Category Archives: Insurgency

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.

 

 

Immigration Issue In Germany, Tent Cities

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Failed foreign policy and failed nations have immediate consequences and cause future financial destruction not only for America but for many Western nations, like Germany.

Germany Announces Crackdown on Immigrant ‘Welfare Abuse’

By Chris Köver

Germany has announced plans to curb access to welfare for immigrants from other European Union countries, in an attempt to clamp down on the abuse it claims has been a growing problem over the past year. Under a proposal agreed by the cabinet on Wednesday, Germany could expel EU citizens who have not found work in the country after six months, or who are found to have abused the welfare system. The move comes as other member states such as Britain toughen up social security rules in a bid to curb the so-called “welfare tourism” they say has resulted from EU enlargement. The plan would also tighten access to child benefit, which would only be given to those with a tax identification number, in an effort to stop families from claiming child support in several countries or for children they don’t have. Those convicted of benefits fraud, for example by forging documents or claiming payments while self-employed, could be banned from reentering the country for five years. Opposition politicians say such an entry ban would put it on a collision course with the EU, which maintains strict rules on freedom of movement within the bloc.

Tent Cities Test Germany’s Resolve to Support Swell of Refugees Germany is resorting to tent cities to house a flood of refugees led by Syrians fleeing civil war as soaring costs test the country’s willingness to accept newcomers. The government expects the number of asylum seekers entering the country this year to more than double to 450,000. Caring for them will run as high as 6 billion euros ($6.6 billion), the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper reported this week, citing data collected from the interior ministries of Germany’s 16 states.

The influx presents challenges for Chancellor Angela Merkel and her government, with a majority of the public now favoring stricter immigration rules. Merkel herself was personally caught up in the debate earlier this month when she drove a Palestinian girl to tears after telling her that not all asylum seekers will get to stay.

 

“Migrants have become the No. 1 topic for German voters, replacing the old concerns about unemployment and the economy,” Joerg Forbrig, a senior program director at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. in Berlin, said by phone. “This issue is the gravitational center and the political magnet for every German election.” While Merkel’s government is giving the states more money to pay for asylum and added staff to shorten the processing time of applications, the sheer number has left them stretched and resorting to tents to house people. Brandenburg, the state surrounding Berlin, has put up 23 army tents to house 280 people — a temporary solution that can only be used as long as the weather remains warm enough.

Mounting Backlog

“Tent accommodations aren’t the exception — the problems are massive,” said Bernd Mesovic, deputy managing director of refugee rights group Pro Asyl, adding that he worries Germany will soon have a backlog of 260,000 undecided asylum cases. Some politicians are pushing for laws that would more clearly identify who can stay and help speed up the deportation of people from countries such as the Balkan states who have little chance of being granted asylum. In Bavaria, Prime Minister Horst Seehofer said this month that he plans to take matters into his own hands and implement “rigorous” measures to more quickly send home rejected asylum seekers. In the poll released Thursday by broadcaster ARD, 63 percent of Germans want a new immigration law, while 27 percent said that’s not necessary. A total of 62 percent of those surveyed in a Bild newspaper poll this week said they support faster expulsion for people who don’t come from war zones.

Tearful Exchange

Uncertainty about her future in Germany left a 14-year-old Palestinian girl in tears at a Merkel town-hall meeting in the northern city of Rostock this month. The girl said her parents came to the country from a refugee camp in Lebanon and were still waiting for a decision on their asylum application four years later — prompting the chancellor to say that “some will have to go back.” The exchange caused a stir on social media and in the German press. This year there has already been 173 arson and other attacks, mainly on uninhabited buildings planned for refugees, in several towns and cities, according to news magazine Der Spiegel. That compares with 175 such attacks in all of 2014. In Troeglitz, located about 200 kilometers (124 miles) southwest of Berlin in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, a building that was to house immigrants was firebombed in April. The town’s mayor quit after receiving threats from neo-Nazis. The issue has become a political topic in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, where Green party premier Winfried Kretschmann is facing a re-election bid in eight months. Kretschmann’s own party refused his plan to declare more southeastern European countries as safe places of origin, which would have limited the number of those eligible for asylum. Opponents have seized on the matter.

Uncontrolled

“There’s uncontrolled immigration at the moment that exceeds our capacities,” said Joerg Meuthen, the top candidate in the state from the anti-euro party Alternative for Germany. Of the 114,060 applications processed in the first half, 36 percent were granted asylum or protected by a deportation ban, while the rest were refused, according to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. At 20 percent, Syrians made up the biggest share of asylum seekers, followed by 18 percent from Kosovo and 14 percent from Albania. “This is a tragedy foretold,” said Shada Islam, director of policy at the Friends of Europe advisory group in Brussels. “When the EU borders states that are at war or broken — and we don’t help them — then anyone could have seen this coming as people flock to a pole of prosperity for a better life.”

Berger to Hillary to Obama and Back to ’67 Lines

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We have enough issues with our own emails but to read the incremental releases of Hillary Clinton’s email while she was Secretary of State deserves combat pay.

