Cheap Blogging Crutch 09.09

Follow the money: the world's sharpest fraudbusters
Wired UK gives us the story of the world's elite team of financial fraudbusters: The Super Best Money Friends. Follow them as they investigate, expose, and prosecute thieving jackals from the finance and banking industry. It's a very interesting look at not only how people are duped by these schemes, but how they are uncovered, and how they are handled once discovered. With a little luck and a little higher profile, this group of men might be the very group of people we ignore about fraud and bubbles before we begin our next financial sector induced freefall off a cliff.

Dick Cheney 'put airline bomb plot case in jeopardy'
How much does Dick Cheney love illegally imprisoning terrorist suspects and flaunting the law? Well according to the Times, so much so that he'll willingly jeopardize actual legal efforts to imprison those same terrorist suspects in such a reckless manner as to almost let them go free while ensuring that their collaborators do go free or are never even discovered. God, it's such a shame we don't have his leadership on the war on terror anymore. Thanks, Dick.

Bending the Curve: Effective Steps to Address Long-Term Health Care Spending Growth
Look, look, I know, I know, I'm sorry. Yes this is a link to a Brookings Institute study on how to effectively reduce health care costs. It's full of numbers and figures and probably has a chart or two to go along with it's complete absence of curse words or dick jokes. But, if you are interested in a litany of smart things that aren't being considered in the health care debate, this is a great place to start working up some edumacated libary book smartifying anger.

Sick and Wrong
Finally. Rolling Stone has now put up Matt Taibbi's extensive look at the legislative and political effort to fuck you hard on health care. Now you can move from just vaguely knowing the shapeless mass that is trying, and succeeding, to stick it to you, to seeing the true form of the beast and what specific horrible curses and incantations they are hurling at you. Surprisingly it only took five steps to completely screw things up.

The mainstreaming of crazy
Phil Plait of Discover Magazine's Bad Astronomy blog, himself no stranger to fighting bad science and lies about everything from climate change to moon landings, finally cracks and unleashes hell on the poisoned state of debate, intellectualism, and intelligence in this country. What finally caused him to crack? The GOP outrage over Obama telling schoolkids to study hard and stay in school. Yeah, that was crazy, but I'd only rate it about a 4 out of 10 on the Beck Scale.