Look’s like India’s going on strike next month:
The Centre has failed to negate the court’s judgement of right to strike. It has also failed to hinder the rising unemployment, growing poverty, reckless privatisation, closure of factories and dilatory tactics to enact law for unorganised sector workers…
The “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest is over, and the winner’s been chosen. And it’s damn good.
Jacob Remes points out a History News Network account of the tension at the annual Business meeting of the American Historical Association, which he attended, over the successfully passed resolution calling on Yale to respect the right of its graduate students to organize. Yale History Chairman and candidate for Yale College Dean Jon Butler made the unfortunate argument that it was “presumptuous” for historians to concern themselves in a dispute over free speech and the right to organize and the specious argument that calling for a fair process to determine whether GESO represents the majority of graduate students is unfair to any other potential graduate student organizations, and finally tried and failed to stall the resolution on procedural grounds.
Paul Krugman reviews the most damning moments of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil’s recent account of his time in the Bush administration, and asks the right questions:
How can Howard Dean’s assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn’t made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a “detour” that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O’Neill’s revelations?
Another Republican for (comparatively) progressive taxation:
Chichester’s plan would raise the sales tax by 1-cent, increase the state’s tobacco tax to 35-cents per pack and increase income taxes for people who make over $100,000 of taxable income. He would also raise the gasoline tax by 3-cents per gallon, increase the sales tax on cars from 3.5-percent to 5.5 percent and impose the sales tax on gasoline, which is currently exempt.
He would also give new tax breaks to lower-income workers and would eliminate $12,000 tax breaks for any senior who makes more than $52,000 a year.
The plan shifts money back and forth from the state’s transportation fund and the general fund, which finances state operations. But when all is said and done, the state would have about $725 million more each year to spend on road and transit projects throughout the state.
“I can’t be shy,” Chichester said of his plan.
His colleagues, it seems, are less than pleased.
The MoveOn Voter Fund announces the winner of its “Bush in 30 Seconds” Contest in a gala event tonight. Check out the 15 finalists here. The ceremony will be webcast tonight; what we can’t watch, unfortunately, is the Donna Brazile – Michael Moore steel cage match which no doubt ensued during their deliberations over what makes an effective ad.
As DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton recently observed:
Not content with denying D.C. residents congressional voting rights, Congress has gone out of its way to silence us by placing a rider in the D.C. appropriation that keeps residents from lobbying Congress or country for their rights,” she wrote. This insult added to injury should be enough to send residents to the polls to vote on Tuesday in a primary whose purpose is to tell the country what most Americans do not know, according to opinion polls: that Congress denies voting rights to the citizens of its own capital.
The New York Times is more dismissive of the primary:
This is, alas, a nonbinding beauty contest.
But it relates the case for representation in simple and inarguable terms:
While Wyoming, population 494,000, has one representative and two senators, Washington, population 571,000, has none.
One wonders whether those half a million people would have gone without a vote for so many years if more of them were White.
FirstPrimaryBlog has the latest on tomorrow’s primary, including guest statements from Kucinich, Lieberman, and Sharpton in support of, respectively, statehood, congressional representation, and one or the other.
Five of the candidates – including Lieberman – made the shameful decision to withdraw from D.C.’s primary, leaving Dean, Sharpton, Kucinich, and Mosely-Braun. My prediction is Dean comes in first, Sharpton second.
I’d say this drives home the point rather effectively – especially given we’re under two weeks into the year…
Troubling news from Iran:
A new power struggle engulfed Iran’s government on Sunday when a hard-line Islamic religious authority disqualified half the 8,200 candidates in parliamentary elections next month, provoking outrage among reformers who accused their conservative rivals of trying to steal the vote.
Rejected candidates included a brother of the reform-minded president, Mohammad Khatami. More than 80 current members of the 290-seat Parliament were rejected, including two prominent feminists, two deputy speakers and six leaders of important parliamentary commissions. Many had been outspoken critics of Iran’s strict Islamic religious political system and its treatment of dissenters and diverse views…Nearly 60 reformist members of Parliament held a sit-in at Parliament on Sunday to protest the action.
A New Jersey mayor has capitulated to a craven assault on the rights of immigrants.
City police will be able to detain immigrants anywhere in the city, fine them up to $500.00, and hold them for for 30 days. An area particularly targeted is the well known “The Muster Zone” on Throckmorton Street, where day laborers gather to wait for employers to pick them up.
Other areas affected by the regulations include the monitoring of apartments and/or houses where immigrants are suspected of living, and taxicab companies owned and/or operated by Latino drivers. In the case of cab companies, the Latinos are being required to demonstrate English proficiency to an investigating officer and provide proof of legal residence and verification of a clean criminal record. This process is carried out by the police against the suspected immigrant without the issuance of a moving violation or any other infraction of civil or criminal law.
Find out more, and voice your opposition, here.
Do not read the New Yorker’s review of The House of Sand and Fog, whose assertion that
the ineluctable downward pull of absolutely everything in this movie is more exasperating than moving
leads one to question not only reviewer David Denby’s taste but his humanity as well. Do go see the movie. Now. Please.
Josh Eidelson 