Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Sacromento Bee: Gov. Nikki Haley and her administration have emphatically said “no” to expanding Medicaid in South Carolina.
But whether the state agrees with the federal plan to expand coverage to more low-income adults is ultimately not up to her. That decision rests with the Legislature.

LA Times: Four conservatives squared off in a Republican U.S. Senate primary here Tuesday, but it’s the Democrat that one of them will face come November who figures to transform the battle for an open seat into a national showcase. Tammy Baldwin, a veteran congresswoman from Madison who had no primary opponent, would become the first openly gay member of the staid upper chamber if she won.

Cong. Ron Paul: As Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained, sound money is an instrument that protects our civil liberties against despotic government. Our current monetary system is indeed despotic, and the surest way to correct things simply is to legalize competing currencies.

Byron York at Townhall: Still, that’s a total of 243 people either convicted of voter fraud or awaiting trial in an election that was decided by 312 votes.

One News Now: The National Journal reports that for the first time in history, one of the two major parties is nominating a presidential ticket without a member of the Protestant faith.

Msgr. Charles Pope at the Catholic Archidiocese of Washington: In the midst of such a war however, we Christians and cultural warriors can too easily acquire an acerbic, hostile and cynical attitude, even with each other. We become too argumentative, debating every point, even when it is not necessary, and reasonable people may differ. Too easily we can insist on narrowly defining terms and priorities, and we become unnecessarily cynical if others embrace a broader (though still Catholic) set of concerns. In some sense, many of us have “been in the storm so long children…..” that we ourselves become stormy and develop a kind of trigger finger, even among friends.

USA Today: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will deliver the keynote address that launches the Republican National Convention in two weeks, telling USA TODAY he plans to make an “emphatic” argument on behalf of GOP approaches and shared sacrifice to face the nation’s biggest challenges.

Church Report (AP): Evangelist Billy Graham is improving as he recovers from bronchitis at a North Carolina hospital.

Lori Handrahan at Washington Times: In April, I said the Colombian scandal exposed a national security problem, the epidemic of U.S. government employees viewing porn — child porn — on government networks. I suggested readers type “Transportation Security Administration,” “U.S. State Department,” “Pentagon,” “Immigration and Customs Enforcement” and “child porn” into Google’s search field to understand the scope. I neglected to include “Missile Defense Agency.”

Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy: Judge Sam further ruled that “Utah’s cosmetology/barbering licensing scheme is so disconnected from the practice of African hairbraiding, much less from whatever minimal threats to public health and safety are connected to braiding, that to premise Jestina’s right to earn a living by braiding hair on that scheme is wholly irrational and a violation of her constitutionally protected rights.” | Clayton v. Steinagel, No. 2:11CV379 DS (D. Utah Aug. 8, 2012)

CNSNews: report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that lifting the ban on federal oil drilling in certain areas could increase U.S. petroleum reserves by 30 percent, including an estimated 8 billion barrels of oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

Lollar, Cortney, Child Pornography and the Restitution Revolution (August 3, 2012). Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 2013; Washington University in St. Louis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 12-08-02. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2123527

Ken Klukowski at Breitbart: “Not this time,” promises former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, chairman of a new SuperPAC, appropriately named Defend Paul Ryan. Blackwell and other champions of fiscal discipline and entitlement reform have launched a campaign to get out the truth about Paul Ryan and aggressively refute any smear-attacks from President Obama’s supporters.

NCPA Policy Digest: The state of Illinois faces at least $83 billion in unfunded liability between its five pension systems, and is on track to spend more on its government pensions than on education by 2016, according to a new study released by Governor Pat Quinn’s office, says Fox Business.

NewJersey Newsroom: The rules, which are contained in a program called TRU-ID, would impose stringent measures to verify a resident’s identity before the state issues or renews a license. The ACLU filed a lawsuit to stop New Jersey from implementing the program, arguing that the state improperly tried to impose the changes.

LifeSiteNews: A 13-year-old boy is awaiting sentencing in Calgary after pleading guilty to raping a four-year-old boy in his foster home. The teen, identified as T, told police after his arrest on Jan. 3rd that the idea for the assaults, which occurred over the course of a year, came from watching “gay porn” on his foster parents’ home computer.

CNSNews: A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report says that under the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, 30 million non-elderly Americans will remain without health insurance in 2022 . . . Currently, accoriding to CBO, there are 53 million uninsured persons in the United States . . .

