White House week ahead: The future of Iraq hangs in the balance

By Susan Crabtree
The future of Iraq and just how far the President Obama is willing to re-engage there will loom over the White House for a third week as Obama juggles a mix of domestic, foreign and sports-related events on his calendar.
....Obama sent Secretary of State John Kerry to Iraq to try to persuade the country's sectarian leaders to join forces to fight the al Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which has taken control of large swaths of the north over the last few weeks.
....On the domestic front, Obama on Monday will participate in a summit on working families that will focus on employment policies and ways to help families balance their commitments. First Lady Michelle Obama will also attend, along with Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden.
On Tuesday, Obama will host golfing's 2013 President's Cub teams at the White House.
And Wednesday he will lunch with Israeli President Shimon Peres before welcoming NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson.
In the evening, the president will address the League of Conservation Voters Capital Dinner.
On Thursday, Obama plans to travel to Minneapolis, Minn. for a yet-to-be announced schedule, and on Friday he and Michelle will attend the Marine Barracks Evening Parade in Washington.

House takes up energy production bills this week

By Susan Ferrechio

The House this week will take up legislation that would speed up interstate pipeline projects, increase domestic oil production and expedite natural gas exports.
In the Senate, spending bills have stalled due to partisan infighting, leaving the chamber with little to do but clear a backlog of judicial nominations and debate a hunting and recreation bill.
....This week, senators will likely begin debate on the Sportsmen’s Act, which would increase access to federal land by those who hunt and fish and would require the federal government to factor in how land management impacts recreational access.
With the summer driving season about to kick into full gear, House Republicans aim to put the spotlight on energy with a series of familiar bills that would increase domestic oil production.
The “Lowering Gasoline Prices to Fuel an America that Works Act” won’t win over many Democrats, who favor green energy policies that reduce the nation’s dependency on fossil fuels.
But the Republican majority will easily pass the legislation, which would expand offshore drilling on both coasts and Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, speed up oil and natural gas lease sales and put steps in place to improve accountability, safety and efficiency in offshore energy operations.
....The House will also vote on legislation that would speed up American exports of natural gas. Proponents of the North American Energy Infrastructure Act, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, say the legislation would boost the economy and help countries like Ukraine lessen its dependency on Russian oil.
Opponents say the measure would require years of infrastructure development and would raise U.S. energy prices by cutting the supply available domestically.
In addition to floor legislation, the House Judiciary Committee will spotlight the mass border migration of unaccompanied children with a hearing titled, “An Administration Made Disaster: The South Texas Border Surge of Unaccompanied Alien Minors.”

The week ahead in economics: How much did the economy shrink, and how is housing really doing?

By Joseph Lawler

Two big questions about the U.S. economy will be answered this week.
The first is just how deeply the economy contracted in the first quarter.
The second revision of gross domestic product from the Bureau of Economic Analysis put growth at negative 1 percent for the quarter. Analysts now expect the third and final revision to show that the economy shrunk at a negative 2 percent annualized rate.
Both private-sector and government economists expect growth to accelerate in the coming quarters, based on other indicators like inflation and job growth. Goldman Sachs, for instance, projects growth picking up to near 4 percent in the second quarter. Nevertheless, a steeply negative first quarter would mean, as a matter of arithmetic, that growth for the year is likely to disappoint.
The second question is whether the slight housing market rebound in April was real and a sign that the sector will continue to recover and contribute to growth in the months ahead.
On Monday, the National Association of Realtors will report on existing home sales for May. Home sales totaled 5.4 million last July, but came crashing down after the Federal Reserve began the "taper" of its mortgage-backed securities and mortgage rates began rising. ....On Tuesday, there will be three other new data points for housing: Home prices for April, from the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the S&P/Case-Shiller housing index, and sales of new homes. All three are expected to show increases.
One number to watch in particular is the inventory of new houses for sale. Rising inventories would be an indication of a broader housing recovery, with rising sales volume and moderate price increases in the months ahead.
One other item to watch this week: On Thursday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis will release May data on personal income and spending. That report will include the personal consumption expenditures price index, which is the price index that officials at the Federal Reserve watch most closely.

