PrairiePundit

IBD: The public largely blames President Obama for the flood of children who have poured over the border in recent weeks, creating a growing humanitarian crisis, according to the latest IBD/TIPP Poll released Monday. The late June survey found that the public largely blames Obama policies for the crisis in Iraq and believes the lost IRS emails are an administration effort to cover up wrongdoing at the agency. The poll found that 59% of those closely following the immigration crisis agree that "current administration policies and lack of focus on securing the border" are behind the human tide of illegal crossings. Six in 10 say that the children should be ordered to leave the country. (The survey found that 73% of Americans are following this story closely.) ... There is more. None of the poll results bode well for the President or for Democrats who have been defending the IRS and have watched Democrats try to avoid responsibility for the problems on the border. What is i...

NY Times: Court Limits Contraception Coverage Rule Health Law Violates Corporate Religious Liberty, Justices Say The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision opened the door to challenges from other corporations to many laws that may be said to violate their religious liberty. Video : Health Care Law’s Other Legal Challenges Justices Rule Some Public Workers Need Not Pay Union Fees In a 5-4 decision, the court said there was a type of worker — a partial public employee — who could choose not to join a union. So how did Obama respond to this rebuke of liberalism by the court?  He goes out to the Rose Garden to say he is now the dictator of immigration law.

LA Times: Obama's bid to deport children complicates immigration reform effort There seems to be some realization that the policy of not immediately deporting the "other than Mexican" illegals has caused the deluge of illegals in South Texas.  Instead of sending them back we have turned the Border Patrol into traffickers and military bases into stash houses.   The immigration reform bill passed by the Senate would not solve this problem and in fact makes it worse.

Paul Bedard: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s fumbles and bumbles in the rollout of her latest memoir, “Hard Choices,” has knocked the wind out her easy sail to the White House and put her support in key 2016 presidential election matchups below 50 percent for the first time. At a time when she should be padding her lead over the top Republican contenders, her underwhelming effort has cut her numbers, said pollster John Zogby. In his latest Zogby Analytics survey taken June 27-29, for example, her commanding leads over former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have shrunk greatly and she doesn’t even receive 50 percent of the vote. Worse, her support among married and wealthy voters has plummeted. Zogby told Secrets, “Even more than her dwindling leads over GOP contenders is that while she is pretty much running against herself, in a very high profile book tour, she is losing ground. Her biggest problem I have always felt is t...

Daily Beast: After months of gaining territory, weapons, and cash, ISIS is putting its global credibility on the line in a play that could backfire spectacularly. On Sunday morning, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, or ISIL , if you must) pronounced the reformation of the caliphate—the historical Islamic state that once stretched over much of the modern-day Muslim world—with ISIS emir Abu Bakr al Baghdadi as the man in charge. It’s arguably the boldest move yet by the group, which renamed itself simply The Islamic State. But if ISIS isn’t careful, this could be the moment when all of its gains in Iraq and Syria are squandered; when would-be allies are alienated; and when the group’s critics within the jihadi community were proven right all along. In the statement—released in Arabic, English, German, French, and Russian—ISIS claimed that it had fulfilled all the legal requirements for the caliphate and that all existing jihadi groups and indeed all Muslims around the world we...

James Jay Carafano: Obama gets 'surprised' by foreign crises because he isn't paying attention The President is apparently ignoring his intelligence briefings leading to constant surprises.  It appears to be a deadly combination of laziness and arrogance.

NY Post: The signs at the Texas border offer a glimpse of the enormity of the problem of unaccompanied minors trying to sneak into the US. The instructions are printed in English and Spanish, of course — but also, surprisingly, they’re instructions for help are also in Chinese. Hundreds of Chinese teens are slipping into the US a year, immigration groups say, mostly through Central America and Cuba. They make their way to New York City, typically on buses, where they are farmed out across the country to work in Chinese restaurants. Lauren Burke, a lawyer who speaks Mandarin, has worked with some 200 kids under age 18 in the last five years. She now has a caseload of 30 who need legal status. “Some of them are actually trafficked by their parents. The parents are very complicit,” Burke said. “Sometimes, the family member gets duped by somebody who says . . . ‘I see you can’t afford to send your kid to school anymore. If you send them to America, there are streets paved with gold.’ ” ....

Fuel Fix: One of the developers of a natural gas field off Israel’s Mediterranean coast on Sunday said it has signed a letter of intent to provide gas to a facility in Egypt. Delek Drilling said it is negotiating a deal to provide seven billion cubic meters of natural gas from the offshore Leviathan gas field to British company BG’s plant in Idku, Egypt, through an underwater pipeline annually for 15 years. An industry official familiar with the deal said it could be valued at about $30 billion — which would be the largest energy deal in Israel’s history. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the deal. Until recently, Egypt provided natural gas to Israel. But following the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, supplies were disrupted and eventually halted. Last month, Houston-based Noble Energy Inc., one of Delek’s partners, reached a preliminary deal to sell up to 2.5 trillion cubic feet of gas annually over 15 years to Union Fenosa Gas ...

