Earlier this week the most corrupt federal appeals court on the planet also known as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals angrily threw a gauntlet, also known as a hissy fit, at the feet of the Obama administration.

Their demands?

Judge Jerry Smith, a Republican appointee on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, was part of a three-judge panel hearing arguments in a lawsuit over the Affordable Care Act when he issued his unusual demand, saying the Justice Department must submit the three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday, according to a lawyer who was in the courtroom. The demand was first reported by CBS News.

The Department of Justice, ever deferential to court orders, delivered the requested three-page, single spaced letter in a timely fashion. As much as I'd love to report to you that it said "I <3 Obamacare." over and over again to fill up the space, the DOJ treated the order with far more deference than it deserved.

Here is part of their response:

2. In considering such challenges, Acts of Congress are “presumptively constitutional,” Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC, 507 U.S. 1301, 1301 (1993), and the Supreme Court stressed that the presumption of constitutionality accorded to Acts of Congress is “strong.” United States v. Five Gambling Devices Labeled in Part .. Mills,” and Bearing Serial Nos. 593-221,346 U.S. 441 , 449 (1953); see, e.g., Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1, 28 (2005) (noting that the “congressional judgment” at issue was “entitled to a strong presumption of validity”). The Supreme Court has explained: “This is not a mere polite gesture. It is a deference due to deliberate judgment by constitutional majorities of the two Houses of Congress that an Act is within their delegated power or is necessary and proper to execution of that power.”

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I hope the Obama administration stands firm on this one. It was only a matter of time until the church upped the political ante, and of course a low-life like Newt Gingrich is only too happy to jump on the bandwagon. The American church's hierarchy climbed under the covers with the right wing decades ago, and they're all too happy to tear down the Democratic candidates on command:

During church services on Sunday, Catholics around the country were read a blistering letter assailing the Obama administration for an "assault on religious liberty" in the form of a coming requirement that most church-linked organizations - among them hospitals, schools and universities - offer birth control coverage as part of their health care plans.

Despite strong lobbying from religious groups, the Health and Human Services Department announced earlier this month that most church-linked groups will not be exempt from the requirements - which also mandate that no co-pay be charged for contraceptive services - though they will have an extra year to comply beyond the August 1 deadline.

Churches themselves (along with any other employer that is explicitly focused on offering a religious message, and which primarily employs those who believe in that message) are exempt from the requirement.

Religious groups were outraged by the decision - saying it forced employers at church-linked organizations to violate their conscience - and on Sunday Catholic leaders took their complaints directly to parishioners. As Business Insider reported, similar letters were read in churches around the country complaining that "the Obama Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation's first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty."

In an appearance on "CBS This Morning" Monday, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich brought up the letters, using them as an opportunity to attack both the Obama administration and Republican rival Mitt Romney.

"The Obama administration has just launched an attack on Christianity so severe that every single church in Florida had a letter read from the bishops yesterday all across the country - Cardinal [Timothy] Dolan was leading an effort to explain that, literally, freedom of religion in America is now being attacked by Obama," he said. "The Romneycare does the same thing. Romneycare has tax-paid abortions. Romneycare put Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in America, in the bill. No right to life group's in the bill. Planned Parenthood is. Romney himself approved taking away a conscience clause from Catholic hospitals."

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This is the first time ever that the feds are regulating new power plants, which of course is a much bigger carrot to get owners to comply with strict standards. This is very good news for the environment, assuming the lobbyists don't neuter it before implementation:

In one of the most significant reversals of Bush-era policy, the Obama administration plans [this week] to issue greenhouse pollution limits for new power plants, a major step in the fight against global warming. The new rule — which will go into effect in 2013 — confirms the end of the era of dirty coal-fired power plants:

The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits between 800 and 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.

Since the late 1990s, “natural gas has been the fuel of choice for the majority of new generating units,” and in the 2000s, wind power generation also grew significantly. With the high cost of its toxic pollution from mine to plant, coal has been losing out to cleaner sources of fuel in the electric utility sector. Although few new coal plants have been built in the last twenty years, aging plants — some built in the 1930s — still produce about 40 percent of U.S. electricity, and about 80 percent of carbon pollution from the power sector.

It's bad news for the coal industry -- and the communities which are economically dependent on coal:

The rule announced Tuesday could either derail or jump-start plans for 15 new coal-fired power plants in 10 states, depending on when they start construction. Those that break ground in the next year would be exempt from the new limit. Those that start construction later will have to eventually comply with the rule.

