Saturday, August 22, 2015

Mine owner tried to stop EPA from drilling, was threatened with fines

Hey, remember that time when the EPA blew a hole in the side of an abandoned mine and flooded the surrounding river basin with millions of gallons of toxic sludge? Ah… good times, my friends. At the time we wondered if they were going to fine themselves for all of the ecological damage they caused. Well, no such luck, natch. But there were some fines discussed. They came up in conversation when the mine owner tried to keep them from messing around with site. Todd Hennis had some experience with the EPA in the past and they had caused some similar leaks at another property of his. This time he told them he didn’t want them in there messing around, but they made their position clear. (Washington Examiner)
Mr. Hennis said he opposed having the EPA investigate leakage from the inactive mine near Silverton, Colorado, because he had tangled with the agency in previous years over its work at another mine he owns in Leadville, Colorado.
“I said, ‘No, I don’t want you on my land out of fear that you will create additional pollution like you did in Leadville,’” Mr. Hennis told Colorado Watchdog.org. “They said, ‘If you don’t give us access within four days, we will fine you $35,000 a day.’”
The EPA has admitted that its agents accidentally unleashed the acidic flood, which has since contaminated the San Juan River in New Mexico and seeped into Lake Powell in Utah, albeit in very low concentrations.
The Interior Department and the EPA’s Office of Inspector General are investigating the circumstances leading up to the accident, while at least two House committees are also expected to hold hearings on the spill.
It turns out that Watchdog Colorado was all over this earlier in the week and the story seems to check out. There was a dump of a significant amount of toxic chemicals back in 2005 and it was indeed another of Mr. Hennis’s properties.
But the EPA escaped public wrath in 2005 when it secretly dumped up to 15,000 tons of poisonous waste into another mine 124 miles away. That dump – containing arsenic, lead and other materials – materialized in runoff in the town of Leadville, said Todd Hennis, who owns both mines along with numerous others.
“If a private company had done this, they would’ve been fined out of existence,” Hennis said. “I have been battling the EPA for 10 years and they have done nothing but create pollution. About 20 percent (of Silverton residents) think it’s on purpose so they can declare the whole area a Superfund site.”
If Mr. Hennis is correct, the earlier incident was far more egregious. The EPA had collected large quantities of sludge and dumped it down a shaft in the New Mikado mine without telling Hennis that they were doing it. The chemicals later leached into the local water supply. So is somebody going to investigate precisely what these EPA characters have been up to out there in the mountains? Senator John McCain has called for an investigation, but even if they do find that some serious skulduggery has been going on, what do they do after that? I mean, who do we normally call to investigate an environmental disaster and determine what damages, if any, are due? We call the EPA. Are we going to have them investigate themselves?
What could possibly go wrong?

Déjà Vu: When Bill Clinton Pardoned His Former CIA Director over Classified Documents on His Home Computer

Bill Clinton John Deutch - Google Search
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton insists she did nothing wrong by running all of her government communications, including classified material, through her unsecured, home-brewed computer server. Perhaps she’s forgotten one of her husband’s final acts in the Oval Office: issuing a presidential pardon to former CIA director John Deutch. Deutch’s offense? Keeping classified material on unsecured home computers.

The pardon came just as Deutch was reportedly going to cop a plea with the Justice Department. Deutch headed the CIA from May 1995 to December 1996. Several days after he left the agency, classified material was discovered on a government-owned computer at his house in Bethesda, Md. Additionally, unsecured classified magnetic media were found in the study. According to the CIA inspector general’s report, the computer had been “designated for unclassified use only.


” Unlike the current administration’s six-month delay in obtaining Clinton’s computer, the feds moved almost immediately in the Deutch case. Within ten days of discovering the errant material, they retrieved the hard drive from Deutch’s computer. A formal security investigation was opened within a month. 



that the government didn’t let Deutch’s lawyer pick and choose which e-mail communications to turn over. Rather, a “technical exploitation team, consisting of personnel expert in data recovery, retrieved the data from Deutch’s unclassified magnetic media and computers.”

