I don’t even watch CNN, not on purpose, but I often flip by them when I’m channel surfing.  Sometimes I’ll even click on them deliberately just to see what kind of b.s. they’re peddling.   And I admit I have hated them with a passion for years now, ever since I used to trade e-mails with their news head, and he would actually write me back, and he’d try to convince me that they weren’t really that biased, and then he got sacked for not being biased ENOUGH.   I think his name was Jordan Eason or Eason Jordan, I can’t remember.   He actually had the temerity to claim that Wolf Blitzer wasn’t biased.  Ha!  

They jumped the shark a long time ago.

But if there’s a term for jumping the shark AGAIN, I think it would apply to CNN these days.   The Second Jumping of the Shark, or perhaps the Jumping of the Whale.

Every time I flip by there, it’s pure “TERROR!” and nothing else, 24/7, over and over.  

I’m confused.   Some patsy tried to set his balls on fire on an airplane and it’s an international crisis?    Wow.   Are people really buying this crap these days?   Haven’t they wised up?

I mean, just today they had an Elephant in the Room situation where it was revealed that the father of the “terrorist” talked with the CIA about his son not too long ago.   I mean, he MET with the CIA.    

Then, right on schedule, the guy is helped onto an airplane by a well-dressed man in Amsterdam, because he doesn’t have a passport and somehow he convinces an international air carrier to let a guy onto an international flight without a passport?   And the guy by some just WHACKY coincidence isn’t on the “no fly” list even though we have nuns and thousands of people who have no business being on it — hell, Ted Kennedy was on it — and now they’re trying to come up with all KINDS of excuses as to why this guy wasn’t on the no-fly list …..

But what I always try to look at during times like this is this:

What news stories are NOT being reported right now?  

Because this is how they “cover stuff up”.   They find another story that’s just SOOO fascinating and they have to spend SOOOO much time on that they (gosh!) just don’t have time to report other stories.  

Anyway, I have a couple of candidates.   Please feel free to add your own.

1.   Official: U.S. intelligence found Iran nuke document was forged

WASHINGTON, Dec 28 (IPS) – U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a “neutron initiator” for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Oops.  Yeah, we sure wouldn’t want the U.S. population to know about this, because next month we might want to ramp up the hatred against Iran again, it might be a timely thing to do, and we sure wouldn’t want them remembering this, now, would we?

2.  Treasury Okays Unlimited Slush Fund For Fannie, Freddie

Forget raising the cap to $800 billion for Fannie/Freddie.  They announce (on Christmas eve no less) that the slush fund for picking up toxic mortgage is unlimited:

Treasury uncaps credit line for Fannie, Freddie

The Obama administration pledged on Thursday to back beleaguered mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, no matter how big their losses may be in the next three years.

It also jettisoned a demand that the two companies cut the size of their mortgage-related investment portfolios next year, allowing them to provide even more support in the near term for a housing market recovering from its worst slump in decades.

Wow!   Now if the majority of the American people actually knew about both of these, they might be a little angry, and justifiably so.

But you gotta wonder what other pockets are being picked while the “news” channels are on this 24/7 “TERRORGASM”.

In yet another example of unbelievable douchebaggery, our favorite Senator Joe Lieberman has decided, based on some guy trying to set his underwear on fire on a flight to Detroit, that we need to go to war with Yemen.

“Somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, Iraq was yesterday’s war,” Lieberman explained. “Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war. That’s the danger we face.”

Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA), also appearing on the program, seemed to agree, calling an attack against Yemen “something we should consider.”

What these two double-douchebags fail to mention is that we’ve already attacked Yemen.

Do they really think we’re that stupid?   I guess if you’re appearing on Fox, you can assume your audience IS that stupid, but c’mon.    Just a few days ago we sent Tomahawk missiles into Yemen, slaughtering dozens of civilians.  We also signed off on Saudi air strikes that had the same result — a slaughtering of civilians.

So yeah, let’s just ignore that for the time being, and maybe we can somehow retroactively justify something we’ve actually already done, based on some extremely flimsy evidence about this guy who tried to set his nutsack on fire on an airplane.   Flimsy evidence?  How can that be?   Why would CNN be reporting on this 24/7 with it’s “Fear! Fear! Fear!” tactics if the evidence was flimy?   Yemen is the enemy damnit!    I heard it on TV!

