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'American' Products That Aren't American - Yahoo! Finance

What does being "American" mean in the marketplace?

If you're a U.S. consumer, it's apparently a huge incentive. According to a 2010 survey by Adweek Media and Harris, 61% of Americans say they are more likely to buy a product when an ad says it's "Made in America." That includes 75% of Americans 55 and over, 66% of those 45 to 54 and 61% of those 35 to 44.

It also indicates a premium those same Americans are willing to pay for those products. After toys from China entered the country in 2007 laden with toxic levels of lead, pesticides and chemicals, a Gallup poll found that 82% of Americans would rather spend more money on a toy if it were made in the United States. That percentage jumped to 94% when survey participants were asked if they'd pay extra for food produced in the U.S. to avoid Chinese imports.

That consumer patriotism is great and all, but does it do any good when buyers are given conflicting messages about what is and isn't made in this country? Does a beer can draped in the colors of the American flag necessarily indicate an American brewer? Does a truck rambling through the rugged American landscape as a song about "our country" plays in the background necessarily indicate an "American-made" vehicle?

Does the presence of the word "American" in the product's name or in its producer's core marketing agenda make that product "American"?

Any good, American skeptic knows the answer. Putting on a topcoat of red, white and blue and hiding behind a heavy layer of jingoism can't hide a product's true identity. That made it pretty easy to put together this checklist of 10 "American" products that have dual citizenship at best or are hiding their true colors at worst:

Budweiser
Anheuser-Busch InBev really wants you to believe that the only way to get something more American into a beer can is to brew it with grain grown on the battlefields at Lexington and Concord and water piped from the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall.

The company spent more than $1 billion on its NFL sponsorship alone and has plowed $239 million more into Super Bowl ads over the past decade. Its Clydesdales are American commercial icons and Budweiser's red, white and blue cans send a not-so-subtle message that despite the brewery's German roots, it's American to the last drop.

That facade came crashing down in 2008, when Brazilian-Belgian brewing company InBev took over Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion. Though the company still has a dozen breweries in the U.S., there have been a whole lot of layoffs stateside in an attempt to make the brewer a leaner, more cosmopolitan international player.

Budweiser, Bud Light and Michelob are still feature players in the stable, but now they're sharing shelf space with brewery mates such as Boddington's, Lowenbrau, Hoegaarden, Spaten and Labatt.

Bud's not even the brewer's only big gun anymore, as it made clear by airing a Stella Artois ad featuring Adrien Brody during the Super Bowl a few years ago. It still throws around that "King of Beers" title here in the states, but its recent relegation to third place among U.S. beer brands indicates that crown is slipping. Don't blame Bud for talking tough and acting aggressively on football Sundays; when the game's over, it goes home to multinational masters that consider it their American Beck's.

Chevrolet Silverado
You're right, John Mellencamp, this is our country. Just make sure you're including all of North America in that grouping.

The Chevy Silverado and its doppelganger, the GMC Sierra, have all the makings of a big, durable, contractor-friendly, all-American truck. It's just that last adjective that General Motors still has a bit of trouble with. Sure, some of the trucks are assembled at plants in Flint, Mich., and Fort Wayne, Ind., but a sizable number are also made in Silao, Mexico.

Even those made north of the border aren't quite "American." Auto pricing site Cars.com booted the Silverado and Sierra out of the Top 10 of its American-Made Index after its pieces slipped below the list's cutoff of 75% domestically produced content to only 61%.

That's no knock on the Silverado's quality, just a reminder that it takes a global village to raise a Chevy pickup.

Coors
What is the only thing worse that playing "American" while not being produced by an American company anymore? Putting on that costume while being produced by two foreign brewing juggernauts.

Such is the case for Coors, which stopped being solely a Rocky Mountain resident in 2005 when it merged with Canadian megabrewer Molson. That lumped the Coors brands in with a stable that includes the Molson products, England's Carling and Dutch-derived Grolsch. Still, it needed a little something extra to compete in the American marketplace.