As the investigation progressed, the IG discovered that Deutch had “continuously processed classified information on government-owned desktop computers configured for unclassified use during his tenure as DCI [director, CIA] [and that] . . .  these unclassified computers were located in [his] Bethesda, Maryland and Belmont, Massachusetts residences, his offices in the Old Executive Office Building, and at CIA Headquarters.” 


Notice that the government didn’t let Deutch’s lawyer pick and choose which e-mail communications to turn over.

 The computers, as configured and used, were “vulnerable to attacks by unauthorized persons.” The report stressed that “all [computers] were connected to or contained modems that allowed external connectivity to computer networks such as the Internet.” The information the security team retrieved from these computers included “Top Secret communications intelligence” as well as information on the “National Reconnaissance Program.” 


The IG criticized senior CIA officials for not taking appropriate action against Deutch when they were apprised of the results of the security investigation. That was one of the reasons the IG “initiated an independent investigation.”



Democratic Blues Barack Obama will leave his party in its worst shape since the Great Depression—even if Hillary wins.

Democratic Blues - Jeff Greenfield - POLITICO Magazine
As historians begin to assess Barack Obama’s record as president, there’s at least one legacy he’ll leave that will indeed be historic—but not in the way he would have hoped. Even as Democrats look favorably ahead to the presidential landscape of 2016, the strength in the Electoral College belies huge losses across much of the country. In fact, no president in modern times has presided over so disastrous a stretch for his party, at almost every level of politics.

Legacies are often tough to measure. If you want to see just how tricky they can be, consider the campaign to get Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill 178 years after he left the White House. Working class hero? How about slave owner and champion of Native American genocide? Or watch how JFK went from beloved martyr to the man whose imperial overreach entrapped us in Vietnam, and then back to the president whose prudence kept the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning into World War III.

Yet when you move from policy to politics, the task is a lot simpler—just measure the clout of the president’s party when he took office and when he left it. By that measure, Obama’s six years have been terrible.

Under Obama, the party started strong. “When Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats were at a high water mark,” says David Axelrod, who served as one of Obama’s top strategists. “Driven by antipathy to George W. Bush and then the Obama wave, Democrats had enjoyed two banner elections in ’06 and ’08. We won dozens of improbable congressional elections in states and districts that normally would tack Republican, and that effect trickled down to other offices. You add to that the fact that we would take office in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and it was apparent, from Day One, that we had nowhere to go but down.”

The first signs of the slowly unfolding debacle that has meant the decimation of the Democratic Party nationally began early—with the special election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s empty Senate seat in Massachusetts. That early loss, even though the seat was won back eventually by Elizabeth Warren, presaged the 2010 midterms, which saw the loss of 63 House and six Senate seats. It was disaster that came as no surprise to the White House, but also proved a signal of what was to come.

The party’s record over the past six years has made clear that when Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017 the Democratic Party will have ceded vast sections of the country to Republicans, and will be left with a weak bench of high-level elected officials. It is, in fact, so bleak a record that even if the Democrats hold the White House and retake the Senate in 2016, the party’s wounds will remain deep and enduring, threatening the enactment of anything like a “progressive” agenda across much of the nation and eliminating nearly a decade’s worth of rising stars who might help strengthen the party in elections ahead.
When Obama came into the White House, it seemed like the Democrats had turned a corner generationally; at just 47, he was one of the youngest men to be elected as president. But the party has struggled to build a new generation of leaders around him. 

