Today is June 20th. • On this date in 1782, Congress adopted the Great Seal of the United States. It took six years of discussion and debate to finalize the seal, during which one congressman said they would have to pass the seal in order to see what was on it. • On this date in 1863, West Virginia was admitted to the Union as the 35th state. It would have been two days earlier, but they were waiting to see how the canary fared. • Also on this date, in 1963, the Soviet Union and the United States established a “hot line” communication system to reduce the risk of “accidental” nuclear war. Man, can you imagine the hallmark card for that oops? “Roses are red, violets are blue, we’re sorry we nuked the snot out of you.” • And finally, today is National Ice Cream Soda Day. I’m having mine in a 32 ounce cup, with three scoops of vanilla, and side of insulin. YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME, NANNY STATERS!! • Consider this an Open Thread.

Morgan Freeman: ‘We’re In a Lot of Trouble If We Don’t Reelect Obama’ | Newsbusters
“And I think, this is Morgan Freeman’s personal thought, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble if we don’t reelect him because people on the other side of the fence scare me.”

MSNBC Host on 9/11: ‘Muslim Terrorists’ Were An ‘Imagined Racial Enemy’ For White America | The Blaze
“Perry, who anchors The Melissa Harris-Perry show on the weekends, remarked that 9/11 vaulted America into a ‘nationalist fervor’ that was similar to ‘having post-traumatic stress disorder.’”

Video: Kids Sing ‘God Bless the USA’, Libs Tell Them to “Burn In Hell” | The Mental Recession
“Let’s get this straight – you dislike pro-American songs, and you want children, their parents, and Republicans in general to burn in hell.”

Lawrence O’Donnell Mocks Ann Romney for Riding Horses to Combat Multiple Sclerosis | Newsbusters
“If going for walks, going to the museum, watching television, or, heaven forbid, riding horses helped ‘regenerate her strength and renew [her] vigor,’ isn’t that a good thing?”

Rep. Loretta Sanchez: ‘Mitt Romney Doesn’T Even Want Us To Be Here’ | Free Beacon
“Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D., Calif.) said Wednesday of Latinos that Mitt Romney ‘doesn’t even want us to be here.’”

Your 1-Minute Video Could Be Featured in FrackNation! | FrackNation
“We want you to submit 1-minute (or shorter) clips of what energy means to you. We’re so excited about what you’re going to submit, that we want to include the most compelling clips in FrackNation! Three winners will be chosen by the directors of FrackNation.”

Fast & Furious: Why the Failure to Submit a Privilege Log is a Big Deal from SunshineStateSarah

noctilucent (nok-tuh-LOO-suhnt): adjective Visible during the short night of the summer.
(via Dictionary.com)

From the diaries

Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson  is the public affairs and policy interview show produced by The Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The show has been in continuous production for almost 20 years (first on PBS, now on the Internet) and just about everyone has stopped by at one time or another. We’re thrilled to finally make the show available to RedState readers.

To start things off, we’re happy to bring you our newest show featuring one of our most requested guests. Radio host, columnist, conductor, and best-selling author Dennis Prager discusses why evil is normal, why the left appeals to Americans, what God wants, why Islam is cannot be reformed, and his new book, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph.

Why do so many Republicans vote like squishes, often siding with Democrats on issues — or at least not voting with conservatives in the House?

The most common theory is that these Republicans are in tight races in swing districts. They have to sometimes cross the aisle. They have to sometimes vote like squishes just to stay elected.

The Madison Project this morning is completely blowing up that common and oft repeated theory.

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In a stunning move, Eric Holder’s request for President Obama to assert executive privilege over documents related the Fast & Furious scandal has been granted.

President Obama has granted an 11th-hour request by Attorney General Eric Holder to exert executive privilege over Fast and Furious documents, a last-minute maneuver that appears unlikely to head off a contempt vote against Holder by Republicans in the House.

Already the left has jumped into defense mode, pointing to executive privilege asserted by previous presidents in order to move the conversation from coverup to a media critique of “selective outrage.”

The GOP was a step ahead of them and released a video reminding everyone just how committed then Senator Obama was to transparency related to documents in the now hilariously trivial “AttorneyGate” involving the alleged political firings of attorneys by the Department of Justice under AG Alberto Gonzales.

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He hates his life – or at least, he’s about to hate his life. You see, if Congress votes today to hold US Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt of Congress today for Holder’s stonewalling on providing documents on the botched Operation Fast & Furious botched gunrunning scandal* then Mr. Machen is apparently the lucky individual who gets to bring charges up for a grand jury. Assuming, of course, that Holder doesn’t blink before then and give House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa the documents that Issa’s been demanding ever since Holder got caught lying about the Department of Justice’s oversight of Operation Fast & Furious.

All of this puts Machen in an absolutely no-win situation: if the US Attorney brings charges, Machen will get an unbelievable amount of push-back from both the administration (which will be passive-aggressive) and the DC local political structure (which will just be aggressive). But if Ronald Machen does not bring charges then his career is over; the DC federal power structure values obedience to Congressional prerogatives a heck of a lot more than they value obedience to Presidential ones. Presidents are ephemeral; even the successful ones have less than a decade of true power. Congress endures, and it gets mean when it’s crossed.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Phil Kerpan to discuss the EPA’s war on coal, a key vote today in the Senate, and how EPA regulations could drastically increase your utility bill.

