For those who have very little insight into drug smuggling and would like to know more, Jackpot is a great book for you. Jason Ryan is a South Carolina journalist and former newspaper reporter who has done his homework. And because of the painstaking effort he put into many interviews, this piece of work is spot on. Let’s peer into the life of marijuana smuggling kingpins of the 1970s with Jason and see why he was so intrigued.

At this point in history, the US government perpetrates at least seven wars. A stagnating US global economy now serves the wealthiest one percent at the expense of the bottom ninety-nine percent. The political class has an increasing disinterest in confronting the current and oncoming crises that have and will result from climate change. And, there is an intensifying bipartisan consensus among the Washington establishment that national security and American capitalism should trump civil liberties and digital privacy rights.

Now more than ever the American people of this country need to be out in public spaces debating with one another, having dialogue about the issues that corrupt and inept politicians will never properly confront.

CNN’s State of the Union featured California’s Democratic Governor, Jerry Brown, the man who was my governor when I entered state service in 1976. He’s no longer Governor Moonbeam. He’s now a mainstream Democratic leader, which is much worse.

His comments on Washington politics and the stark choices Californians and all Americans face were typical of the defeated, resigned, and morally bankrupt posture of the Democratic Party. I don’t know why these people bothered to run for office.

Apparently, in the 930 days since Barack Obama became president, the United States has slipped into a dangerous agnosticism, if not outright atheism.

Maybe S&P is right to fear a tectonic adjustment in US economic policies.

Reading the news today is like watching a bad disaster movie. As you shout at the screen for the characters not to open the hatch that will flood the ship, they open the hatch.

The default crisis was sort of like this, with one big difference. A disaster movie “works” because the audience knows something the characters don’t: there’s death behind that hatch. That’s not true of the default drama.

The Congressional Budget Office is out with a new report about the projected long term solvency of Social Security. The report reaffirms the basic fact that it will be roughly 27 years until the Social Security Trust Fund is exhausted.

It is China’s own actions that lead to the U.S. borrowing that it is complaining about.

The fact that American people are very upset with Congress right now shouldn’t be surprising. Congress has becoming significantly more gridlocked and it just ended a very public high stakes fight. The country has also been stuck in a bad economy for years, and despite that fact that the vast majority of voters want Congress focused on jobs, all Washington has focused on for months is the deficit

It’s Morningtime!

ABC scheduled the managing director of Standard and Poors, none of the the other shows mentions the downgrade but it will surely be a topic. C-SPAN’s Q&A will be interesting with RT’s Alyona Minkovski, and Avedon Carol and digby are Virtually Speaking this evening.

FDL Book Salon is quite the adventure, Jackpot: High Times, High Seas, and the Sting That Launched the War on Drugs. FDL Movie Night goes behind the scenes of the culty group Up With People.