Politics The monarchy as entertainment: Is it more than a joke?
Okay, we now know the butler didn’t do it. A bigger question remains: beyond providing the tabloids with tittle-tattle, what’s the point of Britain’s monarchy?... The long, slow collapse of the British monarchy is a global story. The shrivelling of its main parliamentary chamber is a local tragedy.
· House of Windsor. [OpenCemocracy.Net]

Protesters have deserted Sydney's Olympic Park, site of the World Trade Organisation ministerial meeting, after 28 people were arrested today during tense running battles with police. Running battles at WTO protest

Media Learn Some Election Lessons

Let's consider the first lesson. Television anchors and correspondents joked election night about being careful this time around. "We are going to call races off real votes," said Jeff Greenfield of CNN with a grin. He meant there would be no projecting of winners based on the results in a few bellwether precincts.
· Grin [Entertainment]

Media Journalist finds something worse than being sued for libel
It's probably a short list, but having someone sniffing out your sources would probably be up there. Christopher Byron knows. The pugnacious, prolific financial writer is not only being sued for a story he wrote in Red Herring, but more recently he discovered someone managed to talk AT&T into revealing all of his phone calls for the month he worked on that story.
· Red Herring [SF Gate]

Oldest Profession BE ANGRY. BE VERY ANGRY.
Thimerosol is a solution of alcohol and ethyl mercury previously used as a preservative in some medicines, including some infant vaccines. It is possible, though not established, that its use in vaccines, combined with the increasing number of vaccinations infants receive, was the reason, or a reason, for the surge in autism cases during the 1990s. Apparently a simple calculation would have suggested that the mercury load in the combination of recommended vaccines was above the established safe level, but no one did the calculation, including Eli Lilly, which makes thimerosol. Dick Armey figured it out right away: sneak a provision into the Homeland Security bill at the last minute to protect Lilly from lawsuits. This is the kind of overplaying an admittedly strong hand that will, I hope, eventually bring the Republicans down.

What does preventing parents of autistic kids from suing drug companies that put poison in vaccines have to do with Homeland Security?
· Special-interest riders on unrelated bills [PLA Blogger]

Lifstyle the stages of squalor

The filthy, disorganized apartment shared by three members of the Amherst College Marxist Society is a microcosm of why the social and economic utopia described in the writings of Karl Marx will never come to fruition.
· Cosm [Onion]