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New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on the vanishing middle class:

let me just point out that middle-class America didn’t emerge by accident. It was created by what has been called the Great Compression of incomes that took place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation. Since the 1970’s, all of those sustaining forces have lost their power.

Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families – and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich to bankruptcy “reform” that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march back to the robber baron era.

…

Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity won’t be easy: the middle-class society we have lost emerged only after the country was shaken by depression and war. But we can make a start by calling attention to the politicians who systematically make things worse in catering to their contributors. Never mind that straw man, the politics of envy. Let’s try to do something about the politics of greed.

On the Al Franken show, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter discussed Congress’ unwillingness to investigate anything that’s gone amiss in this administration. Franken mentioned the Republican Congress’ lack of interest in the disappearance of $8.8 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds. Alter contrasted the current situation with an earlier one:

Alter: During World War II… a shooting war every day with thousands of people being killed, a senator from Missouri named Harry Truman — who was seen at the time as a machine hack — he held hearings.

He was a Democrat. Nobody from the Roosevelt Administration said, “No, you can’t hold hearings about war profiteering.”

Franken: Democratic House, Democratic Senate, Democratic White House — they hold hearings.

Alter: Because smart people in government know that those hearings can actually help them do their jobs more competently. Ferret out wrongdoing. If you’re really patriotic, you want accountability, because you want to improve performance.

If Watergate taught us anything, it’s that the system works.

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter imagines how Watergate would play out today:

Those of us who hoped it would end differently knew we were in trouble when former Nixon media adviser Roger Ailes banned the word “Watergate” from Fox News’s coverage and went with the logo “Assault on the Presidency” instead. By that time, the American people figured both sides were just spinning, and a tie always goes to the incumbent.

…

Just as in the Valerie Plame case, the Justice Department subpoenaed Woodward and Bernstein to testify before the grand jury about their sources. When they declined, they were jailed for 18 months on contempt charges.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow does the Time Warp, and Ward Sutton looks at Woodward and Bernstein, the Next Generation.

Well, heck. I’m just about positive this system used to work.

The fix is in, methinks:

A Justice Department decision to seek $10 billion for a stop-smoking program in its suit against the country’s leading tobacco companies, instead of the $130 billion suggested by one of its expert witnesses, set off a firestorm on Wednesday.

Several Democratic lawmakers with a longtime interest in smoking and health issues attacked the department for what they said was a politically motivated decision, as did public health groups.

Judge Gladys Kessler of Federal District Court, who is presiding in the trial here against the companies, took note of the sudden change, telling the court on Wednesday, “Perhaps it suggests that additional influences have been brought to bear on what the government’s case is.”

The states-rights administration that fought tirelessly to ban state-sanctioned medical marijuana has a different perspective on tobacco. They caved on the Microsoft antitrust case, too.

One thing you can say for sure about the Bush Administration: they sure ain’t working for us.

The core belief of the Bush Administration is not about spreading democracy throughout the world. It’s not about saving Social Security, fighting terrorism, banning abortion or outlawing gay marriage. It’s certainly not about leaving no child behind.

The core belief of the Bush Administration is this: the rich in this country sure do have it rough, and poor people get all the breaks.

So we get “tort reform,” carefully tailored to protect corporations with vast resources from lawsuits by people with few resources. We get bankruptcy law “reforms” that strip ordinary people of their hope for a second chance while preserving special protections in bankruptcy law for the very rich. We get tax laws that favor millionaires over working folks, and favor billionaires over millionaires.

The New York Times says the Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind:

The people at the top of America’s money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Call them the hyper-rich.

They are not just a few Croesus-like rarities. Draw a line under the top 0.1 percent of income earners – the top one-thousandth. Above that line are about 145,000 taxpayers, each with at least $1.6 million in income and often much more.

The average income for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002, the latest year for which averages are available. That number is two and a half times the $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation, that group reported in 1980. No other income group rose nearly as fast.

The share of the nation’s income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002. The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell.

Next, examine the net worth of American households. The group with homes, investments and other assets worth more than $10 million comprised 338,400 households in 2001, the last year for which data are available. The number has grown more than 400 percent since 1980, after adjusting for inflation, while the total number of households has grown only 27 percent.

The Bush administration tax cuts stand to widen the gap between the hyper-rich and the rest of America. The merely rich, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, will shoulder a disproportionate share of the tax burden.

President Bush said during the third election debate last October that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans. In fact, most – 53 percent – will go to people with incomes in the top 10 percent over the first 15 years of the cuts, which began in 2001 and would have to be reauthorized in 2010. And more than 15 percent will go just to the top 0.1 percent, those 145,000 taxpayers.

The Times article is part of a series called “Class Matters.”

Humans leave their mark on the planet:

The devastating impact of mankind on the planet is dramatically illustrated in pictures published on Saturday showing explosive urban sprawl, major deforestation and the sucking dry of inland seas over less than three decades.

