Read at CNN.

Shelley blogs on the political implications.

The Christian Science Monitor has a good Q & A.

Scripting News has a good set of links to follow.

I did not know much about Senator Wellstone until today. Based upon everything I am reading, he was a real leader. The rare kind. Say a prayer for his family and loved ones.

An impressive anti-Iraq war essay from the far right in The American Conservative. I find these arguments persuasive.

My friends on the left will love this NYTimes article. My friends on the right will tear it to shreds. Me? I have doubts about some of it, but I find this hard to argue with:

…But then why weren’t executives paid lavishly 30 years ago? Again, it’s a matter of corporate culture. For a generation after World War II, fear of outrage kept executive salaries in check. Now the outrage is gone. That is, the explosion of executive pay represents a social change rather than the purely economic forces of supply and demand. We should think of it not as a market trend like the rising value of waterfront property, but as something more like the sexual revolution of the 1960’s — a relaxation of old strictures, a new permissiveness, but in this case the permissiveness is financial rather than sexual. Sure enough, John Kenneth Galbraith described the honest executive of 1967 as being one who ”eschews the lovely, available and even naked woman by whom he is intimately surrounded.” By the end of the 1990’s, the executive motto might as well have been ”If it feels good, do it.”

Think about it. Now some scary facts (that should be researched, statistics are funny ya know):

… the average annual salary in America, expressed in 1998 dollars (that is, adjusted for inflation), rose from $32,522 in 1970 to $35,864 in 1999. That’s about a 10 percent increase over 29 years — progress, but not much. Over the same period, however, according to Fortune magazine, the average real annual compensation of the top 100 C.E.O.’s went from $1.3 million — 39 times the pay of an average worker — to $37.5 million, more than 1,000 times the pay of ordinary workers.

…the past 15 years it has been hard to deny the evidence for growing inequality in the United States. Census data clearly show a rising share of income going to the top 20 percent of families, and within that top 20 percent to the top 5 percent, with a declining share going to families in the middle.

…The C.B.O. study found that between 1979 and 1997, the after-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of families rose 157 percent, compared with only a 10 percent gain for families near the middle of the income distribution.

…the top 10 percent contains a lot of people whom we would still consider middle class, but they weren’t the big winners. Most of the gains in the share of the top 10 percent of taxpayers over the past 30 years were actually gains to the top 1 percent, rather than the next 9 percent. In 1998 the top 1 percent started at $230,000. In turn, 60 percent of the gains of that top 1 percent went to the top 0.1 percent, those with incomes of more than $790,000. And almost half of those gains went to a mere 13,000 taxpayers, the top 0.01 percent, who had an income of at least $3.6 million and an average income of $17 million.

…According to Piketty and Saez, in 1970 the top 0.01 percent of taxpayers had 0.7 percent of total income — that is, they earned ”only” 70 times as much as the average, not enough to buy or maintain a mega-residence. But in 1998 the top 0.01 percent received more than 3 percent of all income. That meant that the 13,000 richest families in America had almost as much income as the 20 million poorest households; those 13,000 families had incomes 300 times that of average families.

… life expectancy in the U.S. is well below that in Canada, Japan and every major nation in Western Europe. On average, we can expect lives a bit shorter than those of Greeks, a bit longer than those of Portuguese. Male life expectancy is lower in the U.S. than it is in Costa Rica.

…These days 1 percent of families receive about 16 percent of total pretax income, and have about 14 percent of after-tax income. That share has roughly doubled over the past 30 years, and is now about as large as the share of the bottom 40 percent of the population. That’s a big shift of income to the top; as a matter of pure arithmetic, it must mean that the incomes of less well off families grew considerably more slowly than average income. And they did. Adjusting for inflation, average family income — total income divided by the number of families — grew 28 percent from 1979 to 1997. But median family income — the income of a family in the middle of the distribution, a better indicator of how typical American families are doing — grew only 10 percent. And the incomes of the bottom fifth of families actually fell slightly.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a pull yourself up by your bootstraps kinda guy. But what does it mean? Is the middle class getting squeezed out of existence? By what exactly? Ourselves? Simply not caring anymore? What does it mean to be middle class?

