TV News LIES

In a recent post here, I described an event that I produced in Syracuse, New York, which brought together disparate anti-fracking groups for a screening of Josh Fox's documentary film Gasland.

As one would expect, among the readers who posted here there was a strong level of both support for the event (and any anti-fracking advocacy) and critiques of our effort, typically from gas industry functionaries or labor that supports hydraulic fracturing on behalf of jobs.

Reality makes rubble of fiction.

Our implausible world can take almost any topic or subject, skewer it, spin it around in its rotisserie barbecue:  give it a few and, voila!  Everything goes out a nice, golden brown.

Just like Meals, Ready to Eat, or MREs -- field rations for military members in the familiar brown plastic packets, for example. The meals are popular with survivalists, campers, hunters, and others away from their ranges-in-home, let alone from antelope playing near the 'fridge.

Wiki tells us the U.S. government requires the following information be printed on each MRE case:  U.S. Government Property, Commercial Resale is Unlawful.

So, what's the implausibility here?  It's not true.

“The law has turned ordinary people into criminals for engaging in normal human behavior,” says Liz Reitzig, one of the event’s organizers.  “I am proud to stand with others as we peacefully do not comply with these laws.”

On August 18, 2012 a group of mothers and others, members of the advocacy groups, the Raw Milk Freedom Riders and Lemonade Freedom Day, will take their raw milk and lemonade to the lawn of the US Capitol to celebrate their right to “voluntary exchange.”

By offering raw milk and lemonade for sale or barter, which is illegal in many places including Washington DC, these mothers and other activists risk criminal charges, and possibly jail.  Last August, in a similar protest, three people were arrested for selling 10-cent cups of lemonade.

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If you want to know what PBS would like without government funding turn on A&E, History Channel, or the ever oxymoronic Learning Channel. These networks have been long held up by Republicans as the private sector alternative to PBS, but look at the programming that these channels actually contain. Would Sesame Street be replaced with Pawn Stars? Instead of Antiques Roadshow, how about Storage Wars? Replace Downton Abbey with Toddlers and Tiaras.

Romney was asked by Fortune where he would cut government spending, and he answered, “There are three major areas I have focused on for reduction in spending. These are in many cases reductions which become larger and larger over time. So first there are programs I would eliminate. Obamacare being one of them but also various subsidy programs — the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to strand (sic) on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf.”

Mitt Romney was essentially telling Elmo and the rest of Sesame Street to stop being a bunch of bums and get a job. Mitt Romney’s vision for America includes the death of Amtrak, slashed funding for the arts and humanities, and a privatized PBS.

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Soldiers killed themselves at a rate faster than one per day in July, the Army announced Thursday. There were 38 deaths either confirmed or suspected as suicides, the highest one-month tally in recent Army history, the service said.

The Army suicide pace this year is surpassing last year, particularly among active-duty soldiers where there is a 22% increase — 116 deaths so far this year vs. 95 during the same seven months last year, according to Army data.

Administrative judges, the adjudicators of regulatory law at U.S. government agencies, may face a threat to their independence from political influence under a recent court ruling.

A federal appeals court ruled in July that the Copyright Royalty Board, a panel of administrative judges who set the rate broadcasters pay for copyright licenses, was unconstitutional because of the way its panelists are appointed and the job protections they are given.

Exactly ten years ago I was imprisoned for my refusal to enlist in the Israeli military. This marked the end of a three-year losing legal battle in Israeli court to have conscientious objection recognized as an option for military service.

It was the beginning of an ongoing struggle to save my country from its inevitable demise. Like a drug-addict, Israel needs an intervention.  It is addicted to the military; blind support does it no good.

Sometimes, everything really IS rocket science. Even for NASA, nothing in life is a given, no matter how many successes, and no matter how high the zenith or how far the apogee.

Witness the crash of a moon lander in a recent test, an embarassing oops! after so many wins, the most recent -- and perhaps most extraordinary in some time -- the safe landing of the one-ton rover Curiosity on Mars.