Existing power plants, even if they make changes that increase emissions, would not be covered at all. And new ones would have years to meet the standard and could average their emissions over three decades in order to meet the threshold.

But eventually, all coal-fired power plants would need to install equipment to capture half of their carbon pollution. While not commercially available now, the EPA projects that by 2030, no new coal-fired power plant will be built without carbon capture and storage.

The coal industry has been publicly supportive of carbon capture and sequestration (CSS), but it's likely that now that a requirement that will diminish or even destroy them is actually pending, they will not go quietly into that good night. Be prepared to fight if you want to stop climate change.

Oh dear. This means that the administration still plans to make God-fearing Catholic organizations indulge in accounting tricks that will still result in the same thing: Women insured through those organizations will get free access to contraceptives. How awful.

Let us stop here for a moment to think of all the people in this country who did not want to pay to bomb innocent people in Iraq, who believed with all their hearts that the war was immoral and a crime against God, and yet no one (especially the Republicans in Congress) gave a damn what they thought:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration took another step on Friday to enforce a federal mandate for health insurance coverage of contraceptives, announcing how the new requirement would apply to the many Roman Catholic hospitals, universities and social service agencies that insure themselves.

In such cases, the administration said, female employees and students will still have access to free coverage of contraceptives.

The coverage will be provided by the companies that review and pay claims — “third-party administrators” — or by “some other independent entity,” it said.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the government would guarantee women access to contraceptives “while accommodating religious liberty interests.”

The new proposal escalates the election-year fight over the administration’s birth control policy.

President Obama had previously announced what he described as an “accommodation” for religiously affiliated organizations that buy commercial insurance but object, for religious reasons, to covering contraceptives and sterilization procedures. In these cases, the White House said, the insurer “will be required to provide contraception coverage to women free of charge.”

On Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services went a step further and said it would propose a similar requirement for group health plans sponsored by religious organizations that insure themselves.

The new proposal did not mollify Republicans in Congress.

As a Catholic, I'm getting a little tired of right-wingers like Newt Gingrich spewing nonsense like this.

Newt Gingrich sought to make inroads among religious voters Sunday, accusing President Obama of having “basically declared war on the Catholic Church.”

Gingrich, who converted to Catholicism himself in 2009 (his third wife, Callista, sings in a Catholic choir), was speaking about the Obama administration decision this week to require church-affiliated employers to cover birth control drugs in their health plans, regardless of religious beliefs.

Gingrich, in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, said the decision represented “a radical Obama administration imposing secular rules on religion.”

Since Newt is a new convert, he might be surprised to learn that,

Some 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptive methods banned by the church, research published on Wednesday showed.

And,

A Le Moyne College/Zogby International national poll in 2007 found 67 percent of American Catholics disagree with the church teaching that artificial birth control is wrong.

And,

In particular, Catholic voters do not approve of schools teaching abstinence-only programs in schools. Six in ten (64 percent) oppose requiring high school sex education programs to only teach abstinence. They also believe insurance companies should be required to cover and pharmacists required to sell birth control pills. Three-quarters of Catholics support requiring health insurance plans to cover birth control pills (75 percent). Nearly eight in ten (78 percent) oppose allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions.

Let's get real, shall we? The U.S. government is actually on the same side of this "war" as most American Catholics. Those "secular rules" Gingrich whines about the Obama administration enforcing are already being embraced by church members, whether he knows it or not.

What really annoys me is that right-wing partisans like Gingrich side with the Vatican when it's convenient and ignore it when it's not. Want to discuss the Vatican's position on the death penalty, the Iraq War, global warming, torture or Social Security and Medicare, Newt?

Didn't think so.

One of the richest men in the country, ranking in the 0.006 percent of Americans, likes to accuse the President of creating an “entitlement society.” Mitt Romney, the heir apparent, next in line GOP nominee … is against entitlement.

When I hear “entitlement society” I think, “country club.” But When Mitt uses that phrase he doesn’t mean rich guys like him, given all the advantages of wealth, who are now enjoying its comforts – he means the rest of us. Yes, Mitt is against an “entitlement society” because that involves too many people and not just him and his ilk. It’s not the “entitlement” he contests – it’s the entire “society” part.

At the Monday Florida debate last week Mitt noted that under Gingrich’s tax plan Mitt would pay no taxes at all. Gingrich responded with, “Well, if that -- and if you created enough jobs doing that -- it was Alan Greenspan who first said the best rate, if you want to create jobs for capital gains, is zero.”

