This was a particularly bloody week, politically and literally. The survey of it reveals a sweep of vicious Primary contests and paroxysms of violence, interspersed with a high pitch of absurdity - such as the man arrested for performing a home circumsicion and controversy over a cross-dressing third grader. By and large, this was a rather ugly week.

As for the political contests, I’ve covered them adequately in my past posts of this week. To summarize, Obama had a great night on Tuesday - though not a coup de grace - and has since surged forward. Hillary loaned herself money, perhaps as a ploy to raise money - all we really know is that she lied about being so strapped for cash that some of her campaign volunteered to go without pay.

Now the Primary attention for the Democrats shifts its focus from Super Tuesday to Sidekick Saturday-Sunday, when five states will be holding their elections or caucases. As for the GOP, Romney exited the scene with a whimper hanging his star on 2012, and all bangs heard were the jeers hurled in McCain’s direction at the mighty Conservative Political Action Conference.

Meanwhile, the wires were buzzing with news of Clinton profligacy and puling. Bill bemoaned his sorry station as a spouse who cannot defend his wife. He claimed that he had been misrepresented by the media for “factually accurate” statements, conveniently cherry-picking the incidents when his statements came anything close to factual accuracy.

On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Clinton called Obama’s celebrated opposition to the Iraq war “a fairy tale,” suggesting that while Obama had spoken out against the war in 2002 while he was an Illinois state senator, Obama had moderated his anti-war stance during his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign.

Later, campaigning for his wife in South Carolina, Clinton suggested an Obama victory there would be a racial one, like the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s twenty years ago.

To our former President’s credit, he is in part right - a lot of hay was made by slanting his statements in the most offensive air possible. And yet, one cannot fail to realize that he made those very statements in order to be as offensive as possible to Obama. To compare his rival’s success to Jesse Jackson’s ill-fated and marginalized campaign was hardly an objective statement. To characterize Obama’s statements in 2004 about the war as grounds to call his opposition to Iraq “a fairy tale” is mendacious and mean. And citing those two incidents alone sets aside the absolutely inaccurate statements he made regarding the Nevada lawsuit to ban caucus cites that were predicted to be unfavorable to the Clintons and Obama’s statements regarding the worth of Ronald Reagan.

No boohooing, Bill - not when you’re the bully getting punched in the nose here.

As for Clinton spending, we now have another story akin to that of them stiffing the waitress in Iowa and tooling around in great, gaudy caravans of SUVs: Apparently they shafted some rental proprietor of his due funds and left the place in much the state they did the White House.

Rochester physician Terry Bennett said he rented a city building to people who worked for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — and skipped town without paying the bill.

Making matters worse, Bennett said, the 3,000-square-foot building at 236 Union St. was left trashed. Campaign signs were left lying all over the place, he said.

This is clearly an “oops, my bad” situation, but it seems indicative of the lack of care the supposedly super-organized Clinton campaign exercise over their personnel. A similar instance can be found on YouTube, where Hillary posted a video called “The Conversation Continues,” turned off the ability for users to make text comments, and ignored people telling her that the sound is wonky. If this is “experience,” I think I’ll go for vision.

The vision of the Democratic Party as a whole seems to be in question, as the Primary process has exposed some serious flaws in its organization. First off would be the poor way that the DNC handled the moves by the Michigan and Florida state parties to hold early contests - denying the delegates a vote at the convention, then mumbling into their sleeves about possibly allowing the delegates after Hillary won unopposed elections in those states. That is assinine enough to get the eyes rolling. On top of that, Howard Dean said this week that he wants to resolve the entire Primary matter with some sort of backroom sit down with the candidates. Can we get more elitist and shady?

The idea that we can afford to have a big fight at the convention and then win the race in the next eight weeks, I think, is not a good scenario. So, after the primaries are over, the last primary is June 8th in Puerto Rico, there may be another state with there, and after that if we don’t have a nominee, I think we will have a nominee sometime in the middle of March or April. But if we don’t, then we’re going to have to get the candidates together and make some kind of an arrangement. Because I don’t think we can afford to have a brokered convention — that would not be good news for either party.”

This idea sounds like something out of a novel Ann Coulter would write. Someone in a high place better inform the Screamer that what would really be “not good news” for the Democratic Party would be to make it seem like their candidate is being chosen in the board room and not the ballot box.

And personally, I feel a brokered convention could be fun - it would clear the Party palate, so to speak, like in ‘68.

A more morbid breed of insanity was apparent throughout this week as well. On the very day I reported on the deranged events surrounding the Super Bowl Massacre that didn’t happen, there were a number of shootings. First was a lunatic who killed his family and fought off SWAT officers in Los Angeles. Then came an attack on a Missouri City Council by a moron with assault weaponry. And now, just this morning, some woman gunned down some Lousiana college students and herself in the latest installment in what’s becoming a seasonal school shooting schedule.

So it was that random violence and reckless Primaries reigned this week in review.

This week was most remarkable in that it culminated with Obama gaining eleven points in the national Gallup polls, which speaks well for the intelligence of the nation. If it truly is due to the wisdom of the electorate, this trend will continue, with factors like last night’s widely watched Democratic debate serving as significant assets to Obama’s ascent.

Yet the news today was news of the dumb: In some ways in an amusing sense, some an annoying, and in some a truly tragic, awful sense.

The laughably moronic item floating around today comes from across the pond. Apparently some knucklehead in marketing though it would be a good idea to call a bed for pre-teen girls, “The Lolita“. Working in marketing as I do, I can assure you this story is not nearly so far-fetched as it sounds. The article on it puts it best:

A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active pre-teens.

Woolworths said staff who administer the web site selling the beds were not aware of the connection.

I would reckon that they were not. Or, more likely, simply did not listen to the people who repeatedly told them about it.

Next on the WWW agenda is a piece that falls under a “cardinal stupidty” - the kind endemic in government, that reminds us about the similarities between sausage and legislation. Legislators in Mississippi of all places, in what was more likely a joke or a jab at the earnest concerns about obesity, fashioned a bill to ban certain obese individuals from being served by restaurants. Naturally, this dog did not hunt in the land where even lard must have butter on it.

The bill, which is likely dead on arrival, proposes that the state’s Department of Health establish weight criteria after consultation with Mississippi’s Council on Obesity. It does not detail what penalties an eatery would face if its grub was served to someone with an excessive body mass index.

Whether that was just a dumb joke or a joke about the dumb will likely never be known outside of the Jackson Kiwanis Club. But in our next article, the joke is most definitely on us.

There may be talk of our credit bubble economy being close to popping, with energy crises slowing production world wide, but that hasn’t dampened the spirits of the good people at EXXON Mobil, who posted record profits. Now, just to be clear, I am not opposed to oil companies posting record profits - even at the expense of the tax payer, or the wealth of human misery that comes from regional instability. I am, however, opposed to them posting records profits at the expense of the tax payer [i]and[/i] from regional instability [i]and[/i] while our heavy industry and construction groans on the brink of collapse.

The eye-popping results weren’t a surprise given record prices for a barrel of oil at the end of 2007. For much of the fourth quarter, they hovered around $90 a barrel, more than 50 percent higher than a year ago.

Crude prices reached an all-time trading high of $100.09 on Jan. 3 but have fallen about 10 percent since then.

So as I put in $3.19 a gallon to fill my tank, I want to at least be put at ease by being able to look at the big picture - and I do not mean the swelling backsides and bank accounts of the oil companies. The only consolation I can take from that is, “at least Russia isn’t the one sucking it down.” But, of course, increasingly, they are.

The last news relating to the stupid is so ghastly that simply calling the unfortunates involved ’stupid’ is distasteful and saddening. It shows the lengths that the al-Qaeda elements in Iraq must go to and will go to in order to keep America’s veins open in the region. It’s probably the most vile news I’ve read all week, and I read the Drudge Report daily; this is saying something.

It involves the worst suicide bombing in Iraq in a long time - one that blew up, of all places, a location called “the pet market,” which did, among other wares, have pets, and which was perpetrated by mentally disabled bombers. According to Iraqi security sources, the two women - who were the instruments of sequential attacks - suffered from Down’s Syndrome.

Other officials said the women were apparently unaware of what they were doing in what could be a new method by suspected Sunni insurgents to subvert toughened security measures.

More than 70 people died and scores were wounded in the deadliest day since the US “surge” of 30,000 extra troops were sent to the capital this spring.

In the first attack, a woman detonated explosives hidden under her traditional black Islamic robe in the central al-Ghazl market. The weekly bazaar has been bombed several times since the war started but recently had re-emerged as a popular place to shop and stroll as Baghdad security improved. At least 46 people were killed and more than 100 wounded.

