PrairiePundit

Washington Post: How Obamacare got to Supreme Court WONKBLOG | How did a minor lawsuit become a major threat to the Affordable Care Act? Minor?  Over half the states challenged the law.  That is not a minor event.  The arguments made by those challenging the law were serious and substantive.  It was liberals who were oblivious to the challenges as well as the public anger sparked by the law.  They still do not get it.

Daily Mail on Sunday: Hillary dares to bare! Clinton meets King of Saudi Arabia... and doesn't hide her ankles She is lucky the Saudi sex cops were not around.  They would have been struck with the vespers.

Sunday Telegraph: The security services have issued an unprecedented public warning that Akhmed Zakayev — an exile who is a friend of Vanessa Redgrave, the actress — is the target of a murder plot. On their advice, the Home Secretary has fought a court battle to remove the man MI5 believe would organise the “hit”, who they say is a danger to “national security”. But  The Sunday Telegraph  can reveal that judges have allowed him to stay in Britain and fight to remain here. The case raises serious questions about how Britain can be protected from foreign threats. The murder plot is disclosed in the wake of the attempted assassination of German Gorbuntsov, the wealthy Russian banker who was shot outside his London flat and who remains seriously ill in hospital. ...  The UK is plagued by courts that refused to deport terrorist and others who present a threat to national security.  The judges usually make the government put the people on...

BBC: At least eight people have been killed in three explosions in the southern Thai province of Yala, officials say. Yala Governor Dejrat Simsiri said the blasts occurred over 10 minutes at around midday (06:00 BST) in the commercial district of Yala city. He said two of the bombs were hidden in motorcycles and the third in a car. Thailand's three southern-most provinces have been plagued by bomb attacks and shootings since 2004, when a separatist campaign reignited. "We are not sure which group of suspected Muslim insurgents were behind this but we are looking," Mr Dejrat said. The Associated Press and Reuters news agencies put the death toll from Saturday's bombings at eight, with around 70 wounded. AFP quoted a nurse in the emergency unit of Yala provincial hospital as saying nine people had died. "There are nine dead now and 112 injured people sent to our hospital," the hospital worker told AFP. ...  Muslim religious bigots have been ...

IBD:  "You're-on-your-own economics" doesn't work, President Obama asserted Friday, just as the World Bank reported a halving of world poverty due mainly to — you guessed it — you're-on-your-own economics. If anything puts our president, the leader of the Free World, squarely outside the global mainstream, it's statements like the one he made to students at a University of Vermont fundraiser Friday: "The American story is not just about what we do on our own," the president said. "We have always understood that we wouldn't win the race for new jobs and businesses and middle class security if we were just applying some you're-on-your-own economics. It's been tried in history and it hasn't worked. It didn't work when we tried it in the decade before the Great Depression. It didn't work when we tried it in the last decade." Well, maybe he's never heard of the Roaring '20s. And perhaps he didn't tr...

BBC: Far-right groups from across Europe are holding a rally in Denmark aimed at setting up what they term an anti-Islamic alliance across the continent. The demonstration has been organised by various groups who are concerned about the "Islamification of Europe". The English Defence League (EDL), which is taking part, said it hoped it would be the start of a Europe-wide movement. Campaigners against racism are worried that hardline Islamaphobic groups in Europe are now joining forces. The number of people attending the rally in Denmark is likely to be small. But analysts say what is more important is that many are the leaders of anti-islamic groups from a variety of European countries. Some have been in the Danish city of Aarhus since Wednesday where they have had a chance to hold meetings and discuss ideas. One of the organisers of the rally is the EDL which wants to stop Muslim migration into Europe all together, viewing it as a threat which will lead to c...

Hollywood Reporter: Critics say the "Today" show attempted to incite racial anger when it cut crucial seconds from audio of a phone call placed by George Zimmerman just before he killed the teenager. The NBC segment in question featured anchor  Ron Allen  and ran on the  Today show on Tuesday. On Thursday,  Sean Hannity  and guest  Brent Bozell  played the NBC version of the 911 call and compared it with the unedited version.NBC News is being excoriated in some circles – with competitor Fox News Channel leading the charge – for selectively editing audio of the 911 call placed by  George Zimmerman  just before he killed  Trayvon Martin . In the NBC segment, Zimmerman says: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.” The full version, though, unfolds like this: Zimmerman: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” 911 opera...

