Friday, November 11, 2005
TRUST IS LIKE VIRGINITY: ONCE YOU LOSE IT, YOU CAN'T GET IT BACK
Poll: Most Americans Doubt Bush's Honesty
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Most Americans say they aren't impressed by the ethics and honesty of the Bush administration, already under scrutiny for its justifications for an unpopular war in Iraq and its role in the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity.
Almost six in 10 — 57 percent — said they do not think the Bush administration has high ethical standards and the same portion says President Bush is not honest, an AP-Ipsos poll found. Just over four in 10 say the administration has high ethical standards and that Bush is honest. Whites, Southerners and white evangelicals were most likely to believe Bush is honest.
Bush, who promised in the 2000 campaign to uphold "honor and integrity" in the White House, last week ordered White House workers, from presidential advisers to low-ranking aides, to attend ethics classes.
The president gets credit from a majority for being strong and decisive, but he's also seen by an overwhelming number of people as "stubborn," a perception reinforced by his refusal to yield on issues like the Iraq war, tax cuts and support for staffers under intense pressure.
More than eight in 10, 82 percent, described Bush as "stubborn," with almost that many Republicans agreeing to that description. That stubborn streak has served Bush well at times, but now he is being encouraged to shake up his staff and change the direction of White House policies.
Concern about the administration's ethics has been fueled by the controversy over flawed intelligence leading up to the Iraq war and the recent indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for his role in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name.
That loss of trust complicates Bush's efforts to rebuild his standing with the public. His job approval rating remains at his all-time low in the AP-Ipsos poll of 37 percent.
"Honesty is a huge issue because even people who disagreed with his policies respected his integrity," said Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist from the University of Texas.
The mandatory White House lectures on ethics for its employees came after the Libby indictment, and some people say they aren't impressed.
"It's like shutting the barn door after the horse escaped," said John Morrison, a Democrat who lives near Scranton, Pa.
"This week's elections were just a preview of what's going to happen," he said, referring to Tuesday's New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, both won by Democrats. "People are just fed up."
Some Republicans are nervous about the GOP's political position.
"A lot of elected Republicans are running for the hills in the Northeast," said Connecticut GOP strategist Chris DePino after what he called "a waterfall of missteps" by Republicans. Bush and the GOP must return to their message that the United States has been safe from terrorism during his administration, DePino said.
Only 42 percent in the new poll said they approve of Bush's handling of foreign policy and terrorism, his lowest rating yet in an area that has long been his strongest issue.
The war in Iraq is at the core of the public's unrest, polling found.
An AP-Ipsos poll last week asked people to state in their own words why they approved or disapproved of the way Bush was doing his job. Almost six in 10 disapproved, and they most frequently mentioned the war in Iraq — far ahead of the second issue, the economy.
"To use an unfortunate metaphor, Iraq is a roadside bomb in American politics," said Rich Bond, a former national Republican chairman.
Many of those who approve of Bush's job performance cited his Christian beliefs and strong values, the second biggest reason for support after backing his policies.
"I know he is a man of integrity and strong faith," said Fran Blaney, a Republican and an evangelical who lives near Hartford, Conn. "I've read that he prays every morning asking for God's guidance. He certainly is trying to do what he thinks he is supposed to do."
The poll of 1,000 adults was conducted Nov. 7-9 by Ipsos, an international polling firm, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
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On the Web:
Ipsos — http://www.ap-ipsosresults.comThursday, November 10, 2005
THIS LAND AIN'T YOUR LAND, THIS LAND IS OUR LAND
House Could Alter 19th Century Mining Law
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - As many as 20 million acres of public land could be sold under a proposed change in mining law that is tucked into a budget bill in the House.
At issue is the possible overturning of a congressional ban that has prevented mineral companies and individuals from buying public land, including some in national forests and parks, at cheap prices if the land contains mineral deposits.
"If this provision became law, it could literally lead to the privatization of millions of acres of public land, including national park and national forest land," said Dave Alberswerth, public lands director for The Wilderness Society.
A vote on the overall bill was put off until next week.
The Interior Department over the past decade has approved slightly more than half of the 405 patent applications it received before 1994, and is processing the final 50.
House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif., and other committee members want to lift the ban, which prevents anyone from applying for a new patent application. They propose raising the price to $1,000 per acre or "fair market value," whichever is more. That does not take into account the value of the minerals the lands might contain.
Under existing law, companies have had to convince the Interior Department that the land has a valuable mineral deposit and it can be mined at a profit. Department officials say companies typically spend about $10,000 to $15,000 per acre trying to document that it is economically viable to mine there.
