Jobs. Are We Having Fun Yet?

In Slate Daniel Gross analyzes why Americans don't feel better about the job market when Bush brags about creating 1.4 million jobs. According to the U.S. Department of Labor the country had an employment–to-population ratio (that's the percentage of Americans over the age of 16 who have a job) of 64.4% in January of 2001 when Bush took office. But in May of 2004, that ratio stood at only 62.2%. What should we make of this? If the ratio were still at 64.4%, with our current population of 293 million, there would be nearly 4.8 million more Americans employed. Click here, check the third box (Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate) then hit "retrieve data." For good graphical job formation data, try Job Watch.

Register to Vote Now

You can register to vote online here courtesy of Working For Change and The League of Women Voters.

Something Is Happening...

but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Rove? Last night my wife and I hosted a house party promoted by MoveOn PAC and organized around the movie Fahrenheit 9/11. The draw was a conference call with Michael Moore. We tried to cap the number of guests at 50 but wound up with 85. The purpose of the party was to discuss the movie and to prepare people to make a difference on Novemeber 2 by participating in actions to register voters, to persuade voters to vote for John Kerry and finally to get out the vote. 15% of the guests agreed to host a party on July 11 when MoveOn members will reach out to hundreds of thousands of unregistered voters in key swing states.

We were one of 4,600 house parties all across the country and attended by over 55,000 people. Our son Charlie organized a similar but larger town meeting at the UNLV Law School in Las Vegas. He had tried to cap the number of attendees at 200 (the size of the room) and registered 315 guests before being forced to turn people away at the door.

More Pattern Recognition

The Bush administration really knows how to spin. Listening to Bush the last few days on NPR you get the impression that we have achieved all our goals in Iraq. However, reading Paul Krugman's column in tomorrow's New York Times, I am directed to the Brookings Institute's Iraq Index. My, my. Check it out. Oh, and here is Krugman's close: "Let's say the obvious. By making Iraq a playground for right-wing economic theorists, an employment agency for friends and family, and a source of lucrative contracts for corporate donors, the administration did terrorist recruiters a very big favor."

Lessons of Hubris

I used to think of the New York Times as the "paper of record." But gradually, I have come to see that the Washington Post has better reporting. Today Robin Wright explains how the Iraq occupation has discredited the Bush Doctine of preemptive strikes, unilateralism, war on terror and promoting democracy in the Islamic world. She quotes Geoffrey Kemp of the Nixon Center who says "Of the four principles, three have failed, and the fourth -- democracy promotion -- is hanging by a thread." Read it all here.

Going Negative. BIG TIME!

Go to the Bush/Cheney website and see their new television ad linking John Kerry and Hitler. Click on "This is not a time for pessimism and rage" to see for yourself. I am not making this up. Can they sink any lower? You bet.

I Am Shocked...

...shocked, to find dissembling going on here. The Associated Press has sued the Pentagon and Air Force, seeking access to all records of President George W. Bush's military service, but the news agency wonders why it has come to this.

"It seems a little curious because the president made a pretty forceful presentation that he had nothing to hide," said AP General Counsel Dave Tomlin, when asked for his reaction to what the AP considers government stonewalling. "But we are not surprised." Read it here.

Parsing the Polling Data

I was never particularly interested in voter polls until I read Ruy Teixeira's book "The Emerging Democratic Majority." Ruy publishes an informative blog called Donkey Rising. Today he takes a closer look at yesterday's Washington Post poll and notes that indendendent voters seem to be giving up on Bush. He directs the reader to the poll itself because "the Post makes basic crosstabular information from their polls available interactively on their website." Try this exercise. Go to the interactive poll. Click on the first question, and select "results by party." Then select "results by age." What group of independent adults do you suppose strongly disapproves of the way Bush is handling his job the most? Did you guess "over 61"? Neither did I.

Bridging the Gap

More than 44 million Americans, mostly from working families, are without health coverage including more than 8 million children. On June 19, my wife and I and friends marched together with 10,000 others across the Golden Gate Bridge to send a message to elected officials that every man, woman, and child should have access to decent, affordable health care. We have the SEIU to thank for organizing this effort. Barely covered in the local press (page B7 of the San Francisco Chronicle), you can read about it here.

The Liberal Ideal

When I was a freshman in college in 1968, Robert Reich was the President of the student body. He was a thoughtful leader then and he still is today. I recommend this interview in BuzzFlash. Here is a taste.

"The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality of result. It’s equality of opportunity. There’s a fundamental difference. So condemning the working class and the poor to lousy schools and to a health care system that is increasingly skewed toward the privileged violates these basic tenets of liberalism, as does a tax break that is overwhelmingly benefiting those who are already very rich at a time in our nation’s history when the gap between the rich and everyone else is wider than it’s been in over a hundred years. And finally, liberals believe in a foreign policy that is multi-national and collaborative, working through the United Nations, NATO and our major allies, seeking to prevent violence and war through spreading middle-class prosperity rather than through the simple assertion of our military might. Our moral authority is as important, if not more important, than our troop strength or our high-tech weapons. We are rapidly losing that moral authority, not only in the Arab world but all over the world."

Kaczynski Writes Better Than Shakespeare

Find out how several well-known writers (and the Unabomber) would fare on the new SAT in this piece in The Atlantic Monthly .

