Class Warfare Sans Class: Bushies take the "tax-the-poor" bait. (Timothy Noah in Slate)
    

Old Time Records: Oustanding collection of digitized 78s (Via Boing Boing Boing)

"Fantastic collection of blues and country 78s, converted to MP3, on this page. I can't get enough of it. Just the artist and track names are poetry, like "Dr. Humphrey Bates' Possum Hunters" performing "My Wife Died Saturday.""

    

Broken records: RIAA cooked the books to invent "piracy problem". (Boing Boing)

A new research report suggests that the convicted price-fixers at the RIAA cooked the books to create a nonexistant "piracy problem."

So the record industry cut their inventory (and artist investment) by 25 percent and sales only dropped 4.1 percent, even though the economy is at rock bottom. There were almost 12,000 fewer new releases for the consumer to choose from in 2001 than 1999. The record companies are making more money per release than ever.

    

The Times in Brief

These Times Demand the Ten Commandments?

In apparent effort to demonstrate its superiority to an Alabama courthouse, the Times has sent Chris Hedges to cover the seemingly-timeless topic of the Decalogue. Perhaps it's a top-X X-mas list. In any event, here are the first two articles, which I confess to having fully read yet:

Unending Journey Through Faith and Heartbreak: How, as one rabbi asked, can the parents of a child who died accept the First Commandment, which is interpreted to mean that all is fated by God?

A Quest for Rapture Leads a 'Phish Head' Astray: What is idolatry in the 21st century?

Pentagon Debates Propaganda Push in Allied Nations

Such a program, for example, could include efforts to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that have become breeding grounds for Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism across the Middle East, Asia and Europe. It might even include setting up schools with secret American financing to teach a moderate Islamic position laced with sympathetic depictions of how the religion is practiced in America, officials said.

    

Bush league losers: War on drugs nets small-time offenders (Houston Chronicle)

Texas' war on drugs punishes few major importers and dealers but imprisons thousands caught with less than a sugar packet full of cocaine or other illegal drugs.

Of the 58,000 drug convictions won by local prosecutors over the past five years, 77 percent involved less than a gram of a drug, according to district court data analyzed by the Houston Chronicle.

The numbers suggest that these men and women are collateral damage in the war on drugs, arrested because they were easy targets rather than objects of a grand strategy.

    

Commercial Radio versus the Iranian Student Uprising: Casey Kasem or Freedom? (Jackson Diel in Washington Post)

Two weeks ago, Radio Freedom abruptly disappeared from the air. Iranians were no longer able to hear firsthand reports of the protests or the nightly think tanks about their country's future. Instead, after two weeks of virtual silence, the broadcasts are being replaced this week with tunes from Jennifer Lopez, Whitney Houston and other soft-rockers.

How did the mullahs pull off this well-timed lobotomy? They didn't: The U.S. government, in the form of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, did it. In an act that mixes Hollywood arrogance with astounding ignorance of Iranian reality, the board has silenced the most effective opposition radio station in Iran at a time of unprecedented ferment. In its place, at three times the expense, the United States now will supply Iran's revolutionary students with a diet of pop music -- on the theory that this better advances U.S. interests.

Even the name of the station has been sanitized. Instead of "Freedom" -- regarded as too political by the programmers -- the radio will be called "Farda," meaning "tomorrow." Never mind that "freedom" is what thousands of young Iranians have been risking their lives to shout every day on the streets. "The assumption of the people who did this back in Washington is that Iranian young people, like young people in most places, don't want to hear news," says Stephen Fairbanks, the ousted director of Radio Freedom. But this is not most places -- this is Iran, where young people are leading a rebellion against a dictatorship that has stifled opposition media.

The "people back in Washington" Fairbanks referred to are led by Norman Pattiz, a Los Angeles-based commercial radio mogul and generous Democratic contributor who was rewarded by President Clinton with an appointment to the broadcasting board. As the chairman of the board's Middle East committee, Pattiz initially focused on the Voice of America's Arabic service, which he deemed out of touch in a region where there is growing popular hostility to the United States. His solution was to replace what he called the "old-style propaganda" of VOA with Radio Sawa, a pop-music station that debuted last March. Sawa broadcasts five minutes of news twice each hour, along with Whitney, Britney and a few Arabic balladeers.