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Kool-Aid is a household name today. Nebraska named Kool-Aid as its official state drink in the late 1990s, while Hastings, Nebraska, the city where the powdered drink was invented, "celebrates a yearly summer festival called Kool-Aid Days on the second weekend in August, in honor of their city's claim to fame," notes Wikipedia. If you're an adult, you likely have memories of drinking the powdered beverage on hot, summer days as a child. But, the story of Kool-Aid's invention and rise to popularity is an interesting one—literally a rags-to-riches story.

https://twitter.com/SharylAttkisson?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Sharyl Attkisson‏Verified accou @SharylAttkisson 4h4 hours ago Looking back, this leaked internal email from government intel firm says a lot, doesn't it?

A U.S. House seat left vacant because of the death of Democratic Congressman Alcee Hastings likely will not be filled until early next year. Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday that qualifying for a special election in Southeast Florida’s Congressional District 20 will be held in September, with a primary election on Nov. 2 and a general election on Jan. 11.

Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., died Tuesday after a more than two-year bout with pancreatic cancer, NBC News confirmed. Hastings, who served in the House for nearly three decades, was 84. Throughout his career, he held several key committee assignments and leadership positions, most recently as vice chairman of the Rules Committee. After the congressman’s death, Democrats hold a narrow 218-211 advantage in the House, giving the party a small margin for error in passing legislation. Six seats are vacant. Hastings, a former federal district court judge, was impeached in 1988 amid accusations of bribery and perjury. The Senate voted to...

Longtime Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings (D), the dean of the Florida congressional delegation, died Tuesday after a battle with pancreatic cancer, two leadership sources confirmed. He was 84. Hastings started his career as a civil rights attorney and was nominated by former President Carter in 1979 as a federal judge in Florida. Nearly a decade later, he was impeached by the House for bribery and perjury, and convicted by the Senate, making him only the sixth federal judge in U.S. history to be ousted from office by the Senate. Hastings later made an unlikely political comeback in 1992, winning a...

The Ulysses Group says it has real-time access to 15 billion cars worldwide.. They monitor cars through GPS and sensors on equipment such as airbags.. The data may be from car makers and through manufacturers of individual parts.. The Ulysses Group has strong ties to the U.S. military and promotes its capability.. .... A South Carolina-based surveillance firm that has sold services to the U.S. military is promoting its ability to provide real-time location information about 15 billion cars every month. The company, called The Ulysses Group, says it can monitor vehicles in every country in the world, except North...

Alcee Hastings was appointed to be a federal judge in 1979. In 1981, he was accused of soliciting bribes and obstructing justice ... A special committee of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals began a .. three-year investigation ended with the panel concluding that Hastings did indeed commit perjury, tamper with evidence, and conspire to gain financially by accepting bribes. ... He was impeached by the United States House of Representatives and convicted by the Senate. He was kicked out of his judgeship in 1989. .... Four years later he ran for the U.S. House — a federal office —...

Who better to set the rules for Trump’s impeachment trial than a guy who has actually been impeached? That’s right, the Democrats, in all their infinite wisdom, appointed Alcee Hastings as the vice chair of the rules committee. Hastings went through an impeachment trial in 1988 on a bevy of crimes he committed while serving as a federal judge. Playing in the Democrat sandbox, the disgraced ex-judge was elected to congress by the crazed liberals. ... Here's something you don't see every day: Alcee Hastings, a former federal judge impeached and removed from the bench for taking bribes, participating in...

U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings is hinting that he's contemplating retirement — but not too soon. Just elected to his 12th term, Hastings has already declared his intention to seek a 13th term in 2016. The Miramar Democrat has represented most of the black communities in Broward and Palm Beach counties since 1993, making him the region's longest serving member of Congress.

The House Ethics Committee revealed on Thursday that it is investigating Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) over whether his relationship with a member of his staff breaks House rules. Hastings has admitted to being in a relationship with his aide, Patricia Williams, who serves as his deputy district director. The committee is now investigating whether Hastings violated House rules with that relationship and if he received any improper gifts from that employee. The House last year adopted a rule preventing members of Congress from having a sexual relationship with a member of their staff. "The Committee is aware of public allegations...

Full title: Ethics Committee releases messages showing Tlaib asking campaign for personal money, as ethics probes announced The House Ethics Committee on Thursday released a trove of striking internal campaign communications sent in 2018 by Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib , in which Tlaib urgently requests money from her congressional campaign to defray personal expenses. The document dump was related to the committee's ongoing ethics probe into Tlaib, which the panel said on Thursday would be "expanded" based on a referral from the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). Additionally, the Ethics Committee acknowledged for the first time on Thursday an...

