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(Frankfort - September 24, 2009) State Auditor Crit Luallen today released the 2008 Pike County Fiscal Court audit, which refers an issue concerning a county employee to the US Attorney’s Office, Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, Kentucky Retirement Systems and county attorney. The audit found that the county’s financial statements, in all material respects, fairly present the county’s assets, liabilities, and equity arising from cash transactions and revenues received and expenditures paid in conformity with the modified cash basis of accounting. As part of the audit process, the Auditor must comment on non-compliance with laws, regulations, contracts and grants. The Auditor...

While the exact route of the Great Wagon Road has not been preserved, as such, we know that in Virginia and West Virginia, from the Potomac to the Roanoke Valley, it is either under or parallel to Route U.S. 11. Because the highway has been regraded, straightened, widened, and sometimes relocated and sometimes expanded to three and four lanes, it is often hard to know whether you are on, or simply driving parallel to, the Great Wagon Road. Except . . . there are places where you can be relatively certain that you are on the old road. [Pictures]

A document filed in federal court this week by the Justice Department offers new evidence that former vice president Richard B. Cheney helped steer the Bush administration's public response to the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's employment by the CIA and that he was at the center of many related administration deliberations. The administration's discussion of Wilson's link to the CIA was meant to undermine criticism by her husband of administration allegations that Iraq attempted to acquire uranium, a matter that her husband had probed for the CIA, according to testimony presented in a 2007 trial. *snip* He mentioned in...

If you believe the White House, there are 30 million Americans who support a government health care takeover. But if you look at the funding behind the Obamacare campaign, it's the same few leftist billionaires, union bosses and partisan community organizers pushing the socialized medicine agenda. Let's connect the dots. On Thursday, a national "grassroots" coalition called Health Care for America Now (HCAN) will march on Capitol Hill to demand universal health care. The ground troops won't have to march very far. HCAN, you see, is no heartland network. It is headquartered at 1825 K Street in Washington, D.C. --...

Prominent voices on the left are divided over how to address the unfolding scandal at ACORN, the nationwide community organizing, housing and voter registration group. This scandal is not the one that concerns fraudulent voter registrations by ACORN workers. And it’s not the scandal concerning the Bush Administration’s agreement to allow taxpayer money for the Fannie/Mae Freddie Mac bailout to go to ACORN housing nonprofits. This is the scandal concerning the embezzlement of almost $1 million by ACORN’s financial officer, the cover-up engineered by his brother, who is ACORN’s founder and longtime leader, and the reaction of ACORN’s supporters in...

Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do. Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s...

Iran makes no secret of the fact that it manufactures weapons for export, including mortar bombs of the general type found in Iraq. Customers from around the world can log on to the Web site of the government-owned Defense Industries Organization and view a wide array of Iranian-made munitions. If they decide to order, they apparently can pay by credit card, as a VISA logo suggests. The site - which promises "best quality and fast service" - is an example of the vigor with which Iran has moved into a global arms market long dominated by the United States and...

PORTOLA The state Department of Fish and Game says it wants to poison a Sierra Nevada lake next year to rid it of voracious northern pike before the invasive fish can spread downstream and devastate wild fish stocks. The department proposes to drain Lake Davis in Plumas County to about a fifth of its current size, then poison the remaining water along with the lake's tributary streams, springs, and ponds. A final decision is expected in January so that the department can begin draining the lake. The poisoning would take place next September. This would be the second time the...

Kevin Moloney for The New York TimesMelissa Bechhoefer, registrar of the Colorado Historical Society, with a sword and scabbard that belonged to Zebulon Montgomery Pike. Kevin Moloney for The New York TimesIn spiffying up to attract tourism, Pueblo, Colo., settled on the idea of a River Walk to anchor downtown. Much of the attraction, along the Arkansas River, offers themes related to Pike’s Southwestern expedition. PUEBLO, Colo., July 13 — All over tourist country, there’s an invisible borderline where people stop and shut their wallets, as if halted by a sign: nothing beyond here to see. snip... Now Pueblo...

Teresa Heinz Kerry: Bag Lady for the Radical Left By Ben Johnson FrontPageMagazine.com | February 13, 2004 With Matt Drudge’s recent revelation that John Kerry is as faithful to his second wife as he was to his old Vietnam “brothers,” the senator’s presidential campaign may depend more than ever on the actions of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. While the mainstream media has thus far overlooked the alleged infidelity, media outlets have also overlooked a far more important story: The former Mrs. John Heinz is also in bed – financially – with the radical Left. Teresa Heinz Kerry has financed...

I got some really disturbing mail today from something called Working Assets Long Distance. If you join their long distance telephone plan, you get a free pint of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream every month for a year, 60 free minutes of long distance for 3 months, paid connection fee, free calls every day to targeted decision-makers, and 1% of charges to progressive nonprofit groups. "Progressive organizations" that were listed were ACLU, Stand for Children, Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace, Doctors without Borders, Amnesty International, Center for Economic Justice, Planned Parenthood, Sweatshop Watch, and Children's Defense Fund (of Marian Wright Edelman...

Bush Ads in HeinzSightby Daniel Sargis08 March 2004Is President Bush really in a pickle over his recently released campaign advertisements?  The media would have you believing the issue has some traction.  As Reuters reported, “Families who lost relatives in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks pressed President Bush's re-election campaign on Friday to stop running political ads that use images of the devastated World Trade Center....”  Of course, there are “57 Varieties” of truth to this story. Almost without exception, the family members quoted in this and other similar stories are associated with pro-Kerry and/or, ipso facto, anti-Bush causes.  And, God forbid,...

John Pike is everywhere, promoting himself in the media as "a national security expert"Just today in the Christian Science Monitor: "It makes me nervous that, like the British, we've acquired an empire in a fit of absent-mindedness," says John Pike,a national security expert at GlobalSecurity.org. The key aspects of today's US military deployments, according to Pike, are their scope, and their durability. "They're not just a bunch of guys passing through," says Pike. Let's take a look at John Pike. Spokesman John Pike: self-promoter [Excerpt from his site] John Pike, one of the world's leading experts on defense, space and ...

<p>PORTOLA, Calif. (AP) - The voracious northern pike that have survived every effort to eradicate them from a scenic Sierra Nevada lake now appear to be winning the public relations battle as well.</p> <p>State wildlife officials poisoned Lake Davis six years ago in an unsuccessful attempt to kill the foreign fish they fear will devastate the lake's trout population and could endanger downstream salmon. They've since tried shocking, netting, trapping, hooking and even blowing up the toothy pike, only to see the population keep growing.</p>

Satellites crucial to American warfare In-Depth Coverage By JON SARCHE Moving through the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, a Special Operations group came upon a fortified Taliban position that Northern Alliance guides said could take several weeks of ground fighting to defeat. Nineteen minutes later, the site was reduced to smoking rubble, a victim of America's growing use of space in warfare. "We've done even better than that in Iraq," said Col. Jim Rodgers of the Air Force Space Command. "We have a goal of single-digit minutes." Making that possible are scores of satellites providing soldiers and commanders with navigational, communications...