Happy Birthday: 87-Year-Old Ohio Man Finds His Calling

In Toledo, Ohio, we met an 87-year-old retired salesman with an arduous passion. Jim Gagnon likes to call the people he loves on their birthdays -- which wouldn't be so arduous, if Jim wasn't so amorous.

"I'm a lover of people. I love you guys," Jim told us. "I gotta have your birthdays."

Jim started calling people on their birthdays shortly after his 21st. And in the 66 years since, he has amassed a list of thousands of friends, former coworkers and random acquaintances - which he dutifully reconnects with every year. People like Gretchen Wood, an old customer.

"I don't know him well at all," Gretchen said.

Jean Lovejoy gave him a ride -- once.

"It was a one day thing," Jean said. "Never saw him after that."

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Thank you for your service: Cops push Vietnam vet two miles home when his 300 lbs scooter breaks down on Memorial Day weekend

It was the ultimate show of respect for a disabled Vietnam war veteran on Memorial Day weekend.

Going above the call of duty, two San Diego police officers pushed Gilbert Larocque nearly two miles home after his 300-pound motorized scooter broke down on a busy road.

For the 67-year-old whose legs were injured when he worked as a door gunner in the Army, the officers' kindness is something he will never forget.


'You wouldn't expect them to do something like that … push you all the way home,' Larocque toldABC 10 News.

'I appreciate what they did. They went out of their way. How many people would stop?'

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Father Fined $200, Sentenced to One Year of Probation for Making His 8-Year-Old Son Walk a Mile Home From School

When Robert De Mond asked his son last year why he was placed in timeout and didn’t get a straight answer, he pulled over, had the 8-year-old hop out of the car, then told him to walk the rest of the way home.

The father is now answering for his “old-school punishment” with a fine and probation.

Judge Kathleen Watanabe with the 5th Circuit Court in Hawaii slapped De Mond with a $200 fine and one year of probation for telling his son to walk the last mile home, despite Hawaii’s law allowing parents to discipline children with punishments such as spanking, KHON-TV reported.

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Last photo of the mother left in such agonising pain in hospital she had to crawl on her hands and knees to beg for painkillers. Three days later she was dead - because 'doctors missed' fatal blood clot

Three days after Margaret Lamberty was photographed doubled over in agony on a hospital floor, the mother-of-four died of suspected multiple organ failure.

The picture was taken hours before the 45-year-old's family claim she was apparently forced to crawl on her hands and knees along a corridor to beg nurses for painkillers.

Mrs Lamberty's daughter Laura said her mother's cries for help went unheard, after the family returned home when visiting hours finished.

They say staff at University Hospital of North Staffordshire 'abandoned' the mother-of-four before she died in April from a 'treatable condition'.

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Michelle Obama Is Ignoring the Problems Her New School Lunch Standards Have Caused

Yesterday in an op-ed, First Lady Michelle Obama attacked the House of Representatives for considering giving some schools a one-year reprieve from complying with the new school lunch requirements.

In a New York Times column on her Let’s Move initiative, Obama addressed several issues but sidestepped acknowledging key problems that have been identified with the school lunch program. For example, she doesn’t talk about:

• The massive food costs incurred by schools. The costs are so bad some schools have reportedly transferred money out of teaching budgets to meet the requirements.
• The major declines in student participation.
• Plate waste. In a survey conducted by the Government Accountability Office of school nutrition officials in all states and Washington, D.C., officials from an astonishing 48 states indicated that food waste caused by the changes was a challenge for at least some of their local school food authorities.
• Food storage problems and the need for new kitchen equipment.
• Lack of flexibility. The National School Boards Association explained, “School boards cannot ignore the higher costs and operational issues created by the rigid mandates of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.”

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With new troubles, questions mount about Obama's competence

Give Barack Obama credit. He never claimed he had the executive experience many Americans feel is essential for a president.

Go back to October 2006. There was much buzz that Sen. Obama, newly arrived in Washington, would run for the White House. "You've been a United States senator less than two years, you don't have any executive experience. Are you ready to be president?" the late Tim Russert asked Obama on NBC.

"Well, I'm not sure anybody is ready to be president before they're president," Obama responded. "You know, ultimately, I trust the judgment of the American people."

