"While much of the political world obsesses over Twitter fights and Seamus the dog, Barack Obama has set himself up for a high-profile defeat on one of the most important issues of the campaign. 

"The president has put his feet in cement in opposition to the Keystone oil pipeline. But on Capitol Hill, more and more Democrats are joining Republicans to force approval of the pipeline, whether Obama wants it or not. 

"The latest action happened Wednesday, when the House passed a measure to move the pipeline forward. Before the vote, Obama issued a veto threat. The House approved the pipeline anyway -- by a veto-proof majority, 293 to 127. Sixty-nine Democrats abandoned the president to vote with Republicans. That's a lot of defections."

"War is not a ladies auxiliary tea party, and it's all too easy for people comfortable in Los Angeles or New York or the White House to condemn the troops without context. Those troops should be given company level letters of reprimand and moved on.

"... I'm furious, not at the troops who did something dumb, but I'm furious at the moral cowardice of military leaders who never stick up for our troops but protect their own careers. Do I sound angry? As a 22-year-old former Army enlisted man and officer, I'm angry as can be because Gen. Allen needs to get it through his head that a leader is responsible for everything his troops do or fail to do. That's the military code. Don't blame the troops out doing the tough work. Blame the generals whose strategy has failed, the cowardly, cowardly White House just trying to kick the can down the road to November, and blame the establishment media that really loves, loves to trash our soldiers and Marines."

"It has become an article of faith among some policy makers and advocates, including Michelle Obama, that poor urban neighborhoods are food deserts, bereft of fresh fruits and vegetables.

"But two new studies have found something unexpected. Such neighborhoods not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.

"Within a couple of miles of almost any urban neighborhood, 'you can get basically any type of food,' said Roland Sturm of the RAND Corporation, lead author of one of the studies. 'Maybe we should call it a food swamp rather than a desert,' he said."

"During the 2011 debate on combining tax hikes and spending to reduce the deficit by $2.5 trillion, Scott Rasmussen's polling found that 75% of Americans were convinced that any deal in Congress would actually increase taxes on the middle class. 

"Even with the president promising to tax only the rich, why did 75% of Americans believe they were the ultimate targets of any threatened tax hike? The history of trickle-down taxation over the last 100 years and the last two Democratic administrations suggests an answer.

"The Alternative Minimum Tax was imposed in 1969 because 115 households investing in municipal bonds reportedly paid little or no federal income tax. This tax on the rich who were paying what the president and others call a 'fair share' now affects four million households. On Jan. 1, 2013, it is set to hit 27 million more -- raising an estimated $120 billion, according to the Obama 2013 budget. In 40 years, a tax on 115 households will have grown to threaten 31 million."

"How much will ObamaCare -- call it the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act if you like -- cost over the next 10 years? 

"More than you've been led to believe, reports Charles Blahous of George Mason University's Mercatus Center. To be specific, he projects it will add $1,160 billion to net federal spending over the next 10 years and at least $340 billion to federal budget deficits in that time. 

"Blahous was appointed by Barack Obama as one of two public trustees of the Social Security and Medicare programs. He worked on these issues in George W. Bush's administration and submitted his Mercatus paper for anonymous peer review."

"The authenticity of conservative women has always been under attack by radical orthodox feminists, but perhaps not as brazenly as by someone with such direct and frequent access to the corridors of the White House message machine as Hilary B. Rosen.
 
"The D.C. career lobbyist and Democratic media strategist took to CNN's airwaves this week to craft a left-wing 'War on Women' attack on the real moms of the GOP. Ostensibly aiming at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for his 'old-fashioned' views of women, Rosen's mouth instead shot off in the direction of wife, stay-at-home mother of five, grandmother of 16, and cancer and multiple sclerosis survivor Ann Romney. Mrs. Romney, sneered Rosen, 'never worked a day in her life' outside of the home and should have no voice on women's issues.
 
"President Obama never met a payroll in his life, but that hasn't stopped him from dictating what business owners across the country should and shouldn't be doing. But I digress."

"If Obama can cobble together disaffected young people, greens, women, minorities and the poor -- who all believe a nefarious 'they' have crushed their dreams -- then massive debt and deficits, high unemployment, sluggish growth and spiraling gas prices won't decide the election. 

"Lots of presidential candidates have run by identifying such enemies of the people, rather than debating the general state of the nation -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not. 

"But the problem with an us/them strategy is not just winning an election, but trying to put back together what was torn asunder."

"I'm suspicious of superstitions, like astrology or the belief that 'green jobs will fix the environment and the economy.' I understand the appeal of such beliefs. People crave simple answers and want to believe that some higher power determines our fates. 

"The most socially destructive superstition of all is the intuitively appealing belief that problems are best solved by government. ...

"If Americans keep voting for politicians who want to spend more money and pass more laws, the result will not be a country with fewer problems but a country that is governed by piecemeal socialism. We can debate the meaning of the word 'socialism,' but there's no doubt that we'd be less prosperous and less free."

"In March, 120,000 jobs were created, while more than 330,000 people dropped out of the workforce. For self-serving reasons, the Obama administration spins this as good news. 

"According to government math, March unemployment declined by .1 percent even though more Americans were out of work. This is because the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) doesn’t count people as officially unemployed if they are not looking for a job. So even though the 'not in labor force' figure is at a record high of nearly 88 million people, the administration can keep reporting a drop in unemployment by counting only those it wants to count. ...

"The government naturally wants to put as good a face on the ostensible recovery as possible, but the official unemployment figures are painfully out of step with reality. If three Americans are quitting the workforce for every one who finds a job, this is not a recovery. It is a national jobs crisis."

"In October 2010, on the eve of the Islamic revolution that the media fancies as 'the Arab Spring,' the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood called for jihad against the United States.   

"You might think that this all but unnoticed bombshell would be of some importance to policymakers in Washington. It was not. It is not. This week, the Obama administration quietly released $1.5 billion in foreign aid to the new Egyptian government, now dominated by a Brotherhood-led coalition in parliament — soon to be joined by an Ikhwan (i.e., Brotherhood) luminary as president.  

"It is not easy to find the announcement. With the legacy media having joined the Obama reelection campaign, we must turn for such news to outlets like the Kuwait News Agency. There, we learn that, having dug our nation into a $16 trillion debt hole, President Obama has nevertheless decided to borrow more money from unfriendly powers like China so he can give it to an outfit that views the United States as an enemy to be destroyed."