Attention

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent our advertisers

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Ocean City Air Show 2013

The OC Air Show will feature an All-Star, All-Civilian line up, June 8-9, 2013 over the beach and boardwalk of Ocean City, Maryland. There will be teams of parachute jumpers, demonstrations of a variety of aircraft, low altitude flyovers, and non-military aerobatic performances. Acts already online for the performances June 8 and 9 (with practices on the 6th and 7th) include:

Air Force Heritage Flight
Mike Wiskus in the Lucas Oil Pitts
Sean Carroll YAK-9 Fighter Demo
John Klatt in the ANG MXS
Lucas Oil Parachute Team
GEICO Skytypers
The Red Bull Helicopter
P-51 Mustang Demo
L-39 Jet Demonstration
Sea Harrier Jet Demo

Schedule:

Wednesday, June 5: 

7 pm Coors Light Taxi before Take Off Party. This party is open to the public and will be held at Micky Fins in West Ocean City. The Lucas Oil Parachute Jump will be featured.

Thursday, June 6 at 7 pm

There will be a Bacardi Welcome Party, also open to the public, at the Embers/Blu Crabhouse. Again, the Lucas Oil Parachute jump is featured.

Friday, June 7:

8 am: Breakfast with the Performers at Layton's Family Restaurant on 16th St.

1 pm: OC Air Show Preview -- The Show Center is between 15th and 16th Streets on the beach

7 pm: Coors Take-Off Party open to the public at Hooper's Crabhouse with the Lucas Oil Parachute Jump team.

Saturday and Sunday, June 8 and 9th:

8 am: Breakfast with the performers at Layton's Family Restaurant at 16th Street both days.

9 am: Display Village opens both days. 15th, 16th, and 17th streets as well as the inlet parking lot.

10 am: Drop Zone and Show Center beach is open. Tickets available from ocairshow.com.

1 pm: OC Air show Show Center at 16th Street (tickets for VIP viewing available at ocairshow.com) 

All performances are free to watch from anywhere but the Show Center and Drop Zone.

4 pm both days: Air Show Happy Hour at Surfin' Betty's Beach Bar at 1601 Atlantic Avenue (at 16th and the Boardwalk)

7 pm on Sunday Only: Air Show Afterburner Party at the Captain's Table in the Marriott hotel at 15th Street and the beach. This last event is also open to the public.

First Wife Gets It All

The Supreme Court says a dead federal employee's benefits go to his ex-wife despite his remarriage. Warren Hillman made his first wife the beneficiary of his Federal Employees' Group Life Insurance policy before their divorce. He never changed the designation after he remarried. When Hillman died, his first wife got the money. The second wife sued. Despite Virginia law, no luck. The court says named beneficiaries get the money.

Black Brant XII To Launch From Wallops Island At 11:05PM Tonight

Systems are currently go for launch of a Black Brant XII. Targeting 11:05 pm EDT. After some trouble with the live link it is now working.


Live Link

Launch has been canceled for tonight. 
We are scrubbing for the evening. There are issues with instrument cooling. Next attempt will be tomorrow evening at the same time.

Shell-licking Employee An Isolated Incident, Taco Bell Claims

 
Taco Bell is defending a sick shell game purportedly played by one of its employees.

The fast food giant, which is owned by Kentucky-based Yum! Brands, Inc., responded to a viral photograph that circulated Monday of one of its employees apparently licking a stack of taco shells by claiming the incident was a prank.

"We have spoken with the restaurant and confirmed that the shells were never served to customers,” company officials replied on its Facebook page in response to a copy of the photograph. “This is completely unacceptable and we are taking the appropriate action against everyone involved."


Read more

Back For Round Three

A two-time IRS manager is returning for a third tour of duty in the agency's time of crisis. Todd Grams will become the IRS chief of staff. He starts tomorrow. He'll report to the acting commissioner, Danny Werfel. Grams will leave VA, where he is chief financial officer and executive in charge of the office of management. Grams disclosed his plans in an email obtained by Federal News Radio. He spent two years as the tax agency's CFO, and three years as its chief information officer. The IRS is under fire for the way it handled tax exempt applications from conservative groups.

