Who Screwed the Middle Class? -- Kevin Jones / Mother Jones
I've written several times before about Winner-Take-All Politics, in which Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that middle-class wage stagnation and growing income inequality are due as much to political decisions over the past 30 years as they are to broad economic trends. I find their arguments persuasive, but there's no question that it's a tough case to make. After all, exactly which political decisions are we talking about? Can we point to specific pieces of legislation or specific agency decisions that have retarded wage growth?
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Miranda is Obama's latest victim -- Slate
One of the central pledges of Barack Obama's campaign was that -- as he put it early in his presidency -- the Bush administration had gone wildly wrong because it "established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable -- a framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions; that failed to use our values as a compass." Instead, he implored, we must fight Terrorism only "with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process, in checks and balances and accountability." Thus, he thunderously vowed, "We must never -- ever -- turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake."
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Non Sequitur by Wiley -- 10 March 2011
Definitely the way Washington seems to work to me!
Not Mincing Words -- Slate
And so it seems, Robert Gates really will be leaving the Pentagon soon. On his way out the door, he gives the military some refreshingly frank advice.
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A good day to read George Washington's Farewell Address
FYI: he was actually born tomorrow, 22 February 1732
Feds wrongly links 84,000 seized sites to child porn -- InfoWorld
Imagine you're a respectable, law-abiding owner of a small business. You show up to your shop one morning, only to find the doors barred and a big sign in front window reading, "The federal government has seized this business as it's affiliated with creating, distributing, and/or storing child pornography."
Worse yet, imagine that every other business on the block was similarly locked up and had the same damning explanation on their front window. And even once the confusion was cleared up with the feds, it took a few days more to get all the signs down and all of the businesses up and running again.
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