Nor'easter next week primarily a threat to North Carolina

Via NC Links and Thinks

 

A complex series of low pressure systems will affect the U.S. coast near North Carolina through early next week, and a powerful Nor'easter is expected to develop off the North Carolina coast on Monday, then move northeastwards out to sea. The storm will be too far from coastal areas of New Jersey and New York hard-hit by Sandy to cause more than minor coastal flooding, thankfully. However, high winds, heavy rain, and coastal flooding are expected to affect the coast of North Carolina beginning on Saturday, with the peak winds and greatest coastal flooding likely to occur on Sunday and Monday. 

Minor to moderate flooding will occur along much of the Northeast North Carolina coast, and coastal Highway 12 that connects the Outer Banks to the mainland will probably be cut. Hurricane Sandy pummeled the Outer Banks of North Carolina in late October, causing $13 million in damage. Sandy weakened or wiped out the protective dunes along a long section of coast, and caused significant damage to coastal Highway 12. As a result, all it takes is a high tide to cause overwash on this vital artery. The road was closed on Tuesday due to overwash during the high tide cycles, and requires a 4-wheel-drive vehicle to navigate it due to the extensive damage it has suffered over the past two weeks. Residents of the Outer Banks must take a 2-hour ferry ride to get to the mainland when Highway 12 is cut.

More @ Wunderground

“They tried to kill my daughter.”

Via Hype And Fail 

 Typical

 An early morning FBI raid has a District Heights family in fear. The agents came into the house and drew their guns at the family’s daughter, but she wasn’t armed.

“They almost hit my daughter, man,” says Emory Hughley. “If I hadn’t told her to go back in her room they probably would have shot her.”

Hughley says he was asleep in the basement when he heard a bang at the front door. His 18-year-old daughter Myasia was upstairs in her room with two friends who were spending the night. Around 6 a.m. he says he came up to the living room and saw 15 FBI SWAT agents coming inside, guns drawn.
“I’m shouting ‘Nobody is armed, nobody has a gun!’ and then all of a sudden I heard ‘She’s got a gun!’ and they just opened fire,” he says.

Hughley says he looked up and saw his daughter standing outside her bedroom in the hallway. Then he heard gunfire.

“I’ve got eight holes in my wall. One bullet went past my head, almost hit me, ricocheted off my brick wall and some of the shrap metal hit my little daughter in the back of her neck, all for nothing.” says Hughley.

Myasia was treated at a local hospital for a flesh wound and released.

More @ ABC 7

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NBC 4

House GOP: Obama officials using secret emails to avoid oversight

 

The House science committee is demanding the White House explain why top administration officials are using secret e-mail accounts and other techniques to conceal their taxpayer-paid activities from public oversight.

The evidence of officials’ efforts to evade transparency laws includes EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s use of the fake name “Richard Windsor”, and hidden e-mail accounts, according to a Nov. 16 letter sent by the committee to several White House officials, including Jackson.

The committee’s letters justified their startling statements with evidence published in The Daily Caller. The Caller’s report was based on an investigation by Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the author of a new book “The Liberal War on on Transparency.”
“The use of these [hidden] accounts could seriously impair records collection, preservation, and access, therefore compromising transparency and oversight,” said the letter, signed by committee chairman Rep. Ralph Hall.

The letter also asked Jackson’s office to provide all records related to “‘Richard Windsor’ or other aliases used by the EPA Administrator or senior management…. [plus] records relating to the establishment or use of dual, secondary, or non-public email accounts.”

More @ The Daily Caller

Efficiency: $4 Million Spent to Distribute $12 Million in Food Stamps

Breitbart

VERBATIM

In the wake of hurricane Isaac, Baton Rouge, Louisiana spent $4 million dollars setting up emergency food stamp application sites which eventually distributed $12 million in benefits.

Hurricane Isaac struck the gulf coast the last week of August 2012 and was responsible for nine deaths. In the wake of the disaster, emergency food stamp sites were set up at six locations in Baton Rouge. In that city alone $4.2 million was spent on renting everything from chairs to port-a-potties to food service.

According to records examined by CBS affiliate WAFB, $360,000 was spent renting 240 portable toilets, over 112 of which were delivered to one location. Nearly half a million dollars was spent catering food and snacks for state workers.

WAFB notes that the $4.2 million spent in Baton Rouge did not include the salaries of state workers. The cost of setting up the distributions sites was split between the state of Louisiana and the federal government.

A total of $12.4 million in food stamps were distributed as a result of the effort, less than triple what was spent on the distribution effort itself.

