The American people don’t subscribe to the conservative position about why our nation has a deficit. Most people blame our deficit not on excessive social spending but instead on low taxes for the rich or the huge military budget, according to this National Journal poll. Just because some people might be concerned about the deficit doesn’t mean they support the Republican party on the issue.

Please tell me that I didn’t just step out of a time machine. I guess I probably didn’t travel too far back in time, given we’re talking about Republicans in the 2012 GOP Clown Car cycle, because this is what Rick Santorum said just yesterday in an interview with CNN’s John King about the Pentagon considering relaxing rules regarding women and frontline roles in combat.

A contracting firm that specializes in anti-terrorism and force protection training, consulting and management services has been hired to train Cook County Sheriff’s Police in the run-up to the NATO-G8 meetings that are to be held in Chicago in May of this year.

The idea of economic conversion, of retooling and retraining pieces of the military industrial complex to build what other wealthy nations have (infrastructure, energy, education, etc.) converged with the end of the Cold War two decades back. It was time for a peace dividend as well as a little sanity in public spending. Among the cosponsors of a bill to begin economic conversion in the late 1980s was a guy by the name of Leon Panetta.

Standing in the way was Congressman Newt Gingrich (Republican, Lockheed Martin).

The Defense Department has identified the four Marines who urinated on dead Taliban soldiers in an infamous video that turned up this week. The military may charge the Marines with war crimes, though a final decision has not been made.

Leon Panetta has sketched out his vision for an “austerity” military, which only spends slightly less than every country on Earth does on their militaries combined, rather than more. This reflects the cuts from the spending cap version of the debt limit deal, not the trigger cuts which would reduce another $500-$600 billion from Pentagon budgets over 10 years. We’ll be able to fight only one unnecessary ground war and another “not-hostilities” action, plus drones wherever.

Maybe this is the new big plan for the economy: sell as many weapons to the Middle East as possible. Let a million Rosie the Riveters bloom. That this buildup endangers an entire region, one holding the keys to the current energy infrastructure of the world, is just a sidelight to this, I guess.

Apparently the CIA has taken the rare step of acknowledging the sovereign rights of another country, as well as the existence of public opinion and blowback, by suspending drone attacks in Pakistan, according to the LA Times. They claim that the hiatus is in its sixth week.

On the heels of the drone that landed inside Iran recently, now there’s a report of another drone crash-landing in the Seychelles Islands. This was a crash landing, rather than the apparently intact drone in Iran, which may have been taken over remotely.

Iran showed off their new toy, courtesy of the CIA, on state-run television, proving their possession of a US surveillance drone.

The condition suggests that the Iranians took control of the remotely-piloted aircraft rather than shooting it down.