I almost never watch television news, but I listened to the local Fox affiliate the other night.  The lead story, which was pumped with ads during The Big Bang Theory for two nights running, raised the question whether budget cuts had killed a man.  

As best one could tell from the story, there was a young man high on meth, with mental health problems, who attacked the house of his parents and then collapsed unconscious in their front yard.  The question of budget cuts arose because at this hour of the night there were no County deputies on duty.  So police from a neighboring town were called and came.

An ambulance arrived quite quickly, but for reasons not disclosed in the story, the ambulance crew held back waiting for the police, until the scene was "cleared". Any objective reporting of these events would begin with the observation that taking meth can kill you. And any objective reporting of this tale would investigate the bureaucratic procedures that held back the ambulance personnel.

For all we know, the crew sat in their car, radioing to headquarters that they could obviously see that the boy was unconscious, but were refused permission to enter the scene.  This is not a death caused by budget cuts.  The government immediately sent a crew of two (I would assume), who could have assisted the young man.  By all appearances, this case resembles the case where English newspapers recently reported a man had drowned in two or three feet of water in a park pond in plain sight of the rescue workers, because the "health and safety rules" forbid them from entering the water.  But Fox News' spin is we need to raise taxes to send out larger and larger crews of government workers to interact with each other.

This was the local news, but another lead story took place in Ohio.  A young black man reeking of marijuana had fled from the police at a traffic stop.  The state's response? To assault his home with a fully armored SWAT team terrifying all those inside. The man was not there.

The focus of the story was a video showing a Sheriff's deputy playing "patty cakes" to calm down the man's terrified little daughter.  The obvious message: SWAT teams are nice to children.  I rather doubt that this station reported it when a Georgia SWAT team threw a flash grenade into a crib and burned a child's face off.  

It is a staggering waste of money to send fully-armored SWAT teams into circumstances such as these.  We are bringing about a culture of totalitarianism, and Fox and the rest of the media are putting a happy face on it.  And as this culture of totalitarianism bankrupts us all, we will continue to see Fox and the rest of the media selling the great lie that the government needs more of our money.  I'll keep watching the Internet to get my news, and recommend you do too.