Watch: GOP Convention. Delegates Rule 40

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In part from Rush Limbaugh:

There are many interpretations and variations of rule 40.  For example, it’s not just a candidate has to get 1,237 and if nobody does, it’s wide open.  Even at that point, even if nobody gets 1,237, you still have to have won a majority of eight states to be eligible to win the nomination.  Did you know that?

However, rule 40 can be changed the day before the convention by the Republican Party.  And there is a party convention meeting in April, and if it looks like whatever eventuality is gonna happen, they can easily change that eight states to two.  They could change it to four in order to make everybody eligible.  Let’s say they want Rubio and Rubio does not win a majority of delegates in eight states.  This is not the 20% threshold we’re talking about.  We’re talking about a majority.  If he doesn’t, then there’s no way that even if Trump doesn’t get to 1,237, there’s no way that Rubio would be eligible, according to rule 40.

However, they can change rule 40 the day before the convention.  That’s also in the rule!  Rule 40 basically says what it says today, and has the provision that they can rewrite it and say whatever they want it to say the day of the convention or the day before. (interruption) Well, it’s their convention, Snerdley.  It’s the Republican Party’s convention.  They can write whatever rules they want.  And they have given themselves all kinds of outs and latitude and leeway to write new rules whenever they need them.  (interruption) It’s exactly right, why they don’t trust — and this is what Cruz is talking about.  If they start messing around like this, it’s all over.

Full transcript here.

Rules of the Convention are here and Rule 30 is important.

$500 Million State Dept Climate Change Collusion

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Senators accuse State Dept. of defying Congress with $500M UN climate payment

FNC: Two Republican senators are accusing the State Department of misusing taxpayer dollars by green-lighting $500 million for a United Nations climate change program without first obtaining congressional approval.

The senators now are demanding the department justify the “cloak-and-dagger” contribution to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) – even threatening legal action.

“Lawyers cannot replace the constitutional requirement that only Congress can appropriate money,” Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., said, adding that he’s demanding a “full legal analysis.”

Gardner, in a statement to FoxNews.com, alleged the department was trying to “wave a magic wand and write a half-billion dollar check to a Green Climate Fund that they admit was never authorized by Congress.”

He also vowed to “pursue legislative action that prevents cloak-and-dagger re-programming of money outside of congressional approval.”

At the center of the dispute is whether the State Department abused its authority in shifting funds between an existing program and the climate fund.

The Obama administration – despite resistance from congressional Republicans — has committed the U.S. to contributing $3 billion to the fund, a program established by the United Nations to help poor countries adopt clean energy technologies to address climate change. Nearly 200 other nations have agreed to provide $100 billion per year by 2020, from private and public sources.

Along with Gardner, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., maintains Congress has not allocated any funding for what he calls the “international climate change slush fund” and has in fact “prohibited the transfer of funds to create new programs.”

The State Department acknowledges the funding was never explicitly approved by Congress – but argues the department was within its authority to shift funding to the Green Climate Fund, because Congress did not explicitly prohibit funding the GCF.  

Under questioning by Barrasso at a March 8 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Heather Higginbottom told the committee the funds were diverted from the department’s Economic Support Fund — which provides economic funding to foreign countries — to the GCF after a full review by department lawyers.

State Department spokeswoman Katherine Pfaff also confirmed to FoxNews.com the source of the funding was the economic fund, but could not say from which exact program the money came.

And she bluntly addressed the GOP senators’ accusation. “Did Congress authorize the Green Climate Fund? No,” she said, adding that department lawyers “reviewed the authority and the process under which we can do it.”

The administration, meanwhile, has requested another $750 million for the GCF in its fiscal 2017 budget.

Higginbottom also insisted they were not required to notify Congress about the transfer from the Economic Support Fund.

At the hearing, though, Barrasso said the first installment of the $3 billion pledge was “a blatant misuse of taxpayer dollars.”

