Krauthammer: 'If Fences Don't Work, Why Is There One Around The White House?'

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Photo Credit: TownHall The illegal immigration problem at the Southwest border is worse than it has ever been—tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors are coming into the U.S. at unprecedented rates. Border Patrol is overwhelmed and lacking adequate resources to handle the influx, and the administration’s proposed solutions to stem the tide are underwhelming to say the least…

BILL O’REILLY: How do you secure the border, Charles?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Alright, here’s what I’ve been on for years. You start with a fence. It’s very simple. People say, ‘Oh, fences don’t work. You make a ladder.’ Well, then you build two fences, triple strand fences. San Diego did that in the mid 90’s and within a decade, the illegal immigration rate at that point was reduced by 90% and people ended up going through other places like Arizona.

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How Obamacare Is Constricting the Economy

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Photo Credit: TownHallWhile the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs report this week contained mostly good news, our economic statistics have been shaky over the past few months. A major downward revision to economic gowth has a report showing that the economy contracted by almost 3% last quarter.

It’s possible that Obamacare is holding back the economy. Jared Meyer, policy analyst at Economics 21, wrote about how Obamacare’s hurting economic growth:

The Employer Mandate. The Act originally required businesses with over 49 full-time equivalent employees to offer insurance that met government requirements by January 1, 2014, but President Obama has delayed the mandate. Once implemented, if employers decide not to offer coverage, they will face fines of $2,000 per worker (the first 30 workers are exempt). This penalty is effectively over $3,000 since it is not tax deductible. Going from 49 to 50 workers will cost a business an additional $60,000.

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Another Obamacare Success Story: HHS Says It Can’t Verify U.S. Citizenship Of 1.3 Million Enrollees

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Photo Credit: IJ Review During his State of the Union speech in 2009, President Barack Obama said that Obamacare would not cover illegal immigrants. Congressman Joe Wilson (R-South Carolina) famously heckled at Obama, “You lie!” in response.

Well, it turns out that Congressman Wilson may have been right. A new Department of Health and Human Services report finds that nearly 1.3 million who signed up for Obamacare through Obamacare.gov cannot verify whether or not they are in the country legally.

From Breitbart News:

A devastating new Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General report released on Tuesday reveals that the Obama administration has yet to determine whether 1,295,571 of the over 8 million Obamacare enrollees are U.S. citizens lawfully in the country.

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Town Won't Welcome Illegals Without a Fight

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Drew Zahn.

They’ve already turned the buses away once, and they’re prepared to do it again.

Murrieta, a booming city in Southern California that has grown from only 2,000 residents in 1980 to over 100,000 residents today, has unwillingly become a microcosm of the nation’s struggle to process the tens of thousands of illegal immigrant minors streaming across the U.S. border.

On July 1, when U.S. officials sought to bus illegal immigrants into Murrieta for processing to relieve the overcrowded centers in Texas, a reported 200 to 300 Murrieta residents stood in the roadway and effectively blocked the buses from delivering their passengers. The buses were forced to turn around and drive to a Border Patrol station instead.

But the feds aren’t relenting, promising more buses will come and setting up police tape and barricades to keep the roads clear.

Many of the residents, however, are not surrendering so easily.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AP / The Press-Enterprise, Sarah BurgeProtesters turn back busloads of illegal immigrants, as border stations overwhelmed

By William La Jeunesse.

America’s border crisis reached Main Street, as flag-waving protesters in a San Diego suburb turned back three busloads of illegal immigrants after the town’s mayor warned Tuesday that federal officials were using the community as a safety valve for facilities swamped by a tide of Central American refugees.

Fears of disease, crime and already-strained government services prompted Murrieta, Calif., Mayor Alan Long to rally residents against plans by the Department of Homeland Security to bus the children and families to a processing center in the city of 106,000 residents. Confronted by the protests, the buses were rerouted to San Diego.

