It seems like this frog will keep on boiling until we get some kind of cataclismic event - a Great Depression, or something like that.

Of course, if/when that happens, the shouting heads on Fox News will blame it on Clinton, so maybe nothing will get done even then.

Kevin Drum,

One source of rising insecurity is "free" trade. Jobs lost due to offshoring (whether individual jobs or whole factories) help account for this rising insecurity. Yet you're a fan of "free" trade. How do you explain this contradiction?

Or maybe a nuclear test in North Korea?

You may remember Jacob from his guest blogging last year with Paul Pierson after the publication of their book Off Center, an exploration of how the activist base of the Republican Party has managed to pull the GOP so far away from the center of American politics without suffering at the polls.

You're making no sense here. If the American people continue to vote for the GOP even while they support the economic policies you hate so much, doesn't that mean the GOP's economic policies ARE the center? I think you're just imposing your own liberal policy view on your view of the center. I believe the American people (except for the fringe left like Michael Moore) want the same thing GOP wants - smaller government, lower taxes, and less regulations on business. Since the American people continually vote the GOP into power, this supports my view the Republican party is the party of the center while the Democratic Party is the party of the angry fringe left.

Nah, if we listen to Bush and his Administration, the economy is great, just fine, and more robust than anyone expects. So remember to vote for the Bush Republicans, and let them provide us all with more prosperity. If gas were up, strangely enough, it would be all over for the Republicans; it will be after the election. If you're tired of this type of prosperity, vote and get out the vote and support the Democrats who will provide some counter-balance to the Republicans.

---
want the same thing GOP wants
---

Gay sex with underage pages?

Since the economy is booming, peace and democracy are breaking out all over the world, and morality and core traditional values are gloriously resurgent in the homeland, the whiny liberals find some not even second, not even third, but fourth order effect to complain about.

You guys really need to get some anti-BDS pill.

---
peace and democracy
---

Presumably represented by the number of tortured and mutilated corpses we recover on any given day.

Or maybe a nuclear test in North Korea?

Geez, wait for it. We're still assembling all our "It's All Bush's Fault" talking points. After all, if Gore or Kerry were president, we all know North Korea would have completely abandoned all ambitions to have nuclear weapons.

Looks like North Korea is officially nuclear. They are claiming they conducted an underground test, and it looks like they aren't bluffing:

The U.S. Geological Survey said it had detected a 4.2 magnitude quake in North Korea at 10:35 local time (0135 GMT) on Monday, confirming a similar report from South Korea.

Maybe that was Rove's October Surprise?

---
morality and core traditional values
---

exemplified by our re-affirmation of second amendment principles in Nickel Mines, PA

And the United Staesa batallion shy with no troops to put on the DMZ if the shit hits the fan on the Chosin.

*Unites States a batallion shy - I dunno what the fuck happened there.

A major part of the problem is that many American's understanding of economics and personal finance is so poor that they do not understand how the GOP's economic policies hurt them.

Very few high schools still teach economics, and the math skills of most Americans are so poor that they cannot understand or make informed decisions about which political party's economic proposals are better for them.

Kevin - are you going to start a Nuke thread?

Since the economy is booming,

Um, the whole point of this post is to point out that, for most people, no it isn't. In fact, that well-known whiny lefty rag called The Economist has a story on just that, here

Or, you could continue to revel in your own dishonesty. Your choice.

---
we all know North Korea would have completely abandoned all ambitions to have nuclear weapons.
---

Someone needs to tell the NKoreans that Reagan's increased defense spending caused the Soviets to implode.

I wonder why it doesn't seem to be working with the NKoreans? It's a puzzlement.

Ha the old trick that only the liberal elites can decide if the people are well off. The people themselves may feel just fine economically, but if the elites say that they aren't on the basis of some obscure statistical measure, by golly the people are not fine. Who are the people to decide for themselves?

the math skills of most Americans are so poor that they cannot understand

One of the Community College courses I teach is basic Statistics (Math 115 - like I said basic - I'm not a statistician, or a Mathemetician, I'm a scientist. We just take a lot of Calc and Trig) I will attest to slipping Math skills. We are nearly a chapter behind because they were ill-prepared, and some of the less able have dropped, so we are picking up the pace a bit, but a chapter and a half behind at six weeks in? We haven't even got to the hard part yet.