LA Times: Confusion, costs plague state's Obamacare enrollees Some Californians are stuck with high bills after learning their doctors are out of network. 'I thought I had done everything right, and it's been awful,' says a Fullerton woman The Obamacare screw ups continue long after it is supposedly "fixed."

Fox News: Iraqi government forces have reportedly been forced to pull back from the northern city of Tikrit after an offensive to reclaim the city from Sunni Muslim militants was blunted by fierce fighting. The BBC , citing eyewitnesses, reported Sunday that the Iraqi army had fallen back to the town of Dijla, approximately 15 miles to the south. The witnesses said that the government forces' drive to retake Tikrit had been hampered in part my the large number of improvised explosive devices laid on the approach to the city. The witnesses said that security forces continued to shell the city, though what damage those shells may have done is unclear. Iraqi officials had claimed that troops had pushed into the heart of the city in what was the biggest attempt yet by the Baghdad government to reverse a series of defeats suffered earlier this month at the hands of the Al Qaeda-inspired Islamic State in Iraq and The Levant (ISIS). The militants have surged across Sunni-majority areas ...

Kyle Smith: Why Democrats insist on lying about how ‘poor’ they are ... But there’s another reason Democrats can’t talk about their wealth. It’s because they can’t say, “I made it big. Follow me and you can, too.” Democrats earn their money in ways that aren’t available to most Americans. Yet even for Democrats, the Clintons got rich in an exotic way. They accumulated something like $100 million not by building a business or inventing something or even writing some hit songs. Their entire fortune came from political celebrity. (Their daughter has even accumulated $15 million by being the offspring of political celebrities. Or did you think NBC News paid her $600,000 a year because of her obvious broadcasting ability?) If the Clintons had gotten rich inventing Facebook, that fortune would have spawned many others. But celebrity honoraria don’t work that way. Drug dealers create more middle-class jobs than these people do. Moreover, both Clintons have given so many speeches to big-b...

Michael Goodwin: Say this for President Obama: He’s got an uncanny ability to block out distractions and keep his eye on the ball. Facing a horrific expansion of terrorism in the Mideast, a meltdown of public support at home and major rebukes by the Supreme Court, the president remains fixated on No. 1. “I’m finding lately I just want to say what’s on my mind,” he told a Minneapolis audience Friday, and then ticked off a series of complaints about — surprise — Republicans. “They don’t do anything, except block me and call me names,” he said. “If they were more interested in growing the economy for you and the issues that you are talking about instead of trying to mess with me, we would be doing a lot better.” He wasn’t finished: “The critics, the cynics in Washington, they’ve written me off more times than I can count. But cynicism doesn’t invent the Internet. Cynicism doesn’t give women the right to vote.” There you have it: the presidential mind in Year 6. Don’t cry for Argentina —...

And they are before a judge who has appointed a special prosecutor before to deal with DOJ abuses.  He has given the IRS and DOJ until July 10 to explain their failure to comply with a court requirement.

NY Times: For Wendy Davis, Filibuster Goes Only So Far in Race to Be Governor of Texas Wendy Davis’s campaign for governor is expected to set a fund-raising record, but even supporters point to missteps in her race and question her chances at election. Davis's filibuster did not change any minds.  At best it made liberals feel better about their support for abortions, but those who oppose abortion were also energized to oppose her.  In Texas there are more who oppose abortion than support it.  Her fund raising has not change that dynamic.  It also can't hide the fact that she is not a good candidate.  She seems to be constantly lurching from one gaffe to the next trying to come up with a message to attract conservative voters to her brand of liberalism.  It just is not working.  She and her funding sources may have bought into the myth of changing demographics as a solution to selling liberalism in Texas, but the voters have not.

NY Times: Obama to Seek Funds to Stem Border Crossings President Obama will seek $2 billion for border enforcement to cope with the influx of illegal Central American migrants, including unprecedented numbers of unaccompanied minors. If you give the President the benefit of the doubt and say that the surge of illegal young people at the border is just the unintended consequences of his flawed immigration enforcement policy, how can you be certain he will fix the flaws and not just use the money to facilitate keeping these people here rather than deporting them?  He has lost the trust of many Americans on the immigration issue.  What we need is a change in the law that will treat the "other than Mexicans" the same way they treat Mexicans and allow immediate deportation without allow the newcomers to game the system or ignore court orders.

