While America focused on New Hampshire, a classic example of revolving-door politics took place in Washington, going almost completely unnoticed. It's a move that ranks up there with the hire of Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin to head the pharmaceutical lobbying conglomerate PhRMA -- at a salary of over $2 million a year -- immediately after Tauzin helped ram through the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, a huge handout to the pharmaceutical industry.

In this case, the hire involves Walter Lukken, who toward the end of the Bush years was the acting head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. As the chief regulator of the commodities markets, it was Lukken's job to spot and combat speculative abuses and manipulations that might have led to artificial price hikes and other disruptions.

In 2008, the last full year of his tenure, Lukken presided over some of the worst chaos in the commodities markets in recent history, with major disruptions in the markets for food products like wheat, cotton, soybeans, and rice, and energy commodities like oil.

Most notoriously, 2008 saw a historic spike in the price of oil futures, an enormously destructive speculative bubble that peaked in July of that year at the lunatic high price of $146 per barrel (Goldman, Sachs at the height of the mania was telling investors oil might go to $200 a barrel).

Occasionally in the past, I have received emails from readers asking me if it was time to leave America because of some new infringement on our rights.

In the past, I always responded to these emails by saying that it really depended on who the reader was. Anyone, I usually replied, who was in the securities-brokerage industry or the medical profession should start looking, because of how regulated those industries are. If on the other hand, a surfer dude just living for the next wave, would have little reason to be concerned.

Things have changed so dramatically in the last 6 to 12 months that I now believe you are being irresponsible ,no matter who you are, if you do not have a bagged packed and are ready to move at a moments notice.

It is not as though there is some new country, or land where the breeze blows lightly 365 days a year, and where there is no government intrusion into your life, but things could get so bad in the United States that many places may start to look like happy alternatives.

The United States is a very rich country with only minor government harassment at this time. For the most part, we all have smart phones, internet connections, wear fashionable clothes and eat decent food. I now believe this situation could change at anytime. Please note: I am not saying it will change but that it could, very quickly.

As previously reported, while people were de-stressing and enjoying their much needed time off during the holidays, the United States Department of Agriculture announced its approval of Monsanto's 'drought tolerant' genetically engineered corn.

The decision to give the green light to Monsanto regarding their GE corn didn't seem too difficult for the Obama Administration, despite receiving nearly 45,000 public comments voicing opposition and only 23 comments in favor since comments opened.

Prepare to see this new GE corn unleashed into the environment as well as the American food supply.

President Barack Obama failed two years ago to close the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison, and with Wednesday marking the 10th anniversary of its creation, debate is raging over whether a law he signed will ensure it will stay open for decades to come, jailing even United States citizens.

Tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which Obama signed on New Year's Eve, are provisions that appear to allow indefinite military detention of American terrorism suspects, and to require it of suspected foreign enemies.

The Obama administration insists the law merely codifies existing standards, but its strong supporters and vehement opponents are sure it does much more, legally enshrining for the first time in 60 years the authority to hold citizens without trial.

"We're no longer in the box of having to read Miranda rights to terrorists who come to America to try to kill us," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), an author of the bill who praised its passage on his website earlier this month.

Israeli police say a mosque has been defaced with Hebrew graffiti and three cars have been torched in a Palestinian village in the West Bank.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said Wednesday that vandals painted "price tag" and "Gal Arye Yosef" overnight on a wall of the mosque in the village of Dir Istiyya.

"Price tag" refers to a practice by Jewish extremists of accosting Palestinian property - and more recently, Israeli military bases - in retaliation for Israeli government action against settlers.

Gal Arye Yosef is the name of a small, unauthorized settlement outpost that Israeli security forces demolished on Tuesday.

The U.S. carried out its first drone strike into Pakistan since errant November airstrikes by U.S. forces killed two dozen Pakistani troops along the Afghan border. The latest missile attack killed four militants, three of them Arabs, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

The drone strike took place Tuesday near Miran Shah in North Waziristan, an al-Qaida and Taliban stronghold that has been pounded by the U.S. since the drone program began in earnest in 2009. The intelligence officials didn't give their names because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Relations with Pakistan plummeted after the Nov. 26 airstrikes prompted Islamabad to shut down vital supply routes into Afghanistan and force the U.S. to vacate Shamsi Air Base in southwestern Baluchistan province. The U.S. used the base to service drones that targeted militants in the tribal regions close to Afghanistan.

