House Benghazi Committee Issues Subpoena for Former Clinton Aide Sidney Blumenthal | TheBlaze.com

House Benghazi Committee Issues Subpoena for Former Clinton Aide Sidney Blumenthal | TheBlaze.com:

"In the emails, Blumenthal, who was not a State Department employee, appeared to have passed along intelligence from business associates he was advising.

The emails appeared to have been put under serious consideration by Clinton who passed them along to others, including one recipient who appeared to be ambassador Christopher Stevens."

Watch Live: Sen. Rand Paul Launches ‘Filibuster’ in Protest of Patriot Act Renewal | Video | TheBlaze.com

Watch Live: Sen. Rand Paul Launches ‘Filibuster’ in Protest of Patriot Act Renewal | Video | TheBlaze.com:

"There comes to a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer. That time is now,” Paul said Wednesday. “And I will not let the Patriot Act, the most un-patriotic of acts, go unchallenged.”

He later quoted the Fourth Amendment and argued that the text clearly indicates that warrantless surveillance of Americans under the Patriot Act is unconstitutional. He said that the federal government has essentially asserted that all Americans are under “suspicion” by indiscriminately storing their data."

Double "Doh!"-----Local McDonald's franchise shutters downtown Muskegon location

Local McDonald's franchise shutters downtown Muskegon location | MLive.com:
"Arthur Scott, owner and operator of JAAR, cited several reasons for the closure.
He cited the demise of the region's Summer Celebration festival and Muskegon Bike Time organizers' recent decision to end its signature "Steel Horse Alley" activity nearby and move the event to Great Lakes Downs in Fruitport Charter Township.
Scott said the traffic dynamics in downtown had also changed, with patterns going "around the city versus coming through the city." "It doesn't generate a whole lot of customers down there," he said.
Scott said JAAR saw the opening of the new Muskegon Farmers Market as a "huge opportunity," but was later disappointed upon learning the bazaar featured hot food options.
Whistle Punk Pizza, which recently opened a standalone eatery on Third Street, is among the food vendors and is known to serve a popular breakfast pizza."

Muskegon's historic Amazon apartment building in bankruptcy, stays open

Muskegon's historic Amazon apartment building in bankruptcy, stays open | MLive.com:
"According to a court filing, the Community Foundation for Muskegon County  also holds a "subordinated mortgage" secondary to MTGLQ's.
Of an original April 2001 loan of $475,000 from the foundation, a balance of $466,125 remains, according to the debtor."

Clickbaiting Misinformation: Your Wifi Will Kill You - NOT

Clickbaiting Misinformation: Your Wifi Will Kill You - NOT - Hit & Run : Reason.com:
The New York CBS affiliate is running a story about a woman who hooked up wifi in her apartment and began to have headaches, body flushing, and "brain fog." The story is unfortunately at the top of the Drudge Reporttoday.

The first questions might be why did she wait until 2015 to set up wifi and why has she never apparently experienced symptoms while sipping lattes at Starbucks? 
But never mind. 
In any case, the CBS report goes on to cite electromagnetic hypersensivity "researcher" David Carpenter. From CBS:

Dr. David Carpenter, an Environmental Scientist and expert on wi-fi’s effects said the scientific link between wi-fi and health is clearly emerging.

“There is a body of evidence that is strong. it’s not 100 percent understood, but it’s strong evidence that this is a real syndrome that causes real harm to real people,” he said.

Dr. Carpenter said it’s a significant problem for about 5 percent of the population, many of them have no idea that wi-fi is to blame.

“They walk around feeling ill and they don’t know what to do about it,” he said.

Other doctors counter that the evidence connecting wi-fi to illness just isn’t there.

“It’s a psychological phenomenon,” neuropsychologist Dr. William Barr said.

Dr. Barr said some people may have symptoms, but what causes them is something else altogether. He said the power of suggestion may play a role.

