Richard Nixon’s second term as president consisted primarily of the slow unraveling of the crimes of the first term. George W. Bush’s second term seems increasingly consumed with the lethal consequences of his first term. The emerging theme of the Bush presidency is incompetence. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert:

The president who displayed his contempt for Iraqi militants two years ago with the taunt “bring ’em on” had to go on television Tuesday night to urge Americans not to abandon support for the war that he foolishly started but can’t figure out how to win.

…

The incompetence at the highest levels of government in Washington has undermined the U.S. troops who have fought honorably and bravely in Iraq, which is why the troops are now stuck in a murderous quagmire. If a Democratic administration had conducted a war this incompetently, the Republicans in Congress would be dusting off their impeachment manuals.

The administration seems to have learned nothing in the past two years. Dick Cheney, who told us the troops would be “greeted as liberators,” now assures us that the insurgency is in its last throes. And the president, who never listened to warnings that he was going to war with too few troops, still refuses to acknowledge that there are not enough U.S. forces deployed to pacify Iraq.

Cartoonist Mark Fiore explains what Iraq needs before U.S. troops can come home.

Tom Tomorrow has it wrong, I think — Superman isn’t working for Halliburton. He seems to be undercutting them on price. This is not going to sit well with Dick Cheney.

The Bush Administration complains that we aren’t hearing the good news from Iraq. Their critics point to rising levels of violence that are impossible to ignore.

The truth about the situation in Iraq is more complex than we imagine. For the most part, I don’t think we see even the tip of the iceberg — the news we get is a bit of frost scraped from the tip of the iceberg.

This page lists many kinds of data from Iraq from May 2003 to May 2005. There seem to be some trends — some good, some bad. (I found the graphic labeled “View the Op-Chart” easier to understand than the text data.)

More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq remains a complex mix of tragedy and hope. To give a sense of the ebb and flow, this chart shows data for three key months: May 2003 (the first full month after the fall of Baghdad), June 2004 (the last month before the Coalition Authority gave way to the interim Iraqi government) and May 2005.

Karl Rove’s attempt last week to use the 9/11 attacks on America to divide and conquer is old news, but I’m slow. Speaking to the New York State Conservative Party, Rove said:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

Al Franken says:

The thing I will never forgive this administration for is that we were united after 9/11 and they divided us, for their own petty political purposes. And they’re continuing to do it.

Rove continued:

In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to… submit a petition.

Actually, on September 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld argued against attacking the Taliban. He wanted to attack Iraq, instead.

Government terrorism experts knew almost immediately that it was Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda that had attacked us. Although no one had ever launched an attack quite like the 9/11 hijackings, the experts recognized many elements of al Qaeda’s unique modus operandi. For weeks, intelligence channels had been listening to elevated “chatter” from al Qaeda about “something big.” The passengers lists of the hijacked planes contained the names of known al Qaeda operatives.

Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon when it was hit. And yet, he didn’t want to fight the Taliban. He wanted war in Iraq.

At This Modern World, Billmon says Rove’s lashing out desperately, like a punch drunk boxer:

[Like Mike Tyson], Rove isn’t just telegraphing his punches, he’s also displaying the depths of his fear. The rhetorical ear chewing and head butting is a clear sign the champ doesn’t have the juice any more, and knows it. Rove is trying to get by on sheer intimidation. He’s pushing as many primordial conservative buttons as he can — leaning on them, in fact — in hopes he can once again make the dreaded liberals the story, not the march of folly currently sinking into the Iraqi quicksands.

In one old Bugs Bunny cartoon, a surly construction worker tries to uproot the little grey rabbit from his cozy rabbit hole in order to build a skyscraper on the site. Bugs won’t budge. He fights back to protect “the sanctity of the American home.”

Last week, the sanctity of the American home was dealt a fatal blow by the U.S. Supreme Court.

There’s nothing new about the practice of cities using the power of eminent domain to seize property from its owners for the benefit of other private interests.

Years ago here in Columbus, Ohio, a group of investors called the Capitol South Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation seized and leveled several city blocks south of the Statehouse, displacing or annihilating a number of small businesses, including an interesting old book store that I liked to visit whenever I went downtown. They built a high-end hotel, an outdoor skating rink which has long since been abandoned and demolished, and a new upscale shopping mall.

