In Texas, history has a way of repeating itself. Jake Bernstein and Dave Mann of The Texas Observer reveal how last year a small group of politicians and corporations bought themselves a legislature and poured hundreds of millions back into the pockets of the corporations. The no-holds-barred campaign was run through the Texas Association of Business and U.S. House Whip Tom Delay's Texans for a Republican Majority. Both entities took a calculated risk, which paid off with the first Republican Texas legislature in 130 years, but both are now under investigation.
In an apparent effort to stop the public from reading an article about his unsavory past, Tim Yousik, currently running in the Republican primary for Riverhead town supervisor, marched into Town Hall and removed all copies of the Long Island Press' Aug. 14 issue, witnesses say. Yousik was apparently attempting to make disappear the cover story on his dirty past: a 1987 conviction for third-degree sodomy and endangering the welfare of a minor in upstate New York.
Attorney General John Ashcroft declared he would only talk to TV reporters at a recent Philadelphia news conference. Ashcroft's minions escorted a stunned Howard Altman, editor in chief of Philadelphia City Paper, off the premises when he protested the ban on print reporters at the Patriot Act "spin-tour" event at National Constitution Hall. "I was not just steamed, I was flabbergasted. Surely, these people understand irony?" Altman writes.
When thousands of Somali and Sudanese refugees made their way to the American Midwest in the 1990s, they were often hailed as success stories. Starting at the bottom of the economic ladder, they worked double shifts in menial jobs and carved out lives for themselves and their families, thankful just to have the opportunity -- and to be safe from the violence that plagued their war-torn homelands. But as Pitch staff writer Kendrick Blackwood reports, the Somalis and Sudanese brought something with them besides a tireless work ethic: a culture in which young men are taught never to back away from a fight.
Local politics in Spokane can get ugly, especially when a reporter scrutinizes a development deal involving a scion of the city's reigning Cowles clan. "An e-mail exchange between real estate developer and Cowles Publishing chair Betsy Cowles and her PR lackey Jennifer West shows the disturbing tactics they employ to coerce local media, including AAN- member The Local Planet Weekly," Editor/ Publisher Matt Spaur writes.
Police and school officials usually start and stop drug education courses at promoting a "drug- free society," which has about as much relation to reality as promoting sexual abstinence. The Georgia Straight's Roberta Staley looks at the reality of how teenagers learn about drugs -- from each other. Young people need better information -- not only to protect themselves and their friends from addiction and overdose, but to complete the complex process of growing up, she argues.
