Ricky Martin, Gloria Estefan and
Natalie Cole are among those headlining a concert at the White House
tonight, the second such concert held since the sequester went into
effect and marking a dozen since President Barack Obama took office.
Música Latina: In Performance at the White House
will be held at 7 p.m. in the White House East Room in celebration of
Hispanic Heritage Month, according to the White House. Obama will
deliver remarks at the event.
This is the 12th such concert since
Obama has taken office. The last concert was on April 9 with a “Memphis
Soul” theme. It will be the 52nd overall “In Performance at the White House” event, a program which began under President Jimmy Carter in 1978.
The White House said the concert is
about “reflecting the influence of richly diverse Latino communities
from throughout the Americas. The program celebrates the beauty and
diversity of that music.” The concert will be broadcast Oct. 8 at 8 p.m.
on PBS stations nationally and on Oct. 13 on the American Forces
Network.
Artists performing will be Natalie
Cole, Lila Downs, Gloria Estefan, Raul Malo, Ricky Martin, Prince Royce,
Arturo Sandoval, Romeo Santos, Alejandro Sanz and Marco Antonio Solis.
First Lady Michelle Obama will host a
special daytime event at the White House for Washington, D.C. area
student about the history of Latin music.
The April concert featured Al Green, Justin Timberlake and Queen Latifah
When the first post-sequester concert stirred controversy in April, the White House told CBS News
— among other media outlets — that the event is not paid for by the
administration or taxpayers, but rather is covered by WETA, the
Washington, D.C. area PBS affiliate. Federal tax dollars are in the mix,
however, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding. CPB –
the parent agency of PBS and NPR – is a mixture of tax dollars and
private donations.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/16/livin-la-vida-loca-during-sequestration-your-guide-to-whos-performing-at-the-latest-white-house-concert-tonight/
House will move on food stamp bill this week while negotiating deal to fund government
When Congress reconvenes this week, House lawmakers will have just
about two weeks to come up with legislation that will keep the
government funded after the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.
Despite the looming deadline, both chambers this week will focus
attention on other significant legislation, including funding for food
stamps, and congressional hearings on Libya while they scramble behind
the scenes to reach a deal on spending.
The House Republican leadership announced plans to take up a bill
reauthorizing the food stamp program, which expires Nov. 1. Food stamp
legislation is typically rolled into a much broader farm bill, but
Republicans decided to take it up separately after they were unable to
win support this summer for a farm bill because of differences over how
much to cut the food stamp program.
The legislation the House plans to take up this week, the Nutrition
Reform and Work Opportunity Act, is named after the 1996 legislation
that added a work requirement to welfare eligibility.
The House bill would cut food stamps, or the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program known as SNAP, by $40 billion over the next decade
and would toughen eligibility requirements.
The bill is unlikely to draw Democratic support, but Republicans
like it because it would help curb dramatic increase in food stamp use,
which is up by more than 70 percent since 2008.
Total spending on SNAP has increased from $35 billion in 2007 to
$80 billion in 2012, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget
Office.
The House will also take up the National Strategic and Critical
Minerals Production Act, which would loosen federal restraints on mining
for rare earth minerals by streamlining a permit review process that
now takes "over a decade" to oen that's done in just 30 days, according
to the House Resources panel.
The House will also vote on the Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and
Conservation Act of 2013, which would allow the development of a copper
mine about 65 miles southeast of Phoenix.
According to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, developing the
mine would create 3,700 jobs and generate $16 billion in revenue.
Opponents say the mine, owned by a foreign entity, would damage the
Tonto National Forest which was set aside for protection from
development in 1955.
"These bills will foster economic growth and create jobs for the middle class," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.
Beyond the House floor, all eyes will be on Republicans, who
control the chamber and have to come up with a spending plan that can
pass both the Republican House and the Democratically held Senate.
Republicans will likely have to pass a stopgap spending measure,
known as a continuing resolution, or CR, without any help from
Democrats, who believe the GOP budget numbers, which include sequester
cuts, don't provide adequate funding.
President Obama said on ABC's "This Week" Sunday that he wants to
negotiate with Republicans on restoring money cut by the sequester by
incorporating Democratic proposals that include new taxes on oil
companies and companies that ship jobs overseas.
"There are ways of doing this. It's just that they haven't been willing to negotiate in a serious way on that," Obama said.
Democrats are also likely to balk at GOP efforts to tie the
government spending bill to a delay or defunding of the national health
care law known as Obamacare.
Republicans are debating a number of proposals that would link the
spending plan needed to keep the government open and Obamacare, which is
now being implemented in a way that creates enough leverage that the
Democratically led Senate would be forced to support it.
One proposal by the GOP's more conservative House faction would
defund Obamacare for one year and use the savings to replace the budget
cuts called for under the sequester.
Off the floor, Republicans will pick up with their investigation
into the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya,
which killed four Americans including Ambassador Chris Stevens.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold a
hearing on Thursday that will review the findings of a special committee
appointed to review the State Department's handling of diplomatic
security before the attack, as well as its response during and after the
attack.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/house-will-move-on-food-stamp-bill-this-week-negotiate-deal-to-fund-government/article/2535806
President Obama avoids costly Fed chief confirmation battle with Larry Summers' withdrawal
In withdrawing his name from consideration as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Larry Summers
defused the possibility of a rancorous confirmation fight that would
have pitted liberal Democrats against the president’s nominee.
Summers cited the need to avoid a costly nomination battle in his letter to President Obama bowing out of consideration, writing that he has “reluctantly concluded that any possible confirmation process for me would be acrimonious and would not serve the interests of the Federal Reserve, the administration, or ultimately, the interests of the nation’s ongoing economic recovery.”
It was opposition from the Democratic Party’s left flank that raised the political costs for Obama to name his former aide Summers the successor to current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Many liberals mistrusted Summers for his close ties to Wall Street firms, his role in the deregulatory efforts of the Clinton administration as Treasury secretary, and his perceived arrogance and abrasive personality.
Liberals’ apprehension over the possibility that Summers could become the top regulatory and monetary policymaker in the U.S. motivated some lawmakers to pre-emptively endorse the economist thought to be his top rival for the job, current Fed Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen. A group of 20 liberal Democratic senators sent Obama a letter recommending Yellen in late July in response to rumors that the president favored Summers for the job.
After sources close to the White House continued to portray Summers as the likely nominee, some Democratic senators took the unusual step of signaling that they would vote against him if he were picked. On Friday, Montana Sen. Jon Tester announced that he would oppose Summers, citing Summers’ role in deregulating markets as the reason to vote his candidacy down.
Three other Democratic members of the Senate Banking Committee, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, had previously indicated that they would not support Summers’ candidacy. Their opposition meant that, in order to clear the committee, Summers would have had to receive support from the panel’s Republicans, a prospect that would have involved a significant expenditure of the White House’s political capital and further provoked liberal activists at a time when the president’s approval rating is at a low ebb.
In early August, Obama suggested that the White House’s focus on Summers was only a reaction to attacks on the former top economic adviser from the left wing. The president said in a press conference that “when somebody has worked hard for me and worked hard on behalf of the American people, and I know the quality of those people, and I see them getting slapped around in the press for no reason — before they’ve even been nominated for anything — then I want to make sure that somebody is standing up for them.”