Barrasso said because the GCF technically is a new program and not authorized by Congress, the department may have violated the Anti-Deficiency Act, a law that prohibits federal agencies from obligating or expending funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation.

According to Politico, Barrasso is prepared to go to court over the issue and to seek prosecution of individuals if they are found to have violated the Anti-Deficiency Act.

The Wyoming senator’s communications director, Bronwyn Lance Chester, confirmed to FoxNews.com that “all options are being considered.”

The department may have been able to effectively use a loophole to contribute the money – namely, because Congress did not include specific language barring spending to the GCF. Analysts say this dispute could have been avoided if Congress had simply included a specific prohibition on spending for the climate fund.

“The problem is that the horse has already left the barn. There was not a specific line item in the budget prohibiting spending on the GCF. I am sure [State Department lawyers] have come up with some creative way to fund it, but it would not be an issue if Congress had explicitly prohibited it,” said H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the Heartland Institute.

Senate Republicans backed away from including a specific rider in last year’s omnibus bill after President Obama threatened to veto if such a rider were included.

“They were gutless,” said Burnett, who noted the first installment is a “drop in the bucket” when compared with the $3 billion.

Because the omnibus spending bill was silent on the GCF, the White House argued this left the door open for the administration to fund the U.N. program. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in December “there are no restrictions in our ability to make good on the president’s promise to contribute to the Green Climate Fund.”

Gardner and Barrasso also were signatories to a letter sent last year to Obama asserting the deal reached at a United Nations climate change conference in Paris, including the $100 billion-a-year Green Climate Fund, must be submitted to Congress for approval before any funding could be made.

Hellfire Missiles on Passenger Plane? Huh?

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It was not all that long ago that a U.S. made hellfire missile ended up in Cuba….how is a convoluted story but after the United States groveled, we got it back from Cuba where it appears to have been meant for Europe.

Now Portland, Oregon?

Hellfire missiles bound for Portland found on passenger plane in Serbia

RegisterGuard:

BELGRADE, Serbia — Serbia’s authorities are investigating reports that a cargo package bound for Portland containing two missiles with explosive warheads was found on a passenger flight from Lebanon to Serbia.

N1 television said the package with two guided armor-piercing missiles was discovered Saturday by a sniffer dog after an Air Serbia flight from Beirut landed at Belgrade airport.

Serbian media say documents listed the final destination for the AGM-114 Hellfire missiles as Portland, Oregon. The American-made projectiles can be fired from air, sea or ground platforms.

N1 reported Sunday that Air Serbia is helping in the investigation. The Serbian flag carrier says “security and safety are the main priorities for Air Serbia.”

*****

In part from InquisitR: According to Serbia’s N1 Television, the missiles were discovered Saturday by a bomb-sniffing dog after the plane landed at Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport, and shipping documents indicate that the final destination was Portland, Oregon. The missiles had been packed in wooden crates. Whatever the source, it’s clear that they either didn’t anticipate standard airport security or didn’t realize that it could detect a Hellfire missile. The missiles have been more or less unchanged since they were developed in 1974, employing a High-Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) warhead, supported by a Metal Augmented Charge (MAC), which uses a standard shaped-charge explosive in detonation. In other words, they use the same explosive materials as any other bomb, including a solid-fuel rocket.

 American Predator drones mount a single Hellfire II missile designed to eliminate high-priority targets.    American Predator drones mount a single Hellfire II missile designed to eliminate high-priority targets. [Photo by John Moore/Getty Images]

The AGM-114 Hellfire missile is an air-to-surface missile designed to be fired from a helicopter; the warhead is armor-piercing and was specifically developed for anti-armor use; later models were developed for precision strikes from Predator drones. And although intended for helicopter use, the missile can be fired from multiple air, sea, and ground platforms; using laser guidance, it can easily deliver its payload wherever desired — including inside an armored building.

Air Serbia is currently assisting in an investigation. The airline indicated that “security and safety are the main priorities for Air Serbia.” A spokesperson for the FBI’s Portland division indicated that the FBI was aware of the Serbian reports but had no information for release. Lockheed Martin, which manufactured the Hellfires, indicated that they were unaware of the situation and referred further inquiries to government officials.

