Tim Pawlenty Latest GOP Candidate to Get 'Glittered'

(SAN FRANCISCO) — Another Republican presidential candidate just got glittered. A few weeks ago it was Newt Gingrich who was doused in glitter by Nick Espinosa. Now it’s Tim Pawlenty. The former Minnesota governor was reportedly showered in glitter at an event Thursday in San Francisco. Politico is reporting that two protesters outside the AHIP conference managed to get some pink glitter — plus some confetti — on Pawlenty as the Republican candidate was signing books. “Tim Pawlenty, where is your courage to stand?” the protesters said, according to Politico’s Kate Nocera. “Stand for reproductive rights! Stand for gay rights!”

Idaho Family Flees 'Snake House'

(REXBURG, Idaho) — Even in this economy, a picture-perfect five bedroom rural home that lists for just over a $100,000 might seem like a real deal. Except for the fact this home is known by locals in Rexburg, Idaho as the “snake house” because it apparently sits on a nest of non-poisonous garter snakes. The home has had a fraught history of owners leaving in haste. Now owned by Chase bank, it was on the market briefly in January and then taken off again. In September 2009, it seemed like the ideal home for the growing Sessions family. Ben and Amber Sessions got it for what seemed like a steal, paying less than $180,000. But soon after moving in, they found snakes slithering inside the residence and all around the property. “After we moved in, it was really horrible,” Amber Sessions told ABC News. “There were snakes in the walls. We could hear them and then our water tasted like how they smell.”

Scotts Miracle-Gro to Tap into Marijuana Market?

(NEW YORK) — Scotts Miracle-Gro, a leader in lawn care and garden products, is reportedly looking to cash in on the medical marijuana growing industry.

“I want to target the pot market,” the company’s CEO, Jim Hagedorn, said in an interview, according to The Wall Street Journal.  “There’s no good reason we haven’t.”

Hagedorn hopes that by delving into medical marijuana,  Scotts Miracle-Gro will receive a boost in sales.

So far, the use of pot for medical purposes has been legalized in 16 states.  See Change Strategy LLC, an information data services company, estimates that sales of medical marijuana will near $2 billion this year.

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Angry Florida Homeowner Forecloses on Bank of America

(NAPLES, Fla.) — In Florida an angry homeowner whose home was wrongfully foreclosed on by Bank of America, gets revenge by foreclosing on the bank’s local branch.

The incident arose when the bank foreclosed on Warren and Maureen Nyerges of Golden Gate Estates in Naples. This surprised the Nyerges, since they had no mortgage — not with BofA or with anybody else. They had paid cash for their home in 2009. 

Warren Nyerges made phone calls to the bank to try to get them to desist. “I talked to branch managers, I called anyone who would listen to me,” he told the Naples News. “I wrote a certified letter to the [bank] president. No response, nothing.” Finally he hired an attorney. Two months later, the foreclosure had been dismissed. 

Nyerges then sought to recover his attorney’s fees, and got a judgment against the bank. Five more months passed: more phone calls, more letters; no payment. Nyerges went back to court and got a writ of execution, which gave him permission to seize bank assets in payment for his judgment. 

On June 3, Nyerges, two sheriff’s deputies and a moving truck showed up at the local BofA branch. The deputies informed the manager that he could either pay the Nyerges’ legal fees— $2,500—or the movers would start taking away the bank’s furniture and cash. The manager, after conferring with his superiors, gave the deputies a check. 

Bank of America later apologized to the Nyerges in writing.

As to how the situation arose in the first place, the couple’s attorney, Todd Allen of Conrad Willkomm, P.A., says the home’s prior owner had defaulted, and that BofA had taken back the house. “My clients purchased the property directly from Bank of America. If they [the bank] had taken 15 minutes to review their records on the property, they would have seen the details of the transaction.” In his view the Nyerges’ story is “symptomatic of a larger problem: banks just aren’t doing their due diligence before they start foreclosings.” 

