TV News LIES

We could buy Real Fireworks for the 4th of July because we lived near the Port Madison Indian Reservation in Washington state. No wimpy sparklers for us. None of that Safe N Sane garbage. These were definitely Unsafe and Insane. We could buy stuff that exploded. As SCTVs Billy Sol Hurock and Big Jim McBob used to say, It blowed up real good.

I was about to set off a rocket slightly smaller than a cruise missile when I noticed a warning on the box, Use under adult supervision.

Here are four quotations that should have sounded off the rooftops since they were first spoken. Just like so many Truths that have been stripped from public awareness.

We were warned. Clearly.

There is a great story about an editor at UPI long ago, back in the 1970s, who inserted advice to journalists in a foreword to that organization's style guide for writers:  A burro is an ass, a burrow is a hole in the ground:  you are expected to know the difference between the two.

What great advice for Republican candidates vying for their party's coronation!  These guys are already phenomenally low in wattage as illumination of any real issue goes, so, that simple advice should be hugely helpful to them, too!

Speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of millions. What does it say about our system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."

You remember the paralyzing ray, the sound effect, the beam of light flashing across the screen toward its target and -- bingo!  Zapped! All consciousness we had was momentarily checked out, no longer in the building, not on the planet, but caught up in Star Trek, caught and stunned, captured by the light of the ray.

This is how it's been feeling in encounters with media of any kind on this world, and with almost half of its citizens.  First, the flash of light, then, the ticklish electrical sensations begin, like swarming ants on the skin, the intensity gaining strength as the beam -- its first few nanoseconds aboard -- plays havoc with the body's bio-current, then, pulses stronger, threatening to shut down the computing center, up over the eyebrows... Then it does: blackout.

Every time I look up from what I'm doing, another Republican is charging off into some self-made fray, seated backwards, on a mechanical pony -- the kind bolted to the floor, requiring a quarter to rock back and forth -- shouting incoherently, trying to make the metal animal charge faster, trying to make it back up, all the way.

The screeching and screeds are usually about mandating religion in the schools and some neo-creationist harangue, or else revising the history books to show how wonderful and not-at-all demented they themselves are, or about GOP men's rights to dictating vaginal probes into women's vaginas and their God-given rights in specifying women's health care, or else it's some frothy meringue regarding how the non-job-creating but-still-so-called "job creators," corporations and the rich, should be spared paying any taxes as their forbears once gladly did.