This past week, I've been asking TPM staffers to write up their summer reading picks. Below, some of our superb interns weigh in.

Lakshmi: I read Carl Sferrazza Anthony's wonderful biography of Florence Harding last summer and I plan to continue going down the First Lady route by checking out Sylvia Morris's Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady. Also on my list is the young adult novel Child of Dandelions by Shenaaz Nanji, the story of an Asian Indian girl who fled Uganda with her family after Idi Amin issued his 1972 order expelling all Asians from the country.

Matt: For summer reading this year I am mostly just catching up on some Cafe books, Nixonland and Standard Operating Procedure in particular. As a nice beach book, I've also tossed Gravity's Rainbow in there, with some David Sedaris to boot.

Dave: My friends and I formed a Thomas Pynchon Book Club, with our first (only?) selection being Gravity's Rainbow, without a doubt the most frustrating and rewarding book I have ever picked up. I'm not even going to try and describe its madness and perfection. For lighter reading, I'm going with essay books- Will Leitch's God Save The Fan (Crashing the Gates for sports is the best analogy), Keith Johnstone's Improv (techniques on improv comedy, but also great life advice) and Eudora Welty's On Writing (sharp).

Al: I have to admit, I'm still halfway through Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. I'm also reading Freud's last (and controversial) book Moses and Monotheism. And there's always the sisyphean task of catching up on unread RSS feeds.

Ezra: I've been reading books from the TPM Office Big Old Pile O' Books, which I've enjoyed so far.

First was Gaming The Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair and What We Can Do About It. It goes through the problems with various voting mechanisms such as plurality voting, runoff voting, and approval voting. It's a lot of thought provoking political theory, but the author gives many real world examples - especially a particularly wacky Louisiana Governors race - to make the theory relevant.

Yesterday I finished Alpha Dogs: The Americans Who Turned Political Spin into a Global Business, which chronicled the powerful policial consulting firm Sawyer Miller. In addition to helping candidates around the US, they also spread American campaign tactics around the world. The irony was that they gradually grew to support liberal and progressive causes in America while helping large corporations at home and often brutal governments abroad.

And so far I like Get Out The Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout, all six pages that I've read.

My previous posts this week have focused on the difficulties and injustices faced by millions of American workers--wage stagnation, growing income inequality, managers treating their employees in shockingly callous ways. (It's all part of the systematic squeeze that I describe in my new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. See stevengreenhouse.com)

It's July Fourth--and I'm feeling patriotic--so today I will focus on some of what's good in America. Some corporations do not just a good job, but a great job, in how they treat those workers, and I want to focus on some of these stellar employers because we can all learn from them and because they should serve as models for all of corporate America.

The casino-hotels of Las Vegas sponsor an amazing, no-tuition training program in which a $22,000-a-year busboy can train to become a $50,000 a year waiter and even a $75,000 a year sommelier. Each year Patagonia, the outdoors apparel company, gives 40 employees two-month paid leaves to work for the environmental organization of their choice. With its headquarters 150 yards from the Pacific, Patagonia happily allows its employees to go surfing for two-and-a-half hours at lunch time, so long as they get the job done.

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This is some exchange of letters.

The whole thing started when Joe Klein blasted the neocons for instigating the Iraq war. It started here, I think, with Joe Klein simply letting the neocons have it. His language was very strong and the neocons at Commentary and National Review went ballistic, calling out Klein for being anti-semitic. Then the ADL's chairman, Abe Foxman, jumped in to tell Klein he was out of line.

This is the point where the apology usually comes. Not Klein. Klein is a Jew -- and an unapologetic one. He also knows that he's right.

He is sticking to his guns. Read this fascinating exchange. First Foxman.

Then Klein.

Fascinating. And important.

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My how times have changed. In the early 90's the Russians were begging for American financial aid and investment. Yesterday, Russian President Medvedev talked about the recent visit of Treasury Secretary Paulson to Moscow, in search of Russian investment in a faltering U.S. economy.

Mr. Medvedev made his comments on Tuesday in a meeting with a small group of foreign journalists a day after the American treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., appealed in Moscow for Russian investment in the United States. The symbolism of the visit resonated here, in that only a decade had passed since the Russian economy was in shambles and the country was desperate for Western aid.

