The statement:

People in the middle class have long been said to be a robust pillar supporting the socio-economic stability of a country. So, the bigger the middle class, the better our society is. However, the number of those in the middle class here was learned to have declined substantially while those in the upper and lower classes has increased in the last 10 years, according to a report released recently...It makes one wonder whether or not a chronic social state making the rich richer and the poor poorer is being revived. The crumbling of the middle class means nothing other than those in a state of economic hopelessness are increasing. Those driven out of the middle class are set to be deprived of their courage and hope that they would be better off if they work harder.

As if the DOJ audit report on the mess the FBI has made of National Security Letters wasn't bad enough, now the FBI official in charge of the bureau's Communications Analysis Unit says he discovered the frequent legal lapses and reported his concerns over them to his superiors in early 2005.

I had an interesting experience on Sunday. I turned on Meet the Press just as Russert started his four-way debate on Iraq, with the one-and-only Richard Perle as one of the two voices insisting on victory & nothing but (Tom DeLay was the other). Perle sounded so....irrational...that I started doing a little background checking and, yikes!

My personal thanks to Frank Rich for a wonderful column in Sunday's NY Times, titled The Ides of March 2003, reviewing who said what, and what happened when, in the days just before and after our invasion of Iraq.

Remember the President's somber face when first discussing the leak of Valerie Plame's status with the CIA? Remember his somber assurance to the nation that the leak would be investigated and wrongdoers punished?

Hell, remember WMD?

And on it goes...real earnings down
If life feels like it's getting harder, it is...for most of us. From the current BLS release on real earnings:

The man who gave you the contract with America, two divorces, a fear of women's urinary infections, and a recent admission that he was having an extramarital affair at the same time he was leading the effort to impeach Clinton for having sex with Monica Lewinsky is...back.

Lots of little wingnuts have taken to trying to defuse the scandal over the recent firings of US Attorneys by citing a 1993 NY Times article, but only its abstract, which happens to read as follows:

Anyone can say they support the troops and we should take them at their word, but the proof will come when it's time to provide the money

[Still waiting for Cheney or any of his ilk to apply that same reasoning to training & equipping the troops, providing care for soldiers returning from combat zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, and providing care for all vets during the remainder of their lives (rather than viewing the VA budget as a "drag on the economy" as one VA official said a while back).]

I've resisted writing about the recent DOJ audit of the FBI's use of National Security Letters (NSLs), partly because it's so complicated and partly because I just had the feeling that the problem was bigger than the impression you got from the mainstream media.

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