His clients, he says, are “ecstatic — but drained emotionally. It’s scary to have your home foreclosed on when you’ve paid cash for it.” 

Bank of America spokesperson Jumana Bauwens acknowledges a mistake was made: “Basically, we’re truly sorry for the series of unfortunate circumstances that Mr. Nyerges experienced. He received a judgment—and rightly so. On Friday, that judgment was paid.” 

Still, she says of the incident, “It’s not good for business.”

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Local News: Authorities Find Dead Rhino, Other Animal Carcasses in Man's Yard

(ALBUQUERQUE, N.M) — Officials are investigating the discovery of numerous animal carcasses found on a property in Bernalillo County early Thursday morning.

Authorities say the owner of the property has a permit to dispose of animal remains at a landfill, but it appears he was stockpiling the animals, including a rhino, sheep, and horses, in his yard.

Police say they decided to investigate the property after residents complained of a foul smell coming from the man’s home.

No other details have been released and it remains unclear if the man will be criminally charged.

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Porn at the SEC: Agency Watchdog Investigates More Employees

(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission still has a porn problem. 

A new report from the SEC’s inspector general David Kotz details how three employees and a contractor were caught checking out porn at work, the latest string of incidents uncovered by the agency’s watchdog. Kotz only launches investigations after the SEC’s security system flags employees for repeated attempts to access porn websites, but as he outlines in his new semi-annual report to Congress, he recently conducted probes into four workers. 

In October of last year, Kotz looked into a staff accountant at the agency’s Washington headquarters who used his work computer to try to access porn “hundreds of times.” The employee successfully managed to get to “numerous sexually explicit photographs from his SEC computer, including graphic depictions of sexual acts,” Kotz found, noting that much of the porn activity occurred during work hours. The employee initially did not deny that he had used his work computer to access the material, but later declined to testify as part of the inspector general’s investigation. The probe culminated in Kotz recommending disciplinary action against the employee, including removal from his job. As of the end of March, SEC management had proposed that the employee be removed.  

But the staff accountant wasn’t the only one at the SEC looking for porn on the clock. 

Two other SEC employees and one contractor for the agency also were the subjects of investigations by Kotz’s office. One of the employees — an attorney who works at the agency’s headquarters — tried to access porn repeatedly during a two-month period. He was rebuffed by the agency’s security system hundreds of times, but in “many instances” he was successful in getting to the sexually explicit images. The attorney later resigned. 

Another attorney at headquarters was also on the prowl for porn at work. He used his work computer to access “inappropriate images of partially or fully nude women,” according to Kotz — a total of at least 70 images. The employee refused to testify as part of the investigation. As of the end of March, SEC management had recommended that he be removed from his post. 

The contractor, meanwhile, used his SEC computer to check out numerous sexually explicit images, “including graphic depictions of sexual acts,” Kotz found. When confronted by the IG’s office, the contractor admitted to accessing the porn and had his contract with the SEC terminated by agency management. 

It’s not the first time Kotz has uncovered a slew of SEC employees spending their work hours looking at porn. Back in April of last year, Kotz released a report outlining how employees were checking out pornographic websites at the same time as the financial crisis was unfolding — and when Bernie Madoff was swindling investors out of tens of billions of dollars.

The 2010 report, conducted at the request of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, found 31 serious porn offenders at the SEC during a two-and-a-half-year period. While that was only a tiny fraction of the SEC’s 3,500 employees, 17 of the alleged porn offenders were senior officers at the agency, making up to $222,000 a year. One senior attorney spent up to eight hours per day accessing porn, even filling boxes in his office with CDs and DVDs that contained porn that he had downloaded. Another employee — an accountant — tried to access porn sites a staggering 16,000 times in one month. 

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Is Jay Leno Stealing Jokes?

(LOS ANGELES) — Many comedians have been known to steal material from other comics, and now Tonight Showhost Jay Leno is catching heat for some alleged joke thievery.

