Your customized headlines for Tue, Apr 10, 2012

AOL announced Monday that it is selling more than 800 patents to Microsoft for $1 billion, marking the latest salvo in the tech industry's all-out war over who controls the most lucrative ideas powering the Internet and smartphones.

President Obama's landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation's budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a Republican member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.

The new federal consumer watchdog agency is slated to announce Tuesday that it is considering several new rules aimed at increasing transparency and accountability in the scandal-ridden mortgage-servicing industry.

The White House and Senate Democrats are embarking on another big push to sell the Buffett Rule. The Joint Committee on Taxation says the proposal will bring in $47 billion over 10 years. Chuck Schumer, assuming the extension of the Bush tax cuts, says it will bring i8n $160 billion.

— Meet Obama's new best friend on Wall Street.

— A rogue trader is sentenced to death in China.

— Government researchers in Japan say the country's GDP will grow just 0.1 percent this year if its nuclear reactors aren't running.

Ben Smith quotes an anonymous conservative lawyer on the case for overturning Obamacare:

You have built an imaginary mansion, with thousands of rooms, on the foundation of Wickard v. Filburn — the 1942 ruling that broadened the understanding of how the Commerce Clause could be used to regulate economic activity.

We aren't being asked to radically revise the Commerce Clause and throw out seven decades of law, and we won't. But we know the founders never intended the Commerce Clause to allow the Federal Government to regulate everything on the planet. So we are going to accept Randy Barnett's basically spurious exception to that basically spurious idea, and throw out the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that the Commerce Clause regulates "activity" (which we don't really believe), but not "inactivity," (because, why not draw the line somewhere?).

Earlier today, I linked to a Goldman Sachs research note arguing that the most fiscally conservative outcome in the 2012 election would be an Obama victory and Republican control of Congress. But their analysis was limited to deficit reduction. Last week, JPMorgan looked at this question using a broader lens: what happens to the economy under Democratic and Republican presidents, and Democratic and Republican Congresses?

A top official at the General Services Administration was placed on administrative leave Monday, four days after a video that features him joking about the lavish spending at a Las Vegas conference became public.