PrairiePundit

Ann Coulter: After the bad news on gay marriage out of the Supreme Court this week, here’s some good news for conservatives: Demographics are on our side!As M. Stanton Evans has recently pointed out, ”Believers in religious doctrine, the traditional family and pro-life attitudes on abortion are systematically outperforming their secular-liberal opponents in the demographic sweepstakes — having appreciably more children per couple — resulting in a fertility gap that works against the liberals.” Republican states, such as Utah and Kentucky, have been steadily gaining population, while liberal states, such as New York and Vermont, are consistent demographic losers. It should not come as a surprise, though it always does, that people opposed to abortion are out-populating those who consider abortion a right. Jewish publications have repeatedly observed that the declining fertility rate among all American Jews except the Orthodox — the group that votes 86 percent Republican — means tha...

Kimberly Kagan: The Iraq War Is Not Over Since the departure of U.S. troops, it’s only heated up. Kagan does a good job of explaining how Maliki has alienated the Sunnis and allowed the Shia militias to reconstitute.  Obama has provided ample evidence that you cannot retreat your way to victory.  

The Hill: The timing of when to grant legal status to the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants has emerged as the key point of dispute between the House and the Senate, which is poised to approve its immigration bill as soon as Thursday. Differences over the issue could keep the House and Senate from reaching a deal and prevent President Obama from fulfilling the top priority of his second term despite the momentum gained from a successful Senate vote. Republicans in the House say the border security amendment added to the Senate bill Wednesday to bolster GOP support in both chambers improves the legislation — but not enough to gain their support. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) again assured House Republicans in a private meeting Wednesday that the House would not simply take up and pass the Senate bill, leaving prospects for immigration reform reaching Obama’s desk unclear. Conservatives said the border security amendment does not address what they see as the Se...

Politico: Reid Slams House "Crazies" on Immigration He must be talking about Democrats, Right?  Why does he think insults are going to persuade people that he is right?

Washington Times: Edward Snowden in 2009: Those who publish secrets ‘should be shot’ But there are some who would accommodate him on his previous position.

Bill Gertz: Libya’s government earlier this month released a key terror suspect who U.S. officials say was involved in planning the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on U.S. diplomatic and intelligence facilities in Benghazi. Faraj al Chalabi, (also spelled Shibli) an al Qaeda terrorist also linked to the 1994 terrorist murder of two German tourists, was detained by the Tripoli government in March. However, al Chalabi was released June 12 based on claims that there was a lack of evidence to hold him custody. A U.S. official said the U.S. government has evidence al Chalabi was linked to the Benghazi attack but did not provide that information to the Libyan government. It could not be learned why the evidence was not used to hold the suspect. The FBI is conducting an investigation into the Benghazi attack. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment on al Chalabi’s release. Chalabi, who was arrested by the Libyans in March after returning from Pakistan, is believed by U.S. intelligence and law enfo...

Byron York  quotes a letter from Chris Crane head of the ICE union. ... From the letter: Millions of dollars have been spent on television advertisements which feature you and call on Americans to support your bill to end the nation’s practice of de facto amnesty. Yet your bill does nothing to end de facto amnesty, and only guarantees that it will continue.  De facto amnesty is a failure to enforce the nation’s immigration laws on the interior of the United States. It is not a border issue. … 40 percent of all illegal immigrants currently in the United States did not illegally cross the border, but instead entered legally with a visa and didn’t leave when it expired. The 40,000 border patrol agents provided in your legislation will never come in contact with these individuals as they never attempted illegal entry into the United States. … 5,000 ICE immigration officers spread across 50 states, Guam and Puerto Rico, currently attempt to enforce U.S. immigration laws on t...

Thomas Crown: On Tuesday night, a flown-in rent-a-mob screamed, jeered, and overrode ordinary small-r republican governance in Texas in order to make sure that viable children in utero, 20 weeks old and older, could still be killed on their mothers’ say-so. They also opposed efforts to make it so that a woman receiving an abortion did so in a clean medical facility, because a lot of abortionists don’t run those. They stood with Kermit Gosnell and Douglas Karpen, the doctors who, respectively, are in jail for murdering children of the same age and in horrible sanitary conditions, and likely soon will be. And they were cheered on almost unanimously by print and television media. Mollie Hemingway has a wonderful writeup on this , but I wanted to add a part. Because you see, we as Americans allow this madness — mobs running over governance, children being butchered — and I feel it is important to explain exactly what is at stake here. I do this not because it will change a single mind. I...

