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Sunday, December 09, 2018

Snow Emergency Plan for Worcester County, MD 12/9/18

SNOW EMERGENCY IN EFFECT DECEMBER 9, 2018 at 1630 HOURS

The Maryland State Police Berlin Barrack in conjunction with local agencies and the State Highway Administration are implementing the Snow Emergency Plan for Worcester County effective as of December 9 2018 at 1630 hours. This plan is to assist the State Highway Administration in snow clearing operations throughout the county.

Once the snow emergency plan goes into effect, all vehicles on the roadway must be equipped with snow chains or snow tires. In addition, a parking ban is imposed on all snow emergency routes in the County. All vehicles left on the shoulders of these routes will be towed at the owner’s expense.

Household Wealth Hits A Record $109 Trillion... There Is Just One Catch

In the Fed's latest Flow of Funds report released at noon today, the US central bank released the latest snapshot of the US "household" sector as of Sept 30, 2018. What it revealed is that with $124.9 trillion in assets and a modest $15.9 trillion in liabilities,the net worth of US households rose to an all time high $109 trillion, increasing for 12 consecutive quarters and up $2.1 trillion as a result of an estimated $245 billion increase in real estate values, as well as a $1.9 trillion increase in various financial assets like corporate equities, mutual and pension funds, and deposits as the market soared to just shy of new all time highs in the second quarter, even if it needed some time in Q3 to reach a new record just days before the quarter ended.

Total household assets in Q2 rose $2.3 trillion to $122.7 trillion, while at the same time total liabilities, i.e., household borrowings, rose by only $132 billion from $15.6 trillion to $15.7 trillion, the bulk of which was $10.2 trillion in home mortgages.Homeowners’ real estate holdings minus the change in mortgage debt rose by $320.1 billion (a positive number means that the value of real estate is growing at a faster pace than household mortgage debt).

The breakdown of the total household balance sheet as of Q3 is shown below.

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Saturday, December 08, 2018

Dick's Sporting Goods Says Gun-Control Stance Hurt Business, May Close Field & Stream

Dick's Sporting Goods told investors during the Goldman Sachs Retailing Conference that its gun-control stance hurt sales of its hunting business, outdoors business, and that it may close its outdoor-focused Field & Stream stores.

Edward Stack, chairman and CEO of Dick's, said during the event that the sporting goods chain's recent 3.9 percent drop in same-store sales was the result of a mix of factors beyond their control as well as some he called "self-imposed." Specifically, he said, "the decisions we made on firearms" negatively affected their bottom line but the drop in sales was something they expected. They did not, however, regret their decision to change a number of their gun-sales policies and back new gun-control legislation.

"Well I think it's definitely a factor, and it's nothing that we didn't anticipate," Stack said during the call. "As we put out kind of our guidance for the year and our earnings guidance for the year, we knew this would happen when—we've made some decisions on firearms in the past and we've had a pretty good idea of what these consequences were going to be. We felt that was absolutely the right thing to do. We would do the same thing again if we had a mulligan, so to speak, to do it again."

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Steyer Says Republicans Have 'Determination' to Take Away 'Equal Votes'

CHARLESTON, S.C.—California billionaire and political activist Tom Steyer told a group of about 120 people that Republicans are strategizing how to win elections in instances where they know they've failed to win a majority of the hearts and minds of voters, alleging that the party was using tactics such as gerrymandering, inconvenient polling locations, and voter registration "purges" to win.

"This is the perfect place to be," Steyer told the Charleston crowd. "This is a Republican-dominated state. When we think about the right to an equal vote, there is a determination right now to take away equal votes from people, largely by organized Republican interests."

"I truly believe that what Republicans are trying to do is figure out how to win with less than 50 percent" of the citizens, he added later.

The Tuesday night event was the first of a new round of town halls launched after the former hedge fund manager took out a full-page ad in USA Today just about two weeks after Election Day, a move interpreted by most political watchers as the strongest signal yet that the Democrats' largest funder from the 2018 cycle is going to run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

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Paul Craig Roberts Laments The Disintegration Of Western Society

Radical feminists are now being banned by Twitter not because they hate men, which is perfectly OK as far as Twitter is concerned, but because they object to “transwomen.”

What is a “transwoman?” As far as I can understand, a “transwoman” is a male with a penis who declares himself to be a women and demands his right to use women’s toilette facilities anong with the women who are using them.

