TV News LIES

U.S. military deaths in the Afghan war have reached 2,000, a cold reminder of the human cost of an 11-year-old conflict that garners little public interest at home as the United States prepares to withdraw most of its combat forces by the end of 2014.

The toll has climbed steadily in recent months with a spate of attacks by Afghan army and police against American and NATO troops, and questions about whether allied countries will achieve their aim of helping the Afghan government and its forces stand on their own after most foreign troops depart in little more than two years.

Satirical website The Onion has completely owned an Iran news agency. The Iran news outlet published as true a story from The Onion saying rural white Americans would rather vote for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than Barack Obama.

Just because it's satire doesn't mean it isn't true.

You probably remember the steady stream of various hangings of effigies around the nation since Obama took office, many of them done on or near Christian churches.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan says former British Prime Minister Tony Blair could have averted the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Annan, in an interview with The Times of London, said he wonders what would have happened if Blair had told former President George W. Bush he would not go to war without a second U.N. resolution.

"I really think it could have stopped the war," he said. "It would have given the Americans a pause. It would have given them a very serious pause to think it through. ... All this would have raised a question: 'Do we go this alone?'"

More...

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission rule restraining speculation was rejected by a federal judge, handing a victory to two Wall Street groups that challenged the constraints.

U.S. District Judge Robert Wilkins in Washington today ruled that the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act is unclear as to whether the agency was ordered by Congress to cap the number of contracts a trader can have in oil, natural gas and other commodities without first assessing whether the rule was necessary and appropriate.

Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr, the Toronto-born detainee whose decade-long case has bitterly divided Canadians, is on his way home to serve the remainder of his sentence. The Toronto Star has learned that the 26-year-old prisoner was flown off the U.S. Naval base on Cuba’s southeast shore and expected to arrive in Canada early Saturday morning.

Guantanamo officials notified Khadr of his transfer Wednesday, assuring him he would be repatriated by the end of the weekend, a Pentagon source said. Just where Khadr will be incarcerated – or where the U.S. military flight will land – continues to be a closely guarded secret.

Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.

The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general’s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance powers.

John Dodson, the Special Agent who blew the whistle on the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal, is calling on Fortune Magazine to retract its landmark article asserting that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives "never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels."

In a letter addressed to Fortune managing editor Andrew Serwer yesterday, obtained by POLITICO, Dodson's lawyer called reporter Katherine Eban's article "demonstrably false in many respects" when compared to a report from the Justice Department Inspector General released earlier this month, and said "a retraction is in order to correct the record."

Residents and local officials gathered here Thursday to say a fond and final farewell to a lead-contaminated town that no longer exists.

In the past two years, this city in the far southeastern corner of Kansas has been virtually emptied of its residents, who were given government-sponsored buyouts to move away after Treece was declared unsafe for human habitation. Thursday’s ceremony was part municipal funeral and part celebration of the community that once was and is no longer.