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On July 25th, for instance, while John Boehner raced around the Capitol desperately pressing Republican House members for votes on a debt-ceiling bill that Harry Reid was calling dead-on-arrival in the Senate, America's new ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, took his oath of office in distant Kabul.  According to the New York Times, he then gave a short speech "warning" that "Western powers needed to 'proceed carefully'" and emphasized that when it came to the war, there would "be no rush for the exits." If, in Washington, people were rushing for those exits, no chance of that in Kabul almost a decade into America's second Afghan War.  There, the air strikes, night raids, assassinations, roadside bombs, and soldier and civilian deaths, we are assured, will continue to 2014 and beyond.  In a war in which every gallon of gas used by a fuel-guzzling US military costs $400 to $800 to import, time is no object and -- despite the panic in Washington over debt payments -- neither evidently is cost.

President Obama lowered taxes. Why doesn't the country know that? Rick Perlstein on how Rush Limbaugh helped mislead a nation-and why the Democrats let him get away with it.We live in a mendocracy.As in: rule by liars.Political scientists are going crazy crunching the numbers to uncover the skeleton key to understanding the Republican victory last Tuesday.

When using websites, teenagers have a lower success rate than adults and they're also easily bored. To work for teens, websites must be simple -- but not childish -- and supply plenty of interactive features.(Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

On September 17, 20,000 people will swarm into lower Manhattan and occupy Wall Street. Last week Anonymous endorsed #OCCUPYWALLSTREET with a video that attracted over 60,000 views before being deleted by YouTube. The Department of Homeland Security has warned the nation's bankers to be prepared. Corporate owned media is taking notice. Today, Paul Farrell, columnist for the Dow Jones owned MarketWatch.com posted this rousing portrait of what may now unfold:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization. "[E]ven the banal uses of our creative capacity (posting YouTube videos of kittens on treadmills or writing bloviating blog posts) are still more creative and generous than watching TV. We don't really care how individuals create and share; it's enough that they exercise this kind of freedom."