Because every 2016 candidate now must be asked what they think about Rudy Giuliani saying President Obama doesn’t love America, yesterday Rand Paul got asked about it in an interview with Kentucky news station WAVE.

And, while Paul had nothing in particular to say about Giuliani, he did say, “I think it’s a mistake to question people’s motives. It’s one thing to disagree on policy.”

Paul said he’s not interested in questioning whether Obama’s a “good American or a bad American,” because while he may blame the president’s foreign policy for making the U.S. less safe, he’s not going to question whether Obama’s “well-intentioned.”

Rand Paul Taps Liberty Movement Leader As Iowa Political Director


More...http://blog.libertyconservatives.com/rand-paul-taps-liberty-movement-leader-as-iowa-political-director/

Sen. Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential campaign, which in recent months has gone from being a strong possibility to a near certainty, has hired a new political director to conduct operations in the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa.

Jonathan Van Norman, who served as former Rep. Ron Paul’s regional director in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District during his 2012 presidential run, will join an Iowa campaign team which is already staffed with several big names such as former Iowa Republican Party chairmen Steve Grubbs and AJ Spiker. In addition to his work for Ron Paul 2012, Van Norman’s impressive resume includes Liberty For All (a political action committee which proved crucial for Thomas Massie’s 2012 victory), the National Right To Work Committee, and most recently as a Regional Field Director for the Republican Party of Kentucky.

Confirmed.

Was it the racism, the sexism, or just the ignorant bigotry in general that sold you on him?

More than 24,000 murders were recorded in Venezuela last year. This year, Caracas alone is averaging 35 murders a day. Many locals choose simply not to go out after dark. Crews billeted in Caracas with American air carriers are ordered to stay in their hotels, no exceptions. Billboards throughout town go dark at night, because the power grid is crumbling. The shortages started to get serious in December as collapsing oil prices proved the final straw for a wildly mismanaged economy.

Oil accounts for 95 per cent of export earnings. In the years since Mr Chavez came to power, oil output has dropped 25 per cent and huge quantities are essentially given away, to neighbours to curry favour or to Venezuelans for whom petrol is roughly one penny a gallon – or basically free. Items that today are almost impossible to find in the capital include milk, baby milk, nappies, deodorant, soap and shampoo. So too are many medicines. Also absent from the shelves are condoms, bringing the threat of increased HIV rates and unwanted pregnancies from unprotected sex. Queues form outside supermarkets before dawn and purchases are being rationed by the government. Military police patrol checkouts to quell fights.

“It’s horrible, horrible,” lamented Lina Lorusso, 77, in the aisles of a San Lorenzo supermarket in the Chacao district of Caracas, jealously clasping a bag of beans and two cans of peas. It’s the third supermarket she had tried that day. “I have watched people hitting each other and shouting. If you find anything it’s three times more expensive than it used to be.” Ms Lorusso arrived in Venezuela 57 years ago from Bari in southern Italy. Now she is watching as her grandchildren go back to Italy. “The situation here is like it was when I left,” she explains, her lower lip trembling. “Please help us.”

“It’s like a post-war economy with hyper inflation, shortages, fixed prices and the country’s capacity to produce goods destroyed,” Amabilis Castillo, 27, a treasury products analyst for an international bank, explained. A possible default by Venezuela on its ever-expanding debt is also looming.

President Maduro, according to the most recent polls, has seen his support fall to a perilous 22 per cent. When he took to the airwaves a week ago to trumpet foiling one more conspiracy to topple him most observers rolled their eyes, including the US which dismissed as “ludricous” any notion it had played a part. Since becoming President, he has spoken of more than a dozen purported such plots. But this time he said an ex-general had been arrested and 10 other officers implicated. If the added flourish that jets were to bomb the palace was fantasy, his fears of a military mutiny may have had more foundation. Within hours Venezuela’s high command was on television reiterating its loyalty to the President.

Corrections officials in Texas are relocating nearly 3,000 inmates after about two-thirds of them broke out of their housing units during a lockdown at a prison in south Texas

The prisoners at the Willacy County Correctional Center refused to take part in work duties on Friday and some inmates said they were unhappy with medical services, said Management & Training Corp., the company that runs the prison, in a press release.

The inmates were put on lockdown but some broke out of their housing units, MTC said. About 2,000 prisoners went into the recreation area, though none breached the outer fences, MTC said.

Another 1,000 prisoners in another part of the facility were not involved.

