February 25, 2005
 
THUMBS XIII: Byrd, Jay Call for Probe Into Braxton County Marine Recruit's Death; Bush-Taper Wead Violates Ethics; Another Lou Dobbs Moment on Outsourcing
 
by David M. Kinchen
Editor, Bluefield News Network
 
Hinton (BNN) — This is the thirteenth installment of an occasional series expressing approval or disapproval of recent news events, commentaries, etc. Thumbs Up for approval; Thumbs Down for disapproval. I welcome contributions, which will be credited in the item. The contributions can come from within the BNN family or from our readers — I welcome them all. Contact me at davidkinchen@hotmail.com or send the contributions/suggestions to stories@huntingtonnews.net.
 
THUMBS UP — To U.S. Senators Robert C. Byrd and Jay Rockefeller for requesting investigations into the death of Braxton County Marine recruit Jason Robert Tharp, 19, who died Feb. 8, 2005 at the Marine Corps base at Parris Island, S.C. The day before the death of the Sutton man, a Columbia, S.C. TV station caught Tharp on video being grabbed and shoved by a drill instructor, according to the Associated Press. Even in the Marine Corps this is against regulations.
 
THUMBS DOWN to the Marine Corps recruiter who signed Tharp up, reportedly over the objections of his family. The teen, who looks very slightly built in photos I've seen, apparently couldn't keep up with the pace of training demanded by the elite military branch.
 
To those of us of a certain age, the name Parris Island recalls memories of Marine recruits drowning at the coastal South Carolina base in the 1950s. On April 8, 1956, drill instructor Staff Sgt. Matthew McKeon led Platoon 71 on a forced night march through the backwaters of the Parris Island recruit depot in an effort to restore flagging discipline. An unexpected and extraordinarily strong tidal current in Ribbon Creek swept over the recruits, and in the panic that followed six men drowned. I was in high school at the time, and I was also a member of an enlisted reserve unit of the U.S. Army in my hometown in northern Illinois. Like McKeon, the drill instructor involved in this latest incident may face a court martial. In any event, Jay Rockefeller on Feb. 23, 2005 asked Marine Commandant Gen. Michael Hagee to conduct a "full investigation," of the incident, including interviews with drill instructors and recruits who served with Tharp. Sen. Byrd went straight to the top, calling on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to give the investigation his "personal attention."
 
THUMBS DOWN — To George W. Bush's "evangelical adviser" Doug Wead who said he secretly recorded some of his phone calls with then-Gov. Bush "for history's sake." With friends like Wead, who needs enemies? The disclosure that he had such tapes, recordings that spanned two years before the 2000 presidential election when he was an evangelical adviser to Mr. Bush, was published in The New York Times Feb. 20, 2005. Since then, according to The Times, Wead, a former minister of the Assemblies of God, has appeared on several television news and talk shows to defend his actions, insisting several times that he had never sought to profit from the tapes and had decided to release some of them only after the president's re-election.
 
This rings false to me, especially since he used information from the tapes in his recently published book, "The Raising of a President: The Mothers and Fathers of Our Nation's Leaders."
 
Morsels from the tapes have been played on "The Daily Show" and other venues. They deal with W's past drug use — before he became born again – as well as the hiring and firing of gays. I'm no big fan of W, but I think even less of Doug Wead for his surreptitious taping of private conversations and using them in his book. Of all people, an "evangelical adviser" and published author should understand ethics.
 
Because the tapes were made before Bush became president, they would not be subject to the regulations governing presidential papers, which require them to be declassified after 25 years, Barbara Elias, freedom of information coordinator for the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research group, told The Times.
 
THUMBS DOWN — To those who call cable news commentator Lou Dobbs an alarmist for focusing on outsourcing of jobs that can and should be performed in the U.S. My latest Lou Dobbs Moment – what I call my gut feeling when I read about outsourcing – came when I read in the online edition of The New York Times about Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bala S. Manian, who has decided to have 20 of his latest medical technology company's 28 employees work in his native India. The U.S. has been good to millionaire Manian, who came to this nation in 1979 to attend graduate school.
 
In classic Gray Lady understatement, reporter Andrew Pollack says that the move could "be a worrisome sign. The life sciences industry, with its largely white-collar work force and its heavy reliance on scientific innovation, was long thought to be less vulnerable to the outsourcing trend. The industry…is viewed as an economic growth engine and the source of new jobs, particularly as growth slows in other sectors like information technology."
 
Manian told the paper he sees the same kind of opportunities today in India as he saw in the San Jose, Calif. area in the 1970s. At a fraction of the cost, he added, when he said he "can run a group of 20 people for a whole year [in India] for half a million dollars." In the U.S., a million dollars would be gone in three months, Manian said.
 
Those who are sanguine about the outsourcing trend – especially to countries like India and China with hard-working, hard-studying workers – simply don't understand today's realities. We're on our way to becoming a Third World country as long as the trend toward runaway, skilled, knowledge-intensive jobs continues.
 
Meanwhile, I'm willing to bet Manian is enjoying a wonderful California existence in Los Altos, Los Gatos or Woodside. With the money he's saving by not hiring Californians, he can buy a house in each of the three affluent Silicon Valley suburbs!
 
Thumbs Archives:
10/16/04 — Part I
11/10/04 — Part II
11/26/04 — Part III
12/15/04 — Part IV
12/24/04 — Part V
12/31/04 — Part VI
01/08/05 — Part VII
01/14/05 — Part VIII
01/21/05 — Part IX
02/04/05 — Part X
02/11/05 — Part XI
02/18/05 — Part XII
02/25/05 — Part XIII
02/28/05 — Part XIV
03/06/05 — Part XV
03/10/05 — Part XVI
03/18/05 — Part XVII
03/26/05 — Part XVIII
03/30/05 — Part XIX
04/09/05 — Part XX