And the United States a battalion shy with no troops to put on the DMZ if the shit hits the fan on the Chosin.

Are you suggesting that a U.S. ground war with North Korea would be the best option here? If not, what difference does it make?

People keep complaining about our losses in Iraq, and quagmires, and then turn around and complain that we don't have enough troops to invade Iran or North Korea. Huh?

No, but it would be nice to have that batallion back to put on alert on the DMZ, since South Korea is our ally and trading partner and all.

I am saying that we have real bona fide threats in the world and the current administration has pissed away our standing and broke our Army and our Marine Corps and now they are not there when an ally faces a credible threat.

God no, I am not advocating a ground war. Hell no. Hell No!!! But as it sits today, we do not have the deterent capability to stand with our ally.

---
Ha the old trick that only the liberal elites can decide if the people are well off.
---

And only Bush can tell the Iraqi's which of their orifices require more Republican freedom crammed in them.

@alex on October 9, 2006 at 1:10 AM

I have no idea how Kevin explains the contradiction, but with nothing more than an undergrad econ major (really nothing more than Econ 100, or was it 101?) I can explain the contradiction easily.

Free trade is theoretically a net benefit to an economy -- you can demonstrate this with just a little math, or if your so inclined, with graphs and triangles. But it's not a benefit to everyone in the economy. So for everyone to feel like they've benefited from free trade, the winners have to compensate the losers.

In very broad terms, typically what happens is production moves to where it's more efficient, so the producers lose out. But the product is cheaper, so consumers win. For a typical Chinese-made product in Wal-Mart -- Low Prices, Always! -- there are millions of small winners and only a few losers, the people who used to make similar products in the US.

If the winners never get around to compensating the losers, then saying "Free trade is a benefit to our country," is kind of pointless.

s/your/you're/

I hate when I typo a mistake so commonly made. :)

For the NK test deniers, here's the seismic plot:
http://aslwww.cr.usgs.gov/Seismic_Data/telemetry_data/INCN_24hr.html

For the 400 kt doubters:
http://www.iris.iris.edu/HQ/Bluebook/chapter5.magnitude.html
(realistically, a 4.0 magnitude quake figures out to roughly 1 kt - in other words, probably a dud - recall there was similar controversy over the Pakistan tests - and the design likely has the same origins - - A. Q. Khan.).

Global Citizen:

I don't think you can deter a crazy person. I suspect that if North Korea decided to attack South Korea, it really wouldn't matter how many troops the U.S. had lined up on the border.

I understand that North Korea may have "sleeper" agents all through South Korea, too. As well as a lot of artillery and rockets aimed at Seoul.

I read that we're reducing troops in Korea from 37,000 to 25,000 by the end of 2007. Would those 12,000 extra ground troops make all the difference if North Korean armies come across that border?

I don't think you can deter a crazy person.

That's certainly been true of Bush.

It has been pretty common knowledge among the intel community that the NorK government had the inspiration, had invested the perspiration and was just waiting for the motivation.

The time was right with the U.S. military weakened and preoccupied.

If a crazy person couldn't be detered just a little bit, the Armistice wuld not have held for 50+ years.

The Major says that the nuke they blew was 1/25th the payload of a Titan II if it was indeed 400 KT.

Some references:

The Hiroshima bomb was about 15 kilotons. The Nagasaki one was about 22. The former ("Little Boy") was a U-235 gun-type bomb. The latter ("Fat Man") was a plutonium implosion type. A gun bomb is long and thin, while an implosion bomb is mostly round, hence the name.

As Global Citizen says, the Titan II carried a very large thermonuclear warhead (the W53) that yielded about 9 Megatons (9,000 Kilotons). No current warhead in anyone's arsenal is anywhere near this big. As guidance systems have gotten better, warheads have gotten smaller.

The Titan II was a dual-use thermo-nuclear device. Ground burst was to destroy infrastructure, and air burst was to dill people and leave the infrastructure intact. (Like that much radiation would have left it habitable!) This is the size device that would have brought on a nuclear winter.

