Regarding the links in the article:

First - I admire Winston Churchill - but he was not OUR Prime Minister. I think a bust of Lincoln - who was OUR President should be in the office of OUR President. {Remember - the Churchill bust was loaned - implying that the British wanted it back. It is currently in the British Embassy}

Second - Do we need to have a Federal investigation into recent spell-checker failures (possibly include bills in Congress)??

Third - Having members of Congress (House and Senate) vote on bills sounds like a good idea to me. (sheesh!!)

Fourth - "The Justice Department’s internal watchdog said Thursday that eight current or former officials at one of its divisions steered jobs to children and other relatives, violating laws and regulations that forbid nepotism."

That is why we have watch-dogs. We need watch-dogs keeping an eye on everything - including banks and financial institutions.

This is billed as the FDA now having jurisdiction over an individual's cells. That to say the very cells of every person is now regulated by the Federal Govt. Is this for real, and can I assume the left will be alarmed by this?

http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2012/07/25/u-s-district-court-rules-that-stem-cells-are-drugs/

maphi, thank you. but I prefer to remain skeptical of Govt's intentions. You may have heard that one of the most terrifying sentences ever is "we're from the Govt. and we're here to help".

Regarding the Greenland mess up, I honestly think TRMS’s “retraction” also messed up. Big time.

Here are Ezra’s words on Wednesday:

"Tonight I must give you the unsettling news that now, in our scary hot summer Greenland is suddenly not so reliably frozen... Four days later, another Nasa image shows Greenland's ice sheet all but gone. Only 3 percent of it was still frozen. Almost all of it had melted. It had all melted in four days. "

I grew up in a Cronkite world where a trusted voice would deliver unsettling news to a nation. This world was undermined when I witnessed two events which were both wildly misreported by the local press. It was as if the reporter was talking about some alternate reality. I began to believe that the dominant account, whether in news or any other domain must never be fully trusted, and one must always be acutely aware of dissonant voices whispering an alternate account. We need to be honest with those who regard us as authorities so that they can both know they shouldn't regard us as the Cronkite voice of God, and that we are simply trying to do the best we can but sometimes make mistakes. Others took an alternate view: that the dominant media has a particular bias, and that one should listen only to news sources that confirm your preconceptions. That may make for religious FOX and MSNBC viewers, but it does not make for good citizenship. I groaned when I listened to Klein present the Nasa images. Part of it offended a peave of mine- because prior to airing, Bennen’s MaddowBlog thread on this had multiple voices pointing out the misimpression of some contributors that the entire ice sheet had melted, correctly pointing out the absurdity. I felt extremely embarrassed for TRMS that at least 3 very smart people, Klein, exec producer Bill Wolff and whichever producer wrote the copy had to be so estranged from reality that they could think a glacier could melt in 4 days. I expected a massive apology proportionate to how boldly ridiculous Klein’s error was. This is not like O'Reilly making a gaffe stating the Colorado shooter bought 60,000 and not the widely reported 6000 rounds of ammo. All O'Reilly did was demonstrate he didn't pay much attention to the news to get the feeling something was off about the number, and that he should verify it with one of the news experts in the building. What these 3 bright TRMS folks did was demonstrate they easily succumbed to confirmation bias. Further, TRMS did not have the integrity to take personal responsibility, acknowledge the gravity of the error, or offer an apology.

Instead, Ezra's "retraction" last night stated "We mistakenly said the images showed..." Really? Is this the Cronkite royal “We”? Pardon my impertinence, but where does the buck stop with words that come out of your mouth? Face it. This "we mistakenly said" nonsense seeks to deflect responsibility and are BS chickensh*t weasel words.

No Ezra. The statement to make was: "I mistakenly said".

More importantly, here is something I really wold have like to have heard:

"I grew up in a suburb of Irvine California and have no intuitive grasp of what a glacier is. I and the people reviewing the copy of this story had no knowledge or experience that would suggest to us that there was something wrong with the idea that a glacier, could melt in 4 days. And this is not just a glacier. If I had a broader knowledge of the threat of the melting icesheets I would had some better feel for the massiveness of the Greenland sheet- it averages 2 kilometers in thickness. I'm spending time on this not just because of a blind spot of non scientists or people in the city with little experience of real glaciers.

