In the Financial Times I found this article by Ben Funnell. He begins by laying out his stark hypothesis:

Just why is there so much debt in the Anglo-Saxon world? Bankers and regulators know well that it is in nobody’s long-term interests to have allowed borrowing to escalate to a position where the US now owes far more, as a multiple of the economy, than at the start of the Great Depression.
The answer is capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite.

It's a very good article. His conclusion, while sounding all too simple, is inarguable:

...we need a new political consensus, one aimed at reducing overall debt levels while reducing inequality by encouraging education, entrepreneurship and investment in innovation.

In 2004, off-duty police officers in Milwaukee engaged in what can only be described as totally psychopathic behaviour when they beat up a bi-racial man at a house-warming party.
The most amazing thing about the whole affair was not that the police force attempted to cover up the incident (sadly, that is exactly what I would have expected a quasi-military body dominated by authoritarians to do), but that the cover-up almost made it through the criminal justice system. It took a civil trial for the extent of the police cover-up to be revealed.
The good news is that a number of officers involved in the incident are now serving long jail terms. The bad news is that Frank Jude is permanently physically and emotionally scarred. As far as I can tell, he has not received a dime in damages for his suffering. There is also no evidence that the Milwaukee Police Department has really made any institutional changes to prevent (a) hiring borderline pyschos as police officers and (b) improving monitoring to prevent abuses and cover-ups like the one seen here.
The case, distressing though it is, does bring to light one of the downsides of public and electoral attitudes to law enforcement. In most industrialized countries, police officers are paid no more than average salaries. This for a job where they are in many places, quite literally in the line of fire. They could go out on a patrol and not come back. This is a quasi-military organization in that respect. Unsurprisingly, military disciplines such as closing ranks, mutual loyalty etc. will trump logical behaviour.
The bigger underlying challenge, however, is that paying police forces poorly is a very dumb strategy. For a start, it makes police highly vulnerable to corruption. A poorly-paid officer with a family to support cannot help but be tempted by sums of money waved under his nose by criminals in return for some variant on "look the other way". Additionally, poor pay is unlikely to attract high-quality recruits. Police forces therefore tend to be dominated by recruits with lower educational attainment, and a correspondingly greater propensity towards emotional, prejudiced or racist attitudes, and (as we saw above) psychopathic behaviour. Add all of these factors together and you have a major institutional problem across the western world.
The bad news is that we are not going to make much headway on solving the issues until we stop paying police officers peanuts, and instead reward them properly for dealing with the nasties and crazies, and also putting their lives literally on the line during an average work week. While the behaviour of the officers in the above story was appalling, and the response of the police department was typically head-in-the-ass, this is not out of the ordinary, and it will continue to be the norm until we significantly improve the pay of police forces. You can't have good-quality anything on the cheap, and law enforcement is always supposed to be at or near the top of the careabouts of electors, so why are we surprised when we get bad behaviour from people who are paid poorly and then exposed to criminals?
This is so blindingly obvious that I should not have to even be writing about it...

As outlined in this article, which shows how excessive reliance was placed on evidence supposedly uncovered by a police dog, and how the various actors in the story on the prosecution side are all closing ranks and engaging in BS, evasion and other dysfunctional behaviours.
For a beautiful summary of what the proponents of the system would probably say if corned on this, read this comment here.
This is a mind-bogglingly frightening and unnerving story, but if you read the section on the criminal justice system in the book "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by ME), the behavioural pathology at work here is easy to understand. They point out in the book that this sort of misconduct in Florida is not new:

The response of prosecutors in Florida is typical. After 130 people had been freed by DNA testing the space of 15 years, prosecutors decided that they would respond by mounting a vigorous challenge to similar new cases. Wilton Dredge had to sue the state to have the evidence in his case re-tested, over the fierce objections of prosecutors who said that the state's interest in finality and the victim's feelings should supersede concerns about Drudge's possible innocence. Drudge was finally exonerated and released.

As the book points out:

...American law enforcement remains steeped in its traditions, including adherence to the Reid Technique and similar procedures, maintaining a "near absolute denial" that these techniques can and do produce fake confessions and wrongful convictions.

