Behind the Cornucopia of Higher Food Prices

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Photo Credit: CNBC

Photo Credit: CNBC

Alert shoppers are accustomed to watching food prices go up and down. But a string of forces—from droughts to diseases—is raising the cost of a trip to the grocery store at a rapid clip.

And it looks like it will be a while before the price pressure eases.

Some of that pressure is coming from California—the source of roughly half the nation’s fruits and vegetables—where a long-running drought is forcing farmers and ranchers to cut production. After the driest year on record, large sections of farmland are expected to lay fallow this year as the Golden State copes with an ongoing water crisis

That could have “large and lasting effects on fruit, vegetable, dairy and egg prices,” according to a recent USDA report, which said the full impact has yet to be felt.

Smaller cattle herds have forced meat prices higher in March—up more than 5 percent from a year ago, as demand remained strong despite tightener supplies. Ranchers are getting higher prices for cattle and food companies are able to pass them along.

Read more from this story HERE.

Franklin Graham: Muslims Who ‘Want to Practice Sharia Law’ Should ‘Go Back Where You Came From’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

“We should be afraid of sharia law” in America, and Muslims here who want to practice sharia should go back to where they came from, “to those nations that recognize sharia law,” said Rev. Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

In a recent interview with the Charlotte Observer, Graham was asked, “Some say you demonize Islam, and Christians in this country have opposed building a mosque or are worried about Sharia law. Isn’t it –”

Graham, who oversees the international Christian aid group Samaritan’s Purse, said, “We should be afraid of Sharia law. We should be absolutely afraid of it. No question about it, because there’s no tolerance in Sharia law. It persecutes those that do not believe in Islam.”

“And I would say to Muslims in this country, if they want to practice Sharia law, go back to where you came from, to those nations that recognize sharia law,” said Graham. “But we have our own laws here.”

Sharia law is the law of Islam, governing public life as well as private life. “Also meaning ‘path’ in Arabic, sharia guides all aspects of Muslim life, including daily routines, familial and religious obligations, and financial dealings,” states a backgrounder on sharia published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “Marriage and divorce are the most significant aspects of sharia, but criminal law is the most controversial.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Miller Slams ‘Reckless and Irresponsible’ BLM

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Photo Credit: Natural News

Photo Credit: Natural News

Joe Miller today spoke out on the recent standoff between Bureau of Land Management officials and ranchers over disputed land in Nevada.

“The Bureau’s actions were reckless and irresponsible,” Miller said. “Lives could have been lost. There is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and federal agents “gunning up” against otherwise law-abiding citizens and depriving them of their First Amendment Rights isn’t just wrong, it’s unAmerican.”

Miller further pointed out that the Bundy case raises deeper concerns about the 10th Amendment and State jurisdiction. He has long been an advocate of Constitutional limits on the federal government, and of returning power to the states. He believes the best future for our state is Alaskan control of Alaska’s land and resources.

“What we saw in Nevada was the ugly underbelly of a federal government that has gone too far. It’s time for Alaska to assert its prerogatives under the 10th Amendment,” Miller said. “What I don’t understand is the deafening silence from our Congressional delegation on this case, especially in light of the BLM’s role in overseeing 87 million acres in Alaska and the recent federal raids on gold miners near Chicken.”

Joe Miller is a husband, father, combat veteran, and advocate of Constitutional liberty who believes in individual rights, private property, free markets and the sanctity of human life.

Thomas Jefferson Was Right

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Picture - Thomas JeffersonI was honored to receive the endorsement of Alaska Right to Life this past week.

Government has been given a sacred trust to protect life, especially the lives of the innocent and most vulnerable among us. This trust is recognized in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

In announcing the group’s endorsement, Alaska Right to Life stated, “The pro-life position Joe Miller takes isn’t merely a common political platitude, but is centered in the core of who he is. Joe will be a champion for the pro-life cause in Washington and is exactly the caliber of man we need representing Alaska in the US Senate.”

This much I pledge to you, on the first day that I am sworn in as Alaska’s next senator, I will co-sponsor Senator Rand Paul’s Life at Conception Act. Science now matches what faith has taught us for thousands of years: life begins when we are knit together in the womb.