Once a patent is granted, the law does not let the government challenge a company if it drops its plan to mine at a site and resells the property as real estate.
Up to 6 million acres of public lands — those where some 300,000 active mining claims are staked now — could be "patented" under the mining law provision. That includes Western deserts and high prairies, national forests and national parks. There are 900 preexisting mining claims on national parks alone, mostly in California and Alaska.
But officials with the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the mining claims, estimate the amount of public lands that the law could potentially allow to be sold off ranges as high as 15 million to 20 million acres.
That additional acreage includes remote desert and mountain basins where no claims have been staked and there has not been much mining, but a profitable mineral deposit could exist.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., wrote Pombo and urged him to withdraw the measure. She said it would allow people to "carve out numerous private enclaves within our public lands" and that the land sales "could fragment the desert parks" in California.
"Your bill also appears to require the secretary of the interior to sell 'mineral deposits' or lands containing 'depleted' mineral deposits to anyone desiring them," she wrote.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the changes in law could raise several hundred million dollars, including $100 million that could be spent over the next 10 years for mining cleanups and schools that offer training in petroleum, mining or mineral engineering.
The new language lowers the threshold for obtaining a permit and generally mirrors what the National Mining Association advocated. Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the trade group, said those changes would help boost rural Western economies by drawing investment "in areas where mining companies are clearly the high-wage employers."
Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., chairman of the House Resources energy and mineral resources subcommittee, said local governments' tax base would expand through the patenting and purchase of land, providing money for schools, emergency services and other needs.
Rep. Nick Rahall (news, bio, voting record) of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the committee, said the mining provision "would result in a blazing fire sale of federal lands" to U.S. and international companies.
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On the Net:
Bureau of Land Management: http://www.blm.govThursday, November 10, 2005
TORTURE IS NOT IMPORTANT - HOW YOU HEARD ABOUT IT IS!
Frist Worried About Leak, Not Prisons
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he is more concerned about the leak of information regarding secret CIA detention centers than activity in the prisons themselves.
Frist told reporters Thursday that while he believed illegal activity should not take place at detention centers, he believes the leak itself poses a greater threat to national security and is "not concerned about what goes on" behind the prison walls.
"My concern is with leaks of information that jeopardize your safety and security — period," Frist said. "That is a legitimate concern."
He noted that the CIA has also called for a federal criminal investigation into the leak of possibly classified information on secret prisons to The Washington Post. A Nov. 2 Post article touched on a number of sensitive national security issues, including the existence of secret CIA detention centers for suspected terrorists in Eastern European democracies. The Bush administration has neither confirmed nor denied that report.
Frist was asked if that meant he was not concerned about investigating what goes on in detention centers.
"I am not concerned about what goes on and I'm not going to comment about the nature of that," Frist replied.
He added that as Senate majority leader he is privy to classified information and discussions about prison activity. "I'm going to make sure that everything that's done is consistent with the Constitution ... and the laws of the United States of America," he said.
Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., wrote the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees earlier this week calling for a joint congressional investigation into the leak.
"What is the actual and potential damage done to the national security of the United States and our partners in the global war on terror?" the letter said, referring to the leak.
The Post's story said the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al-Qaida captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, part of a covert prison system set up by the agency four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries. Those countries, the Post said, include several democracies.Wednesday, November 09, 2005
ABOUT TIME WE STARTED VOTING THE FUCKERS OUT
Democrat wins signal trouble for Bush
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats on Wednesday celebrated hard-fought wins in governors' races in Virginia and New Jersey that underlined the political troubles of President George W. Bush and Republicans heading into next year's congressional elections.
Democrats retained governor's offices in conservative Virginia and Democratic-leaning New Jersey on Tuesday after sometimes nasty campaigns. They also dealt California's Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger an across-the-board defeat on four ballot initiatives he had championed.
The loss in Virginia was a personal setback for Bush, who put his declining political capital on the line with an election-eve visit on behalf of Republican former attorney general Jerry Kilgore -- only to see him soundly defeated by Democratic Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine.
With Bush's popularity at the lowest level of his presidency, the results helped giddy Democrats claim momentum one year before elections to decide control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress and 36 governorships.
"Yesterday the election was a shot across the bow to George Bush," said New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, head of the Democratic Senate campaign committee, who called the results "a clear repudiation of Bush" and the Republican agenda.