Rents at the new mall were too upscale for most of the small businesses it displaced. Shopping at the new mall was too upscale for many of the citizens of Columbus, including me. My finances have improved since the mall opened, but there’s not much reason for me to visit the mall downtown. Each time I go there, it seems more of the storefronts are vacant. The upscale stores have moved to newer, fancier malls out in the suburbs. Last time I was there, even the Cinnabon stall — which had long held some unholy power over me — was empty.

More recently, another group of investors called Campus Partners seized several blocks of property along High Street, which runs right past the Ohio State University campus. They evicted the tenants: bars, restaurants, clothing, music and grocery stores, dance clubs, pizza shops — everybody. They tore down every building on both sides of the street and put up lots of chain link fences. The site remained vacant for more than a year because the developers hadn’t yet bothered to line up tenants for the new buildings they planned to put there.

Maybe it’s unfair to suggest that the many OSU riots of recent years had anything to do with the annihilation of so many places where students could go to socialize and let off steam. Or, maybe not.

Construction is currently well underway on the new buildings that will provide upscale student housing and — surprise! — an upscale mall. Everything is supposed to be ready when students return for classes this fall.

As I’ve watched these things happen, I’ve always felt that it was an outrageous abuse of a legitimate government power to take property from one citizen for the private profit of other citizens. I’ve always imagined that some day, the Supreme Court would hear a case about this abuse of power, and would step forward to uphold the sanctity of the American home.

Well, they heard a case. They made a decision.

These words, from an 1879 speech by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe, seem fitting:

If we ever owned the land we own it still, for we never sold it. In the treaty councils the commissioners have claimed that our country had been sold to the Government. Suppose a white man should come to me and say, “Joseph, I like your horses, and I want to buy them.” I say to him, “No, my horses suit me, I will not sell them.” Then he goes to my neighbor, and says to him: “Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.” My neighbor answers, “Pay me the money, and I will sell you Joseph’s horses.” The white man returns to me, and says, “Joseph, I have bought your horses, and you must let me have them.” If we sold our lands to the Government, this is the way they were bought.

Now that’s the law of the land.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich on the attempt to turn PBS into a domestic propaganda network:

Here’s the difference between this year’s battle over public broadcasting and the one that blew up in Newt Gingrich’s face a decade ago: this one isn’t really about the survival of public broadcasting. So don’t be distracted by any premature obituaries for Big Bird. Far from being an endangered species, he’s the ornithological equivalent of a red herring.

…

That doesn’t mean the right’s new assault on public broadcasting is toothless, far from it. But this time the game is far more insidious and ingenious. The intent is not to kill off PBS and NPR but to castrate them by quietly annexing their news and public affairs operations to the larger state propaganda machine that the Bush White House has been steadily constructing at taxpayers’ expense. If you liked the fake government news videos that ended up on local stations - or thrilled to the “journalism” of Armstrong Williams and other columnists who were covertly paid to promote administration policies - you’ll love the brave new world this crowd envisions for public TV and radio.

There’s only one obstacle standing in the way of the coup. Like Richard Nixon, another president who tried to subvert public broadcasting in his war to silence critical news media, our current president may be letting hubris get the best of him. His minions are giving any investigative reporters left in Washington a fresh incentive to follow the money.

That money is not the $100 million that the House still threatens to hack out of public broadcasting’s various budgets. Like the theoretical demise of Big Bird, this funding tug-of-war is a smoke screen that deflects attention from the real story. Look instead at the seemingly paltry $14,170 that, as Stephen Labaton of The New York Times reported on June 16, found its way to a mysterious recipient in Indiana named Fred Mann. Mr. Labaton learned that in 2004 Kenneth Tomlinson, the Karl Rove pal who is chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, clandestinely paid this sum to Mr. Mann to monitor his PBS bête noire, Bill Moyers’s “Now.”

Now, why would Mr. Tomlinson pay for information that any half-sentient viewer could track with TiVo? Why would he hire someone in Indiana? Why would he keep this contract a secret from his own board? Why, when a reporter exposed his secret, would he try to cover it up by falsely maintaining in a letter to an inquiring member of the Senate, Byron Dorgan, that another CPB executive had “approved and signed” the Mann contract when he had signed it himself? If there’s a news story that can be likened to the “third-rate burglary,” the canary in the coal mine that invited greater scrutiny of the Nixon administration’s darkest ambitions, this strange little sideshow could be it.