Whether Paulson can convince the Russians to invest some of their new Sovereign Wealth fund in our failing banking system will be a true test of his negotiating skills. The sight of him sucking up to Putin and Medvedev is a true snapshot of a changed world order. As I pointed out last week, the Russians and the Chinese are already the largest holders of our Treasury Bills. I'm not sure even Karl Marx would have understood the irony that the countries that rose to power in the 20th Century under Communism, would end up bailing out the world's largest Capitalist power.

My summer reading pick is Rockin' Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool by Walt Frazier and Ira Berkow, published in 1974. Many of you may know Walt "Clyde" Frazier as one of the greatest basketball players of all time, the backcourt leader of the two-time NBA Champion New York Knicks of the early 1970s. Some may also be familiar with Clyde's razzle-dazzle wordsmithery as a color commentator for Knicks games on the MSG Network (and previously WFAN radio). And still others are no doubt aware of his work alongside Keith Hernandez in the Just For Men hair product commercial campaign (the Frazier-Hernandez pairing serving, according to Wikipedia, as the inspiration for the name of Denzel Washington's character in the movie Inside Man, which is... odd).

I submit that if you have any knowledge of Clyde Frazier whatsoever then you have at some point asked yourself the question, "How can I be as cool as Clyde Frazier?" The book Rockin' Steady provides the answers.

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The Bush administration no longer makes any pretense of opposing an Israeli attack on Iran. Yesterday Martha Raddatz of ABC asked President Bush if he would "strongly discourage" Israel from attacking. Bush wouldn't. He responded that he has repeatedly stated that he favors diplomacy "first."

This is a whole new role for the United States. We no longer even bother to tell our allies not to start wars. We simply smile.

In yesterday's Christian Science Monitor, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami and the Iranian-American scholar Trita Parsi join in rebutting the ridiculous notion that there is no alternative to war,

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Okay, as I always say, it is not entirely President Bush's fault, but he is sitting there, and that is how the game is played (remember Jimmy Carter). Anyhow, here is my take on the June data.

The employment to population ratio (EPOP) ratio fell to 62.4 percent in June, its lowest level in more than three years, as the economy lost another 62,000 jobs in June. This was the sixth consecutive month in which the economy lost jobs. The private sector lost 91,000 jobs in June. With the April and May numbers revised down by 76,000, the job loss in the private sector over the last three months has been 273,000, an average of 91,000 a month. The private sector has now shed 578,000 jobs since employment peaked in November.

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During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush and many conservative commentators attacked Al Gore for engaging in "class warfare" after Gore promised to help the little guy and criticized Bush for favoring the rich. Four years later, the Republicans, using a page from the same playbook, attacked John Kerry and John Edwards for being populist class warriors because of their talk of Two Americas.

In this year's campaign, there's a big difference, at least so far. John Edwards, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have all used robustly populist language about the problems facing America's have-nots, but this year the attacks for engaging in class warfare have largely disappeared.

The reason for this may well be that the news media, political commentators and even many Republicans have come to recognize that income inequality has grown far worse and that many Americans are angry about the widening gap between those at the top and everyone else.

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Kidding! We kid the Obama people! We kid because we love! Ha-ha. We wouldn't vote for Nader if he peed a Starbucks double shot espresso roast with syrup and ice. As for Gabby Hayes, don't even ask.

But we are concerned. You could call us the campaign concern troll. Maybe we should start our own Obama Facebook group. Some sh*t really needs to be trolled, so a trolling we will go. Merrily we troll along. The object of our disaffection tonight is one Anthony Lake, who tries to make clear that the Obama Administration will be ready to go to war with Iran, if need be. Those last three words can bring us to a world of hurt.

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I've got a pile of books I'm hoping to get through this summer. I recently picked up a copy of Pennsylvania Avenue -- Profiles of Backroom Power, by John Harwood and Gerald Seib. As a reporter for TPMmuckraker, I figured maybe I'll stumble across some of those great nuggets of background knowledge that help show how things really work here in Washington. And I also bought a copy of George Soros's new book, The New Paradigm For Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means. I love these sorts of big-picture business books. And Soros seems like a pretty smart guy. (Remember when he made a billion dollars with that bet against the British Pound?)

But the book I pulled off the shelf a few weeks ago was The Oyster Wars of the Chesapeake Bay, by John Wennersten. I found it at a used bookstore last year in my hometown of Salisbury, Maryland. This is not, and never has been, a best seller. But I have a soft spot for the history of Maryland's Eastern Shore, the Chesapeake Bay and the Delmarva Peninsula.