North Korea's nuke isn't a dud!
And the world reacts.
dailykos : We blame GWB, GHWB, RWR, GRF, RMN, and DDE.
redstate : We blame WJC, JEC, LBJ, JFK, HST, and FDR.
GWB : Heads we bomb Caracas / Tails we bomb Damascus.

Point of interest: The world record for a nuclear weapon was the Tsar Bomb, detonated in the arctic by the Soviets in 1961. It yielded 50 Megatons.

It had no real use except for propaganda, and only one was ever made.

More information

After SAC became the Strategic Command, and the Soviet Union was over, there was a big Do at Rhein Mein one time tht some of my husbands old Soviet counterparts attended. I left that function feeling a whole hell of a lot different about the people we considered the enemy for so long. It's hard to fear someopne who tells jokes and passes the salt.

I am betting China is putting troops on the border, threatening to cut off the billion tons of oil and coal that power North Lorea, curtail food aid and impose other sanctions. Chine tried to disuade them, and failed. You know Beijing is pissed.

And I bet that Japanese diplomats are enroute right now.

The next 24-48 hours are going to be interesting.

I do not find the N. Korea regime attractive in the least sense, but why do people immediately frame state leaders who oppose the US will as "crazy".

Their people may be dieing in droves but, so far, the regime has survived in an over-policed, propagandized populace.

Maybe without the distraction of Iraq, $500 billion, and international engagement we could have got Korea to implode by now.

Which brings me back to the thread and why glib commentators like Friedman so annoy.

The world isn't flat, economically; far from it. We're effectively exporting slave, slave-shop and underpaid labor, as well as huge amounts of pollution and inefficient use of resources. We get lower prices, rising profits, falling wages and ever-higher public and private debt in return.

For Jay and his ilk, US citizens have an unrealistic idea of where they are both presently in the income scale or where they might be in their lifetime. They are also lied to by the Republicans and seem to believe it -- so far. So middle-class certainly don't vote for self-interest as they have proven to be relatively better off under Dem governance.

At the last election, more blue-collars voted Republican than Dem, and more graduates voted Dem than Republican for the first time.

Very interestiing.

Keep regurgitating the party line, Jay.

On bankruptcies, also rising incidence caused by medical charges. What a nice economy.

As about risk shift, there have already been studies to show that executive pay has little corelation to coprorate ptofitability or growth so it's probably safe to say it doesn't correlate to risk either.

So in the world lottery, because the power of reward pretty much lies in the same hands as those upper-level execs, they can steal enough in a few short years to guarantee their comfortable retirement, while those at rising risk of loss of job, sliding reward, exponential health and education costs see the least of the pie.

"Since the economy is booming, peace and democracy are breaking out all over the world, and morality and core traditional values are gloriously resurgent in the homeland..."

Wow, who wouldn't like to live on THAT planet? You can almost taste the glory.

Let's have a coca-cola, hold hands and sing a song...

Yes, something about opium production in Afghanistan, and pipelines, and the coca trade in Columbia. Up with people!

Here is a NorK post.

Kenji --

don't you mean "Up the people" ?

May be not. That would be a British derogatory. But I thought I heard GW saying it. Probably learned it from Blair!

Hey, was Paul Pierson the guest blogger that got torn to pieces in the comments last year? Or was it someone else?

I am an economic idiot, so excuse this question:

Is it a coincidence that risk has been shifted to the saving/wage-earning class in the thirty plus years after they floated the dollar off of gold?

I remember someone who got taken to the woodshed and kevin told us to be nice. We told Kevin we certainly would not and if he couldn't take it he shouldn't hang his ass over the plate. Wish I could remember the name. I can't imagine that guest blogger returning, but I jumped out of an airplane once, too.

I leave econ to the voodoo priests in the social sciences building. But I think we have been off the Gold Standard for about half a century or so. I read somewhere that this is the longest time period in history that money has never been so far removed from it's metal roots.

*never = ever

The international gold standard, currency backed by gold convertibility, only lasted from 1871 to 1935 latest. My education is British so I know UK convertibility ended in 1914, with Churchill trying to return Sterling to the standard in the late 1920s.