Eight years later, when he leaves office in 2017 at 55, he’ll actually be one of the party’s only leaders not eligible for Social Security. Even as the party has recently captured more young voters at the ballot box in presidential elections, its leaders are increasingly of an entirely different generation; most of the party’s leaders will fade from the national scene in the years ahead. Its two leading presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are 67 and 73. The sitting vice president, Joe Biden, is 72. The Democratic House leader, Nancy Pelosi, is 75; House Whip Steny Hoyer is 76 and caucus Chair James Clyburn is 75, as is Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, who will retire next year. It’s a party that will be turning to a new generation of leaders in the coming years—and yet, there are precious few looking around the nation’s state houses, U.S. House or Senate seats.
***
Barack Obama took office in 2009 with 60 Democrats in the Senate—counting two independents who caucused with the party—and 257 House members. Today, there are 46 members of the Senate Democratic caucus, the worst showing since the first year after the Reagan landslide. Across the Capitol, there are 188 Democrats in the House, giving Republicans their best showing since Herbert Hoover took the White House in 1929.

This is, however, the tip of the iceberg. When you look at the states, the collapse of the party’s fortunes are worse. Republicans now hold 31 governorships, nine more than they held when Obama was inaugurated. During the last six years the GOP has won governorships in purple and even deep blue states: Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio. In the last midterms, only one endangered Republican governor—Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania—was replaced by a Democrat. (Sean Parnell in Alaska lost to an independent.) Every other endangered Republican returned to office.





GABBY GIFFORDS, MARK KELLY: WE’RE FOR ‘GUN RESPONSIBILITY’ NOT ‘GUN CONTROL’

AP Photo/Tom Uhlman

On August 20, the Essex News Daily ran a story in which Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords claimed they “actually do not support ‘gun control’ in the traditional sense of the phrase,” but “gun responsibility.”

This comes after they have spent nearly three years supporting new gun trafficking laws, new laws on gun show sales, new laws on internet sales, limits on ammunition magazine capacity, expanded background checks, and gun control ubiquitously under the guise of domestic violence prevention.
Yet they say they are not for gun control.
They supported expanded background checks when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) pushed them in 2013, in Washington state during the 2014 midterm elections, and, more recently, they sided with Sandy Hook Promise on SB 941 in Oregon.
Although SB 941 makes background checks universal and sets the stage for the state to confiscate privately-owned guns more easily, Kelly and Giffords say they are not for gun control.
On March 4 Giffords stood with Representative 
Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA)
18%
 (D-CA-5th) to demand that every would-be gun owner pass the same background check her attacker passed, yet she and her husband claim they are not for gun control “in the traditional sense.”

According to the Essex News Daily, Kelly said, “Nobody likes to be controlled.” He went on to say that the gun control group he and Giffords launched simply supports “basic principles” to keep communities safer.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
Via: Breitbart
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[VIDEO] North Korea approves ‘final attack’ on South Korea as tensions increase in region

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared his front-line troops were in a "quasi-state of war" Friday and ordered them to prepare for battle, a day after the most serious confrontation with South Korea in years.
A North Korean military official says a meeting of senior party and defense officials led by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met Thursday night and "reviewed and approved the final attack operation."
He gave no details on what kind of military retaliation North Korea would see as appropriate punishment for South Korea's shelling of its territory Thursday.
It’s the latest challenge in the regional feud. South Korea warned Friday that North Korea was likely to launch "provocations" if Seoul did not meet a Saturday deadline to cease propaganda broadcasts.
Kim Yong Chol, director of the general reconnaissance bureau of the North Korean army, on Friday denied South Korean allegations that Pyongyang has been raising tensions on the peninsula.
He denied the North fired anything across the Demilitarized Zone and says South Korea has not offered conclusive evidence where the rocket was launched in the North, or where exactly it landed in the South.
He suggested human error might have been a factor on the South Korean side and says the South's decision to retaliate with its own barrage was dangerous and rash.
Kim says: "Skirmishes can lead to all-out war."
South Korean Defense Minister Han Min-koo issued a warning at a press conference as a South Korean media outlet reported that Pyongyang appeared to be preparing to test-fire short- and mid-range ballistic missiles.
The report by Yonhap News Agency cited a South Korean government source who said that North Korea seemed to be "weighing the timing of the firing under its strategic intention to increase military tension on the Korean Peninsula to the highest level." The source also said that the apparent preparations for the test had been detected by South Korea's joint radar system, which it shares with the United States.
The North has given Seoul a deadline of 5 p.m. Saturday evening (4 a.m. EDT) to remove border loudspeakers that—after an 11 year lull-- have started broadcasting anti-Pyongyang propaganda. Failure, Pyongyang says, will result in further military action. Seoul has vowed to continue the broadcasts.
Earlier Friday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared his country to be in a "quasi-state of war" and fully ready for any military operations starting Friday evening, according to a report by Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency.
In response, South Korea raised its military readiness to its highest level. Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman Jeon Ha-kyu told a televised news conference that South Korea is ready to repel any additional provocation.

[VIDEO] Jindal: We can't afford the government we have today

Trump Change Trump Change: Voters Rate His Chances

Friday, August 21, 2015
Billionaire businessman Donald Trump has captured the public’s attention for better or worse, and his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, once seen as a pipe dream, is now a topic of serious discussion. So for the near future at least, Rasmussen Reports intends to track Trump’s race for the White House in a weekly Friday feature we’re calling Trump Change.

Our latest national telephone survey finds that 57% of Likely Republican Voters now think Trump is likely to be the Republican presidential nominee next year, with 25% who say it’s Very Likely. That compares to 27% who felt a Trump nomination was likely two months ago when he formally announced his presidential bid, a finding that included just nine percent (9%) who said it was Very Likely.

At that time, Trump ran near the bottom among the 12 declared GOP candidates. Now he leads the pack of Republican hopefuls which has grown to include 17 prominent contenders.

Among all likely voters, 49% think Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee, including 17% who say it’s Very Likely. That compares to 23% and seven percent (7%) respectively in the earlier survey. Forty-eight percent (48%) now say Trump is not likely to win the nomination, with 21% who feel it is Not At All Likely.
Forty-two percent (42%) of Republican voters say Trump is unlikely to be their party’s standard-bearer next year, but that includes just 15% who say it’s Not At All Likely. That’s down from 29% who said a Trump nomination was Not At All Likely two months ago. (To see survey question wording,click here.)

Rasmussen Reports Managing Editor Fran Coombs or spokesman Leon Sculti are available for media comment on these poll results. Call 732-776-9777x205 or send e-mail 

(Want a free daily e-mail update ? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.

The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on August 19-20, 2015 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

As each Republican presidential candidate formally announced, Rasmussen Reports asked voters how likely he or she was to ultimately be the nominee. Jeb Bush was the leader with 56% of likely GOP voters saying he was likely to win the nomination, including 16% who said it was Very Likely.  But we haven’t asked that question about Bush or any of the other GOP hopefuls in recent weeks.


Voters agree with Trump on the need to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. They also believe overwhelmingly that illegal immigrants convicted of a felony in this country should be deported. Trump made both proposals in a policy paper he released last weekend that calls for getting tough on illegal immigration.
Earlier this summer, Trump took a lot of criticism from Democrats and other Republican presidential hopefuls over his candid remarks about the criminality of many illegal immigrants, but most voters agree with Trump that illegal immigration increases serious crime in this country.

The reaction to his comments also increased media coverage of the murder of a young woman in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant from Mexico who said he came to that city because it does not enforce immigration laws. Most voters now want to get tough on so-called “sanctuary cities” that refuse to enforce these laws.

We noted in a commentary last month how the media spins the illegal immigration issue, comparing the coverage of Trump’s positions with those taken by leading Democratic contender Hillary Clinton.

In the face of increasing legal questions about the safety of secrets on the private e-mail server she used as secretary of State and of a vigorous intraparty challenge from Bernie Sanders, belief that Clinton is likely to be next year's Democratic presidential nominee has dropped noticeably over the past month.
Additional information from this survey and a full demographic breakdown are available to Platinum Members only.

