In a National Review blog post, Katrina Trinko falsely accused Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren of plagiarism. She alleged that Warren lifted passages for her 2005 book All Your Worth, which she co-wrote with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi, from another book:

Trinko has since deleted that blog post and published a correction:

I took down my earlier post on Elizabeth Warren plagiarizing from the book Getting On the Money Track.  On Amazon.com, the Warren book All Your Worth is listed as having been published January 9, 2006. As it turns out, that is the paperback publication date; the hardback book was published in March 2005. As such, it appears that Getting on the Money Track (published in October 2005) plagiarized from All Your Worth, not the other way around. 

I apologize for the error.

On Fox News' flagship news program, Special Report, guest host Shannon Bream repeated National Review's false report:

Will Special Report issue a correction on Monday?

Read the full entry ...

Latching onto a Congressional Research Service report commissioned by Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), Fox News suggested today that government investments in clean energy hurt our military. But experts agree that investments in clean energy technology and climate mitigation benefit our national security.

The report found that the federal government has spent more than $68 billion since 2008 on climate-related activities. The majority of these funds went to the Climate Change Technology Program, which invests in renewable energy and other energy technologies that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Although only a small fraction of that funding -- about 0.01% -- went to the Defense Department, Fox anchor Martha MacCallum suggested that climate change programs are being funded at the expense of national security, asking: "Is the White House putting green energy ahead of defense?" And the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore added: "I do think this national security issue is really the crux of the issue about whether we want money that should be spent to keep us safe and keep us secure going for green programs."

Let's put things in perspective. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Pentagon has spent $776 million on climate change programs over the past 4 years. This accounts for approximately 0.0002% of total defense spending over that time frame -- hardly excessive to address a problem that military experts agree poses a major national security threat.

Read the full entry ...

During a May 18 appearance on Fox's America's Newsroom, conspiracy peddler Katie Pavlich made a number of far out claims concerning how the doctrine of separation of power relates to the ongoing investigation of the ATF's failed Operation Fast and Furious by congressional Republicans. 

As you may recall from high school civics class, separation of powers refers to the system of government we have in the United States where the authority of the federal government is divided among three co-equal branches. This equilibrium between branches of the federal government is maintained through the system of checks and balances established by the U.S. Constitution.

But in Pavlich's world, the legislative branch reigns supreme and the Department of Justice must supply any and all documents requested by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) during his committee's investigation. This ridiculous theory would disrupt the system of checks and balances and is refuted by Congress' own research department and court precedent concerning the right of the Executive to withhold certain types of information. 

But the biggest error made by Pavlich -- one that she repeated three times during her appearance -- is that the Department of Justice must turn over every single document requested by the House Oversight Committee in order to be in compliance with Issa's subpoena.

Read the full entry ...

So opined the editorial board of the New York Daily News in response to public scrutiny of the New York Police Department's "stop-and-frisk" policy -- a controversial program that last year alone resulted in over 685,000 stops of primarily black and Latino residents (only 12% of persons stopped were charged with a crime). This week, Manhattan Federal Court Judge Shira Scheindlin granted class action status to a group of victims of the policy who are bringing suit against the city for what they argue is a discriminatory and unconstitutional practice. The Daily News, as well as the New York Post, viewed the ruling -- which they inexplicably believe risks the existence of the "stop-and-frisk" practice altogether -- as nothing less than life-threatening.

The NY Post's editors weighed in as well, attacking outspoken critics of the program whom the editors say "won't rest until the murder rate skyrockets":

Read the full entry ...

Read the full entry ...

On May 17, The New York Times reported on a plan presented to Joe Rickett's Ending Spending Action Fund that would highlight controversial remarks made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright and link these remarks to President Obama. Soon after the report received widespread coverage, the Romney campaign rejected the attack on Obama, despite having brought up Rev. Wright himself in Sean Hannity's radio show as recently as February. After having obsessed about Rev. Wright in the 2008 election, the right-wing media reacted to the decision by lamenting the opportunity to reignite the attack.

The New York Times article reported that in a report titled "The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama," a "group of high-profile Republican strategists" proposed a plan that:

[C]alls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.

"The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way," says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade.