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As a young African American woman and the first lawyer in my family, I find Justice Thurgood Marshall's life both professionally and personally inspiring. But today, which would have been Marshall's 100th birthday, is not just personally significant. It is a day where everyone who is passionate about fairness and equality should pause and reflect on what we must learn from his legacy.

Thurgood Marshall, the first African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice, was a pioneer for legal equality who used the civil court system as a tool for change. Born in 1908 in the segregated South, Marshall experienced all the obstacles and indignities that young people today only see in documentaries and textbooks. But by the time he died in 1993, he had not only witnessed the dismantling of formal legal racism, he had actually played an integral role in achieving it.

As a young lawyer he worked to chip away at Jim Crow, combining sophisticated litigation strategies that earned him respect among colleagues, with a unique wit and humor that warmed even those most staunchly hostile to his anti-racist agenda. At the end of his tenure as a civil rights trial lawyer he had won 29 of his 32 Supreme Court cases. But speaking at his alma mater, Howard Law School, in 1978, he warned graduates against believing that the struggle for social justice would end with a few, or even many, courtroom victories:

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There's a delicious piece in today's New York Post describing parents of graduates from some elite New York City private schools rending their garments over the inability of their children to get into Ivy League colleges this year. But what's really important about the story comes past all the sorrow and fury, when the article suggests that an important factor might be the new admissions policies that Harvard (and to a lesser extent other Ivies) implemented to enable more students from middle- and lower-income families to attend. Their generous subsidies have encouraged a broader range of students across the income spectrum to compete for slots, with some lower-income public school applicants beating out the prep school grads.

At Harvard, under its new policies, tuitions are waived entirely for families earning $60,000 a year or less. Families earning between $60,000 and $120,000 pay a reduced rate on a sliding scale that rises to a maximum of 10 percent of their income. The Post quotes Harvard director of undergraduate admissions Marlyn McGrath as saying, "Our low-income initiative has repositioned us. A lot of people are starting to think about Harvard when otherwise their state university might have been on top of their list." One example is public school student Lukasz Zbylut, who just graduated from Brooklyn's New Utrecht High School and will attend Harvard in the fall. Lukasz's parents are Polish immigrants, and his father works in construction in Brooklyn to support his wife and three children.

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In the mid fifties, the U.S. military got worried because American soldiers, captured by the Chinese in the Korean conflict had "confessed" publicly that the Americans were using germ warfare. We knew the confessions were false and so we began studying how the Chinese got these men to tell lies. As usual, the Army commissioned an academic study.

The 1957 article was entitled "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War" and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been "brainwashed," and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies' harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

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Obama's proposed Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, faith-based initiatives to funnel social welfare money through religiously-run institutions, is not a move to the right as some bloggers argue; in fact, it's a brilliant plot to seize political territory and marginalize the religious right.

The key sentences from the proposal are these:

"Obama does not support requiring religious tests for recipients of aid nor using federal money to proselytize, according to a campaign fact sheet. He also only supports letting religious institutions hire and fire based on faith in the non-taxpayer funded portions of their activities, said a senior adviser to the campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity to more freely describe the new policy."

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My 22-year-old daughter graduated from college in May, and I'm worried about her as she enters the workforce--actually I'm worried about her whole generation as it enters the workforce. Many young people don't realize that they face a far less friendly workplace than when my generation entered the workforce in the 1970s.

To tell the truth, when I began researching my book, The Big Squeeze, Tough Times for the American Worker, I wasn't planning a separate chapter on the nation's young workers--by that I mean, workers under age 35, and especially young Americans who have recently entered the workforce. But as I proceeded with my research, I was surprised and chagrined to learn how tough things have grown for young workers--and that was before the current economic downturn. As a result, I added a chapter, "Starting Out Means a Steeper Climb."

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Anybody interested in helping people across the world better their lives should read Bad Days in Basra (I.B. Tauris & Co, 2008). It matters little if you seek to help establish basic security, shore up the economy, curb corruption or reform schools--it is all in there. We learn that countries like Iraq, depleted by Saddam and by the sanctions imposed by the West, and countries that are in the very early stages of economic and political development, like Afghanistan, cannot be "reconstructed" quickly, especially not by foreign powers. There is no reason to expect that the developments that took the US and the UK several generations can be achieved on the run, in war-torn zones, and among people who have priorities other than material affluence.

