Mortgage lenders are beginning to ease the restrictive lending standards enacted after the housing boom turned to bust, a sign of their rising confidence in the housing market.

Four years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, some states have started using fines paid by BP and its partners to clean up inland water pollution.

First-quarter corporate earnings are getting clipped after Congress allowed a key tax credit to expire at year-end. Google is among the latest to cite the expired research-and-development tax credit for affecting its financial results.

Ahead of the Tape: AT&T is heavily promoting an offering called Next, but the strategy has its drawbacks.

Local authorities have ordered Toyota Motor Corp. and its striking workers in India to end their feud and resume normal operations.

The head of General Motors' North American operations, Alan Batey, said April U.S. vehicle sales are on pace for "a good month."

UKRAINIAN PRIME MINISTER Arseniy Yatsenyuk, left, says he's going to find and punish those distributing leaflets ordering Jews in eastern Ukraine to register with pro-Russian separatists, as Sergey Kislyak, right, the Russian ambassador to Ukraine, calls the fliers an 'outrageous provocation.' Russian ambassador blames Ukraine militia for violence, denies takeoverUkraine, Russia trade blame for eastern shootout Pope urges faithful to pray for Syria, Ukraine in Easter message

Feds hit after auctioning Wyo. horses for slaughter Western states strategize to control federal land

It was Wednesday, shortly before Senator Rand Paul’s bravura 13-hour filibuster, the Jimmy Stewart star turn in Paul’s crusade to have the Constitution ban a bogeyman of his own making: the killing of American citizens on American soil by America’s armed forces — a scandal that clearly cries out for action, having occurred exactly zero times in the 20 years since jihadists commenced hostilities by bombing the World Trade Center.

At a hearing of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Ted Cruz was grilling Attorney General Eric Holder. Cruz seemed beside himself — in the theatrical spirit of the day — over Holder’s refusal to concede that the imaginary use of lethal force conjured up by Paul would be, under any and all circumstances, unconstitutional. The attorney general preferred the fuzzier term “inappropriate” — at least until Senator Cruz finally browbeat him into saying that by “inappropriate” he meant “unconstitutional.”

Keep reading this post . . .

Around the Pentagon, the budget cutters have put away their knives and are reaching for axes. In times like these, every service naturally circles the wagons around its share of the budget pie. The stress is so great that otherwise smart people take incredibly silly stands. Last week, for instance, the former chief of naval operations, Admiral Gary Roughead, published a paper that calls for cutting the Army in half and leaving the Navy’s budget untouched. He sums up the logic for this advice in a few simple words: “The force we propose accepts risk in the burden we are placing on our Army and Marine Corps.” Admiral Roughead, unfortunately, fails to tell us what risk he is accepting in the nation’s behalf. Let me do it for him. The risk he is taking on is summed up in one word: defeat.

A combined Air Force–Navy effort popularly known as Air-Sea Battle takes a seemingly more reasoned approach. At its base, Air-Sea Battle calls for purchasing expensive new weapons (lots of them) so as to clear the sea-lanes of enemies (that don’t yet exist), and to be able to fight through any enemy’s air and coastal defenses. These proposals, however, fail to answer a huge strategic question: To what purpose? After you have opened the sea-lanes and broken through an enemy’s defense, what do you do if that enemy refuses to surrender? In the past, we carried out these missions in order to open the door for the Army and Marines to enter a country and defeat an enemy force.

Keep reading this post . . .

I shall leave it to others to argue the legal and constitutional questions surrounding drones, but they are not without practical application. For the last couple of years, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, has had Predator drones patrolling the U.S. border. No, silly, not the southern border. The northern one. You gotta be able to prioritize, right? At Derby Line, Vt., the international frontier runs through the middle of the town library and its second-floor opera house. If memory serves, the stage and the best seats are in Canada, but the concession stand and the cheap seats are in America. Despite the zealots of Homeland Security’s best efforts at afflicting residents of this cross-border community with ever more obstacles to daily life, I don’t recall seeing any Predator drones hovering over Non-Fiction E–L. But, if there are, I’m sure they’re entirely capable of identifying which delinquent borrower is a Quebecer and which a Vermonter before dispatching a Hellfire missile to vaporize him in front of the Large Print Romance shelves.

I’m a long, long way from Rand Paul’s view of the world (I’m basically a 19th-century imperialist a hundred years past sell-by date), but I’m far from sanguine about America’s drone fever. For all its advantages to this administration — no awkward prisoners to be housed at Gitmo, no military casualties for the evening news — the unheard, unseen, unmanned drone raining down death from the skies confirms for those on the receiving end al-Qaeda’s critique of its enemies: As they see it, we have the best technology and the worst will; we choose aerial assassination and its attendant collateral damage because we are risk-averse, and so remote, antiseptic, long-distance, computer-programmed warfare is all that we can bear. Our technological strength betrays our psychological weakness.