Earth As Art

Here are some wonderful Landsat 7 satelite photos brought to you by the folks at the Library of Congress. "The images have been selected for aesthetic rather than scientific value. These images are actual pictures of the Earth, created by printing visible and infrared data in colors visible to the human eye. Band combinations and colors were chosen to optimize their dramatic appearance." Enjoy.

Confusing Power with Greatness

Back in 1965 Morris Udall famously said "We have, I fear, confused power with greatness." And so we have. Hal Crother believes that 2004 is the worst year ever to be an American. He explains why here.

The Lessons of History or The March of Folly?

"They came as liberators but were met by fierce resistance outside Baghdad. Humiliating treatment of prisoners and heavy-handed action in Najaf and Fallujah further alienated the local population. A planned handover of power proved unworkable. Britain's 1917 occupation of Iraq holds uncanny parallels with today - and if we want to know what will happen there next, we need only turn to our history books..." writes Robert Fisk, The Independent's award-winning Middle East correspondent in this lesson from history.

Trust and the International Community

I was at a meeting tonight featuring Joe Solmonese, CEO of Emily's List. A woman who had just returned from Europe talked about the intensity of the European disdain for the Bush Administration. This reminded me that our reduced credibilty in the Internationial Community has decreased rather than increased our standing in the world ... not to mention our security. Here are some well chosen words from Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Secretary of State. His most telling story is "American leadership worldwide is dependent on our credibility. When President Kennedy faced the Cuban missile crisis, he sent [former secretary of State] Dean Acheson to Europe to talk to [French President Charles] de Gaulle to tell him there are Soviet rockets with nuclear weapons targeted on the United States, and the U.S. would use force to remove them if necessary, which means massive nuclear war between the West and the East. When he finished making that presentation, Acheson said to de Gaulle, “Let me now show you the evidence.” De Gaulle responded by saying “I don’t want to see your evidence. I trust the President of the United States. Tell him we stand with him.” Would any foreign leader do that today? Probably not."

Did Reagan Win the Cold War?

Judging from the news outlets and the punditocracy you would think so. What if you asked an expert in Russian studies? Here is what Jonathon Weiler has to say at The Gadflyer.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Fascinating. Neither Bush nor Cheney care a fig for the facts. Leading up to the war in Iraq, these two worked hard to conflate Saddam and Osama. They are still at it. But I wonder how long voters will hang onto this cherished deception? Check out this classic.

George Orwell vs. Jon Stewart

On the other hand, George Orwell can't really hold a candle to Jon Stewart. See what I mean? Look for "Finding Memo."

Orwell Rolls In His Grave

Well, I have not seen this documentary but I liked the trailer.

Lessons about Feminism and Abu Ghraib

Barbara Ehrenreich gave a powerful commencement address at Barnard this year. The author of "Nickled and Dimed" speaks about the failures in Iraq and the failures of women in Iraq. She exhorts her audience to be women who instigate real change towards a "just and peaceful world." She says "My version of patriotism is simple: When the powerful no longer act responsibly, then it is our responsibility to take the power away from them." Take a look.

What Americans Really Want

Take a moment to read the BuzzFlash interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation. She nails the Bush mantra of "guns, God and gays" and adds this thought on what Americans really want.

"Sure, the American people want us to govern from the center, but it isn't the center the Washington pundits and politicians talk about. Citizens want us to deal with issues that are at the center of their lives. They seek a politics that speaks to and includes them -- affordable child care and health care, quality public education, retirement security, a living wage, environmental protection, clean elections and an internationalist foreign policy that will create real security."

Arrogance and Ignorance

Things certainly would have turned out differently in Iraq if Bush had paid attention to the more thoughtful analysts in the country. I just reread James Fallows The 51st State? which was published in the Atlantic Monthly in November of 2002. In it he warns of the danger of being over optimistic. He writes "If we had to choose a single analogy to govern our thinking about Iraq, my candidate would be World War I. The reason is not simply the one the historian David Fromkin advanced in his book A Peace to End All Peace : that the division of former Ottoman Empire territories after that war created many of the enduring problems of modern Iraq and the Middle East as a whole. The Great War is also relevant as a powerful example of the limits of human imagination: specifically, imagination about the long-term consequences of war." For more of Fallows' insights read Blind Into Bagdad.

Dougie Feith

Have you ever wondered what the neocons were like as kids? Find out about Douglas Feith here.

Pinocchio

Lies, lies, lies. What causes the impulse to lie even when no lie is needed? I read that Bush's Press Secretary blamed the President's fall from a mountain bike on recent heavy rain. Trouble is - you guessed it - there hadn't been any recent rain in Crawford.

If you saw Disney's Pinocchio you know why Dick Nixon was often portrayed with an ever lengthening nose. You are a rare bird indeed, however, if you are familiar with the original book serialized in Italy in 1881. The New York Review of Books and Alison Lurie, English Professor at Cornell give us the skinny here.

Favorite Blogs

Here are my current top five favorite blogs - just in case you are wondering:
Talking Points Memo
Washington Monthly
Wonkette
Max Blumenthal
The Emerging Democratic Majority

Can you detect a trend?

And speaking of patterns, check this out!