Why Such Secrecy about Private Military Contractor’s Men Working the Event?

Via Survival

 

Speaking as an investigative reporter with almost 40 years’s experience, I can say that when government officials won’t talk, they’re generally hiding something embarrassing or worse.

I tried, and nobody will talk about those Craft International Services private security personnel who were widely observed and photographed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, wearing security ear-pieces, hats and T-shirts bearing the company’s skull logo, and all wearing the same dark coats, khaki pants and combat boots, some carrying what appear to have been radiation detectors. (I got no hard answers, though there were some inadvertent hints given.)

I first contacted a man identifying himself as Jack Fleming, a public affairs person with the Boston Athletic Assn., sponsor of the marathon. Fleming advised me that “If you want to ask about that you should contact the Commonwealth (of Massachusetts) Executive Office of Public Safety.”

I called that agency and spoke with the public information office there, a man named Terrell. He first said, "Did you call the Marathon organizers?" When I replied that I had, and that they had said to call his office, he replied, "They did?" Then he said, “You should call the City of Boston Police Department. They released a security plan to some media organizations.”

Indeed they had released that plan to the Boston Globe. Based upon the information it got from the police the article the Globe ran, did report that the Police had deployed “air patrols, K9 units, and more than 1,000 uniformed officers and soldiers along the 26-mile course and the finish line,” but it made no mention of the private contracting of soldiers-for-hire, which is what Craft International does (see the Craft website). News agency Reuters reported, meanwhile, that a top official for the Massachusetts state Homeland Security Department, Undersecretary Kurt Schwartz, told a group at Harvard U. that his agency had “planned” for a possible bombing attack on the marathon, even running a “table-top” exercise about such an event a week before the race.

I called the Boston Police to ask if they had hired the Craft International personnel who were observed at the scene just before and after the bombing, and was told by the public affairs office there that “Anything having to do with the investigation of the bombing would have to be referred to the FBI Boston Division office.”

When I pointed out that I wasn’t asking anything about the investigation, but was simply asking who had hired the security personnel from Craft International, the answer was simply repeated: “You’ll have to ask the FBI.”

So I called the FBI, and got a public affairs person there named Amanda Cox. Her initial response to my question was, “I do not have any information on that.”

More @ This Can't Be Happening

NC: Halifax County man profits from multiple deaths, suspicious fires

Via NC Renegade

 

Public records show a Halifax County man profited from multiple deaths and suspicious fires across several North Carolina counties in the past eight years. The victims' families say his connection to those events is no coincidence.

The murder cases happened years and miles apart. In 2005, a 38-year-old Warren County mother and her young son were shot to death. In 2012, a 29-year-old woman in Northampton County was also shot to death.

Dennis Carter, of Enfield, profited financially from the women's life insurance policy and will, despite being a married man and unrelated to the victims.

A private investigator working for one of the victim’s families found that Carter, a home builder, was also linked to a series of suspicious fires and insurance claims.

Family: ‘Ain’t no way in the world that boy is gonna shoot his mama’

More @ WRAL

NC: Democratic Strategist, Allegedly Killed by Best Man

Via Broken Patriot

Guess no guns in the house.

 "She was a noted member of Sky Blue Strategies, a Left Wing Campaign strategist organization who lists North Carolinians Against Gun Violence (NCGV), an ant-gun group among their clients."

Jamie Kirk Hahn worked with Jonathan Broyhill as a Democratic strategist, but he was being investigated for campaign-finance irregularities—and now he’s the prime suspect in her killing. 

 A North Carolina Democratic political strategist was pronounced dead early Wednesday after she and her husband were attacked in their home, allegedly by the best man at their wedding.

More @ The Daily Beast

Time To Wake Up

Via Blue

Banksters

Via Knuckledraggin' My Life Away

Tom Knapp has passed away

Via Richard

Shooter's Magazine

VERBATIM

Tom Knapp, one of the legends of exhibition shooting, has passed away this afternoon. Tom was not only a great shooter and ambassador of shooting sports, he was a great man and I’m honored I’ve got to know him. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family.

Man Dies in Police Raid on Wrong House

 

A 61-year-old man was shot to death by police while his wife was handcuffed in another room during a drug
raid on the wrong house.

Police admitted their mistake, saying faulty information from a drug informant contributed to the death of John Adams Wednesday night. They intended to raid the home next door.

The two officers, 25-year-old Kyle Shedran and 24-year-old Greg Day, were placed on administrative leave with pay.

“They need to get rid of those men, boys with toys,” said Adams’ 70-year-old widow, Loraine.