IRS canceled e-mail back-up service – weeks after Lerner hard drive crash

By Ed Morrissey
The coincidences just keep on a-rolling in the IRS targeting scandal. It turns out that the IRS didn’t just pay some low-level schlep to recycle backup server tapes on a six-month basis to maintain their e-mail records. They paid an outside firm, Sonasoft, to archive that data for long-term retrieval — or at least they did. That contract got canceled just weeks after Lois Lerner’s hard-drive failure, the Daily Caller learned:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.
The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”
Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.
But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

Oddly, this doesn’t appear to have come up in testimony from officials at the IRS. John Koskinen’s opening statement at the House Ways and Means Committee hearing of how hard the IRS worked to retrieve that data didn’t include any effort to restore a Sonasoft backup from the servers, or mention any outside contractor at all. The existence of this contract appears to have been a better-kept secret than NSA snooping through Internet service providers.

Supreme Court Dials Back EPA’s Global Warming Rules

By Liz Klimas
The Supreme Court on Monday placed limits on the sole Obama administration program already in place to deal with power plant and factory emissions of gases blamed for global warming.
The justices said that the Environmental Protection Agency lacks authority in some cases to force companies to evaluate ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This rule applies when a company needs a permit to expand facilities or build new ones that would increase overall pollution. Carbon dioxide is the chief gas linked to global warming.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the opinion of the court that EPA including greenhouse gases in its interpretation “would place plainly excessive demands on limited governmental resources [and] is alone a good reason for rejecting it; but that is not the only reason.”
“EPA’s interpretation is also unreasonable because it would bring about an enormous and transformative expansion in EPA’s regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization,” Scalia continued. ” When an agency claims to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power to regulate ‘a significant portion of the American economy,’ […] we typically greet its announcement with a measure of skepticism. We expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’”
“An agency has no power to ‘tailor’ legislation to bureaucratic policy goals by rewriting unambiguous statutory terms,” Scalia wrote later in the decision.
...The outcome also preserves EPA’s authority over facilities that already emit pollutants that the agency regulates other than greenhouse gases.
“EPA is getting almost everything it wanted in this case,” Scalia wrote.
The agency wanted to regulate 86 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted from plants nationwide. The agency will be able to regulate 83 percent of the emissions under the ruling, Scalia said.

Former ICE Director on Illegal Immigrant Children: 'They Almost Never Go Home'

By Caroline May
...While the Obama administration has started to combat the rumor mill of “misinformation” by stressing that the new arrivals are not eligible for current policies shielding illegal immigrants from deportation such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), according to the AP, many of the unaccompanied minors will be allowed to live in the United States, attend free public schools, and perhaps work for years regardless of government rhetoric.
"They almost never go home," Gary Mead, former ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Director, told the AP. "It's not a process that ultimately ends in easy resolutions or clear-cut resolutions.”
According to the AP, while the youths are subject to deportation, the system makes it difficult to deal with them hastily. Much of the reason for this is a slow immigration process that finds the courts backed up and immigrants allowed to stay in the country for years as their immigration cases crawl through the system.
Additionally, the AP notes, a 2002 law requires unaccompanied minors to be reunited with parents, relatives, or sponsors in the United States after they are apprehended and turned over to Health and Human Services.
Further, the process requires the immigrants return for their trial dates, something about one-fourth of the immigrants fail to do, the AP reports.
"The longer the process goes, the less likely it is that people will return," Doris Meissner, a former head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, told the AP.

Doctors Warn of Looming Health Crisis Due to Flood of Young Illegal Immigrants

By Dr. Susan Berry
Many of the thousands of illegal immigrant children and teens crossing the United States border are carrying deadly contagious diseases that could easily create a major health crisis in this country, doctors say.

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Dr. Jane Orient, an internal medicine specialist and the Executive Director of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), said that by admitting these huge groups of children who come from countries where medical screenings are minimal and hygiene is poor, the United States is at risk for epidemics of serious diseases and viruses that the nation has not seen in years.

“Tuberculosis (TB) is the single most dangerous disease because it is highly contagious and can be easily picked up at the mall, at a school, or on the bus,” Orient told Breitbart News. “Cases coming from south of the U.S. border can be very resistant to medications. They don’t respond to traditional antibiotics, and the few drugs they may respond to are often toxic, with lots of side effects.”