BBC: At least 10 people have been killed and 14 injured in an explosion in the northern Nigerian city of Bauchi, police say. Police spokesman Mohammed Haruna told AFP news agency the blast, which took place on Friday evening, occurred in a building widely known as a brothel. The cause of the blast is not clear, although Islamist militant group Boko Haram have repeatedly attacked Bauchi. It came just two days after a bomb in the capital Abuja killed at least 22. ... It appears that Boko Harem objects to carnal knowledge as much as to western education.  What ever the issue they resort to mass murder.

Fuel Fix: Ed Whitacre, former chairman and CEO of AT&T and General Motors, has joined former Vice President Dick Cheney and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to invest in a San Antonio-based technology company that collects oil-field data. The company, WellAware Holdings Inc., said Wednesday it has secured $37 million in funding that was led by Activant Capital Group LLC, a New York-based private equity firm, and Slim, an investor and CEO of América Móvil, one of the largest mobile phone carriers in Latin America. Activant invests in technology and software businesses, according to its website. Whitacre and Cheney, who also invested, are board members at WellAware. WellAware was co-founded in 2012 by Matt Harrison, a former vice president at San Antonio-based InCube Laboratories, an incubator for biotech companies. CEO interview: WellAware technology remotely monitors Eagle Ford wells, pipelines WellAware has created software that lets energy companies track wells, pipelines and ot...

Guardian: Wives of top Niger politicians held over child trafficking Wives of minister and parliamentary speaker arrested after alleged baby-trafficking syndicate uncovered in west Africa The arrest included 17 who were accused of trafficking by forcing young women in Nigeria to have babies for sale.  You would think that civilization would have stopped this kind of business decades ago.

BBC: Iraq's army has routed Sunni militants in a major offensive on the northern city of Tikrit, state media say. State television said the governor's HQ had been recaptured and 60 fighters from the Isis militant group killed. A spokesman for the rebels confirmed heavy fighting but implied the attack had failed, saying they were pursuing what was left of the army offensive. The rebels control large swathes of the north and west after lightning raids that captured the second city, Mosul.'Flee or be killed' On Saturday, thousands of Iraqi troops backed by tanks and air power attacked Tikrit from four directions, state TV said. It said there had been complete success in clearing Isis from the city, with some militant commanders among the 60 killed. It said the other insurgents there had fled. ... State TV said preparations were now being made to move north towards Mosul. The Iraqi soldiers are being supported in the offensive by allied Sunni tribesmen and Shia militias....

KRLD: “I’ve had a 7-year-old little girl from El Salvador with her mother come to my front door just in dire need, lost, needing help,” says Linda Vickers, who owns a Ranch in Brooks County. “They wanted to get a ride to Houston; they didn’t want me to call border control. This ranchland is ruthless. It’s deep sand; it’s hot; it’s humid; it literally sucks the life out of a person.” Vickers says even though her ranch is about 60 miles north of the border, bands of illegal immigrants are still crossing onto her land by circumventing border patrol check points. “I have a set of dogs here that are a deterrent and they tend to put some of these people in trees. I’ve even had an MS-13 gang member in a tree up here in front,” says Vickers. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is scheduled to travel to South Texas on Saturday to meet with immigrant children at a detention facility and be briefed about the ongoing humanitarian crisis along the Texas-Mexico border. Vickers wishes Pelosi or a me...

Fox News: Iraqi troops backed by helicopter gunships launched an operation early Saturday aimed at dislodging Sunni militants from the northern city of Tikrit, one of two major urban centers they seized in recent weeks in a dramatic blitz across the country. After watching much of Iraq slip out of government hands, military officials sought to portray the push that began before dawn as a significant step that puts the army back on the offensive. They said the operation includes commandos, tanks and helicopters, as well as pro-government Sunni fighters and Shiite volunteers. Tikrit residents reported clashes in the city, but the extent of the fighting was unclear. Jawad al-Bolani, a security official in the Salahuddin Operation Command, said the immediate objective is Tikrit, the hometown of former dictator Saddam Hussein and one of two major cities to fall in recent weeks to the al-Qaida breakaway Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and allied Sunni militants. He said there was no c...

NY Times: Voter-Fraud Claims and Activist’s Suicide Add to Turmoil in Mississippi The primary fight between Senator Thad Cochran and his Tea Party challenger descended into voter fraud accusations, and a tragic note was introduced when a Tea Party leader committed suicide. The vote fraud allegations are also a product of the unethical race baiting campaign of Tea Party opponents who made bogus claims of racism  in order to get black Democrats to vote against McDaniel.  The fliers and robo calls were disgusting and untrue, but they pushed some people who had voted in the Democrat primary to illegally vote in the Republican runoff.  It maybe a Pyrrhic victory for the establishment.  At this point they also appear to be resisting a review of the voter roles in some areas in order to cover up the vote fraud.  I think the disgust runs pretty deep at this point.