Medical giant Stryker cuts 1,170 jobs, citing ObamaCare

 

Medical supply giant Stryker is the latest company to announce job cuts in anticipation of coming costs associated with ObamaCare, even though the man who inherited a fortune from the company's founder is a fan.

The company will cut 1,170 jobs, or five percent of its worldwide workforce, despite the fact that the founder's grandson was one of the largest contributors to President Obama’s re-election campaign. Medical tech scion Jon Stryker, whose net worth is currently estimated at $1.2 billion, contributed $2 million to the Priorities USA Action super PAC and has given $66,000 in contributions to Obama and the Democratic Party. Stryker does not run the company.

A "medical device excise tax" included in the mandate imposes a 2.3 percent levy on medical device manufacturers and suppliers, which critics say will raise prices on everything from pacemakers to prosthetics to stents. Companies will be required to pay the tax regardless if they have a profit or loss for the year. The tax is estimated to cost the medical device industry $20 billion.

House Republicans tried to have the tax repealed, drafting a bill called the Protect Medical Innovation Act, but the Democrat-controlled Senate has blocked the measure.

More @ Fox

Arizona Gun Store: No Obama Voters Allowed

A gun shop in Arizona has a clear message to would-be customers who happened to vote for President Barack Obama: take your business elsewhere.

Southwest Shooting Authority in Pinetop, Ariz. took out an advertisement last week in the local newspaper, the White Mountain Independent, that spelled out the store's new policy in explicit terms.
"If you voted for Barack Obama your business is not welcome at Southwest Shooting Authority," the ad reads. "You have proven that you are not responsible enough to own a firearm."

A sign on the store's front door contains a similar message. Cope Reynolds, the owner of the Southwest Shooting Authority, posted a letter on the website AmmoLand shortly after the election last week to explain his motives, writing that his personal convictions trump profit:

More @ TPM

Israel readies to invade Gaza as strikes from both sides continue

Via Michael

 

From Gaza City to Tel Aviv, rockets kept flying, people kept dying and fear and anger on both sides kept growing.

For all the bloodshed thus far -- including at least 30 killed in Gaza since Wednesday, according to a Palestinian government website, and Israel reporting three deaths in Kiryat Malachi -- there has been little indication the situation will calm any time soon.

In fact, fears are rising that the opposite will hold true. Israel's Cabinet on Friday approved the activation of up to 75,000 reservists, prime minister's spokesman Mark Regev said. Also, the Israel Defense Forces reported earlier in the day that it is "mobilizing forces" in preparation for a "possible ground invasion of the Gaza Strip."

More and slideshow @ CNN

2nd Amendment Re-post

Roundabout via Carl

The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA

 

 

 The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA

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

Via Hype And Fail

When the Nerds Go Marching In

A GREAT article about the Obama campaign's electronic 'ground game', Narwhal, how they put it together, tested it to fail multiple times, and made it work. Compared to Team Mitten's Orca (which FAILED miserably), this is a great example of how things SHOULD be done. EVERY person with any interest in being involved in a campaign in the future SHOULD READ THIS ARTICLE!

Remember that Orca hadn't really been tested until election day? Here's what the Narwhal team did 17 days before the election: "We worked through every possible disaster situation," Reed said. "We did three actual all-day sessions of destroying everything we had built."

Money quote: "We knew what to do," Reed maintained, no matter what the scenario was. "We had a runbook that said if this happens, you do this, this, and this. They did not do that with Orca."

No, they didn't, and it showed. Yet another Team Romney FAIL!

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

The Obama campaign's technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong.
Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else.
They were talking with people at Amazon Web Services, but all they knew was that they had packet loss. Earlier that day, they lost their databases, their East Coast servers, and their memcache clusters. Thayer was ready to kill Nick Hatch, a DevOps engineer who was the official bearer of bad news. Another of their vendors, PalominoDB, was fixing databases, but needed to rebuild the replicas. It was going to take time, Hatch said. They didn't have time.
They'd been working 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, trying to reelect the president, and now everything had been broken at just the wrong time. It was like someone had written a Murphy's Law algorithm and deployed it at scale.

They'd been working 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, trying to reelect the president, and now everything had been broken at just the wrong time.

And that was the point. "Game day" was October 21. The election was still 17 days away, and this was a live action role playing (LARPing!) exercise that the campaign's chief technology officer, Harper Reed, was inflicting on his team. "We worked through every possible disaster situation," Reed said. "We did three actual all-day sessions of destroying everything we had built."

More @ The Atlantic

Hamas and IDF

Via Hype And Fail