Please sign up for the Rasmussen Reports daily e-mail update (it’s free) or follow us on Twitter or Facebook. Let us keep you up to date with the latest public opinion news.


[OPINION] Let's see even more GOP alternatives to Obamacare

Let's see even more GOP alternatives to Obamacare | Washington Examiner
This week, another GOP contender for president released a plan for replacing Obamacare — demonstrating again that yes, there are Republican alternatives.
As with the plan proposed earlier this year by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the main feature of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's plan to change the pre-Obamacare status quo is a refundable tax credit for those who buy insurance outside their workplace. This is designed not only to ease the transition away from an Obamacare system laden with mandates and subsidies that drive up the cost of care, but also to make insurance affordable for more people than it was before Obamacare.
Some conservatives object that this sounds too much like Obamacare's tax-code-based insurance subsidy. They are right to make their voices heard, but the idea that this proposal is "Obamacare Lite," or even a step in the wrong direction, is preposterous. In fact, the idea of a tax credit had currency in conservative circles when Obamacare was still just a bad idea. More importantly, the subsidies that currently make Obamacare's sky-high premiums more palatable for consumers are not even one of the messy program's bigger problems.
The biggest single problem with Obamacare is its abridgment of human freedom — its unprecedented requirement that every American obtain insurance as a condition of existing, under penalty of fine, and likewise that every employer enter the insurance business or face a penalty.
But the main practical problem with Obamacare so far has been how badly it messed up the insurance market for millions of Americans in the individual and small group markets. These are people who were perfectly happy with what they had, and must now pay more for an inferior product. The additional (often unnecessary) coverage mandates and elimination of all underwriting either caused monthly premiums to skyrocket or caused insurers to jack up deductibles and skimp on their provider networks in order to make their premiums seem like a good deal — in many places, both of these things occurred.
The result is that many Americans who were previously happy with their coverage suddenly find themselves paying substantially more for policies they either cannot use or cannot afford to use.
Walker's and Rubio's plans, as well as that of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, would undo that crucial part of damage from Obamacare, allowing insurers to tailor plans (no more forced maternity coverage for 70 year-olds) and permit more flexible arrangements like miniature plans. They would also break the state regulatory monopoly on insurance licensing, so that New Jerseyans can buy plans that sell in Iowa for a fraction of the prices they must currently pay. This already makes all of their plans superior not only to Obamacare, but also to what existed before it.
But each also has a mechanism for making insurance more available than it was previously. Walker and Rubio have chosen a tax credit system. Jindal has gone the more ideologically pure route of a deduction, which would not subsidize anyone who does not pay taxes. But the conceptual difference between the two is smaller than you might think. Payroll taxes are taxes too. A refundable credit effectively gives all workers a break on them — including those too poor to pay income taxes but too rich to qualify for Medicaid.
Everyone in the Republican field agrees on Obamacare repeal. Conservative tastes will differ on the precise details of the replacement. But it's healthy for the candidates to show their work and demonstrate their commitment to repeal by presenting real plans for replacement that can always be improved upon later. Walker has done the right thing here, and all other candidates who haven't done so yet should follow suit.

Joy Reid Laments Voters Rejected ‘Carter’s Decency and Goodness’ for ‘Bluster’ of ‘Cowboy’ Reagan -

During a segment on Thursday’s The Last Word about Jimmy Carter’s cancer diagnosis, MSNBC national correspondent Joy Reid complained that voters rejected “Carter’s decency and goodness” in the 1980 presidential election in favor of the “bluster” possessed by “cowboy” Ronald Reagan.  

Reid’s pronouncement was prompted by comments from host Lawrence O’Donnell about how Americans have “bought into [a] Trumpian concept of winners and losers” where you’re “utterly worthless as soon as you lose an election in this country” with Carter having “certainly suffered that imagery since losing the presidential election.” 

