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U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion, sent by the planeload in cash and intended for Iraq's reconstruction after the start of the war.

From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, "When did this all begin, America's downward slide?" They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated. Young people have heard of this mythical time - but it was no myth, it was real. And when they ask, "When did this all end?", I say, "It ended on this day: August 5th, 1981." Beginning on this date, 30 years ago, Big Business and the Right Wing decided to "go for it" - to see if they could actually destroy the middle class so that they could become richer themselves. And they've succeeded. On August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired every member of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) who'd defied his order to return to work and declared their union illegal. They had been on strike for just two days.

The Wisconsin recall election was the first major test of the new era in American politics. That new era began in January of 2010 when the US Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that the political voice of We The People was no longer as important as the voices of billionaires and transnational corporations. Now we know the result, and it bodes ill for both 2012 and for the tattered future of small-d democracy in our republic. A few of America's most notorious oligarchs - including the Koch and the DeVos (Amway fortune) billionaires - as well as untraceable millions from donors who could as easily be Chinese government-run corporations as giant "American" companies who do most of their business and keep most of their profits outside the US - apparently played big in this election. I say "apparently" because the Supreme Court has ruled that we no longer have the right to know who is really funding our election commercials, or even our candidates themselves. Thanks to an irrational and likely illegal Supreme Court ruling, we have moved into an era of oligarch-run politics. As much as $40 million of our oligarch's money was spent in Wisconsin in a handful of local races - a testing laboratory for strategies that will now be used against Democrats nationwide in 2012. And so now we enter the battle of the oligarchs over the next fifteen or so months. As the old saying goes, when the elephants fight, the mice get trampled. In this case, the mice aren't just the voters. It's democracy itself. America is now - demonstrably, as proven by Wisconsin - just a few years away from the possibility of a totally corrupted, totally billionaire- and corporate-controlled political system. Political scientists call it oligarchy. The Citizens United election experiment is over, and the oligarchs won. Long live the oligarchy.

This link is not an endorsement; the author is writing propaganda. What you should keep in mind as you read this post is precisely what the author would have you forget - that the victim "confessed" to the acts that supposedly justified his torture, as he was being tortured, on behalf of the US government. That part, so far, doesn't really seem to be in dispute. Only the rightness of torturing confessions out of prisoners - and then playing make believe, and pretending that those are real confessions - seems to be, leaving us to ask "didn't the Middle Ages end a few centuries ago". Don't we all basically know what history shouldn't have had to teach our ancestors - that if you inflict enough pain on somebody, he'll say just about anything to make the pain stop? To attach the word "fascism" to a political ideology that supports this sort of thing is in no way excessive, and that's why I'm linking to this article. Watch the way in which the author, with not a single fact in support of his position, blusters his way past reality, treating a torture extracted confession as a source of unimpeachable truth, and gets you to not notice that he has done so. Learn how this creep works his magic, and when the next creep comes along, you'll be less likely to fall under his spell. Oh, and yes - this is the second penis related story to come out of Africa to be seen on this microblog in a row. Nothing deliberate in this; you're just getting the stories as I find them. Wondering if this one is going to be the start of a trend. Remembering Anthropology 100 back in undergrad, and some of its more graphic descriptions of body modification rituals on the continent, I suppose that's a possibility. One I'd really rather not explore more than absolutely necessary, but when somebody ends up being held prisoner and tortured for seven years because he visited a parody site, I think we need to get past our squeamishness and say something about that.

A Libertarian rebuttal to the post two links down on my profile, written a little more intelligently than most, from somebody who I find myself liking a little - but still showing some of the glib blindness that drove me away from that movement. Eg. responding to the report of the selling of tainted meat by saying that one could prevent the problem by cooking the meat until it's medium (ie. greyish red, instead of grey outright, and only mostly tasteless). "See", she seems to be saying, "even without governmental regulation, you have a choice", not quite getting that it isn't a reasonable choice. Selling meat that doesn't have to be cooked to death to be safe is absolutely possible; my grocery does it with regularity and I cook it rare with regularity, without problems following. So is it reasonable that people in places where the merchants or those they buy from are not as ethical should have to maybe choose between enjoying their meals, or surviving them, just so that somebody else be slimy without undue interference? With how ever much charm, the author of this piece answers that question with a resounding "yes", and shows why Libertarianism is, as I've said, not about the promotion of personal freedom so much as it is about the promotion of personal irresponsibility.

law enforcement official says the FBI has opened an investigation into allegations media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. sought to hack into the phones of Sept. 11 victims. The official spoke Thursday to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly. New York City-based News Corp. has been in crisis mode because of a scandal that sank its UK newspaper the News of the World. A rival newspaper reported last week the News of the World had hacked into the phone of UK teenage murder victim Milly Dowler in 2002 and may have impeded a police investigation into her disappearance. More possible victims soon emerged, including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Murdoch says his media company will recover from any damage wrought by the phone-hacking and police bribery allegations. The FBI's New York office hasn't commented.

It's important, yes, and must be addressed. But by a wide margin, it's not the nation's most pressing economic problem. That would be the widespread and persistent joblessness that has plagued the labor market since the Great Recession began in 2008. Almost 14 million people - 9.1 percent of the labor force - were officially counted as unemployed last month. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There were almost 9 million part-time workers who wanted, but couldn't find, full-time jobs; 28 million in jobs they would have quit under normal conditions; and an additional 2.2 million who wanted work but couldn't find any and dropped out of the labor force. If the economy could generate jobs at the median wage for even half of these people, national income would grow by more than 10 times the total interest cost of the 2011 deficit (which was less than $40 billion). So anyone who says that reducing the deficit is more urgent than reducing unemployment is saying, in effect, that we should burn hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods and services in a national bonfire. We ought to be tackling both problems at once. But in today's fractious political climate, many promising dual-purpose remedies - like infrastructure investments that would generate large and rapid returns - are called unthinkable, in the false belief that they would impoverish our grandchildren. Yet there are other ways to attack unemployment that could garner bipartisan support. Perhaps the most promising is a payroll tax holiday.

Opponents of hydraulic "fracking" say it pollutes water and causes illness. Actor, activist (and newly-minted Countdown contributor) Mark Ruffalo joins Keith to discuss the lucrative practice that potentially threatens supplies of drinking water, and why so many have their heads in the sand. "This is an industry that is the dirtiest, slimiest, most arrogant, and negligent that you can imagine," Ruffalo says. Ruffalo also talks about rumors of blacklisting actors who speak out on political matters, and ponders why he was singled out by CNN to comment on it.  "You can do what's right or you can put your head in the sand," Ruffalo tells Keith, shortly before Keith bestows the ultimate Countdown honor -- welcoming Ruffalo into the ranks of official on-air contributors.

Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen - far from any battlefield and with no due process - it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager's life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people. News reports, based on government sources, originally claimed that Awlaki's son was 21 years old and an Al Qaeda fighter (needless to say, as Terrorist often means: "anyone killed by the U.S."), but a birth certificate published by The Washington Post proved that he was born only 16 years ago in Denver. As The New Yorker's Amy Davidson wrote: "Looking at his birth certificate, one wonders what those assertions say either about the the quality of the government's evidence - or the honesty of its claims - and about our own capacity for self-deception." The boy's grandfather said that he and his cousin were at a barbecue and preparing to eat when the U.S. attacked them by air and ended their lives. There are two points worth making about this:

Tehran, YJC. Naqdi says the US is trying to 'loot' Iranian assets.