Blog Heap of Links for the day 3 March 2011

President Obama on Thursday appeared to reject the idea of arming U.S. agents in Mexico, saying after a meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon that the two governments will look at other ways to protect American officials in the wake of a fatal shooting last month. "There are laws in place in Mexico that say that our agents should not be armed," Obama said, describing the U.S. role south of the border as an "advisory" one. "We do not carry out law enforcement activities inside of Mexico."

A judge put on hold his ruling that President Barack Obama's sweeping healthcare law was unconstitutional pending appeal, allowing the White House to continue implementing the reforms aimed at lowering soaring healthcare costs. But U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson ordered the administration to seek within the next week an expedited appellate review of his January 31 ruling, which favored arguments by 26 states that requiring Americans to buy health insurance starting in 2014 or pay a penalty was unconstitutional.

Just think about that as a 30 second commercial next election year: Obama: "Mubarak must resign. Now means Now!" Map of the Middle East with fires exploding in a series from Tunisia to Bahrain, to the sound of breaking glassware. Over and over again.

So how does brokeass, dumbass, redneck Texas stack up against progressive unionized Wisconsin?... To recap: white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin, black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin, Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin. In 18 separate ethnicity-controlled comparisons, the only one where Wisconsin students performed better than their peers in Texas was 4th grade science for Hispanic students (statistically insignificant), and this was reversed by 8th grade. ...

A Marion County judge has ruled, for the first time in Indiana, that news media outlets can be ordered by the court to reveal identifying information about posters to their online forums.

The boy's mother told police she'd left the boy and a 4-month-old girl in the care of two others while she attended parenting classes. She is not charged but police say endangerment charges are pending against her boyfriend's father and sister.

The bill, which would require only that the notices appear on newspaper websites, is similar to a Senate bill that would demand only that the notices appear on county-controlled websites.

CHANDLER, Ariz. — Authorities have determined a man who was stabbed and beheaded in a suburban Phoenix apartment was killed for stealing drugs from a Mexican cartel, in a gruesome example of drug cartel violence spilling over the border.

The U.S. military's super-secret X-37B space plane is all set to launch on its second mission Friday, though what it will be doing on orbit remains a mystery. The X-37B will launch from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas 5 rocket.