Of course, as Huffington Post notes, it’s not all that unusual to find U.S. Hellfire missiles in that part of the world — the State Department regularly sells them in the Middle East and supplies American allies with them. Most recently, the State Department indicated that a sale of Hellfire II missiles (the variant used by Predator drones) to Lebanon was likely, in June, 2015, and in January, the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency approved a sale of 5,000 Hellfires to the Iraqi government to aid the fight against ISIS, to the tune of some $800 million USD.

In this case, though, the Hellfire missiles were clearly out of place. As former State Department and Pentagon staffer Robert Caruso noted on Sunday, there is no legitimate reason for live military hardware to be on-board a commercial passenger flight, and the missiles were likely stolen. From where, nobody is certain.  Full article here.

“No — there are Syria-related things ongoing in Bulgaria (open source) but even that can’t answer this. Prob stolen.”

Germany: Anti-Immigrant Party Growing

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This has been building since 2014 and gained real traction in 2015.

USAToday: Far-right protests were held in more than a dozen other nations in Europe on Saturday including the Czech Republic, France, Poland and the Netherlands. The marches and demonstrations were part of a coordinated attempt by PEGIDA and like-minded groups to hold a so-called European Action Day. Riot police clashed with protesters at several of the rallies including in Calais, France, where police used tear gas to disperse crowds. Ten people were arrested.

The synchronized demonstrations came as the number of Syrian refugees assembled on Turkey’s border jumped to 35,000, according to Reuters.

The latest exodus is a result of a renewed offensive by Syria’s President Bashar Assad to retake ground controlled by opposition groups near the city of Aleppo, previously a valued commercial center.

Turkey refuses to open the border. It already hosts over 2.5 million Syrian refugees.

German anti-immigration party makes gains in local elections amid refugee crisis

FNC: A nationalist, anti-migration party powered into three German state legislatures in elections Sunday held amid divisions over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal approach to the refugee crisis. Merkel’s conservatives lost to center-left rivals in two states they had hoped to win.

The elections in the prosperous southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate and relatively poor Saxony-Anhalt in the ex-communist east were the first major political test since Germany registered nearly 1.1 million people as asylum-seekers last year.

The three-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD — which has campaigned against Merkel’s open-borders approach — easily entered all three legislatures.

AfD won 15.1 percent of the vote in Baden-Wuerttemberg and 12.6 percent in Rhineland-Palatinate, official results showed. It finished second in Saxony-Anhalt with some 24 percent, according to projections by ARD and ZDF television with most districts counted.

“We are seeing above all in these elections that voters are turning away in large numbers from the big established parties and voting for our party,” AfD leader Frauke Petry said.

They “expect us finally to be the opposition that there hasn’t been in the German parliament and some state parliaments,” she added.

There were uncomfortable results both for Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union and their partners in the national government, the center-left Social Democrats. The traditional rivals are Germany’s two biggest parties.

“The democratic center in our country has not become stronger, but smaller, and I think we must all take that seriously,” said Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, the Social Democrats’ leader.

Merkel’s party kept its status as strongest party in Saxony-Anhalt. It had hoped to beat left-leaning Green governor Winfried Kretschmann in Baden-Wuerttemberg, a traditional stronghold that the CDU ran for decades until 2011. It also hoped to oust Social Democrat governor Malu Dreyer from the governor’s office in Rhineland-Palatinate.

However, the CDU finished several percentage points behind the popular incumbents’ parties in both states and dropped 12 percentage points to a record-low result in Baden-Wuerttemberg, with 27 percent support. Its performance in Rhineland-Palatinate, with 31.8 percent, was also a record low.

The Social Democrats suffered large losses in both Baden-Wuerttemberg and Saxony-Anhalt, where they were the junior partners in the outgoing governments, finishing behind AfD.