Power of suggestion? 
Well, yes. 
For example, this 2013 study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research reports the amusing results of an experiment in which 150 subjects listened to a TV story about the adverse health effects of wifi. 
The researchers then "exposed" the subjects to a sham wifi signal for 15 minutes.  
More than half the subjects then reported symptoms that they attributed to the sham exposure. 
The higher participants scored on a psychological anxiety scale, the more likely they were to report symptoms....

Beck Says This News Report ‘Must End the Hope of Any Presidency for Hillary Clinton’ | Video | TheBlaze.com

Beck Says This News Report ‘Must End the Hope of Any Presidency for Hillary Clinton’ | Video | TheBlaze.com:

“And the president, standing in front of the UN and lecturing the United States of America about a video,” Beck added in an agonized tone. “It had nothing to do with the video! They were running guns.”
Beck said Hillary Clinton learned from her husband to deny wrongdoing until the people no longer care, but she added an element of indignation to it.
“The fact is we had four dead Americans!” Clinton said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans?”

“Or is it because you were running guns to Syrians against the law?” Beck demanded."

Oregon to Test Pay-per-Mile Idea as Replacement for Gas Tax

Oregon to Test Pay-per-Mile Idea as Replacement for Gas Tax - Breitbart
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Oregon is about to embark on a first-in-the-nation program that aims to charge car owners not for the fuel they use, but for the miles they drive.

The program is meant to help the state raise more revenue to pay for road and bridge projects at a time when money generated from gasoline taxes are declining across the country, in part, because of greater fuel efficiency and the increasing popularity of fuel-efficient, hybrid and electric cars.

Starting July 1, up to 5,000 volunteers in Oregon can sign up to drive with devices that collect data on how much they have driven and where. The volunteers will agree to pay 1.5 cents for each mile traveled on public roads within Oregon, instead of the tax now added when filling up at the pump.

Some electric and hybrid car owners, however, say the new tax would be unfair to them and would discourage purchasing of green vehicles.

“This program targets hybrid and electric vehicles, so it’s discriminatory,” said Patrick Connor, a Beaverton resident who has been driving an electric car since 2007...

Two Kinds of Bribes

Two Kinds of Bribes | The American Spectator
Francis Bacon, the essayist, great philosopher, and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I, when impeached by the House of Commons for taking bribes as a judge, confessed to his crimes but offered this mitigating explanation: “Yes, I took bribes, but I didn’t let them influence my decision.” 

...At this point we need to make a distinction between two kinds of bribes, which may be called (for want of better names) particular bribes and general bribes. 
A particular bribe is the kind described in the immediately preceding paragraph, that is, a particular payment to a government official for a particular favor. 
A general bribe is a gift to a governmental official that lacks the criminal element of specificity. 
You make the gift as an inducement to the official to give you some not-yet-specified favor in the future, or as an appreciation for some not-to-be-mentioned favor the official gave you in the past. 

Hillary and Bill have received tens of millions of dollars of general bribes disguised as “speaking fees.” 
In the history of disguises, a long history (it goes back at least to the time Satan disguised himself as a snake in the Garden of Eden), rarely has a disguise been less likely to deceive anyone. 
You might almost say that these speaking fees were so transparent that they were bribes disguised as bribes.

If Hillary and Bill got paid for their speeches on the basis of merit, those speeches must have been far and away the greatest ever given in the history of speeches.
For they had a far great dollar value than the Funeral Oration of Pericles or Cicero’s anti-Cataline speeches.
The typical Clinton speech, to judge by its dollar value, throws Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural into the shade.

Of course the Clinton bribes are general bribes, not particular bribes. 
They are inducements to Hillary, in the event she becomes president, to serve the not-yet-specified interests of the bribe-givers. 
And since general bribes are not criminal offenses, Hillary and Bill can say there is nothing wrong with taking these bribes — on the theory that anything that is not criminal is morally okay.

Hillary’s defenders can point out that the entire American system of campaign contributions is — at least when the contributions are really big contributions — a system of general bribery.
And so if Hillary is guilty of taking general bribes, so is every other major politician in both political parties.
True enough.
But this argument doesn’t show that Hillary is not corrupt.
It shows that everybody is corrupt.

