If you want a stern dose of reality I recommend visiting an important website, one to keep you in touch with the real world in a society where media and political spin abound.

The site is USDebtClock.Org and all you need to do is look at the steadily changing, ever flickering numbers that literally jump out at you to get in touch with the real economic world. As I write this the grand total stands at over $12.4 trillion.

That encompasses $40,239 owed per citizen. While this figure has been quoted frequently when this verboten topic has been discussed the real figure of overriding importance that has tended to be overlooked is the amount per taxpayer.

While $40,239 is a far from insignificant figure, it is nowhere near as calamitous as the salient number determined by taxpayer in that the aforementioned figure includes a large population of children as well as numerous other citizens not paying current taxes.

The amount owed per taxpayer stands currently at $113,496. This leads us into another important category as the situation gets worse, not better.

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Sarah Palin is the same type of dream come true for media spin control operatives as was Ronald Reagan.

As a trained actor Ronald Reagan was accustomed to doing as directors told him. He was easily manageable for the Kitchen Cabinet of millionaires that launched him into politics in sixties’ California for his first run for governor along with his political strategy guiding hand, seasoned professional Stuart Spencer.

Spencer in concert with other handlers Reagan obtained when moving from state to national politics in a successful run for the presidency, resulting in two terms served, sought to turn a potential negative into a positive.

When skepticism was voiced over Reagan’s experience deficiencies in the political realm Spencer’s spin control campaign was to turn him into a “citizen politician” able to rise above partisan political considerations.

In the case of Reagan there was an effort made to make him look like the poised and responsive man in the neatly tailored suit, always ready to act on the people’s business and representing a sharp corporate style team.

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The latest effort of the Republican right and the leader they vigilantly rallied around not that long ago and have now forgotten is reminiscent of a ploy that occurred regularly within the now defunct Soviet Union.

When a former leader became too huge a burden to explain then he would be banished. Children would no longer study this leader’s period of history. An effort would be made within top leadership circles to erase that leader from memory.

The most celebrated example of Soviet attempted erasure came when Nikita Khrushchev took great pains to erase Joseph Stalin from memory. There were all those gulags, those knocks on doors in the middle of the night, then the transporting of opponents to undisclosed locations never to be heard from again.

The strategy was to treat the embarrassing historical period and the leader behind it as if those events and that individual never existed. Those Russians initiating that strategy are tactically similar to the Republican right and the eight years when they not only rallied mightily behind George W. Bush.

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Leave it to Ohio's Dennis Kucinich to do what no one else in Congress has the courage to do. The Representative from the Buckeye State's tenth Congressional District is looking to force a vote on withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to a report by RAW Story.

For congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Afghan President Hamid Karzai's announcement Tuesday that his country would need the US's military support for another 10 or 15 years seems to have been the last straw.

The outspoken House representative says it was Karzai's statement that prompted him to draft a resolution calling for a House vote on the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"We shouldn't be there another 15 to 20 months, let alone 15 to 20 years," Kucinich told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "When I'm in my district talking to people, nobody has come up to me and said we need to be in Afghanistan for the next 15 to 20 years. They do say we need jobs, we need to protect our basic industry, we need education, we need to protect retirement security. I'd like to see us start taking care of things here at home."

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Originally posted at TomDispatch.com

Think of us as just having passed through the failed era of "must" in Washington. For almost eight years, George W. Bush made speeches and appearances in which he hectored this or that country, or enemy, or people about what they "must" do. Never, I suspect, has an American president lectured more people out there on their responsibilities to us. Looking back, what's surprising is how few paid much attention. The Iraqis didn't listen, nor did the Afghans, nor the Iranians, nor, it seems, the Pakistanis, nor the Russians, nor the Chinese... and so on. It's been a remarkably ignominious lesson in bluster and bust -- and a reasonable measure of the actual power of a country that, not so many years ago, Washington pundits were happily (and favorably) comparing to the Roman and British empires in its reach and ambition.

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John Byrne reports this morning at RawStory:

President Barack Obama has quietly decided to bypass Congress and allow the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without charges.

The move, which was controversial when the idea was first floated in The Washington Post in May, has sparked serious concern among civil liberties advocates. Such a decision allows the president to unilaterally hold "combatants" without habeas corpus -- a legal term literally meaning "you shall have the body" -- which forces prosecutors to charge a suspect with a crime to justify the suspect's detention.

Obama's decision was buried on page A 23 of The New York Times' New York edition on Thursday. It didn't appear on that page in the national edition. (Meanwhile, the front page was graced with the story, "Richest Russian's Newest Toy: An N.B.A. Team.")

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Back in 2001, the Defense Department was briefed about a massive data mining system that officials said was aimed at identifying alleged terrorists who lived and communicated with people in the United States.

The new intelligence program granted traditional law enforcement agencies as well as the FBI and the CIA the authority to conduct what was then referred to as "suspicionless surveillance" of American citizens.

"Suspicionless Surveillance" was developed by the Pentagon's controversial Total Information Awareness department, led by Adm. John Poindexter, the former national security adviser, who secretly sold weapons to Middle Eastern terrorists in the 1980s during the Iran-Contra affair and was convicted of a felony for lying to Congress and destroying evidence. The convictions were later overturned on appeal.

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The federal Appeals Court decision to toss a lawsuit claiming contractors tortured detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison is what you’d expect from a tyranny.

The new ruling brushes off the charges by 212 Iraqis who said they or their late husbands were abused by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib. The suit charged private security firm CACI International Inc., of Arlington, Va., of crimes inside the Baghdad hellhole.

But in a 2-1 ruling, the D.C. Court of Appeals said CACI “is protected by laws barring suits filed as the result of military activities during a time of war,” the Associated Press reported. This opinion was written by Judge Laurence Silberman, a Reagan appointee, and supported by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a Bush appointee.

"During wartime, where a private service contractor is integrated into combatant activities over which the military retains command authority, a tort claim arising out of the contractor's engagement in such activities shall be pre-empted," Silberman wrote. If so, with about as many U.S.-led contract mercenaries as regular army involved in the Iraq conflict, this decision preposterously exempts some 150,000 fighters from legal action for any crimes they commit. It gives a shoot-to-kill pass to privateers such as Blackwater, whose operatives on one occasion are said to have gunned down 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians.

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Originally published at Asia Times

It's September 11 all over again - eight years on. The George W Bush administration is out. The "global war on terror" is still on, renamed "overseas contingency operations" by the Barack Obama administration. Obama's "new strategy" - a war escalation - is in play in AfPak. Osama bin Laden may be dead or not. "Al-Qaeda" remains a catch-all ghost entity. September 11 - the neo-cons' "new Pearl Harbor" - remains the darkest jigsaw puzzle of the young 21st century.

It's useless to expect US corporate media and the ruling elites' political operatives to call for a true, in-depth investigation into the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Whitewash has been the norm. But even establishment highlight Dr Zbig "Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski, a former national security advisor, has admitted to the US Senate that the post-9/11 "war on terror" is a "mythical historical narrative".

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By David Swanson

Hurricane Katrina is not as sexy as torture, but has killed more people and ruined more lives, and -- like many non-natural disasters in recent years -- has a chief culprit who has now settled in at 10141 Daria Place, Dallas, Texas, where he clears very little brush and where -- to my knowledge -- not a single politician or journalist or author has sought his wisdom on the affairs of the past seven months. George W. Bush, who should face nonviolent protest every minute of his life while he remains at liberty, knowingly abandoned an American city and nearby towns to a predictable and predicted natural disaster four years ago this week, and for years refused to repair the damage.

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