Category Archives: DOJ, DC and inside the Beltway

What the Obama Admin is not Telling you About Iran

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In 2012, the U.S. Treasury Department which is responsible for maintaining the global terror list, placed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Crops Qods Force in the terror database for violations of the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act for trafficking Afghan narcotics in exchange for weapons to the Taliban.

On July 14, 2015, the U.S. Treasury posted the sanctions relief document on their website as a result of the signed agreement known as the JPOA.

From the Daily Beast in part: The bigger, more complicated story, though, is how the deal will go down with the organization that now plays a huge role in running Iran, albeit behind the country’s clerical façade: the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), also known as the Pasdaran, some of whose internationally infamous leaders showed up on the lists in the nuclear agreement annexes as people who will have sanctions against them lifted.

Whether this was an oversight, a sleight-of-hand, or an attempt to win Pasdaran support, it has to be understood that ever since Rafsanjani (ironically, of all people) let the IRGC into the Iranian economy, allowing it to invest in the country’s leading industries, the group has grown to become Iran’s most important financial power.

The IRGC is now the biggest player in Iran’s biggest industries: energy, construction, car manufacturing and telecommunications. A Western diplomat recently told Reuters that the IRGC’s annual turnover from all of its business activities is around $10 billion to $12 billion, which, if accurate, would be around a sixth of Iranian GDP.

From the United Nations 106 page report in part:

Northern Route

There are various supply chain structures in Central Asia. Trafficking through Turkmenistan appears to feed the Balkan route through the Islamic Republic of Iran rather than the Northern route. Turkmenistan is also unique in Central Asia as a destination country for Balkan route opiates.

 Traffickers increasingly utilize Central Asian railways to transport opiates to the Russian Federation and beyond. The size of some loads detected in 2010 suggests that traffickers are operating with a heightened confidence level. Massive seizures of hashish in containers destined to North America are a confirmation that railroad trafficking is also linked to transcontinental trafficking.

 The Customs union agreement between Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation and Belarus can be misused, as traffickers may opt to re-route opiate deliveries to Europe through the Northern route, as opposed to the traditional Balkan route. There are plans to extend the Customs union agreement to other states such as Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine, and possibly Tajikistan.

 Countering the flow of drugs is complicated by difficulties in co-ordinating efforts between national agencies within Central Asia and between this region and Afghanistan. This is reflected in limited intelligence sharing along lines of supply.

 Drug trafficking and organized crime are sources of conflict in Kyrgyzstan and potentially in the region as a whole. The inter-ethnic clashes that occurred in southern Kyrgyzstan in 2010 have been used by ethnic Kyrgyz criminal groups to assume predominance over ethnic Uzbek criminal groups and to control the drug routes through this part of Kyrgyzstan.

 Rising militancy has been reported across Central Asia, but there are no observed direct connections between extremist groups and drug trafficking. The preoccupation with combating insurgents in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan does, however, hinder counternarcotics efforts by, at least partly, shifting the focus of law enforcement away from drug control.

From the United Nations report in part:

Southern Route

 

Afghan heroin is trafficked to every region of the world except Latin America. The Balkan route (trafficking route through the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey) has traditionally been the primary route for trafficking heroin out of Afghanistan. However, there are signs of a changing trend, with the Southern route (a collection of trafficking routes and organized criminal groups that facilitate southerly flow of heroin out of Afghanistan) encroaching, including to supply some European markets.

Unlike the northern or Balkan routes that are mostly dedicated to supplying single destinations markets, the Russian Federation and Europe respectively, the southern route serves a number of diverse destinations, including Asian, Africa and Western and Central Europe. It is therefore perhaps more accurate to talk about a vast network of rouhtes than one general flow with the same direction.

The Islamic Republic of Iran and Pakistan face a tremendous challenge in dealing with the large flows of opiates originating from Afghanistan to feed their domestic heroin markets and to supply demand in many other regions of the world. The geographic location of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Pakistan makes them a major transit point for the trafficking of Afghan opiates along the southern route.

Iran will propagandize a narcotics problem but in truth, it feeds their economy, criminal activity, weapons smuggling and terrorism.

The opium trade and smuggling routes are so successful due to the criminal network and money, females are also trafficked for slave labor and sex.

Officials of the regime in Iran are involved in the “sex trafficking of women and girls”, the U.S. State Department said in an annual report on human trafficking released this week.

“Iran is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor,” the State Department said in its annual ‘Trafficking in Persons Report 2015.’