Obama had also defended Summers from liberal criticism in a trip to the Capitol to address House Democrats. In both instances, Obama said that Summers would make a good Fed chairman but insisted that he hadn’t chosen a candidate.
Yet criticism from the left wing intensified as the summer wore on. Jim Dean, the president of the progressive political advocacy group Democracy for America, told the Washington Examiner that Summers, “for better or for worse, is a Washington insider, a political insider” and noted that the president would have been risking further political damage with his liberal base by nominating the Harvard professor, especially in light of Obama's recent rifts with his left wing over national security issues.
For their part, Republicans were willing to remain silent and let the nomination process play out and further divide Democrats. But if Summers had been officially nominated, Republicans would have come out in force against him, forcing Obama to seek out GOP senators amenable to the long-time Democrat establishment economic policy guru.
Tony Fratto, a former Treasury official under President George W. Bush and current partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, noted that Republicans are predisposed to dislike Summers for his long record of partisanship and his role in crafting the economic policies of the early Obama administration, including the now-infamous 2009 fiscal stimulus. Fratto noted that a Summers nomination, with Democrats split, would have been “really valuable for the GOP."
Rich Danker, the economics director for the American Principles Project, a conservative policy organization that favors low inflation and tight money, said that “we’ve been looking around to make sure no Republicans would throw Summers a life raft” by voting for him in the case he was nominated, noting Summers’ support for Keynesian monetary policy.
With Summers out of the picture, Yellen is again thought to be the frontrunner for the nomination, although the president has also said that former Fed vice chairman Donald Kohn, currently a scholar at the Brookings Institution, is also a candidate.
Yellen is widely respected and admired by liberals and academic economists.She would likely enjoy the unified support of Senate Democrats and would face an easy confirmation process if chosen.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/president-obama-avoids-costly-fed-chief-confirmation-battle-with-larry-summers-withdrawal/article/2535834
Why Do 70 Federal Agencies Have Armed Agents?
It’s especially ironic that the federal government is looking for any excuse to take away the 2nd Amendment rights of the American people while government agencies appear to be looking for any excuse to arm themselves. Congress should look into this issue and if they don’t see a good reason for these agencies to have armed agents, they should cut off the funds they’re using for weaponry.
http://www.rightwingnews.com/guns/why-do-70-federal-agencies-have-armed-agents/
Summers cited the need to avoid a costly nomination battle in his letter to President Obama bowing out of consideration, writing that he has “reluctantly concluded that any possible confirmation process for me would be acrimonious and would not serve the interests of the Federal Reserve, the administration, or ultimately, the interests of the nation’s ongoing economic recovery.”
It was opposition from the Democratic Party’s left flank that raised the political costs for Obama to name his former aide Summers the successor to current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Many liberals mistrusted Summers for his close ties to Wall Street firms, his role in the deregulatory efforts of the Clinton administration as Treasury secretary, and his perceived arrogance and abrasive personality.
Liberals’ apprehension over the possibility that Summers could become the top regulatory and monetary policymaker in the U.S. motivated some lawmakers to pre-emptively endorse the economist thought to be his top rival for the job, current Fed Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen. A group of 20 liberal Democratic senators sent Obama a letter recommending Yellen in late July in response to rumors that the president favored Summers for the job.
After sources close to the White House continued to portray Summers as the likely nominee, some Democratic senators took the unusual step of signaling that they would vote against him if he were picked. On Friday, Montana Sen. Jon Tester announced that he would oppose Summers, citing Summers’ role in deregulating markets as the reason to vote his candidacy down.
Three other Democratic members of the Senate Banking Committee, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, had previously indicated that they would not support Summers’ candidacy. Their opposition meant that, in order to clear the committee, Summers would have had to receive support from the panel’s Republicans, a prospect that would have involved a significant expenditure of the White House’s political capital and further provoked liberal activists at a time when the president’s approval rating is at a low ebb.
In early August, Obama suggested that the White House’s focus on Summers was only a reaction to attacks on the former top economic adviser from the left wing. The president said in a press conference that “when somebody has worked hard for me and worked hard on behalf of the American people, and I know the quality of those people, and I see them getting slapped around in the press for no reason — before they’ve even been nominated for anything — then I want to make sure that somebody is standing up for them.”
Obama had also defended Summers from liberal criticism in a trip to the Capitol to address House Democrats. In both instances, Obama said that Summers would make a good Fed chairman but insisted that he hadn’t chosen a candidate.
Yet criticism from the left wing intensified as the summer wore on. Jim Dean, the president of the progressive political advocacy group Democracy for America, told the Washington Examiner that Summers, “for better or for worse, is a Washington insider, a political insider” and noted that the president would have been risking further political damage with his liberal base by nominating the Harvard professor, especially in light of Obama's recent rifts with his left wing over national security issues.
For their part, Republicans were willing to remain silent and let the nomination process play out and further divide Democrats. But if Summers had been officially nominated, Republicans would have come out in force against him, forcing Obama to seek out GOP senators amenable to the long-time Democrat establishment economic policy guru.
Tony Fratto, a former Treasury official under President George W. Bush and current partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, noted that Republicans are predisposed to dislike Summers for his long record of partisanship and his role in crafting the economic policies of the early Obama administration, including the now-infamous 2009 fiscal stimulus. Fratto noted that a Summers nomination, with Democrats split, would have been “really valuable for the GOP."
Rich Danker, the economics director for the American Principles Project, a conservative policy organization that favors low inflation and tight money, said that “we’ve been looking around to make sure no Republicans would throw Summers a life raft” by voting for him in the case he was nominated, noting Summers’ support for Keynesian monetary policy.
With Summers out of the picture, Yellen is again thought to be the frontrunner for the nomination, although the president has also said that former Fed vice chairman Donald Kohn, currently a scholar at the Brookings Institution, is also a candidate.
Yellen is widely respected and admired by liberals and academic economists.She would likely enjoy the unified support of Senate Democrats and would face an easy confirmation process if chosen.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/president-obama-avoids-costly-fed-chief-confirmation-battle-with-larry-summers-withdrawal/article/2535834
Why Do 70 Federal Agencies Have Armed Agents?
The recent uproar over armed EPA agents descending on a tiny Alaska mining town is shedding light on the fact that 40 federal agencies – including nearly a dozen typically not associated with law enforcement — have armed divisions.
The agencies employ about 120,000 full-time officers authorized to carry guns and make arrests, according to a June 2012 Justice Department report.
Though most Americans know agents within the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Bureau of Prisons carry guns, agencies such as the Library of Congress and Federal Reserve Board employing armed officers might come as a surprise.
The incident that sparked the renewed interest and concern occurred in late August when a team of armed federal and state officials descended on the tiny Alaska gold mining town of Chicken, Alaska.
The Environmental Protection Agency, whose armed agents in full body armor participated, acknowledged taking part in the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force investigation, which it said was conducted to look for possible violations of the Clean Water Act.