Gold is just another commodity that some people apply magical or alchemical properties to. It's really confidence in the government that counts. (Yeah, there's a loke in there somewhere.)

However, it's no coincidence about the shift in risk. This arises from lax public and corporate accounting laws that allow the costs of pensions, particulalry, to be hidden. The underfunding of corporate pensions has been well reported at times, but there has been no responding legislation while the fat cats run off with the money. Public sector pension funds are also way underfunded, probably in excess of $300 billion. Smoke and mirrors with social security and the military appropriations complicate it even more.

The taxpayers will pick up the bill while our ex-legislators draw their inflationproofed pensions.

I tell ya, Global, it's in the water!

A loke = a joke

Well, it isn't going to un-detonate that NorK Nuke if I pull an all-nighter, and it would be hard enough to stay awake in a graduate colloquium on inferential statistics on a full nights sleep. I don't want to try it on none.

Goodnight.

Lots of info out there on pension underfunding. So, by running budget deficits, we're not just robbing the future generations, we're also robbing ourselves. Now how intelligent is that?

Corporate pension plans underfunding:

http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/17/retirement/pension_problems/index.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/retirement/2004-06-17-pension-shortfall_x.htm

public sector state and local underfunded $490 billion:

http://www.laborresearch.org/story.php?id=403

Federal pensions underfunded $4 trillion (TRILLION)?:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5454161&ft=1&f=1017

Pure genius.

But nobody cares. We're robbing us blind!

Interesting, though maybe this means people will start saving again.

Wait for it. We're still assembling all our "It's All Bush's Fault" talking points. After all, if Gore or Kerry were president, we all know North Korea would have completely abandoned all ambitions to have nuclear weapons.
You may find more on it:http://www.qqak.info/RISK.html
The taxpayers will pick up the bill while our ex-legislators draw their inflationproofed pensions.

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It sounds like Mr. Hacker has captured the modern American conservative mindset perfectly:

Socialize the costs and privatize the gains.

I look forward to reading his book.

Wouldn't a world war be good for the economy--put everyone to work (I mean those who are left)?

Oh, and I forgot to mention in connection with jobs created as a result of war: Al, I'm recommending you for the position of digging through the rubble for bodies.

I remember someone who got taken to the woodshed and kevin told us to be nice. We told Kevin we certainly would not and if he couldn't take it he shouldn't hang his ass over the plate. Wish I could remember the name. I can't imagine that guest blogger returning, but I jumped out of an airplane once, too.

Why is everyone looking at me?

Kevin,

The thread here seems to have gotten a bit tangled. I don't blame you if you've stopped reading. But as for your original point, re "The Great Risk Shift," I will say again that most Americans (most voting Americans, in particular) are confident and comfortable with their economic situation. Unemployment is at 4.6%, gas prices are dropping, and the market is up.

"The Great Risk Shift" is another in a near-endless series of books that seek to prove that Americans are one step away from starvation. What worries most Americans is the $30,000+ in credit card debt they've racked up, plus the mortgage on their $200,000 home, plus the payments and maintenance for the three cars they own.

I wonder if there is anything except a few more bruising defeats at the polls before liberals realize that they can't play FDR any more. Not if they want to win, that is. We'll see.

Mr. Vanneman exemplifies the self-delusional conservative, who upon discovering a room full of horse shit, revels in the fact there is a pony in there somewhere. Unemployment figures have become meaningless under this Administration, as the numbers do not reflect those who have stopped looking and those people who are underemployed (e.g. Phds flipping burgers at Wendys). The stock market (Dow Jones Industrial Average) is just now getting back to where it was under Bill Clinton and the broader NASDAQ still isn't anywhere near where it was. Every child born today inherits around $37,000 (the birth tax) in debt, over half of that rung up under the two Bush Administrations. Job growth is anemic compared to the Clinton Administration - a mere 51,000 jobs last week or about one job for every town in America. America has become a pariah nation, even our old allies France and Germany, despise and mistrust us. The foreign trade deficit is massive ($800+ billion), unsustainable and guarantees a poorer future for our children and grandshildren. We are more dependent on foreign oil than ever and there is no long-term plan to change that.