NY Times: Taliban Mount Major Assault in Volatile Afghan Region The group has attacked police outposts and government facilities in several districts of northern Helmand Province, sending the police and military officials scrambling to shore up defenses. This is the region that US Marines and British troops tamed during the earlier surge. The attacks are a reflection of Obama's lack of strategic patients and his eagerness for retreat.  The Karzai government has also contributed to the desire for retreat among Americans.  I think we are likely to see a repeat of the current fiasco in Iraq because of Obama's lack of leadership.

Fuel Fix: The U.S. Department of Energy said Friday a carbon capture project in Port Arthur, Texas has reached a key milestone : a million metric tons of carbon dioxide blocked from being released into the air. The project, which launched in late 2012 , captures carbon dioxide emissions from a facility run by Air Products and Chemicals Inc. that produces hydrogen for a nearby Valero facility. Special equipment to capture the carbon connects to devices known as reformers, which combine fossil fuels and steam at high temperatures to produce hydrogen. The Energy Department said the project captures more than 90 percent of the carbon dioxide released from two reformers. The carbon dioxide is pumped underground where it can be securely stored without being released into the atmosphere. The technique also has the benefit of improving oil production in mature fields by forcing oil out of the ground. The carbon dioxide from the Air Products and Chemicals facility is transported to the West H...

This is a surprisingly honest take on what is happening at the border.  I wish her mom would pay attention to what she is saying.  I do disagree with her assertion that the border cannot be secured.  The law needs to be changed to allow immediate deportation of the "other than Mexican" illegals the way we now do with Mexicans.  That will substantially halt the flow.

Guardian: Isis onslaught in Iraq claims terrible toll of victims on both sides of divide   Vengeful Shia militias add atrocities to Sunni-led militant group's brutal killings with casualties crossing sectarian lines This is sectarian warfare at its worst with both sides engaged in genocide.  It is what happens when terrorist forces oppose each other.

AP: A fear of voting has gripped Democratic leaders in the Senate, slowing the chamber's modest productivity this election season to a near halt. With control of the Senate at risk in November, leaders are going to remarkable lengths to protect endangered Democrats from casting tough votes and to deny Republicans legislative victories in the midst of the campaign. The phobia means even bipartisan legislation to boost energy efficiency, manufacturing, sportsmen's rights and more could be scuttled. The Senate's masters of process are finding a variety of ways to shut down debate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., now is requiring an elusive 60-vote supermajority to deal with amendments to spending bills, instead of the usual simple majority, a step that makes it much more difficult to put politically sensitive matters into contention. This was a flip from his approach to Obama administration nominees, when he decided most could be moved ahead with a straight...

Washington Times: Army vets blast PC police for attacking Apache, Chinook helicopters as racist Veterans aren’t happy with a recent charges that the Apache, Comanche, Chinook, Lakota, Cheyenne and Kiowa military vehicles are a slur against American Indians. I don't understand their point, unless their attacks are meant as tongue in cheek to make fun of the attacks on the Washington Redskins.  If they are serious, then they are way to sensitive to be giving advice to the military.

Power Line: ... ... Meisel asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when we deposed him. Because the DOJ has already announced that it would not be prosecuting anyone for this, we asked the DOJ to grant him immunity so that we could compel him to answer our questions. DOJ refused, which is a huge red flag that there is likely something more to uncover here. ... Meisel was the conduit in the disclosure of the donor list of the National Organization for Marriage.

LA Times: U.S. intervention in Libya now seen as cautionary tale In three years Libya has turned into the kind of place U.S. officials most fear: a lawless land that attracts terrorists, pumps out illegal arms and drugs and destabilizes its neighbors. That is what happens when you break a place without a plan to deal with the consequences.  They manage to make matters worse.

IBD: The Obama regime plans to slap railroads with costly new rules for shipping shale oil, arguing that it's unsafe. But frackers have turned to rail mainly because the president won't approve safer pipelines. If shipping crude by rail is as dangerous as the administration says it is, it has only itself and its extreme environmental agenda to blame. Absent the blocked Keystone XL Pipeline, more and more North Dakota frackers are opting to use rail to get their crude to refineries and ports in the U.S., a much riskier (and costlier) alternative. As pipeline growth lags, rail shipping has boomed. Right now, 68% of the Bakken formation region's oil is moved by rail vs. 25% three years ago. Thanks largely to the shale-oil boom, railroads shipped about 400,000 tank cars of crude oil last year, up from 9,500 in 2008. Increased rail traffic has led to an uptick in oil tanker accidents, including April's 17-tanker derailment in Virginia in which 25,000 gallons of crude explo...