NY Times: Zoey Kotzambasis, vice president of the College Republicans at the University of Arizona, considers herself a conservative. But she supports both same-sex marriage and abortion rights. Those are not just her opinions. “A lot of the College Republicans I know share the same liberal-to-moderate social views,” she added. “And I think that’s changing the face of the party.”

Collin Levy at Wall Street Journal (via Google): Kansas Governor Sam Brownback is smiling this morning after yesterday’s GOP primaries in his state delivered a fresh batch of conservative lawmakers. In a state where Republicans heavily dominate the House and Senate, groups of liberal Republicans have lately formed coalitions with Democrats to derail the Governor’s agenda, including pro-growth tax cuts.

National Journal: After giving then-Sen. Barack Obama a full-throttled endorsement in the 2008 presidential election, the United Mine Workers of America has decided not to endorse either Obama or the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, in 2012.

Fox News: Missouri Rep. Todd Akin broke out of a three-way GOP primary fight Tuesday and won the nomination to take on Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in the fall.

AP: Conservative Republicans who’ve been working to push GOP moderates out of state legislatures in a large section of the country have scored big victories in Kansas . . .

How Appealing links to reports and filings in the matter.

The Hill: Republican leaders in the Senate are urging the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to resist political pressure to update tax rules pertaining to 501(c)(4) groups, or super-PACs.

The Hill: Santorum will join former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin as the latest slate of headline speakers at the convention, according to a release from the Republican National Committee.

Wayne Allyn Root at The Blaze: And I thought I knew most everyone at Columbia. I certainly thought I’d heard of all of my fellow Political Science majors. But not Obama (or as he was known then- Barry Soetoro). I never met him. Never saw him. Never even heard of him. And none of the classmates that I knew at Columbia have ever met him, saw him, or heard of him. But don’t take my word for it. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that Fox News randomly called 400 of our Columbia classmates and never found one who had ever met Obama . . . Here’s my gut belief: Obama got a leg up by being admitted to both Occidental and Columbia as a foreign exchange student.

Daily Caller: Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company.

Washington Examiner: “I’m leaning toward thinking that the Republicans will have a majority in both houses of Congress,” pollster Ron Faucheux, president of Clarus Research Group, told The Washington Examiner.

FoxNews: The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee have filed a lawsuit to block a new state law allowing men and women in uniform to vote up until the Monday right before an election, while the cutoff on early voting for the rest of the public is three days earlier.

AP: People retiring today are part of the first generation of workers who have paid more in Social Security taxes during their careers than they will receive in benefits after they retire. It’s a historic shift that will only get worse for future retirees, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

Findlaw: The days of tax-free shopping on the Internet may be coming to an end. Congress seems poised to pass an Internet tax law, the Marketplace Fairness Act, that allows states to force online companies to tax their customers.

The Hill: Senate Republicans recently blocked cybersecurity legislation, but the issue might not be dead after all. The White House hasn’t ruled out issuing an executive order to strengthen the nation’s defenses against cyber attacks if Congress refuses to act.

AP: After a final day of partisan battles over drought relief and cybersecurity, members of Congress streamed out of the Capitol looking forward to five weeks of vacation and a fall fraught with decisions on the political and economic future of the country.

CNBC: The government’s most widely publicized unemployment rate measures only those who are out of a job and currently looking for work . . . or that count, the government releases a separate number called the “U-6,” which provides a more complete tally of how many people really are out of work. The numbers in some cases are startling.

AP reports.

Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy: Today the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is holding a hearing on the Internal Revenue Service’s role in “Enforcing ObamaCare’s New Rules and Taxes.” Among the subjects of the hearing is a recent IRS rule authorizing tax credits and subsidies for the purchase of qualifying health insurance plans in federally-run exchanges. Although the plain text of the PPACA only authorizes tax credits in state-run exchanges, the IRS promulgated this rule to ensure the credits (and associated subsidies) are available nationwide. This rule will affect quite a few states because somewhere between 15 and 30 states (if not more) will fail to create exchanges by 2014. The rule is also illegal.

Jim DeMint at Our nation was born from the idea of “no taxation without representation”—that citizens should not be taxed by governments in which they have no political voice. Yet now lawmakers in Washington want to overturn that bedrock principle in order to extract more revenues from American consumers. The Marketplace Fairness Act recently introduced in the Senate would require online retailers to collect and pay sales taxes to states where they have no physical presence or democratic recourse.