“Organized groups reportedly subject Iranian women, boys, and girls to sex trafficking in Iran, as well as in the United Arab Emirates and Europe,” the TIP report said.

“In 2013, traffickers forced Iranian women and girls into prostitution in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. From 2009-2015, there was a reported increase in the transport of girls from and through Iran en route to the Gulf where organized groups sexually exploited or forced them into marriages. In Tehran, Tabriz, and Astara, the number of teenage girls in prostitution continues to increase.”

“Organized criminal groups force Iranian and immigrant children to work as beggars and in street vendor rings in cities, including Tehran. Physical and sexual abuse and drug addiction are the primary means of coercion. Some children are also forced to work in domestic workshops. Traffickers subject Afghan migrants, including boys, to forced labor in construction and agricultural sectors in Iran. Afghan boys are at high risk of experiencing sexual abuse by their employers and harassment or blackmailing by the Iranian security service and other government officials.”

So, back to the question, what is the real reason for the Obama administration aggressive relationship with Iran? With the sanctions lifted, the forecast of future terror activity coupled with smuggling and trafficking women, weapons, slaves and narcotics, the Obama administration has legitimized Iran as a world power forced to be equal on the global stage.

Garland Shooters, Fast and Furious, the FBI

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Still there is this operation known as Fast and Furious concocted by the ATF that lives for real….TODAY.

No one at the FBI, the ATF and DHS is really talking but some investigative reporters and a Senator are asking the right questions.

Assailant in Garland, Texas, attack bought gun in 2010 under Fast and Furious operation

by Richard Serranno

Five years before he was shot to death in the failed terrorist attack in Garland, Texas, Nadir Soofi walked into a suburban Phoenix gun shop to buy a 9-millimeter pistol.

At the time, Lone Wolf Trading Co. was known among gun smugglers for selling illegal firearms. And with Soofi’s history of misdemeanor drug and assault charges, there was a chance his purchase might raise red flags in the federal screening process.

Inside the store, he fudged some facts on the form required of would-be gun buyers.

What Soofi could not have known was that Lone Wolf was at the center of a federal sting operation known as Fast and Furious, targeting Mexican drug lords and traffickers. The idea of the secret program was to allow Lone Wolf to sell illegal weapons to criminals and straw purchasers, and track the guns back to large smuggling networks and drug cartels.

Instead, federal agents lost track of the weapons and the operation became a fiasco, particularly after several of the missing guns were linked to shootings in Mexico and the 2010 killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Arizona.

Soofi’s attempt to buy a gun caught the attention of authorities, who slapped a seven-day hold on the transaction, according to his Feb. 24, 2010, firearms transaction record, which was reviewed by the Los Angeles Times. Then, for reasons that remain unclear, the hold was lifted after 24 hours, and Soofi got the 9-millimeter.

As the owner of a small pizzeria, the Dallas-born Soofi, son of a Pakistani American engineer and American nurse, would not have been the primary focus of federal authorities, who back then were looking for smugglers and drug lords.

He is now.

In May, Soofi and his roommate, Elton Simpson, burst upon the site of a Garland cartoon convention that was offering a prize for the best depiction of the prophet Muhammad, something offensive to many Muslims. Dressed in body armor and armed with three pistols, three rifles and 1,500 rounds of ammunition, the pair wounded a security officer before they were killed by local police.

A day after the attack, the Department of Justice sent an “urgent firearms disposition request” to Lone Wolf, seeking more information about Soofi and the pistol he bought in 2010, according to a June 1 letter from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, to U.S. Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch.

Though the request did not specify whether the gun was used in the Garland attack, Justice Department officials said the information was needed “to assist in a criminal investigation,” according to Johnson’s letter, also reviewed by The Times.

The FBI so far has refused to release any details, including serial numbers, about the weapons used in Garland by Soofi and Simpson. Senate investigators are now pressing law enforcement agencies for answers, raising the chilling possibility that a gun sold during the botched Fast and Furious operation ended up being used in a terrorist attack against Americans.

Among other things, Johnson is demanding to know whether federal authorities have recovered the gun Soofi bought in 2010, where it was recovered and whether it had been discharged, according to the letter. He also demanded an explanation about why the initial seven-day hold was placed on the 2010 pistol purchase and why it was lifted after 24 hours.

Asked recently for an update on the Garland shooting, FBI Director James B. Comey earlier this month declined to comment. “We’re still sorting that out,” he said.

Officials at the Justice Department and the FBI declined to answer questions about whether the 9-millimeter pistol was one of the guns used in the Garland attack or seized at Soofi’s apartment.