Nodding in agreement, Reid declared that: 
I think it says profoundly about who we are as a people that Carter's decency and goodness was taken for weakness and had to be remedied with the sort of bluster of a Ronald Reagan and that the idea we needed a cowboy to replace what people viewed as a man who wasn't cowboy enough to be president, that he was too nice.
Reid added a brief anecdote about how her mother had said that perhaps Carter “was too good of a man to be the President of the United States and he was just too nice” which she then used to scold the U.S. electorate for not seeing what Democrats saw in Carter: “I think it’s a bit sad that we, as a country, take a cerebral, gentle, a kind man for a weak man because that's not necessarily the case.”
Earlier in the segment, contrasting clips of Donald Trump and Carter (from his 1977 inaugural address) were played that allowed O’Donnell to tie together the now cancer-stricken Carter and Trump: “It took 38 years to go from Jimmy Carter's inaugural address, marked by humility and decency, to a front runner for a presidential nomination who has no humility and virtually no decency.”
Those remarks teed up former Carter speechwriter and journalist Walter Shapiro to bash Trump as “promising the American people a government as good as the worst elements and a shallow as the worst with elements of the American people” compared to Carter since he “promised the American people a government as good as its people.”
The relevant portions of the transcript from MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on August 20 can be found below.
MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
August 20, 2015
10:32 p.m. Eastern

THEN-PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER [on 01/20/77]: Your strength can compensate for my weakness and your wisdom can help to minimize my mistakes. 

DONALD TRUMP: I went to the Wharton School of Finance. You know, like really smart people go to the Wharton School of Finance, I will tell you.
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: It took 38 years to go from Jimmy Carter's inaugural address, marked by humility and decency, to a front runner for a presidential nomination who has no humility and virtually no decency. Watching Jimmy Carter's press conference today in which the former President dignified and humane as ever described his planned cancer treatment, journalist Walter Shapiro tweeted: “This is a moment to contrast the moment the grace of Jimmy Carter with the grotesque egotism of real estate developer to who thinks he is up for the job.” Joining us now is Walter Shapiro, fellow at the Brennan Center of Justice and a former speech writer for President Carter. Walter, please expand on that point. You have the floor. 
WALTER SHAPIRO: Well, first of all, Jimmy Carter when he ran in '76 promised the American people a government as good as its people. The way Donald Trump is running, he is promising the American people a government as good as the worst elements and a shallow as the worst with elements of the American people. I mean, the thing that gets me – forget his positions on immigration. The thing that got me is with Chuck Todd on Sunday when Trump was asked who are your military advisers and what he said is, oh, I just watch the Sunday shows. That's all I need. That, more than anything, is such a profound disrespect for the office and the whole Trump circus is more than anything scarily – he either sees the White House as a branding opportunity or he is totally oblivious to a job that Harry Truman decided as the sun, the moon and the stars all falling on you and I can't figure out which is worse. 
(....)
NATIONAL URBAN RADIO NETWORK’s APRIL RYAN: I mean, here you had someone who served in the military – there's no similarity at all. They are total opposites. You have Donald Trump, a man who's talking very negatively and I'm saying it in the best terms I can, about a war hero, John McCain and someone who served and believed in peace. He received a Nobel Peace Prize because he was trying to work out peace throughout the world, but tne thing also, that is blaring for me with Trump versus Jimmy Carter, you had Jimmy Carter who was someone who came from the south, Georgia, with steep still and racial problems in the '70s and he took the high road and he tried to stay away from that. He tried to build on integration, not segregation and here you have Donald Trump, talking about minorities the way he does. Particularly Mexicans, but one thing that really is blaring to me. What happened in Boston and how this homeless person was beaten up, urinated on and they are blaming it on Donald Trump. I will tell you this, Amos Brown, Dr. Amos Brown a board member of the national board of the NAACP said, you know, rhetoric like this is what started the situation in Charleston where that man went in and shot up nine people, shot them dead that that church. So, we have to be careful and you have Jimmy Carter who's a man of peace and this man who's not lily correct. We need some help in this time right now. 
(....)
O’DONNELL: Joy, the Carter presidency is – in America, we are I think bought in to Trumpian concept of winners and losers and you are utterly worthless as soon as you lose an election in this country. Jimmy Carter has certainly suffered that imagery since losing the presidential election. 
JOY REID: Absolutely and I think it says profoundly about who we are as a people that Carter's decency and goodness was taken for weakness and had to be remedied with the sort of bluster of a Ronald Reagan and that the idea we needed a cowboy to replace what people viewed as a man who wasn't cowboy enough to be president, that he was too nice. I remember growing up one thing my mother said to me is maybe he was too good of a man to be the President of the United States and he was just too nice and I think it’s a bit sad that we, as a country, take a cerebral, gentle, a kind man for a weak man because that's not necessarily the case. 
O’DONNELL: Walter, How did it feel inside the administration as you were approaching that re-election. 
SHAPIRO: Well, I didn’t get all the way through the reelection because I did the smartest thing in the entire world. I believe the Gallup polls and I got out in '79 and went to a place called The Washington Post, but the truth is, I have been thinking a lot about the Carter years as – and part of it is the things he doesn't get credit for. Number one, bringing human rights into the entire vocabulary of foreign policy. Number two, basically being pressing it beyond belief about energy. You could read Carter energy speeches, including the misnamed malaise speech from '79 and it reads like a Thomas Friedman column today and thirdly of all, 36 years we have had enduring peace in the Middle East and Israel's continued existence is the bedrock there as it’s negotiated by Jimmy Carter, peace with Egypt.