Ahh, it doesn’t matter anyway does it? Not since we are all building our own personal ego satisfaction zones. Our own personal communities we are kings of. Garret got the right quote:

…you can construct your own multimedia community, in which every magazine you read, every cable show you watch, every radio station you listen to, reaffirms your values and reinforces the sense of your own rightness. it is possible, maybe even inevitable, that you will slide into a solipsism that allows you precious little contact with people totally unlike yourself. but in your enclosed sphere you will feel very important.

Scary, scary, quote. Thanks Garret.

The Age appears to have the best coverage on Bali. This article, in particular, makes alot of sense.

I can’t argue with The Age’s observation that the US press ignores Australia’s pain either.

Our thoughts are with you.

Tim Blair of Australia is blogging about the terrorist attacks in Bali over the weekend. If you can help stavrosthewonderchicken with info on his friend who he fears may have been hurt, send it his way.

After a scan of the blogosphere I found it interesting that it’s kinda quiet about the tragedy. Say a prayer for them.

There is still cause for concern.

But will we get back to priorities?

The more I read, the more the Complete 9-11 Timeline frightens. via Garret.

Oliver Willis’ post Cost of War covers my concerns.

Even though I’m a centrist, although in a recent conversation with one of my old bosses – a mentor – claimed I was a liberal (maybe), articles like Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee have confirmed what I’ve felt for a long time. The far left *and* the far right are full of nutjobs and hypocrites.

Speaking of scary, Dean, of “Heal Your Church Website” and “blogs4God”, has been reporting on the sniper killings. He’s in the neighborhood where it all began.

Our emerging understanding of the 1990s requires that we admit, to ourselves and to the world, that we were engaged in a misguided attempt to achieve growth on the cheap. Instead of curbing consumption to finance our boom, we borrowed?heavily, year after year?from abroad. We did this to fill the widening gap between what we were saving and what we were investing?a gap that opened in earnest under Ronald Reagan but grew under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and has reached new dimensions under the new President Bush. (At least during the Clinton years borrowing went to finance investment, rather than?as in the Reagan and first Bush Administrations?a national consumption binge.) Borrowing cheaply for high-return investments makes sense, of course, if all goes well: returns are more than sufficient to pay what is owed, with interest. For years we were extraordinarily lucky.

However, in the 1990s we began to test our luck, not to mention that of the countries we told to follow our example, and we continue to test that luck. We have put ourselves deep in debt, not to finance productive investments but, rather, to finance wasteful projects: in the 1980s empty office buildings; in the 1990s fiber-optic systems that will not see light for years, and software that has interfered with business productivity rather than enhancing it; today a tax cut that disproportionately benefits the rich, fueling a consumption extravaganza that, though it may have prevented a greater slowdown, has not provided the foundations for future economic growth. It is still not clear how much of the private so-called investment of the 1990s was sheer waste; but even if we consider that only a fraction of the erosion in stock values is attributable to bad investments, the figure must be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. We are still so well off that we may not suffer immediately from this diminution in our wealth, but the consequences are already becoming clear: a loss of confidence not only in markets, and especially the stock market, but in government; a suspicion that the system is rigged to be an insider’s game; a blow to America’s moral leadership abroad. The attack on American-style globalization may be driven by Luddites and protectionists?but it is fed by a perception of American hypocrisy and the unfairness of the new global regime. The Uruguay Round?which forced developing countries to open up their markets to the products of the developed countries, while leaving in place protection and subsidies for many of the goods produced by the developed world?was so unbalanced that sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest region of the world, actually ended up worse off. The interests of drug companies were put ahead of those of the millions of people suffering from AIDS and other diseases, whose lives were jeopardized when the drug companies insisted that the production of low-cost generic drugs in developing countries be shut down.

If we don’t learn from our mistakes, for which the private sector and the government both bear responsibility, we may not be so lucky next time. That said, we shouldn’t disparage the successes of the 1990s, even if we can’t be sure who is responsible for them.

Rare I read something that is so… balanced… Read the rest in The Atlantic.

Read up about John O’Neill at MetaFilter.

But of course we dare not mention any names.