Alaska is long overdue for representation in the United States Senate that respects life. Mark Begich has been a rubber stamp for Barack Obama’s radical judicial nominees and voted with Harry Reid for the so-called “nuclear option,” which allows the most anti-life President in American history to continue to pack the federal bench with judges who have no regard for the life of the unborn.

One of Begich’s first “yes” votes following the nuclear option last fall was to confirm Nina Pillard to the DC Circuit Court in a 51-44 middle of the night disgrace. Pillard wrote concerning abortion, “Casting reproductive rights in terms of equality holds promise to re-center the debate…away from the deceptive images of fetus-as-autonomous-being that the anti-choice movement has popularized…”

Begich also voted for New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen’s amendment last year upholding the ObamaCare HHS contraception mandate. This onerous regulation requires businesses to provide coverage that includes abortion inducing drugs, regardless of deeply held religious convictions.

Over 56 million babies have been aborted since the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe vs. Wade in 1973. Last year in Alaska alone, approximately fourteen hundred were denied the opportunity to take their first breath and become the people they were created to be. This national tragedy must end.

The words of Thomas Jefferson ring through time: “the God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

On this special weekend, when we remember the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, may we all be renewed to do our part to allow His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

God bless you and yours this Easter!

Harry Reid’s View on Terrorists Explained in One Cartoon

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TP-terrorist-590-CI
Photo Credit: Political cartoonist A.F. Branco

As an American who believes vehemently in our Constitution, free speech and free political discourse I find Reid’s comments both ridiculous and hurtful.

Read more from this story HERE.

Barack Obama and the Politics of Lies

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Washington Examiner Editorial.

That was quite a victory dance President Obama did Thursday while claiming Obamacare is “working” because eight million people have now supposedly signed up for the health care program. He even indulged in some less-than-subtle mockery of Republicans – and by extension the majority of Americans who have disapproved of Obamacare since before it became law. “The repeal debate is and should be over,” Obama said, taking a dig at Republicans who are “going through, you know, the stages of grief … anger and denial and all that stuff …”

But a president who is viewed by most Americans as less than honest has no business crowing about a victory that remains anything but obvious. And he certainly should not heap insults on people who for four years have profoundly disagreed with him on the wisdom of Obamacare. To put this as “less than honest” is to be charitable. What Fox News found in its most recent public opinion survey was that 61 percent of Americans believe Obama “lies” about important public issues either “most of the time” or “some of the time.” No other president in living memory has conducted himself in a manner that warranted even asking if such a description was appropriate.

It comes as no surprise today that Obama’s defenders are sparing no invective for Fox News in the wake of that survey. But it was the president, not Fox News, who repeatedly and knowingly misled the American people with two infamous Obamacare lies: “You can keep your health insurance if you like it. Period. You can keep your doctor. Period.” For better or worse, Obama will forever be known as the president who chose repeatedly to propagate two falsehoods. Those two lies were profoundly significant because they were designed to hide the truth about how Obamacare would affect the daily lives and health of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Dems’ 2014 challenge: How to win when Americans see a liar in the White House

By Mark Tapscott.

Timing is everything in politics and the latest Fox News poll suggests the timing of the 2014 midterm election could not be worse for President Obama and his fellow Democrats.

With public approval of Congress in the single digits, senators and representatives in both parties may face the most challenging political environment of their careers.

But the Fox survey makes clear that things aren’t breaking well for Obama, either, and his popularity rating may be the most important factor in determining how Democrats fare in November.

Liar, liar, pants on fire

Presidents have been unpopular before. Harry Truman’s approval rating sank to 23 percent at one point and Richard Nixon was so unpopular that he became the first chief executive ever to resign.

Read more from this story HERE.

Ben Carson: White House Wanted Apology for ‘Offending’ Obama (+video)

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Photo Credit: The Daily Caller / Grae Stafford

Photo Credit: The Daily Caller / Grae Stafford

Neurosurgeon Ben Carson says the White House wanted him to apologize for “offending” President Obama after he famously delivered a conservative message at the National Prayer Breakfast last year.

Carson, the former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, recalls the events surrounding his 2013 speech in his new book, One Nation: What We Can All Do To Save America’s Future. The Daily Caller obtained an advance copy of the book, which is set for release May 20.