The second woman then struck a bird market in a predominantly Shiite area in south-eastern Baghdad killing up to 27 people and wounding 70.

Utterly heartbreaking, I hope that this most extreme action can only be the last gasp of an ailing al-Qaeda insurgency in Iraq. It is almost certain we will see other acts of violence from them, and even whole other armed uprisings, but hopefully this worst day will remain just that - the worst day since the surge, and no worse.

The big news this week was all abuzz with the upcoming primary in South Carolina and the salvos being fired back and forth between the Democrats. In that regard, there was no real news at all.

If Clinton’s untouchability is the chief headline of the day, it’s not a day worth getting out of bed for, journalistically speaking. Every sagely columnist from Peggy Noonan to Dan Savage agrees that Clinton should be eradicated from the political scene. Most within the Democratic party seem thoroughly disgusted with them. And yet their numbers are astronomic, their public support thunderous. In essence, the Clintons seem to me the acoustic of American mass idiocy, much like the early chapters of the Bush years seemed.

And that kind of news - that people can be underhanded, conniving, manipulative, venal and power hungry and still be revered by defensive masses - is not news at all. It is the last eight years of my life.

Even though everything may seem like the past, though, we are definitely living in the future. One major news item this week announced that we are close to creating artificial life.

US scientists have taken a major step toward creating the first ever artificial life form by synthetically reproducing the DNA of a bacteria, according to a study published Thursday.

The move, which comes after five years of research, is seen as the penultimate stage in the endeavour to create an artificial life form based entirely on a man-made DNA genome — something which has tantalised scientists and sci-fi writers for years.

Great. Maybe the Earth will finally be home to a sentient being.

There have been prettier weeks than this one.

If 2008’s first week celebrated change, the second week reminded us that change isn’t going to come any time soon. It’ll be a long haul, and most likely not a pretty one.

* The now-notorious “Obama Is A Muslim Spy - Honest!” e-mail made its rounds during that critical 36 hour window before New Hampshire. Golly gee; what an amazing coincidence. I suppose it has nothing to do with the disappearance of Obama’s 10 point lead over Hillary and the 18% of voters who said they decided on the last day. That the only source we have ever discovered for this abomination was a Clinton staffer is, I’m sure, also just a coincidence.

Fortunately, the new version of the e-mail has a link to snopes.com - included above, too - so that people can click on it and find out its false. Any simple internet search would do this. So that means, only idiots who would fail to check the facts on something before turning it decisive belief and action will succumb. Unfortunately, that seems about 70% of America.

* Iran harassed us with speedboats. Considering we’re the most powerful army in the world, one would think we would tell them that if they did it again, we would blow their zippy little boats into zippy little bits without so much as a “fare thee well.” Instead, Bush and the GOP candidates insisted it was proof Iran was “a threat.” Yes; clearly, Iran was not just trying to poke at us to show it can make us roar like a big, tender giant. Clearly, Iran’s next speedboat assault will render us more vulnerable, more broken, than even the colossal Red Army of the 70s could not.

This was just another incident that made me hang my head in a combination of shock, shame and prayer. I miss the 80s. Do any of you all remember when we actually acted like the invincible superpower we are?

* In what is, in fact, an odd coincidence, Bush visited Auschwitz the day that a German Events Planner put out a shirt protesting smoking bans that features a Star of David patch - a la the Nazis - with the word ’smoker’ in it.

* Meanwhile, the most important story went largely ignored - as usual. The real imminent crisis is not Global Warming or illegal immigration. These make great boogeymen, but are localized and manageable compared to the immense trouble caused by our economic policies of the last eight years - which are, if you’ll allow me an extension of metaphor, four-hundred foot tall, radioactive chickens looking to come home to roost:

The economic crisis is that we have been taking this country’s real wealth and turning it into debt, and then selling that debt overseas.

In short, this tale begins with the tech bubble bursting. Our surplus teeters on becoming a defecit. Bush’s solution is to significantly lower taxes for the highest tax brackets. This in turn encourages corporations to expand, buying new development on credit. Meanwhile, everyone in the lower tax brackets is given a rebate and told to spend more. Americans do, buying more goods that the expanded corporations are producing. Corporations cut jobs to make themselves more competitive in the market, and then reinstate jobs at lower wages after they have expanded in their holdings. The result is a rise, then drop, in unemployment but an overall drop for salaries for middle class and lower class earners. This means more middle and lower class using more credit, while big business uses more credit to expand and so to produce goods they can sell to the middle and lower classes.

