Friedman's imaginary India

Duck and cover, fellows, Thomas Friedman's back in India, and the mysterious subcontinent exercises its usual sorcery on the wandering pundit, eliciting paragraphs of ecstatic drivel, as it has from so many New York Times men.

My favorite remains a post-Christmas dispatch, published on Dec. 27, 2002, by Keith Bradsher, the New York Times' resident correspondent in India at the time. It was a devotional text about neoliberalism's apex poster boy at the time, Chandrababu Naidu, chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh, Time's "South Asian of the year."

After composing a worshipful resume of Naidu's supposed achievements, Bradsher selected for particular mention a secret weapon that the canny reporter deemed vital to Naidu's political grip on Andhra Pradesh. "Naidu and his allies," Bradsher disclosed to NYT readers, "speak Telugu, a language spoken only in this state and by a few people in two adjacent states." What Bradsher was saying was that Naidu spoke the same language as the 70 million other inhabitants of Andhra Pradesh. It was as though someone ascribed Tony Blair's political successes in Britain to his command of English.

The Hyper Rich

AUSTIN, Texas -- David Cay Johnston, the invaluable New York Times reporter who specializes in our tax system, has come up with some staggering figures on what he calls "the hyper-rich," the wealthiest one-thousandth of the population, and their taxes.

-- "The share of the nation's income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980. ... The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell."

-- "Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest income -- a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data -- now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000."

-- "Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000."

New Book: Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election?: Essential Documents

Did George W. Bush Steal
America’s 2004 Election?
ESSENTIAL DOCUMENTS
Edited by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
Preface by Rev. Jesse Jackson

“In contrast to the deadly silence of the media is the silent scream of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the accompanying data, the louder that scream grows.”
—Robert C. Koehler, Tribune Media Services

PLACE YOUR ORDER TODAY!!!

Indians pay conservative lobbyists to meet with Bush

AUSTIN, Texas -- A jaw-dropping article in The Texas Observer (www.texasobserver.org) shows that two lobbying clients of Jack Abramoff paid $25,000 to Grover Norquist's group for a lunch date and meeting with President George W. Bush in May 2001. Abramoff brought the Indian chiefs to the White house at the request of Norquist, a leading "movement conservative" in Washington. In addition, Abramoff obtained $2.5 million in contributions from the Indians for a nonprofit foundation run by his wife and himself.

The White House guests were the chiefs of two of the six casino-rich Indian tribes represented by Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon, former top aide to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. The $25,000 check from the Coushatta tribe of Louisiana is made out to Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax group founded and directed by Norquist.

Torture News



http://mattbors.com

Harvey Wasserman's 6/3/05 article-CORRECTION

Dear Mr. Wasserman,

I am a long time reader of your work and the progessive/indy media in general and while I whole heartedly endorse your analysis of the revisionist history of the religious right visa vie our founding fathers. You are incorrect to characterize Thomas Paine as an atheist. I quote from Ch 1 of Paine's "Age of Reason" --

"I believe in one God and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I belive the equality of man and I believe that religious duty consist in doing justice, loving mercy and evdeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy" -Dover Publications 2004.

I think it is important to note that Paine and the other diests problems were not with God per se - rather with the instutions of organized religion and church- which, much like today can be turned against people's well being. For Paine, a freethinker, God was a God of Reason and therefore amenable to science, the enlightenment and democracy.

Thank you for your time.
J. Ward Regan

Support John Conyers' inquiry into Downing Street Memo

Help Rep. John Conyers investigate and expose the criminal behavior of George W. Bush and his lies about the reasons to attack Iraq. Sign the letter and contribute! Conyers Website

The Fundamentalist attack on separation of church and state defames America and its founders

The right-wing's multi-front war on American democracy now aims at our core belief in separation of church and state. It includes an attempt to say the founding fathers endorsed the idea that this is a "Christian nation," with an official religion.

But the founders---and a vast majority of Americans---repeatedly, vehemently and with stunning clarity denounced, rejected and despised such beliefs.

Nowhere in the Constitution they wrote does the word "Christian" or the name of Christ appear. The very first phrase of the First Amendment demands that "Congress shall make no law concerning an establishment of religion."

One major reason Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Ethan Allen and the vast majority of early Americans rejected the merger of church and state was the lingering stench of Puritan intolerance. The infamous theocratic murders of the Salem witch trials sickened the American soul, just as today's power grab by Karl Rove's new corporate fundamentalists creates an atmosphere of intolerance and fear, defined by the world's largest prison gulag.

Deep Throats and Stolen Votes

Ironically this week, Mark Felt, former Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, revealed that he was Watergate's "Deep Throat" and perhaps the most famous whistle-blower in our nation's history, but the embattled Deputy Director of the Hocking County Board of Elections (BOE) Sherole Eaton, Ohio's most well-known whistle-blower, may be fired for courageous attempt to expose alleged election tampering.

Eaton suggests that there are many potential Deep Throats throughout the Buckeye State: “…There are staff on other boards that would not come forward with things, and they have shared things with me. They were afraid they’d lose their jobs,” she told the Free Press.

The Executive Committee of the Hocking County Democratic Party met behind closed doors at a Logan, Ohio senior center on Thursday, May 26 to discuss the forced resignation of Eaton by the Hocking County BOE. Sources within the Democratic Party told the Free Press that a majority of the Executive Committee members were backers of Eaton and confronted Democratic BOE members Gerald Robinette and Susan Hughes who had voted to fire Eaton.

Optical scan machines hacked in Florida

Tallahassee, FL: "Are we having fun yet?"

This is the message that appeared in the window of a county optical scan machine, startling Leon County Information Systems Officer Thomas James. Visibly shaken, he immediately turned the machine off.

Diebold's opti-scan (paper ballot) voting system uses a curious memory card design, offering penetration by a lone programmer such that standard canvassing procedures cannot detect election manipulation.

The Diebold optical scan system was used in about 800 jurisdictions in 2004. Among them were several hotbeds of controversy: Volusia County (FL); King County (WA); and the New Hampshire primary election, where machine results differed markedly from hand-counted localities.

New regs: Counting paper ballots forbidden

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