It remains unclear whether Soofi’s 2010 visit to Lone Wolf is a bizarre coincidence or a missed opportunity for federal agents to put Soofi on their radar years before his contacts with Islamic extremists brought him to their attention.

Though Islamic State militants have claimed to have helped organize the Garland attack, U.S. officials are still investigating whether Soofi and Simpson received direct support from the group or were merely inspired by its calls for violence against the West.

Comey suggested that the attack fits the pattern of foreign terrorist groups indoctrinating American citizens through the Internet. He referred to it as the “crowdsourcing of terrorism.”

In a handwritten letter apparently mailed hours before the attack, Soofi said he was inspired by the writings of Islamic cleric Anwar Awlaki, an American citizen killed in a 2011 U.S. drone strike in Yemen.

“I love you,” Soofi wrote to his mother, Sharon Soofi, “and hope to see you in eternity.” In a telephone interview, Sharon Soofi described the letter and said her son had been shot twice in the head and once in the chest, according to autopsy findings she received.

At the time of the 2010 gun purchase, Soofi ran a Phoenix pizza parlor. His mother said that was about the same time he met Simpson, who worked for Soofi at the restaurant. They later shared an apartment, a short drive from the Lone Wolf store.

Reached by telephone, Andre Howard, owner of Lone Wolf, denied that his store sold the gun to Soofi. “Not here,” Howard said before hanging up.

Sharon Soofi said her son had told her he wanted the pistol for protection because his restaurant was in a “rough area.” She said he also acquired an AK-47 assault rifle at the end of last year or early this year, when authorities believe he and Simpson were plotting an attack on the Super Bowl in Arizona.

“I tried to convince him that, what in the world do you need an AK-47 for?” she said in a telephone interview. Soofi told her they practiced target shooting in the desert. Her younger son, Ali Soofi, was living with his brother and Simpson at the time, she said, but left after becoming frightened by the weapons, ammunition and militant Islamist literature.

She blamed Simpson for radicalizing her son, who she said had no history of religious extremism. A month before Soofi bought the pistol, Simpson was indicted on charges of lying to the FBI about his plans to travel to Somalia and engage in “violent jihad,” according to federal court documents.

Simpson was jailed until March 2011 and convicted of making false statements. But the judge ruled there was insufficient evidence to prove the false statements were connected to international terrorism. Simpson was released and placed on probation.

After the Garland attack, the FBI arrested a third man, Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem, and charged him with planning the Garland attack. At a detention hearing on June 16, prosecutors and an FBI agent provided details about the plot, but avoided discussing the history of the firearms.

Sharon Soofi said she found her son’s letter in her post office box. It was dated the Saturday before the attack, and postmarked in Dallas on Monday, the day after the assault, suggesting he dropped it in the mailbox before he and Simpson arrived in Garland. “In the name of Allah,” the letter began, “I am sorry for the grief I have caused.”

He referred to “those Muslims who are being killed, slandered, imprisoned, etc. for their religion,” and concluded, “I truly love you, Mom, but this life is nothing but shade under the tree and a journey. The reality is the eternal existence in the hereafter.”

 

World Leaders and the UN Allows Sex Slaves

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There is not a world leader or any member of the United Nations much anyone in the National Security Council, the State Department or the White House that is not current on the plight of Christians and Yzidis in the Middle East.

We are in an era when each diplomatic communication or meeting by anyone in the Obama administration with Middle Eastern country governments, the topic of human rights is not discussed and pressure taken to cure, however, the words and threats are shallow at best.

We witnessing a modern day holocaust and no one has a strategy or a war plan to stop the death, the human trafficking or the slavery.

The Islamic State’s Christian and Yizidi Sex Slaves
by Nina Shea:

Unlike Muslims, who can conform and wait out ISIS until the day it is defeated, Christians, along with “polytheist” Yizidis, can don veils and give up cigarettes and alcohol, but, as non-Muslims, their very presence is an intolerable offense to the year-old “caliphate.” These minority religious groups in Iraq and Syria, lacking protecting armies or militias of their own, find themselves in unique peril. During his Bolivian trip this month, Pope Francis called it “genocide.”

ISIS demands nothing less than the conversion of all Christians and Yizidis to Islam under penalty of death for men and enslavement for women and children. (Another frequently cited option for Christian “People of the Book”, the payment of jizya, is a ruse, for the tax is raised until it becomes unpayable and property and lives are taken after all. Hence, last summer, Mosul’s bishops chose exile for their communities, rather than attend an ISIS meeting to learn of its jizya terms.)

