carapace – Not your father's america

Monday, January 30, 2006

To Concerned People,

President Bush will be delivering his State of the Union Address this Tuesday evening.

In the past the Institute for Public Accuracy has distributed hard-hitting analysis following such addresses. Here is a web link to a news release about a previous State of the Union address:

http://accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=376 .

We will of course produce material along these lines for media professionals for the upcoming address. But we also plan to do something else.

We will be putting information into a PDF file as well, tailored not primarily for media professionals, but for use by the general public. We hope that you will participate in this effort. Activists will be able, early Wednesday morning Eastern Time, to print a timely one-page flyer off our web page

http://www.accuracy.org

which they can distribute to people as a tool to get good information out and to organize locally.

We will include some blank space at the bottom so that groups can have their name and contact information on the flyer. We hope that you can use this as an opportunity to interact with people at subway stations, workplaces, on the street — wherever you think useful — to help explore issues with others and to help spark dialogue between people.

You can also help by spreading the word about this resource online, including to email lists, activist alert networks and on blogs and other web pages.

– With best wishes from the Institute for Public Accuracy

BUSH’S STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS TO BE SIMULCAST IN ENGLISH

President Hopes to Reach Broader Audience, Aides Say

For the first time since he was elected President of the United States, George W. Bush’s State of the Union address tonight will be simulcast in English, the White House confirmed.

With the president’s approval ratings sagging, the decision to simulcast the speech in English was widely seen as an attempt by the president to make an appeal to a broader audience.

“The majority of people in this country are English speaking, and quite frankly, we can’t afford to ignore them any longer,” one senior aide said. “Hopefully, by doing the English simulcast, we’ll be reaching out to a lot of those folks.”

Once the decision was made earlier in the month to launch the historic first English simulcast of a speech by President Bush, then began the hard work of translating the text of the address from Mr. Bush’s language into English.

Davis Logsdon, a professor of linguistics at the University of Minnesota, was one of several scholars approached to do the translation who ultimately quit in frustration.

“The problem is that the language the president speaks, by most measures, is not a language at all,” Professor Logsdon said.

Still, the White House remains guardedly optimistic about tonight’s simulcast, and aides said that if all goes as planned they might soon offer English simulcasts of press briefings by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Elsewhere, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein stormed out of his courtroom today, got a good look at what was going on in the streets of Baghdad, and quickly hurried back in.

Borowitzreport.com

NAKED PHOTOS OF BUSH AND ABRAMOFF ROCK WHITE HOUSE

But President Still Denies Knowing Lobbyist

President George W. Bush found himself embroiled in controversy today with the publication of five photos showing him and disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff totally naked.

The photos, published yesterday in Payboy, a magazine devoted to naked pictures of disgraced lobbyists, appeared to fly in the face of the President’s claims that he had never met Mr. Abramoff.

The five photos, which appear to have been taken on five different occasions, show the two naked men smiling and shaking hands.

“The fact that they are smiling and shaking hands proves that they know each other,” said Davis Logsdon, the magazine’s photo editor.

At the White House, the president’s top advisors were working overtime to limit the political havoc that the nude photos of the president and Mr. Abramoff could wreak.

At a press briefing this morning, White House spokesperson Scott McClellan spoke dismissively of the controversy, calling the brouhaha over the naked photos “a tempest in a teapot.”

“These naked pictures of the president and Jack Abramoff are nothing out of the ordinary,” Mr. McClellan says. “In the course of his daily schedule, the President poses nude with dozens of dignitaries.”

Mr. McClellan said that the American people “would have no problem believing” that Mr. Bush posed naked with Mr. Abramoff on five different occasions without actually knowing who he was.

“Our polls show that the American people think that most of the time the President is in the Oval Office he does not know what he is doing,” he said.

Elsewhere, Ford Motor Co. announced that it was cutting 30,000 jobs, including Job One.

Borowitzreport.com

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06020/641039.stm

From: Poacnewsletter

The Bush administration’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has withheld the tax refunds of more than 1.6 million low-income U.S. taxpayers in the past five years, according to a report by the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service. Most of the refunds were withheld from taxpayers eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The EITC is a special tax benefit for America’s working poor. The IRS criminal division froze the refunds for suspected fraud but did not notify taxpayers to give them the opportunity to provide documentation for their claims. The report found that at most one in five of the withheld tax returns was questionable. The median adjusted gross income of taxpayers whose refunds were withheld but were found to have committed no fraud was $13,330, and the median income of those who claimed the EITC was $11,956. The median refund owed was $3,685, a significant amount for working poor taxpayers.

From: Work in Progress