“These people are fleeing a less desirable area — we all understand that, we’re compassionate for that, but those are concerns,” Long told Fox News. “We’ve asked a lot of questions, we wanted to make sure no stone went unturned so that we had certainty on what exactly we were getting. And when you start asking about the health screening that they claim they get — there’s a lot of gaps. They could not answer a lot of questions we had to give us certainty that the people on those buses were healthy.”

The three buses were trailed by a half-dozen news crews during the two-hour trip from the border to Murietta. After the buses were blocked, federal authorities rerouted the vehicles to a freeway and then to a customs and border facility in San Diego within view of the Mexico border.

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In NSA-Intercepted Data, Those Not Targeted Far Outnumber the Foreigners Who Are

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Photo Credit: Washington PostOrdinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

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Montana Newspaper Apologizes for Endorsing President Obama

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Photo Credit: ShutterstockWe’re sorry!

That’s essentially what the Billings Gazette said in a scathing editorial published Friday, which was meant as a public apology for endorsing President Obama in 2008.

“Sometimes, you have to admit you’re wrong,” the editorial stated. “And, we were wrong.”

The paper even pined for the Bush Administration despite calling it a “sub par presidency,” longing for “the good ol’ days when we were at least winning battles in Iraq.”

The piece went on to list eight mistakes the editorial board thinks President Obama has made (as explained by The Washington Examiner):

– The scandal over NSA spying on Americans

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University President Calls Law Requiring Study of Constitution ‘Archaic’

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Photo Credit: Thomas Cooper University of South Carolina president Harris Pastides is refusing to comply with a state law that requires all public universities to teach students about America’s founding documents, including the Constitution, calling it “archaic.” In a bit of irony that is apparently lost on Pastides, USC claims the state law is itself unconstitutional.

Section 59-29-120 of the South Carolina Code requires students be taught the “essentials of the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers,” and goes on to provide that “no student in any such school, college, or university may receive a certificate of graduation without previously passing a satisfactory examination upon the provisions and principles” of those documents. A number of South Carolina universities do not require students to take such courses or pass such an exam—most notably the state’s flagship institution: the University of South Carolina.

When asked about this by a student at an academic forum in 2013, the vice provost of USC, Dr. Helen Doerpinghaus, claimed that while the university did not follow the letter of the law, it did follow the “spirit of the law” by handing out pocket-sized Constitutions on Constitution Day. Under this logic, the university must believe it could teach students chemistry by handing out a copy of the Periodic Table on World Science Day on Nov. 10.

Starting in December 2013, several concerned state legislators wrote to the university asking about this failure. President Pastides responded by saying the law was “archaic” and giving multiple reasons for the university’s noncompliance. He also claimed that about 60 percent of students take a political science or history class that discusses these documents, which, of course, means that approximately 40 percent of students don’t take those classes and do not receive a proper grounding in our founding documents and the principles that animate them.

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Apollo Astronaut: Climate Alarmism Is the ‘Biggest Fraud in the Field of Science’

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Photo Credit: CNS News Climate alarmism is “the biggest fraud in the field of science” and the 97% consensus claim is nonsensical, Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham tells MRCTV in a preview of his presentation at the upcoming Heartland Institute climate conference, July 7-9.

“Since about 2000, I looked farther and farther into it,” Col. Cunningham (USMC, Ret.) tells MRCTV in an exclusive interview. “I found that not one of the claims that the alarmists were making out there had any bearings, whatsoever. And, so, it was kind of a no-brainer to come to the conclusion.”

Cunningham rejects the notion of man-made climate, not only as fact – but also as even qualifying as an actual “theory”:

“In the media, it was being called a theory. Obviously, they didn’t know what it means to be a theory.”

“If we go back to the warmist hypothesis – not a theory, but, a hypothesis – they’ve been saying from the very beginning that carbon dioxide levels are abnormally high, that higher levels of carbon dioxide are bad for humans, and they thought warmer temperatures are bad for our world, and they thought we were able to override natural forces to control the earth’s temperature. So, as I’ve looked into those, that’s the problem that I’ve found, because I didn’t find any of those to be correct – and, they certainly were not a theory, it was just their guess at what they wanted to see in the data they were looking at.”