Shorter summary: stories such as this one show that the American law enforcement system has major weaknesses and challenges in its ability to objectively investigate and prosecute crimes. This is quite apart from the fairly mind-boggling statistic that the USA has the highest documented rate of per capita incarceration of any country in the world, which suggests either a country riddled with crime (which I do not see) or an extreme willingness to lock people up. Based on dumb-ass legislation such as the "three strikes" rule, I think that there is a significant incidence of the latter mindset, but stories like this one also lead me to conclude that there are very significant failings in the prosecutorial side of the system, about which all of the actors in the system are in denial.

...in addition to changing the title, I am sure that he would have mentioned Photoshop as a tool used by regimes to manipulate visual images...

Link: http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/blog_post.2009-06-08.4688664953

I was going to quote from this article, but it stands on its own and is so amazing that you need to read it (it's a short article). My initial reaction and my considered reaction are one and the same = that this is one of the most egregious examples of abuse of the legal system by prosecutors that I have ever read about. This is all in the service of a fundamentally impossible task - the attempt to seal the land borders between the USA and Mexico (and possibly Canada), which in the case of the USA-Mexico border is 1933 miles in length.
Any solution to illegal immigration that is based on a border fence or barrier is fundamentally flawed from a construction maintenance and logistical viewpoint. A permanent durable barrier would make the Great Wall Of China look like a small weekend engineering project. Perhaps the secret plan is to resurrect the post-World War II public works side of the Army Corps of Engineers?

Link: http://www.kwch.com/global/story.asp?s=10451609

When a society allows deeply dysfunctional individuals to conflate abortion with murder, without sufficient pushback from educated electors and opinion-formers who ought to be awake and alert, instead of mentally narcoleptic, this is the eventual result.
Let us not beat around the bush here. This, folks, is terrorism. I demand that the full weight of anti-terrorism laws in the USA be deployed to find the killers, bring them to justice, and marginalize and discredit the killer's supporters. They are nothing more than amoral, twisted, murdering jerks, and their support groups need to put away their fake apologies and Shut The Fuck Up (yes, Operation Rescue, I was referring to you, you dehumanizing bunch of scumbags).
UPDATE - The police have arrested a suspect, and, based on this article, it seems that the suspect was a disaster waiting to happen. Now, of course, we have a bunch of people who met him and became acquainted with him popping up saying stuff like "he was weird, wacky and had an obsession with abortion". All very interesting to know, but why was this guy allowed to graduate to terrorism? This is all somewhat reminiscent of Michael Ryan, and Timothy McVeigh.
Worse still is that there is a large body of evidence, in the form of threats and illegal behaviour (right up until the present day) towards abortion clinics and medical professionals. U.S. law enforcement has been wilfully and consistently ignoring these incidents and law enforcement issues for a long time. Any law enforcement official who expresses surprise at what has just happened is wilfully obtuse and deceitful, stupid, or both.
PZ Myers has a pretty good posting summarizing some thoughts about this disgraceful event:

In many ways, though, Roeder's religiosity is going to be a distraction. It simply doesn't matter, and the strongest conclusion we can draw from it is that religion fails to provide a reasonable framework for morality, since it is so easily and regularly subverted to rationalize evil. Focus instead on the root of the problem: Roeder was an amoral, obsessed nut who found support for his delusions among a particularly ugly American subculture. Gods don't matter. And when you think gods do, you lose sight of the truth: other people matter.

UPDATE 2 - David Neiwert, who has extensively studied domestic hate groups, weighs in with his thoughts on the Tiller murder.
UPDATE 3 - Jeffrey Feldman explains in this article how authoritarian fascists have succeeded in their attempts to frame abortion as murder. As he explains:

Dr. George Tiller was killed in his church because the right-wing has built a political movement around a violent idea: that America has been transformed by liberals into a culture that "murders" babies.
Like a giant river supported by millions of tiny underground streams, this movement is supported by everyone who defines those with whom they disagree on abortion policy as supporters of "murder."

As Feldman points out, the whole framing process has been perniciously supported and enabled, not only by dysfunctional politicians, but also by the media:

In political debates, right-wing voices almost always use certain controversial procedures to define abortion as "murder," but even when the subject moves beyond those procedures they continue to use "murder" to describe all other aspects of abortion. The phrase "baby murderer," then becomes short-hand for referring to "liberals" in other contexts.
This right-wing rhetorical strategy is used so often, people barely give it any notice anymore. Calling people "murderers" and "baby killers" has become a normal part of U.S. media. Guests on TV and radio shows who routinely accuse their debate opponents of supporting or condoning "murder" are invited back time and time again to repeat the accusation.

