TV News LIES

Smoking in New York City's parks, beaches, boardwalks, pedestrian plazas and other public spaces will be banned from May 23 despite complaints about excessive meddling by government in people's private lives.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed the legislation on Tuesday after the city council voted 36 to 12 in favour of the smoking restrictions earlier this month. The law extends the city's existing ban on smoking in restaurants and bars.

From my own Twitter account, I confronted the user, JCCentCom. He tweeted back that the demonstrators were "political enemies" and "thugs" who were "physically threatening legally elected officials." In response to such behavior, he said, "You're damned right I advocate deadly force." He later called me a "typical leftist," adding, "liberals hate police."

Only later did we realize that JCCentCom was a deputy attorney general for the state of Indiana.

Thirty Years of War and Peace and Best Actor Awards for Our American Presidents

Unlike Barack Obama, the previous presidential actor, GW Bush never betrayed his core audience. Instead he simply betrayed the country as a whole for eight long years. An aggressive chauffeur, he seemed to want to drive the country, I mean car, off the road. Happily for his handlers he had a man named Cheney as designated driver, while the "war president" as he liked to be called, posed by the limousine (or aircraft carrier) for photo opportunities. However the important driving was left to DC. Chiefly a puppet, rather than actor or salesman, president Bush was handed the country after the fraudulent 2000 elections. Asleep at the wheel, GWB had that slightly deranged look of a sociopathic hit-and-run driver on the morning of 9-11, aware the limo had swerved and struck a million innocent bystanders (and counting) and so awaited his owners to vouch for him during the following eight years. I wrote more about GWB in my column (Google) A Tale of Two AWOLS.

Everyone knows that Tea Party revolutionaries fear and hate socialism about as much as the Antichrist. Which is funny, because the Tea Party movement’s dirty little secret is that it owes its existence to the grandaddy of all Antichrists: the godless empire of the USSR.

What few realize is that the secretive oil billionaires of the Koch family, the main supporters of the right-wing groups that orchestrated the Tea Party movement, would not have the means to bankroll their favorite causes had it not been for the pile of money the family made working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure.

In 1994, Congress passed a law requiring the new cell phone networks to provide "intercept solutions," as Caproni puts it. Now, the Obama administration wants a similar requirement for communications systems on the Internet.

The FBI, the Commerce Department and the various spy agencies have been meeting for months to discuss possible legislation, and last week there was a preliminary hearing on the subject in the House of Representatives.

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have found that less than an hour of cellphone use can speed up brain activity in the area closest to the phone antenna, raising new questions about the health effects of low levels of radiation emitted from cellphones.

The researchers, led by Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, urged caution in interpreting the findings because it is not known whether the changes, which were seen in brain scans, have any meaningful effect on a person’s overall health.

Tuesday marked five years since Justice Clarence Thomas last asked a question during the Supreme Court's oral arguments.

Thomas speaks in the court only on the few occasions during the year when he is called upon to read a decision. Throughout his nearly 20 years on the bench, he has sat silently and watched as his colleagues quiz the lawyers on their cases.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a federal law bars lawsuits against drug makers over serious side effects from childhood vaccines. By a 6-2 vote Tuesday, the court ruled against the parents of a child who sued the drug maker Wyeth in Pennsylvania state court for the health problems they say their daughter, now 19, suffered from a vaccine she received in infancy.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court, said Congress set up a special vaccine court to handle such claims as a way to provide compensation to injured children without driving drug manufacturers from the vaccine market. The idea, he said, was to create a no-fault system that spares the drug companies the costs of defending against parents' lawsuits.