John Adams was watching television when his wife heard pounding on the door. Police claim they identified themselves and wore police jackets. Loraine Adams said she had no indication the men were police.

“I thought it was a home invasion. I said ‘Baby, get your gun!,” she said, sitting amid friends and relatives gathered at her home to cook and prepare for Sunday’s funeral.

More @ ABC

Climate scientists come to terms with the lack of global warming

 

“The mainstream media cannot maintain the official man-made global warming narrative any longer,” Marc Morano of the climate skeptic website ClimateDepot.com told TheDC News Foundation. “With the lack of warming and the failure to shift the climate debate to ‘extreme weather,’ warmists are now losing once stalwart members of the media in promoting man-made climate fears.”

 =============================== 

Despite the heated rhetoric from the Obama administration and environmental groups about the urgency of global warming, climate scientists have begun to come to terms with the lack of evidence of catastrophic global warming over the last decade.

“While some climate scientists continue to resist the obvious that the climate system is more complex than they assumed, others are starting to accept that the multi-decadal climate projections provide very incomplete simulations has to how the real climate system works,” Roger Pielke, Jr., environmental studies professor at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. 

More @ The Daily Caller

Obama's Borrowed More Per Household ($53,616) Than Median Household Earns ($50,502)

 

Under President Barack Obama, the federal government's debt has increased by an amount per household that exceeds the annual median household income.

Since Obama’s first inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009, the federal debt has climbed $6,167,472,778,984.22. That equals about $53,616 for each of the 115,031,000 households the Census Bureau currently estimates are in the country.

By contrast, the Census Bureau’s most recent estimate of the median household income was $50,502 (for 2011).

If the federal government increased taxes sufficiently to take from the private sector the equivalent of $50,502 for every household in the country—that is, an amount that equals the median household income multiplied by the total number of households ($50,502 x $115,031,000), it would only take in $5,809,295,562,000.

More @ CNS News

Bill Maher: “This Country Is Becoming A Police State, It Is Very Troubling To Me”

One-off 1967 Shelby GT500 Super Snake going up for auction in May

Via Dan

 

Mecum Auctions announced today a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with the offering of the legendary 1967 Shelby GT500 Super Snake – the only one of its kind ever built – at Dana Mecum’s 26th Original Spring Classic auction in Indianapolis, May 14-19 at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. This history-making, Shelby American-built mechanical marvel will cross the block for the first time ever at live public auction on Friday, May 17 as the headliner to more than 2,000 vehicles at the original, largest and best muscle car auction in the world.

Carroll Shelby originally assigned the car to demonstrate Goodyear’s new “Thunderbolt” budget passenger car tires in a high-profile press event, but the mission was expanded after a chance encounter between Shelby and his friend, former Shelby American sales manager Don McCain.

McCain suggested that Carroll put a racing 427 Le Mans GT40 engine in the GT500 for the test and let him sell the car with the intention of building 50 more to be marketed and sold to the public as the powerhouse Shelby Super Snakes, thus originating the name.

More @ Mustangs Daily

Calif. Bill Would Let Non-Citizens Serve on Juries

Via Bill

 

The California Assembly passed a bill on Thursday that would make the state the first in the nation to allow non-citizens who are in the country legally to serve on jury duty.

Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, said his bill, AB1401, would help California widen the pool of prospective jurors and help integrate immigrants into the community.

It does not change other criteria for being eligible to serve on a jury, such as being at least 18, living in the county that is making the summons, and being proficient in English.

More @ ABC

Telling the Truth about Immigration

Via Jerry 

 

Nobody wants to.  Most politicians would rather appeal to platitudes about America as a “nation of immigrants” than confront their responsibility to attend to the common good of their own people.
 
And, depending on the poll you examine, it would seem most Americans view themselves as sufficiently removed from the effects of immigration that they, at least, think of lax immigration policies as “fair” and “nice,” and would just soon not consider what it entails for their material or cultural well being.  One recent poll, however, suggests that Americans are slowly coming to grips with reality, finding psychological strategies of maintaining a platitudinous openness while preferring to see an actual reduction in the inflow of foreign persons into our country.

Pandering to the heart of their party, many establishment Republicans draw the line that we ought to secure the border, breaking the floodtide of manual laborers who sneak cross the desert lands of the South West against the shoals of a fence, virtual or just plain literal.  They then add that we ought to welcome those qualified with technical skills — because, of course, dumb Americans are just so dumb that they do not study such subjects in sufficient numbers.  Well, as with nearly everything in establishment Republicanism, even when they are sincere they are still lying.  A new study shows that the H1-B visa program for “highly qualified” foreigners is in fact being used to lubricate the wheels of off-shoring American jobs. There is in fact NO shortage of science, technology, and math workers, but rather a surplus.  Certain companies and their wooden political spokes-models just pretend there is so that they may import foreign workers as consultants to help them prepare to send their call centers and information technology operations abroad.

