Immigration enforcement program to be shut down -- By Alan Gomez, USA Today

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is starting to shut down a program that deputized local police officers to act as immigration agents.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have trained local officers around the country to act as their agencies' immigration officers. Working either in jails or in the field, the officers can check the immigration status of suspects and place immigration holds on them.

The program, known as 287(g), reached its peak under President George W. Bush, when 60 local agencies signed contracts with ICE to implement it. But that trend slowed significantly under President Obama— only eight agencies have signed up since he took office, and none has done so since August 2010.

Now, in their proposed budget for the upcoming year, Department of Homeland Security officials say they will not sign new contracts for 287(g) officers working in the field and will terminate the "least productive" of those agreements — saving an estimated $17 million. All the contracts between ICE and local police agencies run for three years, so that portion of the program could be finished by November when the last contract for field officers expires.

In its budget request, DHS said officials instead will focus on expanding Secure Communities, a program that checks the fingerprints of all people booked into local jails against federal immigration databases. The followup work in those cases is done by ICE agents, not local police.

"The Secure Communities screening process is more consistent, efficient and cost-effective in identifying and removing criminal and other priority aliens," the department explained in its budget request.

The program had been criticized by Homeland Security inspector general reports, which found that local officers were not being properly trained and there was not enough oversight to ensure that local agencies weren't using the program to engage in racial profiling.

A study last year by the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, found that immigrants developed "fear and mistrust of authorities" when they realized that local police could act as immigration agents.

The main complaint Friday from groups that oppose 287(g) was that the program isn't being terminated immediately, and that its replacement — Secure Communities — is not much better.

"The 287(g) program has been repeatedly called into question by advocates as well as the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, and should be terminated rather than sustained with taxpayer money," said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. "The Secure Communities program is surrounded by grave concerns about the impact to public safety, community policing and civil rights abuses."

Defenders of the program, such as Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, say Homeland Security is "putting politics ahead of public safety" by cutting back the 287(g) program. She said Secure Communities is helpful but that local officers working in the field are better able to identify illegal immigrants who may not have their fingerprints in federal databases, making it harder to identify them.

She said some agencies such as the Colorado Department of Public Safety have used their 287(g) officers to suppress drug and human smuggling, gang activity and identity theft and said many sheriffs and police chiefs prefer the program to Secure Communities.

"The problem for ICE is that while they may feel that they get political brownie points for this kind of gesture, in reality what the anti-enforcement groups want is for them to end 287(g) and Secure Communities, not curtail (them)," said Vaughan, director of policy studies for the center. "So it's futile — they end up making everyone on both sides angry."

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Satan and Santorum -- By Paul Kengor, The American Spectator

Perspective from Reagan's Evil Empire speech.

Like vampires fleeing a cross, the secular world shudders and trembles at the sight of Rick Santorum delivering a speech about good and evil at Ave Maria University in Florida in 2008. Santorum's statement came 25 years after another much-maligned social conservative, Ronald Reagan, delivered a similarly fiery but much-needed statement in Florida in 1983. In both cases, our liberal friends recoiled in horror, mortified that any American other than Barack Obama or Jimmy Carter might dare remark on matters of faith and state, of the temporal and eternal.

I caught excerpts of the Santorum speech for the first time yesterday, when America's omnipresent force -- Matt Drudge -- posted the link under the grim, black-and-white headline, "SANTORUM'S SATAN WARNING." Immediately, the remainder of the natural universe leapt in knee-jerk hysteria, and soon Santorum's warnings of the Evil One were the talk of a stunned nation.

As I digested the speech, I was struck at how so many of Santorum's themes and words -- which were right on the money -- echoed those expressed in Ronald Reagan's historic Evil Empire speech. Santorum ruminated on the "father of lies," spiritual warfare, truth, vanity, sensuality, temptation, pride, education, abortion. Like Reagan, he fears that the "great political conflict" at work in America "is not a political war at all, or a cultural war -- it is a spiritual war." In that war, "the father of lies has set his sights on none other than good, decent, powerful, influential United States of America."

And then, like Reagan, he finished with a message of faith-based optimism for the faithful gathered in the room: "My message to you today is that you will lose, you will lose battle after battle; you will become frustrated, but do not lose hope. God will be faithful, if you are."

As for Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire speech, it was many things. It is remembered principally, and correctly, as a bold, long overdue utterance of unadulterated truth about the USSR, which Reagan aptly described as "the focus of evil in the modern world." But the speech was much more. It looked inward at the sins and evils at work in America -- as did Santorum's speech. It was first and foremost a speech about evil generally, theological as much as political -- like Santorum's speech. As Reagan himself put it, "We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin." Reagan dared to use the "J" word, inserting a distinctly Christian claim: "There is sin and evil in the world, and we're enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might."

Reagan's speech came at 3:04 p.m. on March 8, 1983 in the Citrus Crown Ballroom at the Orlando Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel. The audience was the National Association of Evangelicals. He began by thanking all those present for their prayers, saying that their intercession had "made all the difference" in his life. He cited his favorite quote from Lincoln, about being driven to his knees by the conviction he had nowhere else to go. He then commended the role of religious faith in American democracy. "[F]reedom prospers only where the blessings of God are avidly sought and humbly accepted," Reagan maintained. "The American experiment in democracy rests on this insight." He said the discovery of that insight was the "great triumph" of the Founders. Indeed it was.

Characteristically, Reagan cited Thomas Jefferson on God and liberty and George Washington on the indispensability of religion and morality to "political prosperity." Reagan bemoaned the "modern-day secularism" that had discarded the "tried and time-tested values" upon which American civilization was based. He expressed deep concern over rising illegitimate births and abortions. He pushed for prayer in public schools.

Reagan then spoke without fear about evils pervading American life. "Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal," said Reagan. "[T]he long struggle of minority citizens for equal rights, once a source of disunity and civil war, is now a point of pride for all Americans…. There is no room for racism, anti-Semitism, or other forms of ethnic and racial hatred in this country."

Like Santorum, Reagan essentially agreed that America too had been victimized by Satan. Racism and slavery and ethnic hatred were among the Devil's vicious victories in the United States.

Only then did Reagan turn his attention offshore -- toward the Soviet Union. "[L]et us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness," asked Reagan, "pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world."

And yet, like Santorum, Reagan was wary of the temptation to pride, to vanity, including mistaken and misplaced pride and vanity. It was there that he offered the most famous passage in his speech:

I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority…. I urge you to beware the temptation of pride -- the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

Reagan quoted Whittaker Chambers. In so doing, he cast the struggle facing America as a spiritual one. Reagan stated:

The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith. Whittaker Chambers, the man whose own religious conversion made him a witness to one of the terrible traumas of our time, the Hiss-Chambers case, wrote that the crisis of the Western World exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in communism's attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said, for Marxism-Leninism is actually the second oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, "Ye shall be as gods.''

Reagan then finished with a burst of faith-based optimism, quoting one of his favorite Scripture verses, from Isaiah: "He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increased strength.… But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary."

There was much more to Reagan's speech. I encouraged readers to Google a transcript and read more. You will find even more remarkable similarities to Santorum's thinking.
Of course, in reaction to Reagan's speech, the press went nuts, much like the reaction to Santorum's remarks.

Oh, well. To borrow from Reagan: There they go again.

Be not afraid, Rick. Be not afraid.
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New Romney tax plan goes the full Reagan -- by James Pethokoukis, The American

Back in January 1983, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial with the headline “Finally, a Tax Cut,” referring to how the bulk of President Ronald Reagan’s tax reductions didn’t kick in until that year. It was as much an expression of relief as satisfaction.

Well, “finally a tax cut” plan from Mitt Romney. Oh, sure, Romney’s original plan did call for cutting corporate tax rates and capital gain tax rates for middle-incomers. It also called for abolishing the death tax. A nice start but not nearly bold enough for a nation facing the sorts of economic challenges that America does.

Romney 2.0 goes the full Reagan. The plan’s centerpiece: An across-the-board, tax-rate cut of 20 percent, returning the top rate to 28 percent, where it was when Reagan left office in January 1989. In addition, the tax rate for people in the lowest income bracket would drop to 8 percent from 10 percent, and to 20 percent from 25 percent for those Americans in the middle, according to the Wall Street Journal.

And how would Romney pay for the tax cuts? Well, the revenue would come through a combination of faster economic growth and new limits placed on deductions, exemptions, and credits — particularly on higher-income Americans. Indeed, if you are going to cut the corporate rate to 25 percent, as Romney proposes, then you really need to get top marginal rates in that ballpark, too, to avoid avoid creating distortions leading to tax shelter mania. (The Obama White House ignores this in its new corporate tax plan. Team Obama would lower the corporate rate to 28 percent, leaving a huge gap with the 40 percent top marginal individual income tax rate it also wants.)

Is the Romney plan as bold and aggressive as those proposed by Rick Santorum (two individual rates, 28 percent and 10 percent, along with a  17.5 percent corporate rate) and Newt Gingrich (a 15 percent flat income tax, 12.5 percent corporate tax, zero investment taxes)? Certainly not, though it remains to be seen how Romney would alter the vast tangle of tax preferences cluttering up the code. But Romney’s plan would have a much better chance of actually being enacted by the next Congress if he becomes the 45th president of the United States. So Romney should get points for realism.

