Planned Parenthood Challenges New South Dakota Abortion Law

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A law scheduled to go into effect July 1 to require women to wait 72 hours and consult a crisis pregnancy center adviser before getting an abortion violates First Amendment rights, according to a lawsuit filed Friday by Planned Parenthood in U.S. District Court in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Calling South Dakota’s abortion laws the most burdensome in the nation, Planned Parenthood said that HB 1217 aims to misinform pregnant women with the intent of dissuading them from getting an abortion.

“Under the pretext of ensuring the patient’s decision to have an abortion is ‘voluntary, uncoerced, and informed,’ the law has both the purpose and the effect of severely restricting access to abortion services, and violates patients’ and physicians’ First Amendment rights against compelled speech and patients’ right to informational privacy,” Planned Parenthood said in a written statement.

HB 1217 was passed in March and aims to toughen the state’s current 24-hour mandatory waiting period. The law requires physicians to provide women with a list of “pregnancy help centers” where they must go to get “written proof” that they sought counseling before getting an abortion.

A woman must also be given the opportunity to view a sonogram and receive literature describing the risks associated with abortion.

Read More at Fox News

Wisconsin case should’ve had different judge

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A legal expert who has been watching the court battle over Wisconsin’s collective bargaining law says it was not only wrong for the judge to void the measure, but she should have recused herself from the case.

Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, thinks Judge Maryann Sumi should have withdrawn herself because her son was an organizer for one of the big unions in Wisconsin that protested the legislation backed by Governor Scott Walker and other Republican lawmakers.

“Even worse, the day before she issued her decision, she actually hired lawyers who filed a brief on her behalf in this very same case, which is being considered by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin,” he explains. “I have never heard of a judge hiring lawyers to file a brief [to make] arguments in a case.”

Judge Sumi ruled against the law last week, saying Republicans violated Wisconsin’s open meetings law — but Spakovsky disagrees.

“If you read her opinion, she ignores the fact that there is a specific exemption for the kind of bill that was passed,” he notes. “She basically said that they didn’t give a 24-hour notice of a legislative meeting. But the meeting was for a conference committee, and the Senate actually has a rule that says that there doesn’t have to be any notice of proceedings for a conference committee.”

Read More at OneNewsNow by Chris Woodward, OneNewsNow

Pro-Obama Media Always Shocked by Bad Economic News

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As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word “unexpectedly” or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.

“New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed,” reported cnbc.com May 25.

“Personal consumption fell,” Business Insider reported the same day, “when it was expected to rise.”

“Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month,” Reuters reported May 25, “worse than economists’ expectations.”

From Human Events By Michael Barone, Human Events

The GOP Loss In New York Was About New York, Not Paul Ryan

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Republicans suck in New York. Period. End of Story.

The GOP lost the special election in NY-26 and the media and Democrats are heralding it as proof that the GOP is getting punished for wanting to reform medicare.

Back when the GOP lost the 2009 special election in New York featuring Dede Scozzafava, et al, the Democrats heralded the GOP defeat as proof that Republican opposition to Obamacare and being the “Party of No” was a clear sign that the Democrats were right on the agenda and the GOP’s obstruction of Barack Obama would be punished by the voters.

That was before the GOP went on to win the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races and pick up Ted Kennedy’s (!!!!) seat in Massachusetts.

To say that this special election defeat of the GOP is a repudiation of the GOP’s efforts on Medicare is laughable on its face.

The truth of the matter is that the Republican Party of New York sucks and has sucked for a while. It is especially terrible at special elections where the out of touch party leaders pick state legislators who everyone hates and runs them.

Read More at Red State by Erick Erickson, Red State

Without Obama, We Would be a Global Energy Superpower

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Saudi Arabia has long been the dominant producer of petroleum on the planet. Nature endowed the Arabian Peninsula with gigantic deposits of this vital source of energy. Many of us have lamented the quirk of nature that placed much-needed oil in the most geopolitically unstable region in the world.