[...]

The $10 million plan, one of several being studied by Mr. Ricketts, includes preparations for how to respond to the charges of race-baiting it envisions if it highlights Mr. Obama's former ties to Mr. Wright, who espouses what is known as "black liberation theology."

The group suggested hiring as a spokesman an "extremely literate conservative African-American" who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a "metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln."

But the right-wing media has not followed Romney as he has attempted to distance himself from the ad campaign.

Read the full entry ...

A May 18 Wall Street Journal article claimed that the "tenor" of a recently proposed super PAC ad campaign to attack President Obama over his association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright "was far different than that adopted so far by [Mitt] Romney," and that Romney's campaign "has been focused on raising money" and the economy while "rarely straying beyond those topics." But as Politico pointed out, Romney invoked Wright as recently as February to attack the president.

From the Wall Street Journal (note: full article available behind pay wall):

Mr. Romney's comments on the Obama campaign's attack, three days after the ad was released, underscored his campaign's approach in recent days: It has been focused on raising money and building Mr. Romney's image as a businessman concerned about the economy and federal debt, rarely straying beyond those topics--including putting him in front of a monitor at public events showing an updated total of the national debt.

[...]

The tenor of the proposed ad [linking President Obama to Reverend Wright] was far different than that adopted so far by Mr. Romney and many other GOP-leaning groups, which have chosen not to attack Mr. Obama personally. The episode was a reminder that while independent super PACs have shown their power to assist candidates they favor, they also hold the potential to complicate or contradict a candidate's own messages.

Read the full entry ...

The Daily Caller recently reported that "$3.1 billion in DOE loan guarantees" to First Solar "created mostly overseas jobs." In fact, the chairman of First Solar testified before Congress that "all the jobs directly created with the loan guarantees" are American.

The Daily Caller embedded video of his testimony in its report, but apparently didn't watch it all the way through. Neither did right-wing news aggregator Weasel Zippers, which ran with a similarly misleading headline.

In a House Oversight Committee hearing, Chairman Darrell Issa attempted to make hay of the fact that First Solar, which is based in Arizona and employs thousands in the U.S., also has solar projects and employees overseas. But Michael Ahearn, the chairman of First Solar, clarified that the loan guarantees only supports projects in the U.S.:

REP. DARRELL ISSA (R-CA): OK, so jobs created with loan guarantees, stimulus, and others, basically not American.

MICHAEL AHEARN, FIRST SOLAR: No, no, all those jobs are American and all the jobs directly created with the loan guarantee.

Read the full entry ...

For conservatives, it never gets old. It's 2012 and Obama's dedicated media foes are still writing about his possible foreign birthplace.  

But now, in a confusing twist, conservatives are demanding the mainstream press pay great attention to the latest Kenya-related blip-of-a-revelation, that a 21-year-old publishing pamphlet not meant for public distribution erroneously claimed that Obama had been born in Kenya. (The author of the pamphlet insists it was a simple mistake.) One Breitbart blogger is now insisting that the press take this story very, very seriously and follow it up with detailed reports. And if journalists don't, well, that's just proof that the liberal media is covering for Obama.

Please note that up until very recently, conservatives were making the exact opposite claim. You'll recall that birtherism, according to some right-wing pundits, was a liberal media conspiracy and the only reason the story lived on was because the Obama-loving press wouldn't stop writing about it in hopes of making the president's opponents look like "right-wing nutjob kooks."  (Hint: They didn't need any help.)

The claim, of course, was pure fiction. Last year, it was Fox News that went all-in on the birther story and gave Donald Trump a national platform to embarrass himself with his birth certificate expedition.  

Nonetheless, right-wing commentators were in heated agreement: Talk of Obama's birthplace was a deliberate "distraction" cooked up by the press and the White House to keep people's minds off the real issues of the day.

If so, then Breitbart.com is now part of that vast left-wing conspiracy, as the site has morphed into a clearinghouse this week with scores of blog posts about burning questions that surround Obama's birthplace. Or at least the burning question that surrounds a 1991 pamphlet that mentioned his birthplace.

