PrairiePundit

Washington Post: President Ronald Reagan tried to get rid of it. So did President Bill Clinton . This October, their wish is finally set to come true. The Federal Helium Program — leftover from the age of zeppelins and an infamous symbol of Washington’s inability to cut what it no longer needs — will be terminated. Unless it isn’t. On Friday, in fact, the House is planning a vote to keep it alive. “Many people don’t believe that the federal government should be in the helium business. And I would agree,” Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) said on the House floor Thursday. But at that very moment , Hastings was urging his colleagues to keep the government in the helium business for a little while longer. “We must recognize the realities of our current situation,” he said. The problem is that the private sector has not done what some politicians had predicted it would — step into a role that government was giving up. The federal helium program sells vast amounts of the gas to U.S. companie...

NY Times: George Jones, Country Singer, Dies at 81 Mr. Jones was nicknamed Possum for his close-set eyes and pointed nose, and later No-Show Jones for the concerts he missed during drinking and drug binges. They will now place a reef on Jones door.  He was a great singer who finally seem to get hold of his demons.  This is another of his big hits.

Ron Arnold: If you think national monuments are statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, welcome to the crazy catalog of federal land grabbing tools. These "monuments" are actually large areas that are supposed to be small, and can be created out of thin air by the president with the stroke of a pen. This extraordinary power has been abused by presidents of both political parties time and again to bypass Congress in creating national park-size units -- a congressional power -- at his own whim to satisfy his Big Green constituents. But parks are expensive to operate and monuments are budgeted like second-class citizens -- and they block resource use. Members of Congress last week held a hearing on nine separate bills to rein in the president's national monument proclamations by requiring congressional approval or requiring a public National Environmental Policy Act comment process before taking effect. National monuments are the brainchild of Teddy Roosevelt, th...

Texas Tribune: House Republicans on Thursday struck back at Democrats who in 2011 alleged there wasn’t a need for a state voter ID law because most of the fraud at the ballot box occurs on mail-in ballots. The lower chamber tentatively approved a measure that would make it a Class A misdemeanor for someone to collect and deposit 10 or more mail-in ballots from other voters during an election. It does not apply to the collection of ballots cast by military service members, their spouses or dependents. Republicans said that the measure, House Bill 148 by state Rep. Cindy Burkett , R-Sunnyvale, would prevent crimes by eliminating “ballot harvesting,” which proponents of the bill say lead to voter fraud and possible voter intimidation. The bill also prohibits a courier who collects such mail-in ballots from receiving compensation. The measure, which was supported with an 86-41 vote Thursday, is still subject to final approval by the House. The measure drew contentious debate after Democ...

He continues to make the argument that a path to citizenship is a poison pill that the President wants.

Erick Erickson: There is a battle of funny headlines playing out across America. According to the Wall Street Journal , “Suspects Roused by Jihadist Thought.” Surprisingly, the New York Times headline was “Boston Suspect Cites Islamic Extremist Beliefs as Motive”. Unsurprisingly, they changed it to “Boston Suspects Are Seen as Self-Taught and Fueled by Web”. Note that now, instead of fueled by religious zeal, it’s the series of tubes known as the internet that did it. The Washington Post, of course, has to take all the religion out of it and blame America.”Boston bombing suspect cites U.S. wars as motivation, officials say,” reads the Washington Post headline. Credit where it is due, the Washington Post does a masterful job of blaming America. “[T]he evidence so far suggests they were “self-radicalized” through Internet sites and U.S. actions in the Muslim world.” The Internet and American actions did it. Time magazine is already exploring whether boxing might have had something to...

Mickey Kaus: Schumer-Rubio Fraud O’ the Day: You know the alleged requirement, heavily advertised by supporters of “comprehensive” immigration amnesty, that previously illegal immigrants will have to pay “ back taxes ” in order to become legal? Turns out that’s basically a fraud too– like so much else in the Schumer-Rubio “Gang of 8″ amnesty bill. Politico   had the story last week [E.A.]: Negotiators had to choose between a hard-line approach favored by Republicans, like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), that would have required immigrants and employers to painstakingly piece together a tax history so the government could collect what is owed and a less burdensome option of focusing on people who already have a past-due bill with the Internal Revenue Service. Guess which approach they chose! They chose the milder approach and punted the details to the Treasury Department and IRS to hash out down the road. In other words, it looks as if illegal immigrants will only have t...

Washington Examiner Editorial: As the initial elation over the swift identification and ending of the Brothers Tsarnaev manhunt fades, a steady stream of facts are emerging that strongly suggest the need for a more sober assessment of the FBI's performance in the two years prior to the Boston Marathon bombing. FBI counter-terrorism agents interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the brothers, in January 2011 after receiving a tip from Russian intelligence. Since the interviewing agents thought they heard nothing to indicate Tsarnaev was a terrorist, little else was done and the case was closed two months later. A few months after that, Tsarnaev went to Russia and encountered somebody or experienced something that apparently prompted him to become quite open about his devotion to a radical vision of Islamic jihad. The FBI visited him a second time after he returned to the United States but again concluded that Tsarnaev was not a threat. It is speculation now, of course, but it...