Larry Kudlow: ... Obama is  obsessed  with oil and gas. He is a prisoner of the left-wing environmental groups. And really, he’s extending his leftist class-warfare attack from rich people to successful oil and gas producers.   What seems to have Obama especially steamed is the fact that the conventional-energy companies are profitable. Especially the five largest. So he wants to tax them. He then wants to redistribute their income to his favorite green-energy firms. Sound familiar? I don’t know which is more important to the president -- the fact that he hates fossil fuel or the fact that he hates success. Or that he wants an energy-entitlement state.   But here’s what I do know, factually.   Oil companies have an effective corporate tax rate well above 40 percent. And they operate within one of the highest-taxed industries in America. According to the Tax Foundation, for more than 25 years, oil and gas companies have sent more tax dollars to Washingto...

Michael Continetti: Hoping to spend the week sliming Paul Ryan and screeching about the mythical Republican “war on women,” the Democrats instead have been set back as the news cycle spun out of their control. Foreign policy, health care, and energy have forced them into a defensive crouch. No wonder I’m in such a good mood. David Axelrod most likely is not. He must have wished he could go back to bed on the morning of Mar. 26, when news broke of President Obama’s “hot mic” moment at the security summit in South Korea. ABC News had caught the president telling Putin stooge Dmitri Medvedev that he needed the Russian dictator to give him “ space ” on issues such as missile defense until after “my last election,” at which time he will have “more flexibility.” Medvedev nodded sympathetically throughout the conversation and said,  in his best General Orlov imitation , “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.” All that was missing from the ridiculous exchange were fulminations...

Rich Lowry: Delric Miller IV died in a hail of bullets a month ago. When someone fired 37 AK-47 rounds into his Detroit home at 4:30 a.m., he was mortally wounded while dozing on the couch. He was 9 months old. No one made the multicolored teething ring he got for Christmas or his toy hammer into national symbols of random violence. Last year, Charinez Jefferson, 17, was shot and killed on a Chicago street. “She begged the shooter not to shoot her because she was pregnant,” a pastor explained. The alleged assailant, Timothy Jones, 18, shot her in the head, chest and back after seeing her walking with a rival gang member. New York Times columnist Charles Blow did not write a column about Jefferson’s killing as a symbol of the perils of being a young black woman in America. Last June, a stray bullet from a confrontation on a Brighton Beach, N.Y., boardwalk killed 16-year-old Tysha Jones as she sat on a bench. A 19-year-old man, out for revenge after an earlier scuffle on the ...

Jon Entine: New York Times natural-gas reporter Ian Urbina last week launched another salvo in his crusade against the shale-gas industry and the “fracking” method that’s opened up new vistas of gas exploitation. And, yet again, he screwed up.   In a March 18 article, Urbina reported that the Agriculture Department was about to require expensive and extensive home-by-home environmental reviews before issuing mortgages to aspiring rural homeowners who may want to lease out the natural-gas rights on their property.   But his main evidence was a few internal e-mails from lower-level regional administrators. For example, Jennifer Jackson, a junior program director for rural loans in the Ag Department’s New York office, had written: “We will no longer be financing homes with gas leases.” We don’t know how Urbina got access to those internal e-mails — but it’s a good bet he was leaked them by sources who  wanted  this to be the policy.   He also ci...

NY Times Editorial: Editorial: Big Oil’s Bogus Campaign As the industry spends heavily and blames President Obama for rising gas prices, Congress continues to refuse to end unnecessary tax breaks. What Obama and the NY Times have failed to do is demonstrate how raising taxes on oil and gas production will lower the price of gasoline.  They have failed because it is nonsensical to think it would.   The oil and gas companies already pay a higher effective corporate tax rate than other companies.  Why not suggest taking away the same deductions from Apple which makes more money than any oil and gas company? The fact is that both Obama and the Times show a hostility to increasing the production of oil and gas in this country.  They both support policies that strangle domestic production even though domestic oil now cost about $20 a barrel less than imported oil. Obama has been trying to hide his anti energy policies in a dishonest campaign ...

NY Times: ... After 9/11, the Americans threw enormous resources of manpower, money and computer time into the “global war on terrorism,” which was also about tracking the potential terrorist at home, in a country with a tiny and mostly well-integrated Muslim population. The French, with a colonial history, have been dealing with terrorism (and Islam) for much longer. With the largest number of Muslims in Europe — nearly 10 percent of the population, often concentrated in poorer neighborhoods — and closer proximity to the Middle East and North Africa, France has focused more on preventing the recruitment of potential terrorists through a regular infiltration of mosques and radical Islamic networks.   Partly because of their history and partly because of more limited budgets, the French rely more on human contacts, local intelligence and human resources and less on automated phone tapping and surveillance than the Americans do. That can make the French well informed but less sy...