Read the whole article.

Washington Post reporter Dana Milbanks on the Denver Three:

Individually, they are ordinary citizens and political unknowns. But collectively, they are the Denver Three — a political sensation in Colorado that is causing agita to a White House that has bested far more sophisticated foes.

The Denver Three’s quest: to learn the identity of the “Mystery Man” who, impersonating a Secret Service agent, forcibly removed them from a taxpayer-funded Social Security event with President Bush three months ago because of a “No More Blood for Oil” bumper sticker on one of their cars.

Hold it just a second — those so-called “town meetings” on Social Security, where the audiences were pre-screened to agree with the Bush privatization plan — those fraudulent road shows were taxpayer-funded? Grrrrr…

It started when the three got tickets to Bush’s March 21 Social Security town hall meeting in Colorado. They flirted with protesting at the event and wore “Stop the Lies” T-shirts underneath their business attire. But Weise worried about getting arrested.

Even so, they were identified after they arrived as potential troublemakers, and then forcefully removed by a man who, they had been told, was a Secret Service agent. Only later did they learn that the man wasn’t an agent at all. The Secret Service launched an investigation (it’s a crime to impersonate a law enforcement official), and the agency and the White House have both learned the impostor’s identity — but they’re not talking.

No matter. The Denver Three say, in a memo they’re distributing, “ALL ARROWS POINT TO WHITE HOUSE.”

The White House says that’s bunk. But a series of similar events have left the administration vulnerable to such charges. In February, a Bush spokesman blamed an “overzealous volunteer” for a 42-person blacklist used at a Bush event in North Dakota. Complaints have also come this year from New Hampshire and Arizona, and during the campaign, event participants were once required to sign loyalty oaths for admission.

The Republican Party has “overzealous volunteer” training camps scattered across the country, turning out a rugged band of Freedom Fighters. They fight freedom wherever they find it, ever ready to stamp out free speech, free thought, and any concept of fair play.

The conviction of 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen for his part in the murders, forty-one years ago, of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner reminds me of a story told in the Ken Burns documentary, Baseball. The first Commissioner of Baseball was a former federal judge named Kenesaw Mountain Landis:

As a judge, he had once sentenced an aging bank robber to fifteen years in jail.

“Your honor,” the man said, “I’m 72 years old. I can’t serve that long.”

Landis replied, “Well, do the best you can.”

Justice may sleep, and sleep for a long time, but it still lives.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne says maybe the Bush Administration didn’t lie to get us into war with Iraq. Maybe, he suggests, they just don’t know what they’re doing:

The notion that the president led the country into war through indirection or dishonesty is not the most damaging criticism of the administration. The worst possibility is that the president and his advisers believed their own propaganda. They did not prepare the American people for an arduous struggle because they honestly didn’t expect one.

How else to explain the fact that the president and his lieutenants consistently played down the costs of the endeavor, the number of troops required, the difficulties of overcoming tensions among the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds? Were they lying? The more logical explanation is that they didn’t know what they were talking about.

…

The assertion of the “Downing Street Memo” that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of invasion has understandably become a rallying point for the war’s opponents. But in some ways more devastating are other recently disclosed documents in which British officials warned that “there was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” The British worried at the time that “U.S. military plans are virtually silent” on the fact that “a postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise.”

…

Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska says in the current issue of U.S. News & World Report that “the White House is completely disconnected from reality” and that “it’s like they’re just making it up as they go along.” Unfortunately, the evidence of the past suggests that Hagel’s acerbic formulation may be exactly right. Those who still see the invasion of Iraq as a noble mission don’t need to protect the policy from the war’s critics. They need to rescue it from its architects.

I thought the invasion of Iraq was a terrible idea. Unfortunately, history doesn’t offer do-overs. No matter how bad an idea it was to go in, we are in, and we must deal with that fact. I keep looking for evidence of competence from our government, and I keep getting disappointed.

Before we invaded Iraq, I had a heated argument with a friend who supported the invasion. He asked derisively whether I thought we would lose the war.

I said, “We’ll win the war. But then we’ll lose the peace. Which means we’ll lose the war.”

Please, please, please — prove me wrong.