Wesley Pruden: KStreet won a big one Tuesday night in Mississippi. Preserving Thad Cochran in the U.S. Senate, like a specimen in the Museum of Natural History, was important to the Republican establishment and its network of lobbyists, string-pullers and special pleaders who pose as citizens of rectitude and nobility, not like the unwashed in the grass roots who are forever embarrassing the party elites. But the price of victory over an upstart with the backing of the despised Tea Party is likely to be long-lasting and expensive, and not just in Mississippi. Chris McDaniel , the upstart, put his finger on that price on election night. “There is nothing strange at all about standing as people of faith for our country that we built, that we believe in,” he said. “But there is something a bit strange, there is something strange about a Republican primary that is decided by liberal Democrats.” Mr. McDaniel holds no distinction as the perfect candidate, or even as necessarily the best...

Center for Immigration Studies: Government data show that since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal). This is remarkable given that native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population. Though there has been some recovery from the Great Recession, there were still fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million above the 2000 level. All of the net increase in employment went to immigrants in the last 14 years partly because, even before the Great Recession, immigrants were gaining a disproportionate share of jobs relative to their share of population growth. In addition, natives' losses were somewhat greater during the recession and immigrants have recovered more quickly from it. With 58 million working-age natives not working, the Schumer-Rubio bill (S...

Veronique de Rugy:   ... ... the Ex-Im Bank overwhelmingly benefits some of the biggest, most politically connected firms in America , like Boeing, General Electric, and Caterpillar. In the process, the bank subsidizes wealthy foreign borrowers — like Australia’s richest woman , mining heiress Gina Rinehart , owner of the Ex-Im-financed Roy Hill Iron Ore Mine — who who could easily find private capital without government privileges. The bank also subsidizes cash-poor foreign borrowers — like the government-owned Ethiopian Airlines — who are pushed to borrow beyond their means and expose U.S. taxpayers to their substantial default risk in the process. Finally, lenders benefit from Ex-Im finance by earning interest on loans whose risk is borne by American taxpayers . In the candid words of one JP Morgan banker (whose firm just happens to be the biggest private lender that benefits from Ex-Im), the bank is “ free money ” — that is, for the firms who know the right people. ......

Byron York: Dems struggle to show anti-Koch amendment is 'reasonable' Ted Cruz has demonstrated the absurdity of their proposed Constitutional Amendment.

Fuel Fix: House votes to expand offshore drilling It is a good bill that is unlikely to get through the Senate as long as the execrable Harry Reid is Majority Leader and blocker of energy development.   But Democrats who opposed this bill have been exposed as job killers who are on the side of the foreign despots.  Republicans should challenge Senate Democrats on the issue in November.

BBC: Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has told the BBC that he hopes jets from Russia and Belarus will turn the tide against rebels in the coming days. "God willing within one week this force will be effective and will destroy the terrorists' dens," he said. He said that the process of buying US jets had been "long-winded" and that the militants' advance could have been avoided if air cover had been in place. Isis and its Sunni Muslim allies seized large parts of Iraq this month. Mr Maliki was speaking to the BBC's Arabic service in his first interview for an international broadcaster since Isis - the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant - began its major offensive. "I'll be frank and say that we were deluded when we signed the contract [with the US]," Mr Maliki said. "We should have sought to buy other jet fighters like British, French and Russian to secure the air cover for our forces; if we had air cover we would have averte...

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Fox News: ... A new powerful helicopter for special-ops recently made its debut in Europe. The rugged medium-sized EC645 T2 made by Airbus Helicopters (previously called Eurocopter) is made to deploy for a range of missions from armed scout and light attack to search and rescue and MEDEVAC. Powered by two Turbomeca Arriel 2E engines with dual-channel, full authority digital engine control (FADEC) -- it is the most powerful in this series. Power is important because it can provide maximum speed and agility while carrying a full payload. The EC645 T2 has a maximum takeoff weight of more than 8,000 pounds, speed of more than 150 mph and range of about 412 miles. Reports are it performs really well in what is called “6K/95 high & hot” conditions, meaning operating in 6,000 feet altitude and 95-degree environments. Its design reflects special operations requirements, such as rapid easy access to confined areas and supporting fast roping, r...

Joel Gehrke: Obama Suffers 12th Unanimous Defeat at Supreme Court His most recent losses was on recess appointments.  People are starting to keep a list of losses by a guy who claimed to be a Constitutional scholar.  Even his own appointees disagree with him on these cases.

Sen. Cornyn lays out the case against Reid's reckless claims about what is happening on the border and what those seeking to solve the problem are saying.

