TV News LIES

Preliminary sales figures show a very low growth rate for retailers this Christmas season that is likely to be the lowest since 2008. It's not too hard to figure out why this is so, people are getting lower wages and so have less to spend despite increased consumer debt.

It's not that there isn't enough business activity, corporations are showing record profits and the rich are swimming in cash, they just keep it for themselves. In the old days, when cash hoarding really started to tank the economy, people called this occurrence a 'cash shortage'. Today economists call it a recession when it meets their arbitrary standards of decline.

Well, let's see how far we've come in the national discussion on guns, so far:  You've got NRA cheerleader and CEO Wayne LaPierre shooting off his mouth on talking head shows, saying a ban on high capacity weapons magazines will be done, basically, over his dead body.

If I were an unkind sort, I'd be sorely tempted to say, "Works for me."

Good thing I'm not -- I'm not even one of the grinches "making war" on Christmas, as religious believers usually phrase their accusations.

Cannabis makes pain more bearable rather than actually reducing it, a study from the University of Oxford suggests. Using brain imaging, researchers found that the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis reduced activity in a part of the brain linked to emotional aspects of pain.

But the effect on the pain experienced varied greatly, they said. The researchers' findings are published in the journal Pain. The Oxford researchers recruited 12 healthy men to take part in their small study.

This is another one of those pieces attempting to reconcile what we know of our culture and country, and still have it make some sense after another round of innocents have been slaughtered.

Just one more voice in the trying-to-be-OK choir and chorale, here, wondering how it is we had another place of learning and laughter turn into a one-sided OK Corral.

Many people are doing the same, to greater and lesser degrees of futility or utility.  Some people are so far past the deep end, they're wheeling out all the things they already hate, plugging in their old lists as legitimate new causes.

Last Saturday my wife, son, and I, were sitting in a church … voluntarily. As far back as I can remember … this Had Never Happened before. We were there because we’d read in the paper that this was THE place to be for the best Christmas Chorale Music.

Well … not so much. Another typical religion “bait and switch.” They promised traditional Christmas music but instead trotted out a Christian Extravaganza. The church must have some Big Donors because this was a Big Budget Production.

There's been a lot of chatter about the Republicans actually giving in to most of what Obama wants in terms of taxes in exchange for relatively small benefit cuts for the elderly. The very wealthy will get the full tax increase, and low income seniors will be exempted from cuts.

This might be something Obama would take, and not the worst that could happen. Programs would stay intact and ages of eligibility remain the same. The new Democratic Congress in 2015 can fix this pretty easily.