Seventeen-year-old Mwalimu William Karisa, a Kenyan exchange student in Davenport, won't need luggage to carry a gift home to Africa. He is taking clean drinking water for his village.

Mwalimu lives with hosts Mark and Dawn Thompson and attended Davenport West High School, where he's been on the soccer and cross-country teams. He said the idea of team spirit was new to him.

Last fall, a man originally from Kenya visited West High School, and the two Africans met. Mwalimu shared his village's need for drinking water with Pastor Joshua Ngao of Fishers of Men Ministries. Joshua understood that Mwalimu's greatest needs at home were basic and agreed to help him raise funds needed to dig a well for his village, Mariango.

In December, Mwalimu explained his family's situation to his hosts, his exchange-student coordinator, and his fellow exchange students. At times he couldn't make eye contact when explaining that his mother walks four miles in extreme heat - many times twice a day - to collect drinking water. He also said he contracted malaria four times in his life, and many children in his village die from waterborne disease.

I am so done treading lightly for the sake of readers' sensibilities. America is in dire need of honest, problem-solving patriots who can muster enough gumption to get civically involved and provoke action, especially on behalf of our troops.

If you truly consider yourself a supporter of our soldiers, then turn off American Idol or whatever idiotic programming you normally watch, and instead watch the following four documentaries: The Ground Truth, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, Rethink Afghanistan, and Severe Clear.

If you cannot trouble yourself to do at least this much, then shame on you. You don't deserve to be an American. There is so much need-to-know information that is deliberately withheld from us by the mainstream media cartel and our derelict cadre of politicians; the least you can do is dismiss their drivel and consume something relevant, important, and helpful to the troops many of you so ardently claim to support.

Congress passed and in December the president signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which authorizes indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without due process.

Upon quick inspection, it violates the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Founders must be screaming from their graves.

Iowa Senator Charles Grassley voted for it.

Federal court Judge Katherine Forrest issued a preliminary injunction that bars the government from enforcing section 1021 of the NDAA's "Homeland Battlefield" provisions that permits indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens.

At his Eldridge town-hall meeting, I asked the senator if he was aware that a federal judge overturned a portion of legislation he just voted for.

He was not.

Economists and pundits alike are going wild over the United Kingdom's recent "double dip" recession. The 2008-9 recession prompted the election of a conservative coalition led by Prime Minister David Cameron. Cameron decided the best path for economic recovery was "austerity," a program of reduced government spending and smaller government debt. The new coalition - with the aid of Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne - sought to drastically slash the government budget. With the addition of increased taxes, the plan was dubbed "Tax & Axe."

Two years later, the United Kingdom is back in recession. Keynesian economists are enjoying a savory "I told you so" moment, as many pointed out the dangers of austerity during troubled times. The logic runs as follows: When businesses, households, and governments all try to pay back their debts at the same time, they spend less; as they spend less, national income falls, leading to even less spending; this sets off a cycle of decreased spending and economic collapse.

The Keynesian solution is government spending. It goes like this: Governments can increase spending during recessions to keep national income up, preventing the spending collapse. In short, more stimulus is the answer.

In turn, many progressives in the United States are arguing that any similar austerity here (such as Congressman Paul Ryan's budget plan) would have equally bad results: another recession.

Unfortunately, this reasoning is based on a faulty premise. Here is the reality: There is no austerity in the United Kingdom.