THE RICH GET RICH AND THE POOR GET POORER
This graph (from Brad DeLong via Kevin Drum) explains why the economic recovery claims won’t fly for your average worker.

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The Evil One is back. 

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Condolences to Jimmy Breslin, whose daughter Rosemary died Monday.

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LET THEM EAT CAKE
The latest from Mount Olympus:
WASHINGTON — A senior Agriculture Department official’s comment that people who eat at food banks are “taking the easy way out” was taken out of context, an agency spokeswoman said Wednesday, after several members of Congress called for his resignation.
Eric Bost, the department’s undersecretary for food and [...]

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MAKING IT SIMPLE
Amen.
It is a cliché to observe that the parties have drawn further apart, the center no longer holds, and partisans on both sides have withdrawn further into mutual loathing and ever more-homogenous and antagonistic groupings. Where the analysis goes wrong is in its assumption, either explicit or implicit, that both parties bear equal [...]

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Tonight’s deck picture is brought to you by the color green. And as you know, it’s not easy being green. 

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IRONY CENTRAL
I was listening to “Hardball” and Campbell Brown mentioned that the white House staff has been forbidden to see “Farenheit 9/11.” Are these people crazy?

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YOU CAN’T STOP ROCK AND ROLL
What the fuck is this? From The Hill:
Michael Moore may be prevented from advertising his controversial new movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” on television or radio after July 30 if the Federal Election Commission (FEC) today accepts the legal advice of its general counsel.
At the same time, a Republican-allied 527 soft-money [...]

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PATENTLY ABSURD
Mike over at Reading A1 does the definitive Times takedown of the week (God knows, it’s shooting fish in a barrel):
Clinton Fatigue or no, Bill Keller’s bad faith never fails to be noteworthy (or motivating). Boehlert doesn’t have any further reaction from Keller to report, but I’d love to know just what “patently absurd” [...]

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ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW
For most people, this is the reality of the “recovery”:
“Despite the well-advertised pick-up of job growth, recent trends in real wage income remain very disappointing,” lamented Stephen S. Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, in a June 7 memo to clients. “This, in my view, underscores one of the most serious [...]

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BEDFELLOWS
Maybe they were just being modest:
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health violated federal rules by engaging in lucrative collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and not reporting those arrangements to ethics officials as required, according to documents released yesterday as part of an escalating congressional investigation into conflicts of interest at the agency.
The [...]

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SEE NO EVIL
Robert Samuelson has a dopey column in today’s WashPo - dopey, because he’s bemoaning the trend toward consumers choosing partisan media while ignoring the 800-pound elephant in the room. Namely, that corporate bias and its interests already shape the news to a far greater extent than mere partisanship.
But the sorting of audiences by [...]

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TUNNEL VISION
That liberal media. There they go again:
But you can’t, as Mr. Clinton seems to hope, erase the facts. The day before he left office, Mr. Clinton acknowledged, in a deal that allowed him to avoid indictment, that “certain of my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false.” He surrendered his law license for [...]

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MIND YOUR OWN DAMN MANNERS
David Corn makes a salient point: How civil does the debate have to be when the president lied to take us into war?
But these critics have overlooked the main point: the case against Bush. The essential issue is not whether Bush detractors hate the man or are angry with him. [...]

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WHEN IRISH EYES AREN’T SMILING
Nuala O’Faolain, one of my favorite authors, writes about why there will be no warm welcome from the Irish for Bush:
How can there be so little enthusiasm for welcoming President Bush in as pro-American a country as exists on the face of the earth? Our intelligentsia is pro-American; American popular culture, [...]

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NIP N’TUCK
Oh, puh-LEEZE.
“Humane” treatment. Is that anything like “compassionate” conservatism?
Fucking liars.

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BITCH SLAP
I wish I could think of a more creative way to say this than “I love Digby,” but I do:
Lord Saletan tries to explain why his mishmash of a series on Kerry’s so-called “caveats and curlicues” doesn’t make sense to anyone. (Frankly, his explanation doesn’t make any sense either, but whatever.)
What he fails [...]

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IRONIC
Jo over at Democratic Veteran has a real good catch. He points out that Florida is using prisons in poorly-populated rural counties to pad the census for redistricting purposes - and of course, prisoners can’t vote:
Currently, the Census Bureau counts prison inmates as residents of the congressional and state legislative districts in which they are [...]

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CONDOLENCES
Matt Yglesias’s mother died last night. She was 53.

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FONZIE: I WAS WRRRRONN….GGGG
WashPo admits Kerry was right and they were wrong.
On June 19 we wrote that wage increases had kept pace with inflation in the year to May, and criticized Sen. John F. Kerry for suggesting that wages had fallen behind. We were wrong and Mr. Kerry was right: Hourly wages for non-supervisory workers [...]

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BOOK LEMMING
Last Christmas, I bought my father a Borders gift certificate. Then, in one of my trademark moves, I lost it. So I bought him another one.
I just found the one I lost. Guess what book I’m going to buy?

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CLOSE ENOUGH
I read the silly Hitchens attack on “Farenheit 9/11″ this morning. (I must say, Christopher says less with more…) And you know what I have to say?
So fucking what?
From all that I’ve read, Michael Moore is close enough to the truth that it’s driving the wingnuts crazy. Me, I don’t especially care whether Moore [...]

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BLOWING SMOKE
See? You wait a few days, and you see that anything that sounds like it validates Bush administration decisions turns out to be full of holes. Expect the shell game to become fast and furious as Bush’s poll numbers plummet:
WASHINGTON - The CIA concluded “a long time ago” that an al-Qaida associate who met [...]

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MERCHANDISE
I forgot to mention - you can now buy a Suburban Guerrilla T-shirt. Click on the T-shirt icon on the left for more information.

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ASHCROFT STILL THE WORST AG EVER
Krugman is back from vacation:
More important, is Mr. Ashcroft neglecting real threats to the public because of his ideological biases?
Mr. Krar’s arrest was the result not of a determined law enforcement effort against domestic terrorists, but of a fluke: when he sent a package containing counterfeit U.N. and Defense [...]

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TIMES TALK
Salon takes on the Times’ latest Clinton attacks:
Kakutani could not be reached for comment about the “lies” she alleges Clinton told. In an e-mail response to Salon, executive editor Bill Keller points out that “the official investigations concluded that there was insufficient evidence to accuse the Clintons of a crime. Deceit is not a [...]

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FAMILY VALUES
See, you really have to watch this stuff. If you want to run for the Senate, you probably shouldn’t have things like this in your background.
Unless you’re a Republican, of course.
Among the hundreds of pages of documents released was a legal filing dated June 9, 2000, in which Jeri Ryan said she knew her [...]

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FAQ
The LA Times has a piece explaining the SCOTUS decision on HMOs. Here it is.

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CAREER SATISFACTION
This is for those of you who were sitting in the parking lot of your workplace this morning, trying to pry your white-knuckled hands off the steering wheel and make yourself go into the building:
A manager might use bullying to swat down a threatening subordinate, for example, said Dr. Harvey A. Hornstein, a retired [...]

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You don’t really believe all that “rule of law” crap, do you? Because that’s not our understanding of the way things work in this administration:
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 21 — A military judge (Col. James Pohl) ruled Monday that the top American commanders currently involved in the Iraq war will have to submit to questioning by [...]

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