Month: June 2014

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Our Daily Thread 6-26-14

Good Morning!

On this day in 1483 Richard III usurped himself to the English throne. 

In 1844 John Tyler took Julia Gardiner as his bride, thus becoming the first U.S. President to marry while in office.

In 1917 General John “Black Jack” Pershing arrived in France with the American Expeditionary Force. 

In 1926 a memorial to the first U.S. troops in France was unveiled at St. Nazaire. 

And in 1979 Muhammad Ali, at 37 years old, announced that he was retiring as world heavyweight boxing champion.  

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Quote of the Day

“There may be people who have more talent than you, but there’s no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do – and I believe that.”

Derek Jeter

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Today is Chris Isaak’s birthday.

And on this day in 1977, Elvis gave his final concert. But since I prefer his older stuff….

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Anyone have a QoD?

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Prayer Requests 6-26-14

Who has a praise or request they’d like to share?

And it’s Thursday, so don’t forget to pray for Jo and the folks in PNG.

Psalm 1

¹Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.

2 But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.

3 And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

4 The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.

5 Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

6 For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish.

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News/Politics 6-26-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Nope, not even a “hint of scandal.” 🙄

From WaysAndMeansHouse.gov  “Washington, DC – Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) announced the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) targeting of conservative individuals includes a sitting United States Senator.  According to emails reviewed by the Committee under its Section 6103 authority, which allows the Committee to review confidential taxpayer information, Lois Lerner sought to have Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) referred for IRS examination.

“We have seen a lot of unbelievable things in this investigation, but the fact that Lois Lerner attempted to initiate an apparently baseless IRS examination against a sitting Republican United States Senator is shocking,” said Camp.  “At every turn, Lerner was using the IRS as a tool for political purposes in defiance of taxpayer rights.  We may never know the full extent of the abuse since the IRS conveniently lost two years of Lerner emails, not to mention those of other key figures in this scandal.  The fact that DOJ refuses to investigate the IRS’s abuses or appoint a special counsel demonstrates, yet again, this Administration’s unwillingness to uphold the rule of law.”

And now we’re starting to see why Lois took the 5th.

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2. Destroying evidence is a criminal offense too. Anyone else noticing a pattern?

From TheHill  “The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the IRS share a problem: officials say they cannot provide the emails a congressional committee has requested because an employee’s hard drive crashed.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy confirmed to the House Oversight Committee Wednesday that her staff is unable to provide lawmakers all of the documents they have requested on the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, because of a 2010 computer crash.

“We’re having trouble getting the data off of it and we’re trying other sources to actually supplement that,” McCarthy said. “We’re challenged in figuring out where those small failures might have occurred and what caused them occur, but we’ve produced a lot of information.”

I’m sure they did, just nothing incriminating.

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3. Boehner is finally doing something about Obama’s many abuses of power.

From FoxNews  “House Speaker John Boehner announced Wednesday he plans to file suit against President Obama over his alleged abuse of executive power. 

“This is not about impeachment — it’s about him faithfully executing the laws of this country,” Boehner said. 

The speaker alleged that the president not only has ignored the law but “brags about it,” decrying what he described as “arrogance and incompetence.” 

Boehner had been weighing such a lawsuit in recent days, over concerns that Obama exceeded his constitutional authority with executive actions. Republicans have voiced frustration with Obama’s second-term “pen and phone” strategy of pursuing policy changes without Congress — particularly environmental rules via the Environmental Protection Agency. Republicans also complained about numerous unilateral changes to the implementation of ObamaCare. “

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4. As is always the case with this administrations numbers, they’re worse than first reported. And as always, NBC does it’s best to put on a good face for the admin.

From CNBC  “The U.S. economy contracted at a much steeper pace than previously estimated in the first quarter, but there are indications that growth has since rebounded strongly.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday gross domestic product fell at a 2.9 percent annual rate, the economy’s worst performance in five years, instead of the 1.0 percent pace it had reported last month.

