Brown people starving again? Yawn. Starving brown people having the gall to riot about dying? Impudent buggers. Why don’t they choose leaders wise enough to create food stockpiles when harvests fail? What’s this you say – they did? But you say the First World’s shock troops in the World Bank, IMF, and WTO botched up and destroyed those last national reserves against global starvation? What rot!

The Department Of Homeland Security plans to bring the devastating hoof-and-mouth virus to America’s moo belt, making Kansas Sen Roberts and the DHS happy as a firebug at a pyre of burning livestock carcasses. What, them worry? They’re Bushies.

As part of the continuing struggle by the hyper-wealthy to avoid ever having to truly carry their share of the load, TPM Muckraker gives you the case of the poor little rich boys and girls of The Blackstone Group:

Unless Congress treads lightly on delicate private equity and buyout firms like The Blackstone Group, we could see an end to entrepreneurship as we know it, the Bush administration warned this week.

  [CHS notes:  The fabu Cliff Schecter will join us, along with the scintillating TRex, for a very special edition of this week's Book Salon.  Do NOT miss it, Sunday at 5 pm ET/2 pm PT.] If you've done any reading about Mitch McConnell throughout his 22 years as a U.S. Senator, then what happened [...]

I came across this article the other day via Digby. It seems that I.R.S. supervisors are putting tight deadlines on auditors of corporations and limiting inquiries to predetermined areas negotiated by the corporations and the I.R.S. David Cay Johnston of the New York Times: Top officials at the Internal Revenue Service are pushing agents to [...]

Archpundit: The federal government is spending money to keep people abstinent until 29 years old. Seriously. No, no, I mean it. It’s like the Handmaid’s Tale without the mass infertility. I remember when we used to hear this stuff and shake our heads in disbelief.  Then somehow we shifted into cynical acceptance that it was [...]

Nothing like slipping in the perks for your cronies at the last minute: A huge tax bill that Congress passed last week contained a little-noticed gift for select corporations — tens of millions of dollars in breaks on import tariffs. Early Saturday morning, in the frantic final hours of the 109th Congress, lawmakers rolled 520 [...]