Republicans cautioned against reading too much into the results, saying the elections produced no signs of widespread anti-incumbent sentiment. Redistricting initiatives that could have hurt incumbents in Ohio and California went down to defeat and no governors' offices changed parties.
ELECTORAL SNAPSHOT?
"There is not a big anti-incumbent movement building out there," said Carl Forti, spokesman for the House Republican campaign committee. "This is a snapshot in time that doesn't mean a lot."
Historically, the governors' races in Virginia and New Jersey have been particularly bad indicators of future party performance, said Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman.
Republicans won the Virginia and New Jersey governors' races in 1997 only to lose seats in both chambers of Congress the next year. In 2001, Democrats won the two governors' races and lost seats in Congress in 2002.
"The elections were decided on local and state issues and the candidates and their agendas," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. "I do not think you can conclude it represents any larger trend whatsoever."
But Democrats were heartened on several fronts. In addition to the hit in prestige suffered by one-time rising Republican star Schwarzenegger a year before he seeks re-election in California, social conservatives lost several key votes.
In Dover, Pennsylvania, where a court battle rages over the teaching of an "intelligent design" alternative to evolution, voters ousted eight of the nine incumbents on the local school board who supported that curriculum.
Voters in Maine approved the state's law protecting homosexuals from discrimination, although Texas backed a ban on gay marriage.
In St. Paul, Minnesota, incumbent Democratic Mayor Randy Kelly was ousted by voters a year after endorsing Bush, with polls showing the endorsement was a big factor in the loss.
REPUBLICAN BASE
Kaine, the Virginia Democrat, won the rapidly growing outer suburban areas of Washington, D.C., where Republicans earned solid majorities in 2004. Kilgore's poor showing could give pause to Republicans considering calling on the president for help in the 2006 elections.
"I think it would have been closer if the president hadn't gone in there," Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told reporters.
"It really is a disaster for Bush," said Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, who called the results "the logical consequence of Bush's growing unpopularity."
"Virginia is Southern and conservative and that's the Republican base," Sabato said. "If they start losing their base, it's easy to imagine both houses of Congress going Democratic."
The Virginia result also was a boost to the presidential prospects of Democratic Gov. Mark Warner, who was barred by law from seeking a second term but actively campaigned for his deputy Kaine, who promised voters he would continue Warner's policies.
"May I just say I'm looking forward to standing with you at your next victory party," Kaine told Warner at the Tuesday night victory celebration.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
YUP, I'M BORED WITH THE BANALITY OF EVIL AS WELL
Evil Is So Damned Boring
Karl Rove, pasty neocon judges, "Saw II," Dick Cheney's dead soul, ho-hum, pass the wine
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
I think it was somewhere around my 17th article on "Scooter" Libby's duplicitous vileness or maybe it was the umpteenth piece on Karl Rove's bleak sweatiness or Tom DeLay's toothy mug-shot "I'll be skipping prison" grin, like he'd just swallowed a whole baby seal and two live puppies and was coming for your cat.
Perhaps it was with the ongoing onslaught of soul-clotting details of Samuel "Guns 'n' Misogyny" Alito's record of nauseating judicial decisions that happily slap women's rights and bash the environment and support your God-given right to own a machine gun and basically uphold all that the rich white male power establishment holds near and dear that it hit me, oh my God, when did evil get so tepid and oatmealy and beige?
Which is to say, sure, we all love the drama of evil and we love the spectacle of evil and the media (and this very column) can beat the drum of evil's bloody lusciousness until we're red with yawning outrage, but after a while one thing becomes painfully true: We are not moved. We are not really all that scared. We might as well be shaking a fistful of sand: After a minute or two, there's just ain't nuthin' there.
But still we think there is. We are temporarily convinced. Because on one level, these people appear enormously important and significant, their every blink and utterance worthy of report (I should know -- I report it all the time), and hence we glorify and hype them all, these killers and these madmen and these hollow politicos as if they were hot roaring gods among men, as if they were something more than mere bloody blips on the cosmic radar, as if their daily comings and goings were the most breathtaking incidents since UFO anal probes.
But the fact is, they are nothing. Wisps. Yawns. Cosmic flatulence. It is the great existential duality of modern humanity. On one level, we have to care. It is, after all, our world, our life, the here and now, and we should pay attention to its clowns and dictators and devils, and take note and participate. But on that other, more significant level, you cannot help but scream, Oh my God please stop, I am just so sick of these cretins and who really cares about these hatemongers and thieves and can't I just have my wine and sex and books and won't they please just leave me alone?
