Blog Heap of Links for the day 20 May 2011

six Republican senators wrote President Obama asking if he will comply with the War Powers Act, which says Congress must authorize action that lasts more than 60 days.

In an effort to satisfy those arguing he needs to seek congressional authorization to continue US military activity in accordance with the War Powers Resolution, President Obama wrote a letter to congressional leaders this afternoon suggesting that the role is now so "limited" he does not need to seek congressional approval. [LAW? I AM TEH WON! I DON'T NEED NO STEEKIN' LAW!]

Netanyahu swiftly rejected Obama's call for Israel to pull back to the borders that existed before the 1967 Six-Day War. Roughly translated from Hebrew, a statement from the Prime Minister's office said that they appreciated Obama's commitment to peace, but called the pullback to the 1967 borders "indefensible," and said that the Palestinians were less than an honest partner in the peace process.

@SarahPalinUSA Sarah Palin Dear Mr. President, please allow our ally, PM Netanyahu, to respectfully arrive through the front door this time. Thanks,Concerned Americans

Much of the speech was simply outdated boilerplate from the 1960s. This line, for example — "In a global economy based on knowledge and innovation, no development strategy can be based solely upon what comes out of the ground" — ignores the decades of economic diversification pursued by most of the oil producers of the Middle East. Muammar Qaddafi is an outlier and a nut; Algeria, Egypt, Iran, and the Arab nations of the Persian Gulf have all made strides in diversifying their economies. The presidential way to bring up diversification would have been to praise the efforts made already, and pledge US support to continuing or expanding them. Instead, Obama chose to lecture his audience on the need for diversification — sounding very much like someone who hasn't gotten any updated information on this topic since he was awarded his baccalaureate degree in the early 1980s

@SarahPalinUSA Dear Mr. President, please allow our ally, PM Netanyahu, to respectfully arrive through the front door this time. Thanks,Concerned Americans

Mr. Liu co-wrote a 2008 book, "Keeping Faith with the Constitution," intended to offer a liberal alternative to conservative approaches to legal interpretation. He is a past board chairman of the American Constitution Society, a network of scholars, students and practitioners that liberals established as a counterpoint to the conservative Federalist Society. While Republican administrations often have looked for judicial nominees with academic pedigrees to promote conservative legal views, Democrats have concentrated on diversifying the bench with women and minority candidates.

Senate Republicans staged the first successful filibuster of a judicial nominee since 2005 on Thursday, dealing a blow to the Obama administration on the long-stalled nomination of Goodwin Liu to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. ... Republicans have maintained that Liu's liberal views on issues like same-sex marriage and affirmative action put him outside the mainstream, pointing to his writings that additional individual rights can be found in the Constitution. ... Liu also drew Republican ire over his criticism of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in testimony when the conservative judge was nominated to the court. ...

the last-minute furor highlights the discord as they head into what one Israeli official described as a "train wreck" coming their way: a United Nations General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood in September. Mr. Netanyahu, his close associates say, desperately wants Mr. Obama to use the diplomatic muscle of the United States to protect Israel from the vote, not only by vetoing it in the Security Council, but also by leaning hard on America's European allies to get them to reject it as well. Mr. Obama has indicated that he will certainly do the first. But it remains unclear how far Mr. Obama can go to persuade Britain, France and other American allies to join the United States in rejecting the move, particularly as long as Mr. Netanyahu continues to resist endorsing the pre-1967 lines.

U.S. President Barack Obama's endorsement of a longstanding Palestinian demand on the borders of their future state sets the stage for what could be a tense meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday. Netanyahu, who has had strained relations with Obama, headed for Washington saying the president's vision of a Palestinian state on the borders of 1967 -- as part of his vision for an elusive U.S.-brokered peace deal -- could leave Israel "indefensible." The White House talks had never been expected to yield any significant progress to revive long-stalled peace talks, but now that prospect seemed dimmer than ever.