This country desperately needs a new FDR - to repair public infrastructure that has been neglected by the GOP, to create new jobs for new technologies, to restore equity via a progressive tax structure and to build international relationships.

You need to clean the shit off your glasses, Mr. Vanneman, as you are not seeing the world clearly...

Let's rate the Bush 43 Presidency as it relates to the issue of shifting risk:

FROM: The History News Network (an article from 2004-still relevant today, actually, although I wish I had more recent info)

1. Presided over the loss of approximately three million American jobs in his first two-and-a-half years in office, the worst record since Herbert Hoover.

2. Overseen an economy in which the stock market suffered its worst decline in the first two years of any administration since Hoover’s.

3. Taken, in the wake of the terrorist attacks [two] years ago, the greatest worldwide outpouring of goodwill the United States has enjoyed at least since World War II and squandered it by insisting on pursuing a foolish go-it-almost-alone invasion of Iraq, thereby transforming almost universal support for the United States into worldwide condemnation. (One historian made this point particularly well: “After inadvertently gaining the sympathies of the world 's citizens when terrorists attacked New York and Washington, Bush has deliberately turned the country into the most hated in the world by a policy of breaking all major international agreements, declaring it our right to invade any country that we wish, proving that he’ll manipulate facts to justify anything he wishes to do, and bull-headedly charging into a quagmire.”)

4.Misled (to use the most charitable word and interpretation) the American public about weapons of mass destruction and supposed ties to Al Qaeda in Iraq and so into a war that has plainly (and entirely predictably) made us less secure, caused a boom in the recruitment of terrorists, is killing American military personnel needlessly, and is threatening to suck up all our available military forces and be a bottomless pit for the money of American taxpayers for years to come.

5. Failed to follow through in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda are regrouping, once more increasing the threat to our people.
Insulted and ridiculed other nations and international organizations and now has to go, hat in hand, to those nations and organizations begging for their assistance.

6. Completely miscalculated or failed to plan for the personnel and monetary needs in Iraq after the war, so that he sought and obtained an $87 billion appropriation for Iraq, a sizable chunk of which is going, without competitive bidding to Haliburton, the company formerly headed by his vice president.

7. Inherited an annual federal budget surplus of $230 billion and transformed it into a $500+ billion deficit in less than three years. This negative turnaround of three-quarters of a trillion dollars is totally without precedent in our history. The ballooning deficit for fiscal 2004 is rapidly approaching twice the dollar size of the previous record deficit, $290 billion, set in 1992, the last year of the administration of President Bush’s father and, at almost 5 percent of GDP, is closing in on the percentage record set by Ronald Reagan in 1986.

8. Cut taxes three times, sharply reducing the burden on the rich, reclassified money obtained through stock ownership as more deserving than money earned through work. The idea that dividend income should not be taxed—what might accurately be termed the unearned income tax credit—can be stated succinctly: “If you had to work for your money, we’ll tax it; if you didn’t have to work for it, you can keep it all.”

9. Severely curtailed the very American freedoms that our military people are supposed to be fighting to defend. (“The Patriot Act,” one of the historians noted, “is the worst since the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams.”)

10. Called upon American armed service people, including Reserve forces, to sacrifice for ever-lengthening tours of duty in a hostile and dangerous environment while he rewards the rich at home with lower taxes and legislative giveaways and gives lucrative no-bid contracts to American corporations linked with the administration.

11. Given an opportunity to begin to change the consumption-oriented values of the nation after September 11, 2001, when people were prepared to make a sacrifice for the common good, called instead of Americans to ‘sacrifice’ by going out and buying things.

12. Proclaimed himself to be a conservative while maintaining that big government should be able to run roughshod over the Bill of Rights, and that the government must have all sorts of secrets from the people, but the people can be allowed no privacy from the government. (As one of the historians said, “this is not a conservative administration; it is a reckless and arrogant one, beholden to a mix of right-wing ideologues, neo-con fanatics, and social Darwinian elitists.”)

