Arizona Lawmakers Pass Bill Making Silver, Gold Legal Tender

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Photo Credit: Reuters The Arizona Senate on Tuesday approved a measure to make gold and silver legal currency in the state, in a response to what backers said was a lack of confidence in the international monetary system.

The legislation cleared the Republican-controlled Senate by an 18-10 vote after being approved by the state House earlier this month. It now goes to Republican Governor Jan Brewer, who has not indicated if she will sign it into law or veto it.

The bill calls for Arizona to make gold and silver coins and bullion legal tender beginning in mid-2014, joining existing U.S. currency issued by the federal government.

If signed into law, Arizona would become the second state in the nation to establish these precious metals as legal tender. Utah approved such legislation in 2011.

More than a dozen states have considered similar legislation in recent years, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

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Legal Group Launches Domestic Drone Information Center

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Photo Credit: APOn Tuesday, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) announced the launch of its Domestic Drone Information Center to act as a hub for its effort to aggregate public data on unmanned aircraft systems.

The impending deadline of the Federal Aviation Administration’s integration of domestic unmanned aircraft systems — more popularly known as drones — into U.S. national airspace continues to hold the public imagination and raise questions about the technology’s privacy implications.

“Domestic drones have many potential positive applications – e.g., traffic mapping, monitoring agriculture, weather forecasting — but it is vital that their use be regulated,” reads the statement from NACDL.

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Hornady: Ammo Shortage Fueled by Civilian Demand Due to Political Pressures

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerHornady, a major U.S. ammunition manufacturer, is doing everything it can to meet the high demand for bullets that it says has been “all fueled by rumors and conjecture” and has put pressure on gun stores across the country.

“The current political climate has caused extremely high demand on all shooting industry products, including ours,” according to Hornady. “Empty retail shelves, long backorders, and exaggerated price increases on online auction sites – all fueled by rumors and conjecture – have amplified concerns about the availability of ammunition and firearms-related items.”

Ammunition manufacturers are struggling to keep up with the run on ammunition that began in the wake of President Barack Obama’s re-election and the deadly shooting at a school in Newtown, Connecticut that left 20 children and six adults dead.

“Every time there’s a comment about some sort of gun control… that triggers a negative response among firearms owners, because they see it as a limiting factor,” Paul Erhardt, an editor for the Shooting Wire, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“The demand breeds demand in a lot of ways,” Erhardt said, adding that the uncertainty over supply caused by the media and political conditions has firearms owners rushing to purchase what ammo is available.

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Manchin: Gun Control Bill to be Reintroduced

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Photo Credit: Ryan StantonBy Associated Press. One of the architects of failed gun control legislation says he’s bringing it back.

Sen. Joe Manchin on Sunday said he would re-introduce a measure that would require criminal and mental health background checks for gun buyers at shows and online. The West Virginia Democrat says that if lawmakers read the bill, they will support it.

Manchin sponsored a previous version of the measure with Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. It failed. Read more from this story HERE.

Taking Dead Aim at Joe Manchin’s Pathetic Voting Record

By Daniel Horowitz. Do you want to know the definition of pathetic? It’s someone who aggressively brandishes his pro-gun credentials in a campaign commercial, and then proceeds to invest his time into expanding gun control laws. In other words, Joe Manchin is pathetic.

Just how unpopular is Obama with the voters of West Virginia? He lost all 55 counties last year in the general election, and 41% of Democrat primary voters to a man sitting in jail. That’s why Joe Manchin lacks the moxie to air a commercial saying, “I’m Joe Manchin, and I approve this message because West Virginia needs a senator who will stand with Barack.”

Instead of manning up and letting his constituents know he is a gun-grabbing, Obamacare-supporting leftist, Joe Manchin ran a TV ad depicting himself shooting a rifle – taking “dead aim” – at a cap and trade bill. Now he is working indefatigably to pass gun control, even after his bill was defeated. During the gun debate, he also voted against an amendment that would have required a judicial ruling to determine if a veteran is dangerous before he is banned from buying guns. I’m sure the many veterans in West Virginia would appreciate that. Read more from this story HERE.

The Left's 'Crusade to Destroy the Christian Church'

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Photo Credit: BreitbartThe Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has just been re-introduced in the Senate and specifically bans employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. The bill has been around for the last couple of decades and its new supporters (two Republicans and three Democrats) probably believe that polls showing movement in favor of same-sex marriage mean that the iron is hot for striking.

From what I can gather, ENDA will offer the LGBT workers the same federal protections against employer discrimination as there are now in the categories of age, race, gender, religion, and disability. As the bill is written now, it would exempt employers with fewer than 15 employees, religious institutions, and religious-affiliated employers, such as Presbyterian hospitals, Catholic adoption agencies, etc.

Let’s leave the debate over the overall bill for another time. The development I want to focus on is brand new. There is now a push underway to remove the exemption for religious-affiliated employers by no less than the ACLU and a number of LGBT legal organizations…

This harkens back to something I have been trying to sound the alarm over all year — that the goal here has nothing to do with gay rights and everything to do with the left’s ongoing crusade to destroy the Christian Church.