The feminist, Meghan Murphy, twittered a statement and a question:

“Men are not women.”

“How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between men and transwomen?”

There you have it. Yesterday it was feminists who were exercising their special society-bestowed privileges to censor. Today it is the feminists who are being censored. As this insanity of “Western Civilization” continues, tomorrow it will be the transwomen who are censored and banned.

What precisely is afoot?

My readers, who have partially and some wholely escaped from The Matrix, understand that this is the further fragmentation of American society. Identity Politics has set men, women, blacks, Jews, Asians, Hispanics, and white people against one another.

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Goodlatte: House Leadership Blocked Trump-Backed Immigration Reform

The House GOP leadership is responsible for blocking a pro-American immigration reform package which was backed by President Donald Trump, a top House chairman said Tuesday.

The GOP leadership let the House immigration reform die in June by allowing a critical bloc of GOP legislators to split their votes between two rival reform bills, said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the retiring chairman of the House committee on the judiciary.

“The strategy of having two options really let people have an off-ramp — they could vote for the more conservative bill and against the other, or vote for the second bill and not the first,” Goodlatte said, adding:

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Man who filmed cops in lobby of Ohio hotel on night of Kareem Hunt incident was arrested - but the former Chiefs running back was NOT

A man who reportedly filmed Ohio police in the lobby of a hotel on the night of the Kareem Hunt incident was arrested, but the star running back wasn't.

Derek Szeto was staying at The Metropolitan at the 9 in February 2018 when he was arrested by Cleveland police.

He was subsequently charged with disorderly conduct for recording the officers in the hotel's lobby.

On the same night, surveillance video captured the moment the former Kansas City Chiefs running back attacked then-19-year-old Abigail Ottinger from Berea, Ohio.

According to USA Today, Szeto had allowed the victim to use his phone to call 911 after an employee at the front desk told her she couldn't use the phone there.

Szeto tweeted about his arrest three hours after he was taken into custody.

'Don't ever stay at @The9CLE! They apparently don't care about women abuse that takes place in their hotel. I tried to help and got arrested,' he tweeted at the time.

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At Midnight, Michiganders Will Set Clocks to 4:20

When the clock strikes midnight on Wednesday, Michigan will become the 10th state in the Union to allow the consumption of recreational marijuana.

In November, nearly 60 percent of Michiganders voted in favor of Proposition One, which permits adults over the age of 21 to own up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana and grow up to 12 plants in their homes. Public use will remain illegal.

In exchange, the state will leverage a 10 percent excise tax on marijuana sales, which a pro-legalization group projected would raise as much as $130 million in annual revenue.

"The legalization of the adult use of marijuana in Michigan represents a victory for common sense public policy, while delivering yet another body blow to our decades long failed prohibition on marijuana," said Erik Altieri, executive director of pro-legalization group NORML. "Instead of continuing to arrest over 22,000 citizens a year for marijuana related charges, Michigan will now be able to reallocate precious law enforcement resources to combat violent crime while respecting civil liberties and advancing racial justice."

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Tucker Carlson: Our ruling class has clamped down on freedom of speech as never before

Freedom of speech. A lot of people voted for Donald Trump in the hope they’d have more of it. But two years into his presidency, the opposite has happened.

Our ruling class has clamped down as never before on personal expression. Gone is the free exchange of ideas we were promised as Americans. In its place: Mandatory, soul-deadening conformity. An entire population forced to repeat the same mindless platitudes, or else.

An axis of left-wing corporate power, academia, media, and lawmakers have all aligned to curb your right to speak freely - your right to think for yourself. When they control your words, they control your mind.

The left used to deny that this was their goal. However, they’re not even pretending anymore. They’re baring their teeth and snarling. Get in line or we’ll hurt you.

In a speech Monday night, Apple CEO Tim Cook pledged that his company, one of the biggest and most powerful in the world, will do whatever it takes to silence dissenting opinions. Here's some of what he said:

“Hate tries to make its headquarters in the digital world. At Apple, we believe that technology needs to have a clear point of view on this challenge,” he said. “There is no time to get tied up in knots. That's why we only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division, and violence: You have no place on our platforms.”

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https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-our-ruling-class-has-clamped-down-on-freedom-of-speech-as-never-before

Byron York: Ten questions for James Comey

Members of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees will question former FBI Director James Comey Friday morning. After much wrangling, the interview will take place behind closed doors. Comey wanted it to be public, but lawmakers, unwilling to cut up their questioning into five-minute slices for a public setting, insisted on a private session. The House won. But both sides agreed that a transcript of the interview will be released quickly, perhaps as quickly as 24 hours after the meeting.

