Sri Lanka holds presidential elections on January 8, 2015 with the incumbent party being accused of rampant corruption. This is actually being used as an argument in favor of returning the ruling party to power, if you can imagine it.

In this context, a southern ruling party MP’s remarks are highly revealing for their bluntness. He is reported to have advised voters to support the SLFP because, as he put it: “We have made enough money not to be greedy next time. But if you elect the opposition, they will make money hand over fist.”

Now there’s an inspiring slogan: Vote for us because we have already stolen as much money as we need. You have got to admire the brazenness of such a claim and the logic behind it.
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When trying to justify the most appalling acts of torture, its advocates invariably invoke the ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario where we are told that in order to save a huge number of lives it is imperative to get some information quickly from someone who refuses to give it. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia is the latest to haul out this old chestnut about how it could be justified to save millions of lives, adding that there is nothing in the US Constitution that prohibits this, though one would think that the Eighth Amendment prohibition against inflicting “cruel and unusual” punishment would cover it.
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Andrew Cockburn has an interesting article (paywall) in the January 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine where he talks about how the military industry, alarmed by the fact that the end of the Cold War led to a reduction in the need for things like fighter planes, tanks, and other highly profitable heavy armaments, set about creating a new cold war and succeeded.
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As time goes by, there is increasing skepticism over the US government’s claim that North Korea was behind the Sony hack. Fabius Maximus has compiled an extensive list of knowledgeable people who have poured cold water on that hypothesis. But it may be too late to overcome this narrative if it turns out to be false. As Mark Twain famously said, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” The propaganda system depends upon this fact and that is why the US government quickly rushes out its version of events, knowing that the pliant US media will parrot it as fact and the public will accept it. The Bush administration’s WMD lie is the most recent example of this, though there are many others. Remember the Kuwait incubator story? Gulf of Tonkin?
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It is bad enough that almost the entire top echelon of the Bush administration authorized, condoned, and even encouraged the most disgusting forms of torture and that the Obama administration is protecting these criminals. What is even worse is that surveys show that a majority of Americans actually support the CIA’s acts of torture by a margin of 59-31% and similar majorities think that torture produced useful information, that the torture report should not have been released, and that the people who committed torture should not be prosecuted.
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You would think that by now, after all the lies that we have been told by the US government in its efforts to take the country into various wars, we would all have a healthy skepticism when officials blandly assert without providing the evidence that some country that they perceive as the enemy is responsible for some action. And yet here we are, with the media accepting at face value the assertions by US officials that North Korea is behind the Sony hack.
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The Daily Show talks about the absurd right wing and Fox News reaction to the protests against the killing of unarmed black people by the police who strain to find some way of discrediting the various forms it has taken.
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