Red, White, and Blue Ink

As many of you max out your MasterCards and Visas this holiday season, make sure you leave about $30,000 in reserve somewhere. Ditto for your kids. It's your share of a humongous financial time bomb most of us don't care about... but should.

TICK, TICK, TICK... KA-CHING! The AP's Tom Raum lays out the inconvenient fiscal truth about our national debt, which is growing at nearly $1 million a minute:

Even if you've escaped the recent housing and credit crunches and are coping with rising fuel prices, you may still be headed for economic misery, along with the rest of the country. That's because the government is fast straining resources needed to meet interest payments on the national debt, which stands at a mind-numbing $9.13 trillion.

And like homeowners who took out adjustable-rate mortgages, the government faces the prospect of seeing this debt — now at relatively low interest rates — rolling over to higher rates, multiplying the financial pain.

So long as somebody is willing to keep loaning the U.S. government money, the debt is largely out of sight, out of mind.

But the interest payments keep compounding, and could in time squeeze out most other government spending — leading to sharply higher taxes or a cut in basic services like Social Security and other government benefit programs. Or all of the above.

Raum points out much of this debt is held in savings bonds, widely popular and considered safe investments. But he also reminds us other countries are on our IOU list.

Foreign governments and investors now hold some $2.23 trillion — or about 44 percent — of all publicly held U.S. debt. That's up 9.5 percent from a year earlier.

Japan is first with $586 billion, followed by China ($400 billion) and Britain ($244 billion). Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries account for $123 billion, according to the Treasury.

"Borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from China and OPEC puts not only our future economy, but also our national security, at risk. It is critical that we ensure that countries that control our debt do not control our future," said Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio, a Republican budget hawk.

Of course, both parties blame each other for this albatross. D's point to R's for running it up. R's chastise D's for failing to cut spending on entitlements. But if this keeps up, neither side will be spending anything.

NEVER MIND. A Salt Lake City judge threw out a contempt charge against a TV reporter, thus nullifying his order for her to do a public-interest story.

From The Deseret News:

During Monday's hearing, [Judge James] Shumate found that [reporter Kelly] Baker had complied with his order after seeing a story that aired Nov. 19 on KUTV. Jeffs, who was convicted of two counts of rape as an accomplice, was sentenced on Nov. 20 to two consecutive terms of five years to life in prison.

"He said he was watching the news and saw Katie's story on a homeless program in the Salt Lake Valley," said Baker's attorney, Jeff Hunt, who also represented the Utah Society of Professional Journalists in the case. "He thought that the story served the court's purpose, and he dismissed the contempt proceeding."

Although Baker hadn't produced that news story to satisfy the judge's order, Hunt said she was pleased with the hearing's outcome.

Baker, you might recall, interviewed a potential juror in the Warren Jeffs rape-by-accomplice case, violating a decorum order. KUTV has always maintained the order didn't say anything about potential jurors. And your Lightning Round has maintained judicial compulsion of news content violates the First Amendment.

INSIDE THE CANDIDATES. An L.A. Times editorial says presidential candidates should have brain scans. Clearly the press gives them a proctoscopy every election cycle.

Writes neuropsychiatrist and brain-imaging expert Daniel Amen:

Three of the last four presidents have shown clear brain pathology. President Reagan's Alzheimer's disease was evident during his second term in office. Nonelected people were covering up his forgetfulness and directing the country's business. Few people knew it, but we had a national crisis. Brain studies have been shown to predict Alzheimer's five to nine years before people have their first symptoms.

President Clinton's moral lapses and problems with bad judgment and excitement-seeking behavior -- indicative of problems in the prefrontal cortex -- eventually led to his impeachment and a poisonous political divisiveness in the U.S. The prefrontal cortex houses the brain's supervisor, involved with conscience, forethought, planning, attention span and judgment.

One could argue that our current president's struggles with language and emotional rigidity are symptoms of temporal lobe pathology. The temporal lobes, underneath your temples and behind your eyes, are involved with language, mood stability, reading social cues and emotional flexibility.

Our Lightning Round political correspondents have been talking to the various campaigns about this. They've agreed to be scanned, on the condition somebody scans the brains of Ron Paul's supporters.

CHAMPION CHIMPS. A Japanese study says five-year-old chimps did better on a short-term memory test than adult humans.

The AP outlines the test, and pay particular attention to the last sentence.

One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who'd been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers.

They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.

Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.

Aha! Chimps may be faster, but they're not more accurate when it comes to memory. Some of our Lightning Round staffers are shaking their heads and saying, "Well, yeah, of course chimps are faster! They don't have as much on their minds!" By golly, they may be right:

[The lead researcher] believes human ancestors gave up much of this skill over evolutionary time to make room in the brain for gaining language abilities.

Unfortunately, some people give up that skill too.

TYPE IT OFF. ABC News relates the story of a woman who dropped more than 500 pounds by perceivably trading food addiction for online addiction. Nancy Makin says it started when her sister gave her a computer:

"Internet provided anonymity. And people who would have rejected me out of hand, based on appearance, got to see my insides."

Before she knew it, the political junkie was surfing through chat rooms and making friends, beginning to find value in herself again. "I was being loved and nurtured by faceless strangers. … Friends accepted who I was based on my mind and soul."

"I was so busy and happy to get up every morning that I like to say I lost weight in my fingers first."

Makin said the psychological transformation was so complete that she lost all that weight without diet pills, exercise or even a diet. She just stopped gorging.

"I achieved this on my own, in a natural way, with no surgical procedures having been performed. No particular 'diet' plan was followed; no pills, potions or ab-crunching exercises played a part in my recovery," she wrote in a congratulatory letter to herself.

We can believe it, given Jared's experience with Subway. File it under the "questionable diets that work" category. But we ask, how many hours a day is she spending on the computer?