Right after the election last year, George W. Bush said, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.” I think he bought himself some Twizzlers.

Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin:

When the president of the United States says jump, people jump.

But with President Bush, it seems like more and more often they’re jumping in the opposite direction.

Polls show that all of Bush’s talk about Social Security has caught the public’s attention — except that the more they hear about his proposals, the less they like them.

Bush’s increasing insistence that things are going well in Iraq has been accompanied by a dramatic loss of support for the war.

And the latest backfire would appear to be in Iran, in response to Bush’s denunciation last week of Iranian elections as a sham.

Brian Murphy writes for the Associated Press: “Iran’s spy chief used just two words to respond to White House ridicule of last week’s presidential election: ‘Thank you.’ His sarcasm was barely hidden. The backfire on Washington was more evident.

“The sharp barbs from President Bush were widely seen in Iran as damaging to pro-reform groups because the comments appeared to have boosted turnout among hard-liners in Friday’s election — with the result being that an ultraconservative now is in a two-way showdown for the presidency.”

The consensus view in the press today is clear: Bush is losing his touch.

America slaps its forehead and says, “We could have had a good president!” Yes, well, you should have thought of that on Election Day!

I feel sorry for Bill Frist, a little.

As a physician, he must have developed a bit of a scientific mindset — enough to respect the facts some of the time, at least, when backed into a corner by them. Embarrassed by the Terri Schiavo autopsy report showing his video diagnosis from the Senate floor had been wrong, Frist appeared on the Today Show and denied he had ever made such a diagnosis.

As a politician, Florida Governor Jeb Bush is not bound by the scientist’s respect for evidence and logic. When the Schiavo autopsy showed no evidence of trauma or abuse, he leapt into action and put a prosecutor on the case.

Jeb is the eternal optimist. Despite polls showing public revulsion over the way politicians have attempted to feed on the misery of Terri Schiavo’s family, he’s sure there’s a political bonanza in there somewhere.

In March, while a memo circulated among Republican senators calling the Terri Schiavo case “a great political issue,” Dr. Bill Frist, a cardiologist and the Senate Republican Leader, stood up “more as a physician than as a United States Senator,” to voice his opinion on the issue. He had spent an hour watching a videotape of Schiavo, he said. Despite the contrary opinions of doctors who had actually examined and treated the patient over fifteen years, he concluded that Terri Schiavo was not in a persistant vegetative state.

In a blog entry at the time, I wrote:

Either Frist is one hell of a doctor, or he’s a very poor excuse for a man.

Well, now we know.

Via Atrios: Billmon says that, for all our faults, we’re still quantitatively better than Stalin.

If the inhabitants of greater Dachau could ignore the smoke billowing from the chimneys of the invisible, unmentionable camp up on the hill, why shouldn’t we expect most Americans to ignore what’s going on in Guantanamo, or Bagram or Abu Ghraib — or any of the other islands in the archipelago?

Conservatives, of course, froth at the use of such terms, which is why the propaganda machine immediately zeroed in on Durbin’s reference to an extreme nationalist party that flourished in a certain central European country in the 1930s and early 1940s. Just as they popped a vein over Amnesty International’s use of a Russian word for forced labor camp.

Strictly on the facts of the case, they are correct: The American archipelago is just a series of flyspecks compared to its Soviet predecessor. At its peak, the Soviet gulags held an estimated 2.5 million prisoners. The number of deaths — by torture, execution, disease or deliberate starvation — has to be counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The KGB, meanwhile, set a record for the assembly-line murder of political prisoners that I don’t think has been matched since, not even by that wannabe Saddam.

As for the central European extremist leader, well, we all know what he did.

I guess that’s enough to satisify most conservatives. (Maybe they should print up some bumper stickers: “America: Still better than Stalin.”) But some of us have slightly higher expectations of a modern parliamentary democracy. Quantitatively, the case against moral equivalence may be open and shut, but qualitatively . . . well, it’s getting a little more dicey.

The Flintstones and The Jetsons are far more interesting now than they were when they first aired roughly forty years ago. It’s not because they’re funny or witty. It’s not because they have any lasting artistic value. It’s certainly not because they show us anything about the past or the future.

They’re interesting today because they provide an unwitting document of the American world view in the early 1960s. As someone who lived through the 1960s, that’s an embarrassing thing to admit.