Mexico City mushrooms from a modest urban center in 1973 to a massive blot on the landscape in 2000, while Beijing shows a similar surge between 1978 and 2000 in satellite pictures published by the United Nations in a new environmental atlas.

…

“If there is one message from this atlas it is that we are all part of this. We can all make a difference,” U.N. expert Kaveh Zahedi told reporters at the launch of the “One Planet Many People” atlas on the eve of World Environment Day.

…

“These illustrate some of the changes we have made to our environment,” Zahedi said. “This is a visual tool to capture people’s imaginations showing what is really happening.”

“It serves as an early warning,” he added.

Click the “Next” button under the photo in the story to scroll through a series of before and after photos.

New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks on the PBS NewsHour, talking about the need for a truly independent investigation of the Guantanamo prison camp:

This is not only a war against individual terrorists. This is clearly a war for public opinion in the world, and especially in the Muslim world. And there’s no question that what’s happening — or at least the issue of Guantanamo — is a defeat, a daily defeat, for the United States.

And somehow that defeat has to be dealt with. And, to me, having an independent commission that will take a look at whether the Navy’s doing a good job or the investigators down there are doing a good job — that just seems to be necessary.

Harry Shearer on modern whistleblowers:

Ever heard of Greg Thielmann? He should be at least as famous as W. Mark Felt by now. A few stories about him surfaced during the time it mattered, the runup to the war, when he, and his British and Australian colleagues (Dr. Brian Jones and Andrew Willkie) tried to alert us all to the falsity of the intel on which the invasion was based. Their experiences raise the question: what if a whistleblower risks his all to warn his countrymen, and nobody listens? Deep Throat would have been useless without a Deep Ear.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert says reminders of Watergate have come at a good time:

The trauma of Watergate, which brought down a president who seemed pathologically compelled to deceive, came toward the end of that extended exercise in governmental folly and deceit, Vietnam. Taken together, these two disasters, both of which shook the nation, provided a case study in how citizens should view their government: with extreme skepticism.

Trust, said Ronald Reagan, but verify.

Now, with George W. Bush in charge, the nation is mired in yet another tragic period marked by incompetence, duplicity, bad faith and outright lies coming once again from the very top of the government. Just last month we had the disclosure of a previously secret British government memorandum that offered further confirmation that the American public and the world were spoon-fed bogus information by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

President Bush, as we know, wanted to remove Saddam Hussein through military action. With that in mind, the memo damningly explained, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

That’s the kind of deceit that was in play as American men and women were suiting up and marching off to combat at the president’s command. Mr. Bush wanted war, and he got it. Many thousands have died as a result.

From the PERRspectives blog:

Which brings to the Bush White House. Thirty years after Nixon’s resignation, the Bush team is waging a more subtle and successful war against the media. The most paranoid, secretive and vengeful White House since Nixon has sought to create its own news reality through bogus science, fake news, fake reporters, staged events and scripted interviews. Retribution against leakers, whistle-blowers, and objective truth itself is certain, swift and severe. Just ask General Shinseki, Paul O’Neil, Richard Clarke, Richard Foster or Joseph Wilson.

In the wake of the Newsweek fiasco, the uproar over the Amnesty International report, and the unending revelations from Guantanamo Bay, the Bush White House attacks the messenger, just as Nixon did 30 years ago. Scott McClellan argued, “This was a report based on a single anonymous source that could not substantiate the allegation that was made. The report has had serious consequences.” And an “outraged” President Bush merely said the allegations came from “people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report”.

Robert F. Kennedy once famously said, “Richard Nixon represents the dark side of the American spirit.” Well, RFK never met George W. Bush.

In today’s Washington Post, Bob Woodward tells How Mark Felt Became ‘Deep Throat’:

In the course of this and other discussions, I was somewhat apologetic for plaguing him and being such a nag, but I explained that we had nowhere else to turn. Carl and I had obtained a list of everyone who worked for Nixon’s reelection committee and were frequently going out into the night knocking on the doors of these people to try to interview them. I explained to Felt that we were getting lots of doors slammed in our faces. There also were lots of frightened looks. I was frustrated.

Felt said I should not worry about pushing him. He had done his time as a street agent, interviewing people. The FBI, like the press, had to rely on voluntary cooperation. Most people wanted to help the FBI, but the FBI knew about rejection. Felt perhaps tolerated my aggressiveness and pushy approach because he had been the same way himself when he was younger, once talking his way into an interview with Hoover and telling him of his ambition to become a special agent in charge of an FBI field office.

It was an unusual message, emphatically encouraging me to get in his face.

Is W. Mark Felt, AKA Deep Throat, a hero or a villain?