In Washington DC, the media brings America the front line people, like those at the White House and cabinet secretaries, but no one pays much attention to those behind the powerbrokers of government, the real hidden workers that have the conversations, write the press releases, write the speeches, write the cables and emails and sit on the chairs lining the walls of governmental meetings. Those hidden people take the notes, measure the responses, slip notes back and forth, do the legwork, make the calls, read the legislation, scour the global media and countless other housekeeping (literally) items.

Nothing is more clear to validate the above assessment than the process of reading Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Hillary was a user of people, she exploited them for the sake of her objectives and to set diplomatic policy which rose to meetings at the White House level.

Many of those ‘staff’ types get re-cycled from administration to lobby outfits and then re-cycled again to the next campaign and administration.

Now for a key email, which proves the clues to the machinations of politics and how we and others get blindsided.

Sandy Berger urged Hillary to portray Bibi as obstacle to peace

By Philip Klein:

Sandy Berger, a former national security adviser for President Bill Clinton who pled guilty to stealing and destroying classified documents, advised Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state on how to portray Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the obstacle to peace and how to make his political life “uneasy.”

The revelations came in a new batch of Clinton’s emails released on Friday by the State Department.

In the emails, Berger, who chairs the global business advisory firm Albright Stonebridge Group (along with former Bill Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright), outlined a strategy to turn the tables on Netanyahu diplomatically in negotiations with Palestinians.

“The objective is to try shift the fulcrum of our current relations with Bibi from settlements — where he thinks he has the upper hand — to ground where there is greater understanding in Israel of the American position and where we can make him uneasy about incurring our displeasure,” Berger wrote on Sept. 19. 2009, days ahead of a speech to President Obama at the United Nations.

Berger wrote, “Ironically, his intransigence over 67 borders may offer us that possibility — to turn his position against him.”

He argued, “Assuming Bibi will accept no formulation that includes 67 borders, it suggests that Bibi is the obstacle to progress and backtracking on his part on an issue that previous Israeli governments have accepted. It begins shifting the discussion from settlements to the more fundamental issue of ultimate territorial outcome.”

Three days later, he wrote, “Going forward, if Bibi continues to be the obstacle, you will need to find the ground from which you can make his politics uneasy.”

 

On that same day, Sept. 22, Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly, calling for, “a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967.”

Clinton emailed Berger that afternoon, asking, “Let me know how you think today played.”

The fact that Clinton was soliciting advice from Berger while secretary of state is part of a pattern of her taking guidance from former loyal soldiers of her husband’s administration with sketchy histories, as she also was in close contact with political operative Sidney Blumenthal — asking for intelligence on Libya as he did consulting work related to the nation.

Berger became infamous in 2003 when, ahead of testimony before the Sept. 11 Commission, he stole highly classified documents from the National Archives and Records Administration by stuffing them in his pants, and destroyed some of them.

Though he initially claimed it was an “honest mistake,” he later pled guilty to removing them intentionally, triggering a $50,000 fine, and 100-hour community service requirement.

That wasn’t Berger’s first brush with the law. In 1997, while serving as national security adviser for Bill Clinton, Berger had to pay a $23,000 penalty for failing to sell stock as directed by the White House, leading to a conflict of interest.

The checkered past didn’t stop Hillary Clinton from making Berger one of her national security advisers in her 2008 campaign, nor, evidently, did it prevent her from being in contact with him at the State Department.

Clinton had a contentious relationship with Netanyahu, famously boasting that she was the administration’s “designated yeller” at the Israeli prime minister.

In May 2011, Obama caused an uproar when he called for a two-state solution based borders that existed before Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War. Israel considers those borders indefensible, because they are as narrow as nine miles.

 

The Push Pull of Illegal Immigration

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By Daniel Horowitz:

In part: This week, Rep. Babin introduced the Resettlement Accountability National Security Act (H.R. 3314), which places an immediate moratorium on the refugee resettlement program until Congress reauthorizes it with a joint resolution.  The idea behind this legislation is to give the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the legislative arm of Congress, time to research the cost and scope of the program so that the people’s representatives can finally audit this unaccountable, costly, and security-challenged program.

America has served as a beacon of freedom for millions of people who have come as refugees since World War II to escape tyranny and seek the American dream.  In the past, refugees from Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Southeast Asia – just to name a few – have contributed immensely to our culture and economy.

the refugee resettlement program has become an insidious tool used by the elites to remake American society and burden the states with a huge fiscal drain.

But in recent years, much like the rest of our immigration system, the refugee resettlement program has become an insidious tool used by the elites to remake American society and burden the states with a huge fiscal drain.  Worse, it has in many ways become a refugee resettlement program for thousands of national security risks from predominantly Muslim countries from volatile parts of the world without a proper vetting system in place.  With Obama seeking to fundamentally remake America during his final 18 months in office, and with the increasing pressure to bring in more Muslim refugees from Syria, Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) has stepped up to the plate by introducing the first piece of legislation to reinsert the people’s voice into the refugee process.  Much more here.

Illegal immigration prevention spending in Central America backfires, entices migrants

Money squandered as confusing and lenient policies encourage border crossings

The U.S. government paid for a classroom full of computers in El Salvador, but the Salvadoran government never bothered to hire a teacher, investigators said Wednesday — one of a series of bungles in the Obama administration’s plan to flood Central America with U.S. money to try to stem another surge of illegal immigration.