Team Breitbart is making all the strenuous claim that by raising questions about Obama being listed as "Born in Kenya" on an old publishing pamphlet, and blogging about the topic incessantly, they're not wallowing in birtherism. But it's a distinction without a difference, really. Either you purposefully feed this conspiratorial jibberish or you don't.

This week there has been lots of feeding going on and naturally it's been loudly promoted by professional birthers, such as Joseph Farah, who heralded the Breitbart pamphlet story as a "breakthrough." (Although Farah was upset the Breitbart crew was "still reticent about publishing this blockbuster for fear of being labeled 'birthers.'") Breitbart.com contributor Pam Geller also held up the pamphlet story as validation of her previous birther nonsense.

Last year, Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly, two birther non-believers, were lamenting the story's astonishing staying power when Rove noted, "Every moment that conservatives talk about this, they marginalize and diminish themselves in the minds of independent voters."

Rove and others please take note, it wasn't the liberal media or the Obama White House that forced the entire right-wing blogosphere to, once again, wallow in questions about Obama's birthplace this week. That dubious distinction came from within the heart of the conservative movement,  Breitbart.com.

UPDATED: According to a Breitbart post today, the press is now ignoring, or covering up, the site's birther scoop. So, last year the press protected Obama by hyping the birther story. Now the press is protecting Obama by not hyping the birther story.

Noted.

In a May 18 post, on his blog, RedState, CNN's Erick Erickson praised Breitbart.com for its May 17 "vetting" of  Obama, using the post to call Obama a "Composite Kenyan." From his May 18 RedState post:

The Breitbart Crew has done the world a very valuable service in finding a 1991 biography of Barack Obama from his literary agent claiming he was "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."

[...]

The point is not that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. The point is that Barack Obama has repeatedly been perfectly okay embellishing and having others embellish his qualifications and biography to make himself someone unique instead of just another Chicago politician. The pattern goes back to his job as a "financial reporter". A former colleague of his and Obama fan, way back in 2005, claims Barack Obama really embellished his resume describing his financial related reporting.

[...]

[T]he largest point, however, is that the media is yet again caught flat footed, claiming the story is no big deal, irrelevant, or that somehow the Breitbart Crew is in the wrong and peddling Birtherism.

They are not peddling Birtherism. The Breitbart Crew are kind of like illegal immigrants -- doing reporting Columbia journalism grads won't do. In 2008, the New York Times ran a big story on John McCain having an affair with a lobbyist. It got picked up all over the place. Reporters were on the trail. There was no *there* there.

Read the full entry ...

FoxNews.com recently promoted the internet-based conspiracy theory that financier and philanthropist George Soros will somehow corrupt vote counting in the United States through a Spanish company "that Soros owns a big share of." The conspiracy is false: Soros has no involvement or investments in the company.  

During the May 14 edition of the FoxNews.com program Campaign Insiders, Doug Schoen read co-host Pat Caddell a viewer question asking if "there was any truth to the report that a Spanish company doing the vote count -- counting for the U.S. national election, has been engaged to do that and that it is a Soros-controlled."

After admitting that he hasn't "done enough work on it," Caddell still claimed Soros was "an investor in it" and that "this raises a problem": 

Read the full entry ...

A May 17 New York Times article reported that a group of Republican strategists have proposed a sizable campaign to attack President Obama's character. The article set off a wave of condemnations not just from progressives, but also from Mitt Romney and one of the high-profile conservative donors whom the proposal was pitched to.

On his Fox News show, Sean Hannity acknowledged Romney's rejection of the proposal's tactics, which focus on playing up Obama's relationship with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Hannity played a clip in which Romney said, "I want to make it very clear: I repudiate that effort."

After the clip of Romney, Hannity said, "Now, Governor Romney, I have to respectfully disagree with you." He continued:

Now, I do believe the economy, jobs, national security are by far the most pressing issue [sic] facing the country today. I also feel that every candidate, though, needs to be fully vetted. Now, that's something the mainstream media failed to do back in 2008 with Barack Obama, and I believe that the president's relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a man that influenced him for over 20 years, inspired him, is a very important campaign issue. After all, it is a matter of character.

Hannity is creating an alternate reality in which the "mainstream media failed" to vet Obama in 2008.