Other parties won’t share power with AfD, but its presence will complicate their coalition-building efforts.

In all three states, the results were set to leave the outgoing coalition governments without a majority — forcing regional leaders into what could be time-consuming negotiations with new, unusual partners. Merkel’s CDU still has a long-shot chance of forming an untried three-way alliance to win the Baden-Wuerttemberg governor’s office.

Germany’s next national election is due in late 2017. While Sunday’s results will likely generate new tensions, Merkel herself should be secure: she has put many state-level setbacks behind her in the past, and there’s no long-term successor or figurehead for any rebellion in sight.

A top official with Merkel’s party called for it to stay on its course in the refugee crisis. CDU general secretary Peter Tauber pointed to recent polls indicating that her popularity is rebounding and added: “this shows that it is good if the CDU sticks to this course, saying that we need time to master this big challenge.”

Merkel insisted last year that “we will manage” the challenge of integrating refugees. While her government has moved to tighten asylum rules, she still insists on a pan-European solution to the refugee crisis, ignoring demands from some conservative allies for a national cap on the number of refugees.

AfD’s strong performance will boost its hopes of entering the national parliament next year. It entered five state legislatures and the European Parliament in its initial guise as a primarily anti-euro party before splitting and then rebounding in the refugee crisis.

The CDU may have been hurt by an attempt by its candidates in Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate to put cautious distance between themselves and Merkel’s refugee policies, which may simply have created the impression of disunity. The party slipped in polls there over recent weeks.

The two last month called for Germany to impose daily refugee quotas — something Merkel opposes but which neighboring Austria has since put in place. Separately, Merkel’s conservative allies in Bavaria have attacked her approach for months, demanding an annual refugee cap.

Center-left incumbents Kretschmann and Dreyer often sounded more enthusiastic about Merkel’s refugee policy than their conservative challengers.

“The result hopefully will be that the CDU and (their Bavarian allies) will realize that this permanent quarreling doesn’t help them,” Vice Chancellor Gabriel said.

Obamacare Causes a $1.5 Billion Flop in Chicago

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Blue Cross parent lost $1.5 billion on individual health plans last year

ChicagoTribune: Year 2 of the Affordable Care Act was another financial flop for the Chicago-based parent of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois but hints of a turnaround are emerging.

Health Care Service Corp.’s financial losses in its individual business, which includes ACA plans, worsened in 2015. The company, which owns Blue Cross affiliates in Illinois and four other states, said it lost $1.5 billion in its individual business, up from $767 million in 2014, the first year of the health law’s state exchanges for buying coverage.

In anticipation of ACA-related losses in 2015, HCSC set aside nearly $400 million in 2014 to boost reserves to $680.9 million. The company spent $657.3 million of those reserves to cover the medical expenses associated with ACA plans in 2015.

HCSC is the latest large insurer to report losses on 2015 ACA business, a troubling sign for the state exchanges that are the heart of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. The far-reaching legislation has increased access to insurance coverage by expanding Medicaid and providing tax credits to subsidize the cost of insurance. Though the law has brought new customers to many insurers, much of that growth has been unprofitable, reflecting higher-than-expected medical expenses, regulatory challenges and unexpected shortfalls in federal risk-sharing programs.

UnitedHealthcare said it had losses of about $475 million on its 2015 ACA business. Aetna didn’t break out the loss on its individual health plans but said the operating losses on that line of business were 3 to 4 percent of the sales.

As a result of the losses, some insurers have considered withdrawing from the state marketplaces. Any exodus would threaten the stability of exchanges, making the online marketplaces less attractive to consumers.

“2015 was not a good year as far as the ACA went,” said Stephen Zaharuk, senior vice president at Moody’s Investors Service, who covers the health insurance industry. “Insurers had no idea what to expect.”

Still, no one expected the rollout of some of the biggest reforms in health care to be smooth. The exchanges are a new way to sell health plans to a population that largely was uninsured. Moreover, the law forbids insurers from using consumers’ medical history to set prices. Insurers were essentially groping in the dark.