This is where Coors' branches on the family tree get complicated. SABMiller -- formed in 2002 when South African Breweries bought U.S.-based Miller Brewing -- teamed with MolsonCoors to market both companies' beers in the U.S. under the MillerCoors joint venture.

While it's nice that Coors Light recently took the No. 2 spot in the American market from Budweiser, saying it's the No. 2 American beer brand is a bit of an oversimplification. At this point, Coors in the U.S. is equal parts American, Canadian, British and South African. You'd have to dig down through the beer ranks to Yuengling or Boston Brewing

Ford F-150
Didn't think you were going to get away that easily, did you, Ford ?

No, Ford didn't take any of the U.S. government's bailout money and doesn't assemble any of its U.S.-sold F-150s beyond U.S. borders. That doesn't mean that a big chunk of the F-150 isn't made elsewhere.

The F-150 may roll off the lines in Kansas City, Mo., and Dearborn, Mich., but only 60% of its parts are made in the U.S. That's actually a great statement on the F-150's quality and demand, considering that 90% of its parts were made in the U.S. before volume increased nearly 11% in the past year alone. Unfortunately, the F-150's popularity forced Ford to outsource parts and cut costs.

If you're looking for something a bit more American, however, Cars.com says the San Antonio, Texas-built Toyota Tundra has the most American-made parts of any truck on the market while keeping assembly line jobs in-house.

Rawlings baseballs
As American as mom, baseball and apple pie? Not so fast, baseball.

St. Louis, Mo.-based Rawlings has been the official baseball supplier of Major League Baseball since 1977, but hasn't sewn a single stitch into cowhide stateside during that time. Well before Rawlings was called up to the majors, the company had outsourced its production to other spots in the northern hemisphere.

Though founded in St. Louis all the way back in 1887, Rawlings moved its baseball manufacturing plant to Puerto Rico in 1969. That was followed by a move to Haiti shortly thereafter. Finally, the company settled down in Costa Rica, where it has been sending its cowhide, cores and twine ever since. Now part of Jarden -- the same folks who own the Crock-Pot, Mr. Coffee, Oster, Rival and Sunbeam brands -- Rawlings is just a small cog in a really big conglomerate.

It just happens to have the misfortune of providing a key element of the national pastime from the warm tropical confines of another nation entirely.

Levi's
Wear them to the fall of your totalitarian government, name drop them in your protest songs, but just don't call Levi's blue jeans Yankee made. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Levi Strauss & Co. bears little resemblance to the little outfit that cropped up in San Francisco during the late 1800s, outfitted the American counterculture in the mid-20th century and became the symbol of all things American by the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. By that time, the company itself was crumbling under pressure from cheaper overseas manufacturers and started shutting down its U.S. manufacturing operations.

Those "American" blue jeans started coming with "made in" tags as diverse as a soul-searching exchange student's passport stamps. They're made it Japan, Lesotho, Mexico, Cambodia, Turkmenistan, the Philippines and a whole lot of other places far beyond U.S. borders.

The company still maintains a headquarters in San Francisco, but other outposts in Belgium and Singapore as well as manufacturing facilities spread throughout the globe indicate Levi's American identity hangs by a thread, if it hasn't frayed away completely.

American Girl dolls
Hey kid, wanna buy a $100 doll?

Don't worry, they're totally educational, have huge boutique stores and restaurants that you can spend hundreds more dollars in and are nothing like that morally reprehensible Barbie. Mattel should know, as it's owned American Girl since 1998 and has made American Girl and Barbie products in China since roughly that time.

Not that American Girl dolls were all that American before Mattel got involved. The original dolls were made in Germany and weren't made any less pricey by the switch. But quibbling over the doll's price or manufacturing location is of little interest to American Girl, which views its mission as retelling American history through the eyes of pieces of plastic molded into the shape of 9-year-old girls and outfitted like audio-animatronic rejects from Walt Disney World's Hall of Presidents.