Mitt Romney at National Review: But what exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture? In the case of the United States, it is a particular kind of culture that has made us the greatest economic power in the history of the earth. Many significant features come to mind: our work ethic, our appreciation for education, our willingness to take risks, our commitment to honor and oath, our family orientation, our devotion to a purpose greater than ourselves, our patriotism. But one feature of our culture that propels the American economy stands out above all others: freedom. The American economy is fueled by freedom. Free people and their free enterprises are what drive our economic vitality.

Fox News: The final result: Cruz pummeled Dewhurst by about 13 percentage points, according to the Associated Press.

CNSNews: President Obama is trying to prevent thousands of layoff notices from going out a few days before the November election, Sen. Jame Inhofe (R-Okla.) said on Tuesday.

NCPA Policy Digest: Based on comparison data of health status, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a report on health system performance, finding that the U.S. system does not perform better than systems in countries that spend less, say H.E. Frech and Stephen T. Parente, adjunct scholars, and John Hoff, a visiting scholar, at the American Enterprise Institute. These cross-country comparisons, however, are unable to adequately differentiate between health system performance and other confounding factors that determine health. Consider the treatment of the infant mortality rate:

Washington Post: The Supreme Court may have declared that the government can order Americans to get health insurance, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to sign up.

AP: A Senate Democratic committee report says for-profit colleges place revenues above education and charge students high tuition and excessive loan rates.

NCPA Policy Digest: The president and his economic team tend to dismiss the impact that such as tax hike will have on business activity because only 2 or 3 percent of taxpayers with business income are taxed at the highest rates, says Scott A. Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation. However, absent from these calculations (and crucial nonetheless) are the effects of such taxes on pass-through businesses that are responsible for substantial amounts of employment.

Washington Times: About one in six voters still thinks President Obama is Muslim while only half identify him as a Christian, according to a new national poll released Thursday.

Reuters: Legislation to subject the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy to audits sailed through the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday although the measure is expected to die in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Heritage Foundation: Yesterday, the Senate narrowly voted (51-48) to raise taxes on 1.2 million small businesses, which will likely kill more than 700,000 jobs at a time when nearly 13 million Americans are out of work. Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Jim Webb (D-VA) joined all Republicans in bipartisan opposition to the tax hike.

Washington Times: The overwhelming 327-98 vote sends the bill to the Senate where Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, has previously expressed support for an audit — though it’s unclear he’ll carve out time for the legislation this year.

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy: Imagine a defendant in a child pornography case has two computers in his home. Each computer contains twenty images of child pornography. Has the defendant committed one single crime of possessing forty images? Or has he committed two crimes of possessing twenty images each?

RT.com: When you open up the Pandora’s Box of just getting access to incredible amounts of data, for people that have no reason to be put under suspicion, no reason to have done anything wrong, and just collect all that for potential future use or even current use, it opens up a real danger — and to what else what they could use that data for, particularly when it’s all being hidden behind the mantle of national security,” Drake said. Although Drake’s accusations seem astounding, they corroborate allegations made by Binney only a week earlier.

Wall Street Journal: In some cases, the cost of obtaining the tax benefit is greater than the benefit itself—a wrinkle that has helped spawn a cottage industry of tax-credit consultants. Also problematic is the threat of pushback from the Internal Revenue Service. The result: many companies are saying “no, thanks” and are likely paying more taxes than legally required. And corporate breaks that Washington hopes will boost the economy often prove ineffective.

The New American: Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) says he will sue President Obama because of the president’s illegal order to stop the deportation of illegal aliens under a certain age, and that the lawsuit is within weeks of being filed.

Yahoo News: An Oregon judge ruled on Wednesday that stripping naked at the airport to protest the Transportation Security Administration is a protected form of free speech. In other words, if you’re protesting the TSA it’s OK to show a little T&A. | More information at Oregon Live.

Newsmax: “It’s the policy of the fed, the destruction of money, the intervention. It’s a system that is very biased against the middle class. It’s been well known that if you destroy a currency, there is a natural transfer of wealth from the middle class to the very wealthy.”

John Ransom at Townhall: There is a dirty secret about state entitlements that liberals don’t want you to know. The collection of a state pension increases the chances that a pensioner will live in poverty. That’s because money put aside for state-guaranteed benefits can not be safely invested at rates that provide for more than a modest retirement unless the state subsidizes retirement benefits through taxes or if retirement savings are invested in riskier, higher yielding investments. Since governments are loath to raise taxes to subsidize a riskless retirement, benefits are eventually reduced. It works that way in London and Moscow as well as Madison and Sacramento.