I picked up a special edition of Life magazine called “Greatest Americans.” It’s based on a Discovery Channel poll and program series that asks viewers to nominate the hundred greatest Americans. That sounded interesting to me — I enjoy the Discovery Channel.

What we have here is another unwitting and embarrassing document of the American mind in the year 2005. We don’t seem to know much history. Even the categories come off looking pretty silly. Some names definitely belong on the list, and others are debatable, at least. But, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that this is our list of 100 Greatest Americans.”

Great Leaders

• George W. Bush
• Laura Bush
• Bill Clinton
• Hillary Clinton
• George H. W. Bush
• Barbara Bush
• Ronald Reagan
• Jimmy Carter
• Richard M. Nixon
• Lyndon Baines Johnson
• Robert F. Kennedy
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
• John F. Kennedy
• Harry S. Truman
• Dwight D. Eisenhower
• Theodore Roosevelt
• Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Abraham Lincoln
• Thomas Jefferson
• Alexander Hamilton
• George Washington
• Colin Powell
• Condoleezza Rice

Great Statesmen

• John Edwards
• Barack Obama
• Rudolph Giuliani

Great Military Heroes

• George Patton
• Audie Murphy

Great Religious Leaders

• Billy Graham
• Joseph Smith

Great Activists

• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Rosa Parks
• Malcolm X
• Frederick Douglass
• Harriet Tubman
• Cesar Chavez
• Helen Keller
• Susan B. Anthony

Great Innovators

• Thomas Edison
• Benjamin Franklin
• Alexander Graham Bell
• Jonas Salk
• George Washington Carver
• Nikola Tesla
• Albert Einstein
• Henry Ford
• Carl Sagan
• Walt Disney
• George Lucas
• Steven Jobs
• Bill Gates

Great Adventurers

• John Glenn
• Charles Yeager
• Neil Armstrong
• Charles Lindbergh
• Orville and Wilbur Wright
• Amelia Earhart

Great Entertainers

• Marilyn Monroe
• John Wayne
• James Stewart
• Tom Cruise
• Tom Hanks
• Bob Hope
• Bill Cosby
• Katherine Hepburn
• Lucille Ball
• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Christopher Reeve
• Steven Spielberg
• Michael Moore
• Mel Gibson
• Clint Eastwood

Great Hosts

• Johnny Carson
• Oprah Winfrey
• Rush Limbaugh
• Phil McGraw
• Ellen Degeneres

Great Music Makers

• Frank Sinatra
• Elvis Presley
• Michael Jackson
• Madonna
• Ray Charles

Great Writers

• Mark Twain
• Maya Angelou

Great Athletes

• Jackie Robinson
• Muhammad Ali
• Babe Ruth
• Lance Armstrong
• Jesse Owens
• Michael Jordan
• Tiger Woods
• Pat Tillman
• Brett Favre

Great Entrepreneurs

• Howard Hughes
• Andrew Carnegie
• Hugh Hefner
• Donald Trump
• Sam Walton
• Martha Stewart

Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen on our misdirected obsession with testing:

And what does this metastasizing testing, for every subject, at every level, at every time of the year, do to kids? It has to mean that students absorb the message that learning is a joyless succession of hoops through which they must jump, rather than a way of understanding and mastering the world. Every question has one right answer; the measure of a person is a number. Being insightful, or creative, or, heaven forfend, counterintuitive counts for nothing. This is: (a) benighted; (b) ridiculous; (c) sad; (d) all of the above.

You know the answer.

Of course it is important to know that all students have learned to read, that everyone can manage multiplication. But constant testing will no more address the problems with our education system than constantly putting an overweight person on the scale will cure obesity. Proponents trumpet the end to social promotion. They are less outspoken about what comes next, about what provisions are to be made for a student who is held back twice and then drops out of school. The bureaucrats who have built their programs on test results seem to have lost sight of any overarching point of education. Who cares if the light comes on in their eyes if the numbers are good?

The New York Times Book Review on the unending hatred for Bill Clinton:

Millions of Americans despise Bill Clinton. They have done so since he became a presence in national politics in the early 1990’s, and they continue to do so today, more than four years after his retirement from public office.