Actual American girls should consider themselves fortunate for the experience. After all, who can give a less biased view of the messy intricacies of American history than a smiling, disconnected friend from a foreign country?

Craftsman tools
Sears may be in trouble now with hundreds of stores facing closure and the fate of the entire company very much in doubt, but it's been through bad times before.

Consider the case of its trademark Craftsman tool brand. Before you could just snap them up at any Ace Hardware, Craftsman was one of Sears' big draws and its finest example of durable American products.

That little fable was all well and good until 2004, when a class-action suit accused Craftsman of not living up to its "Made in the USA" label. The suit accused Sears of using metal parts from Austria, Denmark, China, India and Mexico in its Craftsman products. That's a big no-no when the Federal Trade Commission says goods can be called American-made only if they're made entirely in the U.S. or made in the U.S. with an overwhelming majority of U.S.-made parts.

The claimants lost not because they were wrong, but because they failed to prove any injury from the mislabeling. While a whole lot of Craftsman products are still made in the U.S., some Craftsman products are now labeled "Made in China."

-- Written by Jason Notte in Boston.

>To contact the writer of this article, click here: Jason Notte.

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Chicken Nuggets: How Bad Are They? | Yahoo! Health

When the kids are wailing, the boss wasn’t happy with your presentation, and the kitchen is anything but pristine, what mom hasn’t thrown up her hands and given in to demands for chicken nuggets? Like, three times a week?

Maybe Mom should tell the kids: Be careful what you wish for.

Read about celebrities who dealt with eating disorders.

This week 17-year-old British factory worker Stacey Irvine was rushed to the hospital when she collapsed, struggling to breathe. During the exam, doctors were stunned to learn that Ms. Irvine had never in her life eaten fruit or vegetables; instead she had eaten almost nothing but fast-food chicken nuggets since she was two years old.

Her mother, Evonne Irvine, told reporters she had gone to great lengths to try to feed her daughter more nutritious food, at one point even trying to starve the girl, but it hadn’t worked. Stacey responded that, once she started eating nuggets, she “loved them so much they were all I would eat.”

Learn to grow your own fruits and vegetables.

What’s so bad about nuggets?

They would be bad enough if they were merely chunks of chicken that had been breaded and deep-fried in oil. One documentary describes McDonald's nuggets as chickens “stripped down to the bone, and then 'ground up’ into a chicken mash, then combined with a variety of stabilizers and preservatives, pressed into familiar shapes, breaded and deep fried, freeze dried, and then shipped to a McDonald’s near you.”

Aside from chicken and oil, those “stabilizers and preservatives” are said to include dimethylpolysiloxane, a form of silicone also used in cosmetics. Another additive is tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), a form of butane. According to one report, chicken is only about 50 percent of a McNugget; the remainder is a mixture of corn-derived ingredients, sugars and synthetic substances.

If a four-piece serving of Chicken McNuggets carried a nutrition label, at first glance it wouldn’t seem too scary: 190 calories, 12 grams of carbs and 12 grams of fat. But consider that more than half of those calories (56 percent) are from fat—and protein accounts for a mere four percent. Add a whopping 360 mg sodium, and its image as “the more nutritious fast-food snack” fades.

Read about 15 surprisingly healthy fast food picks.

What’s the worst that can happen?

Aside from collapsing and gasping for air, as Stacey Irvine did? Doctors also discovered that the veins in Ms. Irvine’s tongue were swollen and she was diagnosed with anemia. Further, such a high salt intake can increase a person’s blood pressure (which ultimately can put them at risk for a stroke or heart attack).

McNuggets are low in nutrients everyone needs, such as calcium, fiber, vitamins, antioxidants and healthy fats, so a steady diet of nuggets means missing out on the health benefits of those ingredients.

Find out which vitamins you really need.

So what’s a parent to do?