The answer appears to be "not much."  The response need not be the use of ground forces.  We could use standoff weapons to take out Assad's air force and weapons delivery vehicles.  Cruise missiles and drones could be very effective.

Byron York: Members of the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Eight have stressed that under their new immigration plan, currently illegal immigrants will have to wait more than a decade before achieving citizenship. Newly-legalized immigrants will be given a provisional status and “will have to stay in that status until at least ten years elapse and [border security] triggers are met,” Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio told Fox News on April 14. “Then the only thing they get is a chance to apply for a green card via the legal immigration system.” The green card process would take additional years, meaning the road to full citizenship could take as long as 15, or even 18, years.  Unless it doesn’t. A little-noticed exception in the Gang of Eight bill provides a fast track for many — possibly very many — currently illegal immigrants. Under a special provision for immigrants who have labored at least part-time in agriculture, that fast track could mean permanent residency in the ...

Washington Post: Task force was warned suspect went to Russia It is not clear whether the official past on the information to the FBI or others.

The Hill: The head of the House Intelligence panel is worried the Justice Department may have jeopardized the public’s safety by allowing a federal judge to read the Boston bombing suspect his Miranda rights before fully interrogating him. Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) is demanding answers from Attorney General Eric Holder on why the DOJ allowed a magistrate judge to inform Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of his Miranda rights while the FBI was in the midst of interrogating him earlier this week. “We can’t have, in a case like this, the judiciary deciding, because it’s on TV and it might look bad for them … that they were going to somehow intercede in this,” Rogers, a former FBI agent, said in an interview with MSNBC. “It’s confusing, it is horrible, [a] God-awful policy, and dangerous to the greater community,” he said. “And we have got to get to the bottom of this, and we’ve got to fix it right now.” Congress has long been divided over the highly charged issue of whe...

Daily Mail: Man 'leaps' off top of Empire State Building... and lands one story below on observation deck

Telegraph: Propaganda is probably as old as government itself, and so we shouldn’t be too surprised to read that A A Milne, creator of the immortal Winnie-the-Pooh, was part of MI7B, a secret First World War propaganda outfit. He was by no means the only writer to wield his pen in war. In those days the MI designation – with us still as MI5 and MI6 – referred to numbered departments in the War Office’s Directorate of Military Intelligence. Not all did secret work – straightforward mapping and recording the orbat (order of battle) of potential enemies were relatively public aspects. MI5 was the directorate’s fifth department, responsible for security and counter-espionage. What we now know as the Security Service emerged from it, but the designation stuck. MI6 was the department that provided interpreters who helped with interviewing foreign refugees, which the Secret Service – better known now as SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service – found useful both as a source of information and ...

Washington Times: A helicopter transporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a quick emergency landing Thursday after military officials spotted — then shot down — an unmanned drone that was entering Israeli airspace. This is the second time in seven months that an unmanned drone had entered Israeli airspace without authorization, NBC reported. “[Unmanned drones] pose a serious threat to the State of Israel ’s security. The IDF will not tolerate any attempt to violate Israel ’s sovereignty or harm its security,” Israeli Defense Force officials said in a statement published by NBC . The helicopter carrying Mr. Netanyahu landed in the northern part of the country, while military shot the drone from the sky. His helicopter resumed flight shortly after, NBC reported. “The [unmanned aerial vehicle] was tracked by IDF ground and aerial surveillance for the duration of its flight path as it attempted to approach Israel ’s coast,” IDF said. “Israel Air Force aircraft intercepte...

Daily Mail: US sailor thwarts Dubai bus driver rapist after putting him in strangehold with her thighs and then beating him into submission She also broke his knife.  The bus driver was later arrested, apparently drowning his misery with booze.

It is a good rant, that attacks the political correctness as practiced by the Obama administration.

AP/RCP: Officials: Bombing Suspect Silent After Read Miranda Rights I am sure those who are responsible for this are real proud of themselves, but they should understand they are endangering others because we will not get relevant information in a timely manner.

Jay Sekulow: America is facing a jihadist enemy. It is an enemy that has proven it can inflict more civilian casualties on the United States than any other foreign enemy in almost 200 years. Just last week this enemy killed 3 innocent people, wounded more than 100 and paralyzed a major American city. Yet, our obsession with political correctness, with a strong desire not to offend our enemies makes our self-defense immeasurably more difficult. The evil nature and intentions of our jihadist enemies are already clear. They hate us enough to pack pressure cookers with ball bearings, to hijack airliners and turn them into weapons of mass destruction, to wear underwear bombs, shoe bombs, and any other kind of bomb they can smuggle onto aircraft. Yet we still can’t face facts. Consider these recent events: - Despite screaming “Allah Akbar!” when he opened fire on unarmed fellow soldiers at Fort Hood – and despite his own long history of radicalism, including communicating with Anwar al-Al...

Washington Post: Muslims have a problem. Uncle Ruslan may have the answer.     When asked about his faith, Boston bombing suspects’ uncle did something remarkable. What he did is say the bombers brought shame on his ethnicity and faith.  He was unreserved in his criticism of them.  In doing so he was so much more convincing than any CAIR representative I have seen.