TV News LIES

The United States lags in ninth place out of 12 of the world's major economies in overall energy efficiency, a survey indicates.

The survey by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy ranked countries on a 100-point scale, using 27 metrics grouped into four major categories: national efforts, buildings, industry and transportation.

Concerns are growing about the reliability of oil prices, after a report for the G20 found the market is wide open to “manipulation or distortion”. Traders from banks, oil companies or hedge funds have an “incentive” to distort the market and are likely to try to report false prices, it said.

Politicians and fuel campaigners last night urged the Government to expand its inquiry into the Libor scandal to see whether oil prices have also been falsely pushed up.

No one really thought it would work, a reality teevee show about government spending.  And it didn't, not at first.  Understandably.

It started out as "Let's Pretend We Care About Spending!"  It was a once-in-a-while program on cable access teevee -- a standard talking-heads, earnest round-table discussion, sprinkled with flat, mic-in-the-audience-of-five comments.

Initial unemployment claims dropped by 26,000 this week to a relatively low number of 350,000. If you weren't aware of that, it is to be forgiven as the main stream media wasn't really interested in telling you about it. They thought you would be more interested in being teased with the idea that Condoleezza Rice was actually being considered as Romney's VP, it's more likely Willard would dig up the corpse of Sarah Palin and run it.

JP Morgan Chase's stock price jumped driving up the stock market, supposedly on "news" that the losses on its derivative trading were "only" 5.8 billion instead of the 9 billion that has been reported.

The United States has experienced the biggest political upheaval in its recent history:  the transformation of a burgeoning welfare state into a rapidly expanding, highly intrusive and deeply entrenched police state, linked to the most developed technological innovations.

The ‘Great Transformation’ was not a single event but a process of the accumulation of powers, via executive fiats, supported and approved by compliant Congressional leaders.  At no time in the recent and distant past has this nation witnessed the growth of such repressive powers and the proliferation of so many policing agencies engaged in so many areas of life over such a prolonged period of time (a time of virtually no internal mass dissent).  Never has the executive branch of government secured so many powers to detain, interrogate, kidnap and assassinate its own citizens without judicial restraint.

Marine biologists and veterinarians say the bodies of more than 500 penguins have washed up on beaches in southern Brazil over the past week.

They tell the G1 online news site that the Center of Coastal and Marine Studies is investigating what caused the deaths of the 512 penguins found on beaches of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. The cause of death should be known in about 30 days.

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After years of following the paper trail of $51 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars provided to rebuild a broken Iraq, the U.S. government can say with certainty that too much was wasted. But it can't say how much.

In what it called its final audit report, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Funds on Friday spelled out a range of accounting weaknesses that put "billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of waste and misappropriation" in the largest reconstruction project of its kind in U.S. history.

Mossad, the Israeli intelligence force, has an Old Testament motto that is described two ways. Politely as, “For by wise guidance you can wage your war.” Or, from a former agent critical of the agency, “By Way Of Deception, Thou Shalt Do War.”

I didn’t know a thing about Mossad until I had to research them for what comes next. Did you know that the Israeli military attacked a U.S. ship (the Liberty) off the coast of Egypt in 1967? Injured 171 Americans, killed 34 and said it was an accident? They said they mistook it for some other country’s large military vessel. But all U.S. soldiers who were interviewed said, “No freaking way. They saw us, they shot us and they killed a lot of us.”