While the economy’s woes have been largely blamed on an unusually cold winter, the magnitude of the revisions suggest other factors at play beyond the weather. Growth has now been revised down by a total of 3.0 percentage points since the government’s first estimate was published in April, which had the economy expanding at a 0.1 percent rate.

The difference between the second and third estimates was the largest on records going back to 1976, the Commerce Department said. Economists had expected growth to be revised to show it contracting at a 1.7 percent rate. Sharp revisions to GDP numbers are not unusual as the government does not have complete data when it makes its initial and preliminary estimates.”

The only ones blaming the weather are those looking to provide cover for the admin. Only the sycophants at NBC could claim these horrible numbers are a sign of a rebounding economy.

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5. The Supreme Court has banned warrantless cell phone searches by police.

From TheWashingtonTimes  “The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police must obtain warrants before snooping through people’s cellphones, delivering a unanimous decision that begins to update legal understanding of privacy rules to accommodate 21st-century technology.

Police agencies argued that searching through data on cellphones was no different from asking someone to turn out his pockets, but the justices rejected that, saying a cellphone holds the most personal and intimate details of someone’s life and falls squarely within the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections.

“The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the unanimous opinion. “Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple — get a warrant.”

The justices even said police cannot check a cellphone’s call log because it could contain more information than phone numbers, and perusing the call log is a violation of privacy that can be justified only with a court-issued warrant.”

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Our Daily Thread 6-25-14

Good Morning!

On this day in 1788 Virginia ratified the U.S. Constitution and became the 10th state of the United States.

In 1876 Lt. Col. Custer and the 210 men of U.S. 7th Cavalry were killed by Sioux and Cheyenne Indians at Little Big Horn in Montana. The event is known as “Custer’s Last Stand.” 

In 1917 the first American fighting troops landed in France. 

In 1962 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the use of unofficial non-denominational prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. 

And in 1973 White House Counsel John Dean admitted that U.S. President Nixon took part in the Watergate cover-up. 

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Quote of the Day

“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

George Orwell

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Today is Jody McBrayer’s birthday.

And it’s Ian McDonald’s too.

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Anyone have a QoD?

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Prayer Requests 6-25-14

Anyone have a request or praise to share?

And it’s Wednesday, so don’t forget Gambia.

Psalm 150

¹Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in the firmament of his power.

2 Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness.

3 Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp.

4 Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs.

5 Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.

6 Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.

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News/Politics 6-25-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. In testimony before Congress the National Archives head says the IRS did not follow the law.

More here from FoxNews  “Archivist of the U.S. David Ferriero, speaking before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, made clear that federal agencies are supposed to report whenever their records are destroyed or even accidentally deleted. But he said that after emails from embattled IRS official Lois Lerner vanished after a computer failure in 2011, nobody told the National Archives.  “They did not follow the law,” Ferriero said. 

The testimony comes as lawmakers dig for answers as to how Lerner’s emails disappeared and why they only found out about it earlier this month. Lerner herself twice has refused to answer questions before Congress, leaving lawmakers seeking answers from other officials who interacted with her or were involved in reviewing her documents. 

Also on the witness panel was White House attorney Jennifer O’Connor, whom Chairman Darrell Issa compelled to testify via subpoena. 

Republican lawmakers, though, struggled to get answers from O’Connor, who previously worked at the IRS, about the emails. She said she only found out the “week before last” that emails were gone. “

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2. The IRS has admitted their guilt in releasing private taxpayer information to the a gay rights group fighting Prop 8.

From TheFreeBeacon   “The IRS has agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) for unlawfully releasing its private information to a gay rights group that is a political rival, the Daily Signal has learned.

NOM expressed relief at the settlement agreement.

“Congress made the disclosure of confidential tax return information a serious matter for a reason,” NOM chairman John D. Eastman told The Daily Signal. “We’re delighted that the IRS has now been held accountable for the illegal disclosure of our list of major donors from our tax return.”

In 2012, the Human Rights Campaign posted on its website private information from the National Organization for Marriage that revealed private information including the identities and contact information for its donors. Then information was then published by multiple media outlets, according to the Daily Signal.”