The FBI, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management and Park Service are among 24 federal agencies employing more than 250 full-time armed officers with arrest authority, according the federal report, which is based on the 2008 Census of Federal Law Enforcement Officers.
The other 16 agencies have less than 250 officers and include NOAA as well as the Library of Congress, the Federal Reserve Board and the National Institutes of Health.
The number of federal department with armed personnel climbs to 73 when adding in the 33 offices of inspector general, the government watchdogs for agencies as large as the Postal Service to the Government Printing Office, whose IG has only five full-time officers.Why does the EPA need armed officers to look for violations of the Clean Water Act? Why does the Federal Reserve Board and Library of Congress need armed officers? Why do so many federal agencies need to have employees that are packing heat? It would be one thing if they simply had security guards on premises, but as you see with the EPA, when a government agency has guns, it looks for any excuse to use them.
It’s especially ironic that the federal government is looking for any excuse to take away the 2nd Amendment rights of the American people while government agencies appear to be looking for any excuse to arm themselves. Congress should look into this issue and if they don’t see a good reason for these agencies to have armed agents, they should cut off the funds they’re using for weaponry.
http://www.rightwingnews.com/guns/why-do-70-federal-agencies-have-armed-agents/
Time Magazine Shields America From Obama's Syria Failure
The Daily Caller reports that the September 16 issue of Time Magazine cover featured a photo of a satisfied-looking Vladmir Putin with the caption "Americans weak and waffling, Russia’s rich and resurgent” -- except in America. Here in the States, Time hid Putin's success and chose instead to put a sports story on the cover.For whatever reason, Time Magazine decided that Americans in check-out lines across America, would be more interested in a story about paying college athletes than a story about Obama's handling of Syria; a story that has consumed the nation's attention for the last ten days.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/09/16/Time-mag-shields-americans-from-obamas-syria-failure
Russian diplomat on Navy Yard shooting: “A clear confirmation of American exceptionalism”
Awkward, but imagine how much more awkward it’ll be if the shooter — or shooters — turns out to be a pro-Assad fanatic angry at American threats against the regime. (It’s naval assets, after all, that are expected to lead a potential U.S. attack against Syria.) If you’re going to gloat over a mass murder that’s been committed against your new “partner in peace” while it’s in progress, at least wait until you know for sure that you’re not allied with the perpetrator.BuzzFeed’s translation: “A new shootout at Navy headquarters in Washington – a lone gunman and 7 corpses. Nobody’s even surprised anymore. A clear confirmation of American exceptionalism.” He followed up 10 minutes later with a tweet in English claiming that the notion of American exceptionalism “smells of political racism,” which is on the cusp of parody as something an especially soft-headed American leftist might say. Evidently that’s the new M.O. for influential Russian fascists who want to troll the U.S. — pretend that they’re the real liberals of the international order and snicker as Americans try to decide whether to be outraged at them for trolling or at their own political system for giving the Russians the opportunity.
By the way, this is the same guy who crowed to Time magazine last week that there’s nothing the U.S. can do about making Syria give up its WMD short of occupying the country like it did Iraq. Lavrov may be the face of Russian diplomacy but this cretin is evidently its id. And no, needless to say, his claim about American exceptionalism here isn’t as true as he wishes it was.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/16/russian-diplomat-on-navy-yard-shooting-a-clear-confirmation-of-american-exceptionalism/
Study: More than 400 Union Officials Made Over $250K in 2012
Media Trackers found that the top 100 highest paid union officials garnered more than $52 million in 2012, salaries paid by membership dues of the laborers and government employees they represent.
The top-paid union official is NBA Player’s Association head G. William Hunter, who made more than $3.1 million on the year. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees chief Lee Saunders rounded out the top 100 with gross pay of $353,580, according to the study.
Labor unions spent more than $1.7 billion on the 2012 election cycle, the most of any interest group. Most of that money went to aid President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, who campaigned on the promise of hiking taxes on those who earn more than $250,000 per year.
“A total of 428 American labor union officers and employees were paid more than $250,000 in 2012, in stark contrast to union propaganda expressing solidarity with ‘the middle class,’” the report states.
Boilermakers president Newton Jones, of Kansas, is the only official in the Top 10 who lives in a right-to-work state. The other nine live in Washington D.C., New York, and Illinois, where employees can be forced to join unions as a condition of employment.
Read the full report here.
http://freebeacon.com/study-more-than-400-union-officials-made-over-250k-in-2012/
Examiner Editorial: Union leaders get rich as membership falls
Labor union membership as a percentage of the nation’s overall workforce has been steadily declining from its peak of 35 percent in the 1950s. The result is that unions now represent only 6.6 percent of all private sector jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS data makes it clear that the trend isn’t going to reverse any time soon, either, because unions lost 400,000 members last year as total employment grew by 2.6 million. The only thing keeping Big Labor from becoming an incidental factor in the American workplace is that government employees are five times more likely to be unionized than those in the private sector.If corporate executives lost market share as dramatically and steadily as the labor chieftains, they would be shown the door or their doors firms would be shuttered. Failure to develop and sell products and services that people want is a surefire way of going out of business. This is what makes free markets the source of the widest range of goods and services for the most people at the lowest cost.
But that’s not the way it works in the highest ranks of Big Labor, as is made clear in an examination of how much the top 100 union leaders were paid last year. A total of 428 private sector union leaders were paid at least $250,000 annually, and the top 100 of those made more than $350,000, according to a study of Department of Labor data by Media Trackers, a conservative, nonprofit investigative watchdog group. The highest-paid union leaders work for organized professional athletes, with G. William Hunter, executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, who received $3.2 million. The only government employee union leader in the top 10 is Gerald McEntee, international president of the Association of Federal, State, County and Municipal Employees, whose $1.2 million compensation put him fourth on the list.
The vast majority of the rest of the top-paid union leaders, however, represent blue-collar trade organizations. Joseph Senese, head of the National Production Workers group, made $698,406; Robert Scardeletti, president of the Transportation Communications Union, got $630,053; and John Niccollai, who runs the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 464, received $549,497. Others managing blue-collar unions on the list include Longshoremen’s Association president Harold Daggett at $541,103; William Hite, general president of the Plumbers Union, at $501,203; and Joseph Nigro, the Sheet Metal Workers' general president, at $459,643. All of these men also receive generous benefits and perks in addition to their annual salaries.
These individuals lead many unions represented by the AFL-CIO, whose president, Richard Trumka, led a labor delegation that met privately with President Obama last week to discuss Obamacare. They represent workers covered by multi-employer “Cadillac” health insurance plans that Obamacare taxes heavily. Their unions will get a special exception not available to millions of middle-class Americans when Obamacare takes effect Oct. 1.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/examiner-editorial-union-leaders-get-rich-as-membership-falls/article/2535825
Uh oh: WH Rejects Unions' Obamacare Demands
"Fairness" 1, Unions 0. For now:The Obama administration on Friday told labor union leaders that their health plans would not be eligible for tax subsidies under Obamacare next year. A White House official said the Treasury Department has concluded that such an exemption is not possible under the Affordable Care Act. The labor unions have been asking that their union plans, known as Taft-Hartley plans, be eligible for premium subsidies the way plans on the new insurance exchange will be. A senior administration official said the White House looked at several ways to make the union plans eligible for subsidies but couldn’t find one.
