TV News LIES

The US stock market fell hard at the opening bell and the corporate pundits were out immediately blaming it on the lower number of jobs created last month. With “only” 200,000 new jobs created they implied that the Obama economic recovery is falling flat.

The first problem with this “news” was that the real numbers don’t come out until Friday, this was just an estimate from a private payroll service company that has become notorious for being wrong.

If no one knows if our security-industrial complex is making us safer, why have we built it? Why are we still building it, at breakneck speed?

Here at home, according to an exhaustive and impressive two-year-long investigation by the Washington Post, the taxpayer-funded Global War on Terror also built enough ultra-high-security office space (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities, or SCIF, in bureaucrat-speak) to fill twenty-two US Capitol Buildings: seventeen million square feet of offices in thirty-three handsome and generously funded new complexes powered up twenty-four hours a day, where an army of nearly one million American professionals spies on the world and the homeland. It’s as if we turned the entire working population of Detroit and Milwaukee into high-security-clearance spooks and analysts.

Unlike mega-rich civilian consumers, political winners are not declared by virtue of having the most toys at the end of the game. The winners of political contests are the ones who have won and scraped up the most mountains of money, enabling them to buy the loudest-possible doomsday-bullhorns that money can buy.

The winners are those who can blow out the most voter-eardrums, banging away at the message they choose to endless flay and beat out on their campaign war drums.

Batman really is a superhero, as it turns out.

It began very oddly, as police in Montgomery, Maryland, pulled over a fully-costumed, caped crusader -- spike-earred, face-covering cowl and all -- driving along in a Batmobile, a black Lamborghini sporting Bat-plates.

World Water Day came and went recently, Thursday, the twenty-second.  I saw it lap at my feet for a moment, then, it was gone again, vanished, submerged back into our busy world, three-quarters of it water.

It is difficult to remember, to not take clean water for granted:  We grew up around it, seems like an automatic birthright, it's always been clean, always been here.  Liquid water, a rarity among bodies in space, plenty of it right here:  It nurtures and sustains us, grows our food, helps us exist and be.

Initial jobless claims dropped again last week to a four year low, taking us back to the early days of Bush meltdown. We really can’t begin sing “Happy days are here again” until claims drop from the current 348,000/week to under 300,000, but we are moving in the right direction.

The survey of economists had predicted a sharp rise in claims, but these are the same economists that are almost always wrong. Why do reporters quote them? You would get a better prediction by flipping a coin.