For instance, on the subject of Wright -- Hannity's undying obsession -- there was a blizzard of media coverage. Over the course of about two months in the early part of 2008, The New York Times and The Washington Post published dozens of articles and columns that mentioned Wright.

Hannity is wishing for a 2008 that never happened.

This afternoon on Fox News' America Live, Megyn Kelly did a segment on criticism of the way venture capital firm Bain Capital, under Mitt Romney's leadership, handled the takeover of a steel mill that later went bankrupt. Unmentioned any point during the segment, however, was the fact that the U.S. government ultimately had to bailout the company by funding the pension payments that the steel mill had promised its employees.

During the segment, Kelly hosted the former CEO of the company Bain created during the takeover of the steel mill. Kelly said that Bain made a "$4 million profit" and "$4.5 million in consulting fees," and adding that an Obama campaign ad -- which PolitiFact rated as "Mostly True" -- "paint[s] Bain under Romney" as "just not caring about" the pensions or employment of the steel mill workers. But she did not mention the bailout.  

Read the full entry ...

During the May 16 edition of America's Newsroom, Fox News "straight news" anchor Martha MacCallum and Fox News contributor and The Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson echoed complaints from the Republican chaired House Oversight Committee about the documents the Justice Department has released responding to their subpoena of files related to the failed Fast and Furious operation: 

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Well there were 22 questions in the last subpoena. 13 of them remain unanswered. The Justice Department hasn't forwarded documents that the House Oversight Committee has requested. And by the way some of those questions, that's the majority of questions, remain unanswered, some of them pertain directly to Attorney General Eric Holder. The Justice Department's position appears to be we can investigate this internally and so we don't need to comply with Congress. I think this is a collision course. Remember this subpoena was issued in October. It's been more than six months now and they have refused to comply. And they have not invoked executive privilege by the way. So it's not even clear on what grounds they are refusing to comply. I don't think there is any question, at least at this point, that there is going to be a contempt citation. 

MARTHA MACCALLUM, HOST: Well we'll see. And it feels like stalling and feet dragging to a great extent on the part of the Department of Justice.

CARLSON: Right.

MACCALLUM: Because they are saying they can't fire anybody, they are doing their own investigation. That is going to take quite some time, most likely until after the election is over and that until they finish that investigation--snicker snicker--and until that investigation is over they feel it wouldn't be right to come out and talk about who they think knew more than they say they knew or exactly when Eric Holder became aware of this program that saw a law enforcement agent killed.

Carlson's comments echo the reporting of his employee, Daily Caller reporter Matthew Boyle, who has written numerous articles about Fast and Furious over the past few months. His pieces almost invariably include the line, "Holder has failed to comply with Issa's Oct. 12, 2011, subpoena," or some variation thereof and often include the claim that DOJ has been nonresponsive to 13 of the subpoena's 22 questions.   

These reports minimize the fact that DOJ has released extensive and detailed information about what documents the agency has released to Issa. According to DOJ, responsive documents to 16 of the 22 questions contained in Issa's subpoena have been turned over to the House Oversight Committee or been made available for viewing by Oversight Committee staff. DOJ has stated that no responsive information exists to one of the questions. Additionally, DOJ has stated it does possess documents responsive to the five remaining questions in the subpoena and additional documents responsive to the other categories, but that it is unable to release this material because it is either relevant to ongoing criminal investigations or prosecutions or is deliberative and therefore protected by executive privilege.  

But Fox News and The Daily Caller would rather regurgitate Republican talking points than admit that there are two sides to this story.

Read the full entry ...

Breitbart.com blogger Ken Klukowski has joined the ranks of right-wing figures hyping the bogus conspiracy theory that the ATF's botched Operation Fast and Furious was actually a secret Obama administration plot to undermine the Second Amendment rather than an operation to bring down Mexican drug cartels. However, the lead Republican investigating the Fast and Furious operation, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), has repeatedly released reports that have debunked this theory.

Klukowski wrote that "the NRA has been pushing for information regarding who knew what in the administration, and any related political objectives being pursued by Team Obama." Klukowski also quoted NRA chief lobbyist Christopher Cox as saying that "[a]ccording to their internal emails, it was all to advance their gun-control agenda."

