thing they have NPR to plead their case to the public.  On the public's nickel no less.

NPR was hitting on all cylinders this morning.  After that plea for the poor down trodden civil servants they launched into an attack on Facebook.  According to NPR, Facebook spend some $10 million (chickenfeed) lobbying Congress on the immigration bill.  Something to do about H1B visa's.  The reporter didn't bother to explain just what Facebook was lobbying for, but she was sure it was evil.  H1B visa's are a deal to let high  tech workers, most often computer programmers, into the US.  US union people are always against H1B 'cause they think it lowers American worker's wages.  US companies are always in favor of more H1B visa's cause good programming talent is hard to come by and bringing it in from overseas gives them a bigger pool to fish in.

Non political that NPR is, very non political.  And government funded.

Innumeracy on NPR

The clock radio came on at the usual time this morning with news that Scott Walker had won in Wisconsin.  That's a good thing, I have been hoping that would happen.
But.  I listened to the same news item repeated three times.  They never did gave the vote totals.   That would require dealing with numbers, something that strikes terror into the hearts of journalism majors.  Part of the story is how much did the winner win by.  Was it a skin of the teeth squeaker, a decent margin, or a landslide?
   This was an important election, said by many to foreshadow outcome of the November presidential election.  Was it just a fear of numbers or was it a bunch of democratic NPR newsies so unhappy about a Republican victory that they decided to conceal an important part of the story?
   Follow up.  I never did heard the vote count on the radio, but the Manchester Union-Leader gave the margin of victory as 6%, which is a solid win.  Not a landslide, but decent.