Mitt Romney continued to drive a debt-oriented message here on Wednesday morning, extending his “prairie fire” of debt metaphor with the assistance of a prop.

In a nod to the independent voters who pushed the Sunshine State into the Democratic column in 2008, Romney noted that both parties were responsible for pushing the debt to the “incomprehensible” levels – which were represented on a giant prop debt clock behind him.

CONTINUED at MSNBC.

Opponents of a U.S. law they claim may subject them to indefinite military detention for activities including news reporting and political activism persuaded a federal judge to temporarily block the measure.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan yesterday ruled in favor of a group of writers and activists who sued President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Defense Department, claiming a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law Dec. 31, puts them in fear that they could be arrested and held by U.S. armed forces.

The complaint was filed Jan. 13 by a group including former New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges. The plaintiffs contend a section of the law allows for detention of citizens and permanent residents taken into custody in the U.S. on “suspicion of providing substantial support” to people engaged in hostilities against the U.S., such as al-Qaeda.

“The statute at issue places the public at undue risk of having their speech chilled for the purported protection from al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ‘associated forces’ – i.e., ‘foreign terrorist organizations,’” Forrest said in an opinion yesterday. “The vagueness of Section 1021 does not allow the average citizen, or even the government itself, to understand with the type of definiteness to which our citizens are entitled, or what conduct comes within its scope.”

CONTINUED at Bloomberg.

STORY 1: Obama worth as much as $10 million

Three things are apparent from President Obama’s annual financial disclosure statement, released today:

He is a wealthy man, with assets of as much as $10 million.

He has a hefty stake in JPMorgan Chase, the megabank that just made a bad $2 billion bet. Obama has an account worth between $500,000 and $1 million.

Despite the nation’s $15.6 trillion debt, he is a believer in government paper. More than half of his assets are in Treasury bills and notes.

The disclosure statement lists assets and liabilities in dollar ranges, so pinpointing the president’s net worth is difficult. His assets appear to tally between $2.6 million and $9.9 million. He holds a mortgage on his Chicago home of $500,000 to $1 million.

As was clear from Obama’s income tax filing, much of his income continues to roll in from book royalties. The disclosure form lists $100,000 to $1 million in royalties from Dreams From My Father, $100,000 to $1 million from Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, and $50,000 to $100,000 from The Audacity of Hope.

Vice President Biden, on the other hand, isn’t all that wealthy. His financial disclosure statement includes less than $1 million in assets — and as much as $1.5 million in liabilities, including between $500,000 and $1 million on his Wilmington home.

Source: USA Today.

STORY 2: Obama has up to $1 million with JPMorgan Chase

US President Barack Obama has up to $1 million in a JPMorgan Chase checking account, the White House said Tuesday as a controversy deepened over the bank’s $2 billion dollar losses.

Public figures in the United States are required by law to publish their assets and investments to avoid conflicts of interest, and the White House releases disclosures for Obama and Vice President Joe Biden each year.

As well as the between $500,000 and $1 million in the JPMorgan Chase Private Client Asset Management checking account, Obama also has millions of dollars in a variety of other accounts and funds, bonds and treasuries.

The largest holding, according to the disclosures, is between one and five million dollars in US Treasury notes.

Most of Obama’s wealth comes from book royalties, including from his best selling autobiography “Dreams From My Father.”

Obama said during a television interview with ABC’s “The View” broadcast Tuesday that the $2 billion in derivatives losses suffered by JPMorgan proved the need for tighter banking regulation.

He also said that JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon was “one of the smartest bankers we got and they still lost money.”

“They still lost $2 billion dollars and counting precisely because they were making bets in these derivative markets. This is why we passed Wall Street reform.”

The US Justice Department has opened an FBI probe into JPMorgan Chase’s more than $2 billion trading loss, a person familiar with the matter told AFP Tuesday.

News of the investigation came as Dimon, JPMorgan’s embattled chief executive, faced criticism at the company’s annual shareholders meeting in Tampa, Florida, over the shock loss.

Source: Yahoo News.

Living in America is becoming very difficult for anyone with a moral conscience, a sense of justice, or a lick of intelligence. Consider:

We have had a second fake underwear bomb plot, a much more fantastic one than the first hoax. The second underwear bomber was a CIA operative or informant allegedly recruited by al-Qaeda, an organization that US authorities have recently claimed to be defeated, in disarray, and no longer significant.

This defeated and insignificant organization, which lacks any science and technology labs, has invented an “invisible bomb” that is not detected by the porno-scanners. A “senior law enforcement source” told the New York Times that “the scary part” is that “if they build one, they probably built more.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that “the plot itself indicates that the terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people.” Hillary said this while headlines proclaimed that the US continues to murder woman and children with high-tech drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa. The foiled fake plot, Hillary alleged, serves as “a reminder as to why we have to remain vigilant at home and abroad in protecting our nation and in protecting friendly nations and peoples like India and others.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that the fake plot proves the need for warrantless surveillance in order to detect–what, fake plots? In Congress Republican Pete King and Democrat Charles Ruppersberger denounced media for revealing that the plot was a CIA operation, claiming that the truth threatened the war effort and soldiers’ lives.

CONTINUED at Activist Post. Written by Paul Craig Roberts.

Colombia’s Chamber of Representatives has approved a bill that would legalize the cultivation of drugs that grow as plants, bringing to fruition the start of more legislative drug reform efforts to come, as promised by South American leaders during the recent Summit of the Americas.

Colombia’s drug crop legalization bill would make growing marijuana, opium, coca and poppies legal, but drug trafficking, including sales, would remain a severe crime, according to Colombia Reports.

The U.S. is a strong ally of Colombia’s and the Obama administration has provided military support to the country, even going so far as to station U.S. soldiers and drone aircraft at Colombian military bases, ostensibly to help combat drug trafficking networks. The country has historically been a key U.S. asset in the region, so much that they’ve even accepted prior U.S. administrations sending aircraft over Colombian poppy and coca fields to spray the indigenous population with herbicide.

CONTINUED at The Raw Story.

President Barack Obama has compiled a handy to-do list for Congress that, “if acted upon quickly, will create jobs and help restore middle class security,” according to the White House’s blog. And it’s about time. This is most certainly not, as cynics might suggest, another transparent political scheme. After all, these initiatives, the White House claims, enjoy bipartisan support—which, I gather, is meant to impress you, even if it’s not exactly true.

Regrettably, the sentiment of the to-do list does garner bipartisan support and illustrates how cheap populism leads to bad policy and why Washington shouldn’t be in the business of “creating jobs” in the first place.

Obama says passing his to-do list would help create “an economy built to last—one that creates the jobs of the future and makes things the rest of the world buys—not one built on outsourcing, loopholes, and risky financial deals.” History tells us that when government “creates” an economy, it won’t be much of an economy to speak of—but here’s the new plan:

“Reward American Jobs, Not Outsourcing.” Hey, let’s play on the genuine frustration of struggling Americans. Most politicians will latch on to this protectionist notion to some extent. But need it really be repeated that outsourcing, by generating more productivity, creates more wealth and more jobs? On this point, most economists actually agree.

CONTINUED at Reason. Written by David Harsanyi.

ABC News has only released one brief clip of Obama’s conversation about gay marriage today, but it seems fairly clear from the network’s coverage that his announcement amounts to much less than meets the eye. He now believes that gay couples should be able to marry. He doesn’t believe they have a right to do so. This is like saying that black children and white children ought to attend the same schools, but if the people of Alabama reject that notion—what are you gonna do?

The key language in the ABC News write-up is this:

The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own.

On this afternoon’s special broadcast, Jake Tapper echoed that point: “The president said he thought this was a state-by-state issue.”

