In his short story "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845), originally published as a hoax, Edgar Allan Poe described a dying man who was hypnotized precisely at the moment of his death. The hypnosis preserved him for some time, until the hypnotist broke the spell. As a result, "his whole frame at once -- within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk -- crumbled -- absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome -- of detestable putrescence."

At the moment, the American body politic resembles the body of M. Valdemar. To be more precise, both American conservatism and American progressivism in their familiar forms are dead, but decay has not caught up with them yet, because both are in a state of suspended animation.

The world changed radically when the global economy crashed in 2008, but the news has not yet reached Washington. The Republicans are giving long-discredited Reaganomics another good old college try, while Barack Obama, having surrounded himself by veterans of Bill Clinton's economic team, is practicing, or malpracticing, 1990s style neoliberalism, or "Rubinomics," named after Democratic Party fundraiser and Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

Reaganomics and Rubinomics were both toxic political byproducts of the generation-long asset inflation of the late 20th century in the United States. As long as the bubble lasted, their exploding wealth permitted Wall Street "bundlers" or fundraisers to capture both national parties by dominating campaign finance. Financialized conservatism differed from financialized progressivism, but the two schools of thought were both based on cheerful happy-talk scenarios in which there were no deep conflicts of interests between the rich and the rest in America.

First, the Tea Party wants school kids everywhere to read their VERSION of the US Constitution, and now they want to brainwash them into some form anti-tax, pro-religious camp that espouses on the very values few in the Tea Party truly exercises or even supports out in public?

Whatever happened to just going to a fishing camp or singing songs over a campfire with gooey Smores stuffed in their mouths?

Makes me wonder which books on "history" they will be using there? Probably the ones that say: "American History-The Sarah Palin Edition".

You know as well as I do, that the Tea Party doesn't believe in government, so how can they also believe in things like economics and US history?

You have to be a progressive or a liberal to do that. People who don't believe in progress or advancing forward are only asking for pain and suffering to be visited upon themselves and/or their neighbors.

Icelandic Foreign Minister Ossur Skarphedinsson has announced his country will back a formal call for Palestinian statehood at the UN, should a proposed motion be put before the international group this September.

The announcement comes after a two-day trip to Gaza by Skarphedinsson, who met with his Palestinian counterpart, Riad al-Maliki.

"I told him that if it came to be at the United Nations General Assembly in September that a motion would be put forward by the nations supporting Palestinian independence and encouraging other nations to recognise Palestine as an independent nation with its 1967 borders, Iceland would support that," Skarphedinsson told national broadcaster RUV.

"Likewise, if a proposition comes to the UN to include Palestine into the UN as a new nation, as President Obama said he wanted a year ago, Iceland would also support that."

British energy giant BP rebounded into net profit in the second quarter of 2011, aided by high oil prices, after a huge loss last year in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, it said Tuesday.

Earnings after taxation hit $5.62 billion (3.87 billion euros) in the three months to the end of June, BP said in a results statement.

That compared with an enormous loss of $17.15 billion in the second quarter of 2010, when it was slammed by spiralling costs from the devastating oil spill.

However, production sank 10.7 percent to 3.43 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, following suspension of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Output was also hit as the group sold of $25 billion of assets to help foot the bill for the disaster.

Oslo, Norway - Norway's justice minister told reporters Tuesday that employees from his department were still missing after an attack on government headquarters in Oslo and a shooting spree at a nearby island that killed at least 76.

Police have not released the names of the victims yet but hope to start that process Tuesday. Justice Minister Knut Storberget gave no information about the missing.

Anders Behring Breivik has confessed to last week's bombing in the capital and a rampage at a Labor Party retreat for young people. In all, 76 people have been confirmed killed in the twin attacks that have stunned peaceful Norway.

"The Justice Ministry has people who are missing, we have people who are very hard hit by this and we are without offices," Storberget told reporters.

Storberget also offered a defense of the police, who announced a substantial reduction in the official death toll on Monday, adding to a growing series of missteps in their response.

As America's empire spreads abroad, it becomes ever more the police state at home. The methods used for the suppression of foreigners by military force and violence are eventually mirrored in the "homeland."

In an article last September 25th titled "It Is Official: the US Is A Police State," author Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Treasury Secretary during the Reagan years, wrote, "'Violent extremism' is one of those undefined police state terms that will mean whatever the government wants it to mean. In this morning's FBI foray into the homes of American citizens of conscience it means antiwar activists, whose activities are equated with 'the material support of terrorism'..."

The FBI raids at home are reminiscent of U.S. military raids overseas. In Iraq, for instance, labor union offices were raided and rifled and labor leaders imprisoned by the Occupation forces. Their "crime" was to oppose sweetheart contract deals with private oil firms.

