TV News LIES

A Minnesota law that requires companies to track and disclose the amount of money they spend on political campaigns likely violates the U.S. Constitution, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

In a 6-5 ruling, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis temporarily blocked the law, saying it burdens companies' free speech, in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That case removed limits on what companies and unions can spend to support or oppose political candidates.

Score one for highbrow tastes: If you’ve ever downloaded a popular movie, TV show or music album from a site like Pirate Bay, there’s a strong chance your IP address is sitting on a database somewhere. But anyone who’s used Torrent sites to obtain some obscure French art-house from the 1970s is likely flying under the radar.

That’s according to a report published today by a team of computer scientists based out of the University of Birmingham, England. The project, the first of its kind, took three years to complete, and offers a tremendous amount of new information about the extent to which various organizations are monitoring file sharing via BitTorrent.

Incredibly, the Republicans think they can pull a Ronald Reagan stunt and work the 'Morning in America' scam on the voters again. Carter lost a big chunk of the union vote who blamed him for the bad economy caused largely by Nixon, they foolishly believed Reagan to be on their side.

Mitt Romney doesn't pass the smell test for most voters, even with many of those who will vote for him anyway.

The New York Police Department opened its Israeli branch in the Sharon District Police headquarters in Kfar Saba. Charlie Ben-Naim,  a former Israeli and veteran NYPD detective, was sent on this mission.

Behind the opening of the branch in the Holy Land is the NYPD decision that the Israeli police is one of the major police forces with which it must maintain close work relations and daily contact.

The New York-based human rights group has cast "serious doubt" on Washington's claim that only three people, all members of al-Qaida, were waterboarded in American custody, claiming in a new report to have fresh evidence that the CIA used the technique to simulate drowning on Libyans snatched from countries in Africa and Asia.

The report, Delivered into Enemy Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi's Libya, also says that the CIA, Britain's MI6 and other western intelligence services were responsible for "delivering Gaddafi his enemies on a silver platter" by sending the captured men to Tripoli for further abuse after the American interrogations.

Any remaining hope for imposing meaningful accountability for torture and other abuses committed against prisoners under President George W. Bush has ended, for all practical purposes.

On Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. announced that no one would be prosecuted for the brutal deaths of two prisoners held in C.I.A. custody.

One of the prisoners, a suspected militant named Gul Rahman, died in 2002 after being shackled to a concrete wall in near-freezing temperatures in a secret C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan. The other, Manadel al-Jamadi, died in C.I.A. custody in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where his corpse was photographed wrapped in plastic.

Short for “hydraulic fracturing,” fracking is the process by which gas companies access underground deposits of natural gas, called shales. Millions of gallons of “fracking fluid”—that’s water and sand mixed with hundreds of chemicals—are pumped deep into the earth’s crust, breaking up rock and freeing natural gas reserves.

Natural gas is being marketed as a clean, green alternative to foreign-oil dependency; this year, the International Energy Agency found that carbon-dioxide emissions in the U.S. fell by four hundred and fifty tons, the result of an increase in the use of natural gas instead of coal. But since the inception of widespread fracking in 1997, horror stories have slowly entered the national conscience: illnesses coinciding with contaminated wells, citizens who can light their tap water on fire, pet and livestock deaths, exploding houses.

It's been a long weekend of eyebrow-lifting reports, likely the perceptual hangovers from the holiday, combined with the come-and-go effects of our ongoing intersection with the Bizarro Universe.

Steely-eyed readers with exceptional powers of recall will remember these odd and unpredictable effects on life in this universe first began because of -- or resulted in -- Willard Romney's selection of Paul Ryan to be his Veep-runner in this marathon presidential race.