PrairiePundit

Guardian: Obama vows Guantánamo closure as strike worsens We should not givie in to the terrorist at Gitmo.  I have zero empathy for these mass murderers who would go back to their trade if they were released.  If they were brought to prisons in the US I see little reason why they would not continue to pursue their goals.  Obama's decision just shows the weakness of his liberal thought process.  I think he will lose on this fight too.  It is time to invite Dick Cheney back on the Sunday shows.

Washington Times: Abbas: Palestinians who kill Jews cannot be punished Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas again insisted at a two-day “Freedom and Dignity” conference in Ramallah last week that Palestinians who murder Israeli Jews cannot be punished. You can imagine why this position does not make any sense to Israelis.  It that is his attitude, the US should put the two state solution on hold until someone interested in the rule of law is a peace partner.

NY Times: Mexico’s President Limits U.S. Role in Fighting Drug Trade Political sensitivities over involvement by the United States in Mexico are longstanding, but changes under the new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, have rattled American officials. It is too bad they are not sensitive about what happens on this side of the border as a result of the lawlessness they are evidently willing to allow.  With the possibility of immigration reform we should expect cooperation on cutting illegal immigration from Central America.

Fuel Fix: Feds double Bakken, Three Forks resource estimate They also trebled the estimate of recoverable natural gas.  Obama was wrong.  We can drill our way out of the energy shortage.  Most of the new growth is in the Three Forks formation.

Huffington Post: If Koch Brothers Buy LA Times, Half of Staff May Quit    That sounds like a win-win for the Koch brothers.  They want have to waste money on severance pay, and there will be a line of people applying for the jobs.  Why do liberals in the media think they are indispensable?

Miami Herald: In February, a speedboat raced toward shore near Boca Raton. After making landfall just south of Camino Real Boulevard, more than a dozen people jumped out of the vessel and scrambled ashore. Most of the individuals were undocumented immigrants — and four had previously been deported. With increasing frequency, deported foreign nationals are resorting to smugglers to return to the United States — either by boat or by walking across the Mexican border. New figures show that the number of federal prosecution cases against previously deported immigrants is increasing nationwide. Criminal prosecutions for illegal re-entry increased from 7,900 in fiscal year 2000 to 35,800 in fiscal year 2010, according to a recent report from the Washington group Immigration Policy Center (IPC). The report further states that 44 percent of all criminal immigration prosecutions in federal courts around the country now come from illegal re-entry, as the charge is commonly called. ...  With

Charles Lane: Of all the arguments for the Obama administration’s green-energy loan program, one of the worst is that federal aid leverages private capital. Consider Fisker Automotive . In August 2009, this wannabe plug-in electric hybrid car company was hard up for cash to pay suppliers and faced potential layoffs. A green-energy loan was the only hope, Fisker executive Bernhard Koehler explained in an e-mail to the Department of Energy — because it would help bring in private money. “We are oversubscribed in this equity round with the DOE support — and nowhere without it,” Koehler pleaded . A month later, in September 2009, the Energy Department approved a $529 million low-interest loan . Vice President Biden stood before the proposed site of a Fisker plant in Delaware and described the department’s program as “seed money that will return back to the American consumer in billions and billions and billions of dollars of good new jobs.” Sure enough, private money started flowing in t

Roger L. Simon: The usual liberal media suspects are in a dither these days over the prospect that the dreaded Koch brothers may buy the Los Angeles Times . The MSMniks are expending a lot of ink and pixels over this supposedly apocalyptic purchase. The proximate cause is the Chicago Tribune Company emerging from bankruptcy and possibly selling its basket of newspapers including the Los Angeles Times , the Chicago Tribune , the Baltimore Sun , the Orlando Sentinel and the Hartford Courant . The LAT, however, the only truly national newspaper in this group, is clearly the crown jewel. Though others are in the hunt (Murdoch, Eli Broad, etc.), the New York Times claims the Kochs have a leg up since they are the only suitors willing to buy the entire package; the others just want the LAT. So media liberals are having a hissy fit and circling their wagons . One of their prizes may be destroyed or, worse, converted (actually, the paper’s been in miserable shape for years). They are as

Roll Call says Sheila Jackson Lee  took the trip in February that cost $23,646.  It was a six day trip to the far east.  It probably was not worth it for the taxpayers.