As Feldman concludes:

No matter how many or how few late term abortions are performed, so long as the right-wing anti-abortion movement continues to fold dissent into an ever-expanding definition of "murder," then the right-wing will continue to give rise to activists who kill doctors.

All of which begs the question: how long do we have to listen to scumbag bullies on radio and TV describing liberal supporters of reproductive rights as "baby-killers" and "murderers" before somebody in law enforcement decides that they might be inciting violence? Do we have to wait until a talk show host himself engages in violent behaviour before making this connection? Am I the the only person in the world who has noticed that the standard approach of authoritarian scumbags the world over, when faced with dissent, is to shout it down, and if that does not look like it is working, to threaten people with violence and other nasty personal consequences?
Wake up folks. The USA has a deadly undercurrent of acceptance of intolerance that is dangerously close to being out of control. There appears to be insufficient willingness on the part of a majority of the population to slap down, marginalize and ostracise offensive, authoritarian jerks.
Which brings us back to where we came in. Shooting an unarmed doctor in a crowded church in furtherance of a warped, murderous pathology is not merely murder. It is quite clearly a terrorist act, and needs to be treated as such. If animal rights protesters can be pursued by US and UK law enforcement using anti-terrorism laws, why are these laws not being deployed against the far more serious events that just occurred in Kansas?

When I was at high school in the UK, our house used to get visited regularly by religious sects. Most commonly it was the Jehova's Witnesses, who were very active locally. The Jehova's Witnesses clearly thought it was OK to drag their children along on these visits - on more than one occasion I would open the door and they would be standing there, children in tow (usually children looking like they would rather be somewhere else, anywhere else but here).
I soon noticed the standard patterns to the Jehova's Witness spiel. They would wave a copy of their house magazine, the Watchtower, and try to interest me in this wonderful publication which was going to change my life. If I demurred, they would produce the Bible and start quote-mining. The book of Revelations was their favorite quote mine, hardly surprising since the whole premise of the Jehovah's witnesses is that when Armageddon occurs, they will be The Chosen Ones, and they seemed to like the impressive sounding numbers quoted in the King James version of the bible in that book, using them in much the same way that Sen. Joseph McCarthy produced his "hundreds of Communists" allegations out of nowhere in the early 1950's.
I soon developed (thanks to an idea from a classmate) a fairly effective way of terminating these unwelcome intrusions. After letting them waffle for a minute or two, I would hold up my hand and say something like "I'm sorry, but this is not of any help to me. I'm an atheist".
They would usually respond with a line like "what benefits do you get from being an atheist?". (not sure why they would ask that, presumably they were looking for something to latch on to and prove I could get more benefits from their wacky sect). This provided me with the perfect response:
"The main benefit I get is that I do not have to stand on doorsteps listening to people like you. Good day". And with that, I would close the door.
I did this three times, it worked every time. They would stand there looking puzzled, then wander off to the next house.
There are better responses..here is a good idea from the comments section of a posting on Pam's House Blend:

I always have a piece of paper and pencil handy by the door. I give it to them and tell them to write down their name and address (no not the address of your church, honeybunch, YOUR personal address) and I'll stop by at a time of MY choosing and insist on telling them my personal beliefs. If they're not home I'll be glad to talk at length with their spouse or kids. Seems they never want to do that.

I shall have to try this. So far I have not been doorstepped here in the USA. It will happen eventually. If I am in a good mood, I will try the Pams House Blend response. If I am not in a good mood, I may just tell them to get the hell off of my property...we shall see.