So rich people whose money makes their money (it’s literally capital gaining) are so fortunate they get to hire other people to pay taxes for them? Rich people with their alleged mythical power to create jobs even get to outsource their tax obligations to poor saps working for a living?

This is the prosperity gospel as a Super PAC-funded marketing blitz. Money is next to godliness and poverty is the fault of the poor for not being better people.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the Romans job-killing communists.

“Contrary to the President's constant disparagement of people in business,” former George W. Bush budget director Gov. Mitch Daniels said in his State of the Union response last week, “It's one of the noblest of human pursuits.” This is one of those phrases you (usually) will only hear in business school (funnier if it was one of those rip-off for-profit colleges). Business is one of the noblest of human pursuits? Noble as in aristocratic? That phrase, “noble pursuits,” is usually applied to an avocation not paying much but rewarding in other ways: teachers; firefighters; nurses; foster parents; soldiers; community leaders; social workers; mentors; rescue workers; care givers; farmers. Or to anyone who’s honest, shows up every day and works hard. That’s a noble pursuit.

Are the wealthy really so sensitive they need Mitch Daniels to make them feel better about themselves in a spiritual sense? What they’re doing not only pays off with privilege and cash – it also has to be venerable from a moral perspective? How much reward does one group need? They own everything and they also need to be thanked?!

The rich are not just over-paid – they’re over valued. And generous welfare recipients.

As Senator Tom Coburn points out in his damning Nov. 2011 report, “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous,” we are a wealthfare state. It reads, “This reverse Robin Hood style of wealth redistribution is an intentional effort to get all Americans bought into a system where everyone appears to benefit.” In other words: We subsidize the rich by telling the poor to pay their fair share.

It’s been a strange three years under the Obama administration. First the GOP was against empathy. Yes, the party had to vehemently opposed seeing the plight of your fellow human beings because Obama was for it. Now their new hot button word? Fairness. Obama used the word fairness in his third State of the Union. And now the GOP has decided to be against fairness and celebrate inequality as being the thing that makes America great.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the three wise men were shareholders.

The prosperity gospel is not America. It’s not democratic. It’s not even Christian. It’s greed warped into being a virtue by the greedy.

The rich aren’t better, they’re just richer.

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In an interview with ABC News on Wednesday morning, Willard once again rewrote history on his position about the government's rescue of the auto industry. He's been playing this little game for months.

Let's be clear. Willard opposed the bailout, which began under George W. Bush and continued under President Obama. Period.

“My view with regards to the bailout was that, whether it was by President Bush or by President Obama, it was the wrong way to go,” he said, during the event at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, sponsored by CNBC.

The problem is, if there hadn't been a bailout, there would be no auto industry.

“Without the intervention of the Bush and Obama administrations, we would have seen the liquidation of both Chrysler and probably GM,” Cole said in August. “That would have taken the whole industry down. We would have seen a disaster in terms of the job impact.”

Something in the range of one million jobs would've been lost.

Willard wants to take credit for favoring a managed bankruptcy -- which is something the Obama administration proposed early on -- and simultaneously bash the bailout.

This is much like bragging about the fact you opposed using a defibrillator on a patient who's heart had stopped--but were right about the antibiotics he was put on later.

Amazing that he keeps getting away with it.

The Obama White House continues to push for a settlement that would let bankers avoid being punished - or even investigated - for a wave of mortgage-related crimes that includes perjury, tax evasion, and several types of fraud.[1]

Despite the President's new-found populism - rhetorically, anyway - officials in his Administration continue to push an unfair deal designed to conceal the financial Crime of the Century.

The Financial Times reported on new details of the proposed settlement, whose stated purpose is to punish banks and reduce the amount of money owed by underwater homeowners. But it's increasingly clear that the deal wouldn't help homeowners very much and wouldn't punish bankers at all.

Banks could lower those loan balances by reducing the amount owed on mortgages owned by investors and not by the bank itself. That's what Bank of America is accused of doing as part of an $8 billion settlement it reached in 2008. This deal would set the stage for a repeat performance.

This proposed deal is still unfair, unjust, and very unbalanced. And it has the Administration's fingerprints all over it.

Unfair

Banks deceived investors into buying bundled mortgages (mortgage-backed securities) that they knew were worth far less than they were paying. Now, as part of this settlement deal, they could shaft those investors again. Many of the investors are from the 99 percent, not the one percent. As the head of the Association of Mortgage Investors told the Financial Times, "It would be a pyrrhic victory to settle the mortgage crisis with the money of public institutions, pension funds and seniors."