The beheadings, crucifixions, and other means ISIS uses to slaughter unarmed Christian and Yizidi men—from priests and bishops to destitute migrant workers—have been proudly displayed by the ultra violent group on social media and have drawn condemnations worldwide. But the Islamic State’s “revival” of the institution of chattel slavery—sex slavery of Christian and Yizidi women and girls no less—has faded from public attention.

Over the past decade, thousands of Iraqi and Syrian Christians—including, in 2013, an entire convent of Syrian Orthodox nuns—have been taken captive for ransom. Last August, shortly after ISIS established its caliphate, it began something new. After capturing non-Sunni women and girls, ISIS began awarding and selling them as sex slaves. The vast majority were Yizidis but some, according to UN reports, were Christians.

On August 5, 2014, two days after ISIS invaded Sinjar, Yizidi MP Vian Dakhil made a riveting emotional speech about the genocide facing Yizidis on the floor of the Iraqi Parliament. She choked out before collapsing, “Our women are taken as slaves and sold in a slave market.””Our women are taken as slaves and sold in a slave market.” A week later, two prominent UN experts expressed grave concern about “sexual violence against women and teenage girls and boys belonging to Iraqi minorities.” Their report stated that “some 1,500 Yazidi and Christian persons may have been forced into sexual slavery,” which they condemned as “barbaric.”

Throughout the fall, lurid reports emerged of the enslaved Yizidis, up to 4,000 in all. As ISIS boasted in its propaganda magazine Dabiq: “This large-scale enslavement of polytheist families is probably the first since the abandonment of Sharia law.”

The Fatwa Department of the Islamic State made clear that the females of the “People of the Book,” including Christians, can be enslaved for sex as well, though Muslim “apostates” cannot. The number of Christian sex slaves is unknown. Three—Rana, Rita, and Christina—are publicly known. In March, 135 women and children were among those taken captive, from 35 Christian villages along Syria’s Khabour River. Their families, unable to afford the $23 million ransom demand, were told by ISIS, “They belong to us now.” The older women were released; the younger ones may be enslaved, though this has not been confirmed.

Cell phone calls from still enslaved girls last September and October disclosed the shocking details of their captivity. A young Yizidi woman in a phone call with activists from Compassion4Kurdistan pleaded: “I’ve been raped thirty times and it’s not even lunchtime. I can’t go to the toilet. Please bomb us.”

On September 7, a 17 year-old, with the pseudonym Mayat, told a journalist that she was being held with forty others females and that everyone, including a 12 year-old and other young girls, some of whom had stopped talking, were sexually abused daily. She told Italy’s La Republica:

They treat us as if we are their slaves. The men hit us and threaten us when we try to resist…. We’ve asked our jailers to shoot us dead, to kill us, but we are too valuable for them. They keep telling us that we are unbelievers because we are non-Muslims and that we are their property, like war booty. They say we are like goats bought at a market.

A 14-year-old Yizidi girl who had escaped said that she and her close friend Shayma were beaten and kicked after being given away as gifts: “Shayma was awarded to Abu Hussein, who was a cleric. I was given to an overweight, dark-bearded man about fifty years-old who seemed to have some high rank. He went by the nickname Abu Ahmed.”

In May 2015, a Yizidi girl was found enslaved by ISIS financier Abu Sayyaf and freed when the U.S. Delta Force invaded his Syrian home and killed him. Nothing further has been reported on her.

After their initial capture by jihadis, the women and girls are held in detention centers. Mosul’s Badoush prison is one “makeshift prison” for “the sexual enslavement of children,” according to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. A Yazidi teenager Du’a told former Congressman Frank Wolf, who interviewed refugees in Kurdistan last January, that she was held in Mosul with 700 other Yizidi girls. She related that the girls were separated by eye color, and members of ISIS were allowed to choose for themselves among the young women.She related that the girls were separated by eye color, and members of ISIS were allowed to choose for themselves among the young women. The rest, she said, were then separated into “pretty” and “ugly” groups, with the most beautiful given away to high ranking ISIS members.

This month, an ISIS flyer was discovered on Twitter by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremists’ online postings. It announced that girls captured in battle were to be the top three prizes in Quran recitation contests held in two Syrian mosques during the month of Ramadan. Accounts that the flyers said these were Yizidi slaves were erroneous; the girls’ religion was not specified and could have included Christians. Coverage of this was limited to Internet postings.