The authoritarian dimwits who seem to constitute an unhealthy proportion of the conservative base in the USA have gotten themselves all worked up into a frenzy (as usual, aided and abetted by the mainstream media) over a remark by President Obama that one of the qualities he may seek in a future Supreme Court nominee is empathy. They seem to believe that empathy is a Really Bad Thing in a judge - why, it might make the judge sympathetic to one of the parties in a case! They also seem to be of the opinion that empathy is a codeword for what they term "judicial activism", which, based on my attempting to debate the phrase with conservatives, seems to itself be a codeword roughly translated as "judges who make decisions that I don't like".
The trouble with these arguments (as ever) is that they are simplistic, and fall into the trap of a false dichotomy. Where do we begin? How about reminding ourselves of arguments put forward in favour of the nomination of current Supreme Court justices who are generally regarded as conservative. Like Clarence Thomas. As this posting by Susan Bandes points out:

Judicial nominees and their supporters routinely assure Congress that they both intend to uphold the rule of law and are capable of empathy for those less fortunate. Clarence Thomas's controversial nomination to the Supreme Court got a crucial boost when liberal judge Guido Calabresi wrote that Thomas understands "what discrimination really means" and knows "the deep needs of the poor and especially poor blacks." Sen. Danforth (R-Mo.) added his own assurances that Thomas's heart would be with "the ordinary folk" if he were on the Supreme Court. In his confirmation hearings, Samuel Alito sought to reassure those concerned about his capacity to empathize with workers and the poor by describing his Italian-immigrant father and his own upbringing in "an unpretentious, down to earth community."

So, there is nothing new in making empathy a central feature of arguments in favour of judicial nominations to America's highest court.
Another aspect of the hand-wringing about empathy is that empathy is a key diagnostic characteristic for good socialization. A defining characteristic of sociopaths, for example, is their general lack of empathy and bonding with other humans. Arguing against the desirability of empathy takes you down a dangerous road. Are you really in favour of appointing a sociopath to the highest court in the land? Is this really a good idea. Of course, from my amateur viewpoint, it seems to me that a number of the leading figures in the GOP's recent past and present seem to exhibit some of the characteristics of sociopaths. The snarling, dismissive, black-and-white worldview of Dick Cheney and the narcissistic self-centered personal life of Newt Gingrich are not stellar advertisements for lack of empathy.
I therefore have tentatively concluded that the objection to "empathy" is yet another example of coded language, with "empathy" replacing "judicial activism" as another rallying cry for reflexive opponents of President Obama. Of course, it would be nice if those opponents stopped trying to rally around illogical, intellectually defective nonsense like this, but we are talking about the modern USA, where the ability to construct a cogent argument is currently taking second place (at least in the mass media) to fear-mongering, the endemic use of logical fallacies, and general bloviation and hand-waving.

Link: http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2009/05/obama-if-we-pretend-it-didnt-happen.html

Right now I am getting pissed with President Obama...he has only been in office 100 or so days, and now he is trying to prevent the release of photos which apparently will show detainees being tortured by U.S. military and or/intelligence department personnel.
The fact that torture has occurred does not seem to me to be in dispute, especially when the proponents of and apologists for torture seem to be expending a lot of rhetorical and argumentation energy on advancing the hypothesis that "torture works". If there was any doubt about the reality of past torture, they would still be clinging to the polite (prior) fiction of "we do not torture".
Obama's attempt to prevent the publication of the photos is supported by reasons that, as Lawyers Guns and Money explains, do not even begin to pass any test of logical argument. In short, the justification is flimsy bordering on BS. We also need to remember that this is a legal argument advanced by the Obama Administration to a circuit judge who may or may not be impressed enough by the argument to rule in favour of it. The judge might well decide that the argument is insufficiently compelling, and permit publication of the pictures.
This, of course, may be the outcome that the Obama Administration knows is inevitable; they may simply be going through the motions of objecting to publication so that they can turn round to the military and the intelligence communities and say "we tried...". However, given other evidence of backsliding on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", I am becoming increasingly concerned that the Obama team is meeting my worst expectations of a team that, once granted governance power, is seeking to abuse that power the same way that its predecessor abused power. Not a good sign.

Link: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/05/outed_blogger_sues_sheriffs_de.php#more

A rather disturbing story, from Ed Brayton's blog at ScienceBlogs:

A formerly anonymous blogger who criticized his prominent Southern Baptist pastor has sued police and state prosecutors for revealing his identify to the church even though an investigation showed he had done nothing illegal.

The blogger's blog is here, with updates on the legal action.
As Ed says, I hope he wins and wins big. This sort of covert investigation under the guise of a "criminal investigation" is nothing more than an invasion of privacy, and needs to be clobbered by the justice system, hopefully in a way that humiliates all of the scoundrels who took part in it.