Republican candidate for U.S. President John McCain has form when it comes to handling a financial crisis - and it's not good. A look at McCain's troubled involvement in the 'Keating Economics' scandal.

Disgraced former presidential aspirant John Edwards is now in the running for Fuck Up of the Year, an award that almost had Amy Winehouse's name on it.

We are watching re-runs from Kuala Lumpur. It’s 1998 again. Then, Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s deputy prime minister, was catapulted from office to prison on sodomy and treason charges. The instigator then was the mercurial colossus of Southeast Asian politics, Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad. Having initially welcomed Anwar as the prodigal son of Malaysian politics, he debunked him in a most conscious act of Saturnalia. In the theatre of Malaysian politics, buggery is almost as serious as the charge of deviationism in Mao’s China. The statute books permit imprisonment for up to twenty years...

It’s fine in Malaysian politics to talk about reform as long as a sense of inertia is maintained above the chatter of promised change. Splendid inactivity – one observes Malaysia’s current Prime Minister, the staid, dull Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as a case in point – suggests continuity. Change, marked by the dangerous word reform, suggests chaos, the disruption of gravy trains and networks of graft. Anwar’s mistake then and now was to violate the canon of inertia... Enter (some argue literally), the 23 year-old man who volunteered to work for the opposition during the tumultuous election earlier this year. He had been Anwar’s aide, and duly fronted with accusations of sodomy at the end of June...

These political re-runs take place because the main party of Malaysian politics, UMNO (United Malays National Organisation), has run out of ideas. It’s a despotism that has run dry of creativity, not merely in policy, but in dealing with rivals... Added to the mix now by his opponents is the suggestion that Anwar is America’s snitch... A character portrait of Anwar according to Barisan Nasional: a sodomizing snitch with masochistic tendencies. [More]

The U.S. body count in Iraq surpassed 4,000. Fighting erupted between different factions there. A chunk of ice six times the size of Manhattan broke off in Antarctica. The U.S. economy continued to sink into recession. But the media predictably remained obsessed with news of Brittney Spears' psychiatric condition and former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer's sex scandal...

The leading lights in the political arena who expend unusual amounts of energy getting and staying elected are often Alpha males, aggressive, driven, confident, ambitious, and always pursuing more. They inspire and deflate. They tend toward autocratic and abusive behavior. They have insatiable appetites for power, food, booze, money and sex ­- often of the most innovative varieties... Just listing the sex scandals involving fast-track political types could fill the pages of an oversized book. So, it should not have surprised the prurient public that New York's governor, son of a multi millionaire who fought Wall Street, blew his career... Imagine, a rich Jewish boy caught in kinky stuff with a high priced shiksa hooker!

Those interested in Alpha male sex psychology might refer to "disorders" involving "suffering/humiliation of one's self/partner." These types suffer from "persistent fantasies/urges to either inflict or receive pain as a means to sexual arousal"... Spitzer's activities with Kristen did not involve love. Think kinky as Kinky, as Joan Rivers once described it. "My husband was having a heart attack and I was lying next to him handcuffed to the bed as was the hooker lying on the other side of him. Lucky the dog on top of her could dial 911." Some of the powerful like to get humiliated ­ pissed and shat on, whipped. They feel better and go forth with zest into their world to humiliate others. [More]