Yearly underreported news round up.

[mattd]

* Antitrust law is history. Meanwhile, the local press quoted Microsoft's
lawyers ad nauseam and reported on how badly rich peoples' stock options
are suffering.
* Energy privatization is dead. Several states put on hold or canceled
their plans to privatize utilities after California's mess showed what
privatization really means: Taxpayers take it in the shorts.
* Massive protests greeted George Bush's January inauguration. Protesters
overwhelmed key points on the Pennsylvania Avenue inaugural parade route,
and TV cameras carefully avoided those areas, the fences surrounding the
parade route, or any acknowledgement of public anger over last December's
coup d'itat.
* Bush and the Republicans have shamelessly used the Sept. 11 tragedy to
try to push through reactionary legislation. The list is long, as is the
list of assaults on the Bill of Rights for those "suspected" of being
terrorists, and anyone else in the general vicinity. How bad is it? Spain
is refusing to extradite terrorist suspects because of Bush's military
courts. When the land of Franco and the Spanish inquisition is lecturing
the U.S. on due process, you'd think there's a story afoot.
* Bush's $300 tax rebates weren't rebates at all. That $300 will simply go
on your new tax bill instead. The government is getting every penny from
you it originally expected to; the "rebate" was a cheap accounting trick to
divert attention from huge, permanent cuts for the wealthy. Most news
reports obediently parroted the fraud. Meanwhile, Dubya's tax cut was a
"stimulus" flop long before Sept. 11, but as Congress now considers yet
another such plan, that story, too, is conspicuously absent.
* For weeks, only The Wall Street Journal has reliably and repeatedly
reported that the anthrax spores found in three letters to congressmen are
a U.S. weapons-grade variety. Once anthrax attacks didn't fit the Osama bin
Laden narrative, the investigation vanished from news programs.
* Gore won Florida. The exhaustive media recount finally released last
month concluded that if all legally cast votes in all of Florida's counties
had been counted in 2000, Al Gore would be president. Inexplicably, media
accounts almost uniformly spun the study as vindicating Bush's victory.
* Finally, so many aspects of our Afghan invasion were reported extensively
worldwide, except here, that it's impossible to pick among them. American
media distinguished themselves by avoiding actual field reporting in favor
of a bizarre alternate universe of White House and Pentagon briefings and
spin. Among our Pravda- esque domestic media's almost verboten topics: new
post-Sept. 11 support for dictators, Afghan civilian deaths, CIA training
of bin Laden, long-term military strategy, oil politics, the Carlyle Group,
Saudi connections to terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the ABM treaty,
or why it is much of the world views the U.S. as a rogue--even
terrorist--state.