But part of me wished Romney would have listened a bit more to economic adviser Glenn Hubbard. In a recent Financial Times op-ed, Hubbard proposed a progressive consumption tax which would “drastically” lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains, along with equalizing the tax treatment of debt and equity. Instead, Romney would leave investment taxes at 15 percent for upper-income taxpayers, while eliminating them for families with an annual income below $200,000. Increasing the child-care tax credit would have been another intriguing option.

(Interestingly, Romney might pay more taxes under his own plan. Hubbard told the WSJ that Romney would direct his Treasury secretary — which might be Hubbard himself — to determine if some part of “carried interest” income from investment funds like Bain Capital should be taxed at regular income tax rates rather than at lower capital gains rates.)

Yet take a step back and consider the following: Romney wants to a) slash income tax rates by 20 percent, b) lower corporate tax rates by 30 percent while slashing corporate welfare, c) reform Social Security by gradually raising the retirement age and indexing benefit growth for higher-income retirees to inflation instead of wages, d) create a premium-support Medicare system for younger workers, and e) cut government spending by $500 billion during his first term. If Romney does become the Republican nominee, he would certainly be running on the boldest GOP agenda since Reagan ’80, maybe ever.
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The new and improved Romney tax cut plan -- by James Pethokoukis, The American

Here are the details of Mitt Romney’s new tax cut plan. My analysis is coming up:

– Make Permanent, Across-The-Board 20 Percent Cut In Marginal Rates. This bold stroke reduces the tax on the next dollar of income earned for all taxpayers. The new top rate of 28 percent returns to the top rate signed by President Reagan in 1986.

– Promote Savings And Investment For The American People. Mitt Romney will maintain the current 15 percent rate on income from qualified dividends and capital gains. He will cut taxes further on lower- and middle-income Americans by ensuring that families with an annual income below $200,000 will pay no taxes on income from capital gains, interest, and qualified dividends. These low tax rates will create powerful incentives for Americans to save and invest, while spurring business investment and economic growth.

– Abolish The Death Tax. Eliminating the death tax will allow families to pass assets between generations without complicated tax avoidance schemes and without breaking up family businesses.

– Repeal The Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). The AMT was originally implemented in the 1970s with the purpose of ensuring that the wealthiest of Americans could not artificially reduce their tax burden. But if Congress fails to pass the annual AMT patch, many middle-income Americans will become ensnared in the AMT trap. It should be repealed immediately to eliminate harmful distortions in the tax code, and replaced with a simpler tax system that reduces tax avoidance schemes.

– Cut The Corporate Rate To 25 Percent. It is vital that the U.S. move to quickly reduce the corporate tax rate and put American companies on a level playing field. The high U.S. corporate tax rate handicaps the nation’s overall economy in competition with the rest of the world.

– Strengthen And Make Permanent The R&D Tax Credit. This credit promotes innovation in both manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries, and helps businesses plan their innovation spending. With a strong, permanent credit, companies will now be able to invest for the future with confidence.

– Switch To A Territorial Tax System. The United States taxes income on a worldwide basis, regardless of where it is earned. This worldwide system of taxation sets the U.S. apart from most other OECD countries, which have converted to territorial systems of taxation. Japan and the United Kingdom are two countries that recently traded their worldwide tax systems for territorial systems. This switch will promote U.S. interests in two key ways:

–  Repeal The Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). One major drawback of the Corporate AMT is its effect of penalizing companies that invest in capital equipment. A growing economy depends on robust capital investment. Unfortunately, corporations that are subject to the Corporate AMT are unfairly hit by strict depreciation rules. Due to this chilling effect on capital investment, the corporate AMT must be fully repealed. Investment will no longer be penalized, spurring labor productivity, an increase in American incomes, and greater economic prosperity.

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Secret Obama memo wanted the $800 billion stimulus to be -- gasp!--$1.8 trillion -- by James Pethokoukis, The American

It could have been bigger. Much, much bigger.

