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Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell had quite a heated battle on Thursday's "The Last Word." During one segment, after O'Donnell besmirched his guest for not enlisting for military service during the Vietnam War despite having worked for the Department of Navy as a ballistics analyst, Cain marvelously asked, "Do you stay up night to come up with the wording in these questions or do you have someone writing them for you?"

New secret recordings obtained by CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson show ATF agent Hope MacAllister, who we have not yet heard from throughout this investigation, speaking with Lone Wolf Trading Company owner Andre Howard and expressing concern about ATF whistleblower John Dodson, the ATF agent who exposed the scandal by coming forward with information about Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry's death in March. In the recording, MacAllister and Howard sound panicked, not only about Dodson, but about Senator Charles Grassley and about how Attorney General Eric Holder would respond to exposed scandal. The following audio doesn't prove Eric Holder knew...

25 Signs That The Financial World Is About To Hit The Big Red Panic ButtonAugust 30, 2011 Most of the worst financial panics in history have happened in the fall. Just recall what happened in 1929, 1987 and 2008. Well, September 2011 is about to begin and there are all kinds of signs that the financial world is about to hit the big red panic button. Wave after wave of bad economic news has come out of the United States recently, and Europe is embroiled in an absolutely unprecedented debt crisis. At this point there is a very real possibility...

MAP OF THE DAY: New York City Hurricane Evacuation Zones Dina Spector Aug. 25, 2011, 1:44 PM As hurricane Irene barrels toward the east coast, thousands of residents have already been evacuated from the coastal villages off North Carolina. Now New York, New Jersey, and Delaware officials are preparing for the possibility of mass evacuations. New York city officials are still monitoring the storm and won't make any calls until Friday afternoon at the earliest whether to evacuate areas of the city susceptible to flooding, including Battery Park City in Manhattan, Coney Island in Brooklyn and Far Rockaway in Queens....

In an increasingly urbanized world, earthquakes threaten unprepared cities with mass destruction.Seismic risk mitigation is the greatest urban policy challenge that the world confronts today. If you consider that too strong a claim, try to imagine another way in which bad urban policy could kill a million people in 30 seconds. Yet the politics of earthquakes are rarely discussed, and when discussed, widely misunderstood. Take the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, which released 600 million times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. The ensuing partial meltdown of the Fukushima reactor prompted international hysteria about nuclear power, but few...

I just got off the phone with a source on Capitol Hill who has spent the past few days trying to convince Republicans to vote for a debt ceiling hike. He told me that the biggest obstacle he faces has been "market complacency." "Frankly, a bit of panic would be very helpful right now," he said. As he explained it, lots of people in Washington, D.C. expected that this would be a week marked by panic in the markets. Stocks would tank. Bonds would get clobbered. The dollar would do something dramatic. And all of this would help convince reluctant...

S&P 500 futures fell at the open of electronic trading as investors grew increasingly worried at the lack of progress. The benchmark S&P was down 1 percent, or 14 points, to 1326.00. Early currency trading suggested a move away from the dollar, with the biggest drop in the greenback coming against the Swiss franc. In early Asian trading, the dollar dropped to 0.8121 against the Swiss franc, down 0.7 percent.

...as it stands right now, Obama’s failing to connect and Garrett cited his so-called Twitter town hall meeting as an attempt almost in desperation to resurrect the messaging success the president in his prior election. “[I]f people aren’t listening to you on that core message, it doesn’t matter what you say anymore,” he said.

The 2012 presidential marathon is on, and one mainstream pollster (Rasmussen) says a Republican apparition is opening up a lead on President Obama. (Any Republican 46 percent, Barack Obama 42 percent.) A growing number of Democrats figure that whoever can keep his head in the rattle and bang of unexpected events just doesn’t understand the situation. If the president is not yet in full panic mode, he’s right to be running scared. Class warfare is the Democratic default mode, and Mr. Obama is looking for the panic button earlier than incumbents usually do. He warns darkly of many bad things...

RUSH: The AP: "The economy is tiring again." The press, they're so depressed because Obama had a week of "no negatives." There were no negatives, and then all this rotten economic news hit. This rotten economic news never went away! This rotten economic news has been what has defined this administration since the stimulus bill. There hasn't been any good economic news since this bunch assumed power. One of the biggest lies, one of the biggest myths in the last two-and-a-half years is that there has ever been a recovery. There has not been, statistically or otherwise. In terms of...