With assistance from other law enforcement agencies and by using tear gas, the prisoners were brought under control, MTC said. Two officers and three inmates suffered minor injuries.

The offenders are mostly low-level custody inmates who are “criminal aliens,” MTC said. Willacy County is located in the southern tip of Texas.

MTC said the process of moving inmates to other prisons will take about a week.

“Once all the inmates are moved, we will begin assessing the damage. Soon after the disturbance began yesterday afternoon, inmates set three small fires which were quickly extinguished,” said Issa Arnita, director of corporate communications for MTC.

NAPLES, Florida — Wall Street seems to be wasting money on another Republican who may have no shot at the White House in former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of Bush’s biggest likely 2016 GOP primary opponents—Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)—tells Breitbart News in an exclusive interview.

“I think his main electability problem is with the Republican base,” Paul said.

What you need, I think, is someone who has the ability to excite the Republican base and expand the party. You can’t have someone who is so moderate that they think they can get the moderate vote but can’t excite the Republican base.

I think that is the biggest obstacle he has to overcome, is that being a moderate in a conservative party is difficult. When you refer to conservatives in the third person, as he did recently, that makes it even more difficult I think to connect with conservatives. When the first person you call when you decide to run is Hillary Clinton, that doesn’t really endear you to the grassroots.

Paul is saying that Bush may attempt to muscle his way to the nomination by appealing to moderate GOP voters nationwide with big fundraising and big government support, but if somehow Bush comes away with the nomination he won’t be able to get conservatives to show up and vote for him in November 2016. That was the same problem Mitt Romney faced in 2012, and John McCain in 2008—meaning that if Wall Street backs Bush in the primary, it may be supporting the prospects of Hillary Clinton or another Democrat.

Paul tells Breitbart News that Bush is likely to face widespread resistance from many Republican voters in the state where he was governor: Florida.

“One thing I noticed this morning about being in Florida, an early primary state, is that if I were Jeb Bush, I’d be very worried about his Common Core position because the one thing I noticed about the crowd this morning was the unity and enthusiasm in opposition to Jeb Bush’s position on Common Core,” Paul said.

Paul was referring to a grassroots event with Collier County Republicans on Saturday morning, where he spoke for about 30 minutes then took questions.

“Sen. Paul, Jeb Bush—through his influence over our state legislature—is killing our efforts to return our education system to our local communities and districts. What’s your view on Common Core?” one Republican activist asked Paul.

Paul responded by noting that he supports dismantling the entire Department of Education, including Common Core.

“Good question. I’m an old-fashioned conservative. I grew up supporting Ronald Reagan when it was part of our platform to get rid of the entire Department of Education. I still think we should,” Paul said.

The crowd of about 100 GOP grassroots activists, including many who aren’t the most conservative in the world, rose to its feet in thunderous applause for Paul.

“We found a Common Core in the English section that talks about the demise—it’s an op-ed that someone just put in there that you’re supposed to read for English comprehension and it talks about the Cold War,” Paul continued as the crowd quieted down.

It says, well, the Cold War finally ended when Reagan apologized to Gorbachev, they became friends and then Gorbachev ended the Cold War. That’s not exactly right. The danger of having a national curriculum where you use the bully force of the federal government to force things down is that bias could enter into the curriculum. I think that is a bias there.

My fear is that if one person makes a mistake in Washington—even a mistake on explaining math, which they’ve had some problems with. My son and I—kids don’t watch any of the news, but my son forwarded me something on Common Core and he forwarded me the math problem and we look at the math problem—I tested out of calculus, I’m pretty good at math—we were struggling to understand what they wanted us to get out of a two digit addition problem.

So the thing is I’m not here to tell you I know the best way to do two digit addition problems, you should figure that out locally with your teachers, your principals, your school boards. I’m not against national tests. When I was a kid, you took the College Board Achievement test. You should want to know how Florida compares to Kentucky and how it compares to India and China and all these other countries.

Comparison statistics is a great idea. It just shouldn’t be mandated from Washington. I’m very much opposed to any of this being in Washington. I’m on the Education committee, and I will introduce an amendment to try to stop and defund Common Core.

The room rose in thunderous applause again. “What a guy!” one man, an army veteran who had asked a previous question, yelled in admiration.

In his interview with Breitbart News later, Paul said that the GOP nominee needs to be a conservative who can reach out to new potential voting blocs without compromising principle.