Byron York: One argument often heard in the debate over comprehensive immigration reform is that the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico to the United States, once measured in the hundreds of thousands per year, has slowed dramatically and is not likely to pick up again. "All across Mexico's ruddy central plains, most of the people who could go north already have," reported the New York Times in early April. "[P]ast experience and current trends in both Mexico and the United States suggest that legalization would not lead to a sudden flood of illegal immigration on the scale of what occurred after 1986." Some reformers have cited stories like the Times' to suggest there's no need for sweeping new border security or workplace enforcement measures; illegal immigration is on the decline anyway. It is true that net migration from Mexico fell to virtually nothing during the depths of the Great Recession. That did not mean Mexicans stopped coming to the U

James Rosen, Fox News: At least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned. Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistle-blowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials. “I'm not talking generally, I'm talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.” Toensing declined to name her client. She also refused to say whether the individual was on the ground in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, w

Daniel Kessler: In recent weeks, there have been increasing expressions of concern from surprising quarters about the implementation of ObamaCare. Montana Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat, called it a "train wreck." A Democratic colleague, West Virginia's Sen. Jay Rockefeller, described the massive Affordable Care Act as "beyond comprehension." Henry Chao, the government's chief technical officer in charge of putting in place the insurance exchanges mandated by the law, was quoted in the Congressional Quarterly as saying "I'm pretty nervous . . . Let's just make sure it's not a third-world experience." These individuals are worried for good reason. The unpopular health-care law's rollout is going to be rough. It will also administer several price (and other) shocks to tens of millions of Americans. Start with people who have individual and small-group health insurance. These policies are most affected by ObamaCare's community-ratin

Bill Gertz: Online al Qaeda jihadists revealed earlier this month that a senior al Qaeda leader was killed in a CIA-led drone strike inside Pakistan’s northern territory. A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the reported death of Abdallah al Adam, who was an up-and-coming senior leader in charge of security and intelligence operations for the terrorist group. U.S. officials described al Adam as a key al Qaeda commander who had emerged in recent years since the death of other senior leaders. His death, if confirmed in a formal martyrdom statement from the group, would be viewed as another major victory for the covert CIA and U.S. military teams pursuing senior al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and elsewhere for more than a decade. ...  He was described as a teacher of security and intelligence which would be the al Qaeda equivalent of a G_2 in the military.  The group continues to try to replace those lost through attrition in their long war.

WSJ: Investigators have found female DNA on at least one of the bombs used in the Boston Marathon attacks, though they haven't determined whose DNA it is or whether that means a woman helped the two suspects carry out the attacks, according to U.S. officials briefed on the probe. The officials familiar with the case cautioned that there could be multiple explanations for why the DNA of someone other than the two bombing suspects—Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar—could have been found on remnants of the exploded devices. The genetic material could have come, for example, from a store clerk who handled materials used in the bombs or a stray hair that ended up in the bomb. On Monday, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were seen leaving the Rhode Island home of the parents of Katherine Russell, the widow of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The elder brother died after a shootout with police four days after the April 15 bombings. Ms. Russell has been staying with her parents

Guy Benson: Within months of Democrats ramming through Obamacare without a single Republican vote, the American people responded, pummeling the president's party at the polls. Republicans gained 63 seats in the House, six United States Senators, six governorships, and nearly 700 seats in state legislatures nationwide. Conservatives had their temporary political revenge, we were told, but Democrats would get the last laugh because Obamacare was sure to become more popular once Republicans' scurrilous smears against the law were shown to be false. How's that working out ? Democratic senators, at a caucus meeting with White House officials, expressed concerns on Thursday about how the Obama administration was carrying out the health care law they adopted three years ago. Democrats in both houses of Congress said some members of their party were getting nervous that they could pay a political price if the rollout of the law was messy or if premiums went up significant

Washington Post: Defense cuts pose quandry for liberals They got the cuts they have always wanted but they recognize that it is hurting economic growth.  Many of the cuts were misguided reducing the development of weapons systems needed for the next war and also not replacing equipment like aircraft that are older their their pilots. I have been arguing ever since the stimulus bill that defense spending generates more for the economy than funding state and local government spending.  We now have statistical data to support that.   It is not the first time liberals have been wrong about spending priorities.

