TV News LIES

Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, a husband-and-wife team of hawkish military analysts, put their jobs at influential Washington think tanks on hold for almost a year to work for Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

Provided desks, e-mail accounts and top-level security clearances in Kabul, they pored through classified intelligence reports, participated in senior-level strategy sessions and probed the assessments of field officers in order to advise Petraeus about how to fight the war differently.

Their compensation from the U.S. government for their efforts, which often involved 18-hour workdays, seven days a week and dangerous battlefield visits?  Zero dollars.

Congress stripped a provision Tuesday from a defense bill that aimed to shield Americans from the possibility of being imprisoned indefinitely without trial by the military. The provision was replaced with a passage that appears to give citizens little protection from indefinite detention.

The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 was added by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), but there was no similar language in the version of the bill that passed the House, and it was dumped from the final bill released Tuesday after a conference committee from both chambers worked out a unified measure.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says that coal will catch up with oil as the world's leading energy source by 2022. In a report, the Agency says that increased demand from India and China are fuelling the push.

Natural gas offers the best hope of reducing carbon emissions in the short term the report concludes. It comes as the European Union acknowledged that it has been unable to fund a single project to capture and store CO2.

In late November, while other parts of New Jersey were recovering from the superstorm, the quiet town of Paulsboro was blindsided by a very unnatural disaster. A train derailed while crossing a local bridge, sending freight cars tumbling into the water below and releasing a toxic swirl of the flammable gas known as vinyl chloride, used to make PVC plastics.

In the following days, chaos ensued as residents hurriedly evacuated. Authorities struggled to manage the emergency response, leaving people confused and frustrated by a lack of official communication about hazards.

Last Saturday my wife, son, and I, were sitting in a church … voluntarily. As far back as I can remember … this Had Never Happened before. We were there because we’d read in the paper that this was THE place to be for the best Christmas Chorale Music.

Well … not so much. Another typical religion “bait and switch.” They promised traditional Christmas music but instead trotted out a Christian Extravaganza. The church must have some Big Donors because this was a Big Budget Production.

There's been a lot of chatter about the Republicans actually giving in to most of what Obama wants in terms of taxes in exchange for relatively small benefit cuts for the elderly. The very wealthy will get the full tax increase, and low income seniors will be exempted from cuts.

This might be something Obama would take, and not the worst that could happen. Programs would stay intact and ages of eligibility remain the same. The new Democratic Congress in 2015 can fix this pretty easily.

The Philippines Congress approved its Reproductive Health Bill, offering government-provided contraception and sex education classes, after heated debate.

The bill, known as the RH Bill, passed the Senate 13-8 and the House of Representatives 133-79 Sunday night. A reconciliation committee will work out differences in the House and Senate versions before the legislation goes to President Benigno Aquino, who is expected to sign it before Christmas, The Philippine Star reported Monday.

Sounds like a cool music venue for jazz, but it's actually real:  The Blue Strawberry.  Stems from research into helping berries resist freezing temps.  These are research berries only, so don't get excited about blue shortcakes and such, at least not yet.

Such is life in the GMO world, where one researcher has made a transfer of genes from the Arctic Flounder Fish -- it produces a sort of anti-freeze that allows it to protect itself in freezing waters.  Once the anti-freeze-making gene was isolated, it was introduced to berries.  The result was a blue berry that doesn't turn to mush in the freezer.