Is it not true? Just look: Karl Rove has unleashed steaming piles of malevolence on this nation so tepid and lifeless they might as well have been buckets of duck-blood pudding. "Scooter" Libby -- and by the way anyone named "Scooter" should be officially banned from the "Evil is my co-pilot" club for life -- little boy Scooter just took the bullet for his black-souled torture-lovin' boss, Dick Cheney, over the equally boring Valerie Plame scandal, and Cheney is perhaps one of the most mediocre hunks of evil incarnate since James Baker or Dan Quayle or "Everybody Loves Raymond."
And oh my God, Samuel Alito, the white man's white man and the impending death of anything resembling a dynamic Supreme Court for the next 30 years, couldn't be any more pasty and quivery in his jellied evilness if you stuck plastic devil horns on his head and a "SpongeBob Is Gay" baby's bib on his sunken sunless chest and spun him around three times and hit him with a stick. I mean, please.
And by the way, am I the only one who looks at Saddam Hussein in those trial video clips and thinks, OK, yes, he sanctioned the murder of tens of thousands (with happy U.S. complicity) and he was ruthless and cruel and this much we know? So why does it feel like most anyone reading this right now could make him whimper like Paris Hilton in cheap polyester via three hard slaps and a nasty wedgie? Why is his supposedly titanic evil so shuddering and small?
You already know why. Because after a certain point, at a certain width of lens, they simply disappear. They fall off your personal radar, the things you let affect your soul. They pass right by our shared threshold of media interest and cultural fascination and race straight into the land of Get Over Yourself, we are all in this together so sit down and shut the hell up. Sure they can wail and scream and kick in the door, sure Bush can mumble "we do not torture" even as Cheney defends it and Gonzales trumpets it and even when we have the goddamn pictures to prove that we do. But ultimately you just look at them and you go, Are you serious?
Is that it? Is that all you've got? Do you not know how insignificant and silly you seem, like a grain of sand that's sitting on a beach, threatening the ocean that it's gonna drink it all up? Do you not realize how the planet brushes you off like chronic dandruff?
Which brings me to this: I have for some ungodly reason now suffered twice through the full trailer for the nauseating horror flick "Saw II" because it was there and because I was momentarily morbidly fascinated and because I simply cannot fathom why this shrill sadomasochistic swill exists at all, this grisly and gruesome tale of a twisted killer and his bizarre medieval torture chamber and the five awful actors who fail to survive it in the most disgusting ways imaginable, given how this movie is, to just about anyone with a pulse, repulsive and dim and jarringly repugnant on a dozen different levels. Just an opinion.
But here's the thing: You can only look at this gruesome slurm and wonder, Why does this exist? Why the hell does anyone, any human on this planet, want to pump this detritus into the world? What sort of boring chemical imbalance gave birth to this, what screenwriter and what producer are coming up with these films in their seedy unhappy basement and saying, Lo, we have created something good in the world, something that will entertain the masses and give light and power and pleasure? No one, that's who. It is just repugnance. Repugnance and revulsion as a means to hollow profit. You know, just like politics. It is so easy. It is so small. It is so unerringly, unrelentingly boring.
Look. You want evil? Groupthink is evil. Mediocrity is evil. Hopelessness is evil. Decision by committee is evil. Glittery kitten sweaters are evil. Loveless marriage is evil. McDonald's marketing is evil. Spiritual homogeny is evil. Family sitcoms. Microsoft Windows. Disney cruises. Food poisoning. Yeast infections. Cruelty.
As for the rest, these warmongers and power sluts, well, theirs is merely an evil bred of ignorance and gurgling ego and impotent weeping in the night. Theirs is an evil so lukewarm and spongy it makes you recoil and shudder as if you accidentally touched a raw calf's tongue at the Japanese market. Hell, I can find better, more gut-wrenching evil in the Wal-Mart music aisle under "Simpson, Ashlee." The others, they're just the same ol' boring noisemakers howling into the Void.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
SOINTANLY!
Women May Enjoy Humor More, if It's Funny
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The difference between the sexes has long been a rich source of humor. Now it turns out, humor is one of the differences.
Women seem more likely than men to enjoy a good joke, mainly because they don't always expect it to be funny.
"The long trip to Mars or Venus is hardly necessary to see that men and women often perceive the world differently," a research team led by Dr. Allan L. Reiss of the Stanford University School of Medicine reports in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
But they were surprised when their studies of how the male and female brains react to humor showed that women were more analytical in their response, and felt more pleasure when they decided something really was funny.
"Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon," said Reiss. "So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it."
