With drone strikes and kill lists, the president set a dangerous precedent.

The foreign leaders are dropping like flies -- to American surveillance. I'm talking about serial revelations that the National Security Agency has been spying on Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, two Mexican presidents, Felipe Calderón (whose office the NSA called "a lucrative source") and his successor Enrique Peña Nieto, at least while still a candidate, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It's now evidently part of the weekly news cycle to discover that the NSA has hacked into the emails or listened into the phone conversations of yet another allied leader.

Reportedly, that agency has been listening in on the phone calls of at least 35 world leaders. Within 48 hours last week, President Obama was obliged to call an irritated President François Hollande, after Le Monde reported that the NSA was massively collecting French phone calls and emails, including those of politicians and business people, and received a call from an outraged Merkel, whose cell phone conversations were reportedly monitored by the NSA. Of course, when you build a global surveillance state and your activities, thanks to a massive leak of documents, become common knowledge, you have to expect global anger to rise and spread. With 196 countries on the planet, there are a lot of calls assumedly still to come in, even as the president and top Washington officials hem and haw about the necessity of maintaining the security of Americans while respecting the privacy of citizens and allies, refuse to directly apologize, claim that an "exhaustive" review of surveillance practices is underway, and hope that this, too, shall pass.

In the meantime, on a second front, the news is again bad for Washington, as upset and dismay once largely restricted to the tribal backlands of the planet seem to be spreading. I'm talking here about the global assassination campaigns being conducted from the White House, based in part on a "kill list" of terrorist suspects and using the president's private air force, the growing drone fleets of the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command. In the last week, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have come out with reports on the U.S. drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen debunking White House claims that few civilians are dying in those strikes and raising serious questions about their legality.

Didn't any Obama geniuses read the newspaper? The US is a high tech/software/eCommerce powerhouse. We're really good at this stuff.

So why did the Obama administration give a $1 billion plus ObamaCare website contract to a UK company that is already under investigation for everything from gross incompetence to government fraud to sexual assault?

Follow the money. The corporate felons spent $1 million on lobbying (read that "legalized bribery to dirtbag politicians.")

That's a 1,000 to 1 return on their investment (bribe to contract size.)

Why can't every American get in on this corporate gravy train? Think of the good it would do the country.

I'd be happy to give Obama $1,000 to get a million dollar contract to create a web site. I'd even make sure it works. Which government punk do I give the money to?

In a bizarre announcement yesterday, the U.S. Treasury Department boasted that the government of Jordan had closed on a $1.25 issuance of sovereign debt guaranteed by the U.S. government.

While I am not sure how common it is for our nation to guarantee these types of issuances (comments would be appreciated), the announcement represents a gigantic slap in the face on multiple levels.

From the U.S. Treasury Department's press release:

This guarantee marks the conclusion of a process that President Obama set in motion in March 2013 when he visited Jordan. During his visit, President Obama noted that a U.S. guarantee, "can help deliver the results that Jordanians deserve... to see their schools better, their roads improved, healthcare, clean water all enhanced, the training that I know a lot of Jordanians seek, particularly young people, to get a job or to turn entrepreneurial skills into a business that creates even more jobs." That vision was further affirmed by the signing of a loan guarantee agreement in Amman on August 14, 2013.

Did you catch that? The Treasury Department expressed its preoccupation with Jordanian healthcare on the same day it is revealed that the top hospitals in America will not accept Obamacare.

Paul Gambaccini, the veteran BBC TV and radio presenter, has been arrested on suspicion of sexual offences under Operation Yewtree.

Gambaccini, whose broadcasting career spans 40 years at the BBC, was held on Tuesday as part of the inquiry into alleged sexual offences by Jimmy Savile and others.

Scotland Yard has refused to name the 64-year-old, but Gambaccini's identity was confirmed by sources on Friday.

The DJ, who is one of Britain's best known broadcasters and foremost authorities on music, becomes the 15th arrest under Operation Yewtree since it began a year ago.

He was arrested under the "others" strand of the investigation, meaning the allegations are not directly linked to Savile. He was held at an address in south London before being taken into police custody.

Shortly after 6pm on Tuesday Scotland Yard announced that the 64-year-old had been bailed to a date in early January "pending further enquiries".

The billionaire founder of one of the world's largest investment firms has acknowledged that he has gotten incredibly wealthy "at the expense of labor" and is calling for higher taxes on the rich to help curb growing economic inequality.