Well, check this out from Chris Floyd:

Wow, that didn’t take long at all. Scant days after the American war machine took the cloaking device off its direct military involvement in Yemen, we have an alleged attempted terrorist attack by an alleged attempted terrorist who, just scant hours after his capture, has allegedly confessed to getting his alleged attempted terrorist material from … wait for it … Yemen!

Yemen-trained terrorists on the loose in American airplanes! At Christmas! Great googily moogily! It’s a good thing our boys are on the case over there right now, pounding the holy hell outta some of them Al Qaeder ragheads! And to think, a few pipsqueaky fifth columnists had been starting to wonder why we were killing dozens of innocent civilians on behalf of an authoritarian regime embroiled in a three-way civil war on the other side of the world.

(snip)

And it must be true, right? I mean, just look at how well-sourced the NYT story is. “A law enforcement official” — Police captain? State trooper? G-Man? Traffic cop? — said that the alleged attempted terrorist said he’d got his “explosive chemicals” from Yemen. (Elsewhere in the paper, other unnamed officials told NYT reporters that the alleged material strapped to the alleged attempted terrorist was “incendiary,” not explosive. But who cares? “Bomb, Terror, Yemen!”)

Of course, the NYT noted that “authorities have not independently corroborated the Yemen connection claimed by the suspect” (nor, they could have added, have they independently corroborated that the claim was actually made), but still, the completely anonymous “law enforcement official” said that the suspect’s claim “was plausible,” and even added: “I see no reason to discount it.”

Well, it doesn’t get more solid than that, does it? They nailed that story down so tight you couldn’t pry it open with God’s own crowbar. An anonymous source confirmed the plausibility of his own claim.   Man, that’s ironclad. It’s certainly good enough to light up the media firmament with headlines linking “terror in the Heartland” with the empire’s newest killing field in a volatile foreign land.

So yeah, with that kind of evidence, let’s go bomb a new country!   Oh, wait, we already have.   Shhh!

While we were all shopping and arguing over whether or not fruitcake is fit for human consumption, Obama decided to go to bat and fight for someone.   Who was he fighting for?   The torturers of the Bush administration, that’s who.   Oh, and anyone else in the United States government who wants to torture and violate the human rights of others.

As Chris Floyd reports, The United States is now legally free to torture whomever it wants, thanks to the Supreme Court of the land, and the political power weilded by Barrack Hussein Obama.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here’s how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.”  They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

And people wonder what this “hatred” is towards Obama.   “I didn’t get my pony?” they ask?   Ha.  They have no idea.   I hate Obama for the same reasons I hate Bush.  Why?  Because Obama IS Bush.   His administration is one and the same as the Bush administration, and I mean that quite literally when it comes to justice, human rights, and the wars.    ALL THE SAME PEOPLE are running the show, and we know that Bush’s Justice Department is a bunch of corrupt, human rights-violating  flunkies recruited from the ranks of the “religious right”.    And they are still in office, fighting for their hatreds

Now Obama is not just passively letting these people continue the Bush/Cheney yearas, he is going out of his way to enable  them.  

He is putting his name to the most egregious violations of human rights in this nation’s history.  

What’s really pathological is that he is shitting on the very system that freed African American people, of which he is a gene-carrying member.  

More from antiwar.com:

US: Guantanamo Prisoners Not ‘Persons’

by William Fisher,

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that “torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use.”

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., had ruled that government officials were immune from suit because at that time it was unclear whether abusing prisoners at Guantanamo was illegal.

Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

Ironically, the first African American president is promoting a policy frighteningly familiar to the Dred Scott decision of yesteryear:

“Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not ‘persons’ within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow,” he added.

The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants – whether or not they were slaves – were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.

Thanks, Obama.   Next time someone calls you an “Uncle Tom” I simply won’t cringe.  I might even nod.   I might even say “hell yeah.”