The U.S. Geological Survey said it had detected a 4.2 magnitude quake in North Korea at 10:35 local time (0135 GMT) on Monday, confirming a similar report from South Korea.
Posted by: Global Citizen on October 9, 2006 at 1:29 AM

No need to worry, this is all part of the President's Doomsday Initiative. Everything is going according to his long range plan.

Pale Rider,
I thought your list would never end. But we still have more than 2 years to go for his Doomsday Initiative to play out. Be prepared to lengthen your list further.

Off Topic but did anyone see the Presidental face this morning.

I've never seen Bush look so speechless and worried- it truly look as if Bush doesn't know what to do - but maybe it's because Cheney and Karl are so busy they simply haven't been able to diaper little Bushie with his talking points yet.

Anyway, we can trace this arms race for North Korea and Iran to David Frum's stupid "Axis of Evil" speech, because it started a rush to keep Bush/Cheney from their next pre-emptive invasion.

For starters, Pale Rider, you might want to update yourself on the economic statistics since 2004.

Anyone interested in escaping the income inequality that this blog whines about incessantly can go to Cuba.

Oh! Ha! Ha-ha! Yes!

"Go to Cuba." Ha!

Oh, mhr, I doff my cap to you, sir! Such subtlety! Such cutting wit! Oh how drolly you parody the conservative mind, so lacking in imagination as to conceive only the two options! Ha! Nothing else can exist for nothing else does exist!

Cuba! Ha!

By God sir, you are the very image of the modern satirist. Pray continue!

Anyway, we can trace this arms race for North Korea and Iran to David Frum's stupid "Axis of Evil" speech, because it started a rush to keep Bush/Cheney from their next pre-emptive invasion.

Speaking of talking points...

Might want to check the history of those nuclear weapons programs. Surprisingly, they didn't start when Bush was inaugurated.

mhr: you seem so fond of increased income inequality and the Republican destruction of the middle class. Maybe you should try Brazil or South Africa. Don't let the favelas and shanty towns bother you.

'Anyone interested in escaping the income inequality that this blog whines about incessantly can go to Cuba. Prior to 1981 he could have gone to the Soviet Union and its satellites all of whom were founded on establishing regimes based on equality and social justice-they fell somewhat short.
--mhr

Of course three decades of economic sanctions and blockades of Cuba kind of make your comparison ring false and hollow, mhr. Or a person could go to a socialist country like Sweden, where the average citizen has a higher standard of living and longer life expectancy than citizens of the United States....

As far as the “winners compensating the losers” in free trade so that everybody wins or is at least no worse off (“Pareto Optimality?”), it’s a nice concept but perhaps unlikely. For the most part, people take whatever they can get from the pie and the ability to do that is a function of market power or the ability to resist it. While free trade can impose costs on specific economic activities, individuals can still capture the benefits it produces in other domestic economic activities if they have the market or anti-market power (think government employees) to do so. I think the two most important things that prevent that power in the bottom of the economy are immigration and trade unconstrained by need to balance international accounts.

The former imports workers to compete the jobs that aren’t and the immigrants are likely have lesser expectations in the exchange between them and their employers than native born workers. The so-called shortage of workers that is being used to justify the immigration agenda of the elite would be expected to result in what economic theory tells us happens with shortages: the price what is in short supply rises. That is the market power workers need to garner a larger share of the pie including economic security. If we find that workers are getting too much of our national output, we can always increase immigration to correct that.

Limiting trade to balance in our international accounts would still allow the market to exploit the trade efficiencies with the important caveat that our collective improvidence wouldn’t be allowed to consume based on selling off our national wealth. At some point borrowing and selling off our assets will have to stop anyway and by then it might just be ugly.