In an 'Investment Outlook' newsletter titled "Scrooge McDucks," Bill Gross, founder and chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO) wrote:

Having benefited enormously via the leveraging of capital since the beginning of my career and having shared a decreasing percentage of my income thanks to Presidents Reagan and [George W.] Bush via lower government taxes, I now find my intellectual leanings shifting to the plight of labor.

"Having grown rich at the expense of labor, the guilt sets in and I begin to feel sorry for the less well-off," Gross writes.

He continues:

I would ask the Scrooge McDucks of the world who so vehemently criticize what they consider to be counterproductive, even crippling, taxation of the wealthy in the midst of historically high corporate profits and personal income to consider this: Instead of approaching the tax reform argument from the standpoint of what an enormous percentage of the overall income taxes the top 1 percent pay, consider how much of the national income you've been privileged to make.

Indeed, the top 1 percent of US income earners made 19.3 percent of national household income in 2012, its largest slice of the proverbial pie since the IRS began keeping records a century ago. Since the Great Recession officially ended in 2009, 95 percent of all income gains went to the top 1 percent of earners.

The local Wausau, Wisconsin newspaper has come out against those who oppose Common Core suggesting they are nothing more than just "conspiracy theorist's". "The Germans in WWII used this defense to discredit those who were onto them.

The Wausau Herald has come out suggesting Common Core opponents offer only "fringe conspiracy theories". Well here is a conspiracy for you.

Check out these other Common Core conspiracies realities. They want you to believe that evidence is now just a "Conspiracy" if it's not part of the global establishments per-approved plan. This is called gas lighting. It was used in WWII by the Germans..

• Common Core Government Course teaches Students To "Legalize" Prostitution.
• New Common Core Standards 3 X 4 = 11 Is Okay Answer
• Common Core Turns Students Into Lab Rats

Now according to the Wausau Herald you conspiracy theorist if you call assignments that require your children to "Think like a Nazi" and "act it out in class" extreme.

Parents and Students are still enraged at Albany High School over a persuasive writing assignment that required the students to create an argument on why "Jews were evil and the source of Germany's problems."

For 31 days now, the Obama administration has been telling us that Americans by the millions are visiting the new health insurance website, despite all its problems.

But no one in the administration has been willing to tell us how many policies have been purchased, and this may be the reason: CBS News has learned enrollments got off to an incredibly slow start.

Early enrollment figures are contained in notes from twice-a-day "war room" meetings convened within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services after the website failed on Oct. 1. They were turned over in response to a document request from the House Oversight Committee.

The website launched on a Tuesday. Publicly, the government said there were 4.7 million unique visits in the first 24 hours. But at a meeting Wednesday morning, the war room notes say "six enrollments have occurred so far."

They were with BlueCross BlueShield North Carolina and Kansas City, CareSource and Healthcare Service Corporation.

The current revelations on the NSA's spying are just the tip of the iceberg and affect "almost every country in the world," said Glenn Greenwald. He stressed the NSA stores data for "as long as it can," so they can target a citizen whenever they want.

Glenn Greenwald, the man behind the reports on the NSA global spy program, spoke to El Mundo journalist German Aranda and stressed that the US espionage activities went much further than just Europe.

"There are a lot of countries, and journalists in a lot of different countries, who have been asking for stories and to work on documents for a long time," Greenwald said. He added that he was working as fast as possible to "make sure that all of these documents get reported in every single country there are documents for, which is most countries in the world."

Shedding light on the NSA's motives in compiling metadata on citizens, he said the spy organization's main aim was to store the information to be able to dip into it whenever necessary.

On Thursday, the United States debt spiked $328 billion, setting a new record. Our debt has now officially surpassed $17 trillion.

The previous high of $238 billion was set two years ago.

The Washington Times reports that the sudden increase can be attributed to the government's "replenishing its stock of 'extraordinary measures' - federal funds it borrowed from over the last five months as it tried to avoid bumping into the debt ceiling."

Since May, the federal debt barely increased, staying right around $16.7 trillion. But Congress's recent deal, which went into effect on Wednesday, completely suspended the government's borrowing limit.

When the debt ceiling increased on Wednesday, the Treasury Department was subsequently able to refund pensions and programs that had been unfunded since May.

Israeli warplanes struck a military base near the Syrian port city of Latakia this week, an Obama administration official told CNN on Thursday.

An explosion at a missile storage site in the area was reported in the Middle Eastern press, but an attack has not been confirmed by the Israeli government.

The target, according to the Obama administration official, was missiles and related equipment the Israelis felt might be transferred to the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah. The official declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the information.