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 3. This was obvious from his snarky testimony. He clearly acted like a partisan Democrat. Just another flunky who bought his position.

From PJMedia  “IRS Commissioner John Koskinen looks like he got the job atop the taxman agency the old fashioned way: He bought it.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, Koskinen has donated about $100,000 to Democrat candidates and committees since his first donation in 1979. His donor recipients include Gary Hart, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic nominee in each presidential campaign since 1980 (which would even include Walter Mondale, who stood no chance of beating President Ronald Reagan in 1984), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s campaigns. He most recently donated $2,500 to Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) in 2013.”

“He has given no money to Republicans. The taxman is a partisan Democrat.”

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4. The number of veterans that we know died awaiting care has grown greatly.

From TheWashingtonTimes  “The problems at Veterans Affairs extend well beyond long wait lists, with a report Tuesday showing the department is plagued with poor care that has cost up to 1,000 veterans their lives and left taxpayers on the hook for nearly $1 billion in malpractice settlements since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some of the problems detailed in the report by Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma are downright ghoulish. They include the case of a former security chief at a New York Veterans Affairs medical center whom the FBI arrested on charges of plotting to kidnap, rape and murder women and children.

The VA has come under fire in recent months over reports that dozens of veterans died while stuck on secret waiting lists at a VA facility in Phoenix. Since then, an inspector general’s investigation has found widespread misuse of secret wait lists in a number of facilities. The department’s secretary has resigned.

But Mr. Coburn’s report, titled “Friendly Fire: Death, Delay and Dismay at the VA,” argues that problems go back well before the Phoenix scandal and run deeper than bogus wait lists and scheduling practices designed to help managers show that they are meeting performance goals.”

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5. The White House and ICE continue to release illegal immigrants into the US. Not surprisingly, they refuse to say how many.

From YahooNews  “The Obama administration has released into the U.S. an untold number of immigrant families caught traveling illegally from Central America in recent months — and although the government knows how many it’s released, it won’t say publicly.

Senior U.S. officials directly familiar with the issue, including at the Homeland Security Department and White House, have so far dodged the answer on at least seven occasions over two weeks, alternately saying that they did not know the figure or didn’t have it immediately at hand. “We will get back to you,” the Homeland Security deputy secretary said Friday.

The figure is widely believed to exceed 40,000 since October. It’s believed to be slightly below the roughly 52,000 children caught traveling illegally from Central America over the same period, an extraordinary increase since last year that is driving a humanitarian crisis at the border.

Despite promises to the contrary, this is how it looks when the image-conscious Obama administration doesn’t want to reveal politically sensitive information that could influence an important policy debate. The mystery figure is significant because the number of families caught crossing from Central America represents a large share of new immigration cases that will further strain the overwhelmed U.S. immigration courts system. It also affects federal enforcement strategy, such as where to deploy the border patrol, and political calculations about whether Congress or the White House will relax American immigration laws or regulations before upcoming congressional elections in November.”

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6. And now we know that the Obama admin ignored warnings about the ISIS offensive in Iraq.

From TheDailyBeast  “For months before the fall of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, Washington and London were getting detailed warnings about jihadist plans to exploit Sunni resentment toward Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and launch an ambitious takeover of northern and western Iraq.

Kurdish military sources say the strategy of the ultra-radical Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) was telegraphed long in advance. The Kurds, who have their own autonomous region in northern Iraq and their own armed forces, monitored developing ties between the jihadists and tribal leaders as well as growing contacts with former Iraqi military officers.

The prime minister of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, Nechirvan Barzani, says he warned Baghdad and the United States months ago about the threat ISIS posed to Iraq and the group’s plan to launch an insurgency across Iraq. The Kurds even offered to participate in a joint military operation with Baghdad against the jihadists.

Washington didn’t respond—a claim that will fuel Republican charges that the Obama administration has been dangerously disengaged from the Middle East. Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki dismissed the warnings, saying everything was under control.”