Fuel Fix: Natural gas turbines now are powering the world’s fastest ferry, according to GE. Two of the turbine-maker’s engines, capable of generating a combined 59,000 horsepower, were installed on a 325-foot passenger and vehicle ferry, GE said. The ferry has reached record speeds while running fully on natural gas and will soon be delivered to Argentina, where it will begin shuttling passengers between Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay, according to GE. Turbines: Battlefield engines take on oil field mission The “wave-piercing catamaran” can travel at a speed of 58.1 knots, or 67 miles per hour, Australian ferry builder Incat Tasmania said in a statement. “Of course there’s a few speed boats that could surpass 58 knots but nothing that could carry 1,000 passengers and 150 cars, and with an enormous duty free shop on board,” Incat said. The high-powered vessel runs on two of GE’s 22 megawatt aeroderivative gas turbines, which have modified Boeing 747 jet engines at their cores,...

Fuel Fix: The Texas shale boom has led to record growth in the demand for electricity in West Texas, experts said in at the Gulf Coast Power Association panel on Wednesday afternoon. Oil and gas worker camps and drilling activity have dramatically increased demand for electricity in previously unpopulated parts of Texas, including the Eagle Ford and the Permian Basin regions. The growth has left transmission and utilities scrambling to keep up. Power demand: Summer power bills to shrink — but not in Texas For example, Oncor, which provides the transmission lines for the territory around Midland, Abilene and Odessa, added 247 megawatts to its system in the last three years, a thousand percent increase over the 22 megawatts added from 2006 to 2009. Utility representatives said they also are investing heavily in infrastructure in these regions to meet the huge leap in demand. “You can just see the exponential growth in the transformer infrastructure and capacity that we have added in...

Houston Chronicle: Immigration agent allegedly bribed with egg rolls and cash Well there were a lot of egg rolls.

Guardian: Ecuador has said it could take months to decide whether to grant asylum to Edward Snowden , potentially confining the US whistleblower to the halls of a Russian airport for weeks to come. ... I saw a movie once about a guy living in an airport .  It was called,  The Terminal .  It sounds like a real boring existence.

Chuck DeVore: ... The BEA revised California’s real GDP growth downward from 2009 to 2011 in each of three years by a cumulative 2.6 percent, the third-largest negative revision in the nation. In other words, California’s economy shrank an additional 2.6 percent before it grew 3.5 percent. So, in the past five years California’s real GDP contracted 0.3 percent, one of ten states where economic activity was less in 2012 than it was in 2008. By contrast, the BEA revised Texas’ growth upward by 0.5 percent from 2009 to 2011. Texas’ newly revised real GDP growth from 2009 to 2012 was 13 percent. From 2009 to 2012, California’s share of the U.S. economy shrank from 13.1 percent to 12.9 percent while Texas’ portion of the American economy increased from 8.2 percent to 9 percent. Some critics might contend that Texas’ economic boom is wholly due to the revitalization of the Lone Star State’s oil and gas fields through fracking. However, if the entire mining sector is removed from the...

Market Watch: Young Americans may have been among the biggest supporters of Obamacare, but they may also be the least likely to comply with the law. The architects of health reform say the law will make insurance more affordable and widely available. But in 2014, benefits experts say, the cheapest option for 20-somethings will be to pay the penalty for not buying health insurance, rather than paying for any health insurance at all—that is, provided they don’t get sick. And as more young people do the math, more seem to be deciding the Affordable Care Act isn’t such a good deal for them: Support for a national health-care plan dropped nearly 11% among American college freshmen between 2008 to 2012, with under 63% in favor of it today, down from 70%, according to UCLA’s annual student survey. Next year, uninsured Americans must pay a penalty of $95, or 1% of their annual salary if they make more than $9,500 for the year. A person earning $50,000, for example, would pay a $500 penalty ...