“He did not appear to be hostile or angry,” Carson writes of Obama, “but within a matter of minutes after the conclusion of the program, I received a call from some of the prayer breakfast organizers saying that the White House was upset and requesting that I call the president and apologize for offending him. I said that I did not think that he was offended and that I didn’t think that such a call was warranted.”

Conservatives rallied around Carson last year after his remarks, made from a podium as Obama sat just feet away. In his speech, he railed against “political correctness” and offered specific ideas for health care reform.

Read more from this story HERE.

EPA’s Secret Gas Chamber Experiments: A Deceitful Failure

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Photo Credit: Thinkstock

Photo Credit: Thinkstock

A man — we’ll call him “Subject No. 1” — had a clear plastic pipe stuck into his mouth with his lips sealed around it, while the diesel exhaust from a parked truck outside the gas chamber was mixed with particulate matter and pumped straight into his lungs. The pumped mixture level was 135 times the mean diesel truck emissions exposure in the United States.

Scientists Andrew Ghio, Jon Sobus, Joachim Pleil and Michael Madden, with laboratory director Wayne Cascio, administered this toxic mix of diesel and particulate matter to 41 people. In all, they gassed 81 subjects with various mixes of diesel, particulate and ozone in five different experiments — tagged with the science fiction-like names Omegacon, Xcon, Kingcon, Depoz and Lamarck.

No, these are not mad scientists from some 1930s D-list horror movie; they’re employees of the Environmental Protection Agency who used human subjects in an air pollution test chamber at the EPA’s Human Studies Facility in Chapel Hill, N.C., in 2010 and 2011.

The consent form that volunteers signed for the Omegacon cocktail pumped into Subject No. 1 lacked the warning that particulate exposure can cause death in older people with cardiovascular disease. EPA accepted a 58-year old woman with Stage 1 hypertension, premature atrial contractions, osteoarthritis, gall bladder removal and a family history of heart disease. EPA’s scientists were humane enough to turn off the gas when she suffered atrial fibrillation, and hospitalized her overnight for observation.

The quintet of EPA gas chamber experimenters were producing risk assessment studies ordered by then-agency head Lisa Jackson to justify the Obama administration’s push for crushing new clean air regulations, which they claimed would prevent tens of thousands of premature deaths each year by reducing emissions.

Read more from this story HERE.

EPA Concedes: We Can’t Produce All the Data Justifying Clean Air Rules

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Photo Credit: CNSNews.com / Penny Starr

Photo Credit: CNSNews.com / Penny Starr

Seven months after being subpoenaed by Congress, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy conceded that her agency does not have – and cannot produce – all of the scientific data used for decades to justify numerous rules and regulations under the Clean Air Act.

In a March 7th letter to House Science, Space and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), McCarthy admitted that EPA cannot produce all of the original data from the 1993 Harvard Six Cities Study (HSC) and the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) 1995 Cancer Prevention Study II, which is currently housed at New York University.

Both studies concluded that fine airborne particles measuring 2.5 micrograms or less (PM2.5) – 1/30th the diameter of a human hair – are killing thousands of Americans every year.

These epidemiological studies are cited by EPA as the scientific foundation for clean air regulations that restrict particulate emissions from vehicles, power plants and factories.

The agency has recently come under fire for exposing volunteers to concentrated levels of particulate matter without informing them of the risks, a practice Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, called “despicable.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Medicaid Paid $12 Million for Deceased People in Illinois

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Photo Credit: Ano Lobb

Photo Credit: Ano Lobb

The Illinois Medicaid program paid an estimated $12 million for medical services for people listed as deceased in other state records, according to an internal state government memo.

The memo dated Friday, which The Associated Press obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, says the state auditor compared clients enrolled in the Medicaid database last June with state death records dating back to 1970. Auditors identified overpayments for services to roughly 2,900 people after the date of their deaths.

The heads of the departments of Healthcare and Family Services and Human Services, the two state agencies involved with Medicaid payments, outline steps to fix the problem in the memo to their senior staffs.

The memo states that more than $7 million has been recovered and the rest is expected to be recouped by year’s end.

Sen. Dale Righter, a Republican from Mattoon and the Senate GOP’s point person on Medicaid reform, said the finding was further evidence that Democrats’ arguments that they have done all they can to clean up the Medicaid rolls is “empty rhetoric.”

Read more from this story HERE.