A special union carve-out isn't permitted under the legislative language, and would increase the law's costs by an estimated $200 billion over the next decade. But since when have legal niceties and price tags deterred this group? The administration has axed provisions cynically designed to "reduce costs" on paper in the past, and the president personally intervened to orchestrate a legally-dubious exemption on Obamacare subsidy rules for members of Congress and their staff. Avik Roy explains why groups like the AFL-CIO are incensed over the White House's decision:
Here’s the issue that was at stake. A number of labor unions participate in multi-employer health plans, also known as Taft-Hartley plans. These plans allow unions to organize, say, all the restaurant workers in a particular county, taking advantage of the economies of scale that come from a larger insurance pool. The problem is that, thanks to Obamacare’s employer mandate and its subsidized insurance exchanges, businesses with fewer than 50 employees now have an incentive to drop health coverage for their employees and let those workers get coverage on the exchanges...it’s a big blow to the labor unions who organize the plans, because workers no longer need unions to negotiate or obtain their health coverage.
Thus, at least temporarily, the increasingly-acrimonious rift between the White House and Big Labor will deepen. Much attention has been paid to Republican disagreements over how best to oppose Obamacare, but the more significant divisions exist on the Left; some elements of the Democrats' coalition unwaveringly support the law, while others aren't pleased with what they're seeing.
I'll leave you with a few more Obamacare notes to kick off the week:
(1) According to a recent survey, 92 percent of federal workers and retirees would prefer to keep their current plan than be dumped into the Obamacare exchanges -- a fate that awaits millions in the private sector, despite endless "keep your plan" assurances from Obama.
(2) GE and IBM is punting thousands of retirees off of the companies' longstanding healthcare plans. Bloomberg reports that this "historic shift" could "push more costs onto US taxpayers."
(3) In an incident that will be sure to spark more discussion about the fraud risks inherent in Obamacare, Minnesota's state exchange accidentally leaked the highly sensitive private data of nearly 2,500 insurance agents in the state:
A MNsure employee accidentally sent an e-mail file to an Apple Valley insurance broker’s office on Thursday that contained Social Security numbers, names, business addresses and other identifying information on more than 2,400 insurance agents. An official at MNsure, the state’s new online health insurance exchange, acknowledged it had mishandled private data. A MNsure security manager called the broker, Jim Koester, and walked him and his assistant through a process of deleting the file from their computer hard drives. Koester said he willingly complied, but was unnerved. “The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was,” he said. “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary. If this is happening now, how can clients of MNsure be confident their data is safe?”
Obamacare's deadline for full implementation is two weeks from tomorrow. According to Congressional testimony heard last week, not a single state is completely ready.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/09/16/uh-oh-wh-rejects-unions-obamacare-demands-n1700977
ObamaCare monitors your sex life
The New York Post tells us how ObamaCare has empowered Big Government to monitor your sex life, drafting doctors from every practice – including those that have no logical connection to sexual activity – into service as data collectors:‘Are you sexually active? If so, with one partner, multiple partners or same-sex partners?”
Be ready to answer those questions and more the next time you go to the doctor, whether it’s the dermatologist or the cardiologist and no matter if the questions are unrelated to why you’re seeking medical help. And you can thank the Obama health law.
“This is nasty business,” says New York cardiologist Dr. Adam Budzikowski. He called the sex questions “insensitive, stupid and very intrusive.” He couldn’t think of an occasion when a cardiologist would need such information — but he knows he’ll be pushed to ask for it.The Left has a long history of convincing its supporters to slip on fur-lined chains of obedience in every other aspect of their lives, by convincing them the only liberty that really matters is sexual freedom, which mean Bible-thumping judgmental conservative prudes want to take away. Guess what, suckers? Now you’re going to have ObamaCare inspectors monitoring your bedroom activities, and you’ve traded away too much of your freedom and dignity to say “no.” The government owns your body now, and it has a vested interest in observing and controlling everything you do with it.
The president’s “reforms” aim to turn doctors into government agents, pressuring them financially to ask questions they consider inappropriate and unnecessary, and to violate their Hippocratic Oath to keep patients’ records confidential.
What happens to doctors who burn their Sex Police draft notices? They’ll be fined up the wazoo for not asking about your wazoo:
Doctors and hospitals who don’t comply with the federal government’s electronic-health-records requirements forgo incentive payments now; starting in 2015, they’ll face financial penalties from Medicare and Medicaid. The Department of Health and Human Services has already paid out over $12.7 billion for these incentives.
Dr. Richard Amerling, a nephrologist and associate professor at Albert Einstein Medical College, explains that your medical record should be “a story created by you and your doctor solely for your treatment and benefit.” But the new requirements are turning it “into an interrogation, and the data will not be confidential.”You can say that again, Dr. Amerling. The ObamaCare commissars are so desperate to push their crappy exchanges into service on October 1 that they’ve forgone security measures. There’s not much training or vetting for the gigantic army of bureaucrats hired to administer this disaster.
Last week, a staffer accidentally sent an unsecured Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing 2,400 Social Security numbers to an insurance broker who wanted to become an ObamaCare navigator. The crack ObamaCare data security team swung into action by calling the broker and asking him to delete the file. Doubtless the data harvested on your sex life will be treated with equal care.
It’s long past time for Americans of all political affiliations to assert their basic human dignity – to say nothing of their fiscal common sense – and demand full repeal of ObamaCare immediately.
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/09/16/obamacare-monitors-your-sex-life/
GAI President: Gov't, Political Elite Haven't Learned from Financial Crisis
Peter Schweizer, the president of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute (GAI), said that on the fifth anniversary of the nation's financial crisis, the government and political elite still have not learned anything.In an appearance on Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125 with Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon, Schweizer said the financial crisis taught the country that Americans "can't trust the political and financial elite to make decisions with integrity."
He added that the "government and political elite have not learned" from their mistakes five years ago and they are continuing to engage in "social engineering" in the financial sector that leads banks to make risky loans.
Schweizer emphasized there is a huge "lack of trust" with the country's governing institutions and noted that is a result of a "failure of leadership" and not a "failure of the system."
He said America's financial troubles have not occurred because "the American people have gone lazy," but because the political elite have betrayed the people to enrich and benefit themselves and their cronies.
Ultimately, Schweizer said "criminal behavior" was much more of a factor behind--and at the heart of--the financial crisis than people making risky choices.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/15/GAI-President-Government-Political-Elite-Haven-t-Learned-from-Financial-Crisis
Syria in the Age of Myth
Myth I. Conservatives opposed to bombing Syria are isolationists.
Hardly. It would be better to call conservative skepticism a new Jacksonianism that is not wedded to any Pavlovian support for intervention or particular political party.
Instead, Jacksonians wish to husband U.S. power and prestige. Only that way can we ensure that we have both when existential crises loom—and many are now on the horizon.
