Your tax dollars at work

Just think, folks: the state of South Carolina actually elects people like Jim DeMint. To the Senate, no less.

But hey, if you want your share of stupid via the free enterprise system instead, here's Weepy.

In the wake of the Tuskegee experiment

It's a bit of a slog, but David Gorski's piece on Science-Based Medicine on the Guatemalan syphillis "experiment" conducted largely by American researchers in the 1940's is worth perusing, if only to remind medical researchers on how not to conduct such studies.

Never a dull moment in Cook County

You've got to admire a man who sticks to his principles: Urkel's aide Carla Oglesby was fired, but only after she was arrested for the oodles of dollars she allegedly defrauded the county of.

(Yeah, I said "principles". I didn't say they were good ones.)

Never a dull moment in US political advertising

What a surprise: the barrage of political advertising made possible by the Citizens United SCOTUS ruling is getting funded to a large degree by exceedingly wealthy people from other countries who have apparently decided that our exceedingly wealthy people need help in burying democracy as deep as possible.

It's almost gotten to the point where I might actually welcome the hypothetical vodka-binging aliens from Zeta Reticuli if they invade us.