The WonkLine: April 12, 2011

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s (R) plan to eliminate 130,000 people from the state’s Medicaid program is now being challenged in court.

“The nation’s top Medicare official on Monday rebuked the House GOP’s plan to radically overhaul the healthcare program for seniors” telling reporters that “lawmakers need to find the ‘political will’ to maintain the program’s current structure while finding additional savings.”

“Missouri’s Democratic attorney general is calling on a federal appeals court to overturn the healthcare reform law’s requirement for individuals to purchase insurance.”

Pakistan has demanded that the U.S. sharply scale back the number of CIA operatives and special forces there and that it end drone strikes. “The request was a sign of the near collapse of cooperation between the two testy allies.”

The UN office for the Middle East peace process reports today that the Palestinian Authority is now largely ready to govern a state.

U.S. military officials said the drug wars raging in Mexico and Central America rival the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of scale of violence, spending and weapons.

The unveiled FY2011 continuing resolution cuts EPA funding, delists wolves, and limits funding for Interior’s ‘wild lands’ policy.

In the past few weeks we’ve seen three colleges decide to move beyond coal on their campuses, showing yet again that students are helping to lead the fight for clean energy: Miami University of Ohio, Ohio University, and Western Illinois University.

“Several people have died from a record flood that has devastated areas surrounding the Red River in North Dakota and Minnesota.”

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) gave the thumbs up to people who want to bring guns into churches. Yeah, you read that right.

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster, a former Republican legislator who became a Democrat shortly before he began his run for Attorney General, is now acting like a Republican again by filing a brief challenging the Affordable Care Act.

An 80 year old Democratic voting official who initially endorsed a GOP official’s claim that she suddenly found 14,000 new votes favoring the GOP’s candidate in a Wisconsin supreme court race is now recanting that endorsement.

A new poll shows a record 58% of New Yorkers support marriage equality, with only 36% opposed.

FOX News launched a transphobic attack against J. Crew yesterday for featuring a designer painting her son’s toe nails pink, calling it “psychological sterilization.”

The Catholic League took a full-page ad out in yesterday’s New York Times, attempting to minimize the reputation of priests as pedophiles and blame homosexuality for the abuses.

Friday’s budget deal reportedly includes $700 million for a new round of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.

The Maryland Assembly voted last night to become “the 11th state to extend in-state college tuition breaks to illegal immigrants.”

“The GOP is simultaneously emasculating teachers’ unions while adopting the worst parts of their agenda,” writes Kevin Carey.

A “bill [that] would authorize law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of certain criminal suspects” and “require employers with more than four workers to verify the immigration status of new hires using” E-Verify passed the Georgia Senate Monday.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) “vowed” last night on Fox news that she would not “give up on the fight for Arizona’s illegal immigration law despite a federal courts ruling to freeze key parts of the bill.”

A group of conservative state legislators have come up with a strategy called “attrition through enforcement,” which “is designed to impose legislation that makes life so difficult for illegal immigrants that even if they aren’t caught and deported, they may just leave on their own.”

The budgets cuts that were agreed to in order to avoid a government shutdown “join a growing list of minor problems impeding growth, economists said, including higher fuel prices and bad weather, Europe’s creeping malaise and the effect of the Japanese earthquake.”

“Hopes are fading for a far-reaching settlement between regulators and banks over improper home foreclosures as some regulators press ahead to reach their own settlements,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Friday’s budget deal didn’t include President Obama’s request for more IRS funding, even though “the Government Accountability Office publicly released a study showing that, as of the end of fiscal year 2010, roughly $330 billion in federal taxes had never been paid.”

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