The more prudent course is to weigh each intervention in terms of whether it serves long-term U.S. strategic interests. And ask if it can it do more good than harm to those beneath the bombs and at a cost commensurate with the results. Does it enjoy at least 50% support from the Congress and people? Have the president and his team worked hard to explain the rationale, methodology, and desired objectives to both allies abroad and Americans at home?
All that might sound like a lot of ifs—suggesting thereby an impossible bar for success abroad. But those prerequisites are neither too cumbersome nor guarantees of anything certain. After all, sloppy thinking occasionally can still result in won wars, while professional preparation can sometimes fail—given that nothing is certain in war.
Instead, such considerations offer a better chance of success when the bombs start falling. And they reflect an administration that takes military force seriously.
The present one does not. It still cannot explain why a “shot across the bow” and an “unbelievably small” bombing campaign are not “pinpricks.” (Who wants to be the first or last pilot to die to prove that his mission was not just a pinprick, but instead achieved only unbelievably small damage?)
Why is Congress initially to be bypassed, then consulted, then to be bypassed if not on board, then to be postponed if believed not on board, and now to be forgotten? Is it really isolationist to doubt the wisdom and efficacy of bombing Assad when we were told it was to: a) help the rebels, b) destroy WMD, c) punish Assad for using WMD, d) warn others not to use WMD, e) remove him, f) weaken him, g) restore U.S. credibility, h) restore mostly Barack Obama’s lost credibility, i) thwart Russia, j) show Iran, k) welcome in Russia, l) ignore Iran, m) create stability after Assad’s departure, n) not get involved after Assad’s departure, o) sort out good rebels from bad ones, etc.?
Weakening America and making Syria worse is not a proof of bipartisan interventionist support for the necessary postwar global system.
Myth II. John Kerry is far worse than Hillary Clinton at secretary of State.
True, poor Kerry is played hourly by the Russians and Syrians. He seeks to lecture and pontificate, not persuade and inspire. He ends up doing neither well. The secretary freelances into embarrassment. At times Kerry warns of imminent bombing; at times he champions sober negotiation; at times both and again neither. He talks ponderously and long. Even the Russians cannot stand the pomposity and cry no mas.
Kerry tries to resonate Obama’s orders. But he cannot—both because presidential directives, to the extent that there are any, are incoherent and unserious, and because, like Obama, Kerry made his career damning just the sort of unilateral preemptory military action—without allies, the UN, public support, or an authorization from Congress—that he is now demagoguing for. Was Kerry for Assad before being against him? Is Assad about like Genghis Khan—or is he now Hitler?—or worse, or maybe far worse? Are Assad’s soldiers lopping limbs and burning villages as Americans supposedly did in Vietnam? Or are some of the rebels the real cannibals and executioners of prisoners?
Yet all that said, Kerry inherited and made worse this mess, but did not create it. It was Hillary Clinton, not Kerry or even Obama, who first issued empty red lines that she either had no intention of enforcing or should have known that Obama had no desire to honor.
It was Clinton who grandly announced to the world that Kerry and other senators were right in declaring Assad a “reformer” and a “moderate.” It was Hillary who oversaw, along with Samantha Power and Susan Rice, the debacle in Libya. It was Hillary who explained why Gaddafi —the clever monster in rehabilitation doing all that he could do to massage Western oil-hungry and petro-dollar-grabbing elites—had to go, but why the suddenly now satanic Assad should be left alone to reform.
It was Hillary who was the architect of “lead from behind,” which proved nothing. Hillary thundered callously “what difference does it make?” over the four dead in Benghazi. Her State Department both stonewalled the Benghazi inquiry and, before the attack, refused to consider requests for more security.
It was Hillary who chortled in crude fashion “we came, we saw, Gaddafi died,” and in cruder fashion lied to the families of the dead that a right-wing video, not Islamist militias attacking a poorly defended consulate engaged in secretive arms smuggling, had led to the deaths of their sons. And, yes, it was Hillary who jumped ship to avoid the consequences of her own disastrous tenure, while she hit the lecture circuit to cash in and prep for her 2016 presidential run.
Kerry is incompetently cleaning up the wreckage of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous tenure.
Myth III. America is now in decline after being humiliated in Syria.
Syria was a diplomatic disaster and emblematic of the larger Obama foreign policy catastrophe.
But America will survive it, and it will become a textbook example of what not to do, analogous to Kennedy’s disastrous Vienna summit with Khrushchev, or the sad decision to forfeit a won Vietnam to the communists in 1974-5, or Jimmy Carter’s annus terribilis of 1980. Yet Syria is not an historic date marking America’s descent into permanent decline.
America’s longer-term, post-Obama indicators are in our favor. We lead the world in innovation. Immigrants still seek the U.S. We will be more energy secure than at any time since the 1930s. Our deficits are sinking after sequestration, with fossil fuel expansion and cheaper energy.
Our top universities have never more dominated world-wide rankings. Obama’s neo-socialism is waning; even he postpones elements of an unpopular Obamacare.
Even a slashed military is still far stronger than the next dozen militaries combined. One American worker, amid economic doldrums, still produces almost three times the goods and services of three Chinese workers. And so on.
Russia has brilliantly outclassed Obama. Yet Obama is not America and Putin is not Russia. The latter’s country is shrinking, increasingly unhealthy, a kleptocracy dependent solely on gas and oil revenues in the midst of an oil and gas boom elsewhere. A weak Obama and strong Putin do not translate into a strong Russia and a weak America. Obamitis will pass; the Russian malady will not be alleviated by Putin’s KGB cunning.
We will survive Obama, if barely, but then also flourish—if only by the wisdom of reacting to and doing the opposite of what the Obama era has wrought.
Myth IV. Syria is another Iraq
Obama cannot finish a speech without blaming George Bush and damning Iraq—a campaign about which he admitted in 2004 that “there’s not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush’s position at this stage.”
Before invading Iraq, Bush spent a year winning public opinion (70% at the time of invasion), sought UN approval, won joint congressional authorization, and forged an alliance of 40 countries.
His rationale, wisely or foolishly, was clear: to remove Saddam, to stay on, to foster a constitutional order, to show the Middle East that there might be an alternative between theocracy and dictatorship. The 2004-7 implementation of that policy was as disastrous as operations in 2003, and again in 2008-9, were inspired.
In a post-9/11 landscape, Bush wished to avoid both the pinpricks of Clinton’s cruise-missile strategy (compare the smashed al-Shifa aspirin factory in the Sudan or the futile missiles sent after bin Laden) and the incomplete results from the successful 1991 war that had nonetheless left Saddam in power, left Kurdistan imperiled, left 12 years of no-fly zones, left a corrupt oil-for-food UN debacle, and caused the Clinton administration and the Congress to call for regime change.
Bush may have fixated on WMD, in the manner of the Obama administration now in Syria, but he was also supported by both CIA and congressional agreements about WMD capability inside Iraq (whose ultimate fate we may only know from a post-Assad Syria).
Bush was supported by 23 congressional authorizations to go to war, from genocide, to the harboring of anti-American terrorist killers, to attempts to kill a U.S. president, to attacks on U.S. planes and allies. Harry Reid, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton gave stirring speech to preempt.
