Heard this on Rush and found the story online — Appeals court rules against Obama healthcare law

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An appeals court ruled on Friday that President Barack Obama’s healthcare law requiring Americans to buy healthcare insurance or face a penalty was unconstitutional, a blow to the White House.

The Appeals Court for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, found that Congress exceeded its authority by requiring Americans to buy coverage, but also ruled that the rest of the wide-ranging law could remain in effect.

Of course the entire law needs to be scrapped, but removing the individual mandate will eventually do the same thing. It cannot survive without it, and that’s a good thing. Not that any of this is the final word. You can bet on this being decided by the Supreme Court no matter how many lower courts rule.

That being said, I’d still rather see more decisions like this one.

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I’ve been living in the Sunshine State (temperature as I write this – 28 degrees) for nearly nine years. 2010 has seen more than a few interesting news items. This AP story recounts many of them.

Florida lived up to its reputation for being an odd state in 2010, a year where stupid crimes, poor decisions and general weirdness seemingly showed no geographical or age limits.

Read, enjoy, comment.

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First there was Breitbart and BreitbartTV. Then things got big — Big Hollywood and Big Government big.

Now we are treated to Big Journalism. Here’s what Editor in Chief Michael Walsh has to say:

So let me be blunt: we’re not here to compete for Pulitzer Prizes, to sit on committees, to scratch each other’s backs on the weekend television wagfests or to conform to some arbitrary code of ethics cooked up in the days when the mainstream media was the only game in town, and had already begun to cozy up to the government and the establishment, thus abandoning its constitutional mission of keeping a finger on the pulse of America, and an eye on the crooks:

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So welcome to the other side. I am extremely proud to be joined in this venture not only by my colleagues here at breitbart.com but by the more than sixty writers and reporters who thus far have volunteered – volunteered! – to enter the fray.

The list of contributors and the deserved success of Breitbarts other ventures are reason enough to add BigJournalism to my feed reader, twitter, and blogroll, but this focus more than justifies those decisions.

No longer need we simply assert and ask you to trust us: now, we can use pictures, links, and video clips to carry the argument forward and make our case. Or at least get you to think about it in a way perhaps you never did before. Because we believe the search for the truth is not some figment of Derrida’s imagination. We believe that the truth, while elusive, is knowable, or at the very least worth trying to know.

We stand foursquare with the Founders. We believe in the First Amendment, not just for we, but also for thee. We believe the phrase, “Congress shall make no law…” could not possibly be clearer. We despise “political correctness” and everything it represents. We will not be told, “you can’t say that,” because to accept that stricture means we cannot think it, either. We believe that freedom of inquiry, freedom of opinion and freedom of expression are the fundamental liberties upon which this country was founded. And we will fight to defend them.

I encourage you to check them out, and follow the stories that they will be offering.

Cross Posted at The Regiment

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News sources are reporting a series of coordinated attacks in Baghdad. I’m not going to excerpt anything, sure that you will want to go read the whole report, or turn to television coverage.

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Not much available, but I just read that Tiger Woods was seriously injured in a car crash as I was scanning the news during lunch.

Professional golfer Tiger Woods was seriously injured in a car accident early this morning, the Florida Highway Patrol just reported.

Woods, 33, pulled out of his driveway in the Isleworth community about 2:25 a.m. when he struck a fire hydrant, and then drove into a tree at his neighbor’s property, FHP reported.

Woods was transported to Health Central Hospital in Ocoee in serious condition, FHP said. No other information about his condition has been released.

UPDATE: Reports are now saying that he has been treated and released. It would be good news to find out that the “seriously injured” originally reported was an over statement of the facts.

Besides, he has always had trouble with his drives being off line. Too soon?

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I’m sure most of you are already aware of the shootings that took place earlier this afternoon at Fort Hood in Texas. The story is very fluid and changing very quickly. There is plenty of speculation and few known facts. The few of those are 12 dead and 31 wounded. The shooter was Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan a 39 or 40 year old convert to Islam who was a psychiatrist at the base. Hasan was killed by a local LEO who was himself killed in the firefight.

I have a feeling that the details on this, when they are known, are going to be very strange.

Updates as they become known.

7:19 – Reports now are saying the correct name is Nidal Malik Hasan. One thing I’m hearing from multiple news stations is that he received a bad evaluation when he was at Walter Reed.

10:12 – Hasan is not dead as previously reported.

Authorities identified the suspected gunman as Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who had treated soldiers wounded in foreign wars preparing for foreign deployment at the post.

“Our investigation is ongoing but preliminary reports indicate that there was a single shooter,” Lieutenant-General Robert Cone, Fort Hood’s commanding officer, told a news conference. “The shooter is not dead but in custody in stable condition.”