Bad Days in Basra is written by a person with a unique qualification to address the topic: Hilary Synnott was a British diplomat when he was appointed the man in charge of Basra (the city and the province), after the British liberated it in 2003. On first read, one may see the book as a long list of all the things one must be prepared to do when seeking to jump a country from its present dilapidated condition to that of a prosperous, democratic nation. One may think that one can take the list of all the things that went awry in Iraq, or were mismanaged, or were missing, and fix them or provide for them.

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David Brooks made an important mistake in his Tuesday column about Barack Obama's fund raising. He writes: "If Obama's tax plans go through, those affluent donors could wind up giving over 50 percent of their income to the federal government."

According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center's analysis of Obama's tax plan, the correct share for the richest 1 percent of households--those with income above $600,000--is 36 percent; for the for the richest 0.1 percent, above $2.9 million, the rate would be 39 percent. Note also that since these estimates include taxes remitted by corporations, the actual tax returns that these households fill out would find them paying less than 30 percent of their income in taxes. Even with Senator Obama's proposal to raise Social Security taxes on those with earnings above $250,000, a proposal for which he has yet to specify a rate, tax liabilities of the affluent would still be far below 50 percent of their income.

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Our new Coffee House editor Lila Shapiro has asked the TPM staff to share our summer reading lists here at TPMCafe's Coffee House blog. And I must confess that while I frequently fantasize that I'm going to read more Nabokov or any other sort of highbrow literature, I almost always end up spending whatever free time I have reading history. And that usually spending some span of months digging into one era before getting my fill of it and moving on to another.

At the moment I'm reading a series of books on World War I and World War II, mainly the first -- not so much the wars proper, but the periods leading up to them and what factors pushed the countries to war.

Most of my interest is just characterological. I've been on history kicks like this for my whole adult life. And at this point I just figure it's a permanent condition. But reading these books -- or in several cases rereading them -- has helped me work through, though not in any particularly linear or direct way, my thoughts about the Bush years and the last two decades, going back to the end of the Cold War.

Normally, anything so recent as the 20th century doesn't quite do it for me in the history department. But this is an exception.

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Late yesterday I recorded an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. She is one of my favorite interviewers (what a voice!). She wanted to talk about credit reporting agencies. What made the interview stand out was her introduction, which began with a story about her husband's trip through Credit Reporting Hell.

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The U.S. government needs to do more for American parents. (See Kristin Bateman's post on a new article by Eric Nguyen examining parents in bankruptcy.) But it's not just Europhile liberals who are saying this anymore. Although, in recent years, "family values" has implied gay rights and abortion, these connotations may be fading as conservatives (like Bill Kristol, David Brooks, and folks at the National Review) embrace the Clintonian arguments made by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in their new book, Grand New Party. (The authors discuss it with Tom Ashbrook, and fellow guest Bob Cutner, here.)

A new consensus is emerging that government should distribute wealth and opportunity more equally, in particular to help parents. As conservatives eschew Reagan's dictum that "government is the problem," (quote at 6:09), it frees Democrats politically to espouse even more ambitious and comprehensive policies. Nevertheless, I fear that taxes and special interests will impede any reform.

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Confronted with the media uproar of this week (so far), Wesley Clark's declaration about military service not automatically qualifying a politician for leadership, Obama today passed up a perfect (from an opportunistic point of view) opportunity to apply the guillotine to the back of the general's neck. Ben Smith at Politico posts this from Obama's press conference today, "responding to a reporter who asked the candidate why he hadn't called on Wesley Clark to apologize for his remarks yesterday":

"I guess my question is why, given all the vast numbers of things that we've got to work on, that that would be a top priority of mine?" Obama said. "I'm happy to have all sorts of conversations about how we deal with Iraq and what happens with Iran, but the fact that somebody on a cable show or on a news show like Gen. Clark said something that was inartful about Sen. McCain I don't think is probably the thing that is keeping Ohioans up at night."