The proposed deal would force banks to meet a certain dollar limit for reducing mortgage principal. But it's designed to let them use other people's money - mortgage investors' money - to reach that limit. They would have to reduce principals by a larger amount if they were using someone else's money.

Taking $1.00 off their own books might get them $1.00 closer to their goal, while using investors' money money only "earn" them fifty cents. Is that really supposed to encourage them to do the right thing?

Ask yourself: What if you were given a choice between spending a thousand dollars of your own money to pay a fine - or two thousand dollars of someone else's? (And remember: You're a banker, so don't let conscience influence your decision.) What would you do?

The money should come out of the banks' balance sheets, not those of mortgage investors that in many cases they've already defrauded. Even that isn't entirely fair: Many pension funds and other institutional investors hold bank stock, too, as do unwary private investors. They've also been defrauded by bank executives. But someone has to pay the price for trusting these bankers and tolerating their continued presence in the executive suite.

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How can it be that a runaway teenager is deported to Colombia without even a cross-check of her identity? Here's how it happened, via WFAA.com:

News 8 learned that Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Colombia, who had warrants for her arrest.

So ICE officials stepped in.

News 8 has learned ICE took the girl's fingerprints, but somehow didn't confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.

"She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was," Turner said.

Through her granddaughter’s Facebook messages, Turner says she tracked Jakadrian down.

There's really no excuse for this. I don't care how much of a priority it is to enforce immigration laws. They should be enforced with accuracy, not expediency. And to require her to pay for the ticket home? Ridiculous.

Now she is pregnant, being held in a detention facility in Bogotá. God knows what has happened to that child after she was deported and now, but whatever it is, it shouldn't ever have happened. ICE likes to brag about their numbers and say they're deporting criminals and repeat offenders, but it seems that they're a bit sloppy about how they're doing it. They fingerprinted this child, for heavens' sake! How hard would it have been to compare her fingerprints to those of the person whose name she used before sending her out of the country? I wonder if they ever thought the absence of a Columbian accent would have been a clue? Evidently not.

Even if the Houston police screwed up, and I believe they did, the responsibility and ultimate screwup sits firmly with this administration's immigration authorities. An apology and restitution is the least they should do.

Step up, DHS. Get this girl home. Now.

Update: CNN just ran this report at 9 AM this morning. Note how the entire story is being twisted now to blame the victim. It's HER fault she's in Colombia. Somehow she plotted to use someone's name who was never in the ICE system? According to CNN, she jacked the whole system to get from Texas to Colombia. They can't imagine why, of course, but it's clearly this 14-year old (now 15) African-American teenager's fault that she is being held in the system in Colombia after being deported from this country.

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As Bernie Sanders says in that clip, we're picking winners and losers. Sure we are. And the Republicans are working hard to make solar energy a big loser. In the case of Solyndra, they're also hoping to smear the Obama administration with the "crony politician" label at the same time.

This Solyndra "story" is a non-story and just another smear, but as digby points out:

Progressives are very concerned that the right isn't out there misinforming the rest of the public and go to great lengths to "set the record straight." By contrast, during the Bush years, when liberals criticized the president, the other side would say "Yeah. So what? He did the right thing." They'd stage a symbolic hissy fit every once in a while to prove their moral/patriotic bonafides, usually over a perceived slight from a hippie somewhere, but they really didn't care if the left "understood" what they were doing or if they approved. In fact, they consciously try to offend them.

It's not limited to the Bush years. They still do it, every single day. Cheer the death of a hypothetical 30-year old? It's totally justified because "Obamacare is socialism." Climb into bed with Big Pharma? No problem, as long as you feign outrage that someone would dare suggest you can be bought for a mere $5,000.

Add to that the right-wing custom of ritual defamation, and the Solyndra smears begin to make more sense, particularly when it's clear what constituencies the right serves.

Still, as a lefty-type, it seems to me that facts do and should matter, so here is the Solyndra non-story/scandal in a nutshell, summarized from this Think Progress timeline.

The Solyndra loan guarantee process began in 2006, under the Bush administration, as part of a loan guarantee program under the newly-passed Energy Policy Act of 2006. It took three years for those loan guarantees to be approved, despite the efforts of the Bush administration to push the process in order to have something to show for their energy policy efforts. In that three-year period, the market changed for alternatives to silicon-based solar panels after China flooded the market with cheap silicon-based panels.

Free markets being what they are, Solyndra failed.

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