NY Times: Push to Require Online Sales Tax Divides the G.O.P. Antitax groups seem to be losing their influence, as Republican lawmakers’ constituents support legislation that would require Internet retailers to collect sales taxes. This is a tax that will kill off some small businesses, which maybe what some of its proponents intend, especially the brick and mortar stores.  For small craft entrepreneurs who sell on eBay and Etsy it will be a hardship that may push them out of business entirely.  It is also a hardship for rural purchasers who buy on line to save the cost of fuel while looking for an item.  I find that the cost of delivery is usually close to the cost of sales tax on many items.  What the bill does is not fairness   It is a special interest legislation to benefit a few as well as feed the coffers of greedy government.

Steve Maley: ... Remember when President Obama said this? …(T)he natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence. That’s why my Administration will  keep cutting red tape  and speeding up new oil and gas permits . That was in the  2013 State of the Union  address. On April 9, the House Natural Resources Committee held a hearing to look into the growing disparity between production on Federal lands vs. state jurisdiction. Witnesses Hail State Energy Policies, Discuss how Federal Red Tape Blocks Much-Needed Energy Production Note that the permitting time on Federal Lands has doubled since 2005, which makes the President’s promise to “keep cutting red tape” ring hollow. ... There is more. Obama is not serious about cutting red tape on energy exploration and his administration continues to try to strangle domestic energy production on federal sites.  Most are still not even available for exploration while he keeps offering sites that peopl

Chicago Business: ... The Texas capital snapped back from the recession with the highest rate of job growth, jumping 9.6 percent from its low point, in 2009, according to a Brookings Institution study of the nation's top metro areas. Chicago was 75th with a 2.3 percent rebound. Though it's less than one-fifth the size of Chicago, Austin has increased jobs 29 percent since 2003, the highest rate of any big U.S. metro area, according to federal data tallied by the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. Austin has scored major expansions from Apple Inc., which is adding 3,600 jobs to the area; eBay Inc.'s PayPal unit, which will bring 1,000 jobs; and Visa Inc., which is building a new cybersecurity center that will employ 800 people. ... Chicago and Illinois have had to offer tax breaks to keep some of their businesses, but that does nothing for the start ups and small businesses who don't have clout.  They are better off starting their endeavors in Austin.

Daniel Horowitz: One question that proponents of endless amnesty can never answer is how they ever plan to stop future waves of illegal immigration if they continue to telegraph the message that deportations are taboo.  That as long as they can reach our shores and “become part of the fabric of society,” they are here to stay. Indeed, Marco Rubio  presciently warned  about this lax attitude towards enforcement when he was running for Senate in 2009: “If you grant amnesty, the message that you’re sending is that if you come in this country and stay here long enough, we will let you stay. And no one will ever come through the legal process if you do that.” This is why many of us believe that to the extent amnesty can ever work as a final solution, it must be preceded by a resolute determination to enforce deportations against future illegal entrants.  The Senate immigration bill, however, does just the opposite.  Aside for the fact that it will be virtually impossible to decip

Yid With Lid: Man--who knew we Joooos were so powerful. According to an official close to the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Jews are the most powerful sorcerers in the world. Its hard to understand how we learned sorcery while being so busy controlling the media, Hollywood, the banks, and of course the government. Memri is reporting: Mehdi Taeb, who is close to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and heads Khamenei's Ammar Base think tank, said in April 2013 that the Jews are the most powerful sorcerers in the world today, and that they have used their powers to attack Iran – for instance by turning the U.S. into their tool and getting it to impose sanctions on Iran, and also through attempts, albeit failed, to interfere in the 2009 elections. He added that while Iran has so far withstood their assaults, they have not yet used the full scope of their powers against it.  Come on Mehdi, we control the banks if we were sorcerers also those Joooos would have figured out a way

Conn Carroll: ... ... the simple fact is that illegal immigrants are not to blame for California's troubles. One need only look at Texas, a state that has a much bigger border with Mexico and a similarly large illegal immigrant population. Despite its many illegal immigrants (or maybe even because of them), Texas has a booming private-sector economy, low unemployment and highly competitive public schools. But while Texas and California have identical Latino populations (nonwhite Hispanics make up 38.1 percent of both states' populations), Texas has done a much better job of assimilating its newcomers. A language other than English is spoken in more than 40 percent of all California homes. That number is just 34 percent in Texas. Hispanics own almost 21 percent of all businesses in Texas. That number is just 16 percent in California. But there is one thing California is great at -- getting immigrants hooked on welfare. California is home to just 10 percent of the entire U.S.