A lot of progressives have been wincing, and some yelping, that Obama's positions on the Supremes' Second Amendment decision, the companies-wiretap bill, and the war appropriation manifest a grim and counterproductive march toward the middle. (Here's Arianna Huffington, for example.) It's going to be a long campaign and an even longer presidency. Stuff, and politics, happen. But isn't it evident that the rush to conclude that Obama's dashing toward "the middle" is overgeneralized and overwrought? The toughest he went was "inartful."

Deep breaths, everyone.

Today was the day that Medicare was supposed to take an axe to physicians' fees, slashing them by an average of 10.6 percent, across the board. But last week, in a stunning turn-around, the House voted 355 to 59 to block a pay cut for physicians. The Senate leadership reacted by reneging on a compromise that progressives had forged with conservatives. What ensured included name-calling and open threats on the Senate floor.

Reading about the battle, I couldn't help but think that HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt may be correct when he suggests that Medicare reform could require "a degree of bipartisan statesmanship" that a highly polarized Congress just doesn't posses. Health Care reform may be too hot to handle. Perhaps Congress should delegate the job to someone else.

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A new American Bankruptcy Law Journal article by Harvard 3L Eric Nguyen shows that families with school-age children work harder to keep their homes in times of financial crisis, including by filing for bankruptcy. Nguyen's empirical analysis suggests that parents are often willing to make significant sacrifices--continuing to make hard-to-afford mortgage payments and filing for bankruptcy--in order to avoid uprooting their children and moving to cheaper housing.

As Prof. Warren showed in The Two-Income Trap, middle-class families often stretch their finances thin in order to buy homes in better school districts. With school qualities varying widely town to town--thanks to an education system that, despite stark disparities, continues to be funded by local property taxes--parents feel they must take these financial leaps in order to provide their children opportunities for success. Then, when these families hit by a crisis (say, when one parent loses a job or gets ill), those parents don't have a financial buffer to get them through the rough time. The law should help these families.

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Soccer moms step aside. In this year's campaign working-class voters have elbowed you aside as the demographic group that candidates covet most.

As Barack Obama and John McCain seek to outmaneuver each other in wooing John and Jane Punchclock, the question that leaps to the fore is, what do working-class voters want?

Some answers to that question became clear to me when I was interviewing hundreds of workers for my new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. (see www.stevengreenhouse.com) In many ways, working-class voters want what Harry Truman was promising: A Fair Deal, or at least a Fairer Deal.

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Now that patriotism has been appropriately squared away, Senator Barack Obama is scheduled to deliver a major address on motherhood. It will be the mother of all addresses. He will disparage feminists of the bygone 70s for demeaning the role of women as care-givers, because the children are the future. Let's say we shouldn't be surprised if it happens.

It would obviously be too much to expect Obama to defend the 60s left. But not too much to wish he didn't say stupid things about the struggles of the era. The same sort of foolishness can come back to bite you on the arse. The Vietnam War was an awful thing. Criticism of it did not simplify to "blaming America for all that was wrong with the world." The Iraq War is an awful thing. An attack on Iran would be awful too. If your mind is muddled on one, or two, where will you be on the third?

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So Lila has asked us all here to write a piece about what we're reading this summer. As the former editor 'round these parts, I thought I'd jump in here first to get the ball rolling. Ok, here goes.

Despite running book clubs here for over a year, I'm actually pretty terrible at reading books. There are only so many pages I can read without wanting to click. I suppose it's because Google is making me stupid (or at least making my brain desire more interactive stimulation when it learns), but I usually read three or four books at a time and usually only get through one of those four.

A few days ago, I finally picked up Drew Westen's The Political Brain. It, and a few other books, have me kind of depressed.

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This week, I've asked all TPM staffers to write a brief post about what their summer reading picks are. This seems especially fitting today, when a federal court review on alleged enemy combatants at Gitmo used a Lewis Carroll reference to make a crucial point in the ruling:

The judges compared the argument to the logic in Carroll's nonsense poem. The Bellman lead his crew across the ocean, guided by a map that was just a blank piece of paper. He rallied and reassured his crew simply by repeat himself.

"I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true," the Bellman says in the poem.

"Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true," the court wrote.

It's a dark comparison. But Lewis Carroll's writing-- the opposite of a blank piece of paper in more ways than one-- can serve as a real map in times like these.

So, without further delay, my top summer picks.

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In all the analysis about how conservative or mixed in ideology the Supreme Court has become, there's been little comment on the reality that in almost every case where corporations challenged state regulations or taxing powers this term, the corporations won and state power lost. "This has been a very successful year for the business community," said Miguel Estrada, who represents many key corporate interests before courts in Washington, D.C."

