TV News LIES

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.

Keep an American soldier locked up naked in a cage and driven half mad while deprived of all basic rights, and you will be instantly condemned as a barbaric terrorist. Unless the jailer is an authorized agent of the U.S. government, in which case even treatment approaching torture will go largely unnoticed. Certainly if a likable constitutional law professor happens to be president, all such assaults on human dignity will easily pass muster.

After being interned like some wild animal in that cage in Kuwait, Pfc. Bradley Manning was transferred to the Quantico, Va., Marine base and further subjected to conditions that his lawyer termed "criminal."

One of the problems with any sort of a year-end wrap-up is knowing where to start.  One other problem is knowing when to stop.

Look at it this way:  When faced with a category called Most Objectionable Republican, you know you've got a really long slog ahead of you.  In all fairness, in a case like this, the possibilities really start opening up and the skies are not just the limit, they're the jumping-off point.

Republicans control the Michigan state legislature.  It was the perfect opportunity to push through laws limiting union power and labor rights for public-sector workers.  So, they did. Michigan is now the 24th state out of 50 designated as a "right-to-work" state.

For critics, this act translates into a "right-to-fire-and-treat-workers-anyway-we-want" law. Critics will also know that Republicans and their fat cat constituents are no doubt all smiles with today's action in the House of Representatives, a push they began last week in the Senate.

We're looking in on some of those ubiquitous, Year-End summaries, letting them out of their cages and urging them to stretch their legs -- to take wing a bit early this December.  Call it a seasonal lark.

It's not that we're likely to forget these tales (we have memories like elephants).  There's just a good supply of animal tales squirreled-away in our cache:  Dogs and deer, whales and flies, ducks, cats, elephants, even a sort-of giraffe.

You know how it is:  It's Saturday, and, in your mind's eye, you're vacationing in the tropics, surfing via your motherboard, running fast along topical waves of interest in the vast internet ocean, hooked on something or other you find titanically interesting, when you strike the unexpected iceberg, snapping to a halt with a sickening lurch.

All you can manage to do is stare numbly and in shock at the screen, dead in the water, dumbstruck and adrift in your one-person lifeboat, and without so much as first aid kit, water, rations, or a flare gun.  Or Dramamine.