Rocket Launch Scheduled Tonight June 4 From Wallops

WALLOPS ISLAND, VA – A Black Brant XII suborbital rocket carrying the Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment (CIBER)is scheduled for launch between 11 and 11:59 p.m. EDT, June 4, from NASA’s launch range at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

The backup launch days are June 5 through 10. The rocket may be visible to residents in the mid-Atlantic region.

With CIBER, scientists will be studying when the first stars and galaxies formed in the universe and how brightly they burned their nuclear fuel.

Jamie Bock, CIBER principal investigator from the California Institute of Technology, said, “The objectives of the experiment are of fundamental importance for astrophysics: to probe the process of first galaxy formation. The measurement is extremely difficult technically.”

This will be the fourth flight for CIBER on a NASA sounding rocket. The previous launches were in 2009, 2010 and 2012 from the White Sands Missile Range, N.M. After each flight the experiment or payload was recovered for post-calibrations and re-flight.

For this flight CIBER will fly on a larger and more powerful rocket than before. This will loft CIBER to a higher altitude than those previously obtained, thus providing longer observation time for the instruments. The experiment, which will safely splash down in the Atlantic Ocean more than 400 miles off the Virginia coast, will not be recovered.

The NASA Visitor Center at Wallops will open at 9:30 p.m. on launch day for public viewing of the launch.

The mission will be available live on Ustream beginning at 10 p.m. on launch day at:http://www.ustream.com/channel/nasa-wallops

Mission status on launch day can be followed on Twitter and Facebook at:http://www.twitter.com/NASA_Wallops orhttp://www.facebook.com/NASAWFF

Mission status also is available on the Wallops launch status line at 757-824-2050.

More information on CIBER and the NASA Sounding Rocket Program is available at:http://www.nasa.gov/soundingrockets

The Obama Veto

The White House says President Barack Obama will veto a pair of national- security spending bills moving through the House unless they come with other measures to bolster education and the economy. At issue are the fiscal 2014 appropriations for Homeland Security and for military construction and Veterans Affairs. They are mostly kind to the affected agencies. But the White House says Congress must agree on a topline discretionary budget before passing individual bills. Otherwise, it says, bills like these would lead to draconian cuts elsewhere. The House plans this week to consider the first of 12 spending bills.

I’m A Born-Free American Woman, Wife, Mother, And Citizen

Mississippi Puppy Mill Raid

Sebelius Won't Intervene In Girl's Transplant Case

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The U.S. health secretary said she won't intervene in an "incredibly agonizing" transplant decision about a dying Pennsylvania girl, noting that three other children in the same hospital are just as sick.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a congressional panel Tuesday that medical experts should make those decisions.

However, relatives of 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan said Sebelius' remarks confused them because they want a policy change for all pre-adolescent children awaiting lung transplants, not just Sarah.

The Newtown Square girl has been hospitalized at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for three months with end-stage cystic fibrosis and is on a ventilator. Her family wants children younger than 12 to be eligible for adult lungs because so few pediatric lungs are available.

More 

15% Off NEW COURSES With TASC

Tactical American Security Consulting, LLC

15% Off NEW Training Courses With TASC

We're offering 15% Off Training on our new courses! We are now offering NRA personal protection inside/outside the home, NRA Rifle and NRA shotgun! You can buy this deal today or buy and share it with your friends to get an additional incentive!
Learn More.

Why Didn't I Think Of That! (Part 1)







One Walmart's Low Wages Could Cost Taxpayers $900,000 Per Year, House Dems Find

Walmart wages are so low that many of its workers rely on food stamps and other government aid programs to fulfill their basic needs, a reality that could cost taxpayers as much as $900,000 at just one Walmart Supercenter in Wisconsin, according to a study released by Congressional Democrats on Thursday.

Though the study assumes that most workers who qualify for the public assistance programs do take advantage of them, it injects a potent data point into a national debate about the minimum wage at a time when many Walmart and fast food workers are mounting strikes in pursuit of higher wages.

The study uses Medicaid data released in Wisconsin to piece together the annual cost to taxpayers for providing a host of social safety net programs, including food stamps and publicly subsidized health care, to workers at one Supercenter in the state.

More 

Warrant Officer Sean W. Mullen of Dover, DE Killed In Afghanistan

DOVER, Del. (AP) - A special forces soldier from Delaware and stationed at Fort Campbell in Kentucky has been killed in fighting in Afghanistan.