NCPA Policy Digest: With regard to wealth insecurity, Rank finds that workers between the ages of 25 and 60 experience vast changes in income over time, and that this exposes them to a wide variety of economic conditions . . . By age 60, nearly 77 percent of Americans will have lived in a household earning more than $100,000 for at least one year.

Human Events: I’m sure this all entirely coincidental. It’s just one of those random acts of Fate. Who knows when Atropos may cut the thread of our destiny, and where the loose ends might land when they fall?

WSJ: The Obama administration urged Congress to make it easier for people to discharge a portion of certain student debt by filing for bankruptcy protection. The recommendation, in a report by the Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, wouldn’t affect the vast majority of student debt, which is issued by the federal government. It would apply only to the roughly $150 billion, or 15% of total outstanding student debt, issued by private lenders such as SLM Corp.’s Sallie Mae and Wells Fargo & Co.

Washington Times: A forthcoming report from the conservative organization Americans for Limited Government details how President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics sent her children to a politically left-wing Jewish summer camp with communist roots.

The Drudge Report is blaring the headline above from this Daily Caller Report: USDA has an agreement with Mexico to promote American food assistance programs, including food stamps, among Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals and migrant communities in America.

The Hill: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned Wednesday that an audit bill pushed by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) could create a “nightmare scenario” for the central bank.

Daily Caller: Former Justice Department official Patrick Trueman, who proudly participated in federal pornography prosecutions during their “heyday” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, told The Daily Caller that Mitt Romney’s campaign assured him that Romney would “vigorously” prosecute pornographers if elected president.

The NY Post reports.

WorldNetDaily Reports: Cold Case Posse lead investigator Mike Zullo said the new information confirms the document presented to the American public in April 2011 is undoubtedly fraudulent.

Daily Caller: A new book due out Tuesday makes the case that Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, mentored Barack Obama when he lived in Hawaii.

Patrick Trueman at Townhall: The U. S. Supreme Court decision on broadcast indecency in FCC v. Fox Television, Inc. , (June 21, 2012) (“Fox II”), has reignited an important debate: whether TV networks have a right to distribute indecent material into our homes without our consent. The U. S. Congress prohibited such activity and the high Court upheld that prohibition decades ago.

Cong. Ron Paul: The true evil of inflation is that newly created money benefits politically favored financial interests, especially banks, on the front end. Over time, however, the net result of monetary inflation is always the devaluation of savings and purchasing power. This devaluation discourages saving, which is the key to capital accumulation and investment in a healthy economy. Inflation also tends to hurt seniors and those living on fixed incomes the most.

FRC: Family Research Council President Tony Perkins is pleased to announce today that Lt. Gen. (USA Ret.) William G. “Jerry” Boykin has joined Family Research Council as its Executive Vice President. In this role, he will oversee day-to-day operations including policy, finance, development, communications, human resources, facilities, information technology, constituent communications and services.

Arthur B. Laffer and Ford M. Scudder at the Wall Street Journal: The United States faces an economic collapse thanks to massive tax increases on Jan. 1, and continued deficit spending for years on end.

Reuters: A federal appeals court on Thursday threw out the conviction of a medical researcher because child pornography found in his home was improperly seized by authorities, who had a warrant for a different apartment in the same building. | United States of America v. Voustianiouk, No. 10-4420

Findlaw: Voters in Los Angeles County will have their say on porn condom usage in the upcoming November ballot. It’s hard to believe that the average person cares about this issue. Yet the AIDS Healthcare Foundation was able to secure enough votes to qualify the measure for the ballot.

The Hill: House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) led a successful effort on Wednesday to defeat a conservative attempt to double the food stamp cuts in the House farm bill, an effort that could have sunk the legislation.

Fox2Now.com (includes video): The measure asks voters to decide whether Governor Jay Nixon should be prohibited from setting up a health insurance exchange without an approving vote from the people or the legislature.

How Appealing links to reports and the ruling 94th Street Grocery Corp v. NYC Board of Health.

AP: It’s a common tactic for pornography producers trying to protect their product from online piracy: They sue unknown “John Does” who illegally download movies, then go to Internet providers to learn their true identities and collect.