“Legal immigrants have always been required to undergo health screenings,” Orient continued, “but these kids coming have no medical screenings and no vaccine records. They’re likely coming here with a number of infectious diseases that will spread like wildfire.”

“Norovirus is also an extremely contagious virus with symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhea,” she explained. “All we need is one outbreak of that virus and we would have an overwhelming public health crisis.”

Common Core Issue Highlights Huge Role of Federal Government in Education

By Dr. Susan Berry
...McDaniel’s comment zeroes in on one of the main problems with the U.S. Department of Education – the fact that funding funneled to states comes with “strings” attached.

Emmett McGroarty, education director at the American Principles Project, agrees with McDaniel.

“The U.S. Department of Education is not necessary to make a mere transfer of money from the federal government to a state,” McGroarty told Breitbart News. He continued:

What the Department bureaucracy does enable is conditional funding and waivers. The Department provides money or, as with Race to the Top, the possibility of money to a state in return for obedience to the federal government’s policy whims. And now, as with the No Child Left Behind waivers, the Department is offering regulatory flexibility - that is substituting one set of burdensome regulatory requirements for another set - in exchange for the state’s obedience to the federal government.

...“Another problem with conditional funding is that the state education bureaucracy tends to act as advocates for the federal policies and view legislators and citizens with paternalism and hostility,” McGroarty explains. “This weakens a state’s system of checks and balances and undermines citizen-directed government.”
“The elimination of the U.S. Department of Education and the prohibition of conditional funding and waivers would mean that the citizens of a state could truly make their own decisions about education policy and spend all their money as they see fit—whether that money came from state taxes or the federal government,” he said.

Neal McCluskey, associate director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, agrees with McGroarty, and then observes the results of decades-long interference in education by the federal government.“The U.S. Department of Education is unconstitutional – the Constitution only gives Washington specific, enumerated powers, and authority over education is not among them – but it also has a decades-long record of failure,” he told Breitbart News. “Test scores have been stagnant throughout its lifetime, while spending has skyrocketed. Its oodles of higher education dollars mainly translate into rampant tuition inflation and waste.”“And it doesn’t create new money,” McCluskey asserts. “It takes it from taxpayers, burns a bunch off in bureaucracy, then offers the remainder back with politicized, stultifying rules attached.”The issue of the Common Core standards in the U.S. Senate primary race in Mississippi has raised a small-scale version of the conversation Americans are ready to have about the role of the federal government in education.

US ties 'worthless' under Obama says Polish FM

By Rick Moran
Poland's Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski was secretly recorded saying that during the Obama administration, the Polish-US alliance "isn't worth anything."
BBC:

Poland's Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski called his country's ties with the US "worthless", a Polish news magazine says, giving excerpts of a secretly recorded conversation.
The magazine Wprost is already at the centre of another scandal over leaked tapes involving the Polish government.
Mr Sikorski called Poland's stance towards the US "downright harmful because it creates a false sense of security", according to the new leak.
He has not denied using such language.
According to the excerpts, Mr Sikorski told former Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski that "the Polish-US alliance isn't worth anything".
Using vulgar language, he compared Polish subservience to the US to giving oral sex. He also warned that such a stance would cause "conflict with the Germans, Russians".
'Total suckers'
He also used a racially loaded term to describe the Polish stance - "murzynskosc", which suggests a slave mentality.
``(We are) suckers, total suckers. The problem in Poland is that we have shallow pride and low self-esteem,'' Mr Sikorski was quoted as saying.
Earlier this month Mr Sikorski, a conservative and leading critic of Russia in the current Ukraine crisis, was nominated by the Polish government to replace Baroness Ashton as EU foreign policy chief.
Baroness Ashton, known as the EU High Representative, will step down in November, but EU leaders have not yet decided who will replace her.
The Polish government says it will not comment on the excerpts until Wprost publishes the full transcript.

This is a common refrain around the world from our allies. Our enemies don't fear us and our friends don't trust us. That's a combination almost guaranteed to bring about chaos in the world.

