Jonathan Cohn, TNR
One of these days, a dire prediction about Obamacare will come true. Today isn’t it.The Administration on Thursday released new information about the “Federally Facilitated Marketplaces.” Under Obamacare, every state must have an exchange—a place where people without employer-sponsored insurance can find insurance. Some states are running their own exchanges. Others are asking the federal government to do most, or all of, the work. Those federal-run exchanges are the FFMs.

Paul Krugman, NY Times
Like many observers, I usually read reports about political goings-on with a sort of weary cynicism. Every once in a while, however, politicians do something so wrong, substantively and morally, that cynicism just won’t cut it; it’s time to get really angry instead. So it is with the ugly, destructive war against food stamps.

Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
Obama says enough is enough. He doesn’t want us on “a perpetual wartime footing.” Well, the Cold War lasted 45 years. The war on terror, 12 so far. By Obama’s calculus, we should have declared the Cold War over in 1958 and left Western Europe, our Pacific allies, the entire free world to fend for itself — and consigned Eastern Europe to endless darkness.

The Truth-o-Meter says: Pants on Fire! | 'Dhimmitude' on page 107 of the health care law exempts Muslims, claims chain email

Have you ever heard of "Dhimmitude"? A chain email claims "dhimmitude" is on page 107 of the health care law, and it means Muslims will be exempt from the health care law. We don’t want to keep you in suspense, so we’ll tell it to you straight: The word "dhimmitude" is not in the health care law. We know this because of our previous reporting on the law, and also because we did a full-text search on both the main law (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) and a companion law (the Health Care ...

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Michael Grunwald, Time
Let’s stipulate that it’s totally uncool for IRS agents to single out Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. But let’s also stipulate that it’s totally absurd for Tea Party groups, as well as liberal groups and any other blatantly political groups to qualify as tax-exempt “social-welfare organizations.”What social-welfare organization really means, in the Tea Party context, is “tax-exempt political organization that doesn’t have to reveal its donors.” It’s a dodge. In other contexts—the...

Carl Cameron, FOX News
FOX News' Carl Cameron reports what the impact of recent Obama administration scandals may be on future elections.---CARL CAMERON, FNC: The Obama Administration’s scandals over Benghazi, spying on reporters, and the IRS’s targeting of conservatives has the GOP reinvigorated and Democrats worried:REINCE PREIBUS, Fmr. RNC Chairman: They’re seeing that you’ve got a scandal-plagued White House, which has an effect on all Democrats across the country.

The Truth-o-Meter says: False | Steve King says Ronald Reagan’s 1986 "amnesty act" led to 15 million votes for Barack Obama

During a House floor speech, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, expressed frustration that one of his conservative heroes, President Ronald Reagan, had signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, a 1986 law that gave legal status to many illegal immigrants who were then residing in the United States. King is a leading congressional critic of efforts to legalize undocumented immigrants. "Ronald Reagan’s signature on the 1986 amnesty act brought about Barack Obama’s election," King said in the May 23, 2013, speech. King’s point was that a side effect of the 1986 law was to boost the numbers ...

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Corinne Purtill, Global Post
The London Islamic Cultural Society sits on a quiet street in Wood Green, a multiethnic, working-class neighborhood in north London.Next door is the Greek Cypriot Women’s Organisation and across the street is the Gospel Centre, an evangelical Christian church with a billboard depicting a smiling Jesus in an England soccer jersey and the caption “No one saves better.”But on Tuesday, only the mosque bore a warning to its members on the door.

Maureen Dowd, New York Times
David Plouffe told Alter that Obama was “better suited to politics in Scandinavia than here,” meaning, Alter writes, “that he was a logical and unemotional person in an illogical and emotional capital.” Ironic, given that it was Obama’s emotional speeches that precociously vaulted him into the Oval Office.

Ruby Cramer, BuzzFeed
In southeast Queens, at the corner of Merrick and Francis Lewis boulevards, the Laurelton Memorial Day parade is assembling outside a Duane Reade, though you’d barely know it. Just before 9 a.m., when the annual march is set to begin, the parking lot is quiet, and the crowd of Boy Scouts and drummers, residents and veterans, is scattered, waiting for the real parade hubbub to get going.“Did you think it started at 10?” says one woman, on the phone with a tardy friend.

Jonathan Easley, The Hill
The House Judiciary Committee is investigating whether Attorney General Eric Holder lied under oath during his May 15 testimony on the Justice Department’s (DOJ) surveillance of reporters, an aide close to the matter told The Hill.The panel is looking at a statement Holder made during a back and forth with Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) about whether the DOJ could prosecute reporters under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Daniel Klaidman, The Daily Beast
It was Friday, May 17, and officials at the Department of Justice had gotten word that The Washington Post was working on an explosive story: a reporter had obtained an affidavit for a search warrant to seize a Fox News journalist’s personal emails.

Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post
Mark O’Mara is doing a masterful job of painting Trayvon Martin as a thug who deserved to die at the hands of his client George Zimmerman. Some of the photos and text messages from the unarmed 17-year-old’s cellphone released by O’Mara last week play right into the rabid hate inspired by Trayvon’s killing. And I’ll admit to being disturbed by a few we hadn’t seen before. Still, none of the sophomoric antics captured on Trayvon’s cellphone camera justifies what Zimmerman did.

Sally Pipes, Forbes
Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) raised eyebrows across the country last month when he publicly fretted about an Obamacare “train wreck” as the Administration rushes to implement the many provisions of the law that take effect in 2014.President Obama has attempted to assuage Sen. Baucus’s concerns, saying that his staff was “pushing very hard to make sure that we’re hitting all the deadlines.”

Peter Wehner, Wkly Standard
Some conservatives think that the elite media are finally turning on Barack Obama and his administration.The argument goes like this: The trio of scandals that have burst forth in the last couple of weeks—the events before, during, and after the deadly attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi; the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups; and especially the Department of Justice’s secret subpoenas of Associated Press phone records and targeting of Fox News reporter James Rosen as a potential co-conspirator in a leak investigation—will mark an...

Ross Kaminsky, TAS
Only in the United States Congress could a legislative provision entitled “Market-Based H-1B Visa Limits” actually mean that “the number of visas calculated under subparagraph (A) for any fiscal year shall not be less than 110,000 or more than 180,000.”If you read even a few pages of the so-called Gang of Eight immigration bill trudging its way through Congress—a bill that contains many provisions as horrendous as that one—you can’t help but think of Otto von Bismarck’s famous sausage-making analogy and wonder...

Peter Suderman, Reason
At a congressional hearing yesterday with Gary Cohen, the Health and Human Services official charged with managing the implementation of Obamacare, Republican legislators charged that Cohen’s agency may be improperly allowing some states to run “assister” programs that pay people to help individuals sign up for the health law’s coverage options. Republicans charged that HHS may not have the statutory authority to fund those programs in states running their own exchanges. That includes states like California, which plans to use a significant part of the...

The Truth-o-Meter says: Mostly False | Mitch McConnell says HHS put a gag order on insurers about impact of Obamacare

Controversy is swirling around the White House, with inquiries into the consulate attack in Benghazi, the IRS' targeting of conservative groups and the Justice Department’s probe of journalists’ phone records. Some Republicans say these issues are emblematic of the how the Obama White House operates. "There is a culture of intimidation throughout the administration. The IRS is just the most recent example," Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on Meet the Press on May 19, 2013. "... Over at HHS back during the Obamacare debate, Secretary (Kathleen) Sebelius sent out a directive to help insurance companies telling them ...

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Jonathan Chait, NY Magazine
The biggest piece of President Obama’s second-term agenda is his widely expected plan for the Environmental Protection Agency to issue new carbon regulations for power plants, a move that could bring the United States in line with the greenhouse-gas-reduction goals it agreed to in Copenhagen and open the way for an international treaty to control climate change. If the administration unveils such a plan, conservatives will undoubtedly challenge its legality. The legal challenge won’t take place for two years, but the two sides are preparing for war already. The field of...

George Will, Washington Post
Early in an opinion issued recently by a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Judge A. Raymond Randolphsaid: “Although the parties have not raised it, one issue needs to be resolved before we turn to the merits of the case.” The issue he raised but could not resolve — that is up to the Supreme Court — illuminates the Obama administration’s George Wallace-like lawlessness. It also demonstrates the judiciary’s duty to restrain presidents who forget the oath they swear to...

Rep. Conyers & Lennox Yearwood, Politico
President Barack Obama knows the dangers of not going far enough or fast enough to stop the climate crisis. History will celebrate his decision to lead us toward a clean energy economy that solves climate change and creates long-term, sustainable jobs for Americans. But achieving this awesome goal requires that we reject the TransCanada Corp.’s proposal to build the Keystone XL pipeline, which would cut through the heartland of America.This is a simple decision for a president who supports protecting our climate and creating jobs.

Rich Karlgaard, Forbes
The duty of every columnist is to share, not hide, his beliefs. Here is a core belief of mine: Growth–economic and personal–is not an option. Let’s go further and assert that growth is a moral requirement, for no other reason than that the opposite of growth is stagnation–a death of sorts.

Chris Stirewalt, FOX News
Lerner is set to invoke her Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate herself for her role in the IRS targeting of President Obama’s political enemies before a House panel today. She will not be saying how or why the agency did so or how many of her subordinates were involved. Most significantly, she will not be explaining who else in the Obama administration was aware of the misconduct. One might have thought that the very fact that her office was at the center of the abuses would have been enough to earn Lerner at least an indefinite paid vacation from her duties. Surely when it...

Paul Starr, American Prospect
Compromise is often an unhappily revealing art. “Ideals may tell us something important about what we would like to be. But compromises tell us who we are,” the philosopher Avishai Margalit writes. In finding compromises with Republicans on the federal budget, Democrats need to remember not only who they are but who the voters depend on them to be.From that standpoint, the start of the budget battle in early April did not go well. Acceding to Republican demands for cuts in Social Security and Medicare, the president’s budget left his party open to a cynical but...