Sex slaves are also sold. Under rules for “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour [of Judgment],” Dabiq gives a theological justification for selling women as war booty: “The enslaved Yizidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers as the polytheists were sold by the [Prophet’s] companions.” It also cites more recent precedents: namely, the “enslavement of Christian women and children in the Philippines and Nigeria by the Mujahidin there.”

The article argues that sex slavery benefits both the Muslim community, by enlarging it, and the slave by “making heaven accessible.” The formerly enslaved girls report being consistently pressured, including by beatings, to convert to Islam. (Rules for proper beatings are included.) If they become Muslim, they can then be sold as brides to jihadis.

On October 15, ISIS published pricing guidelines for slaves based on age. Under the heading “Merchandise,” the listing starts with “200,000 dinars for a woman aged 1-9 / Yizidi/Christian” and ends with “75,000 dinars for a woman aged 30-40 / Yizidi/Christian.”

In practice, the pricing appears to be market driven. An Australian jihadist for the Islamic State, Mohamed Elomar, tweeted that he was selling seven Yizidi sex slaves for $2,500 each and posted a photo of one. In June 2015, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that ISIS militants were selling slaves for $500 to $2,000.In June 2015, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that ISIS militants were selling slaves for $500 to $2,000. The UN representative Bangura said that captured women and girls are often forced to strip naked and are judged by ISIS militants who gauge how much they are to be sold for in a slave auction.

A father listened helplessly as his distraught enslaved daughter told him in a cell phone call that she was being sold for $10 that same afternoon. Du’a told Wolf she was sold for $2 after being put in the “ugly” group.
Theology aside, Bangura reported that in order for ISIS to recruit more foreign fighters to join its military ranks, the caliphate continues to capture more girls and women in each newly conquered territory and then sells them for “as little as a pack of cigarettes.” The Islamic State’s goal is to make them affordable to men of all means, especially the young jihadis on whom the caliphate depends for its military success. Bangura observes, “This is a war that is being fought on the bodies of women.”

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child reports that, in the Mosul markets where ISIS sells abducted children and women, “attaching price tags to them,” it found that the buyers were local youths who were being recruited as jihadis. Amnesty International’s December report confirms that buyers are largely local Iraqi and Syrian men. The involvement of their former neighbors is a factor driving many Iraqi Christians and Yizidis to emigrate from the region.

No female is considered too young; only women over forty are let go or released for ransom. Amnesty reported that some slaves were “just babies.” Du’a said one of the girls penned up with her was seven months-old. Another 21-year-old escaped slave said that, while detained for sale, a guard took another younger captive into the bathroom and raped her; she was nine years-old. ISIS guidelines price Christian and Yizidi 9 year-olds at $172.ISIS guidelines price Christian and Yizidi 9 year-olds at $172.

A toddler brings equal value. A Christian woman, whose family could not flee Qaraqosh when ISIS invaded because her husband is blind, told Wolf that they came to her house, shouting, “Convert or we will kill you.” An ISIS militant snatched from her lap Christina, her three-year-old daughter. The mother later learned during a furtive cell phone call from Rana, an enslaved Christian woman, that she had cared for Christiana while they were detained with other enslaved women until the baby was taken away.

A Dabiq article asserts that from Sinjar in Iraq “one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic State’s authority.” ISIS uses the slaves in caliphate bordellos run by British women—members of the al Khanssaa Brigade, an all-women religious police. Farah Ispahani, a Reagan Fascell Democracy Fellow of the National Endowment for Democracy and a former Member of Parliament in Pakistan, studies ISIS women volunteers. One of the few of these to mention the sex slavery is “Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajirah,” who argues that taking slaves through war is a “great prophetic Sunnah containing many divine wisdoms and religious benefits.” Dabiq identifies one such benefit: it saves men “who cannot afford marriage to a free woman [who] finds himself surrounded by temptation towards sin.” It explains that “the desertion of slavery had led to an increase in adultery/fornication because the sharia alternative to marriage is not available.”

Over 600 Yizidi girls, one by one, have been redeemed by private efforts with KRG help, according to a July 7 interview with Vian Dakhil. Two more Yizidi girls were freed from enslavement in Mosul, on July 14. Conspicuously absent in the rescue operation, Dakhil notes, was the Iraqi government.

After a spate of reporting on the Yizidis last fall, the Islamic State’s slave practice has received scant attention. The Wilson Center’s Middle East director Halleh Isfandiari observes that “Arab and Muslim governments, though loud in their condemnation of ISIS as a terrorist organization, have been silent on its treatment of women.” The reaction of the White House and Congress has been muted as well. The State Department’s 2015 Sex Trafficking report, released on July 27, devotes barely two paragraphs out of 380 pages to the Islamic State’s institutionalization of sex slavery in the past year.

