1. “ACLU sues Library of Congress over firing employee who criticized Gitmo
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/75275-aclu-sues-library-of-congress-over-firing
2. “Republicans Reject Reid Half Measures, Embrace Gangsta Rap
Meanwhile, Liz Cheney urged her party to unite behind rapper 50 Cent for the GOP presidential candidate in 2012. “That will teach Reid a lesson,” she said, noting that gangsta rap is about guns, wearing big crosses, distrust of government, entrepreneurship, rejection of science and elite education, over-dressing, torturing your enemy, occasionally shooting your friends, and upholding old-time patriarchy. “I’m not accusing Mr. Cent of any of these things, mind you. Let’s face it, Tupac and Notorious B.I.G aren’t here any more, but maybe we can hearken back to them.” Plus, she noted, singing along with gangsta rap lyrics makes it possible to go way beyond just saying “Negro” the way Saltsman and Reid did. “That will be a relief for a lot of members of our party,” she acknowledged.
“You can’t accuse gangsta rap of being anything lite,” she noted. “Nobody in my family has ever been able to understand a word they say–but we like the values, especially the guns and shooting and torturing people.” Embracing this subculture, she asserted, would help the Republican Party get back to its core values. Moreover, she said, the Republican Party could reinvigorate gangsta rap, which many say is dead–killed by the opulence the big payouts by recording companies made possible. “Did you see what we did to Baghdad and Saddam? Nobody is better at gang wars and busting caps in people’s asses than we are. We’re proof that rich people don’t have to be soft or nice.” Asked about a possible running mate for 50, she just smiled coyly.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/01/us-will-hit-94-debt-to-gdp-ratio-next.html
4. “Faked Pandemics – a threat for health
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16911
5. In 2001, cell calls from planes at altitude were impossible:
“Cell Phone Limitations
Given the cell phone technology available in 2001, cell phone calls from airliners at altitudes of more than a few thousand feet, especially calls lasting more than a few seconds, were virtually – and perhaps completely – impossible. And yet many of the reported cell phone calls occurred when the planes were above 25,000 or even 40,000 feet24 and also lasted a minute or more – with Amy Sweeney’s reported call even lasting for 12 minutes.25
Three problems have been pointed out: (1) The cell phone in those days had to complete a “handshake” with a cellsite on the ground, which took several seconds, so a cell phone in a high-speed plane would have had trouble staying connected to a cellsite long enough to complete a call. (2) The signals were sent out horizontally, from cellsite to cellsite, not vertically. Although there was some leakage upward, the system was not designed to activate cell phones at high altitudes.26 (3) Receiving a signal was made even more difficult by the insulation provided by the large mass of an airliner.
…
Such calls would become possible only several years later. In 2004, Qualcomm announced a successful demonstration of a fundamentally new kind of cell phone technology, involving a “picocell,” that would allow passengers “to place and receive calls as if they were on the ground.” American Airlines announced that this new technology was expected to be commercially available in 2006.32 This technology, in fact, first became available on commercial flights in March 2008.33
…
If asked which part of the official story can be most definitively shown to be false, I would speak not of the alleged phone calls but of the destruction of the World Trade Center, the official account of which says that the Twin Towers and WTC 7 came down without the aid of pre-set explosives. Given the fact that this theory involves massive violations of basic laws of physics, the evidence against it is so strong as to be properly called proof – as I have recently emphasized in a book-length critique of the official report on WTC 7 in particular.122
Nevertheless, the importance of the evidence against the official account provided by analyzing the alleged phone calls should not be minimized. If the official story is false, then we should expect every major dimension of it to be false – which, as I have emphasized in another recent book, can be seen to be the case.123 It is this cumulative argument that provides the strongest disproof of the official, war-justifying account of 9/11. The evidence that the alleged phone calls from the airliners were faked is an important part of this cumulative argument.124″
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16924
6. “The fundamental unreliability of America’s media
Aside from falsity — and the fact that they become irreversibly lodged in our political culture as fact — what do all of these deceitful reports have in common? They’re all the by-product of granting anonymity to people and then repeating what they claim as fact, with the falsehood-disseminators protected by “journalists” from any and all accountability for their falsehoods. It’s exactly the same process that caused our leading media outlets to tell Americans about Iraq’s massive WMD program and Al Qaeda connections; Jessica Lynch’s heroic firefight with inhumane Iraqi devils and her “rescue” by our Marines; Pat Tillman’s death at the hands of Al Qaeda monsters; and government tests that “confirmed” the presence of bentonite in the anthrax used to attack the U.S., which meant it was likely that Saddam was behind the attacks.
Unjustified anonymity — especially when mindlessly repeating what shielded government sources claim in secret — is the single greatest enabler of false and deceitful “reporting.” Despite (or, really, because of) its unparalelled record of producing lies, it will never stop, because agreeing to it is how “journalists” end up being selected as favored message-carrying servants for the powerful. This falsehood-producing method isn’t ancillary to American journalism but central to it; the book which is occupying the attention of America’s political and media class is based exclusively on unattributed, shielded sources, and that seems to bother none of them.
None of the falsehoods documented here will ever lead to any accountability, because the identity of the falsehood-producers will be shielded by their loyal journalist-servants, and the journalists themselves will simply claim that they wrote what they did because their hidden sources told them to. That’s not only the effect, but the intent, of the central method of American journalism: to disseminate outright falsehoods to the American public and ensure that neither the liars nor their loyal message-carriers ever face any consequences or even reputational loss. Anonymity is so common that “reporters” barely even bother any longer to explain why it’s justified, notwithstanding numerous policies of media outlets requiring exactly that explanation. As the use of anonymity has escalated rapidly, so, too, has the pervasiveness of outright falsehoods and the inherent unreliability of much of what the American media “reports.” Lying is so much easier — and thus so much more common — when you get to do it while remaining hidden.
…
Two other media points:
(1) I’ve been writing frequently of late about the perception disparities between Americans and the Muslim world due not to their propaganda-based ignorance but to our own. Here’s a somewhat old but highly illustrative example: in 1996, then-Secretary-of-State Madeleine Albright was asked by 60 Minutes about the fact that American sanctions on Iraq resulted in the deaths of “a half million children” — more than the number killed at Hiroshima — and Albright dismissively replied: “We think the price is worth it.” At the time, FAIR documented that while the number of dead Iraqi children — as well as Albright’s quote — was known far and wide in predominantly Muslim countries, it was almost completely blacked-out in the American press. How many Americans know that our sanctions resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children?
(2) Last night, Brian Williams began his NBC News broadcast by expressing extreme and righteous anger over a truly momentous scandal: Mark McGwire’s steriod use, telling his audience: “Because this is a family broadcast, we probably can’t say what we’d like to about the news today.” Wow, scathing. If Williams has expressed even a small inkling of an objection — let alone righteous outrage — over things like torture, lies that led to the Iraq War, chronic surveillance lawbreaking and the like, I’d be quite surprised. Walter Cronkite famously and unusually abandoned precepts of journalistic “objectivity” in order to stand up to the U.S. Government’s lies over the Vietnam War; Brian Williams — who was embedded in the Iraq War and was a reverent commentator regarding everyone involved — does so in order to stand up to a detested, powerless baseball player. In that contrast one finds a nice illustration of what our modern press corps is.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? 
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