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A Tarrant, Alabama Police officer who became an Internet sensation after he decided not to arrest a grandmother he caught shoplifting eggs but to buy her some eggs instead, went a step further this week when he delivered two truckloads of food to her home to help her children. "The last time I saw my house this full, I was 12-years-old and staying with my grandmother," 47-year-old mother and grandmother Helen Johnson told al.com Wednesday after the food was delivered to her home. "I've been crying all day." Last Saturday, Officer William Stacy of the Tarrant Police Department was called...

The just passed $1.1 trillion Cromnibus (Continuing Resolution and Omnibus) check float that successfully got through the Republican controlled US House contains language that could gut pension plans, according to analyses by both conservative and leftist web writers. “The pension provision was made public late Tuesday night,” says a web source that blasts efforts to write down public pension allotments. (1) Mike Adams of Health Ranger warns that “all the pension benefits that have been promised government retirees are about to be stolen back from retirees.” (2) Quoting a WaPo article, Adams also points out that “the proposal would torpedo...

Good morning everyone. A short post to get Freeper opinion. I saw former General Zinni on Fox News this morning and he came out in favor of the report released this week by Diane Feinstein. What is the word on Zinni? Was he a good commander? Was he anti Bush, pro Obama?

A radio station that asked listeners to vote on whether two turkeys should be killed has been criticised by animal lovers - including Queen guitarist Dr Brian May. And the RSPCA has urged Jack FM to rethink the online vote on whether the turkeys should be cooked or kept alive. The RSPCA said it opposed any practice with the "potential to cause animals pain... in the name of entertainment". Currently, 62% of people have voted to save the turkeys, named Sage and Onion. The Oxfordshire station said if listeners voted to kill the pair in the "cook it or keep...

When you take a stand on principle in the unprincipled world of Washington, D.C., you’re sure to upset a lot of people, as U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz found out Saturday when he forced a vote on the constitutionality of President Obama’s overreaching executive order on immigration. In a move that pitted Cruz in a head-to-head matchup with outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the Texas senator prevailed in getting a point-of-order vote on whether Obama’s action was constitutional, before the Senate passed a massive $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill. Cruz would lose that vote overwhelmingly — 22 to...

Management at Roxy’s bar and dance club apologized on Facebook late Friday for a “hands up, pants up” wristband that sparked a late night protest linked to police involvement in the deaths of black men in Ferguson and New York. A group of around 90 protesters linked arms and stopped traffic outside of Roxy’s at 1025 E. Broadway at 11:30 p.m. Friday, eventually causing police to close the intersection of Tenth and Cherry streets to vehicle traffic for a short time. The Facebook apology said the wristbands were meant to be a joke about the bar’s dress code policy, which...

BERKLEY — Stacie Chapman’s heart skipped when she answered the phone at home and her doctor — rather than a nurse — was on the line. More worrisome was the doctor’s gentle tone as she asked, “Where are you?” On that spring day in 2013, Dr. Jayme Sloan had bad news for Chapman, who was nearly three months pregnant. Her unborn child had tested positive for Edwards syndrome, a genetic condition associated with severe birth defects. If her baby — a boy, the screening test had shown — was born alive, he probably would not live long. Sloan explained that...

The Sunday Propers: Gaudete Sunday Kevin TierneyIn his commentary on today’s Mass in The Liturgical Year, Dom Prosper Gueranger speaks of a Church that will “somewhat lessen” the penitential season in today’s liturgy.  Bells are rung, the Gloria is sung and the organ is played, something that doesn’t happen during Advent normally.  Why is this so?  While normally we answer “to anticipate the joy of the Messiah”, I think a deeper answer is in order, and today’s liturgy provides it.When we fast, it is important to remember that the point is not to “give something up.”  The point is...

State Rep. Scott Fitzpatrick filed legislation this week that would prevent anyone without legal status from getting state aid for higher education. His goal is to block a proposed rule by the state Department of Higher Education that would allow some immigrant students to qualify for the state's A+ scholarship program, which covers two years of studies at a community college. At issue are students who qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, created by Obama in 2012 to stop the deportation of children who have lived in the U.S. for years but whose parents brought them to...

New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) decreed that insurers operating in his state must cover sex reassignment surgery. Up to now insurance has typically not covered this on the grounds that it is elective rather than the result of an unforeseen illness or injury. “The whole idea behind insurance is that it allows the buyer to protect himself against events that he cannot control,” said industry spokesman Barbara Arian. “No one opts to come down with a life-threatening disease or to be maimed in an accident. We can insure against these events because we and the insured both aim to...

House Resolution 758 officially calls upon President Obama “to provide the Government of Ukraine with lethal and non-lethal defense articles, services, and training required to effectively defend its territory and sovereignty.” The Ukraine Support Act of 2014 does not use the phrase “lethal aid,” but it does give authorization to Obama to “provide defense articles, defense services, and training to the Government of Ukraine for the purpose of countering offensive weapons and reestablishing the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, including anti-tank and anti-armor weapons, crew weapons and ammunition, counter-artillery radars to identify and target artillery batteries, fire control, range...

I need to begin with a confession: I’m one of those people who gets his Christmas cards done way ahead of time. This year I started a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, which is more or less what I always do. Why so early? Because this is how people with a compulsive streak do everything. Granted, our obsession with punctuality makes us pains in the neck, but remember – we compulsives are the ones who arrive on time for appointments, meet our deadlines, and make the trains run on time. Time. That was what I was thinking about during one...

I’m standing at the intersection of Dwight and Shattuck in Berkeley with my hands in the air, shouting, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” It is the third night of protests over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the grand juries’ decision against indicting the white policemen involved in each of these cases. Surrounding me are students wearing Cal sweatshirts, young mothers with children, hippie types with gray ponytails, and a few middle-aged women like me. Although the crowd is sprinkled with brown and black faces, most of us are white. The irony of being a white person mimicking...

Explanation: Where did all the stars go? What used to be considered a hole in the sky is now known to astronomers as a dark molecular cloud. Here, a high concentration of dust and molecular gas absorb practically all the visible light emitted from background stars. The eerily dark surroundings help make the interiors of molecular clouds some of the coldest and most isolated places in the universe. One of the most notable of these dark absorption nebulae is a cloud toward the constellation Ophiuchus known as Barnard 68, pictured above. That no stars are visible in the center indicates...

The leader of a group hoping to improve liberals' fortunes at the state level revealed on Friday plans to start tracking conservative state legislators based on the assumption that "someone’s going to say something about black people" or women. “We’re working with David Brock and Media Matters and American Bridge who have trackers that we can send out to monitor the debate on some bills that you all might be running," Nick Rathod, executive director of SiX, said. "I think in many legislatures my understanding is that a lot of legislatures stream their floor debates but don’t necessarily transcribe it...

A Federal judge has ordered the Bank of America to pay a Florida couple $1 million for a slew of automated calls that occurred over a four-year period. According to the order, the relentless calls violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and as such the bank must pay the couple $1,500 for every prerecorded message received. In a statement, Joyce and Nelson Coniglio said they were harassed by telephone calls repeatedly after telling the bank on multiple occasions to stop. The calls started after the Coniglio’s began having problems with their mortgage payments....

On December 9, Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety released a study claiming "100 school shootings" had occurred since the heinous Sandy Hook attack on December 14, 2012. The problem is their list contains non-school shootings, shootings that did not occur, and accidental discharges of firearms that were legally possessed on campus.

Tyler Durden 12/13/2014 The undisputed winner in this year's "Worst Idea At The Wrong Time" category is the poor suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, a town which was looted, burned and generally eviscerated on several occasions in the past few months as a result of public anger first at the murder of Mike Brown and subsequently, the acquital of the police officer who shot him. Why? Because according to Bloomberg, in order to close a municipal budget gap - and keep in mind the prevailing poverty in the region has been widely attributed as one of the reason for the escalating...

New government guidance has LGBT rights advocates "thrilled" In one short paragraph of a 34-page memo released on Dec. 1, the Department of Education articulated a clear stance on gender identity, saying transgender students in public schools should be enrolled in single-sex classes that align with how they live their lives day-to-day. “We’re thrilled,” says Shannon Minter, the legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “It’s so critical to the health and well-being of those students, and it’s going to be so helpful to have that guidance in writing so that schools understand what their obligations are.” The...

So while nobody knows the future we still need to know what to expect from the week's two big headlines, even though our view can easily (and will probably) be muddied w/ other factors.  So we deal with an unknown future by checking the historical record for clues on at what the news means to our future investment returns.  What oil bargains do:  namely, what's it doing to the economy and to investments; here's what tanking oil's done in the past (ya gotta LOVE the fed's data site) and how real oil prices (2014$ per barrel) track real GDP-- [click...