Women were subjecting humor to more analysis with the aim of determining if it was indeed funny, Reiss said in a telephone interview.
Men are using the same network in the brain, but less so, he said, men are less discriminating.
"It doesn't take a lot of analytical machinery to think someone getting poked in the eye is funny," he commented when asked about humor like the Three Stooges.
While there is a lot of overlap between how men and women process humor, the differences can help account for the fact that men gravitate more to one-liners and slapstick while women tend to use humor more in narrative form and stories, Reiss said.
The funnier the cartoon the more the reward center in the women's brain responded, unlike men who seemed to expect the cartoons to be funny from the beginning, the researchers said.
The new insight could improve understanding of such conditions as depression, the researchers said.
"The bottom line is that I think it contributes to the foundation of understanding individual differences in humans," Reiss said. Humor is used by humans to cope with stress and to establish relationships, and it can even help strengthen the immune system.
Reiss' team studied the response of 10 women and 10 men to 70 black-and-while cartoons, asking them to rate the jokes for how funny they were. While the volunteers were looking at the cartoons their brains were being studied with an MRI to determine what parts of the brains were responding.
In large part, men and women had similar responses to humor, using parts of the brain responsible for the structure and context of language and for understanding juxtaposition.
In women, however, some areas were more active than in men. These included the left prefrontal cortex, which the researchers said suggests a greater emphasis on language and executive processing, and the nucleus accumbens, or NAcc, which is part of the reward center.
Reiss said he was surprised at the NAcc finding. The researchers theorized that because women were being more analytical they weren't necessarily expecting the cartoons to be as funny as did the men.
Then, when they saw the punch line, the reward center lit up, indicating something pleasant and unexpected.
Arnie Cann, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, commented: "Given the findings in the current study, that women appear to use more executive functions, it could be that they are more engaged in scrutinizing the humor to decide if it fits their views on what is acceptable humor. Once they decide the humor is OK, they could be experiencing a relief-like response."
That would fit in with the finding that women experience more reward from the joke, said Cann, who was not part of Reiss' research team.
Reiss' research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
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On the Net:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pnas.orgMonday, November 07, 2005
POOR GET POORER AS MIDDLE CLASS VANISHES
Workers face paycheck pinch
After inflation, American workers earned 2.3 percent less than they did a year ago.
The Christian Science Monitor - For all its strength, the current economic expansion is not boosting the American worker's paycheck.
Wages have been rising nominally: Average pay rose 8 cents last month to $16.27 an hour, according to a government report Friday. That's not fast enough to counter inflation.
By one common measure, average pay for an hour's work has less purchasing power than it had four years ago - when the current growth cycle began.
It's a pattern of weak wage growth that's now several years old, but the trend has worsened in recent months. Wages for the most recent quarter were 2.3 percent lower, after inflation, than workers received a year before.
While energy costs are the most obvious culprit, other forces may be playing a role, from globalization and illegal immigration to the weakening of labor unions. Politicians, too, could share in the blame.
Experts differ on just how wide and deep the problem runs. But the disturbing implications are clear enough. America's proud heritage as a land where the standard of living rises like late-summer corn seems, to many, to be at risk.
Even the fact that budgets have grown tighter for many debt-laden families is a volatile issue for the nation politically and financially. And economists say that while the pay pinch affects a wide swath of occupations, the impact is hardest on those without college degrees.
"It's two different worlds," skilled and unskilled, says John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C. "There's no way you can consider this one overall labor market."
Well-trained job seekers are in hot demand, he says. But the labor market is weak for those whose education ended in high school. In some cases, "weak" is an understatement.
The automotive industry, and the nation, got a shock a few weeks ago when Delphi Corp., a major auto-parts supplier, demanded that union workers take a gargantuan pay cut so the company can survive.
The airline industry, too, faces a period of intensive restructuring that is difficult for workers of all skill levels.
Pilots at Northwest Airlines last week approved a 24 percent temporary pay cut, to give the beleaguered airline breathing room while a new labor contract is negotiated.
In the grocery industry, the spread of Wal-Mart has had a similar pay-squeezing effect on some unionized supermarkets.
Nor is the challenge confined to the United States. Wage growth has been slowing in Europe and is tepid in Japan, as those regions work through a difficult restructuring of their economic base.
What these industrialized nations share is growing competition for lower wages, from factories in places like Portugal, Poland, and China.
US manufacturers have done remarkably well at responding to global competition by finding ways to make workers more productive.
Traditionally, rising productivity allows employers to raise wages without raising prices. Thus it holds the key to rising living standards in society.
