TV News LIES

There's nothing like going to another country to get news about your own.  At least the internet / internets / internest / interwebz / internexus -- whatever you choose to call it -- makes dashing out for an electronic paper tons easier than before, boarding an international flight every morning in your PJs.

There are at least three advantages that come to mind.  First, the United States no longer has a press corps interested in journalism -- they have become professional softball lobbers and the current culture's fluff-and-product-placement pimps.

While the US Air Force's drones have been firing all sorts of air-to-surface missiles and bombs for roughly a decade now, the Navy took a big step toward getting in on the action last week when it launched six Israeli-made Spike missiles from an unmanned 36-foot motorboat.

The Navy pretty much admits that the project — called the unmanned surface vehicle precision engagement module (USV PEM) — is aimed at defeating threats that are straight out of Iran's war plans for the Persian Gulf region.

The United States, as it turns out, has a lot of unburned natural gas trapped as tiny bubbles in our shale bedrock. Until about a decade ago, much of this trapped underground gas was considered unrecoverable. But that all changed with the rollout of a drilling technique (pioneered by Halliburton) called hydrofracturing, or fracking.

Fracking bores horizontally through the bedrock, blasts it with explosives, and forces into the cracks, under enormous pressure, millions of gallons of water laced with a proprietary mix of poisonous chemicals that further fracture the rock. These boreholes provide the channel out of which the gas flows.

Here’s how hydraulic fracturing introduces cancer risks into communities from the start and into perpetuity:

Money, success -- it all gets tumbled and jumbled around together, mixed together and stirred ' round and 'round.  It's little wonder we've lost track of everything that might rightly be beneath any banner called Success.  We usually restrict Success to dance a jig on the rusty insignia of a battered money clip.

Maybe this is a Big Step Up for the Species.  Hard to tell.  We used to invoke Success only on the heads of dead animals we were dragging back to the hearth in the cave.

A jury has ordered an $85m (£53m) compensation payout by the American military contractor Kellogg Brown and Root – which helped build Guantánamo Bay and has tendered to run key police services in Britain – after finding it guilty of negligence for illnesses suffered by a dozen soldiers who guarded an oilfield water plant during the Iraq war.

After a three-week trial the jury deliberated for two days before reaching a decision against KBR, which used to be part of Halliburton corporation. KBR was ordered to pay $6.2m to each of the soldiers in punitive damages and $850,000 in non-economic damages.

For the past three years, the Internal Revenue Service hasn't been investigating complaints of partisan political activity by churches, leaving religious groups who make direct or thinly veiled endorsements of political candidates unchallenged.

The IRS monitors religious and other nonprofits on everything from salaries to spending, and that oversight continues. However, Russell Renwicks, a manager in the IRS Mid-Atlantic region, recently said the agency had suspended audits of churches suspected of breaching federal restrictions on political activity. A 2009 federal court ruling required the IRS to clarify which high-ranking official could authorize audits over the tax code's political rules. The IRS has yet to do so.

To be successful, be successful.

Hmmm.  That one almost demands a Homeresque "D'oh!" be parked at the end to spike its inscrutable truth.  On second thought, the only thing here that's obvious is that this opening thought's going to take a few more tries to fully flesh out.

Here's Sir Arthur Helps, from 1868:  "Nothing succeeds like success."  Getting warmer.

All right, with apologies, let's start again.  This time, we'll go a few laps 'round the ol' philosophical cul-de-sac.  After all, if you're going to contemplate the broader Moneygoround, then gathering one's thoughts aboard a conceptual merry-go-round may prove useful.

In the conservative political world, Jay Sekulow is hailed as an avowed crusader for religious liberty and the super-attorney behind the American Center for Law and Justice, a group Time magazine called a "powerful counterweight to the liberal American Civil Liberties Union."

Unlike many conservatives, Sekulow, a Fox News legal analyst, has long backed Mitt Romney, whom he calls his friend. Sekulow advised Romney's 2008 presidential campaign, and has reprised that role during the 2012 election. He and his group have also joined forces with anti-gay crusaders in Africa to criminalize homosexuality.