TV News LIES

Leading Republican contender and prominent Christian candidate Rick Perry has been accused of hypocrisy after it was revealed that he invested thousands of dollars in the country's largest pornography distributor.

Just a week after he launched his presidential campaign, the Texas governor has come under fire for his investment in Movie Gallery, a company that rented pornographic movies.

As Texas Gov. Rick Perry embarks on his Obama-bashing, evangelical-courting, tea party-outdoing campaign for the presidency, we miss Molly Ivins more than ever.

The late and celebrated liberal columnist was known as a writer of sparkling political commentary infused with a trenchant wit and copious shots of zero-bullshit humor. She was the consummate Texan, a ferocious populist critic of the American right wing, and a sorely missed Mother Jones contributor. Here's the C-SPAN footage of Ivins speaking at a Mother Jones fundraising event in 1992:

In a 2002 film highlighting her work as an education activist, Michele Bachmann endorsed the argument of her colleague, Michael Chapman, who claimed that state and federal education reforms were leading the United States toward its own Holocaust.

Minnesota's new curriculum standards, Bachmann contended, were going to "undermine our freedom and undermine our national sovereignty" and turn children into "global citizens." The "brave new world" Chapman warned about, she said, wouldn't be far behind.

But many other more telling facts indicate that Obama is but a figurehead of an unelected government in the US. This unelected power of corporate elites – commercial, financial, military – governs with the same core policies regardless of who is sitting in the White House. Whether these policies are on social, economic or foreign matters, the elected president must obey the direction ordained by the unelected elite. That kind of untrammeled power structure conforms more closely in practice to dictatorship, not democracy.

Obama’s presence in the White House indulges a superficial moral/political correctness while the masters whip us all into austere servitude.

On Monday, the House finally passed a deal to raise the debt limit after weeks of wrangling with a cadre of reactionary, Tea Party-endorsed lawmakers. The measure, which will force some serious cuts to public spending, is expected to easily pass in the Senate. When it does, a painful second "dip" into recession becomes far more likely -- all the conditions are there.

Last week, a depressing report on economic growth caught many observers by surprise. The take-away was that gross domestic product (GDP) – the measure of economic activity within our borders – has been growing at a snail's pace in the first half of this year -- far slower than analysts had predicted. Researchers at the Federal Reserve tell us that since 1947, about half of the times we've had six months of growth as weak as we've seen in 2011, the economy sank into recession in the following year.

Americans for Prosperity is sending absentee ballots to Democrats in at least two Wisconsin state Senate recall districts with instructions to return the paperwork after the election date. The fliers, obtained by POLITICO, ask solidly Democratic voters to return ballots for the Aug. 9 election to the city clerk "before Aug. 11."

A Democrat on the ground in Wisconsin said the fliers were discovered to be hitting doors in District 2 and District 10 over the weekend.