How US and Britain were warned of Isis advance in Iraq but 'turned a deaf ear'

Exclusive: Kurdish intelligence chief says information was passed on to CIA and MI6 about grand plan to take Baghdad

By Richard Spencer

Five months ago, a Kurdish intelligence "asset" walked into a base and said he had information to hand over. The capture by jihadists the month before of two Sunni cities in western Iraq was just the beginning, he said.

There would soon be a major onslaught on Sunni territories.
...."We had this information then, and we passed it on to your (British) government and the US government," Rooz Bahjat, a senior lieutenant to Lahur Talabani, head of Kurdish intelligence, said. "We used our official liaisons.
"We knew exactly what strategy they were going to use, we knew the military planners. It fell on deaf ears."
...He warned that the Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was now a greater threat to western countries than Osama bin Laden had been in 2001.
He and his boss, Lahur Talabani, head of Kurdish intelligence, both said that a lack of resolve by the West to finish what they had started in removing Saddam Hussein was responsible for the current crisis, rather than the 2003 invasion itself.
Their claims about the intelligence they provided the West are partly an attempt to increase the pressure to provide more support now.
"Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is now something bin Laden could only dream of being," Mr Bahjat said. "The sleep of reason produces monsters. It's the lack of resolve in the West that is the most important thing.
Reason has been sleeping and now we have lots of monsters."
The Kurds officially cannot appeal for more arms to defend themselves except through the federal government, but Mr Talabani said more could have been done.
"I have completely lost hope in America after listening to President Barack Obama," Mr Talabani said. "I blame him personally for what has happened in Syria, in the Middle East, in Iraq at the moment. I have no hope any more.

The Left Reboots for Total War

By Mike Flynn
....America is a center-right country. Yet, the left has been able to project its political power far more effectively than conservatives. It understands far better how to organize people and to frame issues in a way that more immediately touches on their lives.
Before its collapse from internal corruption, the leftist group ACORN had perfected the community organizing model of building political power. Its internal manual on building an organization advised activists to begin with long-simmering local needs, rather than tackle national issues. New chapters would organize for a stop sign at a dangerous intersection or speed bumps in a residential neighborhood, for example. Only after individuals had been identified, recruited and organized would the organization more on to larger, more political, issues.
The writers participating in the "symposium" at The Nation are resurrecting this model. The left is organizing at the state and local level, focusing on issues like local minimum wages, paid leave and new workplace regulations. It is pushing cities and states to ensure workers have a minimum number of hours, not just minimum wages. Businesses would be required to give existing workers more hours before they were "allowed" to hire more part-time workers.
The left is also pushing for a "bad business fee," which would penalize companies that don't pay high enough wages or benefits. Of course, funds raised by such "fees" would be spent by the left.
In other words, while the national political climate seems to favor conservatives and Republicans, the left is rebooting at the state and local level. It is also planning an almost entrepreneurial approach to organizing that is, sadly, foreign to much of the conservative movement.

Hillary presses the self-destruct button again over money

By Thomas Lifson
....Now, she’s done it again. In an interview with the Guardian, as friendly a publication as one could imagine, she’s gone and stuck her foot in her mouth again.
She has claimed that despite the reported hundred million dollars she and her husband have raked in since the time since they were “dead broke,” they are not “truly well off.”

…with her huge personal wealth, how could Clinton possibly hope to be credible on this issue when people see her as part of the problem, not its solution?
"But they don't see me as part of the problem," she protests, "because we pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off, not to name names; and we've done it through dint of hard work," she says, letting off another burst of laughter. If past form is any guide, she must be finding my question painful.