The Daily Caller reports Leno told a joke on the May 26 installment of The Tonight Show that appears to be very similar to a joke told two days earlier by Andy Levy on the Fox News Channel show, Red Eye.

According to PopEater.com, here’s a transcript of both jokes:

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, May 26
Jay Leno: “Bad news for the state of California. The Supreme Court will force the state to release something like 46,000 convicts because of prison overcrowding. But the good news — it looks like the Oakland Raiders will have more season ticket holders. Yeah, so the stadium will be packed.”

Red Eye, May 24
Andy Levy: “Supreme Court orders tens of thousands of California prisoners released. This actually might help the Raiders start selling out their home games again.”

The hosts of Red Eye don’t fault Leno, but they do blame the Tonight Show writers.  Red Eyeco-host Bill Schultz said on the air Saturday, “Jay didn’t steal anything except another Dorito.  His writer stole the joke…”

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NJ Gov. Christie Takes State Helicopter to Son's Baseball Game

(MONTVALE, N.J.) — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has made ethics and government reform a centerpiece of his administration, raised some eyebrows with his decision to take a state helicopter to his son’s baseball game Tuesday afternoon. 

Moreover, he left in the middle of the game, presumably to make it back to Princeton for his meeting with a group of Iowa activists who had flown to New Jersey to try to convince the governor to run for president.

According to the Newark Star Ledger, the governor landed in the $12.5 million helicopter right before the game began, and then “got into a black car with tinted windows that drove him about a 100 yards to the baseball field.”  His son Andrew is the starting catcher on his high school team.

Christie and first lady Mary Pat Christie took in a few innings of play but left during the fifth inning.  “During a pitching change,” reported the Star Ledger, “play was stopped for a couple of minutes while the helicopter took off.”

In an email to the Star Ledger, Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak defended the governor’s choice of transportation.

“It is a means of transportation that is occasionally used as the schedule demands.  This has historically been the case in prior administrations as well, and we continue to be judicious in limiting its use,” Drewniak wrote.

Meanwhile, the Des Moines Register reported Wednesday morning that while the Iowa activists were not successful at getting Christie to commit to a presidential run, he did tell the “Iowans he has accepted an invitation from Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad to give the keynote address at an education summit here this summer.” 

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Exclusive: Taxpayer Money Spent on Shrimp on Treadmills

(WASHINGTON) — You’ve probably heard of shrimp on the barbie, but what about shrimp on a treadmill?

The National Science Foundation has, and it spent $500,000 of taxpayer money researching it.  It’s not entirely clear what this research hoped to establish, but it’s one of a number of projects cited in a scathing new report from Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, exclusively obtained by ABC News.

It’s not just shrimp on a treadmill.  The foundation spent $1.5 million to create a robot that can fold laundry.  But before you try to buy one to save some time, consider that it takes the robot 25 minutes to fold a single towel.

The list goes on.  Lots of people love to use FarmVille on Facebook, but lots of people probably don’t love the government’s spending $300,000 in taxpayer money to study whether it helps build personal relationships.

“What it says to me is, they have too much money if they’re going to spend money on things like that,” Coburn said in an interview.

But there’s more.  The National Science Foundation has its headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, D.C., a building it pays $19 million a year to rent.  But now that the 20-year lease is nearly up, it has decided that it is time to move; into a new building that will cost $26 million annually to rent.

Even gelatin wrestling has been the subject of an agency project — in Antarctica, no less.  The foundation notes that the project is the work of contractors, not agency employees.

Whatever the case might be, Coburn said, the situation is another example that federal spending has gotten out of control.

“We have 12 different agencies doing pure research, and we’re duplicating and we’re not sharing the information across and it’s siloed,” he said.

In response to Coburn’s report, the National Science Foundation launched a vigorous defense of its projects.  Agency officials said they “have advanced the frontiers of science and engineering, improved Americans’ lives, and provided the foundations for countless new industries and jobs.”

And the facts back up that statement.  One agency project helped lead to the creation of Google, while another led to the invention of bar codes.

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