The passion of the Clinton haters is a phenomenon without equal in recent American politics. It is not based on any specific policies that Clinton promoted or implemented during his years in office. It is almost entirely personal. In its persistence and intensity, it goes far beyond anything that comparable numbers of people have felt about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or either of the presidents Bush. It surpasses even the liberals’ longstanding detestation of Richard Nixon. The only political obsession comparable to it in the past century is the hatred that a significant minority of Americans felt for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In this respect the phenomenon is all the more puzzling. Roosevelt made enormous and sometimes reckless changes in the American government and economy, and when his critics loathed him for it, he loathed them back. “They are unanimous in their hate for me” he said of them in his 1936 re-election campaign, “and I welcome their hatred.” Clinton, on the other hand, was a centrist who undertook no dramatic transformations of society or government and, what was more, showed himself to be an instinctive conciliator who believed in compromise almost to a fault.

Viewed in historical perspective, Clinton-hatred is not easy to explain. Certainly the Monica Lewinsky affair does not explain it. The people who detested the president after that dalliance became public were essentially the same ones who had detested him in 1992. They merely grew louder.

There is, of course, a simpler argument that some Clinton haters use to explain the persistence of their passion. They say that he was, to put it bluntly, a very bad president -- immature, self-absorbed, indecisive in domestic affairs and disastrously weak when it came to representing America in the affairs of the world.

It is this argument that John F. Harris utterly demolishes in “The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House,” his thorough, readable and scrupulously honest account of the Clinton years. Harris, who was The Washington Post’s White House correspondent from 1995 through 2000, is no Clinton apologist. His portraits of the decision-making process he witnessed reveal a president who indeed lacked discipline in his daily routine; examined and re-examined policy choices endlessly, to the frustration of his advisers; and was fearful about the use of military force abroad, even in behalf of the most defensible causes.

But over the course of 500 pages, Harris also documents the history of a president who, however frustrating he may have been in style and method, usually made the right choices in the end — even when he felt that he was hurting himself politically. The 1993 spending cuts and tax increases, over which he agonized for months, ultimately reduced the federal deficit, reassured financial markets and set in motion the prosperity that marked the second half of the decade. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which Clinton signed against the advice of his closest Democratic allies, turned out to be the most successful domestic policy initiative of the 1990’s.

I was talking up the latest Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith, a few weeks ago, before I’d seen the movie.

Well, I finally saw the movie, a week and a half ago.

So, uh… just forget I said anything, okay?

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.

Since Monday, when Apple announced it will switch the CPUs in their Macintosh computers from the current PowerPCs to Intel Pentium-type chips, I have wandered the highways and byways of the internet, sharing my view that the move dooms the Macintosh, and explaining why I think so.

Late last night, I suddenly realized I was trying to convince people to join me in my gloomy assessment. And I realized that nothing good would come of that effort.

Only time will tell whether my prediction is correct. It’s entirely possible that I’ll be proven wrong. If so, what am I doing now but annoying people?

Even if time shows I’m right, what good will come of my prediction? Certainly I’m not going to persuade Apple to reverse course.

I also realized that I’ve been blurring together two separate predictions:

1. That Apple sales will suffer severely, and
2. That Apple will join Microsoft in extending DRM Everywhere, and taking control out of the hands of the computer owner.

I’m more worried about the second prediction. I surely hope I’m wrong about that. I love my Macintosh. But if Apple switches to a locked-down computing experience, I will go rough it with the Linux hippies in the Land of the Free.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

I’m not the only person who sees Monday’s announcement as the end of the Macintosh. Via Backup Brain, here’s Jerry Kindall:

Mark my words: within five years, there will be no Macintosh. There will probably be no Apple. Bill Gates will have his last little sliver of marketshare. He’s sitting in his office in Redmond, not ten miles from where I am right now, cackling with glee. Apple’s only hope is to get out of the computer business entirely, and that’s too speculative to hang their entire company on. The Macintosh today has been declared end-of-life and the userbase is being transitioned to Windows. I wouldn’t be surprised to see many small Mac developers decide to jump to Windows development today.

I remember Jerry from BBS days, when we were both using the Apple II family of computers. We’ve both been around for a while. We’ve both seen handwriting on walls.

I wish Steve Jobs had bit the bullet today, and announced in plain English that Apple Computer is dropping out of the computer business.

That’s not what he said, but I’m convinced that’s what happened today. Normally, I would add that I hope I’ll be proven wrong. This time, I’m not so sure that success in Apple’s transition to monopolist Intel’s CPUs would be preferable to the end of the company’s computer line.