In almost every Supreme Court decision decided this term, state regulation lost out against business claims of federal preemption of state powers. The list and effects on consumer protection, labor rights and state budgets went on and on (for analysis go to the flip):

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Happy Monday Cafe-ers. This week at Cafe, NYT reporter Steven Greenhouse joins us at Table for One to talk about his new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. In his opening post, featured below, he provides a litany of disgraceful corporate behavior, like the time RadioShack laid off 400 workers in Fort Worth, Texas, via email: "The workforce reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated." The discussion is ongoing all week, a post a day, so stay tuned.

Plus-- in honor of Summer, the beach, Fourth of July, or a late homage to Summer Solstice (pick your preference)-- we'll be featuring staff summer reading pics all week, 2 staffers a day. Dying to know what Josh Marshall reads when he stops blogging at 4:00 a.m.? Me too. Feel free to jump into the comment threads with your own summer choices.

In 1991, we at the Communitarian Network issued a paper titled "The Case For Domestic Disarmament," a high-profile position paper which stated that what is needed to significantly enhance public safety is domestic disarmament of the kind that exists in practically all democracies.

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By far the most important domestic policy issue facing the next president will be fixing the health care system. The United States stands out among wealthy countries in not guaranteeing health insurance to its citizens.

Yet, even though many people cannot get access to care, we still pay more than twice as much per person as the average in other wealthy countries. And we have the worst outcomes. Only a severely over-medicated politician would claim we have the best health care system in the world.

As bad as the current system is, it keeps getting worse.

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It's getting close to the Fourth of July and you can bet Vice President Cheney will be enjoying his secure undisclosed location in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. You can also bet that he will be monitoring a bizarre secret dance with Al Qaeda that is currently going on. This morning's New York Times reports the frustration CIA officers have in not being able to pursue Al Qaeda into the Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

A (new plan) was meant to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington's risk-averse attitude toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan. They also argue that catching Mr. bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive. But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light.

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The NYT's rehash of Democrats' "southern problem" is a pretty remarkable accomplishment. 1,300 words on the first African-American nominee's ability to compete in the historic site of slavery and Jim Crow without the words "racism" or "prejudice" or any other phrase that put the trends both current and historic in proper context.

Instead, the "paper of record" chose to whitewash history with polite euphemisms. On why white Southerners left the Democratic Party:

But voters' allegiance was rocked in the 1960s by the Democrats' leadership in passing civil rights legislation, and whites began to move to what Republicans asserted was their more natural ideological home. [emphasis added]

Yes, and that ideology was, um, white supremacy.

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What ever happened to the golden rule?

That's what I often asked myself as I was researching my new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. I often felt amazed, even appalled by the way many corporate managers treated their workers. It's understandable that corporate managers have grown tougher in recent decades because foreign competition and Wall Street have placed ever-fiercer pressures on companies to cut costs. But that hardly explains why so many managers seem to have grown downright callous and why so many treat their workers with a shocking lack of dignity.

Unfortunately, I found a disconcertingly large number of real-life examples to draw from as I was writing The Big Squeeze (for more information, see www.stevengreenhouse.com), which seeks to explain the tough times that millions of American workers--white-collar and blue-collar, male and female, twenty-somethings and fifty-somethings--face as wages have stagnated, health and pension benefits have grown worse, job security has shriveled, and many workers have been pressured to work harder and faster.

One company fired a computer engineer on Take Your Daughters to Work Day as his eight-year-old daughter looked on. At Electronic Arts, the video games giant, some employees complained that they were required to work 30 days a month, 80 hours a week.

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The news that Cindy McCain defaulted for four years on the property taxes from one of her 7 houses, along with the $500K in Amex Platinum debt, leads me to believe that Cindy McCain may be having liquidity problems. Her largest asset, Hensley Beer Distribution, is a private company, so its stock is totally illiquid even though a big wealth management firm like American Express would loan her money (thus the huge Amex credit line) using the private Hensley stock as collarteral. But if every one of the 7 houses she owns is mortgaged, she might be having some cash flow problems paying for all those private jet rides for John. Obviously they paid up as soon as Newsweek broke the story, but how many other creditors are waiting to get paid?