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Our Daily Thread 6-24-14

Good Morning!

On this day in 1497 Italian explorer John Cabot, sailing in the service of England, landed in North America on what is now Newfoundland.

In 1675 King Philip’s War began when Indians massacre colonists at Swansee, Plymouth colony. 

In 1844 Charles Goodyear was granted U.S. patent #3,633 for vulcanized rubber.   

In 1955 Soviet MIG’s down a U.S. Navy patrol plane over the Bering Strait. 

And in 1982 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that no president could be sued for damages connected with actions taken while serving as President of the United States. 

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Quote of the Day

“The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world’s joy.”

Henry Ward Beecher

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Today is Mark Lowry’s birthday.

Today is also Jeff Beck’s birthday. In my never-ending quest for out-of-the-ordinary music, this one’s pretty high up the list of favorites. Jeff Beck, with Billy Gibbons of ZZTop, performing Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons.”

Love it. 🙂

And it’s Jeff Cease’s as well. So Crowes it is.

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Anyone have a QoD?

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Prayer Requests 6-24-14

Who would like to share a request or praise with us today?

Psalm 149

¹Praise ye the Lord. Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise in the congregation of saints.

2 Let Israel rejoice in him that made him: let the children of Zion be joyful in their King.

3 Let them praise his name in the dance: let them sing praises unto him with the timbrel and harp.

4 For the Lord taketh pleasure in his people: he will beautify the meek with salvation.

5 Let the saints be joyful in glory: let them sing aloud upon their beds.

6 Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand;

7 To execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people;

8 To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron;

9 To execute upon them the judgment written: this honour have all his saints. Praise ye the Lord.

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News/Politics 6-24-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. What Congress can do about Obama’s constant re-writing of laws.

From TheNYPost  “Regarding immigration, health care, welfare, education, drug policy and more, Obama has suspended, waived and rewritten laws, including the Affordable Care Act.

That law required the employer mandate to begin this year. But Obama wrote a new law, giving to certain-sized companies a delay until 2016, and stipulating that other employers must certify they will not drop employees to avoid the mandate. Doing so would trigger criminal perjury charges; so, he created a new crime, that of adopting a business practice he opposes.

Presidents must exercise some discretion in interpreting laws, must have some latitude in allocating finite resources to the enforcement of laws and must have some freedom to act in the absence of law.

Obama, however, has perpetrated more than 40 suspensions of laws. Were presidents the sole judges of the limits of their latitude, they would effectively have plenary power to vitiate the separation of powers, the Founders’ bulwark against despotism.”

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2. The man who broke the Middle East.

From PoliticoMag  “There’s always Tunisia. Amid the smoking ruins of the Middle East, there is that one encouraging success story. But unfortunately for the Obama narratives, the president had about as much as to do with Tunisia’s turn toward democracy as he did with the World Cup rankings. Where administration policy has had an impact, the story is one of failure and danger.

The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.

How did it happen? Begin with hubris: The new president told the world, in his Cairo speech in June 2009, that he had special expertise in understanding the entire world of Islam—knowledge “rooted in my own experience” because “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” But President Obama wasn’t speaking that day in an imaginary location called “the world of Islam;” he was in Cairo, in the Arab Middle East, in a place where nothing counted more than power. “As a boy,” Obama told his listeners, “I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.” Nice touch, but Arab rulers were more interested in knowing whether as a man he heard the approaching sound of gunfire, saw the growing threat of al Qaeda from the Maghreb to the Arabian Peninsula, and understood the ambitions of the ayatollahs as Iran moved closer and closer to a bomb.

Obama began with the view that there was no issue in the Middle East more central than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Five years later he has lost the confidence of both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and watched his second secretary of state squander endless efforts in a doomed quest for a comprehensive peace. Obama embittered relations with America’s closest ally in the region and achieved nothing whatsoever in the “peace process.” The end result in the summer of 2014 is to see the Palestinian Authority turn to a deal with Hamas for new elections that—if they are held, which admittedly is unlikely—would usher the terrorist group into a power-sharing deal. This is not progress.”

