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NAACP chief Julian Bond said Americans should be concerned about the Bush administration’s actions toward the poor and disadvantaged. “The current administration came into office four years ago inheriting a surplus, and within little more than a year, they’ve created one of the largest deficits in history,” Bond said. “The reason for that deficit isn’t the war in Iraq, or any of the other things we did after 9/11. It’s entirely based on the tax giveaways to the rich. “And the consequence is that programs that help people at the bottom of the economic scale are now being sacrificed in the name of this giveaway to the richest 1 percent of the population. ... It’s an awful state of things.” In October, the IRS launched an investigation of the NAACP because Bond allegedly made partisan remarks in a speech at the NAACP National Convention in July — the idea being that Bond had violated the NAACP’s tax-exempt status by, in effect, campaigning against Bush. But the NAACP has refused to obey the IRS’ repeated orders since January to turn over documents related to the speech, arguing that the investigation — launched in October, right before the presidential election but several months before tax returns are filed — was outside the IRS’ authority and was designed to distract the NAACP from its get-out-the-vote activities. . [more]