Guardian: Diplomats are warning of growing Islamist violence against western targets in Libya as blowback from the war in Mali, following last week's attack on the French embassy in Tripoli. The bomb blast that wrecked much of the embassy is seen as a reprisal by Libyan militants for the decision by Paris the day before to extend its military mission against fellow jihadists in Mali. The Guardian has learned that jihadist groups ejected from their Timbuktu stronghold have moved north, crossing the Sahara through Algeria and Niger to Libya, fuelling a growing Islamist insurgency. "There are established links between groups in both Mali and Libya – we know there are established routes," said a western diplomat in Tripoli. "There is an anxiety among the political class here that Mali is blowing back on them." That anxiety escalated last week after militants detonated a car bomb outside the French embassy, wounding two French guards and a Libyan student, the fir

AP/Yahoo: The Environmental Protection Agency has dramatically lowered its estimate of how much of a potent heat-trapping gas leaks during natural gas production, in a shift with major implications for a debate that has divided environmentalists: Does the recent boom in fracking help or hurt the fight against climate change? Oil and gas drilling companies had pushed for the change, but there have been differing scientific estimates of the amount of methane that leaks from wells, pipelines and other facilities during production and delivery. Methane is the main component of natural gas. The new EPA data is "kind of an earthquake" in the debate over drilling, said Michael Shellenberger, the president of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental group based in Oakland, Calif. "This is great news for anybody concerned about the climate and strong proof that existing technologies can be deployed to reduce methane leaks." The scope of the EPA's revision was vast.

CNN: Spanish police say they've arrested the man behind what's been called the biggest cyberattack in history . The suspect, a 35-year-old Dutch citizen, traveled around Spain in a van he used as a mobile office, Spain's National Police said in a statement Sunday. Police arrested him Thursday north of Barcelona, Spain, on a European arrest warrant at the request of judicial authorities in the Netherlands, the statement said. Authorities have not released his name, and a photo police issued showing his detention blurred his face. The arrest comes a month after Internet users around the globe faced slowed-down service during the prolonged denial-of-service assault on The Spamhaus Project , a European spam-fighting group. Security experts said the attack used more sophisticated techniques than most distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks and targeted the Web's infrastructure, which led to other sites performing slowly. In a DDoS attack, computers flood a website

Washington Times: The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says that evidence suggests the Boston bombing suspects had help in the attack and that he is concerned about a “wider conspiracy.” “Given the level of sophistication of this [explosive] device, the fact that the pressure cooker is a signature device that goes back to Pakistan and Afghanistan … leads me to believe there was a trainer,” Rep. Michael T. McCaul , Texas Republican, told “Fox News Sunday.” “The question, where is that trainer or trainers? Are they overseas in the Chechen region, or are they in the United States. And [with] my conversations with the FBI , that’s the big question.” Mr. McCaul says U.S. officials are casting a “wide net” worldwide to find anyone responsible for aiding the suspects, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev , who is in custody, and his brother, Tamerlan , who was killed in a shootout with police during the manhunt for the two. The lawmaker said he believes the mother of suspect Tamerlan Ts

Pete Sepp: Whatever else you can say about the Obama Administration's energy policies, you have to give it credit for consistency and perseverance. The White House consistently misrepresents tax deductions and other provisions as "subsidies." And it perseveres in its years-long, disastrous campaign to raise tens of billions in new taxes on America's domestic energy producers. As my colleague Demian Brady at National Taxpayers Union's research affiliate pointed out in a recent analysis , "If the Obama Administration was out to prove its commitment to recycling, it has certainly done so with the Fiscal Year 2014 budget. Washington may have been abuzz over the few ‘new' ideas contained in the latest package from the White House, but on closer inspection taxpayers will find many of the same old fiscal proposals that have ignited controversy in prior years." You'd think from listening to the president and his fellow tax-hikers in Congress that Ameri

