‘Coal Rollers’ Protesting EPA Regulations or Just Blowing Smoke?

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Fox News By Fox News Insider.

Some truck owners are steaming mad over President Barack Obama and EPA regulations.

Some of these so-called “coal rollers” are making a political statement, thumbing their noses at the Obama administration’s effort to lower carbon emissions. Others are generally flipping off environmentalists.

These drivers are modifying their diesel trucks by installing a smoke stack to create bursts of black smoke.

Read more from this story HERE.

___________________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: Chris ButlerEPA regs likely to kill 68-year-old Louisiana peach orchard

By Chris Butler.

The peach orchards at Mitcham Farms, near the north Louisiana city of Ruston, have survived winter freezes, droughts and dangerous hail storms, but they evidently will not survive the Environmental Protection Agency and its regulations.

The family-owned business, established in 1946 and featured in tourism magazines, is Louisiana’s largest peach orchard, according to its website, but owner Joe Mitcham expects he’ll close up shop in only a few years.

The federal government’s banning of a chemical in 2005 known as methyl bromide, used to treat diseased peach trees, has really given him no choice, as most of his trees won’t survive without it.

Read more from this story HERE.

___________________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: REUTERSEPA claims it has the power to garnish wages without court approval

By Fox News.

The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly claimed that it has the authority to unilaterally garnish the wages of individuals who have been accused of violating its rules.

According to The Washington Times, the agency announced the plan to enhance its purview last week in a notice in the Federal Register. The notice claimed that federal law allows the EPA to “garnish non-Federal wages to collect delinquent non-tax debts owed the United States without first obtaining a court order.”

The push remains up in the air, however, as the agency says any “adverse comments” would prevent the EPA from moving forward — and some criticism has emerged in recent days.

Absent that, the rule could take effect Sept. 2. The EPA said the rule was not subject to review because it was not a “significant regulatory action.”

The EPA has claimed this new authority by citing the Debt Collection Improvement Act of 1996, which gives all federal agencies the power to conduct administrative wage garnishment, provided that the agency allows for hearings at which debtors can challenge the amount or the terms of a repayment schedule.

Read more from this story HERE.

TheDC Uncovers Another VA Backlog: Months Of Neglected Medical Records

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Daily Caller The Memphis VA Medical Center has yet another medical records backlog, The Daily Caller has learned — this one estimated at three to five months long.

According to the whistleblower, who provided the photo of this second set of medical records piling up at the Memphis VA Medical Center, the individual responsible for scanning in these records is Carnell Clark, an employee at the facility who is currently busy helping to catch up on a backlog TheDC exposed in June.

Sandra Glover, the spokeswoman for the Veteran Integrated Services Network 9, told TheDC the records are for “Intensive Care Unit (ICU) ‘flow sheets,’ also referred to as ‘work sheets,’ which contain real-time vital sign, input/output, and other pertinent information during the time a patient is in the ICU.” Veteran Integrated Services Network 9 includes the Memphis facility.

According to a March 2014 Office of Special Counsel (OSC) complaint filed by another employee of the Memphis VA, the hospital has known about this problem — and an alleged cover-up — since at least that time.

Read more from this story HERE.

IRS Isn’t the Only Government Agency to Destroy a Hard Drive

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: The Daily Signal The way it’s going, government hard drives might be the next protected class under federal law.

Internal Revenue Service hard drives containing two years of emails to and from Lois Lerner, the senior Obama administration official at the heart of the alleged political targeting of conservative nonprofits, have been “recycled” and the contents destroyed. So have six of her colleagues’ hard drives. A U.S. House committee is investigating.

Hard drive shenanigans aren’t just a federal issue.

A Broward County Sheriff’s Office internal affairs audit has revealed information on outgoing Sheriff Al Lamberti’s hard drive was lost after his subordinates destroyed it with a hammer. The audit was first reported by the Sun-Sentinel newspaper.

No motive was given in the report, but public information could have been destroyed. Investigators can’t be sure, but complete backup copies of Lamberti’s hard drive were not located.

Read more from this story HERE.

Fed Up: Anger Rising Across America

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP / Jacquelyn MartinEvery Fourth of July we have a family dinner and take turns reading sections of the Declaration of Independence. When my kids were young they were thoroughly bored. When they were teenagers they rushed through the reading so they could ditch the family and see their friends, who weren’t subjected to such July 4th indignities. But my children are grown now, and this year brought their friends to our family dinner.

We handed out slices of American Flag cake along with copies of the Declaration and commenced reading, going around the table. My children were apprehensive their friends would think their parents were too corny, and their friends looked on politely, but unenthusiastically. The first few lines were familiar to everyone: “When in the Course of human events”…and…. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”

We’re seeing the stirrings of a movement against Washington’s governing elite, an increasingly angry reaction to their abuse of power.

Read beyond those first two paragraphs, though, and you get the long list of grievances the Colonials had against the King. Some of our readers this year were in the military, two were Special Forces guys, just back from some of the fiercest fighting in Afghanistan. The rest were recent college graduates, struggling to find jobs, get apartments they could afford, and payoff college loans.

This year our reading of the Declaration clicked.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s Spiritual Advisor Jim Wallis Goes On Race Rant

/5 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Daily Caller Dr. Jim Wallis has been an icon in the liberal evangelical world for decades, through his political advocacy and as the editor-in-chief of the liberal Christian magazine Sojourners. Currently, in addition to his editorial duties, he is also a spiritual advisor to President Obama, one that visits the White House on a regular basis. The White House visitors log has 65 mentions of a Jim or James Wallis, often marked specifically as a meeting with the President or the First Lady.

So what does this man, who has the ear of the leader of the free world, actually believe? Well on Sunday, June 29, Wallis gave a speech at Wild Goose Festival, a progressive Christian music festival in Hot Springs, North Carolina, entitled, “Racism is America’s Original Sin.” In his speech, Wallis called America a country founded on racism and accused all Americans, especially those who take conservative political stances, of being racists.

Wallis opened with the story of when his son Jack was studying immigration in school. In his role as part of the Soros-funded Evangelical Immigration Table, Wallis has been very active in pushing for immigration reform and a path to citizenship in particular. Wallis was invited to address Jack’s class, during which he told them about the roughly 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

“The kids said, ‘Why don’t they fix this?’” he recalled, “’The Congress, why don’t they fix this?’” Wallis, rather than giving the pros and cons of various immigration proposals, decided in would be easier to slime his opponents as racist in a public school setting.

“‘Well, they say they’re afraid,’” Wallis told the classroom. “And I looked at this class, this fifth grade public school class, and I saw Latinos, African-Americans, Asians-Americans, Native Americas, Samoans, Maltese, Australians, and I looked at them and I said, ‘They’re afraid of you!’”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Unhinged Pro-Abortion Protester Knows Little about Human Biology … Or Criminal Law

/10 Comments/in , /by

Let’s just say that this isn’t going to make Burger King’s rainbow Whopper highlight reel in terms of public relations. A woman wearing her work uniform threatened, attacked, and berated pro-life demonstrators who didn’t appear to be anywhere near a BK outlet in Columbus, Ohio. She started off by loudly insisting that a baby at the 12-week gestational mark has no distinguishing features whatsoever — yelling incoherently about “clump of cells” at one point to the bemused but disciplined young man — and then started kicking signs and shoving protesters, all on camera (warning: language NSFW):

It’s not difficult to catalog the number of potential legal issues that Victoria Duran creates for herself here, or for that matter credibility issues. It’s amusing in one respect to see someone so passionately engaged in exposing her ignorance of human biology while attempting to lecture someone else about it, as well as her ignorance on basic American civics. I’m sure that a few die-hard supporters of Planned Parenthood would applaud the “no uterus, no right to talk about it!” Duran declaration, but as the police must have informed her at the end of this spree, that’s far from the case here in the US.

Read more from this story HERE.

Germany Kicks Out Top US Spy Over Espionage Claims

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: TownHallGermany on Thursday demanded Washington’s top spy in Berlin leave the country as a new round of allegations of U.S. espionage worsened the friction between the two allies.

The immediate trigger was the emergence of two new cases of alleged American spying. They inflamed a furor that erupted last year when it was learned that the U.S. was intercepting Internet traffic in Germany and eavesdropping on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone calls.

More broadly, the move to kick out the CIA station chief appears to reflect a Germany out of patience with what it sees as a pattern of American disrespect and interference.

“The representative of the U.S. intelligence services at the United States Embassy has been asked to leave Germany,” German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement.

“The request occurred against the backdrop of the ongoing investigation by federal prosecutors as well as the questions that were posed months ago about the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies in Germany,” he added. “The government takes the matter very seriously.”

Read more from this story HERE.

WATCH: BBC Admits 'Gaza Under Attack' Images Fabricated

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AFPThe BBC has admitted that pictures of alleged Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and their aftermath may be inaccurate.

A little-known division of the corporation called BBC Trending says that many of images being shared on social media under the #GazaUnderAttack hashtag are in fact several years old, and in some cases from different conflicts.

In one case, a Twitter user posted multiple images with the caption: “This is not a matter of religion. This is a matter of humanity #GazaUnderAttack” – except one of the images was from Syria last month, and another from Baghdad in 2007.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sheriff Feds Releasing Criminals Deported 10-15 Times into Arizona

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: MARK RALSTON / AFP / Getty ImagesOn Tuesday’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on the Fox News Channel, Pinal County, AZ Sheriff Paul Babeu reported that the federal government has released criminal illegal aliens into his community and that his officers have arrested individuals who have already been deported 10 or 15 times. He said “[the federal government] has released dangerous violent criminals right in my county and they refuse to give me the names of these criminals, and that there are “cartel scouts…ushering the drugs through all the way up to Phoenix” within the county. Babeu added, “We have a guy just yesterday we arrested and everyday 10 times deported, 15 times deported, because there are no consequences for breaking the law.”

He also blasted President Barack Obama’s claim that the $3.7 billion the president requested from Congress will help remedy the situation on the border…

Read more from this story HERE.

Hillary Clinton Refuses To Apologize For Laughing About 12-Year-Old Rape Victim She Maligned In Court

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP / Carolyn KasterSeveral weeks ago, the Washington Free Beacon unearthed the following audio of Hillary Clinton discussing a rape case she defended in 1975:

It’s only taken her expert team of PR pros a few weeks to come up with a halfhearted excuse for the Hillary Tapes. Apparently, they just lifted it from her Twitter feed.

Alana Goodman, Washington Free Beacon:

Hillary Clinton weighed in on her 1975 legal defense of an accused child rapist on Saturday, her first comments on the case since it came under scrutiny following a Washington Free Beacon report last month.

Clinton spoke in clinical, legal terms while explaining her defense of the rapist, who Clinton helped to avoid a lengthy prison term by relying on a technicality relating to the chain of evidence of his blood-soaked underwear, as well as arguing at the time that the 12-year-old victim may have exaggerated or encouraged the attack.

Read more from this story HERE.