TV News LIES

While flying back home to Wisconsin earlier this fall, Victoria Trinko had no trouble spotting her family farm from the sky. She simply looked for the frac sand mines that have begun to punctuate the rural Midwestern landscape.

From the ground, tending to her cows, Trinko said she is more likely to feel, smell or taste the presence of those mines and the trucks hauling its powdery sands toward an expanding array of natural gas drilling sites. The sand is an essential ingredient in the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process.

Emails that attorneys representing a defendant in the BP oil spill case plan to introduce in February show for the first time that the oil company knew the massive scale of the 2010 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico weeks earlier than previously disclosed.

BP has long maintained that it provided full disclosure to the public and the federal government about its knowledge of the spill’s extent and did so promptly. The emails suggest otherwise.

Customs and Border Protection has launched what it calls a comprehensive review of its officers' use of force amid a sharp increase in fatal confrontations along the Southwest border. The initiative, which appears to be the most far-reaching of its kind in recent years, calls for an assessment of current tactics and the participation of an independent outside research center.

Mexican government officials, who have condemned the shootings, also will be provided briefings on closed investigations involving force, according to a memorandum prepared for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

More jobs were created last month than were expected, with 147,000 created in the private sector and 1,000 public sector jobs lost that need to be subtracted from the number. The unemployment rate continues to fall as that is based on a large household survey, and is down to 7.7%.

While the number of people that reported working didn't change, the rate at which the boomers are retiring is picking up. Some economists estimate that we need as few as 75,000 new jobs per month to keep up with the growing millennium generation. The underemployment rate continues in the high teens, with nearly one million reporting that they are not looking for work as no jobs exist for them.

There must be a rule somewhere that says everything in life must be stranger and more complicated than it really needs to be.

If there is such an ancient edict handed down through the ages, like an amulet that we can't shed, one that's still mysteriously holding sway over us, then our days suddenly go from inexplicable to predictable.

Sometimes The Curse, or whatever, has a sense of humor.  Other times it is as likely to trip you on the way by as it is to sneer and growl at you, no longer playfully waggling its fingers, its thumb parked on its nose.

A leading human rights group on Friday accused Israel of violating the laws of war when it killed 12 civilians in an airstrike during its recent conflict with Palestinian militants in Gaza. Israel's army countered that Palestinian militants were to blame for hiding in civilian buildings.

Israel launched its air assault on Gaza last month to try to stop frequent rocket barrages at southern Israel. The conflict ended after eight days with an Egyptian-brokered truce.

Makes perfect sense to me: These petty fools have had way too much moonshine.

How else to explain the nation's rapid slide down the sharply-razored bannister, right into a pool of iodine, then sloughed off into a slag heap, Congress able to agree only on one small thing -- banishing one word from all legislation?
Lunatics.

Yes, the House of Representatives yesterday voted 398 to 1 to strike the word from all legislation.  The Senate did the same back in May.  It's an effort to tip one's hat and nod more politely at mental illness -- a noble and politically-correct act.

Located about 45 miles south of Baton Rouge, Assumption Parish carries all the charms and curses of southern Louisiana. Networks of bayous, dotted with trees heavy with Spanish moss, connect with the Mississippi River as it slowly ambles toward the Gulf of Mexico. Fishermen and farmers make their homes there, and so does the oil and gas industry, which has woven its own network of wells, pipelines and processing facilities across the lowland landscape.

The first sign of the oncoming disaster was the mysterious appearance of bubbles in the bayous in the spring of 2012. For months the residents of a rural community in Assumption Parish wondered why the waters seemed to be boiling in certain spots as they navigated the bayous in their fishing boats.