“What I find as I’m traveling around the country is that people don’t want us to dilute our message,” Paul said.

They don’t want our message to be Democrat-light. They don’t want our message to be wishy-woshy. They want our message to be principled. They want us to boldly be for what we are for. I think you can be all of that and still find new voters by taking aspects of your message that haven’t been listened to and haven’t been heard to new venues. That doesn’t mean we give up on what we stand for.

This article is from 2012, about how the town of Keane got pissed when they learned the city of 23,000 was planning to buy a Bearcat. Spoiler: the town purchased the Bearcat anyway.

We are 18 months from halving, when will we start to see the halving bubble start to build???

I am thinking it is a year out.... languish around 300 for another 12 months....

We are in a post bubble era. Those who think the fever is gone should look at the number of addresses in use and the number of transactions.
https://blockchain.info/pl/charts/n-unique-addresses
https://blockchain.info/pl/charts/n-transactions

You do realise all these articles coming out of psychotic and violent girlfriends is making it much harder for me to go out and find a girl right guys? I'd much rather stay single with all these stories I keep hearing about lol, it's come to a point now where if I ever meet someone new I'm just thinking "Please don't be a psychopath, please don't be a psychopath"

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday other countries should not have the illusion that they can attain military superiority over Russia, Interfax reported.

"No one should have the illusion that they can gain military superiority over Russia, put any kind of pressure on it. We will always have an adequate answer for any such adventures," he was quoted as saying in an address dedicated to the Defenders' of the Fatherland Day holiday next week.

A British woman is staging a desperate legal bid to become pregnant with her own grandchild – using her dead daughter’s eggs.
In the first case of its kind in the world, the woman, 59, and her husband will claim it was their daughter’s dying wish that her eggs be fertilised by donor sperm and implanted into her own mother’s womb. It would be the couple’s only chance to become grandparents after their daughter, an only child, died of bowel cancer four years ago while still in her 20s.

She chose to freeze her eggs in the hope that she could have children in the future, but tragically lost her battle with the disease. No UK-based clinic has agreed to treat the mother, who is now hoping to export the eggs to New York, where a clinic is lined up to provide fertility treatment at an estimated cost of up to £60,000.

At her age, the woman’s chances of becoming pregnant using the eggs are small.
There are potentially large risks to her health, and the health of the unborn child, if fertility treatment succeeds.
However, the woman and her 58-year-old husband say they are determined to honour their daughter’s wishes and the case is now set to be decided by a judge.

Is Hillary Rodham Clinton a McDonald’s Big Mac or a Chipotle burrito bowl? A can of Bud or a bottle of Blue Moon? JCPenney or J. Crew?

As she readies her second presidential campaign, Clinton has recruited consumer marketing specialists onto her team of trusted political advisers. Their job is to help imagine Hillary 5.0 — the rebranding of a first lady turned senator turned failed presidential candidate turned secretary of state turned likely 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.

Clinton and her image-makers are sketching ways to refresh the well-established brand for tomorrow’s marketplace. In their mission to present voters with a winning picture of the likely candidate, no detail is too big or too small — from her economic opportunity agenda to the design of the “H” in her future campaign logo.

“It’s exactly the same as selling an iPhone or a soft drink or a cereal,” said Peter Sealey, a longtime corporate marketing strategist. “She needs to use everything a brand has: a dominant color, a logo, a symbol. . . . The symbol of a Mercedes is a three-pointed star. The symbol of Coca-Cola is the contour bottle. The symbol of McDonald’s is the golden arches. What is Clinton’s symbol?”

Clinton’s challenge is unique. Unlike potential Republican challengers of relatively middling fame who are introducing themselves to a national audience for the first time, Clinton is almost universally recognized. Love her or loathe her, potential voters know who she is after more than two decades in public life.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis urged members of Italian organized crime groups on Saturday to repent, saying the Catholic Church would welcome them if they promised to stop serving the cause of evil.

He spoke during an audience at the Vatican for pilgrims and anti-crime activists from the southern region of Calabria, home to the 'Ndrangheta, mainland Italy's equivalent of the Sicilian Mafia.

"Open your hearts to the Lord. The Lord is waiting for you and the Church will welcome you if your willingness to serve good is as clear and public as your choice to serve evil was," he said.

When he visited Calabria last June, he accused organized crime groups of practising "the adoration of evil" and said members had excommunicated themselves from the Church by their actions.