Again, off topic, but North Korea's nuclear test last evening represented just one more failure in the long litany of this Administration's and this President's failures:

- Failure to do anything about al-Qaeda prior to 9-11, despite multiple warnings.
- Failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri.
- Failure to generate meaningful job creation, despite promises to do so with every tax cut.
- Failure to respond timely to one of the largest natural disasters in American history (i.e. Katrina)
- Failure to follow the Constitution of the United States by issuing 700+ "signing statements" that disrespect the separation of powers.
- Failure to adequately fund No Child Left Behind, resulting in a lot of children being left behind.
- Failure to allow the UN weapons inspectors to complete their work in Iraq, which would have revealed there were no WMDs there.
- Failure to build a coalition and consensus before invading Iraq, which resulted in the U.S. "going it alone" and incurring almost all of the casualties and the costs.
- Failure to provide adequate troops after the invasion, to maintain law and order.
- Failure to anticipate the consequences of disbanding the Iraqi army and mass "de-Baathification".
- Failure to manage the fiscal affairs of the United States in a responsible manner, resulting in massive budget and trade deficits that will cripple U.S. competitiveness for decades to come.
- Failure to be a "uniter not a divider" as was promised, resulting in the most divided American electorate since the Civil War.

I could go on, but you get my point. The American people should not be surprised by this, however. If the mainstream media had been doing their job during the 200 presidential campaign, they would have pointed out that George W. Bush's entire pathetic life is one long string of failures and criminal misconduct.

Make that "2000 presidential campaign", not 200. My bad.

TCD

Might want to check the history of those nuclear weapons programs. Surprisingly, they didn't start when Bush was inaugurated.

The NorK nuclear program was on ice from 1994 until Bush opened his mouth and said "Axis of Evil" like some fucking comic-book super-hero - Yes - Clinton that evil evil man - got them to stand down and operate under the "Agreed Frame." They immediately pulled 800 spent fuel rods from their cooling pond, kicked out the inspectors and fired up their reactor after the dry-drunk little bitch occupying the oval opened that fucking mouth of his.

One would think that the many trolls would be all over Bush at the right wing sites for his failure to privatise Social Security - He came out of the 04 elections with his little cap gun blazing away over that issue - How come the Publicans, who controlled Congress, failed to push through privitazation legislation? Those trolls come here and rail against the liberals. Oh yeah, the Big Bad Libs scared the poor wittle Publicans into not pushing any bills. That damnable Josh Marshall and Kevin stopped those push over Pubs in their tracks.

Sad to see how quickly we have gone from The Age of Aquarius to the dawning of The Age of Apocalypse.

Guess I didn't close that tag after the quote. Sorry. Again.

The NorK nuclear program was on ice from 1994 until Bush opened his mouth and said "Axis of Evil" like some fucking comic-book super-hero - Yes - Clinton that evil evil man - got them to stand down and operate under the "Agreed Frame."

This is part of the cult of Bush--North Korea developed nuclear weapons on his watch and on his watch alone. These weapons weren't built in 1999 and then just trotted out seven years later for testing.

Here's the truth:

The nuclear crisis began in 2002 when U.S. officials accused North Korea of running a secret uranium-enrichment program in violation of international treaties. Washington and its allies cut off free fuel oil shipments delivered to the impoverished country under a 1994 deal with the United States.

North Korea retaliated by quitting the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in early 2003 and restarting its plutonium-based nuclear weapons program, which had been frozen under the 1994 agreement.

Perhaps the US should do something about the MDGs and address global poverty, including US poverty. This is what we should be pressuring our leaders to do...

http://www.borgenproject.org

not only are middle-class incomes stagnant, but they're far more unstable than in the past

The US economy was unusual from about 1945-1975. Outside that interval, there was little or no security in the economy. the instability of today is more like the instabilities faced by our forebearers. Your idea of "the past" is superficial.

Considering, however, 1946, 1956, 1966, 1976, 1986, 1996, and 2006, in which year would you prefer to be earning a median income, or even an income at the bottom 20th percentile? 2006 is better.

There are two kind of people...

The Screwheads and the Doomed.....

Hunter,

FUCK the Doomed!

Someone is going to write a very good book connecting the risk shift and rejection of the idea that the state can and should socialize risk to the growth of fundamentalist religion which offers certainty and a sense of security to those who believe and legitimates the suffering of everyone else.

There is a graph at visualizingeconomics.com that adds insight to when and what happen to cause the slow growth of wages. From the timing it looks like it may be a response to fed policy of keeping inflation in check while the government is running large deficits.