TV News LIES

This morning, Democrats tore into House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) for preventing women from testifying before a hearing examining the Obama administration’s new regulation requiring employers and insurers to provide contraception coverage to their employees.

Republicans oppose the administration’s rule and have sponsored legislation that would allow employers to limit the availability of birth control to women.

A new study suggests that organic brown rice syrup — a sweetener used in many organic and gluten-free foods, including baby formula — may be a hidden source of arsenic.

No surprise here: arsenic is not good for you. In high doses, of course, it’s a deadly poison, but even at lower levels exposure to arsenic can raise the risks of cancer and heart disease.

US legislators set to more than make up for White House cuts to missile defense spending, Capitol Hill sources tell the ‘Post’; if Israel asks for more money, “without a doubt they would get it,” Congressional aid says.

Congress is set to significantly increase funding for Israeli missile defense to more than make up for White House cuts to the program, Capitol Hill sources told The Jerusalem Post Tuesday.

The UK government's scientific advisory group found no link between childhood leukaemia and proximity to nuclear power plants, but German and French research has found an alarming doubling of risk. Matilda Lee reports.

The study, conducted by the Institut de Radioprotection et de Surete Nucleaire (INSERM) and reported in the International Journal on Cancer in January 2012, looked at child leukaemia cases nationwide diagnosed between 2002 and 2007, with addresses coded around 19 nuclear power plants. It demonstrated a stastically signficant doubling of the incidence of leukaemia childhood near nuclear power plants.

Questions about the authenticity of the leaked Heartland Institute documents are fading, as projects described therein are confirmed. Heartland’s senior fellow James Taylor confirmed the existence of the climate-denier classroom curriculum project to ThinkProgress Green yesterday.

Now, anti-science blogger Anthony Watts has confirmed that Heartland is funding his project to display weather station data, detailed in the leaked fundraising plan. In a comment at Andrew Montford’s Bishop Hill blog, Watts claims there are no “nefarious motives” in his project:

Love is in the air in Iowa — or at least the diplomatic equivalent of it.

When Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping arrived in this small town late Wednesday, carefully chosen welcoming gifts were on hand, nostalgic remembrances were on everyone’s lips and hearts all around were ready for the wooing.

Officially speaking, Xi, who is expected to become China’s president next year, picked Iowa as the centerpiece of his U.S. tour because he visited here as a lowly provincial official in 1985 to learn about American agriculture.

So much in life is unpredictable.  It is oddly comforting and miraculous to know that we can, in this country, still generate an enormous amount of heat with so little light being shed.

Missouri, Indiana, and New Hampshire are the latest places to have played footsie with bills getting Creationism jammed into public schools for instruction and review, on the same footing as Evolutionary sciences do, as just one more menu choice for the kids.

The evening news starts almost every day with a scary story about the price of gas going to $5.00 by Memorial Day, and how bad that would be for the economy. They usually follow with a story about Iran threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, or maybe that will be lead story today.  They don’t mention that that currently the largest manufactured export from the US is gasoline.

The oil companies are even closing refineries because they can’t get rid of enough gasoline to justify running them, but still the corporate media dutifully report that the “shortage” of gasoline is driving up the price.