Category: random

Detectives searching for Karen Mitchell are interested in talking to Manhattan real estate heir Robert Durst in the disappearance of the 16-year-old.  Karen vanished on November 25, 1997 after volunteering at a homeless shelter in Eureka, California.

At the time of her disappearance a command center was set up in a donated room at the Eureka Inn and since, stacks of papers on the case fill more than 30 volumes and stands over six-feet high. Law enforcement has combed through every lead given to them including the driver of a car that had slowed to speak with a girl resembling Karen the day she disappeared.

The car, a light blue 1977 Ford Granada, ultimately failed to get a solid lead.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

There was a caller, who claimed to have heard details of Karen’s kidnapping and murder and a letter to the Times-Standard from “Topaz,” who said police should try looking behind Taco Bell and Bayshore Mall. A search of the area found nothing.

Police said that after leaving the shelter, Karen walked over to the Bayshore Mall to visit her aunt, Annie Casper, at her shoe store. Then she left for her aunt’s home, and has not been seen since.

At the time, Annie and Bill Casper were both well-known in the business and law enforcement communities; Annie owned Annie’s Shoes, while Bill worked as the supervisor of the state Department of Justice crime lab in Eureka. She moved to Humboldt County from Southern California when she was 13.

The day Karen disappeared she had been filling out college applications. She was planning to go to Humboldt State University and was interested in politics, especially involving the environment, and in children.

In 1999, officers interviewed confessed serial killer Wayne Ford after he walked into the sheriff’s department carrying a female breast in his pocket, telling officers he had killed a woman. In the end, investigators could not connect him to Karen’s case.

In 2004, police set off on the largest land search since she disappeared. Investigators and cadaver-sniffing dogs inspected a fence line near Truesdale Street and another along Hilfiker Lane, looking for clues.

Durst lived in Trinidad at the time and visited Casper’s store, while dressed in drag, at least four times. Durst was recently arrested in New Orleans and is charged with murder in Los Angeles and has been suspected but never charged in the disappearance of his first wife in New York.

In 2003, he was acquitted of murder in a dismemberment death in Texas.  Durst is also a person of interest in the disappearance of 18-year-old Kristen Modafferi, who vanished on June 23, 1997 after leaving work in San Francisco.

While everyone’s heard of ISIS or ISIL, there is a new name for the group gaining popularity and supposedly the radical Islamic terror group hates it. This new name — Daesh — is already starting to be used by governments officials.

“In less than three months, the international community has come together to form a coalition that is already taking important steps to degrade and defeat ISIL, or Daesh,” SOS John Kerry said from NATO headquarters in Brussels in December 2014.

Say what?

Daesh, pronounced Die-esh, apparently comes from the Arabic name with which ISIL refer to themselves, “al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham.”  The claimed hate at being called Daesh is that its supposedly like the verb ‘Daes,’ which means “one who crushes something underfoot.” It also sounds like ‘Dahes,’ or “one who sows discord.”

On the surface, this is yet another Progressive ploy at word play as revealed by France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius: “This is a terrorist group and not a state. I do not recommend using the term Islamic State because it blurs the lines between Islam, Muslims and Islamists.”

We need to stop trying to reinvent the enemy by altering its name to avoid offending the very people who’re dedicated to destroying us.

President Obama is trying to force his foreign policy on our next President by creating ‘a third term.’ The very week that ISIL beheaded 21 Coptic Christians, Obama sent an “Authorization for the Use of Military Force” to Congress restricting our fight against the radial Islamic group.

So what’s in Obama’s AUMF?

— Authorization to use force against the Islamic State and any related group.
— No restrictions on where in the world.
— No authorization to conduct “enduring offensive ground combat operations”.
— The Authorization would automatically end after three years unless Congress reauthorizes it.
— It repeals the 2002 AUMF for Iraq.

That appears to be what we’re doing now, under the old AUMF. And, it’s clearly not enough as ISIL keeps advancing, killing men, women and children in Iraq, Syria, and Libya.  This includes ‘sub-sets’ of people like Christians and homosexuals.

If enacted Obama’s AUMF would keep the next president from waging a ground war against ISIL until 2018.  Also, by having his AUMF passed by Congress, Obama will be able to claim he’s ‘acting’ under the terms of the agreement approved by Congress.

Finally, this AUMF, with its new controlling terms is unconstitutional.

Obama appears to on the verge of creating a precedent that would have Congress lessen the commander-in-chief’s use of force. And while Congress has the ability to “declare war,” it doesn’t have the power to limit the president in the execution of such a declaration.

The framers of the Constitution put all executive power into a single official office commonly referred to as the Commander-in-Chief or President.  So, if Congress approves Obama’s AUMF, it will permanently cripple that framework.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey all recently pressed for congressional approval of the AUMF.

The truth doesn’t seem to mean much to those who claim the mantle of national leadership these days. Worse yet, it appears to matter even less to those who follow those same so-called leaders.

‘If you like your healthcare,” President Obama promised, “you can keep your healthcare.”

While hundreds went to Selma, Alabama to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the march across the city’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry said it wasn’t about celebrating ‘voter rights.’

“Folks who are clearly out here marching because they believe that reproductive rights continue to be threatened in this country, and particularly in the South,” Harris-Perry said. “This is truly motivated by what the president has called, and, of course, in quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘the fierce urgency of now.’”

Then there is Hillary Clinton, who claimed ‘convenience,’ as the reason she used a private e-mail account to conduct State Department business.

“Looking back, it would have been better for me to use two separate phones and two separate e-mail accounts,” Clinton said. “I thought using one device would be simpler. Obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way.”

Finally, Senator Harry Reid issued a message to the 47 Senate Republicans who signed onto a letter to Iranian leadership, instructing them on how our U.S. Constitution works.

“I’m disappointed that some of my Republican colleagues are destroying the long tradition of bipartisanship in defending Israel and stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” Reid said. “We’re witnessing a fundamental test of Republicans’ ability to govern. They’re treating nuclear negotiations as a chance to play political games.”

With such tripe being bantered about it’s not hard to think about how 2 Timothy 4:3-4 reads: “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”

Activist Gloria Steinem said it best for the Progressive who may be reading this: “The truth will set you free — but first it will piss you off.”

President Obama has already enacted amnesty through executive fiat and now, he’s eyeing unilateral tax increases. This comes after a self-described democratic socialist and Vermont Senator, Bernie Sanders called on Obama to raise more than $100 billion in taxes through IRS executive action.

As the ranking minority member on the Senate Budget Committee, Sanders wants executive action if Congress refuses to pass his version of tax reform.  Sanders’ letter calls on Obama to close these “tax loopholes:”

— The Check the Box Loophole
— The Hewlett-Packard Loophole
— The Real Estate Investment Trusts Loophole
— The Corporate Inversion Loophole
— The Carried Interest Loophole
— The Valuation Discount Loophole

The problem with Sanders’ request is that is fails to acknowledge the relationship between Congress and Treasury. The department has no more power than Congress delegates to it.

But if Obama can handout work permits, Social Security numbers, and driver’s licenses to millions of illegal aliens, then tax increases would be easy as White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest points out: “Now I don’t want to leave you with the impression that there is some imminent announcement, there is not, at least that I know of. But the president has asked his team to look at the array of executive authorities that are available to him to try to make progress on his goals.”

Those actions, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will raise federal deficits by $8.8 billion over the next ten years. Meanwhile, unconcerned with deficits, Obama wants more tax reporting too – but few are talking about this.

Businesses that purchase more than $600 worth of goods or services from a contractor would have to get that contractor’s Taxpayer Identification Number and check it with the IRS. If it doesn’t check out, the business would have to withhold from 15-percent to 35-percent of the payment, sending it off to the IRS, doubling or tripling the reporting obligations of small businesses.

The timing of Sanders’ letter and Earnest’s response should be a wake-up call to leaders in Congress as this nation fought a revolution, in part, because of taxes levied by a despot.

The Obama administration is proposing a new government agency dedicated to keeping the nation’s food safe. It would merge parts of the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services.

The proposal comes after outbreaks of illness linked to chicken, eggs, peanuts and cantaloupe. More than a dozen federal agencies oversee food safety, and consumer advocates have long called for giving it a single home.

Currently, the Agriculture Department oversees the safety and inspections of meat and processed eggs and the Food and Drug Administration oversees safety of most other foods. The new agency would coordinate with state and local health departments, a job that is now mostly handled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2010, Congress passed a sweeping food safety law that gave the government new powers to inspect processing plants, order recalls and impose stricter standards for imported foods. It also requires stricter food safety standards on farms and in manufacturing plants.

Despite this, the CDC estimates that there are 48 million food borne illnesses a year from contaminated foods. More bureaucracy is the answer every time.

The abandoned mill buildings in Toulon date from 1892. The main building housed a ball mill used to process tungsten as well as precious metals.

Unlike most other mining sites, the original mill is still standing — it’s the large, two-story metal building next to the railroad tracks. The ruins are on private property and the owners are extremely protective of the site.

As you approach the site from I-80, you’ll happen upon a set of railroad track. Jus’ before crossing them you see a sign the reads, “Rail Road Cross.”

Make certain to read the entire sign because at the bottom, it also states, “No Trespassing.” Unfortunately for me, I thought that meant the tracks as the signage is clearly the property of the rail road company.

None-the-less, I discovered in short order that I had broken the cardinal rule of rural Nevada – I failed to ask permission before I drove passed the three or four RV trailers parked at the town’s entrance. I drove right by the man who would eventually come to tell me I had goofed.

I was only able to snap three frames of the mill before having to beat-feet back to the Interstate.

“Inside the towering tumblers and their attached furnaces are precariously supported by warped floorboards seemingly held together with decades of pigeon droppings,” reports one person fortunate enough to look inside.

Toulon, which appears named for a French seaport was founded in 1917 following construction of a large mill to treat tungsten, gold and silver ore mined at Nightingale. The mill was used sporadically over the years.

Tungsten was discovered in the Nightingale district in 1917, and enough was found that they hauled it down to the mill at Toulon, 40 miles to the southeast. In the early 1930’s they built a 100-ton concentrator on site but it never got much of a workout.

The name “Nightingale,” can be traced to Captain Alanson W. Nightengill (the name was corrupted on state maps), the first State Controller and a survivor of the 1860 Pyramid Lake Indian War.

While not as romantic or exciting as gold, tungsten has its uses, and was particularly important during wartime. Its uses in high-speed metal-working equipment, steel, armor, and armor-piercing shells made tungsten a vital war commodity.

Tungsten was in such short supply during the way that the War Production Board mandated that all replaced automotive ignition points be returned to salvage the tungsten in them. Tungsten production was intermittent until World War II, but then slowed down again until about 1956, when interest petered out altogether.

Because I was very apologetic, I’ve been invited to return to speak with the towns owner about possibly touring the site, this time with his permission.

Senator Tick Segerblom is sponsoring SJR 8, which would raise the minimum wage to either $15 or $16 an hour depending if the employer offers health insurance.  Segerblom and a number of his Progressive pals claim the change is necessary because the current minimum wage isn’t livable.

The minimum wage in Nevada is 8.25 an hour if the company does not provide health insurance. If the company does include health insurance then the starting wage is 7.25 an hour, which is still a dollar more than the set federal minimum wage.

Nevada’s minimum wage compares with California at $9, Oregon, $9.10, and Washington, $9.32. The cities of Seattle and San Francisco have increased their own rates to $15 and hour.

But this has brought about a not-unforeseen problem.

On February 2, Borderlands Books in San Francisco on Valencia Street announced it will close March 31, citing the recently approved minimum-wage increase as the main reason. A day earlier and a block up the street, a restaurant called ‘The Abbot’s Cellar’ served its last customers, pointing at the $15 minimum wage in its decision to close.

Further north, Seattle’s looming $15 minimum wage seems to be costing the city its restaurants. The Washington Policy Center writes that (restaurant) “closings have occurred across the city, from Grub in the upscale Queen Anne Hill neighborhood, to Little Uncle in gritty Pioneer Square, to the Boat Street Café on Western Avenue near the waterfront.”

This isn’t simply a political problem; it’s a serious math problem. Then again with the implementation of Common Core across Nevada, in a few short years no one will be able to recognize a ‘math problem.’

“When angels visit us, we do not hear the rustle of wings, nor feel the feathery touch of the breast of a dove; but we know their presence by the love they create in our hearts,” Mary Baker Eddy.

An 18-month-old baby who survived after her mother’s vehicle veered off the road and landed upside down in a river has captured headlines in recent days, but there’s a mysterious element to the story. Lily Groesbeck was found alive in an overturned car after a crash in which the vehicle plunged into a river in Spanish Fork, Utah.

It was not until 14 hours after the crash that a fisherman stumbled upon the car and alerted emergency personnel. Rescuers rushed down to the car, four police officers all say they heard the same thing: a voice calling out, begging for help.

But they can’t explain who that voice was, because the baby’s mother, Lynn Groesbeck, died shortly after impact, and the voice they heard was too mature to be the toddler.

It brings to mind Jesus’ baptism in Matthew 3:17 where God’s voice was heard, “And behold! There was a voice out of the heavens saying “this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” There were those who heard the voice, others who heard ‘thunder,’ and still others who heard nothing.

“When we all talked together, I said, ‘Was I the only one that was hearing this?’ thinking that I was hearing things,” Tyler Beddoes, one of the officers who rescued the toddler, explained. “And when I talked to the other officers, we all had heard the same thing, a voice saying, ‘Help us. Help me.’”

He added that he’s been laying awake at night thinking: “For two nights I’ve laid awake trying to figure out exactly what it could be. All I know is it was there, we all heard it. It was extra motivation.”

Another officer described the same thing.

“The four of us heard a distinct voice coming from the car,” said Officer Jared Warner. “To me, it didn’t sound like a child’s voice.”

Backing up his comment was fellow rescuer Officer Bryan DeWitt.

“It felt like I could hear someone telling me, ‘I need help,’” DeWitt added. “It was very surreal, something that I felt like I could hear.”

The officers say the calls for help pushed them to work even harder to right the car. After they flipped the vehicle, they discovered only a deceased woman and her child, inside.

“We were just able to push the car onto its side. How, I don’t know, whether it’s adrenaline or what. But it was incredible,” Dewitt continued. “As I grabbed the little baby out of the car seat, as I pulled her head up, I could tell that there was some life in her. I could see her eyes open.”

Lily remains in hospital and her family says she’s going to be okay. Police are still trying to figure out what caused the accident.

As 13th Century theological thinker, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote: “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”

Congressman Trey Gowdy, chairman of the special House committee investigating the terror attack on Americans in Benghazi, says they’ve received more than 800 pages of emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email account, but not all of them.

“There are gaps of months and months and months,” Gowdy said.

He points to a trip Clinton took in October 2011: “And if you think to that iconic picture of her on a C-17 flying to Libya, she has sunglasses on and she has her handheld device in her hand — we have no e-mails from that day. In fact, we have no e-mails from that trip.”

“So, it strains credibility to believe that if you’re on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy that there’s not a single document that has been turned over to Congress,” he adds.

Gowdy also said it’s not up to Clinton to decide what emails should be part of the public record.

“With respect to the president it’s not up to Secretary Clinton to decide what is a public record and what’s not,” Gowdy finished.

President Obama then added his two-cents to the debacle by attempting to side-step any knowledge of Clinton’s use of the private email system to conduct business.

“When did you first hear that Hillary Clinton used an email system outside the U.S. government for official business while she was secretary of state?” CBS’s Bill Plante asked.

Obama answered, “At the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

Press Secretary Josh Earnest was left to clean-up Obama mess, admitting the President was aware of Clinton’s private email address usage.

“The point that the President was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address. He did. But he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up, or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act,” Earnest asserted.

Clinton’s email domain was hosted by a company whose data was hacked in 2010, with information being sent to Ukraine and that the domain was hosted at one point in the British Virgin Islands. Examining the registry information for “clintonemail.com” reveals the domain was first created January 13, 2009 — a week before Obama was sworn into office, and the same day Clinton’s confirmation hearings began before the Senate.