TV News LIES

The United States is a low-tax country. That’s true for individuals and for corporations, and it’s true whether you compare us to other countries or the America of the past. No matter how you slice it the conclusion is the same.

Conservatives like to claim that our budget deficits are purely a “spending problem.” Said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “We don’t have this problem because we tax too little. We have it because we spent too much.”

Thanks to the fantastic work of Bilderberg activists, journalists and the Swiss media, we have now been able to obtain the full official list of 2011 Bilderberg attendees. Routinely, some members request that their names be kept off the roster so there will be additional Bilderbergers in attendance.

The former head of Israel's spy service has launched an unprecedented attack on the country's current government, describing it as "irresponsible and reckless", and has praised Arab attempts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

"I decided to speak because when I was in office, Diskin, Ashkenazi and I could block any dangerous adventure. Now I am afraid that there is no one to stop Bibi [Netanyahu] and Barak," said Dagan.

Dagan has been in charge of aggressive Israeli actions abroad in recent years, that have included assassinations in Lebanon, Syria and Dubai and an air attack on a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria. He also criticised Israel's failure to offer any initiative to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians .

But this isn't privacy. It's hiding. It's a child hiding behind the curtains in case the monsters see it, and I find it weirdly infantile. Oddly unconfident. Grown-ups, happy in what they're doing, don't slide down in their car seats and slip in through side doors. You've got the world's most powerful people sneaking around like naughty kiddies. Naughty kiddies with secret service spotters on their hotel roof, and armed men on motorbikes flanking their limousines.

This is the bit about Bilderberg that I really don't get. It's an old chestnut, but let's just take another bite at it. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that Bilderberg benefits us all. The citizens of the world are made safer, or happier, or healthier, or better off as a result of this meeting. Let's just say that the head of Deutsche Bank spends four days with the head of BP in order to improve our lives.

Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch have been dominant financiers for conservative front groups and nonprofits for nearly three decades. Their money has flowed to organizations dedicated to lobbying for corporate and upper income tax cuts, as well as to groups responsible for mobilizing Tea Party rallies against President Obama.

But the Koch family’s association with fringe right-wing groups began a generation earlier with Fred Koch, the patriarch of the clan.

The disclosure of the Pentagon Papers four decades ago stands as one of the most significant leaks of classified material in American history. Ever since, in the eyes of the government, the voluminous record of U.S. involvement in Vietnam has remained something else: classified.

In the Byzantine realm of government record-keeping, publication of a document in the country’s biggest newspapers, including this one, does not mean declassification. Despite the release of multiple versions of the Pentagon Papers, no complete, fully unredacted text has ever been publicly disclosed.

In 1953 my family—my parents and their four boys, aged 4 to 12, I was 10—moved from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to Israel, where we remained for seven years. My father was what might be called a McCarthy refugee, a former Truman administration official who was also a “premature anti-fascist” (look it up) and thus not eminently employable in that chilly era of Red-hunting.

I’ve since read my father’s FBI file and I know how close he came to being fingered as a former Communist Party member (my parents both left the CP after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact). My father received offers to join many other former government officials in taking overseas posts in such imperial outposts as Japan, Indonesia and Pakistan, but my mother said she wouldn’t raise her children in a “foreign nationals” bubble surrounded by servants.

There are now eight new substances on the official U.S. list of toxins known to cause or suspected of causing cancer.

There are now 240 agents on the list, maintained by the National Toxicology Program (NTP). The NTP lists agents in two categories: those known to cause cancer, and those expected to be added to the "known carcinogen" list once there's more scientific evidence.