Uncharacteristically, ISIS, too, seems a bit self-restrained about broadcasting this particular abomination, which may account for some of the world’s silence. ISIS issued rules last December regulating—though not banning—sexual relations with another’s slaves, with slaves who are sisters, and with pre-pubescent slave girls. It hasn’t produced any slick videos of its slave auctions or bordellos. After YouTube showed jihadis joking about trading their Glocks for sex slaves, and of a British schoolboy-turned-ISIS-militant leering about the hundreds of women slaves in Syria, ISIS ordered a stop to tweeting slave photos.

Once legal, chattel slavery has been abolished worldwide as a matter of law. To the extent that it exists in the world’s darkest corners, it does so as a criminal activity and, as such, is condemned by society at large. As the tribute vice pays to virtue, that remains true even where governments allow slavery to continue with impunity. The Islamic State’s revival of what it purports to be state-institutionalized slavery against Yizidi and Christian women needs to be vigorously condemned, both as a component of religious genocide every bit as horrifying as beheadings, and in its own right.

POTUS Far From Lame Duck, Progressive ‘To-Do’ Items

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The arrogance of Barack Obama continues. Just a week ago, he declared he could win a third term if he ran again.

“I actually think I’m a pretty good President. I think if I ran, I could win. But I can’t,” Obama ad-libbed during a speech in Ethiopia. “There’s a lot that I’d like to do to keep America moving. But the law is the law, and no person is above the law, not even the president.”

So imagine how blindsided America is about to be from now until January 2017. What more is planned? Normalizing relations with Bashir al Assad? Normalizing relations with North Korea? Suspending Border Patrol operations completely? Federalizing all national banks? Imposing more agency regulations on Americans and business? Making all interstate roads toll roads?

Lack of imagination now could prevent you from being prepared. Consider other countries that don’t impose government tyrannical policies and have a better competing edge. Cutting military personnel to roving 4 day work weeks? Replacing Ruth Bader Gingsberg on the Supreme Court with Cass Sunstein? Bailing out the City of Chicago to the tune of $7 billion?

Let us start with what is coming almost immediately.

Obama’s big climate rule ready for Monday launch

Politico: Supporters say they plan to be at the White House for the announcement of an EPA rule that will take on power plants’ pollution.

President Barack Obama is poised to push ahead with the nation’s most ambitious environmental regulation in decades — a crackdown on power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions that the administration hopes will put the U.S. in striking distance of achieving a global agreement to combat climate change.

Environmentalists supporting the rule say they plan to be at the White House for a Monday afternoon announcement that they hope will feature the president himself, as part of what’s shaping up to be a major sales pitch both within and outside the administration. Allies including Virginia environmental groups, elected officials and green-minded business groups have also scheduled media calls for 3 p.m. Monday to react to the news.

The White House has not confirmed the timing of the announcement.

The regulation is expected to ease up on a few of the most controversial provisions that the Environmental Protection Agency included in its draft proposals in the past two years. But it will still set up a years-long legal and political battle with congressional Republicans and other opponents, who call it the major weapon in Obama’s “War on Coal,” and it promises to become a major point of contention for the 2016 presidential race.

The regulation also puts a capstone on Obama’s efforts to secure a legacy as the president who made a serious assault on global warming, without waiting for action from Congress — though he will have to depend on his successors to carry it through. States will also play a big role, with six governors so far indicating they won’t comply with EPA’s mandates.

Environmentalists, who have been pressing for Obama to announce the rule personally, call it a crucial first step in cutting the pollution that scientists blame for boosting the Earth’s temperatures and lifting sea levels. But they say far steeper cuts will still be needed if the world is to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

“This is a huge part of the president’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gases,” said Carol Browner, Obama’s first-term climate czar, who left the White House several months after the administration’s attempt at comprehensive climate legislation failed in 2010. “He has viewed the issue of climate change as something he has responsibility for under the law — the moral and ethical responsibility domestically, but also globally.”

Opponents vow that the rule will not stand. “We believe it’s legally deficient on a number of fronts and believe it’s going to have a terrible impact on citizens across the country,” said West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, one of several plaintiffs who won a Supreme Court victory this summer over an EPA mercury rule.

Future legal challenges against the climate rule are also likely to end up in front of the Supreme Court.

