They are not ‘bug splats’

The drone operators who remotely order the missiles that blow up people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and who knows where else the US is killing people refer to the victims of their airstrikes as ‘bug splats’, presumably because of the resemblance of the images they receive after the strike to what one sees on the wind shields of cars. This is part of the general dehumanizing that is adopted when you are killing people in cold blood from a distance.
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Too big to fail and too rich to jail

lady justiceIt has long been true that the rich and well-connected got better treatment from law enforcement and the justice system than the poor and powerless. But that brutal fact was usually hidden behind a façade that claimed that the system was impartial and fair. The image of the statue of a blindfolded Lady Justice holding evenly balanced scales (like the one on the right) is part of the architecture of the US Supreme Court building and is used to personify this idea that justice is dispensed without favor.
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Introducing the LPD (Libertarian Police Department)

Tom O’Donnell imagines what it would look like if Ayn Rand and her devotees ran the country according to their ideas. It begins:

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”

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The struggle over the senate torture report

The spat between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA about what to do with the 6,300-page report on torture headed towards some kind of partial resolution with the committee voting 11-3 to declassify and release only about 500 pages, not the full report. This consists of just the Executive Summary and conclusions but the CIA opposes even this limited release and while president Obama has said in general terms that he supports declassification and release, in typical shifty fashion he has not yet made it clear what exactly he proposes to do and in fact has withheld documents in his possession that the committee wanted.
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A new meme in the making

One of the common misconceptions heavily promoted by successive Israeli governments and their lobby in the US is that Israel keeps making generous offers of peace towards the Palestinians but keeps getting rebuffed, and that this is the main hindrance to achieving peace. That this goes against all the facts has been repeatedly pointed out but it has become one of those zombie lies that is trotted out routinely and is reinforced by the western media to justify Israeli excesses, apartheid policies, and the steady and continuous encroachment of Palestinian lands by the expansion of settlements in the Occupied Territories.
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