But the Clinton corruption is far worse than average. 
For one thing, the Clintons get bribed on a bigger scale than everybody else. 
More important, the typical general bribe of an American politician goes into his/her campaign fund. 
The Clinton “speaking fee” bribes go directly into the Clinton personal pockets. 

They make the Clintons part of the “one percent” that Hillary will be campaigning against. It’s as if Henry VIII were to campaign against divorce and over-eating.

Iowa Dems Gush Over Hillary Clinton — but Tone Immediately Changes When Reporter Asks Them for One Accomplishment | Video | TheBlaze.com

Iowa Dems Gush Over Hillary Clinton — but Tone Immediately Changes When Reporter Asks Them for One Accomplishment | Video | TheBlaze.com:

"Bloomberg Politics recently gathered a group of Iowa Democrats to discuss former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s viability as a presidential candidate. The group seemed pretty unanimous that Clinton is Democrats’ best chance to keep the White House in 2016.

However, the tone of the discussion immediately changed when host Mark Halperin asked them to name one thing Clinton accomplished while she was secretary of state."

More Countries Caught Manipulating Their Climate Data

More Countries Caught Manipulating Their Climate Data | The Daily Caller:
"Weather agencies in Australia, Paraguay and Switzerland may be manipulating temperature data to create a sharper warming trend than is present in the raw data — a practice that has come under scrutiny in recent months.
Most recently, Dr. H. Sterling Burnett with the Heartland Institute detailed how the Swiss Meteorological Service adjusted its climate data “to show greater warming than actually measured by its temperature instruments.”
...But even with the data tampering, Sterling noted that “there has been an 18-year-pause in rising temperatures, even with data- tampering.”
“Even with fudged data, governments have been unable to hide the fact winters in Switzerland and in Central Europe have become colder over the past 20 years, defying predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other climate alarmists,” according to Sterling.
The Swiss affair, however, is not the first instance of data “homogenization” catalogued by scientists and researchers who are skeptical of man-made global warming.
In January, skeptic blogger Paul Homewood documented how NASA has “homogenized” temperature data across Paraguay to create a warming trend that doesn’t exist in the raw data.
...Before that, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (ABM) was forced to admit it adjusts temperatures recorded at all weather stations across the country. Aussie journalists had been critical of ABM for being secretive about its data adjustments.
“Almost all the alterations resulted in higher temperatures being reported for the present and lower numbers for the past–with the higher numbers being used to demonstrate a historical warming trend–than the numbers that were actually recorded,” wrote Sterling.
“Downward homogenizations in recent years were rare...

Read of the month! The toughest, smartest man in politics today!----Sheriff Clarke: Attacks On Police Will Result in More Black Crime Victims

Sheriff Clarke: Attacks On Police Will Result in More Black Crime Victims - Right Wisconsin - Conservative politics and perspective powered by Charlie Sykes:
"EDITOR'S NOTE: Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke testified Tuesday before the House Committee on the Judiciary on policing and criminal justice reform.
Clarke's testimony in its entirety is presented below.

"Good morning, Mr. Chair, and Honorable Members of the Committee on the Judiciary. Thank you for the opportunity to state my view, which is backed by 37 years of experience from ground level concerning police accountability, aggression towards police, public safety concerns, and what might be the right thing for us to work on now.

Since the events that led to riots in Ferguson, Missouri, police use of force has become scrutinized nationally. Police use of force should be scrutinized—locally, that is. It should be examined in terms of factual data and circumstances that led to the police action, and not from an emotional foundation of false narratives or catchy slogans like “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” or “No Justice, No Peace” or “Black Lives Matter.” Let’s leave that conduct for the public to engage in, not the mainstream media or those elected officials who can’t resist the opportunity to exploit the emotions of an uninformed or misinformed public simply for political gain.