American officials say there had been no promise by Washington that drone operations would be avoided since the deadly airstrikes, but that the lull was part of a broad effort to tamp down tensions with Pakistan. While there has long been some level of agreement by Pakistan over the drone attacks, their scope and frequency has been a source of friction between the two countries.

An Iranian nuclear scientist was killed by a bomb placed on his car by a motorcyclist in Tehran on Wednesday, and a city official blamed Israel for the attack, similar to attacks on nuclear scientists just over a year ago.

Fars news agency identified the victim as Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, a 32-year-old graduate of an oil industry university. It said he had supervised a department at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Iran's atomic energy organization said it would issue a statement shortly.

"The bomb was a magnetic one and the same as the ones previously used for the assassination of the scientists, and the work of the Zionists (Israelis)," Fars quoted Deputy Tehran Governor Safarali Baratloo as saying.

Witnesses told Reuters they had seen two people on the motorbike fix the bomb to the car. As well as the person killed in the car, a pedestrian was also killed. Another person in the car was gravely injured, they said.

China's Ministry of Defence warned the United States on Monday to be "careful in its words and actions" after announcing a defence rethink that stresses responding to China's rise by shoring up U.S. alliances and bases across Asia.

The statement from the ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng was Beijing's fullest reaction so far to the new U.S. strategy unveiled last week. It echoed the mix of wariness and outward restraint that has marked China's response to the Obama administration's "pivot" to Asia since late last year.

"We have noted that the United States issued this guide to its defence strategy, and we will closely observe the impact that U.S. military strategic adjustment has on the Asia-Pacific region and on global security developments," Geng said in a statement issued on the ministry's website (www.mod.gov.cn).

"The accusations leveled at China by the U.S. side in this document are totally baseless," said Geng.

"We hope that the United States will flow with the tide of the era, and deal with China and the Chinese military in an objective and rational way, will be careful in its words and actions, and do more that is beneficial to the development of relations between the two countries and their militaries."

For those readers who are part of the 40% of human beings who think Ignorance is Bliss, stop reading now. This article is about a truth so hard that it was actually depressing to write it. You might think that working on SOTT for many years, most of us are pretty tough and can deal with the hard stuff. But sometimes, you see something that rings a bell, and you know that you've had a glimpse behind the curtain, because somebody went before and left a map to show you the way. In this case, that person was Hannah Arendt.

The modern world can't be an easy place to live in for those who are born genetically predisposed to crave absolute power over others. I mean, these days, any would-be totalitarian has only a very small chance of being born into one of the world's few remaining overt dictatorships, and a much greater chance of being born into a large Western nation that is nominally democratic. While fulfillment of the megalomaniac's innate drive is a walk in the park in a dictatorship, it requires all sorts of protracted subterfuge in a democracy. Bummer.

The main problem with giving free reign to one's dictatorial leanings in a democracy is the whole 'citizen's rights' and 'Rights of Man' thing. How is any self-aggrandizing despot to lord it over the masses, and watch them squirm and suffer and beg, when everyone seems convinced that there are not only democratic and legal rights but also natural 'inalienable' rights that come with just being a human being? Ideas that everyone is 'created equal' and has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness etc. can cause a lot of problems for the average authoritarian. Naturally then, in any democracy, all those rights would have to be removed before any oligarchy could transform citizens into subjects, and they'd have to be removed under the cloak of 'protecting' the very rights that were slated for extinction. A tall order indeed, but there are ways to do it. One tried and tested way is to create a foreign or external threat from which the people of a democracy must be protected. All sorts of draconian laws that subvert civil rights can be passed to combat this 'threat', and if the 'threat' can then be made internal or domestic, and suspicion of 'siding with enemy' cast over the citizens, you're well on your way to banishing those pesky legal and natural rights.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta let slip on Sunday the big open secret that Washington war hawks don't want widely known: Iran is not developing nuclear weapons.

Appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Panetta admitted that despite all the rhetoric, Iran is not pursuing the ability to split atoms with weapons, saying it is instead pursuing "a nuclear capability."

This video is from CBS News, broadcast Sunday, Jan. 8, 2012, as clipped by ThinkProgress.


That "capability" falls in line with what Iran has said for years: that it is developing nuclear energy facilities, not nuclear weapons.