TV News LIES

Tropical Storm Isaac's moist, warm winds increased speed to 70 miles per hour late today, just 4 mph short of a hurricane -- which is anywhere from 293 to 449 mph short of the hot-air wind-speed records that blowhards will achieve at this year's Republican parr-tee in Tampa.

In all, 2,286 delegates and 2,125 alternate delegates have gathered in one spot -- since quarantined by the Combined National Emergency Weather and Mental Health Centers, and dubbed a dangerous depression -- one not curable by anti-psychotic medications.

Despite the admonition of our founders about the threat of standing armies, the government is now conducting high-profile military “training exercises” around the country. The latest “training in an urban environment” is occurring in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It makes perfect sense the Special Operations Command is running the show. It conducts covert and clandestine missions, including psychological warfare ops. The idea is to keep the manufactured war on terror front and center and acclimate civilians to the presence of troops perpetually in their midst. Black Hawk helicopters swooping over downtown skyscrapers and mock battles on waterfronts are now spectator events.

US activist Rachel Corrie was killed by a moron Israeli soldier driving an earth-mover while protesting against the sickening and truly evil daily treatment of the Palestinians, but an Israeli judge has ruled that it was her own fault.

Mitt Romney's campaign said on Tuesday that its ads attacking President Obama's waiver policy on welfare have been its most effective to date. And while the spots have been roundly criticized as lacking any factual basis, the campaign said it didn't really care.

The US military announced on Monday that no criminal charges would be brought against the US marines in Afghanistan who videotaped themselves urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters.

Nor, the military announced, would any criminal charges be filed against the US troops who "tried to burn about 500 copies of the Qur'an as part of a badly bungled security sweep at an Afghan prison in February, despite repeated warnings from Afghan soldiers that they were making a colossal mistake".

On the northern tip of Delaware County, N.Y., where the Catskill Mountains curl up into little kitten hills, and Ouleout Creek slithers north into the Susquehanna River, there is a farm my parents bought before I was born. My earliest memories there are of skipping stones with my father and drinking unpasteurized milk. There are bald eagles and majestic pines, honeybees and raspberries. My mother even planted a ring of white birch trees around the property for protection.

A few months ago I was asked by a neighbor near our farm to attend a town meeting at the local high school. Some gas companies at the meeting were trying very hard to sell us on a plan to tear through our wilderness and make room for a new pipeline: infrastructure for hydraulic fracturing.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has pulled out of an international summit because he doesn't want to share a platform with the "morally indefensible" Tony Blair, it emerged yesterday.

The retired archbishop, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his campaigning against apartheid, said that he had withdrawn from the event because he believed the former Prime Minister had supported the invasion of Iraq "on the basis of unproven allegations of the existence of weapons of mass destruction."

A U.S. federal court ruled on Tuesday that controversial Texas redistricting maps discriminate against black and Hispanic voters, effectively killing the new districts before they could take effect for the November 6 presidential election.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued the ruling. The state maps, passed by the Republican-dominated Texas legislature, redrew districts in a way that reduced the influence of minority voters, the court ruled.

November's election will likely use interim maps drawn by a federal court in San Antonio instead.