What’s interesting in the news today?

1. This will be interesting to watch.

From TheDailyCaller  “Congressman Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, could be facing an ethics investigation if Cleta Mitchell has her way.

Mitchell — a partner at Foley & Lardner and the legal counsel for True the Vote in its case against the IRS for its targeting of conservative groups — is pursuing Cummings over his conduct in the wider investigation.

“[Cummings] announced within 30 days after the IRS scandal that “Whoops, all this investigation is over, and we don’t need to be doing anything more on that,’ and he has done everything he can do to thwart and obstruct this investigation,” Mitchell said. “And has just been adamant that the investigation needs to end, that this is just a witch hunt, that there’s nothing there, that nobody did anything wrong.”

Mitchell believes that Cummings’s actions, including what he described as  ”his investigation of True the Vote” is outside of his jurisdiction and that it is a gross abuse of power to investigate private citizens.”

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2. The culture of corruption in the Obama admin continues. 

From HotAir  “When Congress refused to appropriate more funds for ObamaCare enrollment after already committing a deluge of cash to that effort, now-outgoing HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius began working the phones to perform an end run around Capitol Hill. Sebelius began calling corporate CEOs to push them into donating millions of dollars to Enroll America, an outside group started by Anne Filipic, a former White House staffer. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigated, and discovered that Filipic wasn’t the only White House staffer involved in the fundraising campaign:

The White House allegedly was involved in seeking financial support for a pro-ObamaCare group, according to a new report issued in response to Republican concerns about the administration’s fundraising efforts.

Until now, outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was the only official known to have solicited financial support for Enroll America, a nonprofit that promoted enrollment for the Affordable Care Act. But a Government Accountability Office report released Monday detailed not only the secretary’s involvement but that of a White House adviser.”

“It’s worth noting at this point that HHS regulates these markets in significant ways, especially after the passage of ObamaCare. This wasn’t just a case of working the phones for a charity. This was the Cabinet official with the most impact on these businesses extolling the efforts of a supposedly independent group launched by a close adviser to the President. It doesn’t take much ink to connect those dots, which is why insurers began complaining loudly enough about the pressure for Congress and the media to take notice.”

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3. Once again the result of feel-good policies are unintended consequences worse than what they supposedly fixed.

From TheAP  ” Biofuels made from the leftovers of harvested corn plants are worse than gasoline for global warming in the short term, a study shows, challenging the Obama administration’s conclusions that they are a much cleaner oil alternative and will help combat climate change.

A $500,000 study paid for by the federal government and released Sunday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change concludes that biofuels made with corn residue release 7 percent more greenhouse gases in the early years compared with conventional gasoline.

While biofuels are better in the long run, the study says they won’t meet a standard set in a 2007 energy law to qualify as renewable fuel.”

Of course the govt funds this stuff so it disagrees with the findings, as does the companies taking that money. Not shocking.

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4. Missing the obvious, and I suspect mostly for political reasons. After all, they’d have to admit to 50+ years of failure and the fact that their entire platform of policies has resulted in a disaster for America. They have to ignore it, because they made it that way.

From TheWallStJournal  “Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can’t change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn’t some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?

Yet in the current discussions about increased inequality, few researchers, fewer reporters, and no one in the executive branch of government directly addresses what seems to be the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States: the rise of single-parent families during the past half century.

The two-parent family has declined rapidly in recent decades. In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50% in 2006. This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%). Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.”

“More than 20% of children in single-parent families live in poverty long-term, compared with 2% of those raised in two-parent families, according to education-policy analyst Mitch Pearlstein’s 2011 book “From Family Collapse to America’s Decline.” The poverty rate would be 25% lower if today’s family structure resembled that of 1970, according to the 2009 report “Creating an Opportunity Society” from Brookings Institution analysts Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill. A 2006 article in the journal Demography by Penn State sociologist Molly Martin estimates that 41% of the economic inequality created between 1976-2000 was the result of changed family structure.”

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5. I see they’ve responded to the criticism they received for getting caught off guard.

From HotAir  “Last week, CNN reported that an al-Qaeda conference took place in Yemen, headed by the number-two man in the global structure, and that the US appeared to have missed it. If so, we may be making up for lost time. A series of drone attacks in Yemen has killed dozens of terrorists from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the most dangerous of the constituent networks in the AQ umbrella:

An operation targeting al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is under way in Abyan and Shabwa, Yemen, a high-level Yemeni government official who is being briefed on the strikes told CNN on Monday.

The official said that the scale of the strikes against AQAP is “massive and unprecedented” and that at least 30 militants have been killed. The operation involved Yemeni commandos who are now “going after high-level AQAP targets,” the official said.”

“CNN’s Mohammed Jamjoom reports that the Yemenis are a little skeptical of these operations, and that the embarrassment of missing the convention last week may be driving the claims now:”

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6. The worst is yet to come. This is what has been behind all the illegal delays by the White House. This is what they’re seeking to avoid before the mid-terms. And this is coming from a Democrat.

From NationalReview  ““There are parts of Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, that were postponed because they are unpalatable,” he told the Boston Herald. The “Cadillac tax” that goes into effect in a few years and taxes employer health plans over a certain value, he said, will be “the first time in this country’s history that we have actually taxed health care.”

““We will lose seats in the House,” he said. “I am fairly certain of that based on the poll numbers that are coming out from the more experienced pollsters down there, and I think we may lose the Senate.””

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