MINSK, Belarus (AP) — A sharp devaluation of the Belarusian ruble has spread panic across the country, with people rushing on Wednesday to buy dollars, euros, toasters and canned goods — anything that will not lose its value as quickly as the national currency. Belarusians swept store shelves and queued for entire days at currency exchange offices in a desperate attempt to protect their savings from the country's sinking fortunes. President Alexander Lukashenko promised that the national currency will remain stable following the devaluation ordered a day earlier, but experts warned it will continue its nosedive if Russia doesn't provide...

'Fight the Smears' 2.0 launched, mocks No. 1 best-seller as delusional 'joke' Why is the White House in full defense mode against a book by a small publisher contending Barack Obama is not legally eligible to be president? Today, the Obama re-election campaign launched an all-out attack on a brand new book critical of Obama, "Where's the Birth Certificate," by bestselling author Jerome Corsi, Ph.D., calling it delusional, laughable and a "joke." If this sounds like major déjà vu, it's because the Obama election campaign did exactly the same thing in 2008 when it mobilized a major assault on Corsi's...

Headaches, insomnia, tinnitus, DNA breakdown. . . These are just a few of the myriad problems mentioned when people talk about the constant bombardment of EMFs or electromagnetic frequencies, a huge by-product of the new Smart Meters being installed by public utilities around the country.

Mar 16, 2011 Japan radiation fears spark panic in Russia's Far East VLADIVOSTOK - RESIDENTS of Russia's Far East on Wednesday stocked up on iodine and nervously checked radiation levels despite official reassurances there was no danger from Japan's quake-damaged nuclear plant just 1,000km to the east. Russia's emergencies ministry said that radiation levels remained normal and stressed that there was no risk for human health and that no danger from radiation was expected but many were not convinced. In the regional capital Vladivostok, which is no more than 1,000km west of the Fukushima nuclear plant, pharmacies were sold-out of...

Lufthansa, KLM Cancel Flights to Tokyo's Narita Airport Panicked passengers hoping to flee Japan waited for hours at the country's largest international airport today as concerns about radioactive fallout heightened. The international and domestic terminals at Narita International Airport were crammed with passengers leaving the capital Germany's Lufthansa airline became the first major carrier to cancel flights to irst major carrier to cancel flights to Narita International Airport, which services Tokyo, and will reroute all flights through Nagoya and Osaka, some 300 miles south of the capitol. Dutch carrier KLM followed. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said, "There is no...

Supplies of potassium iodide, a preventive against radiation poisoning of the thyroid gland, are running low at some manufacturers, as Americans seek protection amid fears that radiation from Japan could head to the U.S., according to the companies. One leading supplier, Anbex Inc., quickly sold out of its supply of more than 10,000 14-tablet packages on Saturday, said Alan Morris, president of the Williamsburg, Va., company. He said the closely held firm was getting about three orders a minute for $10 packages of its Iosat pills, up from as few as three a week normally. "Those who don't get it...

The collective Nuclear Industry is massively failing the people they have so long sought to protect. There is no real, reliable, trustworthy news being reported on the situation in Japan except for vague and conflicting reports. Where is the World Nuclear Association? Where is the International Atomic Energy Group? Where is the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission? There should be press conferences on the situation in Japan, the people of the world should know all of the facts on the ground in "real time" because of the nature of the danger we are dealing with. I am in favor of Nuclear...

Via Eric Bolling of Fox News: The Suez Canal and the Suez Canal pipeline transport about 4.5 million barrels of oil per day between the two, so when oil investors/traders see protesters on tanks in the Suez, it creates panic because they’re concerned about the delicate balance between supply and demand on the world’s oil. Any disruption in oil supply spikes prices, and these events are certainly cause for disruption. Also very important is the geographic location — just across the canal is Saudi Arabia — the world’s largest producer of oil. If this unrest spills over into Saudi Arabia,...

Authorities are urging people to remain calm amid panicked scenes of shoppers stripping the shelves of Brisbane supermarkets as they face record flood levels. Large parts of Brisbane and Ipswich are to be inundated, with flood peaks expected to surpass the 1974 floods. There have been reports of panic buying at grocery stores across south-east Queensland, and some retail outlets are running low on essential items such as bread and milk. Scott Driscoll from the United Retail Federation says many shop owners are reporting busier than usual trade. "Trade today has been akin to holiday levels ... very, very high...

Yesterday in Winnetka, Illinois, a 30-person SWAT team crashed into a middle school to save an employee. His wife had frantically called the police after a garbled phone call led her to believe he had been kidnapped. However, they soon discovered that the man had just accidentally “butt dialed” her while listening to music and was completely fine. Yes, this story is basically what would happen if Clark Griswold had a cell phone. It all started because the employee (who, unsurprisingly, is attempting to avoid the press at this point) was listening to a rap song in his car when...