Let me enumerate just a few premises and pieces of data that we ought to bear in mind as we ask those largely prudential questions about immigration — even as many of us refuse to recognize them as prudential, and with the usual obscurantism turn them into questions of human rights:

General Premises

More @ Front Porch Republic

Gun porn

Via mpopenker

America's gun: Sales of AR-15s soar

Via avordvet

 

 Mazzant started off with 100 AR-15 rifles. By the end of the day, he didn't have a single one left.

=========================

At the GunRunners Gun Show outside Atlanta, the line stretches out the door and around the corner. Dozens of people are waiting, ready to fork over big bucks for everything from pistols to high capacity magazines.

Here, the hottest seller isn't a shotgun, handgun, or even a pair of Angie Whitaker's .22-caliber bullet casing earrings. It's the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

"We probably brought maybe 100 AR-15s with us," said vendor George Mazzant, from On the Square Gun & Pawn. "I'd like to sell half of them, and, I'm sure we will. We've been doing that well every weekend."

Mazzant is running a special, selling Stag Arms AR-15 rifles for $999. It's an offer that's too good for show attendee Ken Farrell to pass up.

More @ NBC

School claims right to censor pro-life 6th-grader

A charter school in Minnesota has told a parent that administrators claim the right to censor whatever they want of a student’s speech outside of class time, including a 6th-grader’s expression of her deeply held pro-life views.

The result?
 
A lawsuit over the school’s alleged violations of the student’s constitutional rights.

Brian Bloomfield, executive director of the Nova Classical Academy in St. Paul told a parent, “The school has a right to censor students without violating their free speech.”

He cited the Tinker and Hazelwood opinions from the U.S. Supreme Court as his support. He also cited “wikipedia” in writing, “In short, public schools have every right to prohibit student speech.”
However, the lawsuit brought by the Alliance Defending Freedom said that’s exactly backwards.

More @ WND

Stop the NRA Protest in DC Is a Bust!

 McPherson Square in Washington DC was the staging venue for the Stop the NRA March Thursday.
Too bad Public Campaign, Occupy the NRA, CREDO, Every Child Matters, Moveon, United For Change, USA, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, The Other 98%, and We Act Radio — participating and sponsoring organizations — failed to round up more than a smattering of protesters!

 Too bad Public Campaign, Occupy the NRA, CREDO, Every Child Matters, Moveon, United For Change, USA, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, The Other 98%, and We Act Radio — participating and sponsoring organizations — failed to round up more than a smattering of protesters!

 

Here is the “promising” venue for MILLIONS of anti-NRA Peeps…OOPS…make that a few dozen?
 

More @  The Black Sphere

US imam calls on Muslims in US to wage jihad

Via Cousin John

 

The controversial imam of a prominent mosque in Arlington, Va., has urged immigrant Muslims in the United States to wage war for Islam.

“The enemies of Allah are lining up. The question for us is, are we lining [up] or are we afraid because they may call us terrorists?” Shaker Elsayed told a crowd of Ethiopian Muslims during a lecture at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va.

“Let me give you the good news: they are already calling us terrorists anyway. Whether you sitting at home, watching TV, drinking coffee, sleeping or playing with your kids, you are a terrorist because you are a Muslim.”“Well, give them a run for their money. Make it worth it. Make this title worth it, and be a good Muslim,” said the Cairo-born Muslim.

“Muslim men when it is a price to pay, they are first in line. … They are the first in the community-service line. They are the first in jihad line,” he declared to applause.

More @ The Daily Caller

Obama’s scrub of Muslim terms under question; common links in attacks

Via Cousin John

Before the Boston Marathon bombings, the Obama administration argued for years that there is a big difference between terrorists and the tenets of Islam.

A senior White House aide in 2009 publicly urged Washington to cease using the term “jihadist” — asserting that terrorists are simply extremists. Two years later, the White House ordered a cleansing of training materials that Islamic groups deemed offensive.

Now, some analysts are asking whether the 2009 edict and others that followed have dampened law enforcement’s appetite to thoroughly investigate terrorism suspects for fear of offending higher-ups or the American Muslim lobby.

It is not just the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a radicalized jihadist whom the FBI questioned in 2011 and cleared of terrorism links. At least five Muslims have attempted mass destruction in the U.S. since 2009, undetected beforehand by law enforcement and the intelligence community:

More @ The Washington Times