TV News LIES

It was just another, typical, ho-hum, routine, Republican day at the Congressional office:  Republicans doing nothing whatsoever for the average American, but fighting tooth, nail, claw, skin, and fur to protect the rights of corporations and the obscenely rich. "Don't tread on us?"  Oh, man -- that is sooo rich.  What a hoot!

Don't expect any of this to make the news, stated clearly, or show up at the water cooler in chit-chat, of course.  This yawner-material is the new normal -- has been, since ignorance was declared the new genius, since banks have been too big to fail, since theft was made the new success, and since astroturf groups like Teabaggers sprang up to do the artificial grassroots business of billionaires.

At a festival called Peacestock in Wisconsin last weekend, I met a woman who lives in Little Falls, Minnesota.  That city had forced her to take down signs in her own yard, signs that said "Occupy Wall Street," "Back the 99 Percent" and "Boycott Monsanto."

But Robin Hensel noticed that the city itself was displaying, in violation of the same ordinance, a banner reading "We Support Our Troops."

A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.

What began as a narrow investigation into the possible leaking of confidential agency information by five scientists quickly grew in mid-2010 into a much broader campaign to counter outside critics of the agency’s medical review process, according to the cache of more than 80,000 pages of computer documents generated by the surveillance effort.

Astronomers have spotted the earliest known spiral galaxy, dating to just three billion years after the Big Bang. Theories of galaxy formation held that the Universe was still too chaotic a place to allow such a perfectly formed or "grand-design" spiral to form.

It should take far longer for gravity to bring matter into thin, neat discs. But a team reporting in Nature says the galaxy BX442 got the gravitational "kick" it needed to form a spiral from a smaller "dwarf galaxy" orbiting it.

"Atrazine is the most common chemical contaminant of ground and surface water in the United States. It is a potent endocrine disruptor with ill effects in wildlife, laboratory animals and humans. Atrazine chemically castrates and feminizes wildlife and reduces immune function in both wildlife and laboratory rodents. Atrazine induces breast and prostate cancer, retards mammary development, and induces abortion in laboratory rodents. Studies in human populations and cell and tissue studies suggest that Atrazine poses similar threats to humans. The peer-reviewed scientific studies to support these statements are summarized and can be viewed as you navigate this website."

Anyone in a gas-drilling state has seen or heard the ads talking about how fracking creates jobs and those jobs are  keeping “real” Americans’ communities alive. These ads often have a purported member of the community (extra points if it’s a grandmother or a hardworking dad) talking about how grateful they are to the fracking companies for saving their town.

The subtext, of course, is that people opposed to fracking are at best indifferent to the survival of these communities, at worst utterly opposed to it because of snobbery or hatred for people brave enough to do manual labor.

As head of the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Division of Mineral Resources, Bradley J. Field is a prominent figure in an agency that has promoted hydraulic fracturing as a risk-free and impeccably regulated technology with a proven track record in New York.

Perhaps it's relevant that Field also sees global warming as a good thing. Field is listed on the Global Warming Petition Project calling for the U.S. to reject international global warming agreements, while claiming there is “no convincing evidence” that manmade greenhouse gases will disrupt the earth’s climate.

Israeli officials have taken the highly controversial step of creating the first university in a settlement in the West Bank. A higher education council for the occupied territory decided in favour of the upgrade for the college in Ariel, after it was recommended by Israel's education minister.

It is being seen as a significant victory for the settler movement. However many Israeli academics and the Palestinians have condemned the move.