Texas Tribune/NY Times: About a year ago, talk began circulating in this West Texas town about a huge oil -producing formation called the Cline Shale, east of the traditional drilling areas around Midland. Then the oilmen and their rigs arrived. Now homes and hotels are sprouting, “help wanted” signs have multiplied, and a major drilling company has cleared land to build an office and equipment yard. “It is coming, and it is big,” said Greg Wortham, the mayor of Sweetwater, who also serves as executive director of the Cline Shale Alliance, a new economic development group. The Cline Shale, thousands of feet underground in a roughly 10-county swath, is just one of many little-tapped shale formations in Texas and across the nation, geologists say. That means the potential for oil and gas discoveries is theoretically huge, and the reason is technology. The rock-breaking process known as hydraulic fracturing, coupled with the ability to drill horizontally underground, has allowed d

Michael Goodwin: According to a relative of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Chechen immigrant believed there is “oppression of the Muslim population around the world.” The relative described Tsarnaev to The New York Times this way: “He was angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.” Bombing the Boston Marathon was the Tsarnaev brothers’ way of defending Islam. To say their argument boomeranged, however, isn’t fully true. Not as long as the Obama administration puts religious blinders on the defenders of our homeland. At its core, the Boston case reveals two fundamental truths. One, not all Muslims are terrorists. Two, in recent times, almost all terrorists are Muslims. Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is. Police didn’t catch him by staking out lemonade stands. By the same logic, preventing terrorism requires close scrutiny of Muslim men leaning toward violent jihad. Had they followed that logic, the FBI could have prevented the bombing. But with each p

Megan McArdle: Could There Be A Conservative LA Times? Places like LA are in desperate need of a media to point out how liberalism is destroying California and producing high unemployment while chasing off jobs.  The argument is made that papers reflect their audience, but I think it is the reverse.  Without conservatives the media just reflects and makes excuses for the failure of liberal policies while being critical of conservative alternatives.  Wit conservative writers and editors the conservative point of view will bet a better presentation and people will start to appreciate it more. McArdle talks briefly about Houston and has nice things to say about the Houston Chronicle.  The Chronicle is a middle of the road paper with it share of liberals.  What has made Houston avoid the evils of the liberal ghettos is its aggressive use of extraterritorial jurisdiction to keep from being hemmed in by conservative suburbs.  It stops incorporation in the suburbs and exurbs and when the

Judge Jeanine has a tough reaction to the mother of the bombers.

Washington Post: The United States, concerned that Iran is behind a string of cyberattacks against U.S. banking sites, has considered delivering a formal warning through diplomatic channels but has not pursued the idea out of fears that doing so could escalate hostilities, according to American officials. At the same time, the officials said, the disruptive activity against the Web sites has not yet reached a level of harm that would justify a retaliatory strike. The internal discussion reflects the complex nature of deciding when and how the United States should respond to hostile cyber-actions from other countries. It also reflects the pressure the administration is under from banking industry officials, who want to know what amount of pain or damage will justify a government response. “We don’t have a clear view of what are the triggers — and we’ve asked,” said one industry official who has been involved in discussions with the administration and who spoke on the condition of anon

Doug Ross: I respect Marco Rubio. I supported him in his Senate run. Most importantly, I believe he means well. But the allure of power has proven too strong for him. Ensconced in the Beltway Bubble, Rubio's fallen for what I call "the legislation delusion". Roughly translated, it is the belief that complex, multi-faceted legislation can solve humanity's problems. Obamacare is the quintessential example of law run amok: it represents tens of thousands of pages of regulations, arbitrary thresholds, segmentation of families into static classes, and other symptoms of a master planner's delusions. What the Statist terms "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" is similarly -- and fatally -- flawed. It represents dizzyingly complex regulations, dependent upon arbitrary conditions, restrictions, and dictates all requiring millions of pages of flowcharts. It is the product of the proverbial "Mastermind": one who believes he or she can better orchestrate m

