I've always been partial to Eurotrib followed by Booman for the quality of their diaries and comments. As for the US oriented audience at Dkos, I would have discussed Mario's Florida connections through his ECCP company. Not much, but Mario does have an American base. That's how he got his "professorial" stripes. The Italian press has been investigating the American side (Corriere, if I'm not wrong) but I don't see the US press on to it.

He'll be written off as one of those extravagant Italian scoundrels and it will be generally ignored that Mario's rise to influence owes a lot to his American connections.

I haven't really looked into the Dkos coverage of the Litvinenko death. It's been so outstanding here, so it's a pleasure to contribute.

What may be missed is an overhead view. One naturally emphasizes the story with its human characters and their actions. Often any attempt to see the larger picture is dismissed as conspiracy theorizing. Con-artists strive in Italy because there's a need. A basic tenant of berlusconismo is not to revise history, but to reinvent it in the image of its leader. Yes, the WWII partisans are barbarous, cold-blooded assassins while Mussolini's republicans are cast as victims. The judiciary trials over major massacres and crimes committed in Italy must be contrasted by parliamentary commissions that overturn verdicts and history. Even trial verdicts must be misrepresented.

If Andreotti is condemned for his links to the mafia, the evening news says he was absolved. And just to be safe then the anti-mafia commission spends half its final report attacking the judiciary sentences. The Mitrokhin Commission sentences that the Bulgarians attempted to kill the pope although they were found not guilty in court. The Telekom Serbia corruption scam was invented to frame the opposition with full page banners in the rightwing press and opening news on all channels. Yet in the end the only proof of corruption was laid at the doorstep of that same commission by the Turin Procura: Nearly one million euros to Italo Bocchino, rightwing member of the Telekom Serbia Commission, through the San Marino Finbroker to a strange unknown newspaper called Roma.

Berlusconismo is consumate pornocracy, the triumph of ignorance and prevarication. "Who dares to think was not born to believe in me." In what other nation would a prime minister appoint his personal lawyer to oversee constitutional and judiciary reform, that same lawyer that not only defends the prime minister in his trials but attempts bribery to defend a fascist bomber responsible for the Piazza Fontana massacre? Berlusconismo, and its lesser cousin, Bushism, needs con-artists, charlatans, scoundrels to create its own reality, seconded by sycophants, groveling lackeys and posturing whiners. It's no wonder Italy has produced the various Rocco Martinos, Igor Marinis, Mario Scaramellas and Pious Pumps.

Perhaps the Litvinenko affair and its offshot Scaramella affair does little else but show us a mirror of ourselves. Which as usual we cannot perceive, so intrigued are we by the Russian universe. It only happens there.