Keep reading this post . . .

We are now firmly ensconced in the brutal Age of the Sequester, and things in America are grave. The federal government, we learned on Wednesday, is so strapped for cash that the president has been forced to cut off the People’s access to the home he’s borrowing from them. He didn’t want to have to do this, naturally — “particularly during the popular spring touring season.” But then Congress just had to go and acquiesce in measures that the president himself had suggested and signed into law. How beastly! We axed 2.6 percent from a $44.8 trillion budget, and now the president can’t even afford the $18,000 per week necessary to retain the seven staff members who facilitate citizens’ enjoying self-guided tours around the White House.

The executive mansion is not in that much trouble, of course. It’s certainly not in sufficiently dire straits for Air Force One ($181,757 per hour) to be grounded, or to see the executive chef ($100,000 per year) furloughed, or to cut back on the hours of the three full-time White House calligraphers ($277,050 per year for the trio), or to limit the invaluable work of the chief of staff to the president’s dog ($102,000 per year), or to trim his ridiculous motorcade ($2.2 million). If Ellen DeGeneres wants another dancercize session or Spain holds another clothing sale, the first family will be there before you can say “citizen executive.” Fear ye not, serfs: Austerity may be the word of the week, but the president is by no means in any danger of being forced to live like the president of a republic instead of like a king.

Keep reading this post . . .

So here we are in the early dawn of the Age of Sequester, and the howls of rage are strangely subdued. Sure, Robert Reich is jumping up and down, and a few members of the bobblehead-pundit set are doing their thing, but, so far, there is no widespread public outcry over the “cuts”—which aren’t really cuts, of course, in most cases. Politically speaking, the sequester is a far tamer beast than, say, the Clinton–Gingrich government shutdown, an episode during which Republicans got burned, and burned but good.

As one insightful observer put it, the very modest reduction in the growth of government spending is roughly equivalent to an alcoholic switching from Guinness Extra Stout to Heineken Light, and while the ripples of economic anguish may be felt acutely by those closest to the federal cash flow — government employees and contractors — the general public seems at the moment to be taking the suspension of White House tours in stride.

Keep reading this post . . .

This week, the world was rocked by the news that an infant born in Mississippi with HIV has apparently been cured: The child tested positive for the disease several times in the first month after her birth, while she was receiving aggressive antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, but now, at the age of 23 months, she shows no sign of HIV.

This development points to a hopeful way forward for infants who contract HIV during gestation or at birth, but almost all of them live not in Mississippi, but in places like Mali and Namibia. Yet thanks to the United States government and private benefactors, prompted by President George W. Bush, many of those children and their mothers do have access to some HIV/AIDS treatment programs.

Keep reading this post . . .

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(CNSNews.com) - If you lost your job, how long would it be before you couldn't pay your bills?

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For its second season, the creators of the FX series "The Americans" have chosen a new source for insight into the Cold War during the Reagan years ? one Lt. Col. Oliver North.

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Writing in the New York Review of Books, historian Tim Snyder takes a look at where things stand in Ukraine:On paper, Ukraine is now a dictatorship. President Viktor Yanukovych, in having the deputies of his Party of Regions endorse an extraordinary packet of legislation, has arrogated decisive political power to himself. After hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians spent weeks in the cold demonstrating for basic human rights and a stronger association with Europe, the president has responded with a violation of human rights and a rather sad imitation of Russia.In procedure and in content the laws ?passed? by the Ukrainian Read More ...

Thank God for Andrew Cuomo. His rant Friday night, insisting that people who seek to defend the dignity of human life of the unborn and the sick and elderly are extremists, and are not fit to live in the state of New York is telling. This banishment fantasy, of course, includes anyone who believes Catholic Church teaching on human life. A few things to observe about what he said: Look how far we have come since 1984. On Sept. 13 of that year, another Governor Cuomo, Andrew?s father, Mario, famously laid out his contention that being personally opposed to abortion Read More ...

Over at Salon, Matt Valentine feels hard done by. After he "dared to critique gun activists? agenda," he writes, mean conservatives picked on him. Those conservatives included yours truly, who, Valentine records, accused himof making several improbable ?predictions? about what will happen in Texas if the state legislature removes current restrictions on open carry. Actually I made no predictions whatsoever. I described some real-life incidents involving open carry, and discussed the way people generally behave when they see or hold a weapon (These aren?t predictions, but rather observations documented through 40 years of empirical research, conducted by social scientists at Read More ...