That didn't exactly answer the question. Obama's theory was that if he could survive the rigors of a campaign, and voters chose him to be president, then he was ready to be president. He didn't say anything about actually running the executive branch of the U.S. government.

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Maryland Tries To Rev Up Potential Electric Car Buyers

WASHINGTON -- Leaders in eight states, including Maryland, are hoping to rev up car buyers' enthusiasm for electric cars.

The states, from the East and West coasts, have joined together to promote what they call Zero Emission Vehicles: fully electric cars, plug-in hybrids and hydrogen-fuel cell-vehicles.

The states in the agreement make up a quarter of the new car market, and they hope to put more than 3 million cars with alternative power sources on the road by 2025. Right now there are fewer than 200,000 of the vehicles in the country.

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America Has Been at War My Whole Life

The mainstream media is now heralding the president for announcing that, finally, the war in Afghanistan is going to come to an end.

On December 31, 2016, the last American troop is scheduled to leave, officially putting a period on the last sentence about the United States’ longest war in the history books. The whole move seems arbitrary at best. What magical thing is going to happen that day — the 5,565th day of that war — that actually changes anything from the day before or the day before that?

What has made it worth the $4 billion a year spent and the thousands of lives lost?

Well, at least Obama gets to go down in history as the president who officially ended both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

Official announcement or not, there’s really no end in sight for America’s wars. The day after he said that, Obama was giving a speech before graduating West Point cadets which sealed the deal:

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Dem Rep. Declares There Are No Problems With Florida VA System… So the Internet Reminds Her

Despite the fact that many of her Democratic colleagues are calling for heads to roll over the Veterans Affairs scandal, Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) says the VA system in Florida is doing just fine.

During a Wednesday House hearing on the VA scandal, Brown said she did some “reconnaissance” and discovered there is not “one complaint” about the facilities in her state. It didn’t take long for her opponents to pounce.

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Our "Make It Look Good" Economy Has Failed

When rigged numbers are the basis of our success, we have failed.

The essence of the U.S. economy is make it look good: never mind quality or long-term consequences, just make it look good today, this week, this month, this quarter: make the pink slime look like meat, make the company look profitable, make the low-quality product look good enough to close the sale, make the unemployment rate low enough to justify re-electing the toadies currently in power, make the body count of bad guys look good, and on and on--just makes the numbers look good now, the future will take care of itself.

This is, of course, an attractive lie: the future is a direct consequence of present decisions and actions. It is remarkable how quickly we latch onto the notion that an endless parade of lies, manipulations and deceptions will magically produce a warm and fuzzy future of organic growth fostered by sound investments.

Alas, an economy that relies on an endless parade of lies, manipulations and deceptions has only one possible future: failure--abject, total, undeniable, devastating. Equally remarkable is the current conviction that absurd extremes in manipulation--the billions of dollars of corporate buybacks pushing stocks higher, the socialization of the U.S. mortgage market, where privately issued mortgages (unbacked by government guarantees) have virtually vanished, the ginned-up unemployment number (remove enough potential workers from the count and the unemployment rate is soon near-zero)--will magically lead to an economy that no longer needs extreme manipulations to sustain itself.

All these lies (if we are bold enough to call a lie a lie) and manipulations cannot possibly herald in an economy of honest reporting, market discovery of price and sound investments.

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Sustainability Movement Builds in Maryland; Five New Sustainable Communities Brings Total to 71

Crownsville, MD - Five neighborhoods in three counties have committed to a revitalization plan to conserve resources and strengthen reinvestment in traditional downtown business districts, bringing the number of Sustainable Communities in Maryland to 71.

Maryland’s Smart Growth Subcabinet approved the new Sustainable Communities during meetings on April 16 and May 21.

Reisterstown is Baltimore County’s sixth Sustainable Community. A national historic district founded in 1758, Reisterstown became an important crossroads for travelers commuting from Baltimore City along Reisterstown Road to Pennsylvania and points further north and west. As with many historic communities, Reisterstown has experienced significant decline in its commercial corridor. Working in conjunction with the community, the county plans to revitalize its main street by seeking a Maryland Main Street designation, capitalizing on its historic building fabric and implementing promotional activities such as, a Buy Local Campaign, Farmers Market and Clean Green 15 (monthly 15 minute clean-ups).