The broad strokes of the rule are expected to match the drafts that EPA has issued over the past two years: By 2030, existing power plants will have to put out an average of 30 percent less carbon dioxide than they did in 2005 — a goal the U.S. is about halfway to meeting. And the rule effectively bars the construction of new coal-fired power plants, the biggest source of carbon pollution in the U.S.

Together, the requirements would change the way the U.S. produces and uses electricity, continuing an ongoing wave of coal-plant shutdowns while offering legs up to natural gas, solar, wind and maybe nuclear.

For people closely following the rule, the major questions concern how much the final rule will differ from what EPA originally proposed in September 2013 and last June. Sources have said EPA will roll back an interim pollution-cutting deadline that states and power companies attacked as unworkable, to 2022 from 2020. The agency is also expected to abandon its proposal to require future coal-burning plants to capture and store their carbon pollution, an expensive mandate that opponents said would be vulnerable in court because it violates a 2005 energy law.

States are also expected to get an extra year to submit their compliance plans to EPA — 2018 instead of 2017.

Other potential changes could include making it easier for nuclear power plants and their carbon-free emissions to count toward meeting states’ cleanup targets, changing the way that energy-efficiency initiatives are included in calculating states’ reduction goals, and altering the way that EPA’s formulas treat green energy that is produced in one state but sold in another.

And EPA could tweak the complicated formulas that set widely varying cleanup targets for each state, which in last year’s draft ranged from cuts of 11 percent for North Dakota to 72 percent for Washington state. The raw numbers don’t necessarily reflect the degree of difficulty: Washington, for instance, could meet most of its goal by closing one coal plant that’s already scheduled for retirement, EPA has said.

The costs of the rule will be big — but so will the benefits, the administration contends. Last summer, EPA estimated that the portion dealing with existing power plants would bring $55 billion to $93 billion in economic benefits, compared with $7.3 billion to $8.8 billion in costs to the economy.

But EPA’s critics note that the rule comes amid troubling financial times for the coal industry, and might even arrive on the same day that a major coal producer — Virginia-based Alpha Natural Resources — is expected to file for bankruptcy protection. That follows several other high-profile coal company bankruptcy filings.

Environmental regulations like the carbon rule and a forthcoming Interior Department rule meant to protect Appalachian streams are only part of the reason coal has dropped from nearly 50 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2005 to 39 percent last year. Inexpensive natural gas, which burns more cleanly than coal does, has taken a greater share of the market. And in some regions, coal deposits are becoming increasingly more difficult and less economical to mine.

Meanwhile, Obama’s earlier attempts to tackle climate change have struggled too. The House passed a cap-and-trade bill in 2009, but it died in the Senate the following year despite the Democrats holding a large majority. The president also stumbled with an anticlimactic 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. But he revived climate change as a theme late in his 2012 reelection campaign, declaring that “climate change is not a hoax,” and in his second inaugural address, in which he said failing to take on the threat “would betray our children and future generations.”

The credibility of those promises will be at stake in December, when negotiators the U.S. and other nations gather in Paris to try to reach a global climate agreement.

The final rule is also timed for maximum momentum to take advantage of the final year and a half of Obama’s time in office. Litigation over the rule is likely to last through this decade and potentially into the 2020s, making the winner of the 2016 presidential race a key figure in Obama’s climate legacy.

While it remains unclear just how far a Republican president could roll back the regulation, all sides agree a GOP White House would spell significant trouble for the carbon rule. The GOP field of 2016 candidates opposes the rule: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said it is “unworkable,” while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has called it “irresponsible and ineffective.”

Meanwhile, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has pledged to protect the rule, while it garnered praise from rival Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders has called for even further climate action.

 

 

Activism for Planned Parenthood Runs Deep Including a Judge

Posted on by

Obama Appointee And Bundler Blocks More Video Releases By Group Behind Planned Parenthood Sting

By   (<– great work)

A federal judge late Friday granted a temporary restraining order against the release of recordings made at an annual meeting of abortion providers. The injunction is against the Center for Medical Progress, the group that has unveiled Planned Parenthood’s participation in the sale of organs harvested from aborted children.

Judge William H. Orrick, III, granted the injunction just hours after the order was requested by the National Abortion Federation.

Orrick was nominated to his position by hardline abortion supporter President Barack Obama. He was also a major donor to and bundler for President Obama’s presidential campaign. He raised at least $200,000 for Obama and donated $30,800 to committees supporting him, according to Public Citizen.