You may have seen this already, if you subscribe to Alternet, but in case you haven’t, there’s a very heart warming holiday story about the 10 greediest people in America.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it.   Why raise the blood pressure, why feel bad if I don’t have to?   Can’t I just ignore this, since I’m powerless to do anything about it anyway?

Well, then I read it.  I’m a glutton, right?    And what surprised me about this, this list of piggish financial gluttony, is not just how it even surpassed my expectations as to what greedy corporate assholes these people are, it’s the fact that I hadn’t really heard of any of them.

I pride myself on being pretty well informed, although I don’t go into too many details, especially those of business, it’s just to mind-numbing to dive into that world.   I like to sit back and look at the big picture.   So many that’s why I didn’t recognize hardly any of these people.

Or maybe there’s just so damn many of them, and so many of them are flying under the radar, that most of us still have no idea how we’re being robbed, constantly, and by how many robbers.

In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. “We’d glue the eyelid shut,” he said. “We wouldn’t take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids.”,

I’m not one of those who buys into the “blowback” theories about terrorism, especially of the sophisticated Psyops events like 9/11.  

However, people all around the world, especially in the Arab world, hate us, and they hate us for a lot of good reasons.

One of the biggest reasons they hate us is for our unequivocal support of the war criminal state of Israel.   It doesn’t matter how atrocious the atrocities committed, the U.S. goes out of its way to support anything Israel does.    That last attack in Gaza was particularly criminal and brazen, and our “esteemed” low-lives in our U.S. Congress decided to actually pass a resolution praising Israel’s crimes then.     The vote was 390 to 5.  

But that’s just politics, right?   That’s just your basic warfare stuff, happens all the time, there will always be wars and rumors of war like the bible says, right?   Okay, sure.   You can set all that aside and just take a look at this:

Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs

For the first time, Israel has tacitly admitted stealing Palestinian body parts for transplant in Jewish patients, vindicating accusations leveled by Palestinians and rights groups over the past years.”We started to harvest corneas…whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family,” pathologist Yehuda Hiss, the former head of the Abu Akbar  Center, also known as the L. Greenberg Institute for Forensic Medicine, told Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, now a professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, in a documentary aired by the Israeli Channel Two.

The documentary revealed that in the 1990s, forensic specialists harvested corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

Israel has also been accused of deliberately killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs.

Other body parts believed to have been harvested from deceased Palestinians and others included heart arteries, bones and corneal tissues.

“The skins were taken from the bodies and transmitted to Hadasah hospital in West Jerusalem on the request of the Israeli army to be transplanted to wounded soldiers and in case of disaster,” said Hiss.

Hiss revealed that in the early 1990s, military surgeons began removing a thin layer of skin from bodies to treat burn victims, which he said was done without family consent.

Hughes reportedly decided to publish the interview, recorded in 2000 as part of her studies at the Israeli forensic institute, after a leading Swedish daily reported in August that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians to trade in their organs.

A Swedish journalist revealed earlier this year that Israeli doctors at the Abu Akbar forensic institute had been harvesting organs from Palestinians killed by the Israeli army.

And this isn’t like a one-time thing.  Check this out:

40 years after Israel’s first transplant, donor’s family says his heart was stolen

When Avraham’s brother asked to see the body, the hospital refused. However, he insisted and the doctors finally gave in. The body was completely covered in bandages, “which didn’t jive with a stroke, so he unwrapped the bandages, and was shocked to see the upper body empty: Instead of internal organs, there were bandages that had been stuffed inside to fill the space,” Ofra said.

“They treated him like an alley cat,” she said tearfully. “From the moment he entered the hospital, they apparently saw him only as a potential source of organs and not as a man in need of treatment. They only thought about how to do the deed without us knowing.”

It took a few hours before the family connected the state of the body with the historic transplant. Then, they began asking questions – but the hospital insisted that Sadegat’s heart had not been used.

The family then applied to three cabinet ministers, demanding to know why the heart had been taken without their consent. They did not ask for compensation; they simply wanted to know the truth.

The affair aroused a media storm, but the hospital continued to stick to its denial. Only weeks later did it finally give in and admit that Sadegat’s heart had been used. But it made this admission only after the family signed a document promising not to sue.

And then, of course, there are little things like this: