In the Babylon of Daniel the prophet, worshiping the wrong God openly got you a one-way ticket to the Lion’s Den. The same offense today gets you thrown into America’s leftist media Termite Mound. Bill Maher, Bill Press and their ilk are to our social fabric what the termite is to architecture. The two Bills spearheaded the recent vicious attacks on Tim Tebow. His crime, he openly loves Jesus. Then he started to win games, culminating in last week’s wildcard game. John 3:16 became the number one Google search the following morning. The introduction to the Good News of salvation through Jesus Christ went out to millions. God was glorified, and some were certainly saved, which is primarily what Tebow and every believer prays for. Entertaining football is a bonus. Go Tebow! –Dale
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Airline passengers left more than $400,000 at airport security checkpoints operated by the Transportation Security Administration in 2011.
TSA found $409,085.56 in spare change last year that was unclaimed by passengers, according to figures released by the agency. Historically, if no one comes back to get the leftover money, it stays with the TSA.
A Florida lawmaker is trying to change that, however: Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) filed a bill in April of 2009 that would require TSA to transfer money that is not claimed by passengers when they leave airport security checkpoints to United Service Organizations.
Miller said Thursday in a statement provided to The Hill that the amount of change left at airport security checkpoints in 2011 could be put to better uses than the TSA’s operating budget.
“TSA keeps travelers change accidentally left at checkpoints as an appropriations backfill for agency activities,” Miller said. “There is no incentive for TSA to try to return the forgotten change to its rightful owner.
Solar panel maker Solyndra received a $528 million Energy Department loan in 2009 – and went bankrupt last year. The government’s risky investment strategy didn’t stop there, as a CBS News investigation has uncovered a pattern of cases of the government pouring your tax dollars into clean energy.
Take Beacon Power — a green energy storage company. We were surprised to learn exactly what the Energy Department knew before committing $43 million of your tax dollars.
Documents obtained by CBS News show Standard and Poor’s had confidentially given the project a dismal outlook of “CCC-plus.”
Asked whether he’d put his personal money into Beacon, economist Peter Morici replied, “Not on purpose.”
“It’s, it is a junk bond,” Morici said. “But it’s not even a good junk bond. It’s well below investment grade.”
Was the Energy Department investing tax dollars in something that’s not even a good junk bond? Morici says yes.
“This level of bond has about a 70 percent chance of failing in the long term,” he said.
In fact, Beacon did go bankrupt two months ago and it’s unclear whether taxpayers will get all their money back. And the feds made other loans when public documents indicate they should have known they could be throwing good money after bad.
CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES’ subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra.
In the late summer of 2010, the ATF agent leading the failed Fast and Furious gun-smuggling operation in Arizona flew to Mexico City to help coordinate cross-border investigations of U.S. weapons used by Mexican drug cartels.
Hope A. MacAllister wanted access to police and military vaults for American weapons recovered by Mexican authorities in raids and at crime scenes. She especially was interested in firearms from another ATF investigation, code-named White Gun, that she was running.
Now members of Congress who have spent months scrutinizing the Fast and Furious debacle are seeking to determine whether White Gun was another weapons investigation gone wrong.
“Apparently guns got away again,” said one source close to the investigation, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). “How many got into Mexico, who knows?”
(will Holder be held accountable for this? He should be removed from office quick!)
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White House Council of Economic Adviser Chair Alan Krueger on Thursday blamed “income inequality” on a decline in union membership.
Krueger said that union membership lifted the wages of lower middle class workers into the middle class, but membership has declined from 20 percent of employees in 1983 to 12 percent today.
He also cited the “decline in the real value of the minimum wage in the 1980s.”
Add to that, the role that tax policy has played, Krueger said, speaking at a discussion hosted by the Center for American Progress.
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