Business Insider: Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has called for a July 1 special session of the Texas legislature to address "unfinished business" from the last session, which ended in chaos after a marathon filibuster of a controversial abortion law Tuesday night . "I am calling the Legislature back into session because too much important work remains undone for the people of Texas. Through their duly elected representatives, the citizens of our state have made crystal clear their priorities for our great state," Perry said in a statement. "We will not allow the breakdown of decorum and decency to prevent us from doing what the people of this state hired us to do." ... Davis filibuster of a bill restricting late term abortions was being hailed by the left wing media that normally hates filibusters, but now Gov. Perry is calling the legislature back and it is unlikely Wendy's wind can holdout for 30 days. Davis apparently had a child as a teenager.  ...

National Journal: A sizable plurality of registered GOP voters say they will be less likely to support their incumbent lawmaker if he or she votes for immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship for those currently living illegally in the United States, according to the latest United Technologies/ National Journal Congressional Connection Poll. The findings show that even as national Republican leaders tout the Senate's reform measure as a political necessity for the party, it remains a risky vote for individual GOP lawmakers wary of a primary challenger. Among all adults surveyed, immigration is something of a moot issue: 42 percent of them said a vote either for or against immigration reform would not greatly affect their support for their senator or representative. Thirty-three percent said it would make them less likely to support him or her, and 21 percent said such a vote would make them more likely to back the incumbent. But among Republicans, the issue ...

Ross Douthat: This January, as President Barack Obama began his second term, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to list their policy priorities for 2013. Huge majorities cited jobs and the economy; sizable majorities cited health care costs and entitlement reform; more modest majorities cited fighting poverty and reforming the tax code. Down at the bottom of the list, with less than 40 percent support in each case, were gun control, immigration and climate change. Yet six months later, the public’s nonpriorities look like the entirety of the White House’s second-term agenda. The president’s failed push for background checks has given way to an ongoing push for immigration reform, and the administration is reportedly planning a sweeping regulatory push on carbon emissions this summer. Meanwhile, nobody expects much action on the issues that Americans actually wanted Washington to focus on: Tax and entitlement reform have been back-burnered, and the plight of the unemployed seem...

Diana Furchtgott-Roth: President persists with half-baked environmental regs Obama's misguided policies are costing jobs and driving up the cost of living.  They are not creating jobs, but killing them and in the process driving up the cost of everything.  We should do away with all the ethanol regs.  We should not subsidize inefficient alternative energy.  At best, we should being doing research in alternative energy to find medthods that are efficient and competitive with carbon based energy.

Daily Caller: Twelve different groups within the IRS targeted conservative organizations applying for tax-exempt nonprofit status, according to the attorneys representing tea party plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the IRS. The revelation disproves the suggestion by a top congressional Democrat that only one IRS group was responsible for scrutinizing tea party and conservative applications. Group 7821, Group 7822, Group 7823, Group 7824, Group 7827, Group 7828, Group 7829, Group 7830, Group 7838, EOG-7887, and EOG-7888, and the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division in Washington, D.C. all targeted conservative groups between 2010 and 2012, according to documentation compiled by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which has filed a class-action suit against the IRS. Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee investigating the IRS targeting scandal, previously suggested that tea party applications were sent...

Politico: The conservative outside group FreedomWorks has drawn up plans to spend nearly $8 million mobilizing and expanding the GOP base in Texas, in a move to counter state and national Democratic efforts to make the state more electorally competitive, POLITICO has learned. In a twelve-page internal strategy document obtained by POLITICO, FreedomWorks says that the Republican Party should be alarmed in particular by the Democratic group Battleground Texas, which several Obama campaign officials founded this year with the mission of organizing liberal-leaning constituencies that currently vote at below-average rates. The FreedomWorks memo likens that offensive to the so-called “Colorado Model” – a successful initiative by Democratic donors and organizers to make Colorado a blue state over the past decade – and spells out an itemized budget for responding from the right. “In 2012, Team Obama turned out their core supporters by registering new voters, offering transportation to the po...