Ackerman's guide to the Wikileaks document dump:
There’s a bias in journalism toward believing that what’s secret is inherently a hive of hidden truth. That operating principle animates reporters’ practice of breaking down governmental secrecy. But it can also create a misleading expectation that leaks represent huge new revelations. And when those revelations don’t manifest, it creates an expectation that the trove is neither useful nor significant. In this case, that would be a mistake.
A Pakistani man mourns the death of a relative following a bomb attack in the small town of Pabbi on July 26, 2010. A suicide bomber killed seven people on July 26, blowing himself up at a gathering of senior Pakistani officials mourning the assassination of a cabinet minister's son by suspected Taliban. Police said the bomber was stopped while trying to walk into the home of Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister in Pakistan's northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in the small town of Pabbi. The bomber struck shortly after Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik had visited to pay his respects over the death of Hussain's 28-year-old son Mian Rashid, who was shot dead on last week. By A. Majeed/AFP/Getty Images.
Why are Huckabee and Romney still relative unknowns? Not everyone is obsessed with politics:
Pick something that you pay no attention to. For my dad, I always suggest NASCAR. My dad has read a sports page every day since he was a little kid; he still gets (as do I) a real, honest-to-goodness local newspaper on his front porch every morning. He must have seen the names of NASCAR drivers thousands of times, but odds are he's only stopped to read a story if it had something in the headline that really caught his attention (someone from the Bronx, or Jewish, or both, might do it). If you asked him to name a NASCAR driver he'd probably look at you as if you were nuts…but if you named some of them, he'd probably recognize the names. The idea is that lots and lots of people have about that level of knowledge about most of what happens in politics. It's just background noise. We, the people who write and read political blogs, and watch debates, and pay attention to politics even in the off season –we're the minority.
… slowly (footage slowed down 300 times):
Les Gelb, in a succinct little paragraph:
The United States is giving “moderate” Pakistanis and the Pakistani military billions of dollars yearly in military and economic aid, which allows Pakistani military intelligence to “secretly” help the Taliban kill Americans in Afghanistan, which will drive America out of Afghanistan and undermine U.S. help for Pakistan.
Expect a media neocon blast – Gerecht is already on the war path – for this fall. But Steve Clemons dismisses those who think America will take military action:
While there are individuals in the Obama administration who are flirting with the possibility of military action against Iran, they are fewer in number than existed in the Bush administration. They are surrounded by a greater number of realists who are working hard to find a way to reinvent America's global leverage and power — and who realize that a war with Iran ends that possibility and possibly spells an end to America presuming to be the globally predominant power it has been.
But what if Israel acts unilaterally?
She recently complained that her ABC News interview had been edited to maker her look bad. Well, here's the full transcript of the whole fricking thing. Alas, no unedited video to reveal the moments of cluelessness, panic and lies that litter the rhetorical landscape. Enjoy.
Given the news of the day, this interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is worth a look:
A reader writes:
Please point this reader to this link. Have him download the data for pre-tax and post-tax Household income. Then, have him graph the data for the top 1% (pre-tax and post-tax). Then, have him measure the "much flatter curve" and send in his answer. I'll make a prediction. His answer will be that he can't measure the "much flatter curve" because there isn't one.
Another:
In this post the readers comments don't really hold up to scrutiny. If you looked at the same chart, but only went back to the mid-90's as opposed to 1979, you would still see the top 1% income more than double while the middle 60% and bottom 20% remain stagnant, even though tax rates on the highest earners have dropped since the mid 90's. No attempt to nitpick over tax rates can disguise the fact that income inequality has increased massively in the last couple of decades.
One more:
Doesn't the fact that the incomes are post-tax make the disparity even more stark?
Post-tax means actual take home pay. Take home pay has not changed one bit for 80% of the population, yet it's increased 5 fold for the top 1%. You can thank your reader for pointing out what may have been missed, but so long as that chart accurately reflects post-tax income, all tax avoidance strategies have been included in the calculations.
So even if the top 1%'s entire increase in take home pay is due to reduced taxes and not increased income, who cares? If one person's take home pay stayed stagnant while another person's increased five-fold, EVEN IF that increase was solely due to reduced taxes, wouldn't you still say the income inequality had increased?
The point of the chart still stands. 80% of the population is stuck in neutral with no increase in income and 1% of the population has been pedal to the medal.
Amy Davidson reflects on this video:
It is tempting to think that marriage is not necessary, legally speaking, as long as one is careful about making up wills and signing directives and buying insurance policies. But, from a practical standpoint, that’s just not true (even putting aside the premiums and lawyers’ fees for all those papers). Nor is this only about the elderly, though that’s bad enough: according to the Social Security Web site, there can be benefits for a surviving spouse of any age who is caring for a child (including an adopted child) under the age of sixteen—or older, if the child is disabled—if the widow or widower’s income falls below a certain level. (There are also benefits in the child’s name.) So if your parents were married, there is more of a safety net for your care. And what if your parents weren’t allowed to get married?
The Dish 