TV News LIES

The environmental group Friends of the Earth released e-mails this week revealing a cozy and collaborative relationship between TransCanada Corporation lobbyist Paul Elliott and an employee at the U.S. State Department, the agency currently weighing approval of TransCanada's permit application for the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

A New York Times report notes that the emails show the State Department official providing "subtle coaching and cheerleading" for TransCanada:

Like much of the rest of the country, a substantial number of American veterans of war in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t think the 10-year effort has been worth the cost.

While those who entered military service after 9/11 generally have a more positive attitude toward the US role in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pew Research Center reported Wednesday, “only one-third (34%) of these recent veterans say that both wars have been worth fighting.” The report also says, “Nearly as many (33%) say neither conflict has been worth the costs.”

Many rural areas in the US suffer from a shortage of doctors. Unable to attract Americans, they have turned to foreign-born physicians.

The city of Logan in West Virginia has just 1,779 citizens. The nearest large city, Charleston, is an hour away, via winding roads through the Appalachian mountains. Logan is surrounded by rural land, and is in an area which has lost half its population since the 1950s.

A man from Yemen was the first person arrested for being an undocumented immigrant in Alabama. The police raided a house and encountered the man, Mohamed Ali Muflahi, According to the police, he identified himself as being in the country illegally.

Immediately, the authors of Alabama’s anti-immigrant law issued a press statement hailing the arrest and implying that Muflahi was an illegal alien somehow connected with terrorism. Except that it turns out he was not in the country illegally.

Nearly 20 percent of the more than 2 million troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from mental health conditions, according to a new report.

They amount to more than half of the 712,000 veterans from both wars who have sought medical treatment since leaving military service. Nearly a third of those veterans may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, one of the signature injuries of the conflicts.

Over the past 27 years — the complete timeframe that the data has been available —  there have been 0 deaths as a result of vitamins and over 3 million deaths related to prescription drug use. In fact, going back 54 years there have only been 11 claims of vitamin-related death, all of which provided no substantial evidence to link vitamins to the cause of death. The news comes after a recent statistically analysis found that pharmaceutical drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in the US.

Democrat Earl Ray Tomblin overcame weeks of Republican attack ads to win the West Virginia governor's race Tuesday, successfully distancing himself from the Obama administration and the president's health care plan.

Tomblin, who has been acting governor for the past year, will finish the final year of a term left vacant by Joe Manchin, a well-liked governor who stepped down after he won a U.S. Senate seat.

Isn't that interesting? Months ago, the Obama Administration revealed that it would target al-Awlaki. It even managed to wriggle out of a lawsuit filed by his father to prevent the assassination.

But the actual legal reasoning the Department of Justice used to authorize the strike? It's secret. Classified. Information that the public isn't permitted to read, mull over, or challenge.