TV News LIES

Love is in the air in Iowa — or at least the diplomatic equivalent of it.

When Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping arrived in this small town late Wednesday, carefully chosen welcoming gifts were on hand, nostalgic remembrances were on everyone’s lips and hearts all around were ready for the wooing.

Officially speaking, Xi, who is expected to become China’s president next year, picked Iowa as the centerpiece of his U.S. tour because he visited here as a lowly provincial official in 1985 to learn about American agriculture.

So much in life is unpredictable.  It is oddly comforting and miraculous to know that we can, in this country, still generate an enormous amount of heat with so little light being shed.

Missouri, Indiana, and New Hampshire are the latest places to have played footsie with bills getting Creationism jammed into public schools for instruction and review, on the same footing as Evolutionary sciences do, as just one more menu choice for the kids.

The evening news starts almost every day with a scary story about the price of gas going to $5.00 by Memorial Day, and how bad that would be for the economy. They usually follow with a story about Iran threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, or maybe that will be lead story today.  They don’t mention that that currently the largest manufactured export from the US is gasoline.

The oil companies are even closing refineries because they can’t get rid of enough gasoline to justify running them, but still the corporate media dutifully report that the “shortage” of gasoline is driving up the price.

The FDA won its two-year fight to shut down an Amish farmer who was selling fresh raw milk to eager consumers in the Washington, D.C., region after a judge this month banned Daniel Allgyer from selling his milk across state lines and he told his customers he would shut down his farm altogether.

The decision has enraged Mr. Allgyer’s supporters, some of whom have been buying from him for six years and say the government is interfering with their parental rights to feed their children.

Though founded by a pacifist, Christianity has justified some of the most brutal slaughters in human history, but we may be able to recapture its peaceful essence.

Altogether too many religions sects of both major and minor religions, despite verbally professing a desire for peace and justice in the world, are actually pro-war, pro-homicide and pro-violence in practice (or they may be silent on the subject, which is, according to moral theology, the same as being pro-violence).

About 5,000 lawsuits are pending, including some from patients crippled by tiny particles of metallic debris

The DePuy orthopedic division of Johnson & Johnson, citing declining sales, began phasing out both models of the device — formally known as an articular surface replacement device, which DePuy marketed under the name ASR — in November 2009 and formally recalled them in August 2010 amid reports in databases of orthopedic patients abroad showing they were failing prematurely at high rates.

Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy.”

This effort, at a cost of $100,000 a year, will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, a coal-industry consultant.

A Republican supermajority has muscled two of the most restrictive anti-abortion bills in years through the Virginia House, including one that would all but outlaw the procedure in the state by declaring that the rights of persons apply from the moment sperm and egg unite.

The bills passed over bitter yet futile objections from Democrats. And one GOP delegate caused the House to ripple when he said most abortions come as "matters of lifestyle convenience."