Houston Chronicle: Robust job creation from staffing firms, retailers and restaurants and bars kept the Houston-area economy running hotter than the rest of Texas in February. "We beat the pants off Dallas, we beat the pants off Austin, we beat the pants off San Antonio," said  Patrick Jankowski , vice president of research for the  Greater Houston Partnership . "And the other Texas metros are sitting on the bench waiting to get called into the game." Houston-area employers added 93,400 new jobs between February 2011 and February 2012, according to data released Friday by the  Texas Workforce Commission . That represents an annual growth rate of 3.7 percent. While Houston's bread-and-butter industries such as energy, manufacturing and health care are aggressive job generators, 42 percent of Houston's growth during the past year has come from retailers, bars and restaurants and staffing services. "We're going out to eat more, and we're...

The video show her breaking up with an unfaithful boy friend and joining the Corps.  For some reason this made some feminist angry .  I support the young women who go into the Marine corps and other branches of service.  They deserve our appreciation and respect.

IBD: Leadership: A global tax is the latest example of the idiocy that defines Joseph Biden's vice presidency. Dopiness a heartbeat away from the presidency shouldn't be tolerated. If Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Terminator, promising "I'll be back," the best moniker for Joe Biden might be "the Dumb-Biden-ator," with the motto "I'll be stupid." At a Davenport, Iowa, manufacturing plant last week, Biden declared "We're not done" of the Obama economic program that has saddled Americans with a $1.3 trillion deficit and $15 trillion national debt, with plenty more to come. "We want to create what's called a global minimum tax," he said, "because American taxpayers shouldn't be providing a larger subsidy for investing abroad than investing at home." According to the White House, this refers to all U.S. companies being subjected to a minimum tax on overseas profits, to prevent them from taking ...

Guardian: President  Barack Obama  gave the go-ahead Friday for the tightest sanctions yet against  Iran 's  oil  industry, a move that risks pushing fuel prices even higher ahead of the November elections and raising tensions even further with Tehran. The US will take punitive measures against any country that fails to reduce oil imports from Iran. These countries include China. The sanctions were passed by Congress in December, but the lawmakers left Obama to make the final judgement about the impact a reduction in Iranian oil would have on the US and the world economy. The deadline was Friday. In a statement from the White House, Obama said he decided that though oil supplies are tight, there are enough non-Iranian supplies to allow countries to reduce imports from Iran. In a briefing by the administration ahead of the announcement, an official said these amounted to the toughest sanctions yet against Iran. It is an extremely dangerous move by th...

Con Coughlin: Ryan Crocker told The Daily Telegraph that if the West was to leave Afghanistan too early, al-Qaeda would be able to increase its presence. With the US preparing to withdraw the majority of its combat forces from Afghanistan next year, Mr Crocker warned: “If we decide we’re tired, they’ll be back. “Al-Qaeda is still present in Afghanistan. If the West decides that 10 years in Afghanistan is too long then they will be back, and the next time it will not be New York or Washington, it will be another big Western city.” Mr Crocker, 62, who previously served as ambassador to Iraq, said that while progress had been made, Afghanistan would need Western support for years to come. Nato officials believe that up to 100 al-Qaeda fighters have returned to the country, based mainly in the Kunar and Nuristan provinces near the border with Pakistan. Hundreds more are based in Pakistan and could return if circumstances were to change. ...  I suspect that Yeme...

Daily Caller: Senate Republican staffers continue to look though the 2010 Obamacare  law to see what’s in it, and their latest discovery is a massive $17 trillion  funding gap . “The more we learn about the bill, the more we learn it is even more unaffordable than was suspected,” said Ala. Sen.  Jeff Sessions , the Republican’s budget chief in the Senate. “The bill has to be removed from the books because we don’t have the money,” he said. The hidden shortfall between new Obamacare spending and new Obamacare taxes was revealed just after Supreme Court judges grilled the law’s supporters about its compliance with the constitution’s limits on government activity. If the judges don’t strike down the law, Obamacare will force taxpayers find another $17 trillion to pay for Obamacare’s spending. The $17 trillion in extra promises was revealed by an analysis of the law’s long-term requirements. The additional obligations, when combined with existing  Medicare ...

