TV News LIES

It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners.

Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.

Counter-terrorism analysts still lack the data-search tools that might have kept a bomb-wearing Al Qaeda operative from boarding a Detroit-bound airliner nine months ago, and probably won't have them any time soon, U.S. officials acknowledge.

At the same time, officials say the terrorist threat against the U.S. is becoming more complex, with a greater risk from home-grown militants whose low profiles makes sophisticated intelligence analysis more important than ever.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned Mexico on Monday for failing to protect the rights of two indigenous women who were raped by soldiers in 2002. In two separate rulings, the Costa Rica-based court said Mexico failed to guarantee the rights to personal integrity, dignity and legal protection of Valentina Rosendo and Ines Fernandez, both of southern Guerrero state.

Mexico must publicly acknowledge its responsibility and called for a civilian investigation into the crimes, rather than the military one, which resulted in no charges, according to the ruling. The government also must compensate both women and publish the court rulings in Spanish and the women's indigenous language, Me'phaa.

A new video uploaded to YouTube shows an Israel Defense Forces soldier wriggling in a belly dance beside a bound and handcuffed Palestinian woman, to the cheers of his comrades who were documenting the incident.

The IDF's internal investigation department ordered an immediate probe into the matter after the Ch. 10 television program Tzinor Laila caught wind of the clip on the internet. The full clip and the details behind the incident will be broadcast on the show just before midnight on Monday.

Earlier today, the nonprofit watchdog group Free Press filed a complaint with Federal Communications Commission based on Los Angeles Times columnist James Rainey's complaints about hidden advertising embedded in newscasts. Over the last week, Rainey has written two columns that take the federal government to task for its "flimsy and fitful crackdown" on news outlets that present paid spokespeople as if they were independent consumer advocates.

Unfortunately I played a small part in helping the feral government obtain an image for their plan. I did this 32 years ago in 1978: Two years before Reagan stole the White House, and eleven years before the Berlin Wall went down in 1989. This is significant because while Ronnie claimed credit for the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union: It was also on his watch that the world failed to get their promised "peace dividend" when the cold war officially ended. Instead we got a new and all-powerful; enemy to oppose-worldwide Terrorism!

Amid raucous political debate over tax cuts for the rich and who owns most of America's wealth, university researchers have found at least one reason why we suffer such bruising public policy stalemates in this country.

When it comes to wealth inequity in the United States, we just don't know what we're talking about.

An Israeli military court has convicted two Israeli soldiers for using a Palestinian child as a human shield during an offensive in Gaza in 2009. The soldiers were found guilty of reckless endangerment and conduct unbecoming for forcing the nine-year-old boy to check suspected booby-traps.

It is reportedly the first such conviction in Israel - where the use of civilians as human shields is banned. The sentencing will be decided at a later date, the court said.