We will no doubt hear a lot of statistics thrown around today; some distorted to achieve a predetermined agenda. In 2013, the USDOJ under Attorney General Eric Holder did a study in conjunction with the National Institute of Justice on traffic stop data. They found that when you use control factors that statistics and research require for legitimate findings, any racial disparities are attributed to differences in offending. The study showed that Black drivers violated speeding and other traffic laws at much greater rates than whites. That conclusion of this study under the Eric Holder-led USDOJ might be ugly to some, but it is what the data and research found. That same study showed that three out of every four Black drivers said that police had a legitimate reason for stopping them.

The same is true in arrest and incarceration data of African-American males. Participation rates in violent crime explain the disparity of why so many Black males are locked up in prison. Black males are disproportionately involved in violent crime, and this violence is predominantly perpetrated against other Black people. It is not the result of a discriminatory criminal justice system.

Blacks make up 37.5% of the prison population at the state and federal levels. If we released those convicted on drug charges alone the percentage of Black males in prison would drop to 37%, a mere half of one percent. So much for the myth of Black males filling up prisons merely for drug convictions--not to mention that illegal drug use is the scourge of the Black community and leads to a great deal of violent crime....
Read it all!

The government is going to ban trans fats.

The government is going to ban trans fats. | PJ Tatler
The nanny state’s death star agency, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, is getting ready to ban trans fats.

If you enjoy donuts, movie popcorn, pie crust or french fries (to name a few) you’d better movie quickly before the jack boot of government food regulation sucks as much joy as possible from the American food palette.

Writes Politico, “The Obama administration is expected to all but ban trans fat in a final ruling that could drop as soon as next week, killing most uses of an ingredient that has been put in everything from frozen pizza to Reese’s Pieces but since deemed harmful to human health...”

Peter Suderman at Reason sums it up nicely.

The FDA and its supporters argue that trans fat restrictions are necessary as a health measure following a 2013 proposal that trans fats not be “generally recognized as safe.” This is more than a little bit ironic given that for decades, trans fats were pushed by the public health community as a healthier alternative to saturated fats. Indeed, the food industry shifted to trans fats through the 1980s and 1990s in part because of a requirement that food products with saturated fat be labeled—a requirement which, of course, was put in place by the FDA.

At least indirectly, then, FDA food regulations helped make the use of trans fats more common—yet now the agency is trying to ban the same fats its earlier work likely have encouraged. Meanwhile, itincreasingly seems clear that the old public health wisdom about the evils of saturated fats was off-base, and that the once-evil saturated fats aren’t nearly as bad as previously thought...

Liberals Believe You 'MUST be Made' to Obey - Eagle Rising

Liberals Believe You 'MUST be Made' to Obey - Eagle Rising:

"Even so, it’s during those rare moments of candor that our cultural Marxist friends’ rhetoric actually aligns with their intended actions. In other words, every so often, and usually by accident, they tell the truth.

Take this recent declaration by President Obama at Georgetown University. He was discussing his contempt for conservative new media in general and Fox News in particular:

“[W]e’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues,” he said.

How Kim Jong-un of him. In sum: Goal 1) Control thought by, Goal 2) Controlling the media."

The little man is delusional-------Obama's poverty mythology

STEPHEN MOORE: Obama's poverty mythology - Washington Times:
Everything has contributed to our current malaise except for his own failed policies.

Here’s a brief truth squad examination of Mr. Obama’s mythologies and misstatements of fact. 

This was a long speech, so I will just identify as many of the whoppers as space permits.

President Obama: “The stereotype is that you’ve got folks on the left who just want to pour more money into social programs, and don’t care anything about culture or parenting or family structures … .”

After more than $20 trillion spent on the War on Poverty since 1964 (in inflation adjusted dollars), how is it a stereotype to say the left only wants to pour money at programs? 

Just a few weeks ago, the president blamed the Baltimore riots on Republicans for not spending and borrowing even more money for his social programs. 

He sounded like a parody of himself.

If the left really wants to preserve family structure and advance cultural values such as work, why do they oppose reforms to a welfare system that pays teenage girls to have babies out of wedlock and disparage conservative proposals that require able-bodied Americans to work for their welfare benefits like food stamps...?

Read on...

