TV News LIES

Nearly 70 years after expelling Melvin Dwork for being gay, the Navy is changing his discharge from "undesirable" to "honorable" - marking what is believed to be the first time the Pentagon has taken such a step on behalf of a World War II veteran since the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell."

The Navy notified the 89-year-old former corpsman last month that he will now be eligible for the benefits he had long been denied, including medical care and a military burial. Dwork spent decades fighting to remove the blot on his record.

The Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission has banned fracking disposal wells for unconventional gas drilling wastes due to earthquakes. The Commission voted unanimously to ban them, and the decision requires the immediate closure of one disposal well and prohibits the construction of new wells within a 1,150 square mile radius.

Arkansas residents insisted that there was a correlation between the increase in earthquake activity in the state and wastewater disposal wells. Imagine being on your way out one afternoon, opening your garage door, and experiencing an earthquake that you knew was being caused by gas drills.

Those without a lot of wealth or a lot of power are getting absolutely killed in America today.  The big corporations, the major financial institutions, the ultra-wealthy and those connected to the top levels of government are absolutely thriving even though the economy overall is in shambles.  Meanwhile, "the little guy" is being abused, harassed, regulated, taxed and mistreated like never before.  In general, the big corporations and the government don't spend a lot of time tangling with each other.  Instead, mostly they seem content with attacking the weak members of the herd (the rest of us).  In the United States today, wealth and power have become more concentrated than ever, and the big corporations and the government have figured out thousands of different ways to drain even more wealth and power away from the rest of us.  Most of the time, "the little guy" is not even able to fight back.  Most Americans have very limited resources and a very limited knowledge of the law.  Meanwhile, the "big guys" have almost unlimited resources and can hire huge numbers of lawyers.  So what does that mean for the rest of us?  Well, it means that until society becomes a lot more just, you better do your best to keep from becoming a target of the "big guys".

This will surely get taken out of context in my future political career, but I will say it now anyway: I am embarrassed, saddened, and yes, disgusted, by the behavior and beliefs of the majority of Americans.

A new report came out Tuesday, showing that the poverty rate in America rose to a whopping 15.1% in 2010. That means that nearly one in six Americans gets by on less than $11,139 a year, or $22,314 for a family of four. At the same time, the average CEO rakes in $11.3 million EACH.

Many of those plump, juicy strawberries found on produce section shelves are hiding a deadly little secret. In 2010, regulators in California, where over 90 percent of conventional strawberries are grown, quietly approved the use of toxic methyl iodide as a fruit pesticide after the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved it nationally. But new evidence has now surfaced that government officials twisted study data to make the chemical falsely appear safe in order to get it approved -- and individuals everywhere are now increasingly demanding that methyl iodide be banned.

In case you believed that elaborate government conspiracies were merely the driving force behind X-Files episodes, the Science Channel is setting the record straight. As a compendium to their latest show, "Dark Matters," which explores the darker side of science, the Science Channel has published introductions and full transcripts from government hearings on some of the most unbelievable -- yet true -- conspiracies, including the highly-controversial MKULTRA project.

Agents at the FBI's Quantico, Virginia, training grounds are taught that all mainstream American Muslims are terrorist sympathizers in a cult that likes to donate money to killers. That's according to a scoop by Wired's Spencer Ackerman, who has exposed a series of amazingly clueless Powerpoint slides and documents from the federales' training on Islam. If you haven't read his story yet, do so now.

Ackerman's report brings new light to an alarming problem that's been well-documented since 9/11: American police officers, airport screeners, and soldiers have no freaking clue how to deal with the distinction between the vast majority of Muslims and the minisule minority that actively seek to do us harm.

There is a specter haunting America today. It is the specter of stupidity. A few months ago, I wrote a column I called “The Problem of Republican Idiots.” Believe me, this problem has not gone away. Rick Perry, the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner right now, believes the phenomenon of man-made global warming to be a conspiracy by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data.”

No less alarming is that this stupidity is apparently contagious. The men and women who inhabit the upper reaches of the US media (and pull down the multimillion-dollar salaries) appear to believe that to do their jobs properly, they must make themselves behave like idiots in order to be “fair” to the Republicans and their idiotic ideas.