Republicans were divided about whether to interview Comey at all. He has testified many times, written a book, and publicly discussed his tenure in office at great length. Some Republicans preferred to bring in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has been resisting an appearance on Capitol Hill. "It's been nine weeks since the press reported that Rod Rosenstein was contemplating wearing a wire to record the president and invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told me recently, "and we're spending time bringing in Comey for the 15th time?"

Nevertheless, Comey is coming in. Some Republicans want to ask him more about the Hillary Clinton case, but even some of them acknowledge that the case is over and done with. Others want to focus on the Trump-Russia affair. That includes a lot of material. There will, for example, undoubtedly be some questions about the Trump dossier, the origins of which Republicans have done extensive work to expose.

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Fox’s Chris Wallace: 41 Funeral Revealed Trump Not Part of ‘Presidents Club’

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said on Wednesday that the “chill” that “had descended on that front row” when President Donald Trump arrived at President George H.W. Bush’s funeral made it seem like Trump was not a member of the exclusive “presidents club.”

Trump shook hands with former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama before he took his seat. Former First Lady Hillary Clinton did not even make eye contact.

“Well, I have to say I was struck when President Trump and Melania Trump came to the front row that it was as if a chill had descended on that front row,” Wallace said on Fox News. “You had seen a lot of chatty talk between the Clintons and the Obamas, the Carters. But when Donald Trump sat down, the greeting that he was given by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama was about as cold, about as cool as it could have been.”

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Zimbabwe Mulls Seizing Stolen Property from Mugabe Loyalists

Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced on Wednesday that, following an audit of how the nation’s agricultural lands were being used, the nation would proceed with seizing property from wealthy members of the ruling Zanu-PF party deemed to own too much of it.

Dictator Robert Mugabe launched a nationwide campaign to eradicate white farmers from the country in 2000, seizing most of their land, largely through violent assaults, to allegedly distribute more fairly among the nation’s majority black population. Zimbabwe’s economy, largely based on its agricultural industry, fell into hyperinflation and poverty. Between 2000 and 2015, Zimbabwe saw a $12 billion drop in agriculture production, in part because many of the individuals gifted the stolen land had no history or knowledge of how to keep the land fertile. A 2010 study found that 40 percent of the stolen land fell into the hands of either Mugabe himself or his political allies.

On Wednesday, Mnangagwa – one of Mugabe’s closest cronies as vice president until a dispute with wife Grace Mugabe led him to flee the country and return leader of a bloodless coup – announced that he would soon change this, even as a member of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party. Mnangagwa made the announcement while debuting the results of an audit on land usage in the country, according to the newspaper New Zimbabwe.

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FBI Knew Steele Dossier Was Bogus Before Using In FISA Application: Solomon

A string of emails quietly requested by House Republicans for declassification by President Trump may be the smoking gun that the FBI and DOJ committed egregious abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), according to The Hill's John Solomon.

The email exchanges - kept from Congressional investigators for over two years, "included then-FBI Director James Comey, key FBI investigators in the Russia probe and lawyers in the DOJ’s national security division," according to the report - and took place in early to mid-October of 2016, prior to the FBI successfully securing a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The email exchanges show the FBI was aware — before it secured the now-infamous warrant — that there were intelligence community concerns about the reliability of the main evidence used to support it: the Christopher Steele dossier.

The exchanges also indicate FBI officials were aware that Steele, the former MI6 British intelligence operative then working as a confidential human source for the bureau, had contacts with news media reporters before the FISA warrant was secured. -The Hill

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GOP Winner in Maine-02 Now Declared Loser Due to 'Rank Voting'

On Monday, Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap announced that a recount of the November 6 election in Maine’s Second Congressional District will begin on Thursday and will continue for an estimated four weeks.

Secretary of State Dunlap, a Democrat, declared Democrat Jared Golden the winner of the election on November 15, despite the fact that Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-ME-02) received 2,632 more votes than Golden on election day, a consequence of the state’s implementation of a controversial “rank voting” system.

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California mandates solar panels for homes built in 2020 and later

California lawmakers on Wednesday officially approved a measure that mandates all homes built in the Golden State in 2020 and beyond be solar-powered.