Well, before Roe v. Wade, abortion was a state-by-state issue, too. So was slavery. There are 44 states in which gay men and women are currently barred from marrying one another. Obama’s position is that, while he would have voted the other way, those 44 states are perfectly within their rights to arbitrarily restrict the access of certain individuals to marriage rights based solely on their sexual orientation.

That is a half-assed, cowardly cop-out. There are currently at least three cases winding their way toward federal courts that address the issue of whether (among other things) the equal protection clause of the constitution guarantees gay men and women the same access to marriage rights as heterosexual men and women—the Proposition 8 case, in which David Boies and Ted Olson challenged California’s ban on gay marriage, and several challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars gay men and woman from receiving federal marriage benefits and allows states to refuse to recognize valid gay marriages. Obama’s Justice Department has admirably declined to defend the constitutionality of DOMA. But the position he enunciated today is in opposition to Boies and Olson: Obama is saying that if he were a judge, he would have rejected Boies and Olson’s constitutional arguments and affirmed the right of Californians to enshrine bigotry in their state constitution.

Equality is not a state-by-state issue. There is no reason other than ignorance and hatred that two men can get married in New York and not North Carolina. At a time when vindictive hucksters are rolling out anti-gay marriage amendments across the nation, and when conflicting state and federal laws portend an insoluble morass of divorce, custody, and estate issues, and when gay Americans are turning to the U.S. Constitution and the courts to seek an affirmation of their humanity, “it’s a state-by-state issue” is a shameful dodge.

Is it a politically wise dodge? Maybe. This was obviously a hastily arranged interview—we’re told that ABC News’ Robin Roberts, who is close to Michelle Obama, was only tapped in the last 48 hours by the White House to come down—designed to clean up the mess left by Biden’s pro-gay marriage comments in as advantageous way as possible. And for Obama to declare that he considers North Carolina and other states’ bans on gay marriage to be unconstitutional would probably energize the GOP base. But those bans are unconstitutional. And anyone who supports their legitimacy—as Obama just did, in no uncertain terms—even if they oppose the policy, is adopting the retrograde position in the contemporary gay marriage debate. Obama is moving backward, not forward.

Source: Gawker. Written by John Cook.

Vice President Joe Biden spoke out forcefully against the Iranian government Tuesday at the Rabbinical Assembly Convention meeting, saying actions taken by the Obama White House were preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. But the Romney campaign was quick to disagree.

Military assistance, coupled with financial and oil sanctions passed by the U.S. and the European Union, would cripple the Iranian economy, Biden promised.

“When we took office, let me remind you, there was virtually no international pressure on Iran. We were the problem,” Biden said. “We were diplomatically isolated in the world, in the region, in Europe.”

Biden continued, “We were neither fully respected by our friends nor feared by our opponents. Today is it starkly, starkly different.”

The other side of the aisle struck back at Biden’s comments, with GOP presidential candidate and presumptive nominee Mitt Romney’s Policy Director Lanhee Chen calling foul on the placement of blame, and stating the vice president’s words were “wrong and completely inappropriate.”

CONTINUED at CNN. Video at link.

President Barack Obama is staying in the gay marriage closet because he doesn’t want to alienate black voters or gay donors.

He’s refusing to confirm or deny that he would use a second term to champion new marriage rules that would allow same-sex couples to get marriage licenses.

“We respect the right of all people to have a personal opinion,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said on May 7 — a day after Vice President Joe Biden endorsed marriage for gays and lesbians.

“The president is the right person to describe his personal views. He said his views on this were evolving, and I don’t have an update on that,” Carney added.

Marriage is a tough dilemma for Obama because his base is deeply split: Strong majorities of black Americans oppose changing marriage rules to endorse same-sex couples. Like many other social conservatives, that community sees marriage as an institution to bind parents together and to their children.

That’s a popular position. Voters in more than 30 states — including liberal California — have used state-wide votes to solidify state support for the traditional view of marriage.

But many gays want to see White House endorsement of same-sex marriage because it would provide additional social validation of their relationships.

CONTINUED at The Daily Caller.