[EDITORIAL] Keystone pipeline delay insults taxpayers

For many Americans, the Keystone XL pipeline seems like an artifact from the last decade, like the death of Michael Jackson or Captain "Sully" Sullenberger landing a jetliner in the Hudson River. The pipeline, however, is still unfinished, still needing White House approval to cross the Canadian border.
Even more bizarrely, the southern half of the pipeline, running from Oklahoma to Port Arthur, has been completed. All it needs is tar sands oil from Canada to be fed into its northern half.
President Obama still claims he's just following normal procedures. But the political reality is that he doesn't want to approve the pipeline to placate his environmental supporters ... but he doesn't want to kill it either. So it remains in limbo and may stay that way until Obama leaves the White House.
By now the federal review of the pipeline has set some kind of dubious bureaucratic record. It has gone on for nearly seven years, more than five times the average for other pipeline applications. It's a good thing these people weren't in charge of World War II, or D-Day might still be on the drawing board.
Ironically, the current procedure that Obama is slow-walking was put in place by PresidentGeorge W. Bush to speed up these reviews.Robert McNally, an energy adviser to Bush, said approving a pipeline permit "was seen as the most routine, boring thing in the world."
The real victim in all this is the American people. The pipeline will bring more oil and thus lower gasoline prices to this country. If the Canadians can't sell their oil to us, they'll sell it to China. That will create more pollution and strengthen a key adversary.
Members of Congress have been demanding action, but the president has ignored them. He might listen if voters made it clear that there's a price for this dawdling. If nothing else, all current candidates for the presidency should state forcefully whether they will approve or disapprove this pipeline after all these years.

The Biggest Congressional Scandals in History

The Biggest Congressional Scandals in History | InsideGov
The sheer number of scandals in American politics is staggering. From the White House to local office, no branch of government is immune.
Congress in particular has one of the most colorful histories when it comes to political scandals. In fact, Congress has been dealing with scandals and corruption since its very inception.
With that in mind, InsideGov looked back at some of the largest congressional scandals in U.S. history. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it does give an overview of some of the biggest controversies to rock D.C.