The new standards were approved earlier this year and voted on unanimously by the California Building Standards Commission, the Orange County Register reported.

Officials heralded the move as a “historical undertaking” that “will be a beacon of light for the rest of the country.”

The provisions add an estimated $10,000 to the cost of building a single-family home – including more than $8,400 for installing solar and roughly $1,500 for energy efficiency. Proponents of these requirements, however, say the 30-year lifespan of the solar panels will offset the utility bills. A solar-industry representative cited by the Register said the net savings would come out to roughly $500 a year.

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https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-mandates-homes-built-in-2020-and-later-include-solar-panels

NYT Admits DNA Test 'Darkened Lingering Cloud' over Elizabeth Warren's 2020 Ambitions

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) DNA test was such a fiasco, her advisers and even the far-left New York Times are worriedthis “lingering cloud over [her] likely presidential campaign has only darkened.”

“More worrisome to supporters of Ms. Warren’s presidential ambitions,” the Times writes, is that “she has yet to allay criticism from grass-roots progressive groups, liberal political operatives and other potential 2020 allies who complain that she put too much emphasis on the controversial field of racial science — and, in doing so, played into Mr. Trump’s hands.”

“Advisers close to Ms. Warren say she has privately expressed concern that she may have damaged her relationships to Native American groups and her own standing with progressive activists, particularly those who are racial minorities.”

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Elizabeth Warren's advisers want her to APOLOGIZE for DNA stunt

Advisers to Sen. Elizabeth Warren are counseling her to issue a forceful apology for releasing the results of a DNA test that revealed a sliver of American Indian blood in her family tree.

Democrats blasted the liberal Massachusetts senator in October for drawing attention to her biggest political liability in the middle of a tense midterm election cycle.

Warren's DNA analysis, conducted by a privately hired scientist who is an expert on Native American genomics, showed that her Native American ancestry was between 0.09 percent and 1.5 percent.

The low end of that scale equates to 1/1,024th.

A landmark study published in 2014 in the American Journal of Human Genetics found that, on average, European-Americans have 0.18 per cent Native American blood – twice as much.

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Wicomico Council Okays $489K Loan To Support Nursing Home

SALISBURY – Officials in Wicomico County this week approved a $489,000 loan to keep a county-owned nursing home operating through the remainder of the fiscal year.

On Tuesday, the Wicomico County Council voted to approve a loan in the amount of $489,320 to the Wicomico Nursing Home. The loan will provide for projected operating expenses at the facility through June 30, 2019.

Last month, representatives with the Wicomico Nursing Home – a county enterprise fund – came before the council seeking an operating loan after it was learned that low occupancy, personnel costs and write offs of bad debt had contributed to financial woes at the facility.

Jim Crisp of Gross, Mendelsohn and Associates told the council, for example, that he expected the nursing home to write off $36,000 in bad debt in the current fiscal year and noted that the facility would need a census of roughly 80 residents and $170,000 in salary cuts to break even.

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New Wicomico Council Sworn In; Cannon, Dodd Named Leaders

SALISBURY – Five incumbents and two new members were sworn in to the Wicomico County Council this week following the recognition of two departing councilmen.

At the start of Tuesday’s meeting, Councilmen Matt Holloway and John Hall said their farewells to county leaders and citizens as they stepped down from their positions on the council. Both chose not to run for re-election in November.

For his part, Holloway thanked the voters, county staff and the county council for their support during his two terms.

“I really wanted to thank the voters of Wicomico County for showing support and electing me to these two terms,” he said. “Of course, I want to thank the current and previous councils for their support and friendship over these years and the staff.”

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Officials To Revisit Land Donation

SALISBURY – Officials in Wicomico County will vote again on a land donation that they rejected late last year.

Last December, the Wicomico County Council voted to reject a 235-acre land donation from Connelly Mill Ltd. Partnership after an environmental study revealed potential pollution issues. The property, located next to the Henry S. Parker Athletic Complex and within the City of Salisbury corporate limits, is valued at more than $1 million and consists of wooded parcels and two ponds.

Earlier this fall, however, the council agreed to reconsider the donation after additional environmental studies eased officials’ concerns about contamination on the property and a cost-benefit analysis revealed the property’s potential as a borrow site.

Weston Young, the county’s assistant director of administration, told the council this week the property contained an estimated $20 million worth of soil, which could be used for operations at the county landfill. With the acquisition of a property adjacent to the landfill off the table, he said the county needed a place to mine additional soil.

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