In a striking scene at the outset of the Rules Committee meeting, Florida Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings, who himself was impeached and removed from the federal bench in 1989 for taking bribes, outlined the alleged "high crimes and misdemeanors" that he said Trump had committed.

Full Title: Report: Dem Lawmaker Who Wrote ‘Unfair Impeachment Rules’ Used $200K Taxpayer Dollars to Settle Sexual Harassment Case. Mr. Hastings has been accused of sexual harassment, used tax dollars to settle, broke House rules by hiring his girlfriend as a staffer and was once impeached for accepting a $150K bribe….and he’s in charge of writing “rules.” Well, in not-so-surprising news, the Democrat lawmaker who created the “unfair impeachment” rules is a rule breaker himself – and a criminal. The House Rules Committee vice-chair is Alcee Hastings from Florida, and he has a nasty habit of regularly breaking the rules....

Democratic representative Alcee Hastings (Fla.) has paid his girlfriend the maximum congressional salary for the seventh straight year. Patricia Williams, Hastings's longtime girlfriend, who first appeared on his payroll in 2000, received the maximum congressional salary of $168,411 throughout 2018, according to salary data posted to Legistorm, a government tracking website. Williams has collected the maximum allowable salary since 2012, and has been compensated at a higher rate than Hastings's Washington, D.C., chief of staff, typically the highest paid position in a congressional office. Williams had been listed as district director out of Hastings's Broward County, Fla., office, but in...

Netflix subscribers in the United States are about to see a price hike across all subscription tiers. The service’s most popular plan will increase from $11 to $13 per month for HD streaming. Netflix’s most expensive plan, which offers 4K content and up to four simultaneous streams on different devices, will increase from $14 to $16. And the service’s basic plan, which doesn’t offer HD, will raise from $8 to $9. These price hikes will affect all new subscribers immediately, according to AP, with current subscribers set to experience the hike over the next three months. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings...

Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., joked about how somebody saving a drowning President Trump would be a "catastrophe" at the start of an event in Sunshine, Fla., on Sunday. In a video reported by the Daily Caller, Hastings said he first learned of the joke from Ari Silver, whose father is former Florida state legislator and rabbi Barry Silver. “Do you know the difference between a crisis and a catastrophe?” Hastings said, retelling the joke. "A crisis is if Donald Trump falls into the Potomac River and can’t swim,” Hastings said. A "catastrophe," he added, "is anybody saves his ass.'” Cheers...

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says he fired the company’s top spokesman over use of the N-word. The spokesman, Jonathan Friedland, confirmed in tweets that he was leaving the company, saying he was insensitive in speaking with his team about words that offend in comedy. […] Hastings says Friedland, who is white, later repeated the word with human resources staff trying to address the original incident. …

Former CIA chief John Brennan is a liar. And he’s not the kind of garden variety dissembler that we see in Washington all the time, either. Rather, Brennan is the kind of man who feels comfortable brazenly misleading the American people about an attack on democracy, and then shamelessly lecturing them about civic decency. You may recall, as director of the CIA, Brennan oversaw an operation of illegal spying on a staffer of the legislative branch of the United States government. At least five agency officials under his watch broke into Senate computer files, viewing drafts of a report on...

Hastings's longtime girlfriend also received a promotion; has been paid maximum congressional salary for six straight years A convicted money launderer employed by Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings (Fla.) in one of his Florida district offices received a pay increase for "part-time" work last year, new salary data filings show. Additionally, Hastings's longtime girlfriend Patricia Williams appears to have received a promotion, though she did not get a raise since she is already receiving the maximum salary that is allowed to be paid to congressional staffers. Dona Nichols Jones, who has been listed as working in Hastings's Palm Beach County Office...

It turns out the government secretly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to resolve a sexual harassment case filed by Judicial Watch against a Florida congressman with a long history of unscrupulous behavior. The veteran Democrat, Alcee Hastings, is most famous for getting impeached by Congress as a federal judge following a scandal involving the solicitation of a $150,000 bribe in return for “favorable treatment for defendants in a racketeering case before him.” The disgraced judge was an unindicted co-conspirator, but there was enough evidence against him for Congress to boot him from the bench. Hastings is one of only...