CNN: House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul said stopping questioning to read surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights may have kept investigators from getting valuable intelligence. McCaul, R-Texas, said the complaint could have been filed later and suggested a change in the Miranda laws allowing American citizens accused of terrorist activities to be questioned for at least 48 hours. "Having been a federal prosecutor, I think this rush to Mirandize cost us valuable intelligence in terms of other plots that may be out there," McCaul told reporters on Capitol Hill on Friday. "Remember that before he's Mirandized, he does discuss the fact that he's going to Times Square to detonate these other IEDs that were found in his older brother's apartment. "The only other avenue we had to get this intelligence is through this emergency exception to the Miranda warning," he said. "But in my judgment, the FB

Fuel Fix: A Czech Republic company says it has found an abundant, long-term source of energy in South Texas to help European utilities produce electricity. The energy source has nothing to do with the Eagle Ford Shale. The source is the hated mesquite wood. “We looked all over the world for a stable and big source of biomass. We found the source in Texas,” Zdenek Mayer said. He’s business director and CEO for GreenHeart Energy LLC, the Texas division of GreenHeart Energy, based in Duchcov, Czech Republic. GreenHeart Energy LLC has selected San Antonio for its Texas company’s headquarters — for legal, banking and accounting purposes — but most of its activities will occur near and in Corpus Christi. GreenHeart Energy, founded in 2008, plans to harvest mesquite in South Texas, chip the wood, and ship it from Corpus Christi in bulk to a German port. Once the chips are in Europe, electricity utilities will burn them to create turbine-turning steam. Because burning mesquite ch

Daily Mail on Sunday: How carjacking victim of Boston bombers left his iPhone in his Mercedes so police could track them and thwart their plans to drive to New York I think that is pretty clever.  Police were apparently able to track the car.

Con Coughlin: ... ...   he is less well disposed to the mullahs who incited the violence in the first place, and is appalled by their habit of trading their womenfolk to buy rifles. “This degradation of mind is unrelieved by a single elevated sentiment,” he writes. “Their religion is the most miserable fanaticism, in which cruelty, credulity, and immorality are equally represented. Their holy men – the Mullahs – prize as their chief privilege a sort of droit de seigneur. It is impossible to imagine a lower type of beings or a more dreadful state of barbarism.” ...  This is from Coughlin's book, Churchill's First War  about the fight with the Pashtun in Afghanistan in 1897. There does not appear to be much that has changed in Afghanistan since that fighting.

AP/Politico: Russian authorities secretly recorded a telephone conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects vaguely discussed jihad with his mother, officials said Saturday, days after the U.S. government finally received details about the call. In another conversation, the mother of now-dead bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, officials said. The conversations are significant because, had they been revealed earlier, they might have been enough evidence for the FBI to initiate a more thorough investigation of the Tsarnaev family. As it was, Russian authorities told the FBI only that they had concerns that Tamerlan and his mother were religious extremists. With no additional information, the FBI conducted a limited inquiry and closed the case in June 2011. ...  The mother does seem to be untethered from reality and deeply into Islamic religious extremes.  She m

I think he maybe serious.  If so that is a scary thought.

Mathew Continetti: You have heard the words. You know the narrative. Let’s not rush to judgment. These were lone wolves. They were self-radicalized. The system worked. The dots were connected. Osama Bin Laden is dead; GM is alive. Al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self. It is time for nation building at home. Add up all of those lone wolves, however, and pretty soon you have a pack. Which may be one reason the reaction of some liberals to last week’s terror attack has been so bizarre: The bombing of the Boston Marathon by two radical Muslim immigrants to the United States, in which three innocent bystanders were killed, including an eight-year-old boy, and more than 260 other innocents were wounded, many of them maimed grievously, interrupted certain narratives that have dominated national security discourse since the election of President Barack Obama. The underlying assumption of those narratives is that the counterterrorism strategy pursued by President George W. Bush in the afte

Judith Miller questions the rush to charge which led to a hurried reading of Miranda warning which shut off the intelligence from the bomber.

Washington Post: As U.S. wars end, drop in spending hurts economy It is not just the end of the wars.  We are in desperate need of rebuilding our equipment inventory and developing new weapon systems postponed by the war effort.   Defense spending does much more to grow the economy than so called "stimulus" spending on infrastructure and hand outs.