But in a May 3 memorandum and accompanying report attempting to lay the groundwork for a contempt citation against Attorney General Eric Holder, Issa said that the Fast and Furious operation to allow straw purchasers to buy and transfer guns without being arrested was conceived because law enforcement officials "hoped the weapons, after they were recovered at crime scenes in Mexico, could be traced and linked to cartel operatives including possible high-level financiers, suppliers, and possibly even king-pins."

From Issa's memorandum:

Fast and Furious Conceived

The ATF Phoenix Field Division began Operation Fast and Furious in the fall of 2009 after suspicious weapons purchases led agents to the discovery of an apparent Phoenix-based arms trafficking syndicate. Having been encouraged to devise grander strategies to stop the transfers of weapons to Mexican drug cartels, the Phoenix based agents devised a strategy that went beyond simple arrests or weapons confiscations. They would allow the U.S.-based associates of a Mexican drug cartel to continue acquiring firearms uninterrupted. In doing so, they hoped the weapons, after they were recovered at crime scenes in Mexico, could be traced and linked to cartel operatives including possible high-level financiers, suppliers, and possibly even king-pins.

The operation sought to achieve its lofty goals by focusing on the ringleader of the weapons smuggling syndicate they had identified: Manuel Celis-Acosta. Celis-Acosta was using a then-unknown number of straw-purchasers, including Jamie Avila, to purchase weapons.

At no point in the 17-page memo or accompanying 44-page draft contempt citation against Holder did Issa assert that the program may have had a different, more nefarious purpose.

Read the full entry ...

It appears that Sean Hannity and Ed Klein have patched up their differences in order to peddle Klein's new anti-Obama book.

Klein appeared on Hannity's radio and Fox News shows to promote The Amateur, a re-packaging of several previously discredited conservative complaints about Obama. Like Klein's other books The Amateur boasts anonymously sourced, inaccurate anecdotes that are often too good to be true.

Apparently a taped audio interview conducted by Klein with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a Hannity obsession for years, was enough to rekindle the Klein-Hannity alliance, as seen in this clip from the May 16 of Fox's Hannity:

Hannity appears willing to accept Klein's anonymously sourced writing, despite his own previous skepticism of Klein's methods.

Read the full entry ...

"The Amateur" by Edward Klein is a book about an inept, arrogant ideologue who maintains an absurdly high opinion of his own talents even as he blatantly fails to achieve his goals. Oh, and President Obama is in this book too." - NY Times' Janet Maslin

"The Amateur is the best book I've read on how Barack Obama is wrecking our country." - Donald Trump, on the book jacket

Though his previous work has been marred by falsehoods and his journalistic integrity called into question by people from across the ideological spectrum, you can rest assured that Ed Klein is still a serious reporter. Just ask Ed Klein.

As New York Times book reviewer Janet Maslin noted in her justifiably brutal review of Klein's new anti-Obama book, The Amateur, Klein announces on the first page that it "is a reporter's book," and recounts the "nearly two hundred" interviews and "dozens of four-inch-thick three-ring notebooks" of research he compiled during its writing. These boasts of gumshoe reporting and exhaustive inquiry come off as a feeble attempt by Klein to explain why anyone should respect his new book given his ugly track record.

That Klein's credibility needs repair is beyond question, but it's doubtful that people who stopped taking Klein seriously after he wrote a book forwarding suggestions that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian -- and that Chelsea was conceived when Bill raped Hillary -- will be swayed by his claims of scholarship. (Klein's other recent work includes an embarrassing self-published novel "based on real stuff" co-authored with conspiracy theorist John LeBoutillier about a CIA agent who discovers that Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim Manchurian candidate.)

In a 2005 column excoriating Klein's The Truth About Hillary, conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan called the book "poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced, full of the kind of loaded language that is appropriate to a polemic but not an investigative work." The same criticisms can all be leveled at The Amateur.

Read the full entry ...

I hesitate to offer advice to the amateur vetting squad over at Breitbart.com, but here goes: If you have to start a piece with a disclaimer announcing that "Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of 'Birtherism,'" then you're doing something wrong.

There is no getting out in front of birther allegations.

