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Former Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, former Utah governor and US Ambassador to China, took a battle axe to his own party, comparing it to China's Communist Party. Recounting his first experience on the presidential debate stage in Iowa in August 2011, Huntsman said he was struck by the question, "Is this the best we could do?"

Huntsman jokingly blamed his failed candidacy in part on his wife, who told him she would leave him if he abandoned his principles. “She said if you pandered, if you sign any of those damn pledges, I will leave you,” Huntsman recounted. "So I had to say I believe in science — and people on stage look at you quizzically as though you are an oddball."

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The New Yorkerin tähtireportteri Seymour Hersh kertoo Yhdysvaltain rahoittaneen ja kouluttaneen salaa iranilaisten maanpakolaisten järjestöä nimeltä Kansan mujahedin, joka on Yhdysvaltain virallisella terroristijärjestöjen listalla. EU poisti järjestön omalta terroristilistaltaan vuonna 2009. Ryhmän jäsenten koulutus olisi alkanut George Bushin presidenttikaudella vuonna 2005.

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A Native American tribe has sued some of the world's largest beer makers, claiming they knowingly contributed to devastating alcohol-related problems on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota said it was demanding $500 million in damages for the cost of health care, social services, and child rehabilitation caused by chronic alcoholism on the reservation.

The lawsuit targeted four off-site beer stores in Whiteclay, a Nebraska Panhandle town that, despite having only about a dozen residents, sold nearly 5 million cans of beer in 2010. Most of its customers come from the Pine Ridge reservation on the town's border. Leaders of the tribe blame the Whiteclay businesses for chronic alcohol abuse and bootlegging on the reservation, where all alcohol is banned.

The question, “If I were President I’d…” implies that if you swap out one leader, put in another, then all will be well with America — as though our leaders are the cause of all ailments.

That must be why we’ve created a tradition of rampant attacks on our politicians. Are they too conservative for you? Too liberal? Too religious? Too atheist? Too gay? Too anti-gay? Too rich? Too dumb? Too smart? Too ethnic? Too philanderous? Curious behavior, given that we elect 88% of Congress every two years.

A second tradition-in-progress is the expectation that everyone else in our culturally pluralistic land should hold exactly your own outlook, on all issues.

When you’re scientifically literate, the world looks different to you. It’s a particular way of questioning what you see and hear. When empowered by this state of mind, objective realities matter. These are the truths of the world that exist outside of whatever your belief system tells you.

One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Astrophysicist, Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, and host of NOVAScienceNOW

Recently deployed to participate in counterinsurgency operations outside of Kabul, 19-year-old Pvt. Robert Welsh told reporters Monday that for as long as he can remember, he has wanted to serve his country by fighting in Afghanistan.

"My most vivid childhood memories are of seeing the war on TV and imagining one day I'd be able to grow up and come over here to fight for my country," said Welsh, who has followed the U.S. struggle against the Taliban for more than half his life and once spent recesses at school make-believing he and his fellow third-graders were fighting the war on terror.

"I honestly never thought I'd get the chance to participate all these years later, but here I am." Welsh went on to say that while he doesn't want to get his hopes up, he remains cautiously optimistic that his own children will one day follow in his footsteps by fighting in Afghanistan.

The Obama administration's pattern of targeted killings in the war on terror establishes an important conceptual point. It is now clear beyond dispute that the United States, on a bipartisan basis, fully embraces the paradigm that the threat of international terrorism is a matter of war, not a matter of law enforcement. And rightly so.

That Obama presided over the killing of an American citizen like Anwar al-Awlaki marks a major advance in solidifying and legitimising the war paradigm. [Awlaki's] terrorist sandals may momentarily seem hard to fill, but as history demonstrates, not impossibly so. Lenin's death did not bring the end of Bolshevism; it brought Stalin.

Rahatalousjärjestelmässä taloudelliset heilahtelut johtuvat kokonaiskysynnässä tapahtuvista muutoksista. Jos rahamääräiset transaktiot (kokonaiskysyntä) taloudessa vähentyvät, myös tuotanto supistuu. Mitä enemmän rahamääräisiä velkasuhteita taloudessa kulloisenakin hetkenä on, sitä suurempi on yleensä myös transaktioiden määrä. Jos velan määrä taloudessa kasvaa, kasvaa samalla myös kokonaiskysyntä. Jos velan määrä vähenee, myös kokonaiskysyntä vähenee.

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There has not been any organized, explicitly class-based violence in the United States for generations, so what, exactly, does “class warfare” really mean? Is it just an empty political catch-phrase? [...] I recently argued that real class warfare is when those who have already achieved a good deal of prosperity pull the ladder up behind them by attacking the very things that once allowed working people to move up and join the ranks of the middle class.

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