We’re brought to you as always by Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at bjackson[at]coffeeandmarkets.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Buy Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him on Amazon
Will a Republican save Obama’s War on Coal?
Mercury rule at center of the war on coal
Advocacy group pledges $1M pro-coal campaign
Alexander Joins Obama’s War on Coal
Sen. Manchin, It’s Time to Lead
Studies Show EPA Rules Cost Americans Their Jobs and Their Health
American Commitment

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Barack Obama and the Democrats have promised to make this election a turning point in the fight to make the rich “pay their fair share” of taxes.  They are using biblical innuendo to suggest that it is immoral for the top 1% of earners (who happen to make 17% of nation AGI) to only pay 36.7% of the federal income taxes.  This is their hill to die on.

Accordingly, one would expect Democrats to be the first ones to issue garrulous protestations against farm handouts for the rich.  At present, more than 3/4 of farmers who earn upwards of $250,000 a year receive subsidies from at least one farm program.  Farm subsidies and crop insurance programs help promote income inequality in farming by offering larger subsidies to those who already have larger farms.  These farmers can enjoy multimillion dollar insurance policies that are subsidized in order to guarantee their multimillion dollar investments that would otherwise not be supported by the free market.  Also, federal guarantees of bankers’ loans to rich farmers have further increased their borrowing capacity, thereby driving up the cost of land acquisition.  This, in turn, has shut out small farmers from the business, making it nearly impossible for them to compete.

It’s no surprise that the number of individual farms has dramatically decreased since the inception of government-run agriculture.  According to the Heritage Foundation, the number of farms has declined from 6.8 million to 2.2 million since the Great Depression, despite the fact that the total acreage of farmland has only declined by 13%.  The advent of mechanized farm tools has undoubtedly fueled the increase in large farms, but the government has put the nail in the coffin of the small family farm.

If there’s one sphere of public policy in which there is inequality and redistribution to the rich, it is in agriculture.  One would expect the progressives to trip over themselves to eliminate these giveaways for the rich, right?

Wrong.

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It’s not often conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans, pro-growth conservative groups and the Teamsters agree on something. In fact, it’s almost unheard of.

But when it comes to the federal government’s sugar program – one of the most egregious corporate welfare handouts in a long list of wasteful programs – these strange bedfellows have found common ground.

For years, the federal government has kept the price of sugar high by capping domestic production, imposing a de facto government price floor, and mandating that USDA buy excess sugar to sell to ethanol producers at a loss. The U.S. government also places exorbitant restrictions on sugar imports. The cumulative effect of all these special protections is an artificial increase in the price of sugar for Americans relative to other countries.

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No, really:

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Republican members of the House Oversight and Senate Judiciary Committees have been turning up the heat on Attorney General Eric Holder over his obstructive and misleading testimony about Fast and Furious, the operation in which the ATF coerced American gun dealers into selling firearms to Mexican cartels, and then allowed them to “walk” across our southern border (all without a whisper to the Mexican government).

After being threatened with a contempt of Congress vote (scheduled for Wednesday, June 20), Holder made a last-ditch attempt to avert what he has repeatedly referred to as a “constitutional crisis,” requesting a meeting with Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) to “discuss [the Department of] Justice’s knowledge of the controversial ‘gun walking’ tactics used in Fast and Furious, including information about whistleblowers.”  Issa agreed to the meeting, but informed Holder that nothing less than full disclosure – including the handover of all documents related to the program, its cover-up, and the action taken against ATF whistleblowers – would be acceptable.

That meeting took place at 5:00 this evening, and lasted all of 20 minutes.  It turns out that Holder was trying once again to play the House Oversight Committee – a fact that should surprise nobody, as the attorney general has approached the entire Fast and Furious oversight effort with  the same arrogance we’ve come to expect from him and the rest of the Obama administration.

Instead of providing the documents that Issa had specifically requested, Holder arrived on Capitol Hill with nothing but an offer to brief Issa on the missing docs (all 240,000 of them). Of course, this is already being portrayed by both the administration and the media as a major effort to meet the GOP halfway on this issue (i.e., “hey, come on, he met with them!”).  The Hill quotes Holder as saying, I think the ball’s in their court.  They rejected what I thought was an extraordinary offer on our part.”  However, the fact is that Holder is the one who requested the meeting.  Issa simply requested the documents, which still have not been turned over.

Immediately after the meeting ended, Issa tweeted confirmation that the contempt vote would go forward as promised due to Holder’s continued stonewalling.

Have you been following all the reports about whom Mitt Romney is considering for his running mate?

There have been press reports that the list includes:

• Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty
• Ohio Senator Rob Portman
• Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan
• Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal
• New Jersey Governor Chris Christie
• Florida Senator Marco Rubio
• New Hampshire Kelly Ayotte
• Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels
• Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell
• South Dakota Senator John Thune
• Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush

And every once in a while there are reports that certain candiates are not being vetted. For example this morning, Jonathan Karl of ABC News reported that Senator Marco Rubio was not being vetted.

Don’t read too much into it, but after all the speculation surrounding the ABC news “scoop” about the campaign’s VP vetting process and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney told Sean Hannity that only he and Beth Myers know who is being vetted. Here’s an excerpt of this evening’s Mitt Romney interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News:

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