But lately, wage growth has lagged behind fast-rising US productivity.
Several reasons, beyond the downward pressure of global competition, may be involved:
• The cost of benefits. Some employers have stopped offering health insurance, but those that do are spending more, and thus boosting overall compensation even though hourly wages aren't rising.
• Price-sensitive consumers. As energy costs rose, many companies didn't feel able to pass those costs along to customers. So they have to pay their oil bills by cutting costs elsewhere. Pay hikes get smaller.
• Government policies. Some researchers say a failure to crack down on illegal immigration - whether at the border or in the workplace - has depressed wages for the less skilled.
• Weak bargaining power. The decline of union membership in the private workforce has had a significant dampening effect on wages, some economists say.
"The auto and airline industry - these were some of the best jobs you could get," without a college degree, says Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. Those unionized jobs were "a boost to wages for less-educated workers generally, because to some extent other industries had to compete for those workers."
Other economists counter that a more flexible, less unionized labor market has helped the US trounce its European peers in job creation. Americans spend less time unemployed, but their incomes have arguably suffered as a result.
The result of all these forces is an environment in which wages tend to rise at a glacial pace. And when inflation picks up, that means they don't rise at all in real terms.
Inflation has now reached a 5 percent pace. The upshot is that hourly earnings are effectively 2.3 percent below last year's level.
"The inflation bar is very high right now," says Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. So even the 2.7 percent hourly earnings growth, from a year earlier, "doesn't get you over."
Assessing just how far wages are falling behind inflation can be tricky. The federal government gathers data in several regular surveys, from the Census Bureau to the several sets of data produced by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The results can vary. The numbers above, for example, come from a widely cited wage report, a BLS survey of nonfarm employers called "current employment statistics."
In this survey, hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers rose by a total of just 4.6 percent during the 24-year period from 1979 to 2003, a recent Labor Department study found.
Most other reports show larger gains, in part because they track a wider sample of workers or of income. And clearly, Americans have found the means to consume higher levels of goods and services during that period.
"It's not as bad as it gets painted," says Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an economist at the Hudson Institute. By broader measures of household finances, she notes, "income is rising in real terms."
Still, on the issue of real pay for an hour's work, none of the government surveys show wages rising by even 1 percent a year between 1979 and 2003.
What's the recipe for keeping wages on an upward path? Some economists point to conservative models, such as keeping taxes and regulation low to spur job creation. Others take a more left-leaning tack, calling for stronger labor unions and a boost to the minimum wage.
Experts on both sides often stress education as paving the way for individuals to boost their earnings in higher-level work.
They also focus on two areas - healthcare and energy - where inflation is eating away at spending power. "You either need wages to pick up or inflation to slow down," says Mr. Bernstein. "There may be a bit of both in coming months."Monday, November 07, 2005
ALL THE LYING LIARS
Remember the cause of the CIA leak
By Daniel Schorr, Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON - The fascination with the subject of which official knew what about Valerie Plame and how they peddled the information should not distract us from contemplating the great con game that the administration played with the American people on the road to war in
Iraq.
Clearly the principals chose to assert, whether true or not, that only an invasion would spare America from the imminent danger of Iraqi nuclear and/or biological weapons. From early on, they bought and retailed a dubious bill of goods.
Let's go back to October 2002, when Vice President Dick Cheney received an Italian intelligence report about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in the African country of Niger. The report came to the CIA from a shady Italian businessman who produced a forged document, apparently written on stolen stationery from the Nigerian Embassy in Rome. The CIA doubted the authenticity of that document; the White House seemed more willing to credit it.
You can understand, then, how furious the White House Iraq Group must have been when Ambassador Joseph Wilson, sent to Niger to gather support for the story of Iraq's effort to buy uranium, instead returned with word that there was no evidence to support that supposition and then went public with his conclusion.
The Pentagon had one other source, equally dubious, on weapons of mass destruction. That was the smooth-talking Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who offered a lot of inside information, including word from professed Iraqi scientists. Mr. Chalabi had not only a product, but a market, a friendly relationship with Judith Miller of The New York Times. She wrote a series of stories about Iraqi weapons that her paper ultimately had to disown and apologize for.
But the Bush administration continued to insert alleged Iraqi weapons programs into speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, culminating in a presentation to the United Nations by Secretary of State
Colin Powell that Mr. Powell now bitterly regrets.
So let's not get too bogged down in details of the coverup and the leak. More important is what was being covered up - the sometimes frantic effort to justify a war that didn't seem to have much justification.