You can argue in retrospect that such an ambitious venture was not worth a near $1 trillion and over 4,000 lives and thousands of wounded, but you must concede it was spelled out, authorized, and discussed for over a year. And Iraq did have positive geostrategic effects, at least for a while. Gaddafi surrendered WMD. The Pakistanis put under house arrest the proliferator Dr. Khan. Assad removed Syrian troops from Lebanon. Iran was worried. There was even a stirring of popular Middle East resistance in unlikely places like Tehran by spring 2009.
By January 2009, virtually no Americans were dying in Iraq. A semi-autonomous newly empowered Kurdistan was a model of economic development and relative stability and security in a horrendous part of the world.
We had a forward base to monitor Iran and to protect Iraqi airspace. At the price of some adroit diplomacy with the Iraqis and just a few thousand troops, the U.S. might have pressured the Maliki government to have honored its constitutional promises.
All that we gave up for the 2012 Obama campaign slogan of “I ended the war in Iraq.” If translated honestly, that canard meant, “I inherited no war in Iraq, but have ended a vital U.S. position abroad that ensured the fruits of past humanitarian achievement and advanced our national interests.”
Myth 5. Obama is permanently weakened by Syria and now an impotent president.
Don’t believe that Obama is “ruined” and his administration is “shattered.” Three and a half years is a long stretch for a president, especially given the capabilities of the Obama team and an obsequious media. Every time Obama experiences another self-inflicted mess—from the Obamacare shake-down congressional spectacle to the 2010 midterm rebuke to the serial scandals— he manages to rebound. Already he is claiming his ineptitude was by design and that only his craft brought Putin to the table and averted a crisis; millions still believe such preposterous fantasies.
He is also a genius at diverting attention through another domestic war or foreign crisis (would that our enemies abroad hear the same slurs from Obama that he reserves for his conservative opponents at home: imagine Putin as a “fat cat,” or a warning to Assad that we “punish our enemies.”)
Benghazi, the AP, the NSA and the IRS debacles are put on the back burner by Obama’s Syria follies. They in turn will be forgotten once we brace for a new war to follow the ones waged against the evil redneck assault gun owners; the minority bashers who committed Trayvon Martin-like travesties daily; the sinister homophobes who denied marriage equity; the nativists who hated people of color and so insisted on onerous legal technicalities against undocumented workers; the voter suppressionists who demand ID at the polls; the misogynists who denied powerful professional women a little help to ensure their reproductive rights; the polluters who fouled our air and water and fried our planet; the cruel older generation that ignored embattled students struggling with oppressive loans; and union busters who hated collective bargaining.
All those wars will revive and be bolstered by even more in the next 40 months to come. “You did not build that” and “no time for profit” have demagogic children not yet born. We will hear thousands more of the tired emphatics like “make no mistake about it” and “let me be perfectly clear.” There will be hundreds more straw men: “Some do these bad things; others do those bad things, but I alone do the good things.” We have in store lots more of the teleprompted first-person I, me, my, and mine narcissism. “Bush did it” has three more years of ad nauseam utility. “Iraq” will still begin and almost end every sentence until 2017. “Working for the middle class” will follow each dismal jobs report.
Do not underestimate the rhetorical skills and political demagoguery of Barack Obama. He is as incompetent and delusional as Jimmy Carter, but he has far better sophistic skills, far better advisers, and is far more ruthless. Almost half of America does not pay federal income taxes; almost half receive some sort of government assistance. They are as loyal as the captive media to what Obama represents and delivers.
Putin will not let the Syria debacle fade entirely—aided by John Kerry’s sanctimonious efforts to be remembered as Nelson Mandela with Tomahawks, and to freelance while Barack Obama is incommunicado on the golf links.
Yet even this ongoing Syrian tragedy will not yet end Obama’s influence and power, which has been damaged but has not been lost. Brace for more.
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/syria-in-the-age-of-myth/?singlepage=true
The Impostor President Gets Caught
During the 2008 presidential campaign, the New York Times ran an article on what psychologists call the "impostor phenomenon." To measure it, they ask test subjects questions like, "At times, I feel my success has been due to some kind of luck" or "I can give the impression that I'm more competent than I really am."Although the article had nothing to do with Barack Obama, he would surely have scored off the charts had he answered those questions honestly. He was a reasonably bright guy but not the "brilliant" author and savant white liberals thought him to be. His "luck" derived from the fact that he grew up almost exactly as those liberals had but in the body of a black man. Hearing him they heard themselves. Seeing him say what he said surprised them, validated them, delighted them with its very whiteness. Although they would be the last to admit it, they suffered conspicuously from what George Bush has called "the soft bigotry of low expectations."
In speaking of Obama in early 2007, Joe Biden framed those expectations with dunderheaded clarity. "I mean you got the first mainstream African-American presidential candidate who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Not to be out-patronized, Senate majority Leader Harry Reid found comfort in Obama's having "no Negro dialect." The always-observant Shelby Steele summed up the phenomenon, "Blacks like Obama, who show merit where mediocrity is expected, enjoy a kind of reverse stigma, a slightly inflated reputation for 'freshness' and excellence because they defy expectations."
Throughout his ascendancy, Obama has had to fake something else besides competence, namely a belief in America. This trumpery was on full display during Tuesday night's Syria speech. "When, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act," said Obama at the conclusion of his disjointed speech on September 10. "That's what makes America different. That's what makes us exceptional."
Exceptional? As Russia's Vladimir Putin promptly made clear in a taunting New York Times op-ed, Obama did not believe in American exceptionalism any more than he did. Indeed, Putin's old KGB pals had been working to undermine that belief since the agency's creation.
Obama's rise was, in no small part, a testament to the KGB's success. From his childhood on, Obama had been learning that just about the only thing exceptional about America was Barack Hussein Obama. In Hawaii, his communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, reinforced his mother's casual anti-Americanism. "You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained," Davis reportedly told Obama. "They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit."
Obama drank deeply from Davis's well. In his acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama described the Americanization of Hawaii in Marxist terms as an "ugly conquest." Missionaries brought "crippling diseases." American companies carved up "the rich volcanic soil" and worked their indentured laborers of color "from sunup to sunset."
After hitting the mainland Obama surrounded himself with Davis's spiritual heirs. "I chose my friends carefully," he wrote in Dreams. "The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets." With his new friends, Obama discussed "neocolonialism, Franz (sic) Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy" and flaunted his alienation. Dr. John Drew has confirmed that the Obama he met at Occidental College was a "Marxist planning for a Communist style revolution."
The literary influences Obama cited include radical anti-imperialists like Fanon and Malcolm X, communists like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and tyrant-loving fellow travelers like W.E.B. DuBois. "Joseph Stalin was a great man," DuBois wrote upon Stalin's death in 1953. "Few other men of the 20th century approach his stature." In Dreams, Obama gave no suggestion that this reading was in any way problematic or a mere phase in his development. He moved on to no new school, embraced no new worldview.
In April 2009 in Strasbourg, France, in response to a question about America's role in the world, Obama let that worldview slip through. "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism," he said. In other words, he did not believe in American exceptionalism at all.
