Supreme Court Deciding Today If They Will Take Obamacare Case Now; Some of 15 New Obama Taxes; Obama's Flame-Throwing, Violence-inducing Rhetoric; JP Morgan Downgrades Economic Growth Prospects; Obama Cuts Medicare, Not Ryan; Cloward & Piven by Barack Obama;

American Spectator reports:  Occasionally Supreme Court justices receive a "petition for certiorari before judgment" asking them to consider the decision of some District Court before it has been reviewed by a Court of Appeals. Friday's conference schedule includes consideration of one such petition, filed pursuant to Commonwealth of Virginia v. Sebelius.
The Virginia case was, of course, the first legal challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in which the Department of Justice (DOJ) received a major defeat.

Ironically, the DOJ's brief actually  concedes that the constitutionality of the individual mandate "is undoubtedly an issue of great public importance."

If they decide to grant Virginia's petition, it will not be the first time this very exclusive club has produced raised eyebrows and sharp intakes of breath.  http://spectator.org/archives/2011/04/14/supreme-court-to-consider-obam

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Business Insider reports: Here are some of the 15 new Obama taxes identified by Americans for Tax Reform:

• Raising the capital gains and dividends rate from 15% to 20%

• Raising the death tax rate from 35% to 45% and lowering the death tax exemption amount from $5 million ($10 million for couples) to $3.5 million.  This is a $98 billion/ten year tax hike

• Capping the value of itemized deductions at the 28% bracket rate.  This will effectively cut tax deductions for mortgage interest, charitable contributions, property taxes, state and local income or sales taxes, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and unreimbursed employee business expenses.  A new means-tested phaseout of itemized deductions limits them even more.  This is a $321 billion/ten year tax hike

• Massive new taxes on energy, including LIFO repeal, Superfund, domestic energy manufacturing, and many others totaling $120 billion over ten years

• Increasing unemployment payroll taxes by $15 billion over ten years

• A giveaway to the trial lawyers—not letting companies deduct the cost of punitive damages from a lawsuit settlement.  This is a tax hike of $300 million over ten years                 Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/tax-hikes-obama-budget-2011-2#ixzz1JX8h3uGm
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Floyd Reports writes: Obama is a born again deficit cutter. To achieve this miraculous goal [of reducing our deficit] he has a top secret weapon. It is called the “tax expenditure.”
But everyone knows tax increases are bad, so Obama and his team must be thinking that if they changed the name the voters wouldn’t notice. There is a deeper philosophical reason for the changing language, and it has to do with the fundamental difference between his vision and the Republicans’ vision for the future.
If you assume that all money belongs to the government and the people are privileged to get back some of the product of their labor, then the money doled out to the pockets of Americans must be expenditures.  http://floydreports.com/change-you-can-believe-in-tax-hikes-are-now-tax-expenditures/?utm_source=Expose+Obama&utm_campaign=99621a9a8d-EO_04_14_20114_14_2011&utm_medium=email
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The Wall Street Journal opines: Mr. Obama did not deign to propose an alternative to rival Mr. Ryan's plan, even as he categorically rejected all its reform ideas, repeatedly vilifying them as essentially un-American. "Their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America," he said, supposedly pitting "children with autism or Down's syndrome" against "every millionaire and billionaire in our society." Mr. Obama then packaged his poison in the rhetoric of bipartisanship—which "starts," he said, "by being honest about what's causing our deficit." The speech he chose to deliver was dishonest even by modern political standards.
All Medicare decisions will be turned over to and routed through an unelected commission created by ObamaCare—which will supposedly ferret out "unnecessary spending." Is that the same as "waste and abuse"?
Mr. Obama ludicrously claimed that Mr. Ryan favors "a fundamentally different America than the one we've known throughout most of our history." Nothing is likelier to bring that future about than the President's political indifference in the midst of a fiscal crisis.  http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-opinion-commentary.html
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Commentary Magazine writes: As Barack Obama was delivering his speech on the nation’s long-term debt crisis, word came that JP Morgan has radically downgraded its projection of the nation’s short-term prospects for economic growth. Morgan now thinks the economy will grow at an annual rate of 1.4 percent this year. This comes hard on the heels of Macroeconomic Advisers lowering its growth projection for 2011 from 4 percent at the beginning of the year to 1.7 percent today. These aren’t just horrible numbers for the U.S. economy. They are a potential death knell for Barack Obama’s presidency.  http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/04/13/longterm-debt-how-about-shortterm-implosion/
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The NY Post opines: Incoming party chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz complains of Ryan's treatment of Medicare: "This plan would literally be a death trap for seniors." Funny: "Death trap for seniors" applies a whole lot more to the ObamaCare law that Democrats muscled through last year -- which uses Medicare as a piggybank to fund their new entitlement program.

It's Obama who cut Medicare: The Congressional Budget Office reports that, from 2012 to 2021, the Democrats' health-care overhaul will take a colossal $797 billion out of Medicare and related federal health programs to spend on ObamaCare.
In contrast, Ryan's budget keeps Medicare savings in Medicare, using them to extend the program's life.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_real_death_trap_is_obamacare_E5NOBQd05dtW4V48o6KM3H#ixzz1JV6qKkwr

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Floyd Reports: What was not highlighted in the glow of the administration’s back slapping is that there is another statistic that goes back even further than 1984. Today, just 65 percent of men aged 16-to-64 (and just 67 percent of all men) are working, a huge drop from the 85 percent who were typically employed in the 1950s.
Obama is destroying America’s men and setting the stage for all men in our society to live as so many minority men now live.... instead of lifting the minorities up to a higher status. Obama’s oppressive policies are forcing Americans, especially men, to become tax cheats like so many of the officials in the Obama administration. On the path Obama is pushing men onto, they will work odd jobs “off the books” and find it more profitable to hide their relationship to their families in order maximize eligibility for government handouts. Obama is injecting the “inner city” mentality into America’s suburban middle class in hopes of making the whole country dependent on government largesse. [This is the Cloward and Piven strategy I've talked about.  With the thuggish actions now by unions, Community Organizing and Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals are also in play, to America's great peril.  http://floydreports.com/one-third-of-men-are-out-of-work-and-obamas-thrilled/?utm_source=Expose+Obama&utm_campaign=99621a9a8d-EO_04_14_20114_14_2011&utm_medium=email
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CNS News reports: For the week of April 4-10, Obama’s approval rating was 48 percent among those making $2,000 or less per month, and 46 percent among those in each of the three higher income brackets.
While Republicans were never skilled at articulating how free markets offer the best jobs and cheapest products to the poor, Obama is the master.  Even the most naive voter intuitively knows that Obama has impounded our natural resources and printed fake money.  No matter how many welfare programs he tries to create, poor people will not take kindly to the pain they experience at the gas pump and in the supermarket.  If Republicans would do a better job articulating the regressive effects of ethanol and farm subsidies and food commodities, Obama’s lowest approval rating would be among the poor.  http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/gallup-obama-s-approval-drops-below-50-p
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Redstate reports: Here is the latest report from the Wisconsin Farm Bureau regarding inflation on some of the most basic needs in Wisconsin:

• Apples increased 24 cents (18 percent) to $1.52 per pound.
• A gallon of whole milk increased 50 cents (17 percent) to $3.41 per gallon.
• One pound of bagged salad increased 33 cents (15 percent) to $2.48.
• A five-pound bag of flour increased 25 cents (12 percent) to $2.34.
• One pound of ground chuck climbed 32 cents (10 percent) to $3.41.
• http://www.redstate.com/dhorowitz3/2011/04/14/the-poor-arent-buying-obamas-class-warfare/ 

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