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...Obama's recovery has been pitiful, again the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression, especially as compared to the all-time record Reagan recovery. Indeed, if Obama's perverse policies are not reversed, his soaring tax rate increases next year on top of his skyrocketing regulatory burdens and runaway federal spending, deficits and debt, will just throw America back into recession, before there was even any real recovery from the last recession. Then unemployment will soar back into double digits, the deficit will soar to new records over $2 trillion, and President Obama will have added more to the national debt than...

As large fires scorch vast tracts of land from Alaska to Colorado and Arkansas, the debate over the nation’s fire-fighting preparedness is also heating up. The air tanker fleet tasked with the most dangerous mega-fire tasks – think dropping tons of fire-retardant into remote and steep canyons – is under particular scrutiny. Pointing to the fleet’s decade-long decline from some 44 tankers in 2002 to nine at the start of the 2012 fire season, one critic is calling the current situation an “air tanker crisis.” ...late, says former wildland firefighter Bill Gabbert, founder of WildfireToday.com, a fire news blog. He...

CBS News broke a huge story on Sunday's Face the Nation concerning the Supreme Court's Thursday ruling on ObamaCare. According to Jan Crawford, CBS legal and political correspondent, Chief Justice John Roberts was initially going to strike down the individual mandate requiring citizens to buy health insurance, but changed his mind over the objections of the conservatives on the Court (video follows with transcript): CBS News: Roberts Initially Wanted to Strike Down ObamaCare Mandate But Changed His Mind NORAH O’DONNELL, SUBSTITUTE HOST: We're going to start first with Jan because you've done some reporting. The big question was why did...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles police are aiming to beat suspects to the scene of a crime by using computers to predict where trouble might occur. The Los Angeles Police Department is the largest agency to embrace an experiment known as "predictive policing," which crunches data to determine where to send officers to thwart would-be thieves and burglars. Time Magazine called it one of the best inventions of 2011. Early successes could serve as a model for other cash-strapped law enforcement agencies, but some legal observers are concerned it could lead to unlawful stops and searches that violate Fourth...

"For everything you need to know about how it devolved to this ("To understand healthcare in America, you have to think about bananas") and how to think about the new tax's potential implications (e.g. lower quality of service, capped hiring rates among employers), seven minutes well spent." ">share this with freeinds

(Reuters) - Rising sea levels cannot be stopped over the next several hundred years, even if deep emissions cuts lower global average temperatures, but they can be slowed down, climate scientists said in a study on Sunday. A lot of climate research shows that rising greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for increasing global average surface temperatures by about 0.17 degrees Celsius a decade from 1980-2010 and for a sea level rise of about 2.3mm a year from 2005-2010 as ice caps and glaciers melt. Rising sea levels threaten about a tenth of the world's population who live in low-lying areas...

Obama underlings have been on TV ever since the ruling stating that the mandate is a penalty, not a tax. But SC Justice Roberts said it was a tax. I think the reason the Obama crowd is saying it's a penalty is because they know that if the mandate is officially a tax, it can be repealed by the Congress with a simple majority of 51 Senators (and President Romney signs it into law). So, is the mandate officially and legally a tax, or can it possibly be argued with success by the Dems that it's a penalty, so it...

In the Obamacare decision on Thursday, the five conservative Supreme Court Justices rejected the unlimited scope of the Commerce Clause and the Necessary & Proper Clause envisioned by proponents of federal tort reform bills (especially caps on damages in medical malpractice lawsuits).

They may be right. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first black president. After supporting single-sex marriages, he was called "the first gay president". Now he has all chances to be labeled "the first communist president". And this really means that he is the person to change the course of America – the way Lenin changed the course of Russia about a century ago.

When selling the business of patriotism, put emphasis on the red. A little over a week before America celebrates its 236th birthday, Wisconsin-based flag seller Liberty Flag & Specialty Co. filed for bankruptcy protection.

Obama Tweets: 'Still a BFD' Ah! What decorum! A point worth noting was made by another tweet that followed…  "The last time Democrats gloated this hard after a health care victory, they lost 60 House seats."Although at first glance Judge Roberts’ judicial gymnastics provide a victory for the socialist, the long term repercussions of this decision also offered some hope for their opponents as well.Judge Robert’s ruling leaves the dark cloud of Obamacare over our heads, and that is disappointing, but this dark cloud appears to have a silver lining as well. By calling the penalties a tax and...