All the while, places like China and India are producing those goods, while at the same time China and nations like Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are selling American consumers and businesses debt. They do this so that we can continue to buy the goods we pay them to produce cheaply.

Only now, chips are starting to be cashed. People are starting to think that maybe high-interest loans and maxed out credit cards wasn’t the way to go. Maybe they needed the tax cuts, and fiscal responsibility. But already, major banks like Citibank and Countrywide have sold these peoples’ debt to overseas, so that they can hike their market share and use those Fed tax cuts to buy their business larger.

Something’s going to give. Today, as those above links show, the market plunged and Citibank, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, offered itself up to Beijing. The house of cards is not going to be pretty when it falls, but how it’ll stay up is anybody’s guess.

This week’s news was surprisingly pleasant and serious, rather like a holiday should be. I say this because I don’t go in for the Norman Rockwell jolity holidays, with apple-cheeked, ice-skating youngsters falling on their keisters. There should be a fire, some eggnog, and a general sense of extremely static well being, as fixed as the evening star.

The stars in the early primary states were all /but/ fixed this week, though, made me pretty giddy at times.

All indications are that the falling star you see plummeting towards the Tunguska Incident-type impact of January 3rd’s caucus is Hillary Clinton. Hillary is taking a big dive, and the press is alternately fixating on her campaign’s weakness and on how press coverage of her campaign’s weakness is leading to further weakness in her campaign.

This polling data also comes from declared voters. As I’ve noted before, Obama might be even stronger than polls suggest, considering that his support has a large population of undeclared voters, as the article about his rise in New Hampshire notes:

The poll suggests that the Democratic race could hinge on the turnout of undeclared voters, who aren’t registered with either political party. Much of Obama’s backing comes from undeclared voters, while registered Democrats make up the bulk of Clinton’s support. In New Hampshire, undeclared voters can vote in either party primary, giving them sway in both contests.

On the other side of the political spectrum, a baleful star is rising - Mike Huckabee has launched ahead. He, like Obama, has a substantial margin of polling success in Iowa. He also has a lead in South Carolina, according to a CNN poll, and in Florida.

And though I would prefer two viable candidates in the race, considering how lame Giuliani has been on foreign policy - his supposed strong suit - and what a sell-out Romney has been to social conservatist zealots on topics like gay rights and abortion, I now have no problem with Huckabee being the choice of the GOP plurality. After all, it was the Bible-thumping, wet-eyed lot that shoved Bush and his ilk down our throats in 2000, 2002 and 2004, though better Republicans cut of a kind of cloth that would sicken at the thought of moralizing legislation were passed aside. The GOP rose to dominate our divided nation thanks to the bloc that prioritizes the defense of marriage over the defense of our country. If they want to put up the man that exemplifies that kind of empty quality, so be it. It will be the final nail in a coffin that I can’t wait to see go underground.

The press even has a term for it: Huckacide.

Huckacide was coined out of analysis of the “Huckaboom” - the leap in his poll numbers these past two weeks, born of showing commercials that sell him not as the man with the best foreign policy experience or the finest grasp of the economy (he’s proposing doing away with the IRS and replacing it with a 30% sales tax), but as a “Christian Leader”. If that’s all it takes to catapult you to the head of the flock then I’m fine that the religious right street wants to go out with a Huckabang, not with a whimper.

So this was a week of Hillabust and Huckaboom, as the Hillacopter seems likely to crash in a sudden squall of Obamarama.

Amazingly, not a whole lot else is worthy in the headlines.

Bush said that steroids sullied baseball. I would say that they made it kind of interesting again. Tells you my taste. I like technologically-enhanced man bulls shattering homerun records - and Dodger Dogs. Bush likes the other things that make baseball exciting, whatever those are.

There were a new round of suicide bombings in Iraq - some from al-Qaeda most likely, but a few from intra-Shiite brawling. Nobody in the media is quite sure whether they want to ruin a perfectly good news cycles that’s spawning catchy terms ending in “boom”, “bust” and “copter” yet, so they’re being ignored.

And al-Qaeda released a new recording which is, I assure you, far less interesting than Glenn Danzig talking about the contents of his bookshelf.

And, as it bears mentioning every week, Florida still needs a lot of help.

That’s the splendidly static World Wired Week in Review. Happy holidays.

