JOURNAL-ISM

via Kevin Drum

I see that the Wall Street Journal is busily cementing its reputation as the most dishonest editorial page in the country. Today they crow yet again about the vast tax burden of the upper classes:... read on

So in 1979 the super-rich earned 3% of the money and paid 5% of the taxes. In 1999 the super-rich earned 10% of the money and paid 11% of the taxes. The Journal clearly has a different definition of "grew more progressive" than the rest of us.

In fact, these numbers might start you wondering. If the income share of the super-rich tripled but their tax share only doubled, doesn't that mean that their tax rates must have gone down? Indeed it does.

So shed no tears for the super rich in America. Their incomes have tripled in the past couple of decades and at the same time their tax rates have decreased by 9 percentage points. That's a pretty sweet deal in anybody's book.

Bush hit his lowest approval rating ever:

President George W. Bush's job approval rating has dropped to 28%, the lowest of his administration. Bush's approval is lower than that of any president since World War II, with the exceptions of Jimmy Carter (who had a low point of 28% in 1979), and Richard Nixon and Harry Truman, who suffered ratings in the low- to mid-20% range in the last years of their administrations.

How does it feel. How does it feel. To be on your own...When I saw Bush's poll number, these words crept into my brain. No disrespect to Bob Dylan.

Check out this 1979 CBS news report of the incident.
reader D writes: "Twenty-seven years ago today, America experienced its worst commercial nuclear accident - an "impossible" partial meltdown of the reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. During the tension-packed week that followed, sketchy reports and conflicting information led to panic, and more than one hundred thousand residents, mostly children and pregnant women, fled the area."

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT

Gary Hart, who at the time was head of the Senate Subcommittee on Nuclear Regulation discusses the event on today's Democracy Now.

AMY GOODMAN: Today is the anniversary of the near meltdown. Can you talk about it?

GARY HART: Well, it was scary. I think it was -- we were a lot closer to a major nuclear catastrophe than, I think, most people realized. I’m trying to reconstruct the timing of this. It seemed to me that the plant went critical on about a Thursday -- Wednesday or Thursday. I got an Army helicopter to take me and the minority member, Alan Simpson of Wyoming, to fly over the plant and be briefed up there...read on