Even though the National Abortion Federation filed its claim only hours before, Orrick quickly decided in their favor that the abortionists they represent would, ironically, be “likely to suffer irreparable injury, absent an ex parte temporary restraining order, in the form of harassment, intimidation, violence, invasion of privacy, and injury to reputation, and the requested relief is in the public interest.”

The restraining order is here.

More activism:

Then there is Hillary where Planned Parenthood was working for international policy. TWS:

Planned Parenthood emailed Hillary Clinton on her private email address. The revelation comes in the most recently released trove of Clinton’s emails.

Here’s the email from Laurie Rubiner, vice president of public policy and advocacy, sent directly to Clinton. Exact copy here.

UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F 2014 20439 Doc No. C05764008 Date: 07/31/2015

RELEASE IN PART B6
From:  Abedin, Huma <[email protected]ov
>
Sent: Friday, July 31, 2009 8:09 PM
To: Rubiner, Laurie; H
Cc: preines pverveer
Subject: RE: Kenya
Laurie — She isn t doing any specific health or womens events in Kenya but I ve also shared your email with policy team at state and embassy staff in Nairobi helping to plan the trip to see if there is any way to address this.
From: Rubiner, Laurie
Sent: Friday, July 31, 1009 1:26
PM
To: hdr22@clintonemail.com Cc: Abedin, Huma; preines
Subject: Kenya
pverveer
Secretary Clinton —
I understand you are going to Kenya next week and while I know the trip is primarily focused on trade issues, I wanted to flag an issue for you because I know it is near and dear to your heart.
Kenya has one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in Africa — it is illegal unless a woman’s life is at risk and
criminalizes both the woman and the provider. Two years ago, Kenyan authorities imprisoned a doctor and
two nurses, falsely accusing them of providing illegal abortions. After a year in prison, the providers were found innocent and released, but it galvanized the legal and provider community who formed a coalition to make abortion less restrictive.
It will come as no surprise to you that, as a result of their abortion law, Kenya has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in all of Africa, with an estimated 800 women a day seeking the procedure, often through dangerous means.
Kenya is restarting a long-stalled constitutional review process and they hope to produce a final Constitution by next year. Religious groups are on a concerted crusade to include new language in the Constitution which would codify that life begins at conception . The current Constitution is largely silent on the issue. If this fetal personhood amendment goes forward, it would place Kenya in the small community of nations with such a provision. It would clearly mark Kenya as out of stop with countries attempting to institutionalize the African Union’s Maputo Protocol, one of the most progressive regional documents on women, development and reproductive rights, and with the vast majority of African countries in general. For a country trying to regain the momentum of stability and success it enjoyed until recently, such a policy imposition would be a regression for women’s rights and for the country writ large. I went to Kenya last month to work with the coalition that has formed to strategize against the Constitutional amendment and to work toward a less restrictive abortion law. I also visited several of our clinics and providers in Nairobi and in nearby villages where Planned Parenthood has programs to train providers in post abortion care. You have seen this a million times in your travels around the world, so I don’t need to tell you how poignant the stories were of the lives saved and lost, the bravery in standing u
to constant government harassment, and the fear of what this potential Constitutional amendment will mean to the provision of safe medical services. I know it is asking a lot, but if there is any way that you could draw attention to this issue when you are in Kenya, you would be even more of my personal hero than you already are. It is our hope that if Kenya knows the world is watching they may be more careful in how they proceed. Of course we would be

happy to help you in any way if you decide you want to do something on this while you are there. There is also a Congressional delegation going to Kenya the week of August 8
th
and we are working on them to have a side
meeting on this issue as well. As always, thank you so much for all you do. We are all so grateful that you are there All best, Laurie Laurie Rubiner Vice President of Public Policy and Advocacy Planned Parenthood Federation of America
(202) 973-4863(202) 973-4863 office
349
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F 2014 20439 Doc No. C05764008 Date: 07/31/2015
 
    

Ah, but hold on, it goes all the way to the White House too.

FB and CNS: On Thursday, the White House came to the defense of Planned Parenthood calling the stream of damning videos against the organization “fraudulent.” The talking points used by the White House came straight from Planned Parenthood itself.

Now, according to the visitor log, it was discovered that the president of Planned Parenthood has made 39 visits to the Obama White House since he’s taken office.

Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards made her first trip to the White House on Obama’s first day in office. Since then, she has met with numerous other former and current White House advisers, such as Obama’s former senior adviser David Plouffe (four times) and Valerie Jarrett (five times). Richards also attended Barack Obama’s second inaugural reception.