I emailed some pro-life leaders and friends in New York for their reactions to Gov. Cuomo?s remarks insisting there is no room in the Empire State for those who seek to defend the most innocent of human lives. Not knowing the criminal penalties to come, I?m protecting their names. One friend says:The governor has an unfortunate tendency towards this kind of absolutist rhetoric. Just a few years ago, he declared that anyone who opposed redefining marriage was un-American. If this is a prelude to his re-election campaign, then it's going to be an ugly year, and maybe Read More ...

Charles Krauthammer praised the president's NSA speech as the "best use of Obama's rhetorical powers of dazzling with very little content since the '08 campaign."On Friday night's Special Report, Krauthammer characterized President Obama's reforms to the United States' surveillance as "90 percent smoke and mirrors, and very little substantive change, which is what we need." Due to the programs' importance, the president recognized that any major changes would have risked American security, despite a big push from Democrats to do so."Overall, I give him an A-minus, and if I were a leftie, I'd be upset," Krauthammer concluded.

This is just sad. 2nd Campaign #Fail today: @PryorForSenate uses podium placard linking to Cotton’s site. #MinorOversight pic.twitter.com/rsvKv35co0 ? David Ray (@DavidARay) February 14, 2014 You see, if you click on the “http://www.TheRealTomCottonRecord.com/” link seen on the podium sign you get… redirected to Tom Cotton’s campaign website. His actual, real campaign website. This pretty much means that Senator Mark Pryor is giving his opponent free | Read More »

We’re making some behind the scenes tweaks and changes here at RedState over the weekend. Beginning at 4:00 p.m. ET, the front page will be in read only mode. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but we’re trying to improve the user experience around here. So read-only mode is necessary as we transition the back engine of the site.

On today's edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the UAW's efforts to unionize a VW plant in Tennessee, Senator Bob Corker's 11th hour bombshell and why the left will never support the solution to income inequality.

The more astute ones will only need this to get my point… Stop #commoncore #refusethetest #edreform pic.twitter.com/OOlsRil9QC ? Heather Poland (@TeachrPerspctve) February 13, 2014   …but let’s walk it through anyway. This is not a post on the merits* of Common Core: it’s a post on how people are reacting to it. Which is to say, badly. For people outside the political bubble, Common Core | Read More »

In Oregon, a baker got in trouble for not wanting to bake a cake for a gay union. In New Mexico, a photographer likewise found herself on the wrong side of the law by not wanting to take pictures of a gay wedding. In Colorado, a baker faces fines for not wanting to bake a cake for a gay wedding. In each of those cases | Read More »

What a difference six years makes. The above video, released tonight by The Heritage Foundation, shows two different faces of Barack Obama when it comes to executive branch. In 2008, then-candidate Obama said that America's "biggest problems" had to do with George Bush "trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch."

Dan Gainor relayed to me that Sunday's New York Times hasn't a whiff of Easter on its front page -- not even in its blurbs at the bottom, saved for epic stories like "U.N. Cholera Struggle in Haiti." Above that is a depressing story about a 12-year-old Ecuadorean girl who committed suicide in Mexico after a second failed attempt at illegal immigration into America.

But it could be worse. Jim Romenesko reports from marijuana-addled Colorado that the Denver Post had nothing on Easter, but a huge writeup on "Welcome to Weed Country": 

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The parasite has out grown its host and it can?t live on its own. We are witnessing the convergence of multiple mistake streams combining into one river of destruction. We have a ruling clique concerned only with maintaining its power supported by a dependent class that wants what it wants now not later. And they are employing public sector unions that want to negotiate feather-bed contracts with the same people they help elect. All empowered by a mass of low information voters who either don?t pay any attention to what is going on or accept anything they see, hear or absorb from the Corporations Once Known as the Mainstream Media, late night talk shows or the Daily Show as real news.

BOHEMIA, NY, Aug 2 - Barak Obama's "ill advised" summer campaign tour is in full swing as he tries to convince Americans that he has successfully turned the economy around. "But a record 46.2 million citizens living in poverty - including an overwhelming number of seniors - will find the president's overly optimistic assessment of living conditions in these United States hard to swallow," according to Dan Weber, president of the Association of Mature American Citizens.

Okay. Let me get this straight. The people who drafted the legislation --“ the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- ObamaCare --“ don't want it. Staff are bailing out of Congress.

Shelby Steele is the author of White Guilt. I found the book fascinating especially after the uprising brought about by the self destruction of little Trayvon. All of a sudden America was faced with the illogical cries that everything is unfair in this country because of color. And I had my own observations on this matter but it was interesting to read the remarks brought by a so called black conservative who claimed to live through the bad times in America. So let's see if we can understand what this is all about.

Someone in the White House is channeling John C. Calhoun.

By Dr. Sylvain Charat It happened on a cold of day during the last French presidential campaign in a small industrial town called Florange, in Eastern France. On February 12th, 2012, the campaigning and would-be president Francois Hollande climbed a small truck ladder to get on the roof.

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