After finding out about the INEVITABLE split between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, I checked out the VIDEO of Cruise on Oprah trying to desperately convince us that he was really attracted to Katie Holmes. Everybody remembers his silly couch jumping routine but what is really surprising is that apparently Cruise was performing a Tebow years before Tebow himself was doing it. And did he perform a Tebow several times or was it just once as seen from several angles? VIDEO

Schumer: Repeal will cost GOP in election By Meghashyam Mali - 07/01/12 12:05 PM ET Sen. Charles Schumer on Sunday warned Republicans that they would suffer at the polls if they continued to push for a repeal of the president’s healthcare reform bill. “If Republicans make that their number one issue, the repeal of healthcare, they are certainly going to lose the election, in the House and the Senate and the presidency,” said Schumer on CBS’s “Face the Nation”. “Bottom line is most Americans are not for repeal. If you look at all the polls, a little more than a...

On the day President Obama took the final step in turning the Affordable Care Act into law, his senior adviser, David Axelrod, predicted the public would eventually embrace his ambitious effort at health care reform. Just 32 percent supported the Affordable Care Act when it was approved in March 2010. The number has not changed much. “As the American people become familiar with what this program is and what it isn’t,” Mr. Axelrod said, “they’re going to be very, very happy with it.” Two years later, the public is no happier with the law than it was then. Mr. Obama’s...

PRESIDENT OBAMA has endured much criticism of his legislative skills from his fellow progressives. His conciliatory approach has been compared unfavorably with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s gleeful pugnacity and Lyndon B. Johnson’s relentless arm-twisting. His willingness to strike deals with corporations has been tagged “business as usual.” Many progressives, frustrated over the past three years, have concluded that the political system is fundamentally broken because corporate power has been allowed to suffocate popular liberal policies. But the Supreme Court’s upholding of Mr. Obama’s health care law reminds us that the president’s approach has achieved significant results. If his liberal critics paused...

Or how about 12 steps for ELCA dissenters? (With some apologies to my friends who are in recovery, knowing they will not take offense.) 1. We admitted that we were powerless over ELCA Assemblies and our churches had become unmanageable. 2. We came to believe that a power outside the ELCA could restore us to orthodoxy. 3. We made a decision to turn our lives over to the care of this power as we understood it, whether it be NALC or LCMC. 4. We made a searching and fearless inventory of our constitutions, looking for escape clauses. 5. We admitted...

The most obvious reason is that the Chinese–one important official called it the “little superpower–perceive that Israel in particular and the Jewish people in general have been success stories. Ten or twenty years ago this would have been less unique in the world. But now, sad to say, it stands out more because the United States and Europe, perhaps only temporarily, are not working very well.Of course, on a strategic level, Israel and China have some differing interests but these are less important than they may appear to be. China wants to have commerce with everyone, including Iran, and is...

During the pre-dawn hours on Sunday, July 4, 1999 thunderstorms were occurring over portions of the Dakotas. By 6 AM CDT some of the storms formed into a bow echo and began moving into the Fargo, North Dakota area with damaging winds. Thus would begin the "Boundary Waters - Canadian Derecho" that would last for over 22 hours, travel over 1300 miles at an average speed of almost 60 mph, and result in widespread devastation and many casualties in both Canada and the United States (Fig. 1). The following paragraphs describe what happened along the path of this long-lived international...

On June 28, 2012, many in our nation celebrated our newest federal holiday: Dependence Day. With the declaration that the ironically named Affordable Healthcare Act is constitutional and, therefore, above further legal review on the same day, our nation has changed course away from the direction set forth by our founding fathers. Two hundred and thirty-six years earlier, these great men proclaimed that the American Colonies deserved freedom from oppression by the distant English king and his domestic supporters. Their words formed the bedrock of our nation and culture, providing the inspiration for our people to rise up and unite...

(CNN) — Jack Lew, the White House chief of staff, said Sunday the Supreme Court decision upholding President Barack Obama’s health care measure should put to rest the national debate over the law’s practicality. Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Lew said the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law in 2010, needs to be fully implemented before Americans assess its merit, and that detractors of the law, including Obama’s opponent in the 2012 presidential election, were using it to divide the country. “This was a plan that Gov. Romney supported,” Lew said, “and it’s something that I...