The vast U.S. prison system, which houses 2.4 million Americans, may be compared with the Gulag the U.S. has built abroad. America today is the World's Jailer. As Allan Uthman reported on AlterNet, in 2006 the Bush regime began building "detention centers" to warehouse inmates for unspecified "new programs" when the Army Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root nearly $400 million. What we do abroad, we do at home.

Israel's most secret and tried-and-true weapon is the "false flag" terrorist attack.

State-sponsored terrorism is defined by Encyclopedia Britannica as the "systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective [and] is employed by governments -- or more often by factions within governments -- against that government's citizens, against factions within the government, or against foreign governments or groups."

On July 22, a bomb, said to be an Oklahoma City-type explosive device, crafted with fertilizer and diesel fuel, blew up in downtown Oslo, Norway, in the heart of the government district. Shortly thereafter, a man dressed in a Norwegian police uniform opened fire on a Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utoya in Tyri fjord. Access to the island was by boat only. Over 100 people were killed in the twin terror attacks.

Almost immediately, the world's corporate media began pushing the story that those who were responsible for the blast and mass shooting were associated with "Al Qaeda" and other radical Islamist groups. CNN's Washington, DC chief anchor Wolf Blitzer, a former spokesman for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby and a correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, began his late afternoon program by pointing to "Al Qaeda" and radical Islamists as the chief culprits for the terrorist attacks in Norway.

In the absence of peace and war, domestic social struggles are spilling out into Israeli streets. The outburst of "normal" social struggle in Israel this year is, however, not a welcome sign. Despite claims that the recent social struggles are representative of the normalization of Israeli society, they are actually the ultimate representation of the normalization of the occupation and permanent conflict.

Doctors have been on strike for over 100 days. A massive boycott of cottage cheese brought the country's attention to the high cost of basic food goods. Orthodox and religious Jews mounted mass protests against the police questioning of two rabbis. On Saturday, tens of thousands of youths and otherwise distraught Israelis took to the streets to demand affordable housing and social welfare amid an incredible and seemingly never-ending real estate bubble.

"The current protests are a sign of a return, at least temporarily, to normalcy," Jerusalem Post diplomatic correspondent Herb Keinon wrote in an insightful and enlightening analysis Friday. In the late 1990s, Keinon writes, the Israeli legislative agenda and media focus was on domestic societal issues, dominated by a cultural clash between orthodox Jews and secular society. New political parties founded to address social issues were thrust into Knesset.

"But then the second intifada erupted and drowned it all out," he says. "The equation was simple: First worry about life, and then the quality of life."

While the US authorities and political leaders waste enormous amounts of time and energy looking for new enemies of the state, the real "bad guys" turn out to have nothing to do with Julian Assange, Bradley Manning or cyber criminals from Anonymous. And their actions could be incomparably more devastating and embarrassing for America than the combined efforts of all the whistleblowers and hackers. The latest military-led investigation concluded that corruption put US taxpayers' money into the hands of Taliban. The unreleased report provides evidence that US transportation funds have been indirectly transferred to the Afghan insurgents under a $2.16 billion contract funded by the US. And, what is even more shocking, the contract with all eight trucking companies involved in a fraud was extended by Pentagon in March for six more months. This fact looks even weirder in the wake of the battle over spending and the escalating threat of the default.

According to the report, the military obtained "documented, credible evidence...of involvement in a criminal enterprise or support for the enemy" by four of the eight contractors. The investigators claim they found proof that the trucking firms that were supposed to move US military supplies across Afghanistan, got involved in numerous cases of money laundering, profiteering and bribes to Afghan power figures and insurgence leaders. Literally that means the military was spending US budget to support the corrupted contractors who paid militants to ensure safe passage of the truck convoys across Afghanistan. Neither Assange nor Anonymous could disclose information more embarrassing for the US military.

"This goes beyond our comprehension," said Rep. John F. Tierney - a former chairman of a House subcommittee that charged the military of funding a blatant fraud, - "I would hate like hell to think my kid was over there" and the Taliban was "coming after them with something bought with our taxpayers' money."

Ten years after the notorious U.N. anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, that devolved into an Israel-bashing frenzy, anti-Zionist forces are mobilizing again to hold another anti-Israel conference in South Africa.

This time, Israel will be on trial.

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine -- a standing organization that held two tribunals against Israel last year in Barcelona and London -- has been called for Nov . 5-6 in Cape Town "to probe whether the treatment of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories meets the criteria of the United Nations convention against the crime of apartheid."

The South African Zionist Federation has called the event, which is to involve prominent South Africans and already is making national headlines here, "an irrelevant talk shop."

"Despite its name, the Russell Tribunal is not an impartial, accountable judicial body," a vice chairman of the South African Zionist Federation, Ben Swartz, told JTA. "Rather it is a loose association of lobbyists pushing a narrow, one-sided political agenda, in this case the delegitimization of the State of Israel."

He called it "a pointless political smear campaign by a self-appointed group of anti-Israel activists."