In these last few months, the world has seen what happens when an intellectual lightweight with no fixed principles beyond the vestigial Marxism of his youth faces off against an unscrupulous post-Marxist survivor like Putin. For those paying attention, it wasn't hard to predict.
In 1975, when Obama was goofing off through his freshman year at an elite Hawaiian prep school, twenty-two year old Putin joined the KGB. The opportunistic Putin stayed with "the organs" until 1991 when he schemed his way out of the abortive KGB-backed putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev. "As soon as the coup began," said Putin later, "I immediately decided which side I was on." That same year Obama -- in his own words, "someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career" -- secured an unearned berth in the Ivy League at Columbia University,
In 1995, both Putin and Obama got political. The wily Putin, always one step ahead of the law, took control of the Saint Petersburg branch of the pro-government Our Home Is Russia political party. In 1995, terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers, recognizing Obama's puppet potential, finished writing Obama's memoir, got Obama appointed chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant, and held a fundraiser for his state senate run in his Chicago home.
For the next eighteen years, the resourceful Putin finessed his way through the occasionally lethal minefield of Russian politics. Obama meanwhile was wafted aloft by his own breezy rhetoric and the overheated passions of his deluded followers, including, unfortunately, most of the mainstream media.
When Putin shot Obama's balloon down over Syria no one should have been surprised. As America first learned at Benghazi, you can fake your way through college, fake your way through the Senate, even fake your way through the presidency, but you can't fake your way through a civil war in the Middle East.
Trying (Again) to Freeze the Internet
Judges keep telling the FCC to back off, but the regulators won't stop.
Innovation is alive and well on the Internet, even though courts keep invalidating "net neutrality" regulations. Make that because courts keep invalidating those regulations. It's time to drive a stake through the idea of net neutrality. The Internet should be left free to be run by engineers, not set upon by government bureaucrats.Net neutrality was once a hot political issue. "We can't have a situation in which the corporate duopoly dictates the future of the Internet," Sen. Barack Obama said in 2006, referring to cable and telephone companies, "and that's why I'm supporting what is called net neutrality." He made good on that promise as president, only to be thwarted by the courts, which have held that the Federal Communications Commission has no authority to dictate how the Internet operates. The Communications Act of 1996 forbids the agency from managing the Internet as a "common carrier," the regulatory approach the commission took toward telephones during the AT&T monopoly era.
The latest case drew a standing-room-only crowd in federal court in Washington last week to see whether the FCC will get away with its regulatory willfulness in trying to regulate the Internet after the appeals court already slapped it down.
In 2008, the FCC determined that Comcast CMCSA +1.27% was wrong to slow down the music-stealing service BitTorrent in order to keep other Web traffic flowing. In 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in Comcast's favor and held that the FCC didn't have the authority to second-guess how companies regulate networks. Later that year, the FCC issued new net-neutrality regulations supported only by Democratic commissioners—a rare party-line vote. It called these rules "prophylactic" because regulators had found only a handful of cases in which Internet service providers actually discriminated against content providers, as in the Comcast-BitTorrent dispute.
Verizon is now challenging the 2010 regulations, under which the FCC claimed broad oversight of the Internet—while at the same time acknowledging that not every data packet on the Internet can be treated the same way. The agency grandfathered in the nearly a dozen "nonneutral" technologies, protocols and business terms. Among them: blocking spam, giving priority to medical monitoring data, and Amazon's special deal to deliver Kindle e-books quickly.
The exceptions are so numerous as to make a mockery of the idea of net neutrality. But any further exceptions to net neutrality would have to be approved by bureaucrats. As Verizon argues, the regulations would freeze the Internet in place: "End users successfully accessed the Internet content, applications and services of their choice literally billions of times." The free market and technological innovations have kept the Internet open—by making sure it is not "neutral."
The unsung innovators are the engineers who set technical standards via groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force. They have adjusted how packets of data are routed as new needs arise. As the predomination of text gave way to time-sensitive voice and video, the new content received preferential treatment. An entire industry of content delivery network companies keeps the network functioning smoothly, and not neutrally.
If allowed to stand, the FCC's 2010 rules could scuttle promising new technologies. Driverless cars can become a reality only with quick access to data. Real-time traffic information needs more reliable delivery than, say, your latest photo on Facebook. Other innovations needing highly reliable Internet connections include new digital devices approved by the Food and Drug Administration, such as real-time mobile electrocardiograms and blood-glucose monitors that work through iPhones.
Political support for net neutrality has faded over the years, as more people understand how the self-regulating Internet functions. The alternative is the FCC claims to the power once held by the now-defunct Interstate Commerce Commission, which set prices and other terms for railways as common carriers, just as the FCC now wants to set prices and other terms for the Internet. The ICC is remembered for creating railway monopolies and suppressing innovation. No one wants such a dreary fate for the Internet.
The best hope for the open Internet is that judges keep invalidating net neutrality regulations. The engineers who run the Web have proven that they need no interference from Washington.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324576304579072831777189734.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
Hillary’s Benghazi Investigation Let Top Officials Escape Blame
A new report reveals that the State Department’s Benghazi investigation failed to hold senior officials accountable for the deaths of four Americans.
The State Department’s investigation into the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi was not independent and failed to hold senior State Department officials accountable for the failures that led to the death of four Americans, according to a new investigative report compiled by the House Oversight Committee.
The
Administrative Review Board, chosen by then Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, unfairly placed the blame for the terrorist attack on four
mid-level officials while ignoring the role of very senior officials in
Clinton’s State Department for decisions about security in Benghazi,
according to the new report led by Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA). Also,
the structure of the ARB and the culture in Clinton’s State Department
raised questions about the independence and integrity of the review,
according to Issa’s committee.
“The
ARB blamed systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies
within two bureaus, but downplayed the importance of decisions made at
senior levels of the Department. Witnesses questioned how much these
decisions influenced the weaknesses that led to the inadequate security
posture in Benghazi,” the report stated. “The ARB’s decision to cite
certain officials as accountable for what happened in Benghazi appears
to have been based on factors that had little or no connection to the
security posture at U.S. diplomatic facilities in Libya.”
The Daily Beast first reported
in May that the four officials removed from their jobs and placed on
administrative leave as a result of the State Department’s ARB report on
Benghazi had never been told what they were accused of, never been
given any opportunity to appeal their punishments, and never were
officially fired. One of the officials, former Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State Ray Maxwell, had little to no role in Libya security
policy and was not even alleged to have been connected to the security
failures leading up to the Benghazi attack.
The Daily Beast first reported
last month that the Kerry State Department decided to allow those four
officials to return to work in the State Department, although not in
their previous jobs. Although former Undersecretary of State Thomas
Pickering, the head of the ARB, said that responsibility should be
placed at the assistant secretary level, top officials including
Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Beth Jones were never
disciplined.
In January 2013, Hillary Clinton testified about Benghazi before the Senate. Watch the highlights.
‘It appears increasingly likely the Department’s primary objective was to create the public appearance of accountability.’