Cone said the suspect had been shot multiple times. He previously said the suspect was killed by police officers during the attack at the biggest military facility in the world.

Asked whether the shootings were a terrorist act, Cone said, “I couldn’t rule that out, but I’m telling you that right now the evidence does not suggest that.”

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Like most of you I have been following the news from Honduras. I can’t come close to the excellent coverage that Fausta has been providing, so I point you there.

#Honduras: Zelaya postpones his trip back “for the weekend”

Honduras: What was on the referendum ballots printed in Venezuela

Honduras defends its democracy

and

Coup in Honduras – Correction: This is NOT a coup

Thanks for the great work Fausta!

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Farah Fawcett has lost her long fight with cancer.

Actress Farrah Fawcett, who became an icon of 1970s US television, has died of cancer in Los Angeles aged 62, her spokesman has confirmed.

Fawcett is best known for starring in Charlie’s Angels, and in later years for hard-hitting TV and stage roles.

[...]

As Fawcett’s career was taking off, she posed in a red bathing suit for a poster which went on to sell several million copies.

I well remember that poster. I was, after all, a young teen at the time it came out.

I hope you have found peace.

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Two Metro trains have collided around the D.C./Maryland border.

At least one person was killed Monday in a rush-hour collision between two Metro transit trains in northeast Washington.

A number of other passengers were severely injured, said District of Columbia fire spokesman Alan Etter, in what he describes as a “mass casualty event.” He said crews were cutting apart the trains to get people out.

Fox News is reporting two fatalities and possibly dozens injured. The trains are a part of the Red Line.

UPDATE: The death toll is continuing to rise. I am now seeing reports of six dead and at least 70 injured, many seriously.

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While most of the attention is on the ongoing protests in Iran, and the blogospheric coverage it is receiving, there are other stories that deserve to be covered and followed.

The Real Cost of Health Care Reform

It is consistently sold under the guise of saving “us” money, but in fact the costs would be staggering. How staggering? How about $4 Trillion dollars. Thats $4,000,000,000,000.00!

Yesterday, the CBO estimated that the current Democratic Senate health care bill would increase the defict by $1 trillion over 10 years while leaving 30 million uninsured, forcing the White House to distance itself from the legislation. While liberals have tried to emphasize that the CBO provided only a partial analysis of the draft legislation from Ted Kennedy’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, a more comprehensive analysis of the legislation will only serve to drive the bill’s ultimate cost higher. For instance, because it was only working with a draft of the bill that had holes in it, the CBO did not estimate the costs associated with increasing Medicaid elgibility to 150 percent of the poverty level, or the full cost of providing subsidies to individuals with incomes at up to 500 percent of the poverty level to purchase insurance through state-run exchanges. Once this is taken into account, liberals are right that the final CBO estimate will reflect more people being insured, but the cost of the legislation will go up as well.

Related to that, but with a disturbingly different twist, is the sales job the Obama administration is doing on health care with the uncritical support of the MSM.

Obama’s ABC Infomercial

This story has many on the right re-naming ABC as the All Barack Channel. It fits.

First the story as reported on Drudge:

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

The Director of Communications at the White House Office of Health Reform is Linda Douglass, who worked as a reporter for ABC News from 1998-2006.

Michael Laprarie writing at Wizbang comments:

It seems that the Obama Administration is prepared to bias the debate about single-payer health care not only with disinformation, but by working with the mainstream media in order to deliberately block efforts to present alternative solutions to our health care problems. Perhaps this is a lesson learned from the Clinton White House, which welcomed the debate over HillaryCare because they thought they would easily win it.

One missing element in all of this is any sort of opposing view, as Gaius points out.

They are apparently calling this a “debate”. But when only one side is presented, it is not a debate, it is a lecture. Or worse, propaganda.

This is also some very, very expensive free airtime for Obama. ABC is giving away the air time – and its credibility as a news organization.

[...]

They are not even trying to disguise that they are completely in Obama’s pocket anymore. That’s more than a bit worrisome.

Indeed it is. Michelle Malkin says, “ABC News should be required to register as a federal lobbyist.”

AllahPundit makes this point:

I’m honestly surprised, although it makes a certain sort of ruthless sense: If, as many righties have speculated, The One’s trying to ram through as many Great Society programs as he can before the political pendulum swings back to the center, the media might as well drop all pretense of objectivity and go for broke too.

There is much more on this story, but I’ll leave you with this link to a lighter look at the Sneak Preview of ABC’s Infomercial for Socialized Medicine from Doug Ross.

There’s one other story that deserves mention, but I’ve run out of time this morning. That is the firing of IG Gerald Walpin. This story deserves a lot of attention, something I’ll have to take care of when I return this afternoon.

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