NY Times: In Trek North, First Lure Is Mexico’s Other Line Central Americans fleeing crime and economic stagnation are flowing freely across Mexico’s southern border and causing a spike in migration to the United States. They hop the Mexican coastal train.  If caught by the government they are given 30 days to get out of Mexico so they just continue their journey north.  If caught by the Zetas r other cartels they are subjected to extortion or killed.  If they pay, the cartels sneak them into the country and transport them to stash houses in large cities where they look for work or are transported to other cities.  It is grossly misleading to suggest that we have fewer illegals right now.

NY Times: Europe Facing More Pressure to Reconsider Cuts as a Cure European officials who favored austerity have adopted a softer tone, backing away from a strategy that is widely unpopular with the public. When they talk about austerity what they do is raise taxes and cut spending which puts a brake on the economy.  What they need to do is cut spending and taxes which would give the private sector the ability to grow the economy and shrink government at the same time.  In the US the red states have done just that and have shown the strongest economic growth.   It has worked from Texas to Indiana, while raising taxes has been a disaster from Illinois to California. The bottom line is that liberalism does not work.

Fuel Fix: While championing the benefits of new energy extraction methods, Republican House members accused energy oversight agencies of research that misled the public on environmental and health risks. The accusations came at a joint Energy and Environment subcommittee hearing focus on hydraulic fracturing—often called “fracking”—an extraction technique pioneered in Texas in the 90s, which taps deep ground reserves of natural gas and oil. Rep. Ralph Hall of Rockwall slammed the Environmental Protection Agency at the Friday morning hearing. Hall said EPA reports on fracturing causing water contamination were later retracted by the agency. “Cleary this agency’s more interested in rushing to judgment and placing information in the hands of the media than they are for looking for a sound scientific approach,” Hall said. Hall directed his comments at Kevin Teichman, a science advisor testifying for the EPA. Hall accused the agency’s representatives of lying to Congress in the past. The

Daily Mail: Shocking US government leaflet tells Mexican immigrants they can collect food stamp benefits WITHOUT admitting they're in country illegally This is evidence that this administration is not serious about enforcing immigration law or other laws.

AEI: “Oil production in Texas’s Eagle Ford shale formation reached an all-time high in February as it climbed 74 percent compared with a year earlier.  “The nine geographic fields that make up the majority of Eagle Ford yielded 471,258 barrels of crude a day in February, according to preliminary data released by the Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees oil and gas drilling in the state. In February 2012, the fields produced 271,521 barrels daily.” ...  The Eagle Ford has consistently out produced expectations.  The interesting thing is that it may not be the most productive field in Texas in coming years because other shale oil formations are being developed in West Texas with an even greater potential.

Mark Green: Take a look at the map below, one we’ve used before to show the vastness of America’s offshore oil and natural gas reserves – the overwhelming majority of which (in red) that’s off-limits for development. That should be changed – and could be changed with the right policies in Washington. Legislation introduced today in Congress to  allow drilling off Virginia’s coast  is a step in that right direction. The bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Scott Rigell of Virginia would require the Interior Department to sell at least one offshore lease for oil and natural gas development there, mandating that a portion of any federal revenue be shared with the commonwealth. Access to areas offshore and onshore is vital to the kind of expanded domestic oil and natural gas production needed to make the United States more energy self-sufficient, which would strengthen our energy security. It’s unfortunate that such development is blocked for so much of our offshore reserves – again, loo

Washington Times: The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee says he’s convinced the Boston bombing suspects had ties to Islamic extremism in their native Chechnya. “The mosque that the older brother attended in Chechnya is one of the most radicalized. The types of doctrine that comes out of that mosque are al-Qaeda-inspired,” Rep. Ed Royce, California Republican, told CNN’s “Starting Point” on Friday. Mr. Royce says that Chechen rebels, who for years have been engaged in terrorist attacks in a push to break from Russia to form a caliphate — an independent Muslim state — for the Caucasus region, are linked “to this particular al Qaeda network.” “They have a wider vision of what they want to do with a caliphate and apparently the older brother, for the six months that he was there, was brought into the fold in terms of that movement,” he said. ... There is evidence to suggest he was already pretty radical before he went on the trip, but it si quite possible he went to places