The point of the microcomputer revolution that started in the 1970s was that ordinary people could have complete control of computer power that had previously been available only to governments and big corporations. Once that revolution was well entrenched, Microsoft and other software vendors started trying to take that control back, with things like product activation, active updates and “digital rights management” (DRM) everywhere. Apple has always been an oasis from these anti-customer efforts. However, one apparent reason for Apple’s move to Intel now is that Intel is building DRM capabilities into their CPUs, helping ensure that, although you may have paid for the computer, someone else will control what you can do with it.

In the past year or so, Macintosh sales seemed to be inching up. Now, sales of existing Macs are going to crater. The new machines won’t ship until about the time that Microsoft’s continually-postponed Longhorn operating system does. The first Macintels will ship in about a year. The entire line won’t be converted for two and a half years. During that time, nobody will want to buy machines that Apple has already abandoned. Promises of continuing support for Macs based on PowerPC chips aren’t worth the hot air they’re comprised of.

Whether Steve Jobs said it or not, Apple Computer ceased to be a computer company today.

Time to investigate Linux.

1984:

2005:

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

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.

Neil Armstrong is threatening to sue his barber — make that former barber:

Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, used to go to Marx’s Barber Shop in Lebanon about once a month for a cut. That stopped when he learned that owner Marx Sizemore had collected his hair clippings from the floor and sold them in May 2004 to a collector.

That barber is a real class act.

Shortly after Charlie Chaplin died, his body was stolen from his grave and held for ransom. These days, it would have been offered on eBay as the ultimate Chaplin collectible.

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.

How do you type that frenzied shriek that a crowd of rabid fans made at a Beatles concert?

My first impression is that it’s “Eeeeeeeeeeee,” with maybe a lot of exclamation points at the end, but that seems rather dull and leaden, somehow, there on the screen. If you look at film of the crowds at those concerts, they’re shouting “John! Paul! George! Ringo! I looove you!” and other things. “Eeeeeeeeeeee” doesn’t really do it justice.

At Bruce Springsteen concerts, people shout “Bruuuuce!” and it sounds like they’re booing. Now, that must have taken some time to get used to. If his audience ever turns against him, Bruce won’t know until he sees incoming rotten tomatoes and other produce.

“Aiiieeeeee” has some energy, but it sounds like something a guy would say as his still-beating heart is plucked from his chest in an Indiana Jones movie — there is a strong negative vibe that doesn’t really work for the Beatles’ fan sound. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” as repeated by ten thousand screaming teenagers might actually be close, but it just looks silly there in type.

“Aaaarrrggghhh!” — well, that’s not even close, is it? “Eeeeeeyaaaaa!” looks promising, but it seems kind of hostile. This is harder than it looks.

Aw, heck. I’m gonna go with my original instinct.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Kate Bush is finally releasing a new album! After twelve years! Eeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

I guess this news is almost six months old, but I just heard about it. Eeeeeeee!!!

Kate Bush, if you’re not familiar with her work — eeeee!!! — is a singer/songwriter from England. She was phenomenally popular in Europe during the 1980s and early 1990s. She gained a cult following in the United States, and I was one of the cult.

I first heard her on November 7, 1977 — eeee!! — on Saturday Night Live. She must have made some sort of impression — eee! — because it was more than three years before I heard her again, on December 17, 1980, and I remembered her name and the title of one of her songs. I put a Kate Bush page on my cobweb site (it’s old and dusty, see, because it hasn’t been updated for a long time) and told the story of how I got hooked on the music of Kate Bush.

In the years since Kate went silent, I sorrowfully searched for other singers to take her place. I found Sarah McLachlan and Loreena McKennitt and Sinéad O’Connor and Tori Amos and the Roches and others, all wonderful. But I’ve always hoped to hear more from Kate Bush. Now, at long last, my wish may come true. Wooooohoooooooooooooooo!!!!!!

“Wooooohoooooo” is pretty good.

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.

Had she lived, Marilyn Monroe would be 79 years old today.

This quote is attributed to her:

Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.

Recommended: The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot and The Misfits. The first two are brilliant comedies. The Misfits is not a comedy. Marilyn is extraordinarily good in all three. She had talent.