Krauthammer: New Benghazi E-mail Akin to Discovery of Nixon Tapes

The Curse of Oak Island

Has anyone else watched this series on the History Channel? I happened upon it last night and was pretty fascinated. I have enjoyed reading about the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians since reading Foucault's Pendulum. The Lagina brothers are from Michigan. There definitely is an intriguing mystery there. I hope they find treasure, but the legend says that one more must die for the secrets to be revealed. *gulp*

Bush 43: 'I hope Jeb runs'

Former President George W. Bush on Thursday said he hopes his brother Jeb runs for president in 2016, but added he has “no clue” what’s on his mind.

“I hope Jeb runs. I think he would be a great president," Bush said in an interview on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper. ”I have no clue what's on his mind. And we'll talk when he's ready,”

The Origin of the Phrase “As Dead as a Doornail”

"In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens wrote about the questionable phrase, “dead as a doornail,” saying:

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. 

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

"As with so many etymologies, we don’t know exactly why door nails were used in the phrase rather than something like coffin nails, but we have a reasonably good educated guess. Door nails were long used to strengthen the door. The person building or installing the door would hammer the nail all the way through the boards. On the other side, he would hammer the end flat, bending it so that the nail would be more secure in a process, called “clenching.” In doing so, the nail was rendered unusable for any other purpose. It would be difficult to remove and even more difficult to use again elsewhere. Thus, the bent nail was commonly called “dead” (not just to do with doors, but elsewhere where the nail was bent over and couldn’t be used again.)"

"As to why it is then a “doornail” instead of other cases where such clenching was done, it’s thought it was probably simply because this was commonly done with nails on doors and the euphony of the phrase caused it to stick, where other similar expressions such as “dead as a stone” simply don’t roll off the tongue as nicely."

Another less touted origin theory (read more)

“Aren’t we in the United States? We did nothing wrong”

Terry, who came to Michigan from Iraq in 1970, soon did what immigrants often do: He went into business, buying Schott’s Supermarket in Fraser, Mich., where he still works six days a week. The Internal Revenue Service, a tentacle of a government that spent $3.5 trillion in 2013, tried to steal more than $35,000 from Terry and Sandy that year.

Sandy, a mother of four... remembers, “They just walked into the store” and announced that they had emptied the store’s bank account. The IRS agents believed, or pretended to believe, that Terry and Sandy were or conceivably could be — which is sufficient for the IRS — conducting a criminal enterprise when not selling groceries.

What pattern of behavior supposedly aroused the suspicions of a federal government that is ignorant of how small businesses function? Terry and Sandy regularly make deposits of less than $10,000 in the bank across the street. Federal law, aimed primarily at money laundering by drug dealers, requires banks to report cash deposits of more than $10,000. It also makes it illegal to “structure” deposits to evade such reporting.

Because 35 percent of Schott’s Supermarket’s receipts are in cash, Terry and Sandy make frequent trips to the bank to avoid tempting actual criminals by having large sums at the store. Besides, their insurance policy covers no cash loss in excess of $10,000.

In 2010 and 2012, IRS agents visited the store and examined Terry’s and Sandy’s conduct. In 2012, the IRS notified them that it identified “no violations” of banking laws. But on Jan. 22, 2013, Terry and Sandy discovered that the IRS had obtained a secret warrant and emptied the store’s bank account. (read more)

While trying to avoid "actual" criminals this family made themselves a target of another set of criminals, our own government. In an instance when "government is good" and "taxes are good" is proven to NOT necessarily be so, all the time. For the power to tax is also the power to destroy and there is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

Courageous Palestinian Christian confronts 60 Minutes

Christy (Anastas, apparently), a Palestinian Christian relates her experience as citizen under Palestinian Authority.