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Obama Wants to Force Americans to Pay for Abortion-Causing Drugs Since He Can’t Force Hobby Lobby

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Photo Credit: LifeNews By Steven Ertelt.

So just how is the Obama administration spinning the Supreme Court’s decision today that dealt it a devastating blow? Now that President Barcack Obama can’t force Hobby Lobby and other companies and businesses to pay for abortion-causing drugs, he’s wanting to force Americans to pay for birth control and very early drugs that may cause abortions.

From the Daily Caller:

The White House has quickly converted the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision into a campaign-trail wedge issue, by calling on Congress to continue providing abortion-related drugs to a small number of women who work for Catholic employers.

Because of the court’s decision, women “no longer have access to free contraception coverage… simply because of the religious views held by their bosses,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Daily Signal After Hobby Lobby, Another Part of the Obamacare Mandate Could Fall

By Elizabeth Slattery.

Today’s Supreme Court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties, which are for-profit companies, raises questions about the fate of the HHS mandate accommodation for which certain religious non-profit employers are eligible.

Under the accommodation, non-profit employers self-certify to their insurance provider or third-party administrator that they have a religious objection to providing or paying for certain drugs and devices, and this initiates the process of the insurance company or third-party administrator providing the mandated coverage to employees. Just like the HHS mandate itself, this accommodation has been challenged by dozens of employers for violating the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prohibits the government from substantially burdening free exercise unless it can show that the burden is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest.

In today’s ruling—which deals only with closely held corporations—the existence of this accommodation was proof to a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court that there are less restrictive means for the government to advance the compelling interest behind the HHS mandate. The Supreme Court did not reach whether the accommodation itself complies with RFRA, since it was not an issue addressed by the parties. Further, a hallmark of the Roberts Court is taking incremental steps toward an eventual goal (as it did in recent years with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act). Thus, in the long run, the Court likewise may rule the accommodation violates the free exercise of non-profit groups.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APObama Racking Up Judicial Losses

By Ben Wolfgang.

President Obama suffered two final defeats in the Supreme Court on Monday, capping a 2013-2014 term in which the justices delivered several judicial hits to the White House while taking a firm stand against the unchecked power of the state.

The administration’s losses on Obamacare rules and compulsory union dues served as a rebuke on the Supreme Court’s final day after months of judicial decisions to rein in big government on issues such as snooping without a warrant, campaign finance restrictions and Mr. Obama’s recess appointment powers.

Just as damning was the way the court ruled in some of those cases. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. corralled unanimous votes on privacy and recess appointments — cases that dealt stinging defeats to Mr. Obama, himself a lawyer and former lecturer on constitutional law.

In the more than five years that Mr. Obama has been in office, the court has rejected the government’s argument with a 9-0 decision 20 times.

During the eight years each in the administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the government lost on unanimous votes 15 times and 23 times, respectively. That puts the Obama administration on pace to greatly exceed recent predecessors in terms of judicial losses.

Read more from this story HERE.

NOAA Quietly Reinstates July 1936 As The Hottest Month On Record

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / NASA / NOAAThe National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, criticized for manipulating temperature records to create a warming trend, has now been caught warming the past and cooling the present.

July 2012 became the hottest month on record in the U.S. during a summer that was declared “too hot to handle” by NASA scientists. That summer more than half the country was experiencing drought and wildfires had scorched more than 1.3 million acres of land, according to NASA.

According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in 2012, the “average temperature for the contiguous U.S. during July was 77.6°F, 3.3°F above the 20th century average, marking the warmest July and all-time warmest month on record for the nation in a period of record that dates back to 1895.”

“The previous warmest July for the nation was July 1936, when the average U.S. temperature was 77.4°F,” NOAA said in 2012.

This statement by NOAA was still available on their website when checked by The Daily Caller News Foundation. But when meteorologist and climate blogger Anthony Watts went to check the NOAA data on Sunday he found that the science agency had quietly reinstated July 1936 as the hottest month on record in the U.S.

Read more from this story HERE.