Out of popular demand, consideration for my own convenience and a nod to weekly recap news shows everywhere, I’m now establishing a tradition of reviewing the news of the week in a Friday post - the Wired World Week In Review.

This sardonic scan of events will cover a broad range of topics. I’ll get you the most significant political stories, the most outlandish news items on the wire and a few selections that balance social relevance with sheer oddity. You’ll get the coups and the crackpots, the debates and the Darwin Awards, each with a quick synopsis that gets right past of the meat of the matter and hits the sweet marrow.

So, without further ado, here’s the review:

First, the most important news: The Second Coming has occurred. As most anyone would have predicted, it happened in Florida. But in a way few expected, the Lord returned in some fellow’s ribcage. To this, I have but two things to note: First, that I always thought Quatto from “Total Recall” had a messianic quality about him. And secondly, “You go, Florida. Keep ‘em coming; things would be so boring without you.” Bless your heart, you might say.

The patient recently went to a hospital in Homestead and complained of chest pains.

The doctor ordered an X-ray, and when technicians put the film up to the light, the silhouette of what some said resembled Jesus Christ appeared.

Now, two news items that should interest Conservatives:

In one, a man with a gun protected himself and his family from an armed robber.

Investigators said the Johnson family was returning home from a school event when three people came up to their car. Randall Johnson, 36, pulled out a gun and shot one of the suspects, killing him.

I know - amazing, hm? Things actually work out sometimes.

And yet, not every American who describes themselves as a Conservative will be united in political vindication on this story - wherein a Developmental Biologist was fired from teaching Developmental Biology because he didn’t believe in developmental biology, he believed in Creationism.

In a 2004 letter to Abraham, his boss, Woods Hole senior scien tist Mark E. Hahn, wrote that Abraham said he did not want to work on “evolutionary aspects” of the National Institutes of Health grant for which he was hired, even though the project clearly required scientists to use the principles of evolution in their analyses and writing.

On this matter, I would imagine many Conservatives would be aghast that religious beliefs would even be a factor in the workplace, while many others will simply be shocked by the absurdity of it all.

More absurdity abounds in the usually so reserved and sober state of Syria. The government has apparently blocked access to the online social network, Facebook, allegedly due to suspicions of Israeli infiltration.

Lebanon’s daily As-Safir reported that Facebook was blocked on Nov. 18. It said the authorities took the step because Israelis have been entering Syria-based groups.

One can only imagine the thinking behind this. Was Syria perhaps afraid that it would suffer from a “Friends List” gap? That animated gif pictures of spinning dradels will sway its young Muslims away from the path of the prophet? Or is it the more obvious answer - that Facebook is all a North Korean intelligence mining operation, and that the Israelis were getting to close to figure it out by giving seemingly-benign Syrian pages a hard look?

Infiltration is on John McEnroe’s mind too, as the tennis star claims that organized crime is infiltrating the sport. Talk about moving up in the world - rigged boxing matches have a certain garish glamor, but I can’t think of a sport more pinkies up than tennis.

The former world number one believes that threats to tennis players or their families could be forcing them into throwing matches.

“The thing that worries me is that mafia types, like the Russian mafia, could be involved. That’s potentially pretty dark and scary,” McEnroe told The Daily Telegraph.

As McEnroe says, it is indeed scary. Russian mobsters tend not to be particularly constrained in their targets. If tennis tried to resist their influence, we could be looking at the bloodiest and most extensive purge of British gentry since Oliver Cromwell and his tea-sipping Taliban, the Puritans, were in charge. Ha ha! Reformation humor.

At the very least, it would make “Eastern Promises” seem prophetic - and thus achieve the impossible by making it even cooler than it is now.

Otherwise, loyal readers, not a whole lot else happened in this first torpid week of December. People killed other people. A guy was jailed for not taking his tuberculosis medicine in what I hope is a crackdown that will lead to people who cough in the theater being subjected to public flogging. Politicians traded jabs - with Edwards’ campaign saying that Oprah didn’t care about black people, Cheney saying something vaguely lewd about Congress, and Clinton alternately puling about being attacked and attacking back - in other words, the usual.

My favorite headline about that whole rigamarole was today on Drudge, and read:

Dukakis Says Obama Not Capitalizing On Grassroots; baffled…

Which instantly made me think, “Funk Wonders Why Obama Should EVER Listen To Dukakis; baffled…”

It was that kind of week. Peaceful. Overinflated. Surreal. I almost felt I was back in the 90s again.