Seen on PJ media lifestyle cross-posted on Roger Simon's site there. Simon's take is the Walter Durante Prize for mendacious journalism is well-considered for awarding Bob Simon for his 60 Minutes report "Christians of the Holy Land" in which Israel is blamed for violence and for Christians leaving in such large numbers. The video received in email from CAMERA, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting describes a different situation entirely. The woman was granted asylum in Britain and lives under threat.

The video was pulled from YouTube but put up again by the efforts Jerusalem Institute for Justice, but there is no certainty it will stay up.

I find the comments on YouTube to this video well informed. "I hold your finger." 

This is irrelevant but I fell in love on the spot. Her eyes are extraordinary. She has me. I'm hers. 

KLEM FM

For Janet (of Waco fame) and for Spinelli:

"Ne'er the twain shall meet"
~ have you ever been Kipled? 

MSNBC: "We never have a conversation about racism!"

Walking, A place to think.

Famous walkers...

Wordsworth was a walker. His work is inextricably bound up with tramping in the Lake District. Drinking in the stark beauty. Getting lost in his thoughts.

Charles Dickens was a walker. He could easily rack up 20 miles, often at night. You can almost smell London's atmosphere in his prose. Virginia Woolf walked for inspiration. She walked out from her home at Rodmell in the South Downs. She wandered through London's parks.

Henry David Thoreau, who was both author and naturalist, walked and walked and walked. But even he couldn't match the feat of someone like Constantin Brancusi, the sculptor who walked much of the way between his home village in Romania and Paris. Or indeed Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul at the age of 18 inspired several volumes of travel writing. George Orwell, Thomas De Quincey, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bruce Chatwin, WG Sebald and Vladimir Nabokov are just some of the others who have written about it. (read more)

Ugh.

My "ugh" isn't about what Shaq did in this story. It's about the hypocrisy and lack of grace, as usual. Everybody shaming him must never have done something so awful. Right.

Anyway, good on him for apologizing . (Also, good on him for his auxiliary police effort in Miami.) (link is to Instapundit)

Michael Snyder: "17 Facts To Show To Anyone That Believes That The U.S. Economy Is Just Fine"

"No, the economy is most definitely not "recovering". Despite what you may hear from the politicians and from the mainstream media (shrugging off today's terrible GDP print), the truth is that the U.S. economy is in far worse shape than it was prior to the last recession."

#1 The homeownership rate in the United States has dropped to the lowest level in 19 years.

#2 Consumer spending for durable goods has dropped by 3.23 percent since November.  This is a clear sign that an economic slowdown is ahead.

#3 Major retailers are closing stores at the fastest pace that we have seen since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

#4 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20 percent of all families in the United States do not have a single member that is employed.  That means that one out of every five families in the entire country is completely unemployed.

#5 There are 1.3 million fewer jobs in the U.S. economy than when the last recession began in December 2007.  Meanwhile, our population has continued to grow steadily since that time.

#6 According to a new report from the National Employment Law Project, the quality of the jobs that have been "created" since the end of the last recession does not match the quality of the jobs lost during the last recession... (read more)

Lastly...

#17 The number of Americans receiving benefits from the federal government each month exceeds the number of full-time workers in the private sector by more than 60 million.

Taken individually, those numbers are quite remarkable. Taken collectively, they are absolutely breathtaking."

Yes, things have been improving for the wealthy for the last several years.  The stock market has soared to new record highs and real estate prices in the Hamptons have skyrocketed to unprecedented heights."

But that is not the real economy.  In the real economy, the middle class is being squeezed out of existence.  The quality of our jobs is declining and prices just keep rising."

BTW... If you are considering blaming the President of the USA, you better think again...

ABC News: Email not released because "explicitly not about Benghazi" has section entitled "Benghazi"

@PressSec says @rhodes44 email not released bc "explicitly not about Benghazi." It has section entitled "Benghazi" pic.twitter.com/SP3c5MynS6
— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) April 30, 2014

Jonathan Karl is an ABC News white house correspondent.

