Over the weekend I watched Earth Days, the PBS documentary by Robert Stone on the history of the environmental movement. The show closes with a discussion with Duke Energy CEO and how environmentalist and they all get along now. Then the folks at Greenpeace sent me the real story.

For most of its history America has had a two party political system. It now appears we also have a two realities system, illustrated by our perceptions and trust of Fox News versus other major media. Democrats and Independents tend to trust versions of the facts other than those presented by Fox News; Republicans tend to trust only Fox News’ version.

CBS/AP has a report on “Occupy the Iowa Caucus,” wondering what kind of influence Occupy had on the Iowa Caucus. The report concludes that while there were “attention-grabbing protests” in the run-up to the Caucus the outcome of the Caucus shows Occupy has not “matured into a political force,” mostly because it doesn’t behave like the Tea Party. So?

From Raw Story and via Gawker, we learn that Mitt Romney wants to commercialize all of PBS, apparently because he doesn’t understand that China holding US debt isn’t about government spending profligacy but is connected to their exchange rate and export policies and our desire to watch football on 60 inch televisions. But never mind that.

There are “three national pastimes” in Washington D.C., Brooks informed us: baseball, apple pie, and Congress raiding the Social Security Trust Fund. And the GOP just didn’t want to let that happen.

Ann Reinking, Donna McKechnie, and Chita Rivera — Let Me Entertain You (Gypsy), from the Emmy award winning PBS special Broadway Sings: The Music of Jule Styne (1987).

It’s interesting to see the 2010 U.S. Census data sliced and diced to get a clearer picture of the changes going on in the U.S. For the fundies who still see Americans as a nuclear family – two opposite-sex married parents with 2.5 kids — they are longing for something that simply doesn’t exist in greater numbers than non-traditional families.

And on the subject of divorce, well, talk about w-r-o-n-g.

Sadly the actions of one person are being used to cast aspersions on the entire Wikileaks organization. CNN is the latest to conflate the man who started the work and the organization itself.

Anyone familiar with the stories of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, the organization’s founder and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower to WikiLeaks, would be forgiven for wondering whether PBS Frontline’s documentary “WikiSecrets” presents anything new or not. The documentary attempts to make a sensational connection between Manning and Assange and suggest that Assange might know Manning is the source of the information.

One entity that has thus far avoided all responsibility for the leak are the folks in charge of the Defense Department’s IT. As I have pointed out, DOD’s network security was embarrassingly bad–worse than your average mid-sized corporation. But to make their negligent security even worse, they had already suffered a damaging compromise of their systems when, in 2008, malware was introduced into their system via removable media, the same means by which Manning is alleged to have downloaded the WikiLeaks cables.