Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Friday, April 07, 2006

And the walls come a tumblin' down

Bill Blakemore at ABC News notes that the corporate media have finally gotten around to teling us that, yes, global warming is real, it's caused by humans, and it's a big problem. He notes that this same corporate media has spent the last couple of decades telling us that the whole subject was controversial and did not represent a scientific consensus, because they were happily bamboozled by a disinformation campaign run by the oil companies. And oh yeah, GW Bush and the administration were co-bamboozlers.

Major corporate media reported on the discovery of the fossil of a transitional creature between fish and amphibians, and just flat out said that it was over 300 million years old and enhanced our understanding of the evolution of tetrapods. Yeah, they featured rebuttals from creationists, which is kind of like giving equal time to the flat earth society every time there's a satellite launch, but they made it pretty clear who was full of oats processed through a horse on this one.

We've had plenty of coverage of regulatory agencies failing to protect the public because they are beholden to industry -- the EPA in the case of arsenic and mercury, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the case of nuclear power plant security being two recent examples.

Career civil servants in the Department of Justice are ripping the K Street project to shreds along with the Republican one-party state, and reporters are actually covering the story, so Gonzales can't do anything about it, at least he hasn't so far, as far as we can tell.

Poor Scottie is getting the crap beat out of him every day over illegal surveillance and lying about it, those historic lies about the imminent threat from Saddam's Iraq, the manipulative leaks of classified information, and all that sordid stuff.

A good part of the talking headocracy, for reasons which are not entirely clear, continues to serve as the Office of the Imperial Panegyrist, and editors still don't want us to really understand what is happening in Iraq, but one gets the impression that reporters at least, as a class, are actually starting to do their jobs. Why now, and not last year, and especially why not in 2004? Who knows. It's too little, too late, but we'll take it.

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