Military officials said Tuesday that Warrant Officer Sean W. Mullen of Dover died Sunday in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.

The 39-year-old Mullen was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), at Fort Campbell.

More 

Perdue Expands Va. Soybean Exports To China

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Perdue Agribusiness is expanding exports of Virginia soybeans to China.

Dandong Port Group has agreed to buy up to 29 million bushels of soybeans from this year's crop.

Since an agreement signed in September 2011, Dandong has purchased more than 30 million bushels of soybeans.

Gov. Bob McDonnell says the recently signed agreement was reached during a trade and marketing mission to Asia in April.

McDonnell's office says the new export commitments will help Dandong meet a rapidly increasing demand for soybeans in China.

Perdue Agribusiness operates an export terminal in Chesapeake.

More

White House Promises Veto of GOP Spending Plan

The White House stepped in Monday with a veto threat against a House GOP plan to advance a round of 2014 spending bills that would ease sequester-imposed cuts on the Pentagon while forcing even deeper cuts on non-defense programs.

Those cuts would come in areas like education, energy and water development and foreign aid.

In a statement, the White House budget office said the cuts called for in the GOP plan would force thousands of poor children off of Head Start, harm special education, cut federal law enforcement and dent medical research grants to thousands of scientists. It called on the Democratic Senate and GOP House to reach a broader agreement on the budget before advancing spending bills.

More 

McDermott Blames IRS Victims Paul Ryan Responds

Iraq Collapse Shows Bankruptcy Of Interventionism

May was Iraq's deadliest month in nearly five years, with more than 1,000 dead - both civilians and security personnel -- in a rash of bombings, shootings and other violence. As we read each day of new horrors in Iraq, it becomes more obvious that the US invasion delivered none of the promised peace or stability that proponents of the attack promised.

Millions live in constant fear, refugees do not return home, and the economy is destroyed. The Christian community, some 1.2 million persons before 2003, has been nearly wiped off the Iraqi map. Other minorities have likewise disappeared. Making matters worse, US support for the Syrian rebels next door has drawn the Shi'ite-led Iraqi government into the spreading regional unrest and breathed new life into extremist elements.

The invasion of Iraq opened the door to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which did not exist beforehand, while simultaneously strengthening the hand of Iran in the region. Were the "experts" who planned for and advocated the US attack really this incompetent?

Ryan Crocker, who was US Ambassador to Iraq from 2007-2009, still speaks of the Iraqi "surge" as a great reconciliation between Sunni and Shi'ite in Iraq. He wrote recently that "[t]hough the United States has withdrawn its troops from Iraq, it retains significant leverage there. Iraqi forces were equipped and trained by Americans, and the country's leaders need and expect our help." He seems alarmingly out of touch with reality.

More

Irreconcilable Differences: Conflicting Marriage Laws A Problem For Gay Couples

When it comes to marriage laws, America is now a house divided.

With Illinois failing to approve a gay marriage bill late last week, the number of states expected to legalize gay marriage may be topping out and, unless the U.S. Supreme Court decides otherwise, there are few signs that a large number of other states will follow suit anytime soon.

Can the United States live with such irreconcilable differences?

What happens when a lesbian couple married in New York relocates to North Carolina, which passed an amendment to the state constitution last year banning gay marriage? Can a gay person visit his spouse in the hospital room if there’s a car accident in a non-gay-marriage state? Does a Virginia employer — where gay marriage is not recognized — have to offer spousal benefits, including 12 weeks of federally mandated family leave, to a gay worker who is commuting in every day from the District of Columbia, where gay marriage is legal? Do the laws of the state where the marriage takes place take precedence over the laws of the state where a couple may subsequently reside?


Read more

Forgotten Scandal: Gibson Guitars Still Being Persecuted for Doing No Wrong


Almost two years after Gibson Guitars was raided for violating an obscure law, Representative Marsha Blackburn (R–TN) is demanding a full explanation:
The recent scandals surrounding this administration raise a number of questions about who they choose to target and why. The arrogance and lack of transparency displayed by this President and his cabinet officials in events such as the raids on Gibson Guitar and the IRS targeting of conservative groups show a complete disregard for the rule of law.
In 2011, Gibson’s Tennessee factories were raided for allegedly violating the Lacey Act, a federal statute that makes it a crime to import tropical hardwoods in violation of foreign law.
More