I think we need to look at it because in microcosm, this reveals a problem with how we can take snippets of information and hear what we want to hear. It is how people can honestly hear the President say that business owners did not build their businesses: For example, the BBC and NPR articles on this clearly introduce their stories by stating they are talking about surface ice. NPR lead in:

"In July, the surface of Greenland's ice sheet melted at an unusually fast rate. In the span of four days, an estimated 97 percent of the ice disappeared." (source)

Take the second sentence and "the ice" is taken to be all Greenland ice rather than the intended referent in the first sentence, which is just "surface ice". From the president's statement, a Right winger can listen to the whole segment and think "you didn't build that" refers to "your business", and not the intended "roads and bridges". Careful reading of the NPR, BBS story, or the President's statement would reveal what the speaker's actual meaning was.

And that is our problem. We are too quick to accumulate information that confirms our preconceptions, rather than make an honest empirical attempt to understand the uniqueness of what is being told us. For people accustomed to a glut of information, we tend to gloss over what often is repetitious information telling us the identical message. The truth is, large segments of the American population feel the same way about information overload. In our minds, we have a picture of a Necker cube of society's problems. Progressives see the threat of climate change, the Right sees a hoax to promote a enviro socialist big government attack on core US industries.

We decry the sloppy thinking of Right wingers and wonder why BS detectors do not go off in their heads. It's partly because they have blind spots- they don't have an intuitive grasp of what it means to be on the receiving end of gun violence, on the receiving end of the foreclosure crisis, on the receiving end of "job displacement."

So they hear what the President says, and receive the one interpretation of the necker cube words which confirms their bias: that this is just another black man making an argument for the entitlement society and how business owners are their oppressors.

When we are not on the receiving end of some dominant delusion- say of 'trickle down economics', we can look at the same data and see the world as one can view a 'Necker cube'. We commonly make fun of people at Fox and Friends and wonder at how they can participate in what to us appears to be a willful distortion of reality and rejection of a mountain of facts contradicting their point of view. It looks very different when data appears to confirm biases one holds, and the big trouble comes when that confirmation bias distorts your integrity as an honest seeker of truth. This has to do with what we do with voices in our mind that suggest not self doubt, but an alternate view of what the lines of the Necker cube are really telling us. If we receive further confirmation from other media sources, we shut down our skepticism. As an analyst on Wednesday, I did not listen to those voices, and in my rush to to a great job in Rachel's place I failed to live up to the standards I have for myself, and I apologize."

Willard Romney's priorities are very screwed up if his big goal is to get back Winston Churchill's bust in the Oval Office. Not that #44's priorities are really any better.

And by the way, one could make a very good case that Winston Churchill was one of the people who provided fuel for the fire triggering the market crash of 1929.

He was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920's. England's currency was too strong for his taste (he blamed it on the pound being restored to is pre-war gold value). When a currency is "too strong" it makes the goods from that country more difficult to compete with those of other nations, as the conventional wisdom goes. Anyway it was pressure from Churchill and England on the US to lower its interest rates, which could have been a factor in fueling speculation in the markets.

Churchill was actually visiting the US at the time of the 1929 crash (he was no longer head of the exchequer then) and witnessed firsthand the mayhem in the NYSE on Thursday, October 24 as a visitor. Viewing the consequences of his handiwork, perhaps?

How about a contrast between the eulogies given by Romney and Obama about Sally Ride, and the way her partner of 27 years has been denied the death benefit she would have received had Ride been a male astronaut. This story fell by the wayside in the shadow of the Colorado shooting.

This hopefully will be corrected in today's show, looking back on the news of the week and giving some appropriate air time to how the US government treats this American hero.

Romney on one hand salutes Ride's achievements and how she inspired children, but stands firm in support of DOMA which treats same sex partners as second class citizens. It's hypocrisy typical of Romney World.

Obama does not escape this spotlight- while many benefits to federal employees have been extended to same sex partners, this does not include the death benefit.