The Daily Show examined the question, and pretty much nailed the answer:

G. Gordon Liddy: If Mark Felt was Deep Throat, he’s no hero.

Pat Buchanan: I think what he did is deeply dishonorable. It’s shameful.

Robert Novak: He was one of the worst of J. Edgar Hoover’s toadies.

Daily Show anchorman Jon Stewart: Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak and Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy don’t like Mark Felt. Mark Felt is truly a great man.

I was all over Watergate.

I read the newspaper stories. I watched the Senate Watergate Committee hearings and heard Sam Ervin warn John Ehrlichman that “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” I followed the House Judiciary Committee hearings considering Articles of Impeachment against President Richard Nixon.

When Nixon resigned, I taped his speech by putting my cassette recorder’s microphone right in front of the TV’s tiny speaker. The sound was tinny, but the tape captured the sound of car horns honking in celebration outside my apartment.

I even took a bus to Washington, D.C., and sat in Judge John Sirica’s courtroom through the second day of the Watergate trial of H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and several others.

I read many Watergate books. It’s been about thirty years since I read All the President’s Men. All the time I was reading the book, I was trying to figure out the identity of Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s “deep background” informant from inside the government. Reading the book’s account of one particular meeting between Woodward and Deep Throat, I felt a sudden certainty: I knew who Deep Throat was. It was so obvious, I thought Woodward and his co-author Carl Bernstein were being awfully careless with the anonymity of their secret source.

Through the years, I noted the many lists that folks compiled of people who were suspected of being Deep Throat. A few mentioned the man I knew to be Deep Throat, but most of them brushed past him quickly to dwell on other candidates. I would read the lists and smile quietly. I knew for certain that Deep Throat was FBI Director L. Patrick Gray.

I’m going to be drummed out of the Psychics’ Union for this. Not for being wrong, but for admitting it.

Pat Buchanan was sometimes on the lists of suspects. Last night on MSNBC’s Countdown, he said he knew none of the White House aides on the list could be Deep Throat, because Richard Nixon had helped each of them advance their careers. Apparently they were more loyal to Nixon than to the law. Not too surprising in the Nixon White House.

Well, whatta ya know? The Sinclair Broadcast Group will not block tonight’s episode of Nightline, honoring American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Nightline aired a similar program last year, Sinclair banned it from their stations, including the ABC network affiliate here in Columbus, Ohio.

This year, Sinclair “applauds” reading the names on Memorial Day, “a day set aside to honor our fallen heroes.”

“Unlike Nightline’s reading of the names last year, which coincided with the start of the May ratings sweeps, we feel that this year’s Memorial Day selection is the appropriate setting to remember those who have sacrificed their lives to keep all Americans safe and free,” the Sinclair statement said.

As every American knows, each year on Memorial Day, we honor those who’ve given their lives for our country. The rest of the year, we just shut the hell up about them.

Sinclair also refused to air Saving Private Ryan last year on November 11, Veterans’ Day.

When they banned the Nightline tribute last year, Sinclair didn’t say anything about the ratings sweeps period. Rather, they said Nightline’s tribute “appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq.”

The former Washington bureau chief for Sinclair, Jon Leiberman, was fired after publicly criticizing Sinclair’s plan to run an anti-John Kerry documentary days before last year’s election. For his stand, Leiberman received the Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism earlier this month in Eugene, Ore.

Well, this year, it’s not about politics. It’s all about profit. The controversy over Sinclair’s ban last year gave a substantial boost to Nightline’s ratings. Maybe the higher ratings would be good enough even for sweeps month.

I’m sure glad those guys aren’t on my side.

Via This Modern World, Editor and Publisher discusses a double standard:

Where, in the week after the Great Newsweek Error, is the comparable outrage in the press, in the blogosphere, and at the White House over the military’s outright lying in the coverup of the death of former NFL star Pat Tillman? Where are the calls for apologies to the public and the firing of those responsible? Who is demanding that the Pentagon’s word should never be trusted unless backed up by numerous named and credible sources?

Where is a Scott McClellan lecture on ethics and credibility?

…

Patrick Tillman Sr., the father — a lawyer, as it happens — said he blames high-ranking Army officers for presenting “outright lies” to the family and to the public. “After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this,” he told the Post. “They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy.”

“Maybe lying’s not a big deal anymore,” he said. “Pat’s dead, and this isn’t going to bring him back. But these guys should have been held up to scrutiny, right up the chain of command, and no one has.”

Mary Tillman, the mother, complained to the Post that the government used her son for weeks after his death. She said she was particularly offended when President Bush offered a taped memorial message to Tillman at a Cardinals football game shortly before the presidential election last fall.

The problem isn’t really a double standard. The current administration is above all standards of conduct. That leaves them free to pound on the table about the failings of others.

From PERRspectives Blog, the Bush Mea Culpa Watch:

With the White House and its conservative media goose-steppers pressuring Newsweek for an apology, I thought I might help President Bush keep track of his own: