With Wind At Its Back, GOP Expands 2014 Senate Map

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Photo Credit: Chris Schneider/APRepublicans seem to have all the momentum lately when it comes to the battle for control of the U.S. Senate.

GOP chances were already looking brighter because of the drag on Democrats from the Affordable Care Act and President Obama’s low approval ratings. Then came two developments that suddenly expanded the playing field: Former GOP Sen. Scott Brown recently announced his intent to run against New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, and GOP Rep. Cory Gardner jumped in against Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall.

That makes 12 states with competitive races, according to the Cook Political Report’s latest update.

Democratic incumbents currently hold 10 of those seats; three of them are retiring. Republicans need to win a net of just six seats to become the Senate majority.

While their chances of doing that are clearly rising, political consultant Steve McMahon of Purple Strategies cautions against underestimating the advantages of the Democratic incumbents who will be on the ballot in November.

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Texas: More than 100 People Found in Suspected ‘Stash House’

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Photo Credit: Cody Duty/Houston ChronicleThe phone call to police was a plea to help save a family held by smugglers. But when authorities raided the south Harris County home which they believed held the woman and children Wednesday, they found 110 people imprisoned in a packed, rancid “stash house” where smugglers had locked them away pending payment for their freedom.

A tipster had told authorities the night before that he was being extorted by smugglers, and feared for the safety of relatives from Central America. The tipster had said that a coyote drop of the mother, her 7-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son was supposed to have taken place Tuesday on Houston’s north side, but it didn’t happen and they were missing.

Police have not explained what led them to the Almeda School Road house, where they set up surveillance Wednesday morning. At 10 a.m., they stopped two men in a vehicle leaving the house. Three more suspected smugglers were arrested after they tried to flee, Houston Police Department spokesman John Cannon said.

But their biggest discovery came when authorities opened another door to the house, and encountered a “sea of people coming at the officers as they entered,” Cannon said.

Federal agents, along with police, sheriff’s deputies and constables, found them packed into the home, sitting on each others’ laps, hungry, thirsty, and exhausted.

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Hawaii Law Lets Police Have Sex With Prostitutes

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Photo Credit: Oskar Garcia, APHonolulu police officers have urged lawmakers to keep an exemption in state law that allows undercover officers to have sex with prostitutes during investigations, touching off a heated debate.

Authorities say they need the legal protection to catch lawbreakers in the act. Critics, including human trafficking experts and other police, say it’s unnecessary and can further victimize sex workers, many of whom have been forced into the trade.

Police haven’t said how often — or even if — they use the provision. But when they asked legislators to preserve it, they made assurances that internal policies and procedures are in place to prevent officers from taking advantage of it.

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Charlie Rangel: Tea Partiers are ‘Mean, Racist People’ from ‘Slave-Holding States’

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Photo Credit: Talk Radio News Service / Creative CommonsNew York Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel casually dismissed those who identify with the Tea Party as “mean, racist people,” compared red states to the Confederacy and wondered why President Barack Obama would ever try to work with Republicans — all in under two minutes.

Rangel made the remarks during an interview Tuesday night with NY1, when the anchor asked the congressman about a recent deadly explosion in his Harlem district. The congressman strangely blamed Republicans for blocking unnamed federal programs designed to refurbish failing infrastructure in his community.

“This is the president’s program,” he claimed. “It’s hard for me to explain how you work with a president that thought he could really deal with the Republican leadership. He really thought — and maybe it’s the water they drink at Harvard — that he could deal with the Tea Party!”

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Rand Paul Slams Surveillance State: ‘Drunk With Power’

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Photo Credit: Win McNamee/Getty ImagesBy Shane Goldmacher.

Sen. Rand Paul delivered a blistering critique of America’s spy agencies on Wednesday, likening the surveillance state to the “dystopian nightmares” of literature and arguing that a growing number of his colleagues on Capitol Hill now fear an intelligence apparatus that is “drunk with power.”

“If you have a cellphone, you are under surveillance,” Paul warned an auditorium of more than 350 at the University of California at Berkeley, adding, “I believe what you do on your cellphone is none of their damned business.”

He demanded stronger oversight, calling for a new, bipartisan select committee to monitor the nation’s intelligence agencies. “It should watch the watchers,” he said.

Paul said the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency have run amok. The intelligence world, he said, had wrongly interpreted that “equal protection means Americans should be spied upon equally.”

“I oppose this abuse of power with every ounce of energy I have,” Paul declared.

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Photo Credit: Aric Crabb/Bay Area News GroupRand Paul, Republican presidential hopeful, finds support in Berkeley, of all places

By Josh Richman.

Nobody should be surprised that Rand Paul got so warm a welcome Wednesday, even in a city whose name is often preceded in conversation by “The People’s Republic of…”

After all, the junior U.S. Senator from Kentucky and likely contender for 2016’s Republican presidential nomination is following in his father’s footsteps by drawing crowds of enthusiastic young followers, particularly on college campuses, wherever he goes.

And his policies — particularly criticizing government surveillance programs, avoiding military actions that aren’t vital to national security, and rethinking the war on drugs — draw voters from across the spectrum, including some of Berkeley’s famed lefties.

“He’s a serious contender,” said Bruce Cain, a political expert who directs Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West. “He can come to the Bay Area and plausibly look for money, which is not the case with Sarah Palin or some of the other people on the right.”

The younger Paul has found that money at a series of local fundraisers Tuesday and Wednesday, and tapped his young activist base with a speech Wednesday afternoon at UC-Berkeley’s International House.

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CNN: Flight 370 Swallowed by ‘Black Hole’?

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Photo Credit: CNN ScreengrabBy Josh Feldman.

CNN’s Don Lemon has been entertaining all sorts of theories about the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, including the chance something “supernatural” happened, but on Wednesday night, he actually asked panelists about the possibility a black hole was involved.

Lemon brought this up along with other “conspiracy theories” people have been floating on Twitter, including people noting the eerie parallels to Lost and The Twilight Zone, and wondered, “is it preposterous” to consider a black hole as a possibility?

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Top U.S. General: Look For Missing Jet In Pakistan

By WND.

Retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney — the recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, Air Medal with 17 oak-leaf clusters, Distinguished Service Medal and other honors — is suggesting searchers looking for the missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 take a look at possible landing spots in Taliban-controlled Pakistan.

In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, McInerney, now a contributor to the network, said his recommendation was based on information from sources he was unwilling to disclose on television as well as the analysis of an intelligence service called LIGNET.

McInerney said the free world needs to be worried until the location of the jet, which disappeared March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, is determined.

“My concern is if this airplane could be used as a bearer of a weapon of mass destruction or even conventional munitions that could attack a carrier, Israel, our allies,” he said. “We have to be very alert until we know exactly where this airplane is.”

Investigators believe the airplane changed course shortly after takeoff and headed West for as long as seven hours. They are looking into the politics of the pilot, who had a Boeing 777 simulator set up in his own home from which data recently had been deleted.

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Powers: Bad News for Democrats – Millennials Not As Predictable As They Thought

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Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla, Getty ImagesBad news for Democrats: It seems Millennials are special little snowflakes after all.

A new report by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way highlights the political complexity of a generation raised to believe they were utterly unique. When it comes to politics, they do it their way. Which could make the cohort that turned out en masse for President Obama unpredictable as voters.

Third Way focused on how Millennials’ experience as the first generation raised in an information-on-demand culture has shaped them. They are not “adaptors.” They have only known a world full of endless choices, not a life where you make do with what is available.

Third Way reported, “Living in an à la carte world with unlimited options, Millennials don’t feel they have to choose between two limited choices.” For their elders, it was Coke or Pepsi. But Millennials create their perfectly flavored soft drink with a Soda Stream. They design their own shoes on the Internet. They buy just the songs they like.

This creates expectations for politics. Millennials are “less likely to be satisfied with two static choices, and more apt to be swayed to change their tune,” says the report. They “are much more likely to switch the party they support from election to election — even amongst those who claim to ‘lean’ towards one party or another.”

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Financial World Rattled by String of Suicides

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Photo Credit: Shutterstock; Linkedin; Zumapress.comThe financial world has been rattled by a rash of apparent suicides, with some of the best and brightest among the finance workers who have taken their lives since the start of the year.

A majority of the eight suicides of 2014 have been very public demonstrations, which has suicide-prevention experts puzzled.

“Jumping is much less common as a method for suicide in general, so I am struck by the number that have occurred in recent months in this industry,” said Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Moutier also discounts the location of the act as being the driver behind the reason for the suicide.

“The suicide-research literature doesn’t help very much with the question of why the method of these suicides is so out in the open,” she added.

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Insufficient Pipelines Hiked Natural Gas Price

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesNew England’s electric grid operator says a lack of pipelines is driving the price up for natural gas, and hiked wholesale electricity prices in the region by 55 percent last year.

ISO-New England said Tuesday that the average price of wholesale electric energy rose to $56.06 per megawatt hour, up from a historic low of $36.09 in 2012.

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Obama to Hispanics: We Won’t Deport Relatives If You Enroll in ObamaCare

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Photo Credit: Geoff LivingstonPresident Obama on Tuesday sought to assure legal immigrants that they can sign up for ObamaCare without worrying that “the immigration people” will come for family members who are in the country illegally.

In an interview with Univision Deportes, a Spanish-language sports radio show, Obama said immigration officials won’t have access to the personal information that consumers provide when signing up for healthcare on the new exchanges.

“Well, the main thing for people to know is that any information you get, you know, asked with respect to buying insurance, does not have anything to do with … the rules governing immigration,” Obama said. “And you know, you can qualify if you’re a legal resident, if you are … legally present in the United States.

“You know, if you have a family where some people are citizens or legally here, and others are not documented, the immigration people will never get that information.”

Adolf Falcon, the senior vice president of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health, told The Hill that Hispanic families are wary of Obama’s assurances because of his record on deportations.

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