John Roberts Ticks-Off His Colleagues, Young Voters Meh About Obama, U.S. Wants a Piece of Assange: P.M. Links
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Leaks from insiders suggest John Roberts switched his vote on the health care law, baffling his colleagues and setting off a bitter battle of wills with other conservative justices, who ultimately crafted a scathing dissent and refused to join any element of the chief justice's opinion.
- The Supreme Court's remarkably incoherent ObamaCare decision left states the option of deciding "should I stay or should I go now" when it comes to joining a vastly expanded Medicaid program — and Republican officials are eager to exploit their new bargaining power. Florida has completely opted out, as has South Carolina, and Iowa is likely to follow.
- Assuming you can use the word "interesting" to describe anything including the names "Obama" and "Romney," new polling keeps matters tense-ish, with the two candidates scoring within the margin of error in the battleground states, Michigan, North Carolina and New Hampshire.
- President Obama still has wide support among young-ish voters, but not so much among those newest to the franchise. The incumbent leads Mitt Romney by 12 points among 18- to 24-year-olds, but that's half his lead among the "old faithful" contingent of 25- to 29-year-olds. Thirty percent of the two groups together are undecided.
- Justifying Julian Assange's fears of ending up in American hands if he surrenders to police, Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wants the WikiLeaks founder prosecuted for espionage, and the U.S. Justice Department is targeting him for a criminal investigation.
- Dozens of Japanese lawmakers quit the ruling party to protest a scheme to double the country's sales tax. The defections left the government with a trimmed majority.
- Fighting between Syria's government and the political opposition has killed 16,500 people to-date says the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Along the border, Turkish fighter jets face down Syrian helicopters as tensions rise.
- The case against MegaUpload gets a bit shakier as a New Zealand judge rules that the warrants used to raid company head Kim Dotcom's house were invalid, and that the FBI's absconding from the country with evidence was illegal.
- Tim White, an investigator for the Crestview, Florida, Police Department Street Crimes Unit, was fired for stealing marijuana from a locker to plant in support of a search warrant application. He says he engaged in perjury, tampering with/or fabricating evidence, official misconduct, false report of the commission of a crime and trespassing under orders from supervisors, and saw them commit similar crimes.
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