[COMMENTARY] Contentions Is Hillary Clinton Finished?

That may seem like a wildly premature question in the summer of the year before the presidential election. To which I would respond: It’s too early to know the answer the question, but it’s not too early to ask it.
I say that because the extraordinary developments surrounding Mrs. Clinton’s private email server, which we now know contained material classified as Top Secret and is now in the hands of the FBI. It was on August 11 that the FBI took possession of Clinton’s server hardware and three thumb drives in her lawyer’s possession, which are said to contain copies of everything she turned over to the State Department. In addition, experts say that tens of thousands of emails she deleted may be recoverable. Which means Mrs. Clinton has now lost control over events, which is precisely what she was trying to ensure when she created her own homebrew computer system in the first place.


    Here’s some of what we know so far:
    • Mrs. Clinton, in attempting to cover up her actions, has lied on multiple occasions.\
    • Two veteran prosecutors in the Justice Department’s National Security Division are overseeing the investigation. One of them helped manage the prosecution of David H. Petraeus  (the retired general and former CIA director was sentenced to probation earlier this year and fined $100,000 after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified materials.)
    • Experts say it’s a virtual certainty that her server was compromised by foreign intelligence services.
    If you want to understand the gravity of the situation, I’d urge you to watch this interview with Robert Baer, a former CIA operative and CNN national security analyst. Mr. Baer pointed out that if he had sent a document like the one Hillary Clinton had on her server over the open Internet he’d get fired the same day, escorted to the door and probably be charged with mishandling classified information. When asked if this situation was a “deal breaker” for Clinton’s presidential candidacy, Baer said, “As a national security employee, a former one, yes.”
    “I can’t tell you how bad this is,” he added. “A lot of things get talked about, a lot of gossip, but having documents like this sent across the Internet, it could be hacked very easily and probably were hacked, is a transgression that I don’t think the president of the United States should be allowed to, you know, have committed.”
    Bob Woodward, who knows about such things, said that the Hillary Clinton email scandal “reminds me of the Nixon tapes. Thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively his …. Hillary Clinton initially took that position, ‘I’m not turning this over, there’ll be no cooperation.” Now they’re cooperating. But this has to go on a long, long time, and the answers are probably not going to be pretty.”
    That rather understates things. What we’ve seen so far has not been pretty at all. And with the FBI driving this investigation, things may get a whole lot less pretty for Mrs. Clinton. I understand the argument of those like Ross Douthat of the New York Times that “I simply do not believe that the Obama Justice Department is going to indict the former secretary of state and Democratic front-runner for mishandling classified information, even if the offenses involved would have sunk a lesser figure’s career or landed her in jail.” Still, in a career marked by scandal, this one has the potential to be politically lethal. We’ll know soon enough if it is.

    Ranking Every U.S. President By Net Worth

    Richest US Presidents | InsideGov
    There’s no doubt about it: being the U.S. president is a hard and often thankless job. Richard Nixon famously said, “Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency.”
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    But being president also has amazing perks (Air Force One!), and most presidents have been financially well-off. In fact, the average net worth of a U.S. president ($62 million) is more than 200 times the average net worth of a U.S. adult ($301,000). It pays to be president.
    Using the most recent data from 24/7 Wall St., InsideGov ranked every U.S. president by net worth, from lowest to highest. 24/7 Wall St. relied primarily on historical records to value each president’s assets and adjusted all numbers for inflation. They included factors such as land and property, income, inheritance, and book royalties in their calculation.
    Overall, presidential wealth has gone through several notable trends. Many of the earlier presidents made their fortunes before entering the White House, largely through land speculation. In contrast, many of the modern presidents came into office modestly wealthy, but significantly boosted their finances through subsequent book deals and public speaking.
    *Note: the rankings are 1-43 because Grover Cleveland was president twice. All values are expressed in 2010 dollars and adjusted for inflation.

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