Although Saudi Arabia is the king of oil producers at present, there is another country that has far more extensive deposits of fossil fuels. Because fossil fuels are the most economical and reliable energy sources known to man, the country that has the largest share of them is fortunate indeed. What is this richly endowed country? It is none other than the United States of America.

Perhaps you have heard the United States described as “the Saudi Arabia of coal.” Actually, that may be an understatement, for while the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the Saudis have 20 percent of the world’s known petroleum reserves, the United States has an even larger share—27 percent—of the world’s known deposits of coal. As engineers continue to develop more and more “clean coal” technologies, this abundant resource will continue to serve our energy needs for as long as we need it.

In addition to our immense coal deposits, the United States contains gigantic natural gas deposits. Currently, the United States ranks fourth in natural gas production, but domestic reserves are soaring as horizontal drilling and “fracking” tap the mind-boggling dimensions of the natural gas fields located here in Pennsylvania (the Marcellus formation), Louisiana (the Haynesville formations), and elsewhere across the lower 48. If fracking can be done without contaminating precious water supplies, it is possible that the United States may also become “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.”

There is even more good news: Besides being the Saudi Arabia of coal and potentially natural gas, we may become the next “Saudi Arabia” of oil. This won’t be the light, sweet crude that the Saudis pump at little cost and with relative ease, but it’s oil nonetheless. The Green River shale rock formation under just three of our states—Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah—is estimated to hold 1.8 trillion barrels of oil, about seven times as large as the Saudis’ crude oil reserves.

Read More at Floyd Reports by Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson, Floyd Reports

Congress probes land deal in Alaska’s Tongass forest

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For decades, conservationists, the U.S. Forest Service, tribes, Native corporations and the people who live in the Tongass National Forest have warred over how to manage the vast temperate rain forest that covers most of southeast Alaska.

The fight resurfaces in Washington this week, as the Native corporation Sealaska makes a case to a Senate committee that it should be able to pick new acreage outside of the original land grants it never took ownership of.

The company’s choices are controversial, in part because they include valuable old-growth timber that many would like to see off limits to logging. Some local groups also have concerns about how Sealaska plans to address important cultural locations in the acres it wants, including places that are part of their ancestral history.

The 17 million-acre Tongass is the nation’s largest national forest. Because development came relatively late to southeast Alaska, parts of the forest are little different from how they were centuries ago. The forest, with 11,000 miles of shoreline, is home to bears, salmon and the largest known concentration of bald eagles.

Sealaska argues that it’s sought for decades to assume ownership of all the acreage it was granted under 1971’s Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the landmark legislation that settled aboriginal land claims by the state’s Native people.

Read More at The Miami Herald by Erika Bolstad, McClatchy Newspapers

 

 

Senate debates president’s power during cyber-attack

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Senators squared off with Obama administration officials Monday about plans to give the president emergency powers to protect vital U.S. electronic networks from attacks by hackers, cyberterrorists and foreign governments.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the administration’s legislative proposal, announced two weeks ago, that would rely on a pre-World War II radio emergency law to provide the president with authority to protect key computer and communication networks — like those mainly in private hands that run power grids, phone systems and banking services — from a cyber-attack.

“I must say this baffles me,” said Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Republican, of the administration’s plan to rely on the 1934 statute.

Read More at the Washington Times By Shaun Waterman, The Washington Times

Supreme Court’s Scary Power Grab

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The U.S. Supreme Court effectively ordered California on Monday to release 33,000 inmates over two years from an in-state prison population that numbers about 143,000.

Kent Scheidegger of the tough-on-crime Criminal Justice Legal Foundation blogged that Californians shouldn’t “bother investing much in a car. It will be open season on cars, given that car thieves (nonviolent offenders) will never go to prison no matter how many times they are caught.”

The 5-4 Plata decision upheld a federal three-judge panel that in 2009 found that overcrowding in California prisons is “criminogenic” — likely to produce criminals — and ordered state prisons to run at 137.5 percent of design capacity. The state’s prisons are designed to hold 80,000 inmates. (Be it noted, 100 percent capacity means one inmate per cell.)

Read More at Real Clear Politics By Debra Saunders, Real Clear Politics