For 99.9% percent of the public, receiving a hundred million bucks over the course of 14 years, even if you pay half of it in income taxes, makes one “truly well off.”
....as she and her husband climbed the ladder of social status, and achieved the heights acquired through elective office, they started associating with really, really rich people. So rich that, in fact, no matter how much money she and Bill earned, they were still among the less well-off members of their social set. Whereas she knows many people with their own private jets, she and Bill cannot afford one. You might think that this would not matter, since she can readily borrow one from a friend, or require the dispatch of one as a condition of speaking at some function. But once you are in a social set where that is a dividing line, it becomes a painful mark of inferiority to have to depend on the kindness others for what has become an essential convenience. If you add on the scars of a childhood and adolescence where she felt humiliated by her parents’ middle class status, this form of comparative deprivation becomes a burden, and phrases like “truly well off” just tumble out in unguarded moments.
It is clear that Mrs. Clinton’s greatest enemy is her subconscious mind, full of resentments and arrogance. When she is on guard, as in her Fox News interview, these mistakes don’t happen. But when she is in friendly territory, they just slip out.
Has there ever been a presidential campaign without an unguarded moment? If she does indeed run for president, Hillary had better plan on never relaxing and letting the real Hillary out. Ever.

Hillary is Conservatives' Dream Opponent

By Bruce Walker

Leftists are tone-deaf. Their whole lives are immersed in a surreal reality of ideological rhetoric and self-adulation pampered by sycophant press, sympathetic professors, and similar propagandists. This means that leftists routinely miscalculate, and this accounts for the macabre obsession that leftists have today with Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton.
This unpleasant, dishonest, and utterly unappealing woman now offers her party two bad options. First, reject her and throw the Democrats into a real dogfight for the nomination, which will make it very hard to hold on to the White House. Second, take a deep gulp, crown this terrible candidate, and run the risk of suffering a political tsunami in 2016.
Just how bad might Hillary be for Democrats in a presidential election?
Consider first her unlikeability. Successful presidential candidates almost always are likeable, whether this seems fair or not to us. Ike, Reagan, Clinton, and, yes, Obama – those two-term presidents since the end of the Second World War – seemed like nice guys.
The contrast between Mr. and Mrs. Clinton is particularly stark. Although Bill Clinton’s policies failed and his administration was pocked with scandals, Bill always seemed friendly and relaxed. In the presidential debates in 1992 and 1996, Clinton’s engaging personality trumped the staid and dry George H. Bush and Bob Dole.
Hillary, by contrast, never seems anything but vain and testy. That comes across on television. No presidential candidate in the last half-century appears so unpleasant. Moreover, that image is pretty well fixed in the public mind, and every effort Hillary makes to counter that image has the additional problem of looking phony.
...Hillary is also rightly perceived as the ultimate Washington insider. Her whole resume is being Bill Clinton’s wife during the 1990s, and she has been hanging around, leeching on her husband’s popularity, writing puerile books, doing nothing really but to acquire power and influence and money since 1992. By 2016, Mrs. Clinton will have been a fixture in Washington for one quarter of a century – without, however, a single true accomplishment.
Any American who wanted change in Washington would have to choke hard before voting for Hillary, who represents the status quo as well as any politician in America. With a crummy economy and a crumbling foreign policy, the frustration level most Americans feel about Washington could be toxic for any candidate, but a candidate so closely connected with the Washington establishment may simply be unelectable.
As if this were not bad enough, Hillary is a dreadful campaigner. She won election to the Senate in New York, one of the most leftist states in America, but polls showed that had either Governor Pataki or Mayor Giuliani run for Senator Moynihan’s open seat in 2000, either would have crushed Hillary. The only other campaign she waged was for the Democrat nomination in 2008, and her performance in that race was weak indeed.

....The left seems to genuinely believe that Hillary would be a strong candidate in the 2016 election. She would be, instead, the conservatives’ dream candidate.

Run Hard With This Campaign, Democrats

ByEd Driscoll

Fanfare for the common man, 21st century style, as Democrats weep for the hardworking salt-of-the-earth chap who cheerfully runs the IRS while it upends the lives of millions of Americans and routinely “loses” its own documents.
...As Mary Katharine Ham adds at Hot Air, “Through every second of this montage, please remind yourself that these people fancy themselves anti-establishment. They are the fighters of the Man, the afflicters of the comfortable. Pathetic.”
Actually, I’m pretty sure that the left dropped that particular modified limited hangout right around January of 2009. These days, they’re simply in the business of the naked acquisition of as much power as possible, and don’t really care who knows it, as the above clip helpfully demonstrates.
PK'S NOTE: Unable to post clip; click on link in title to view.