In the spring of 1980 in Boston there was a murder trial of a notorious pair of thugs, ghetto low-lifes who had raped, murdered and robbed a young nurse in her own home. At the trial, the prosecutor asked one of the murderers about a certain boombox, proved to be the nurse's, that was in the man's possession when he was arrested. The exchange went something like this:

Prosecutor: You took that boombox from her apartment.
Murderer: Yeah.
Prosecutor: But when you were arrested, you said that it was your boombox.
Murderer: It is mine.

Now that is what the absence of shame looks like.

For a more recent example of brazen shamelessness, we have the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Association. [Read More!]

From yesterday's Boston Globe, this depressing story about how the Massachusetts legislature does everything behind closed doors & under control of the Party Leaders. This is the way things inevitably turn out in a one-party state.

It's almost enough to make one think of voting Republican (and maybe that's why we seem to elect Republican governors like Romney pretty regularly). But the Republicans who run for state office here are generally even more abhorent than the Democratic hacks who run the show now, so we'll probably stick with what we have. The Democrats may practice machine politics, but at least they're not obsessively homophobic & insanely jingoistic warmongering anticonstitutionalists, which is the Republican trope here in Massachusetts as it is elsewhere across this great nation of ours.

The intrepid pro fair-use and anti-hate-speech activist known as Spocko has a link up to a bit by activist journalist Greg Palast about the “Summit for Security and Prosperity” (“SSP”) of the big cheeses of Mexico, the USA and Canada which recently happened in New Orleans, of all places. Whatever its stated purposes, Palast says, SSP's real goal is the blending together of Canada, the USA and Mexico for the benefits of the non-national power/money elites under the fig leaf justification of NAFTA. Among many of Palast's interesting point is that under new rules, Chinese products can come into the USA with all the rights and privileges of “Made in Mexico” products.

He also makes the point that the super wealthy are (perhaps ever have been?) post-national--it doesn't make sense to think of them as “American” or “Mexican” or “Canadian” or “Saudi” or “Russian” or whatever. How many members of the nominally American upper crust, for example, do you think are serving in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan? Right.

Yet they realize that the trappings of nationalism are important to “the people”, even if “the people” are willing to let go of democracy itself.

[Read More!]

Now, THIS is what I call an avatar!

[Note to readers unfamiliar with Stearns: he's the Wetmachanic who blogs under the “Inventing the Future” rubric, usually about avatars of some damn kind or other.][That's a joke, son.]

Google pays me about four cents a month to run adverts on this-a-here policy-wonk & general bullshit blog, and lately they've been running an awful lot of the John McBush “one man” animated gif, which may be running to the right of this image even now. On account of which, my friends and family give me a fair amount of grief. I tell them that I'm not crazy about Google's running McBush ads here, but I need the money.

In any event it reminds me to run the above picture, which I plan to do at least once a week, until I no longer need to.

Read it and weep.

He's right. What a horrible race of bastard cowards are we.

Over on the corporate media Tee Vee, War Criminal Douglas Feith was seen to be spouting his lies, equivocations, rationalizations and deathworship the other night. He's pretty good at that shit, even if he is the “dumbest fucking guy on the face of the planet”.

Fortunately for us, we have Athenae (also known as Allison Hantschel), who is a bonafide expert on what a horrible lying war criminal Feith actually is, to provide running commentary and expert debunking of war criminal Feith's lies and omissions.

Her book Special Plans is a fantastic resource for anybody who cares about the truth of how the United States of America launched its disasstrous war of agression in Iraq.


Note to producers of infotainment shows on the TV: How about a little Allison love, OK? So she's not Alyson Hannigan, I'll grant you that. But she ain't bad lookin neither! Put her on the air; the country will thank you for it.