But with two years of experience under their belts, insurers may be on more secure footing. HCSC, for one, didn’t book a reserve for potential 2016 losses on ACA plans, said Carl McDonald, a divisional senior vice president at the company. Zaharuk said that’s a good sign the company’s individual business may break even this year.

But HCSC officials are not so optimistic that the ACA plans will be profitable in 2016. Company spokesman Greg Thompson said in an email, “Our not booking a (reserve for ACA losses) for 2016 does not indicate nor imply an anticipated level of profitability for the year.”

Despite problems with its ACA-related business, HCSC narrowed its overall loss in 2015, according to a financial statement filed with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The filing is primarily an accounting of its fully insured lines of business.

The company reported a loss of $65.8 million, down from $281.9 million in 2014, reflecting higher earnings from its group health plans and an increase in investment income. Premium revenue rose 12.5 percent to $31.2 billion.

HCSC is among the biggest players in the individual market, with 1.64 million members at the end of last year, an increase of 3.4 percent, according to the filing. Nearly one-third of its enrollment is in Illinois, where Blue Cross sold roughly 80 percent of all 2015 individual policies in the state.

HCSC doesn’t disclose how much of its individual enrollment came from ACA plans sold on and off the exchanges. The individual market also includes policyholders who were allowed to keep the plans they had before the health law was implemented through 2017. Insurers blame that last-minute change by the Obama administration for keeping healthier people out of the exchanges.

When the exchanges launched, HCSC’s Blue Cross plans offered some of the lowest-priced policies and largest provider networks. The strategy was to provide cost-effective health care access, reflecting the company’s status as a not-for-profit, customer-owned insurer, analysts said.

However, medical costs and customers’ use of health care services on ACA-related plans were higher than anticipated. In 2014, HCSC’s key medical-loss ratio, which measures the share of premiums used to pay patient medical costs, rose to 86.5 percent, from 85 percent. Last year, the ratio jumped to 90.4 percent, according to the annual statement.

To manage the risk, HCSC followed in the footsteps of its for-profit competitors and made significant changes last year that were not consumer friendly.

The company raised 2016 premiums and redesigned policies to shift more costs to consumers. In Illinois and Texas, its two largest markets, HCSC eliminated its popular PPO plans that were more expensive but had the largest networks of hospitals and doctors. The decision sent Blue Cross customers scrambling to find other plans on the exchanges that included their doctors.

The company even took the hard line of walking away from business. In New Mexico, the company sought a rate increase averaging 51.6 percent, after it said it lost $19.2 million in 2014 on its individual business in the state. New Mexico insurance regulators rejected the request but were willing to approve a lower increase, according to published reports. Instead, HCSC pulled out of the New Mexico exchange.

The company also is cutting expenses. Thompson confirmed that HCSC has laid off employees in its information-technology department but declined to say how many were let go. Last month, the company eliminated commissions to independent brokers in Illinois, Texas and Oklahoma on sales of individual plans that take effect April 1 or later.

After eliminating commissions in Illinois, Blue Cross said it remains committed to “expanding access to quality health care to as many people as possible.” The changes are necessary to continue offering “sustainable” health plan options to members, the company said.

Despite signs of strain, the Obama administration says the exchanges are getting stronger. There were many new customers among the 12.7 million people who chose plans during open enrollment for 2016. In Illinois, enrollment grew nearly 12 percent to about 388,000.

Still, the administration has tweaked some regulations to benefit insurers. It placed a one-year moratorium for 2017 on the annual tax insurers pay, which is generally passed along to customers. The change will save some insurers hundreds of millions of dollars. For 2016, HCSC expects to pay a fee of $538.7 million.

The administration also has tightened some of the eligibility rules for people who sign up for insurance after the enrollment deadlines. Insurers have complained that people are waiting until they are sick to buy plans and then dropping coverage after their health problems are resolved, driving up costs and premiums.