Fox New; Computer experts and Republican lawmakers are poking holes in IRS claims that the agency did all it could to retrieve embattled ex-official Lois Lerner's allegedly "lost" emails, which the agency blames on a 2011 hard-drive crash. The email revelation already has prompted three congressional hearings -- with more likely to come -- as lawmakers grow more skeptical of the explanation and look for inconsistencies in the story. Among them, they point to a flurry of emails from mid-2011 between Lerner and the agency's information technology team about the alleged computer failure which was attached to the agency's mea culpa delivered to Congress earlier this month. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, in testimony on Capitol Hill this week, cited those emails as proof of the hard drive crash. But Lerner's communications with the agency's IT team referred to her desire to retrieve "lost personal files" -- not lost emails. And that detail is ...

I think the IRS was just doing what the Democrats wanted and that is why Democrats don't care about the victims of the abuse.  But three quarters of Americans think the IRS is trying to hide something.  Putting the Democrats on teh side of teh IRS is a clear win for Republicans.

The Daily Show Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes , The Daily Show on Facebook , Daily Show Video Archive Jon Stewart eventually goes after the IRS story.

James Taranto: No One Believes the IRS' Story By tying themselves to the defense of the IRS the Democrats are making their political situation worse, but they have to, because they were pushing the IRS to attack their political enemies to begin with.  Even with much of the mainstream media attempting to ignore the IRS story, the word has gotten out and people just do not believe what the IRS is saying. Taranto looks at the polling on the issue of the lost emails.  I think the more the Democrats try to defend the IRS the worse it will be for them in November.

NY Times: Use of Drones Risks a War Without End, Report States A group of military, intelligence and legal experts warned of a “slippery slope” to perpetual war and the dangers of setting bad precedents for foes. The drones are basically a form of a raiding strategy.  Raiding strategies can weaken an enemy over time if they are consistently applied, but the rout to victory is much less sure.  The strategy is generally one followed by a weak power. In this case the strategy in some ways mirrors that of the enemy which uses raids against us and our allies.  Because the Obama approach is less comprehensive than the Bush approach, we have been falling behind in this war, and we are faced with a much stronger enemy now than when Obama took office.

Washington Free Beacon: White House to Congress: We Did Not See ISIL Coming Obama administration officials briefed senators on chaos in Iraq I don't think they are telling the truth.  When confronted by intelligence reports indicating an attack was imminent John Kerry said what really surprised them was the collapse of the Iraqi army.  This looks like another attempt by this administration to claim they learned about events through the media rather than their own management.

Red States: ... With a nearly maxed out Obama donor supposedly running the DOJ investigation of the IRS and a longtime loyal Democrat partisan running the IRS itself, Chicago politics is playing out on full display at the expense of the American people. ... The administration's response to the abuse leads me to the conclusion they are trying a massive corrupt cover up.  In the process they are destroying their own credibility and that of the IRS.

Cal Thomas: People who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid known as climate change are not just “deniers;” we are guilty of a “nihilistic refusal” to address the issue. So says a Washington Post editorial commenting favorably on Monday's Supreme Court ruling that allows the Environmental Protection Agency , under certain limits, to proceed under the Clean Air Act to regulate major sources of greenhouse-gas emissions. The actual nihilists are those who refuse to accept any scientific information that undermines their claim that the globe is warming and humans are responsible for it. Cults are like that. Regardless of evidence contradicting their beliefs, cultists persist in blind faith. ... There is much more with specific examples of factual data that does not support the warmist theory of events.   I think their biggest problem is their attempts to project their theory with computer models have been shown to be based on invalid assumptions.

Red States: 8 Ways the New York Times Misled You about Gov. Scott Walker This was a blatant attempt to smear Gov. Walker by reporting on a discredited partisan attempt to criminalize political differences.  It was shameful journalism for a paper like the Times .

Fuel Fix: The House voted Wednesday to force the Obama administration to accelerate its scrutiny of dozens of proposed natural gas export projects, responding to energy companies’ clamor to sell the fossil fuel to Japan, Thailand and other countries. The measure, which passed 266-150, represents a bid to hasten federal regulatory reviews of the multibillion-dollar projects needed to transform natural gas into a liquid that can be loaded into tankers and shipped overseas. Although the Energy Department has issued seven licenses to broadly export liquefied natural gas to countries that do not have free-trade agreements with the United States, some two dozen more proposals are pending. The legislation would impose a 30-day deadline for the Energy Department to rule on those applications, with the clock starting after the bill is enacted or the required environmental reviews of the construction plans are finished. That’s a big change from the original version of the bill, sponsored by Re...

Fuel Fix: A business association whose members include some of the world’s biggest energy companies is urging the administration to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, arguing that the southern portion of the project already has shown the positive economic impact the project will have on the country. The group commissioned a study on the economic effect of the 485-mile portion of Keystone pipeline known as the Gulf Coast Extension, which opened earlier this year linking Oklahoma and Texas . The study highlights benefits the project had on local businesses like restaurants and hotels along the route. It notes that during construction, TransCanada Corp. — the company behind the pipeline — spent $6 million each month directly with local businesses in Texas and Oklahoma. The project required $2.3 billion in private-sector investment and the work of more than 4,800 people, researchers wrote. The study was prepared by researchers at the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Met...