In an expansive report on last summer’s surge, the Government Accountability Office said confusing and lenient U.S. policies pushed illegal immigrants to make the crossing, and even cited administration officials who said President Obama’s 2012 deportation amnesty for so-called Dreamers did entice some of the surge.

Trying to get a handle on the flood, Mr. Obama has requested hundreds of millions of dollars to try to bolster society in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, the three countries chiefly responsible for the surge, but GAO investigators said corruption or incompetence among the Central American governments may hinder those efforts.

In the U.S., meanwhile, Homeland Security officials poured money into public relations campaigns to try to warn would-be crossers against attempting it, but the government has no idea if those efforts worked, the GAO said.

“Carrying out ineffective campaigns could lead to higher levels of migration to the United States, which is not only potentially costly in terms of U.S. taxpayer resources but costly and dangerous to the migrants and their families,” the GAO said in its report.

Both the State Department and Homeland Security admitted they need to do a better job collecting information and evaluating what they’re doing.

The report comes a year after the surge of illegal immigrant children and families reshaped the immigration debate, drawing attention to a still-porous border and helping  sidetrack President Obama’s hopes of getting Congress to approve a bill legalizing illegal immigrants already in the country.

The surge, which totaled nearly 70,000 children traveling without a parent in fiscal year 2014, plus more than 60,000 children and parents traveling together, overwhelmed the Obama administration, which was left struggling for answers.

Initially officials blamed dangerous and economically depressed conditions in three key Central American nations for pushing illegal immigrants north, but eventually Homeland Security officials admitted that confusing and lenient policies — at least as far as illegal immigrants were concerned — were serving as a magnet to draw illegal immigrants.

In Wednesday’s report, State Department officials in Guatemala said folks there believed that if they could get to the U.S. they could qualify for Mr. Obama’s 2012 deportation amnesty — known officially as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. In reality, that amnesty only applied to illegal immigrants who had been in the U.S. for some time already, though Mr. Obama has already announced a major expansion of the amnesty.

In Honduras, meanwhile, American officials said residents believed the U.S. would allow pregnant women and mothers traveling with children to stay.

To try to counter those impressions, Homeland Security and State Department officials mounted a massive information campaign warning of the dangers of the journey  and telling illegal immigrants they wouldn’t qualify for Mr. Obama’s deportation amnesty. And here at home, the administration opened new detention space to hold the families crossing the border in an effort to ship them back home sooner and deter other would-be crossers.

But GAO investigators said the surge had already begun to ease by the time the anti-crossing public relations campaign began, suggesting that tactic didn’t help.

The story continues by clicking here.

 

 

 

Every U.S. Corporation Hacked by China

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From the Former NSA Director McConnell via CNN:

“The Chinese have penetrated every major corporation of any consequence in the United States and taken information,” he said. “We’ve never, ever not found Chinese malware.”
He said the malware lets Chinese spies extract information whenever they want. McConnell, who also led the NSA from 1992 until 1996, continues to investigate hacks as a high-ranking adviser to Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH).
He listed victims he has come across during his investigations: U.S. Congress, Department of Defense, State Department (which is currently dealing with Russian hackers) and major corporations.
The U.S. government has said it has caught Chinese spies stealing blueprints and business plans. Last year, federal prosecutors took the unprecedented step of filing formal criminal charges against five Chinese government spies for breaking into Alcoa (AA), U.S. Steel Corp. (X), Westinghouse and others.

Exclusive: Secret NSA Map Shows China Cyber Attacks on U.S. Targets

A secret NSA map obtained exclusively by NBC News shows the Chinese government‘s massive cyber assault on all sectors of the U.S economy, including major firms like Google and Lockheed Martin, as well as the U.S. government and military.

The map uses red dots to mark more than 600 corporate, private or government “Victims of Chinese Cyber Espionage” that were attacked over a five-year period, with clusters in America’s industrial centers. The entire Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston is blanketed in red, as is California’s Silicon Valley, with other concentrations in Dallas, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, L.A. and Detroit. The highest number of attacks was in California, which had almost 50.

Each dot represents a successful Chinese attempt to steal corporate and military secrets and data about America’s critical infrastructure, particularly the electrical power and telecommunications and internet backbone. And the prizes that China pilfered during its “intrusions” included everything from specifications for hybrid cars to formulas for pharmaceutical products to details about U.S. military and civilian air traffic control systems, according to intelligence sources.

The map was part of an NSA briefing prepared by the NSA Threat Operations Center (NTOC) in February 2014, an intelligence source told NBC News. The briefing highlighted China’s interest in Google and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, and in air traffic control systems. It catalogued the documents and data Chinese government hackers have “exfiltrated” — stolen — from U.S. corporate, government and military networks, and also listed the number and origin of China’s “exploitations and attacks.”

The map suggests that NSA has been able to monitor and assess the Chinese cyber espionage operations, and knows which specific companies, government agencies and computer networks are being targeted.

The NSA did not immediately respond to repeated requests for comment.