If your kids are hooked on nuggets, experts offer these suggestions for steering them towards healthier eating:

• Serve a variety of healthy foods at home to prevent “picky eater” habits from forming. Taking them grocery shopping, teaching them to find and choose foods, and involving them in meal planning tells them you want to prepare meals they will enjoy. 
• Set realistic goals. If the child bristles at eating a side portion of veggies, make a game to get him to take one bite of the new-tasting food. 
• Make your own chicken snacks at home, using healthy dipping sauces like marinara sauce, yogurt or mustard. If you must bread the nuggets, dip them in an egg, roll them in cornflake crumbs and bake, don’t fry. 
• If you’re eating out, cut out half of the trans and saturated fat by ordering a grilled chicken sandwich instead of nuggets. Order for your child from the adult menu, or share your sandwich with her, so the nuggets issue doesn’t come up. 
• Be consistent and firm, but encourage and praise the child every time she tries a new, healthier food. And be a good role model—don’t expect children to eat healthy when one or both parents snack on salty chips or fatty, processed foods. 
• Keep healthy foods in the meal, even when you give in and allow your child to order nuggets. Serve it with a side salad, fruit, or a slice of whole-grain bread. 

Learn about the 7 superfoods you should be eating.

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Damn You Auto Correct! » The 25 Funniest Autocorrects Of DYAC’s First Year

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Arkansas Democrat's cat killed, painted with "liberal" - Yahoo! News

LITTLE ROCK, Ark (Reuters) - A cat belonging to an Arkansas Democratic campaign manager was found dead on Sunday night with the word "Liberal" spray-painted across its side, the campaign manager said.

The cat was a pet of Jake Burris, who manages Democrat Ken Aden's bid for Arkansas' 3rd Congressional District. Aden is running against incumbent Republican Representative Steve Womack.

Burris was returning to his Russellville, Arkansas home with his four children when he found the cat on his doorstep, the Aden campaign said in a press release on Monday.

The mixed-breed Siamese cat had one side of its head bashed in to "the point the cat's eyeball was barely hanging from its socket," the release said.

Aden told Reuters that the event was "horrible, to say the least."

"Thankfully, there are not that many people who want to do something like this," Aden said. "The majority of people in this district are hard-working folks, but you get the occasional crazy individual out there."

The Russellville Police Department is investigating the incident as an animal cruelty case, according to a police official. Russellville is 80 miles west of Little Rock.

Aden and Burris said they did not believe Womack or his re-election campaign were involved in the incident.

Arkansas' 3rd District is heavily conservative Republican and has been held by a Republican since the 1966 election. Womack first won the congressional seat in 2010 with 72 percent of the vote.

The Womack campaign denounced the violence on Monday.

"The thought of brutalizing any animal for the sake of making a political statement is beyond any standard of decency and the person or people responsible for this act should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law," said Beau Walker, Womack's chief of staff.

(Editing by Corrie MacLaggan and Greg McCune)

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6 hurt during shooting at Calif. teen's party - Yahoo! News

ANTIOCH, Calif. (AP) — Six people, including five teens, were injured when gunfire erupted at a girl's 16th birthday party in the San Francisco Bay area, authorities said Sunday.

Police in Antioch believe three or four male partygoers opened fire Saturday night when two groups began arguing, said police Lt. Scott Willerford. Violence is not common in the neighborhood in Antioch, which is about 38 miles northeast of San Francisco.

"Weapons were brandished and numerous shots were fired from multiple guns," Willerford said.

The gunfire wounded a 13-year-old boy, two 16-year-old boys, two 18-year-old men and a 21-year-old woman, police said. Their injuries ranged from a minor grazing wound to an abdomen wound, police said. Police did not say how many shots were fired, or specify what kind of weapons were used.

Three of the wounded have been released from hospitals, but the 13-year-old, an 18-year-old and the woman remained in serious but stable condition, police said. Their names have not been released.

Police are looking for three or four suspects described as "young men," but acknowledge they haven't been able to obtain more detailed descriptions. Willerford said callers reporting the shooting had said between 70 and 80 people were at the party, but many of them ran away when the gunfire broke out.

Authorities said the party was being thrown by the girl's parents.

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