BBC: N Korea threatens war over US movie Couldn't they just write a bad review?

Washington Times: Obama to spend day in woman’s shoes President Obama plans to spend Thursday in the shoes of a woman named Rebekah. It will be interesting to see how comfortable her shoes are.  

Fox News: 'SHOCKING' DISCOVERY: Lerner sought IRS audit of GOP senator I would not be surprised to find other emails targeting conservative political activist and campaign contributors  by the IRS.  It would find the pattern of partisan audits going after Romney donors among others.

Opinion Journal: The IRS is spinning a tale of bureaucratic incompetence to explain the vanishing emails from former Tax Exempt Organizations doyenne Lois Lerner and six other IRS employees. We have less faith by the minute that there is an innocent explanation for this failure to cooperate with Congress, but even if true it doesn't matter. The IRS was under a legal obligation to retain the information because of a litigation hold. In 2009 a pro-Israel group called Z Street applied to the IRS for tax-exempt status. When the process was delayed, an IRS agent told the group that its application was undergoing special review because "these cases are being sent to a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization's activities contradict the Administration's public policies." In August 2010 Z Street sued the IRS on grounds that this selective processing of its application amounted to viewpoint discrimination. Under the Federal Rules of Civil Pr...

Peter Wehner: During his appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin offered this observation : Because when any government agency, particularly one as powerful as the IRS, engages in something that even people sympathetic to the administration looks weird and suspicious, it’s incumbent upon all of the national media to aggressively ask more questions. The Republicans in Congress are asking questions. I think with a different administration, one that was a Republican administration, this story would be a national obsession. And instead, it’s getting coverage here and a few other places. But it deserves a lot more questions. It certainly does, and Mr. Halperin deserves credit (as does host Joe Scarborough) for saying so. Here’s a thought experiment. Assume during the George W. Bush administration the IRS had targeted MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood, the Center for American Progress, and a slew of other liberal groups. Assume, too, that no conservative groups were the...

Watch Megan Kelly show Obama taking credit for getting the troops out and then when things fell apart, blame it on the Iraqis.  It is a good demonstration of his lack of character and blame shifting personality.

Fox News: The U.S. intelligence community warned about the "growing threat" from Sunni militants in Iraq since the beginning of the year, a senior intelligence official said Tuesday -- a claim that challenges assertions by top administration officials that they were caught off guard by the capture of key Iraqi cities. Earlier Tuesday, in an interview with Fox News, Secretary of State John Kerry said "nobody expected" Iraqi security forces to be decisively driven out by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, as they were earlier this month in Mosul. But in a separate briefing with reporters Tuesday afternoon, the senior intelligence official said the intelligence community had warned about the ISIS threat. “During the past year, the intelligence community has provided strategic warning of Iraq’s deteriorating security situation," the official said. "We routinely highlighted (ISIS') growing threat in Iraq, the increasing difficulties Iraq’s secu...

NY Times: After Opening Way to Rebels, Turkey Is Paying Heavy Price Many Turks now blame their government for facilitating the rise of extremists in Syria and the new insurgency in Iraq, including the kidnapping of 80 Turkish citizens. The Islamist in charge of Turkey supported the radical Islamist in Syria and helped to destabilize the region.  Obama's lack of leadership was also responsible for allowing this to happen.   But that is also the price of "leading from behind."

John Podhoretz: Donkeys’ disaster? Obama’s policies may doom Dems Having to defend Obamacare and its roll out would be a challenge by itself.  Add the debacle in the Middle East and their inability to blame it on others and they have a serious problem.

Mona Charen: Among Republicans, the debate over America's proper world role is vigorous. Sen. Rand Paul blames the current disarray in Iraq on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney . "Were they right in their predictions? Were there weapons of mass destruction there? Was the war won in 2005, when many of those people said it was won?" Cheney, civil but direct, defends his decisions and warns that Paul's "isolationism" is unwise. "He doesn't believe we ought to be involved in that part of the world. That didn't work in the 1930s, it sure as heck won't work in the aftermath of 9/11." That, ladies and gentlemen, is how a substantive debate about serious matters is conducted. One side makes its case; the other side responds. May the better argument win. That's not the way Democrats roll. James Fallows of The Atlantic tweeted , "Working hypothesis: no one who stumped for original Iraq invasion gets to give 'advice' about disas...