The latest installment of the self-serious and wildly incompetent Breitbart.com-led "vetting" of President Obama concerns a 1991 pamphlet published by Obama's former literary agency that erroneously describes Obama as being "born in Kenya." The Breitbartlings claim they're not publishing this as bait for the unkillable birther conspiracy, but rather because... well, even they don't seem too sure:

It is evidence--not of the President's foreign origin, but that Barack Obama's public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.

It's actually evidence of the passive voice's capacity for mischief. And while they might not consider this "evidence" of Obama's "foreign origin," all the birther troglodytes out there certainly do.

Later in the piece they say this fits "a pattern in which Obama -- or the people representing and supporting him -- manipulate his public persona." Um... OK? Left unexplained is what benefit/motive Obama and his support network would have in lying about his birthplace in a pamphlet that would be viewed by a vanishingly small audience.

Also, prior to the pamphlet's publication, Obama had apparently been going around telling major newspapers that he was born in Hawaii. When he was elected to the Harvard Law Review in 1990, the New York Times reported:

The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago's South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.

''The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress,'' Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ''It's encouraging."

Similar pre-1991 mentions of Obama's Hawaiian birth can be found in articles by the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press.

So none of this really makes any sense or has any explanation that isn't insane. But's that's unimportant because...

Regardless of the reason for Obama's odd biography, the Acton & Dystel booklet raises new questions as part of ongoing efforts to understand Barack Obama -- who, despite four years in office remains a mystery to many Americans, thanks to the mainstream media.

What are those "new questions"? They don't know. They just know they're questions, and they're new, and the media, and Obama, and whatever.

UPDATE: Teagan Goddard of Political Wire got in touch with the literary agency, and they said it was all just a mistake. "This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me -- an agency assistant at the time. There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii."

Fox News figures are downplaying and criticizing the latest presidential election poll -- Fox News' own poll.

The poll, released May 16, shows President Obama with a 7-percentage point lead over Mitt Romney, including a 22-percentage point lead among women. Despite the fact that the poll was conducted by their own employer, Fox News figures almost immediately began downplaying the results and criticizing the methodology. On the May 16 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, Fox News contributor Dick Morris joked that the poll showed that Fox News had "Democratic bias" because it surveyed registered voters, a group that Morris claimed include many who "are not going to vote." Morris warned, "If you want to know how the election is going to come out, don't pay attention to that."

This morning's edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends offered similar warnings of the poll's untrustworthiness. After displaying some of the poll's findings, co-host Brian Kilmeade warned viewers that it "seems like a small poll" and was conducted among "registered voters, which a lot of the experts say you can -- you've got to factor that in." 

Read the full entry ...

In a recent report previewing the Economic Policy Institute's upcoming State of Working America analysis, EPI president Lawrence Mishel explained how American workers have been cut out of sharing in economic prosperity during the past 30 years, citing a divergence of pay and productivity as a key driver of growing income inequality in the United States.

Mishel noted that although American workers' productivity has steadily increased, their pay has remained largely stagnant over the past three decades. Mishel explained that "[t]his divergence of pay and productivity has meant that many workers were not benefitting from productivity growth -- the economy could afford higher pay but it was not providing it."

Here's more from Mishel:

A key to understanding this growth of income inequality -- and the disappointing increases in workers' wages and compensation and middle-class incomes -- is understanding the divergence of pay and productivity. Productivity growth has risen substantially over the last few decades but the hourly compensation of the typical worker has seen much more modest growth, especially in the last 10 years or so. The gap between productivity and the compensation growth for the typical worker has been larger in the "lost decade" since the early 2000s than at any point in the post-World War II period. In contrast, productivity and the compensation of the typical worker grew in tandem over the early postwar period until the 1970s.

Productivity growth, which is the growth of the output of goods and services per hour worked, provides the basis for the growth of living standards. However, the experience of the vast majority of workers in recent decades has been that productivity growth actually provides only the potential for rising living standards: Recent history, especially since 2000, has shown that wages and compensation for the typical worker and income growth for the typical family have lagged tremendously behind the nation's fast productivity growth.

Mishel included a chart further illustrating this pay and productivity gap:

Read the full entry ...