History for May 21

History for May 21 - On-This-Day.com:
Plato 427 B.C., Glenn Hammond Curtiss 1878, Armand Hammer 1898 


Raymond Burr 1917, Andrei Sakharov 1921 - Soviet physicist, he came to be regarded as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Soviet antiwar activist, Mr. T (Lawrence Tero Tureaud) 1952 


1542 - Hernando de Soto died along the Mississippi River while searching for gold. 


1819 - Bicycles were first seen in the U.S. in New York City. They were originally known as "swift walkers." 


1881 - The American branch of the Red Cross was founded by Clara Barton. 


1881 - The United States Lawn Tennis Association was formed in New York City. 


1924 - Fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks was murdered in a "thrill killing" committed by Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb. The killers were students at the University of Chicago. 


1927 - Charles A. Lindberg completed the first solo nonstop airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean. The trip began May 20. 


1956 - The U.S. exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean over Bikini Atoll. 


1968 - The nuclear-powered U.S. submarine Scorpion, with 99 men aboard, was last heard from. The remains of the sub were later found on the ocean floor 400 miles southwest of the Azores. 


1982 - The British landed in the Falkland Islands and fighting began. 

LIBERTY REVIEW

LIBERTY REVIEW:

http://www.libertyreview76.blogspot.com/2015/05/bang-bang-by-tammy-derouin-i-witnessed.html

Bang!  Bang!

By Tammy Derouin

I witnessed something extraordinary on a school playground.  An activity which was once typical child’s play has been banished and is now treated like criminal activity.  I probably spent more time watching and gauging the reaction of parents and wondering when the SWAT team was going to descend from the trees than I spent watching the kids.

The kids were enjoying one of my favorite childhood activities, a game of Good vs. Evil, or as we called it in my day, playing guns.  The “bad guys” have changed but the objective remains the same.  I remember playing Army with the neighborhood kids.  I fought the Nazi’s on the ground and the Commie’s in my fighter plane.  We also played Navy.  One of the neighborhood boys had a basement which was perfect for pretending we were on a submarine.  Yeah, we torpedoed the enemy! No, we didn’t apologize!

In this particular game, Zombies were the enemy.  The kids knew who and what was evil.  They even knew the objective was total elimination.  A familiar sound of chasing and defeating the enemy filled the air. Bang! Bang!  Nerf Guns were the weapon of choice.  Several kids ran around with Nerf Guns and to my pleasant surprise, no one felt the need stop them.  Toy guns weren’t confiscated and no one was suspended.... 

Warning signs in the EU-----HSBC to charge for holding deposits

HSBC to charge for holding deposits - FT.com:
"...The unusual steps come after the European Central Bank became the first big central bank to announce a negative deposit rate — in effect a penalty on banks parking their surplus cash — last year.
Central banks in Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland have also imposed negative policy rates of between minus 0.25 per cent and minus 0.75 per cent as they battle deflation and currency pressures.
HSBC wrote to the banks that will be affected this week and will introduce the negative interest rates on August 1. 
It will not affect the deposits of individual or corporate customers."

88 years ago: Bath (Michigan) School disaster kills 45

88 years ago: Bath School disaster kills 45:
"On May 18, 1927, an explosion ripped through the north wing of the Bath Consolidated School building.
Andrew P. Kehoe, a local farmer and school board member, who was also the school's caretaker, had placed more than 1,000 pounds of dynamite in the school building over a period of months, setting a timer so it would explode when classes were in session.
Kehoe had been angry about property taxes used to fund a new school.
He blamed the tax for his financial hardships and the fact that he had fallen into foreclosure on his farm.
After the explosion, Kehoe drove up and detonated explosives in his truck, killing himself and three adults (the school superintendent, the postmaster and his father-in-law) and a child nearby who had survived the original blast.
Before blowing up the school, Kehoe killed his wife, Nellie, and set off various devices that caused his house and other farm buildings to burn.
The tragedy took 45 lives, 38 of them children, and injured 58 others, according to the Bath School Museum.
Their deaths constitute the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history."