Read more from this story HERE.

America's Aging Armed Forces: Another Upgrade Planned for Vietnam-Era Helicopter

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The U.S. Army will hold a flight demonstration on Tuesday of a newly upgraded version of the Vietnam-era OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter, an Army-led initiative that officials say will save $600 million in coming years.

The Army managed the project, which first began in December 2010 and was aimed at improving the capabilities of the existing helicopters by giving them a new common sensor, upgrading their cockpit displays, and cutting their weight by about 160 pounds (73 kg).

By tapping its own expertise and working closely with the helicopter’s original manufacturer, Bell Helicopter, a unit of Textron Inc, and Honeywell International, which makes the helicopter’s avionics, Army officials said they were able to build two prototype aircraft and start flying them just two years after the program began.

“We’ve taken the best of everything and tried to package it into an aircraft as quickly as possible and get it out there … to the force at considerable savings to the U.S. government and the U.S. taxpayer,” Army Colonel Robert Grigsby, project manager for armed scout helicopters, told reporters.

As the “lead system integrator” for the initiative, the Army also retained the technical rights to the new F-model, unlike earlier programs in which the integration work was outsourced to private firms which kept those rights, Grigsby said.

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Obama Admin. Threatening Benghazi Whistle-Blowers at CIA, State

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Photo Credit: Jonathon NarveyAt least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistle-blowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials.

“I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.”

Toensing declined to name her client. She also refused to say whether the individual was on the ground in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, when terrorist attacks on two U.S. installations in the Libyan city killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

However, Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information on all three time periods investigators consider relevant to the attacks: the months that led up to the attack, when pleas by the ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time frame in which the attacks unfolded, and the eight-day period that followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials incorrectly described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.

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Female DNA Found on Bomb Components in Boston Marathon Probe, Source Says

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Photo Credit: APFemale DNA was found on bomb components used in the attack this month on the Boston Marathon, a source familiar with the investigation confirmed to Fox News, though the source cautioned that it is too early to draw hard conclusions from that evidence.

“No one should expect that the investigation is over,” the source told Fox News in confirming the development first reported by the Wall Street Journal, adding that it is just one piece of evidence that investigators are looking at.

The revelation about female DNA came on the same day that the FBI went inside the Rhode Island home of bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow’s parents, and the nearby family of a man identified as his mysterious mentor hired a family spokesman to keep the media at bay.

“We are there as part of our ongoing investigation, but we aren’t permitted to discuss specific aspects of our case,” an FBI official said outside the suburban Providence home where Katherine Russell and her 3-year-old daughter are staying.

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Global Warming Hysteria Wrong Again: Methane Emissions Decreasing Significantly

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Photo Credit: APRevised data from the Environmental Protection Agency now shows that methane emissions released by natural gas drilling are substantially lower than previously estimated, which undercuts claims made environmental groups that methane leaked during drilling accelerates global warming.

“We need a dramatic shift off carbon-based fuel: coal, oil and also gas,” Bill McKibbern, founder of the environmental group 350.org, wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “Natural gas provides at best a kind of fad diet, where a dangerously overweight patient loses a few pounds and then their weight stabilizes; instead, we need at this point a crash diet.”

“New data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may not answer all of those questions in a comprehensive fashion, but they do strongly suggest that activists’ arguments about ‘the methane problem’ for natural gas development are without merit,” according to Energy in Depth.

“They also suggest that methane emissions aren’t increasing it all. They’re decreasing, actually — even as more wells and greater production come online,” the industry-funded group added.

The EPA said that tighter pollution controls by the gas industry has allowed methane emissions to decrease substantially between 1990 and 2010 — by about 41.6 million metric tons per year on average for a total of more than 850 million metric tons overall.

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Wealth Gap Between Whites and Blacks Has Grown Sharply Under Obama

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Photo Credit: Tax CreditsMillions of Americans suffered a loss of wealth during the recession and the sluggish recovery that followed. But the last half-decade has proved far worse for black and Hispanic families than for white families, starkly widening the already large gulf in wealth between non-Hispanic white Americans and most minority groups, according to a new study from the Urban Institute.

“It was already dismal,” Darrick Hamilton, a professor at the New School in New York, said of the wealth gap between black and white households. “It got even worse.”

Given the dynamics of the housing recovery and the rebound in the stock market, the wealth gap might still be growing, experts said, further dimming the prospects for economic advancement for current and future generations of Americans from minority groups.

The Urban Institute study found that the racial wealth gap yawned during the recession, even as the income gap between white Americans and nonwhite Americans remained stable. As of 2010, white families, on average, earned about $2 for every $1 that black and Hispanic families earned, a ratio that has remained roughly constant for the last 30 years. But when it comes to wealth — as measured by assets, like cash savings, homes and retirement accounts, minus debts, like mortgages and credit card balances — white families have far outpaced black and Hispanic ones. Before the recession, non-Hispanic white families, on average, were about four times as wealthy as nonwhite families, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis of Federal Reserve data. By 2010, whites were about six times as wealthy.

Read more from this story HERE.