Erick Erickson: Ignore, for a minute, the IRS targeting of conservative groups and the erasure of seven hard drives at the IRS. Yes, ignore all that for a moment. While the media is doing its best to avoid that subject, with difficulty, it is absolutely and willfully ignoring another IRS scandal that, had it happened in the Bush Administration, would be the lead story of every nightly newscast and above the fold on the front page of every newspaper in America. We now know that some person or persons at the IRS intentionally and maliciously leaked confidential tax records of a non-profit organization so that gay rights activists could target the donors of the organization for harassment. We know this from the emails of the gay rights activist who obtained the records through, what he described, as “a conduit” from the IRS. He then sent the data to the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, which then put the records online. The records contained the names and addresses of donors to ...

Noemie Emery: ... Bush knew American power was the solution when applied properly; Obama thought it was the problem and used it erratically when he used it at all. He thought reducing American presence and sway in the world would lead to world peace, and he was mistaken. He thought the ‘reset' button would mollify Russian president Vladimir Putin , who mocked him, absorbed Crimea and began to move in on Ukraine . He thought courting Iran would make it loosen its fist, but it tightened further. He thought not pressuring Syria would lead to less war, and the atrocities multiplied. He thought he could stop wars simply by leaving before the issues were settled, and the results are now obvious. "For years, President Obama has been claiming credit for 'ending wars' when...he was pulling the United States out of wars that were far from over," said the Washington Post , correctly. "Now the pretense is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain." The Nation...

Leon Wolf: ... Getting audited by the IRS is, to put it bluntly, a life-ruining experience. More to the point, there is virtually no such thing as a pleasant interaction with the IRS under any circumstance. Everyone hates the surly workers, the unpleasant attitudes, the inherent suspicion towards everything you have ever done or said. What sort of person would take the side of the giant, tax collecting, life ruining behemoth? Via Twitchy comes this insane video of Democrat Elijah Cummings on the verge of tears at the shameful, shameful treatment being given the IRS commissioner at Congressional hearings.... Keep in mind, the grilling given Koskinen is less substantial than the grilling given average taxpayers at any single one of the tens of thousands of audits the IRS conducts every year. And unlike the targets of those audits, Koskinen faces no possibility that he will be slapped with fines, penalties, or criminal sanctions – the prospect of unpleasant questions is literally all...

Fuel Fix: U.S. oil and gas reserves increased 9 percent last year, according to a newly released analysis, and almost all of it was due to independent producers — not major, integrated oil companies. The report by audit firm EY analyzed data reported by the 50 largest publicly traded companies based on their 2013 end-of-year reserve estimates. It analyzed proved reserves which, according to federal finance standards, are reserves that companies plan to drill within five years. U.S. oil reserves increased by 2.1 billion barrels last year to nearly 25.4 billion, according to the report. That figure marks a 52 percent increase since 2009. The gains were attributable almost entirely to the work of independent producers — companies only involved in exploration and production, with no refining business. Those companies, such as Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and Devon Energy, are the most prominent actors in the country’s shale plays. ... They seem better able to move quickly to acquire drilli...

Daily Mail: Staff sergeant who fought off 200 Taliban fighters despite being unable to WALK in deadly battle that killed nine of his comrades to be awarded Medal of Honor  Ryan Pitts is set to receive the medal for his heroics during one of the deadliest battles of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan He spent 90 minutes fighting off enemy fighters despite shrapnel injuries to both legs and an arm that left the young soldier critically wounded Nine paratroopers gave their lives and 27 were wounded at The Battle of Wanat President Obama is scheduled to bestow the medal on Pitts during a White House ceremony on July 21 Pitts will become the ninth living recipient of the medal for actions in Iraq and Afghanistan This is more of the traditional Medal of Honor fight and is well deserving.  Fighting against overwhelmin odds while severely wounded is something that shows bravery and a true fighting spirit.

Fox News: The consensus is: it’s no accident. More than three-quarters of voters -- 76 percent -- think the emails missing from the account of Lois Lerner, the ex-IRS official at the center of the scandal over targeting of conservative groups, were deliberately destroyed. That’s according to a new Fox News poll. That suspicion is shared across party lines, albeit to varying degrees. An overwhelming 90 percent of Republicans think the emails were intentionally destroyed, as do 74 percent of independents and 63 percent of Democrats. CLICK HERE TO READ THE POLL RESULTS Overall, just 12 percent of voters believe the emails were destroyed accidentally. Another 12 percent are unsure. ... Democrats are in trouble on this issue and they are making it worse by pretending that it is not a problem.  By turning the IRS into a Democrat attack dog they have undermined the credibility of that agency, possibly irrevocably.

Washington Times: ISIL hell-bent on creating Islamic state to be launchpad for attacks on U.S. The al Qaeda-linked army now conquering territory in Syria and Iraq ultimately wants its new Islamic state to be a launching pad for attacking the U.S. homeland, says a new congressional report. These guys plan a hell on earth for all who do not embrace their weird religious views.