TV News LIES

There are moments in life that make us gasp and seem to stop time in its tracks, submersing us in clear Jell-O -- and then time starts up again, at 1/20th speed.  All the while, at the restart, you know something is horribly wrong, and that you're in real trouble.

You've had those moments:  The tick of the clock when you feel the pit of your stomach leaves and falls through the floor, the temperature instantly plummets to sub-zero.  Yes, and the instant you're sure you're in a car wreck,  already in motion, patiently waiting for final impact.

In 1957, Joel Healy witnessed one of the largest nuclear tests ever conducted on U.S. soil. Healy was in the U.S. Army, stationed in the Nevada desert north of Las Vegas at Camp Desert Rock. He was 17 years old and a private first class at the time.

Healy drove dump trucks, moved materials, and built structures, like houses, that would be destroyed by the explosions so the Army could study the effects of a nuclear blast. He also helped build the towers where many of the bombs were detonated.

According to a Department of Justice press release, Chesapeake Appalachia pled guilty on Oct. 5 in federal court to three violations of the Clean Water Act related to natural gas drilling activity in northern West Virginia. The press release states:

Chesapeake pled guilty to three counts of “Unauthorized Discharge into a Water of the United States” in that it discharged sixty (60) tons of crushed stone and gravel into Blake Fork, a water of the United States, on at least three different occasions in December of 2008.

Chesapeake also admitted that after discharging the stone and gravel that it then spread the material in the stream to create a roadway for the purpose of improving access to a site associated with Marcellus Shale drilling activity in Wetzel County, West Virginia.

Anything that happened yesterday is still news, while last month's headlines get sifted into the heap of modern-day discards.  If you want to reflect on the America of the 1940s -- or even the 1980s -- then you're obviously an archeologist on a mission.

Unless you're summarizing the most recent yak-fest -- the so-called presidential debates.  You remember:  The ones marketed by hucksters like cage matches from two new species only just now discovered in wildest Borneo.

You know:  The Distracted Professor versus the Gish Galloper Extraordinaire!

Initial unemployment claims dropped by 30,000 last week to a four and a half year low. That's a lot of out of work people participating in the Muslim-Kenyan-socialist-anti colonial-fascist-liberal plot to destroy America by not filing for benefits in order to rig the unemployment number.

Layoffs are of course the result of employer action (quitting your job doesn't count), the employers that are, according to Romney, either lacking confidence (despite record profits and $5 trillion cash on hand) or going broke.

Federal and Massachusetts officials said Thursday that they lacked clear authority to take action earlier against a now-shuttered specialty pharmacy that set off safety alarms at least six years ago and is now at the center of a burgeoning meningitis outbreak.

In a teleconference with reporters, the officials described a murky, archaic regulatory apparatus that hampered their ability to keep pace with the rapid changes in compounding pharmacies. That industry, which traditionally has consisted of mom-and-pop operations making customized medicines for individual patients, has expanded to include high-volume pharmacies that rival the production of drug manufacturers.

Environmentalists campaigning to prevent the wholesale destruction of the Indonesian rainforest scored a major victory on Wednesday after coaxing the Walt Disney company, one of the world's largest publishers of children's books, to revamp its paper purchasing policies and sever ties with two of Asia's most controversial pulp and paper manufacturers.

After two years of occasionally testy exchanges and intense negotiation with the Rainforest Action Network (Ran), a San Francisco-based advocacy group, Disney agreed in a new written policy to do everything it could to safeguard endangered forests and their ecosystems, which support the sorts of animals celebrated in Disney feature films and their multimedia spinoffs.

There’s more evidence suggesting that fracking in Wyoming is polluting groundwater near the town of Pavilion, as U.S. Geological Survey water quality sampling appears to show similar results as an earlier EPA study.

The 2011 EPA sampling was one of the first to document hydrocarbons consistent with fracking fluid chemicals in drinking water wells and monitoring wells located near natural gas wells.