James Taranto: When the Archbishop Met the President Cardinal Dolan thought he heard Barack Obama pledge respect for the Catholic Church's rights of conscience. Then came the contraception coverage mandate. It seems pretty clear that Obama attempted to mislead Dolan, and then tried to give him a false compromise when he ran into trouble with his scheme.  While he thinks he is scoring with some women voters, they are people who were already voting for him and he is losing voters he might have had who are concerned about religious liberty.

NY Times: As Afghan Pullout Nears, Businesses Watch the Exits The business leaders Afghanistan needs to succeed after allied forces withdraw their troops in 2014 are already making moves to leave the country. With the treachery shown by some Afghan forces and Karzai's strange policies, I can understand why they might not want to stick around.  The government is already corrupt and will only become more so after the US leaves.  That is not a conducive atmosphere for doing business in a poor country.  I do not blame them for want to leave.

AP says Vietnam was slow to respond to paperwork for deporting a violent criminal and he was therefore released because of a Supreme court ruling that he and others like him can not be held indefinitely.  The ruling is a mistake that puts innocent citizens at risk and at the mercy of careless foreign governments.

Mark Hemingway: ... Unlike Obama, the GOP has already proposed a comprehensive energy plan that would do wonders for green energy. The legislation, A Roadmap for America’s Energy Future, was authored by Rep. Devin Nunes, from the Central Valley of California, and introduced early last year.   Where the administration has done its level best to halt energy extraction on public lands, the GOP legislation would open up to drilling the Outer Continental Shelf, estimated to contain enough oil and natural gas to meet America’s energy needs for about 60 years. It would also open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and encourage domestic energy production elsewhere.   Under the roadmap, new federal revenue from increased domestic energy production would go into a trust fund for renewables. Money from the trust fund would be handed out in “reverse auctions,” where private companies would compete for government contracts based on who can produce the most energy for the least a...

American Crossroads tweaks the President's latest screw up.  Rove is not going to let the media move on from this mistake.

Reuters:  Iran is helping its ally Syria defy Western sanctions by providing a vessel to ship Syrian oil to a state-run company in  China , potentially giving the government of President Bashar al-Assad a financial boost worth an estimated $80 million. Iran , itself a target of Western sanctions, is among Syria's closest allies and has promised to do all it can to support Assad, recently praising his handling of the year-long uprising against Assad in which thousands have been killed. China has also shielded Assad from foreign intervention, vetoing two Western-backed resolutions at the United Nations over the bloodshed, and is not bound by Western sanctions against  Syria , its oil sector and state oil firm Sytrol. "The Syrians planned to sell the oil directly to the Chinese but they could not find a vessel," said an industry source who added that he had been asked to help Sytrol execute the deal but did not take part. ...  I suspect Iran carried th...

Bloomberg Editorial: Few areas of American governance have been as incoherent in recent decades as  energy policy , which is saying something. But lately, we keep seeing reasons for optimism. Almost miraculously, the U.S. is both reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions and becoming increasingly energy independent. As Bloomberg News recently reported, the share of U.S. energy demand met by domestic sources increased to 81 percent through the first 10 months of 2011 -- the highest level in 20 years -- and emissions are expected to decline 12 percent by 2020. A major factor in both trends is increased use of natural gas, a cleaner-burning  fossil fuel  now being extracted in abundance across the country. Hydraulic fracturing, a new production technology also known as fracking, has helped push prices for the fuel to a decade low, and has created plenty of jobs in the process. Inevitably, a large lobbying effort has attached itself to this booming business, advancing bu...

Charles Hurt: ... So, in one week, Mr. Obama got caught whispering promises to our enemy, incited a race war, raised serious questions about his understanding of the Constitution, and then got smacked down over his proposed budget that was so wildly reckless that even Democrats in Congress could not support it. ... But, the media still loves him and hates conservative Republicans so he is not in as much trouble as he should be.

Benny Avni: A campaign of press leaks, led by some Obama administration insiders, is harming Israel’s  and  America’s ability to act militarily to end Iran’s nuclear quest.   Washington officials and sympathetic media plainly intend the campaign to erode public support for a military attack on Iran’s nuclear installations. But reports on Israeli military methods, capabilities and alliances are actively aiding the Iranian regime.   You may have seen some of the headlines: “Congress Sez Iran Could Recover From Israeli Attack Within Six Months”; “Hundreds of Americans Will Die in the Aftermath of Iran Attack”; “Israel’s Secret Staging Ground for Attacking Iran.” Israelis now believe that this public, noisy campaign has replaced an earlier (and much quieter) attempt by top Obama officials to talk directly to Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu and his inner security circle, and persuade them to scrap any plan for an air attack on Iran’s nuclear install...