The Town of Union Bridge is the seventh municipality in Carroll County to receive a Sustainable Communities designation. It is a part of the Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area and is home to the Western Maryland Railroad Museum, an asset that attracts over 500 visitors each year. While many historic homes remain and are well kept, the overall economic vitality of the town is not what it once was in its heyday. To reverse the economic downturn, Union Bridge plans to promote and increase the number of businesses on Main Street, enhance the Union Bridge Walking Tour, improve the Union Bridge Community Center, complete the Little Pipe Creek Park & Trail System and increase housing opportunities for low- and moderate-income senior citizens, using the town’s very own Shriner Court as a model.

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Top VA execs took home millions

More than 1,000 officials with 6-digit pay

The highest-paid Department of Veterans Affairs executives and doctors in Phoenix, where the deadly treatment scandal was exposed, were paid a total of about $70 million from 2011 to 2013, according to a government transparency website.

The pay rates, topping out at nearly $360,000 per year per worker, were revealed in an Open The Books search just as a report reached Congress showing veterans were forced to wait 115 days for treatment.

Among the 100 top-paid federal employees in the city of Phoenix for the most recent reporting period, only a handful did not work for the VA. The other employees, who worked for the Department of Health and Human Services, topped out at nearly $100,000 less than the top-paid VA staff members.

There are about 7,000 federal payroll employees in the city.

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VA Government Union Fought Against Allowing Vets into Private Care

VA Government Union Fought Against Allowing Vets into Private Care

On the top executives keep cutting costs. On the bottom, health care unions keep increasing benefits for workers. In the middle, the patients get squeezed out.

Unlike the unions, a patient has no negotiating leverage with government medicine. So the workers get more benefits and the patients get fewer medications and procedures. And quicker pathways to death so they don’t use up any of the money that would otherwise go to executive bonuses and union benefits.

You can see it in the NHS or the VA. It’s all the same. (via Iowntheworld.com)

Encouraging vets on Medicare to use civilian care instead of the VA could cut the patient backlog at the VA by as much as half, solving a national crisis.

Almost half of vets are 65 or over, and nearly all vets using the VA have Medicare coverage.

Often, they’d be better off getting their bypass surgery and cancer operations at civilian hospitals that do higher volumes of these age-related procedures and have better survival rates, instead of sticking with the VA.

But the VA fails to tell them. The culprit is the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the union that dominates the VA. For AFGE, the VA is a jobs program.

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Hey WBOC, Here's A Little HELP

OCEAN CITY IS STILL CLOUDY.

4:25 PM

Meet Directive 3025.18 Granting Obama Authority To Use Military Force Against Civilians

While the "use of armed [unmanned aircraft systems] is not authorized," The Washington Times uncovering of a 2010 Pentagon directive on military support to civilian authorities details what critics say is a troubling policy that envisions the Obama administration’s potential use of military force against Americans. As one defense official proclaimed, "this appears to be the latest step in the administration’s decision to use force within the United States against its citizens." Meet Directive 3025.18 and all its "quelling civil disturbances" totalitarianism...

As The Washington Times reports,

Directive No. 3025.18, “Defense Support of Civil Authorities,” was issued Dec. 29, 2010, and states that U.S. commanders “are provided emergency authority under this directive.”

“Federal military forces shall not be used to quell civil disturbances unless specifically authorized by the president in accordance with applicable law or permitted under emergency authority,” the directive states.

“In these circumstances, those federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the president is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances” under two conditions.

The conditions include military support needed “to prevent significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property and are necessary to restore governmental function and public order.” A second use iswhen federal, state and local authorities “are unable or decline to provide adequate protection for federal property or federal governmental functions.”

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Eight Pounds of Marijuana Seized During Route 1 Traffic Stop

Middletown - A traffic stop on Route 1 late Tuesday night resulted in troopers seizing eight pounds of marijuana.

The stop occurred at 11:56 p.m. on May 27 when troopers stopped a Chevrolet Malibu that was speeding on southbound Route 1 in the area of Pole Bridge Road. The driver, Steven Verley, 24, of Millsboro (photo attached, blue hooded sweatshirt), had a suspended driver's license. His passenger, Dontel Brown, 26, of Seaford (photo attached, black t-shirt), provided a fictitious name. The troopers also noticed a strong odor of marijuana and air fresheners coming from the vehicle.

The troopers asked both occupants to exit the vehicle. When Brown stepped out, troopers observed a small amount of marijuana fall from his shirt onto the ground.

Both defendants were detained and a search of the vehicle was performed. A small bag of marijuana was found in the center console. In the trunk, troopers discovered eight bags containing a combined weight of 8.2 pounds of marijuana. Troopers also seized $1,622 cash from the defendants.

Both defendants were transported to Troop 9 and charged with possession of a controlled substance in a tier 3 quantity, possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance, and conspiracy second degree. Additionally, Brown was charged with criminal impersonation and Verley was charged with driving while suspended and speeding. Verley was committed to Howard R. Young Correctional Institute on $16,000 cash, $5,000 secured bail. Brown was committed to Howard R. Young Correctional Institute on $10,000 cash, $1,500 secured bail.

More On Sharpton

Flashback: Al Sharpton Says, “If Jews Want To Get It On, Tell Them To Pin Their Yarmulkes Back And Come Over To My House,” Led Marchers Chanting “Kill The Jews”…

In July 1991, a controversy erupted when Leonard Jeffries, a professor at New York’s City College gave a speech blasting “rich Jews” for financing the slave trade and for controlling Hollywood so they could “put together a system of destruction for Black people.”

Sharpton rushed to defend Jeffries, and in the middle of the swirling controversy, declared, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”

A day after Sharpton made that comment, in August 1991, a Jewish driver accidently ran over a 7-year old black boy named Gavin Cato in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and an anti-Semitic riot broke out in which Jewish rabbinical scholar Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death. Instead of calling for calm, Sharpton incited the rioters, leading marches in the streets that included chants of “No Justice, No Peace!” and “Kill the Jews!” At a funeral for the boy who had been run over, Sharpton said, “The world will tell us he was killed by accident. Yes, it was a social accident. … It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights. … Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights.” For those unfamiliar, “diamond merchants” was a thinly-veiled reference to Jewish jewelers.

After an investigation, no indictment was made of the driver who had accidently run over Cato, and he left for Israel. Sharpton flew there in an attempt to “hunt down” the driver and hand him a civil law suit. According to the Daily News, at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, a woman spotted Sharpton and shouted, “Go to hell!” Sharpton yelled back: “I am in hell already. I am in Israel.”

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Detectives Investigate Fatal Shooting in Willow Grove

Camden-Wyoming, DE – Detectives with the State Police Homicide Unit are currently investigating a fatal shooting that occurred on Monday May 26th.

The incident occurred at around 6:20 p.m. when troopers responded to the 7000 block of Willow Grove Road for a report of a subject shot in the stomach. Arriving troopers discovered that Charles W. Semans, 84, had been involved in argument with his grandson, John Rash, 17, when Rash retrieved a shotgun and shot him once in the stomach. Semans was initially transported to Kent General Hospital before being flown to Christiana Medical Center where he succumbed to his fatal wound on Thursday May 29th.

John Rash (Photo Attached) was taken into custody at the residence on Monday May 26th and transported to Troop 3 where he was charged with Assault 1st and Possession of a Firearm During the Commission of a Felony. He has been incarcerated at Stevenson House in Milford since then in lieu of $40,000.00 secured bond.

An autopsy was conducted on Friday May 30th of Mr. Semans by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner who determined the cause of death to be gunshot wound to the abdomen and the manner of death is pending further review.

Homicide detectives are continuing their investigation into this incident.

A Comment Worthy Of A Post 5-30-14

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "JMB Graduation Keepsake":

just received a message that corrected programs will be available Monday. Pick up at the school.

Resort Preps For Hurricane Season

With hurricane season’s official arrival June 1, the resort has been preparing for strong storms.

But the threat of those storms is average or below average this year, based on predictions by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In a release last week, NOAA predicted eight to 13 tropical storms and three to six hurricanes, one or two of which would reach a serious Category 3 status or higher.

In a “normal” year, there would be 12 tropical storms, six hurricanes and two major hurricanes during the June 1 through Nov. 30 season.
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