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3. Once again liberals resort to fuzzy math and falsified data to push their agenda.

From TheTelegraph  “When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.”

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4. Keep in mind what a hypocrite Harry is next time you hear him bashing the Koch brothers. If he’s so worried about billionaires buying elections, perhaps he should look in his own party as well.

From HotAir  “If you think that only Republicans have deep-pocket donors for PACS, your name is increasingly likely to be Harry Reid. Everyone else seems to have figured out that Tom Steyer, George Soros, and plenty of other One Percenters cough up big bucks for progressive candidates and causes, just as the Koch Brothers do for libertarian and free-market causes. Last week, Yahoo’s Matt Bai made it explicit, looking at the inner workings and financing of the Democracy Alliance and its “superrich Democrats.” Today, Politico’s Ken Vogel catches up:

Picture this: millionaires and billionaires gathering under tight security in fancy hotels with powerful politicians and operatives to plot how their network of secret-money groups can engineer a permanent realignment of American politics.

Only, it’s not the Koch brothers. It’s the liberal Democracy Alliance.

The 21 groups at the core of the Democracy Alliance’s portfolio intend to spend $374 million during the midterm election cycle — including nearly $200 million this year — to boost liberal candidates and causes in 2014 and beyond, according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.

Vogel emphasizes throughout the piece that the Koch Brothers are in a class by themselves when it comes to fundraising, but that’s only because they’re more adept at it. Progressives pillory the Kochs for their use of money in politics and its supposedly corrupting influence, but Vogel’s report shows that progressives are perhaps more adept at corruption and influence-peddling:”

This story is older, but it fits in nicely for exposing the hypocrisy from Reid and Democrats. They only have a problem with it when the money goes to their political enemies. When it fills Democrat coffers, they’re fine with it.

From TheFreeBeacon  “The Democracy Alliance takes pains to ensure that its work disbursing millions of dollars to top left-wing organizations remains secretive and free from public scrutiny. But a document left on the floor of the group’s recent gathering reveals for the first time the names of a number of individuals involved in the effort.

It lists new Democracy Alliance “partners,” individuals who every year must pay $30,000 in dues and contribute at least $200,000 to the groups that DA supports. It also reveals names of DA “advisers,” foundation participants, and individuals getting a “sneak peek” at the group’s activities. Among its new partners are top labor union bosses, financial and business leaders, and heirs to billion-dollar fortunes who have made names for themselves as high-dollar Democratic donors.”

“The Democracy Alliance does not actually accept donations. Instead, it solicits contributions from left-wing millionaires and billionaires, and serves as a “pass through” between those donors and top liberal advocacy groups, including the Center for American Progress, Media Matters for America, and Democratic Super PAC Priorities USA.

The group emphasizes secrecy in all of its operations, even as its members and the DA “favored organizations” to which they donate decry the role of “dark money” in American politics. DA does not disclose details of any of the transactions it facilitates, and its members and donation recipients are prohibited from speaking publicly about the organization and its operations.”

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5. I love this guy.

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Our Daily Thread 6-23-14

Good Morning!

On this day in 1683 William Penn signed a friendship treaty with Lenni Lenape Indians in Pennsylvania. 

In 1860 the U.S. Secret Service was created to arrest counterfeiters. 

In 1865 Confederate General Stand Watie, who was also a Cherokee chief, surrendered the last sizable Confederate army at Fort Towson, in the Oklahoma Territory. 

In 1868 Christopher Latham Sholes received a patent for an invention that he called a “Type-Writer.” 

And in 1947 the U.S. Senate joined the House in overriding President Truman’s veto of the Taft-Hartley Act. 

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Quote of the Day

“And I thank God I believe in God, or I would probably be enormously angry right now.”

Clarence Thomas

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Today is June Carter Cash’s birthday, so we’re goin’ to Jackson. From JohnnyCashShow

And it’s Michael Johnston’s too, so Smalltown Poets.

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Anyone have a QoD?