NYT: Soul of Mad Magazine, Al Feldstein Dies at 88

Al Feldstein, who took over a fledgling humor magazine called Mad in 1956 and made it a popular, profitable and enduring wellspring of American satire, died on Tuesday at his ranch in Paradise Valley, Mont...

The founding editor, Harvey Kurtzman, established its well-informed irreverence, but Mr. Feldstein gave Mad its identity as a smart-alecky, sniggering and indisputably clever spitball-shooter of a publication with a scattershot look, dominated by gifted cartoonists of wildly differing styles.

He hired many of the writers and artists whose work became Mad trademarks. Among them were Don Martin, whose cartoons featuring bizarre human figures and distinctive sound effects — Katoong! Sklortch! Zazik! — immortalized the eccentric and the screwy; Antonio Prohias, whose “Spy vs. Spy” was a sendup of the international politics of the Cold War; Dave Berg, whose “The Lighter Side of ...” made gentle, arch fun of middlebrow behavior; Mort Drucker, whose caricatures satirized movies like Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” (“Henna and Her Sickos” in Mad’s retelling); and George Woodbridge, who illustrated a Mad signature article, written by Tom Koch: a prescient 1965 satire of college sports, criticizing their elitism and advocating the creation of a game that could be played by everyone. It was called 43-Man Squamish, “played on a five-sided field called a Flutney.” Position players, each equipped with a hooked stick called a frullip, included deep brooders, inside and outside grouches, overblats, underblats, quarter-frummerts, half-frummerts a full-frummert and a dummy. (read more)

This was my favorite magazine, back in the early 80's, around the time I had learned to read English. Massachusetts, we had a girl staying with us, extended stay, good looking girl, and there was a guy coming over courting her. He brought the magazine one day and I made him my best friend. Some of the humor went over my head sometimes. But the humor I did understand more than made up for the humor I did not. I just loved Mad Magazine.

minimum wage

Screenshots, links not active. I was looking for something else and saw this. [Colorado District 1 representatives] (Denver)

Why is my representative even talking about this?

Oh. That's right. Marching orders from Party.

On the 'what people think' side, omitted: workers with zero skills, workers entering workforce, leisure and hospitality workers that receive tips, and contrary to the graph provided by Economic Policy Institute, most tend to be young; under 25- 50%, teenage 21%, 3% of total workers over 25 yrs old. Let's not mention persons with criminal records that figure would just mess things, and people with disabilities such that simply cannot perform without constant attention. The graph provided is flatly wrong. 

6% of minimum wage earners are women, 3% are men. 

11% work less than 35 hrs. week

States with most minimum wage workers: Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Idaho. Conversely, the states with lowest % of minimum wage workers: Alaska, Oregon, California, Montana, Washington, all under 2%.

Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The institute that produced the graph states: Raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 would give working families, and the overall economy, a much-needed boost.

Of course it would. It would tend to move minimum wage toward living wage. Insisting on this demonstrates that policies pursued affect job creation so negatively that minimum wage now must be considered living wage for increasing number of workers.

When I worked minimum wage this was an issue then too, apparently a perennial issue as economies grow, and I was all for it. Employers are rich, I'm poor, easy that, just raise it already. But having endured that and grown I can see I really was a crap employee, although I was the best doggone dishwasher that place ever had. I wanted to be cook, and those guys just didn't see my potential. They dismissed all that I had to offer. 

From pure economic pov, the correct thing to do is abolish minimum wage altogether. The government has no business in that. But legislators do imagine themselves lords of the economy and by pulling levers this way and that and our allowing it, they make themselves so. Unless stopped. Cries by politicians to raise minimum wage is admission they've messed things so sorely that minimum wage conflates with living wage as must be for the damage they've done. Okay for those who already employed. Not okay for those shut out from employment due directly to this specifically and this type of government meddling.

This subject is a bit boring. Like children arguing over matters long settled, I'd avoid it, but here it is again. Apologies for being so boring, but the subject was delivered from on high, and with no small force. They have to be answered.