Free Republic

Women voters, notably married moms, are turning away from the ruling Republican Party in the run-up to US legislative elections due, in part, to dissatisfaction with the Iraq war and domestic issues. Polls and analysts say that unlike the 2002 and 2004 elections, when terrorism concerns and other security-related issues drove many women to support President George W. Bush and his Republican Party, these factors are no longer playing a key role. "Women voters are turning more Democratic now than they were four years ago," Carroll Doherty, associate director of the Pew Research Center in Washington, told AFP. "Four years...

AT&T Wireless Self-Destructs The story of a botched CRM upgrade that cost the telco thousands of new customers and an estimated $100 million in lost revenue. Hard lessons learned. BY CHRISTOPHER KOCH Executive Summary Last fall, AT&T Wireless frantically tried to complete a CRM upgrade to Siebel 7. It had to be done in time to handle the customer service challenges accompanying a Federal Communications Commission deadline for allowing customers to change carriers without changing their phone numbers. The effort was a failure. Systems crashed and stayed down. Customer reps could not keep up, and angry customers abandoned the...

Recalling officers in their commands killed or wounded in the line of duty, a group of police chiefs from across the nation called on Congress yesterday to renew the federal law outlawing military-style assault weapons. The 10-year-old ban expires in September, and groups including the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) have been trying to persuade Congress to let the law die. "The idea that 10 years later that we're even debating [it]... is insanity," said William Bratton, now police chief in Los Angeles and former police commissioner in New York. Bratton was one of five big-city chiefs, including Philadelphia Police...

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the tough conservative liberals love to hate, provoked a mini-furor by declaring that the Republican-controlled House would not renew Congress' 1994 ban on so-called assault weapons. Only reflexive gun banners and the uninformed can have been disconcerted. The 1994 ban proved predictably ineffective. Letting it expire on schedule in 2004 would change, well, almost nothing. The ban, championed by California's formidable Sen. Dianne Feinstein, was sold on a singularly false (if well-intentioned) premise – that the semi-automatic (one shot for each trigger pull), civilian versions of certain military-type rifles were major contributors to crime. These...