The
new report by Issa’s committee questions why Under Secretary of State
Patrick Kennedy, who admitted to having a role in overseeing the
decision to reject requests for more security in Benghazi before the
attack, was never blamed or disciplined by the ARB. Moreover, Kennedy
played a key role in selecting the members of the ARB and the staff that
helped the ARB do its works, Issa’s report revealed.
“The
haphazard decision to place the four officials cited by the ARB on paid
administrative leave created the appearance that former Secretary
Hillary Clinton’s decision to announce action against the individuals
named in the ARB report was more of a public relations strategy than a
measured response to a tragedy,” Issa’s report said. “Therefore, one
year after the Benghazi attacks, no one at the State Department has been
fired for their role leading up to the Benghazi attacks. It appears
increasingly likely the Department’s primary objective was to create the
public appearance of accountability.”
Several
officials told Issa’s committee that Kennedy was deeply involved in
security decisions and would have been directly involved in the decision
not to approve requests for more security in Benghazi before the
attacks.
“The
ultimate decision maker is Under Secretary Kennedy,” testified Eric
Boswell, the Assistant Secretary of Diplomatic Security, who was
punished by the ARB.
“The
way the Under Secretary for Management runs things, there is no
decision that DS makes that doesn’t have his input and his imprimatur,
his approval,” Maxwell testified. “There is no decision that DS doesn’t
make that doesn’t have his disapproval.”
The report also questions Clinton’s personal awareness and role in the mistakes that contributed to the attacks.
“Did
Secretary Clinton have views on the need to extend the Benghazi
mission, both in the fall of 2011 and summer of 2012? Was she consulted
on these questions and what, if any, influence did her opinion have on
the Department’s decisions?” the report asks.
Issa’s
investigation also found that the ARB was rushed in its investigation,
completing its work in only 10 weeks, undermining claims by Clinton and
President Obama that the ARB conducted a full and complete investigation
into the attacks. Also, the committee identified several conflicts of
interest between the ARB and the people they were investigating. Jones
admitted to the committee that she had close personal and professional
relationships with both Pickering and the executive director of the ARB
staff Uzra Zeya. Pickering also knew Principal Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Liz Dibble, who had a role
in Benghazi security decisions but was not punished after the ARB
report. Dibble was subsequently named Deputy Chief of Mission at the
U.S. Embassy in London.
“For
some, including the Department itself, this report represented the
final word on the internal failures that contributed to the tragedy in
Benghazi. For others, however, the report overvalued certain facts,
overlooked others, and failed to address systemic issues that have long
plagued the State Department,” the report said.
Eric
Nordstrom, the former Regional Security Officer at the U.S. Embassy in
Tripoli, testified to Issa’s committee that top people in Clinton’s
State Department, including Kennedy, were allowed to escape any
accountability for the failures that preceded the Benghazi attack. The
ARB interviewed Kennedy, but not Clinton, Deputy Secretary of State Bill
Burns, or Deputy Secretary of State Tom Nides.
“It’s
an accountability of mid-level officer review board and the message to
my colleagues is that if you are above a certain level, no matter what
your decision is, no one is going to question it. And that is my concern
with the ARB,” Nordstrom testified on May 8.
Issa’s
staff interviewed over two dozen current and former State Department
officials to compile its 100 page report on the ARB. The Daily Beast
viewed an embargoed copy of Issa’s report. The full report will be
released Monday.
The State Department defended its handling of the four mid-level officials punished following the ARB report in a Aug. 29 letter
to Issa. The letter stated that since the ARB had not found any active
breach of duty by the four officials, Kerry was not able to fire them
and was therefore required to bring them back to work in the State
Department.
In
a statement Sunday responding to Issa’s investigation into the ARB,
Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affair Douglas Franz defended
the ARB and disputed Issa’s claim that the State Department has not been
cooperating with the committee. Franz accused Issa of playing politics
with the Benghazi tragedy.
“The response to the tragedy in Benghazi by the Accountability Review Board and the State Department has been thorough and transparent. In fact, it set a new standard for transparency measured by tens of thousands of pages of documents turned over to Congress, testimony in public and closed hearings and a declassified report for the public,” said Franz. “Twisting the facts to advance a political agenda does a disservice to those who lost their lives and those who have devoted the past year to understanding what happened and implementing security procedures to make certain it does not happen again. Attacking the ARB now is an attack on the integrity of one of America’s most respected diplomats and one of the nation’s most respected military leaders, both of whom spent their lives serving presidents of both parties.”
Franz also said that the ARB did not shield officials from questioning or blame.
“State Department officials, including former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, have appeared at nine congressional hearings and the Department has provided thousands of pages of material to members of Congress and their staffs. Under Secretary of State Patrick F. Kennedy has represented the Department at more than twenty open and classified briefings and hearings before Congress to discuss the implementation of new security procedures worldwide,” Franz said. “The facts show that the ARB report was prepared by people of unquestioned integrity, that the process has been transparent and open, and the lessons have been learned and are being implemented.”
“The response to the tragedy in Benghazi by the Accountability Review Board and the State Department has been thorough and transparent. In fact, it set a new standard for transparency measured by tens of thousands of pages of documents turned over to Congress, testimony in public and closed hearings and a declassified report for the public,” said Franz. “Twisting the facts to advance a political agenda does a disservice to those who lost their lives and those who have devoted the past year to understanding what happened and implementing security procedures to make certain it does not happen again. Attacking the ARB now is an attack on the integrity of one of America’s most respected diplomats and one of the nation’s most respected military leaders, both of whom spent their lives serving presidents of both parties.”
Franz also said that the ARB did not shield officials from questioning or blame.
“State Department officials, including former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, have appeared at nine congressional hearings and the Department has provided thousands of pages of material to members of Congress and their staffs. Under Secretary of State Patrick F. Kennedy has represented the Department at more than twenty open and classified briefings and hearings before Congress to discuss the implementation of new security procedures worldwide,” Franz said. “The facts show that the ARB report was prepared by people of unquestioned integrity, that the process has been transparent and open, and the lessons have been learned and are being implemented.”
Update:
House Oversight Committee ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings (D-MD) sent
The Daily Beast a statement criticizing Issa’s new report and defending
the ARB.
“This
Republican report is not an official Committee report, but rather a
completely partisan staff report that the Chairman apparently did not
want Committee Members to see before he leaked it to the press. Rather
than focusing on the reforms recommended by the ARB, Republicans have
politicized the investigation by engaging in a systematic effort to
launch unsubstantiated accusations against the Pentagon, the State
Department, the President, and now the ARB itself,” Cummings said.
Pickering and ARB co-chairman ret. Adm. Mike Mullen will testify before the committee Sept. 19, Cummings noted. “Ambassador Pickering and Admiral Mullen are respected public servants who dedicated their lives to this country, and accusations that they engaged in a ‘cover-up’ at Secretary Clinton’s bidding re completely unfounded,” he said. “I look forward to hearing from them this week at a public hearing where they can finally address these accusations directly, and I hope Republicans will finally join us in an effort to ensure the full implementation of recommendations to improve security for our entire diplomatic corps serving overseas.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/15/congress-hillary-s-benghazi-investigation-let-top-officials-escape-blame.html
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