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Caught up on some of Sunday's paper over lunch.

George Ryan's speech on his blanket clemency for Illinois death row inmates is worth reading.

Another variant on the statistics you've heard before, from a New York Times piece on the changing definition of "the rich":

"In the 80's, it was not so much the top moving way ahead," said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group in Washington. "It was the bottom getting smashed."

In the 1990's, by contrast, inequality kept growing because the wealthy did fabulously well. Despite the decade's prosperity and the raises given to most workers, the top 20 percent of earners were the only group to increase its share of the nation's income.

Speaking of money, this morning I heard a few minutes of the Rush Limbaugh show. The topic, I gathered, was why we need to attack Iraq (which might have nuclear weapons) and not North Korea (which does).

Limbaugh explained that there are three things a nation will use nuclear weapons for: As a deterrent (in which case, they'll tell you they have them), for leverage (ditto), or to attack (in which case they'll keep them a secret until the big surprise). North Korea has proclaimed its possession of nuclear weapons, which means that they're not planning to use them, so they're not the threat we need to focus on.

I'm trying to remember--it's been a couple of months, so things are hazy--but wasn't North Korea trying to hide its weapons program until the U.S. called them on it?

Comments

Re: Hem, I have so many nukeses.

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Aha, I was confused. Here's the story, I think (based on this CNN timeline (http://asia.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/01/10/nkorea.timeline.nuclear.ap/) and, still, my own hazy recollection): North Korea secretly told the U.S. government they had a weapons program. Then the government told the press, not that North Korea had a weapons program, but that North Korea had said they had a weapons program, although the U.S. also had evidence of the program, so anyway, that was all confusing, and then there were a couple of denials and then an admission. Good times.

Your last paragraph is horrifying and funny and sadly plausible.