I hereby release into the public domain the following graphics to anyone and everyone to use, totally free, gratis, no rights reserved, etc. ... the ever-so-useful Race Card [and rubber stamp].... Our progressive betters intend to sling plenty of incendiary accusations at us no matter what we do, so we might as well start countering the meme now....

the MSM isn't about The News, it's about The Agenda, and what they do is no different than what they accuse Big Business of doing. Only instead of conspiring through a secret monopoly with other companies to fix prices, they conspire through a secret monopoly of other media outlets to create a version of the truth —which we call The Narrative.... It's a form of Orwellian GroupThink intentionally designed to turn up into down, wrong into right, lies into truth. And it's a testament to how horribly misguided and failed the Left's ideas are that the undeniable power of the MSM hasn't yet been able to turn America into a member of the European Union....

A Tucson, Ariz., SWAT team defends shooting an Iraq War veteran 60 times during a drug raid, although it declines to say whether it found any drugs in the house and has had to retract its claim that the veteran shot first. And the Pima County sheriff scolded the media for "questioning the legality" of the shooting.

The five officers had "no choice but to shoot" when they breached the front door of the house in the 7100 block of South Redwater Drive and saw Guerena holding a rifle, Storie said. The home is on the southwest side, near South Wade and West Los Reales roads. The house was targeted as part of an investigation into home invasions and drug rip-offs. The Guerena house was among homes that "were identified as locations where these activities were being carried out from." No arrests have been made from any of the other homes where SWAT served search warrants

Scores of Australians suspended or sacked for planking have taken to Facebook to vent their frustration. Woolworths, the country's biggest employer, has axed eight employees in three states for performing the potentially dangerous stunt on top of meat grinders, display shelves, trolleys and stacks of milk crates and then boasting about it online. [Why is the unimportant nonsense the first paragraph and the company rightly preventing problems in its headquarters relegated to second? Because Journalists are infants!]

When asked three separate times due to the astounding callousness as it relates to trampling the inherent natural rights of Americans, he emphatically indicated that he would use random house to house checks, adding he felt people will welcome random searches if it means capturing a criminal. Speaking under the condition of anonymity, a local city Police Chief with 30 years experience in law enforcement directly contradicted the Newton County Sheriff's blatant disregard for privacy & liberty, stating that as an American first, such an action is unconscionable and that his allegiance is to the Indiana and federal Constitutions respectively. However, he also concurred that the ruling does now allow for police to randomly search homes should a department be under order by state or federal officials or under a department's own accord.

The letter concludes: "I fear that he is a man with a problem that may make him ill-equipped to lead an institution where women work under his command." "AT HIS BEST" So who is DSK? The tag, a conscious nod to JFK, was first used by the media and his own handlers during Strauss-Kahn's rise to prominence in the early 1990s. He is a socialist who makes no secret of his vast wealth and lavish lifestyle.

Some women avoid wearing skirts for fear of attracting unwanted attention. Others trade whispered tips about overly forward bosses. A 2008 internal review found few restraints on the conduct of senior managers, concluding that "the absence of public ethics scandals seems to be more a consequence of luck than good planning and action." This is life at the International Monetary Fund

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

Amazon announced that eBooks are now the most popular sales format on Amazon.com, outselling the joint sales of hardback and paperback books. Since April 1, 2011, for every 100 print books Amazon has sold, it has sold 105 Kindle editions. It took Amazon just about four years to make that statement come true, and it represents the tipping point.

A man left paralyzed after a car accident was able to stand and take steps after electrical stimulation of his spinal cord

It's time for the American people to stand by our strongest ally, the Jewish State of Israel, and reject this foreign policy blunder of epic proportions. [h/t to cjwk on HillBuzz]

With Mike Huckabee out of the race for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, three well-known politicians, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich, emerge as leaders in Republicans' preferences. Republicans, however, have less intensely positive feelings about these three than they did about Huckabee. Two less well-known potential candidates, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, generate high levels of enthusiasm among Republicans who recognize them. ... Republicans' nomination preferences at this point largely appear to reflect name identification. ... Romney and Palin are essentially tied; Gingrich does slightly less well even though he and Romney have nearly identical name identification. Ron Paul and Bachmann are the only other potential candidates with name recognition above 50%....