Back in late 2008, soon-to-be Obama White House economic adviser Christina Romer prepared a policy memo—the contents a mystery until now—about how the new administration should deal with the collapsing economy. Romer thought to really do the job, the stimulus—later called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—should have been $1.8 trillion (highlighting for emphasis):

This memo was dug up by Noam Scheiber of The New Republic magazine. Now, Obama never saw that $1.8 trillion number since Larry Summers, who was leading the econ team, thought it was politically impossible:

When Romer showed Summers her $1.7-to-$1.8 trillion figure late the week before the memo was due, he dismissed it as impractical. So Romer spent the next day or two coming up with a reasonable compromise: $1.2 trillion. In a revised document that she sent Summers over the weekend, she included the $1.2 trillion figure, along with two more limited options: about $600 billion and about $850 billion. … But with less than twenty-four hours before the memo needed to be in Obama’s hands, Summers informed her that he was inclined to strike the $1.2 trillion figure. Though Summers, like Romer, believed more stimulus was almost unambiguously better, he also felt that a $1.2 trillion proposal, to say nothing of $1.8 trillion, would be dead on arrival in Congress. Moreover, since Obama’s political operatives were convinced that any stimulus approaching a trillion dollars was hopeless, Summers worried that urging more than this amount would stamp him and Romer as oblivious in their eyes. “$1.2 trillion is nonplanetary,” he told Romer, invoking a Summers-ism for “ludicrous.” “People will think we don’t get it.”

When the economic team finally walked through the contents of the memo with the president-elect on December 16, Romer mentioned her preference for over a trillion dollars. Summers allowed that bigger would be better. But these points were made in passing. “I don’t remember that as part of the discussion,” conceded one member of the economic team in attendance. The final version of the memo had framed the debate around two basic choices—roughly $600 billion and roughly $850 billion—and these were the focus of the conversation. “The option of going well above $800 billion was certainly raised, but it was not discussed extensively,” Romer later recalled in an interview. “We felt the most important thing was to make sure the president-elect was on board with a plan as large as $800 billion.” Neither the memo nor the meeting would have given Obama reason to suspect this amount was arguably $1 trillion too small.

Good heavens. I recently wrote a post about Michael Grabell, a reporter for ProPublica. He documents the many failings of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in “Money Well Spent? The Truth Behind the Trillion-Dollar Stimulus, the Biggest Economic Recovery Plan in History.”

In reporting on the stimulus over three years, I traveled to 15 states, interviewed hundreds of people and read through tens of thousands of government documents and project reports. What I found is that the stimulus failed to live up to its promise not because it was too small (as those on the left argue) or because Keynesian economics is obsolete (as those on the right argue), but because it was poorly designed. Even advocates for a bigger stimulus need to acknowledge that their argument is really one about design and presentation.

In short, Big Government screwed up the Big Spend. Joe Biden, Grabell notes, said the stimulus would “literally drop kick us out of the recession.” But Grabell concludes that “the stimulus ultimately failed to do what America expected it to do — bring about a strong, sustainable recovery. The drop kick was shanked.”

And Team Obama wanted it to be $1 trillion bigger?
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Retired Military Brass Warns of Obama's Harmful Defense Cuts -- by Daniel Halper, The Weekly Standard

President Obama is cutting future defense spending. It is both a conscious choice to divert funds elsewhere, away from the military, and a consequence of last year’s congressional budget agreement, which alone will likely result in an automatic sequestration of at least $500 billion from future military budgets. Regardless, the decision has serious consequences.

In a report today released by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), former brass from all five U.S. military branches detail what these cuts might mean. 

“It will be difficult for the Army to perform the missions indicated if some of the numbers that are being bantered about to achieve the $500 billion reduction become fact,” retired Army Gen. Louis Wagner writes. “If sequestration for another $500 billion becomes a reality, it will be devastating for the Army and the national security of the country.”

Wagner warns: “Instability in the Middle East, the Arab Spring activities, the Iranian nuclear weapons threat, the threat of a nuclear capable North Korea, and instability of our neighbors in Central and South America are all strong indicators that the world is not going to be peaceful in the foreseeable future. Ground forces are very likely to again be involved in a large-scale irregular war or even a conventional conflict. The capability to execute robust full spectrum land operations remains absolutely essential if the United States is to remain a preeminent world power.”

“We will be forced to accept greater risk as a nation,” Major General Sid Shachnow (retired) says. Shachnow goes on to—optimistically—note that this might be fine “[s]ince we have no peer competitors.” But concedes he is not able to determine what this might mean for “achieving victory” in the future.

The primary criticism from the former Air Force brass is the way the cuts are being made—without consideration to mission, only to the bottom-line of the budget.

“The budget for our national defense programs should be based on the amount of resources required to achieve national security objectives established through the usual processes,” writes Major General Robert D. Eaglet (retired), formerly of the Air Force. “Our national security is too important to constrain it to whatever might be achievable within some arbitrary reduced budget target.”

Lieutenant General Charles May (retired), also formerly of the Air Force, shares a similar criticism: “We all understand that strategy should come first but it is obvious that budget changes are being made first and some public pronouncements are being made to justify these changes. But coherence is lacking, preventing a thorough and in-depth analysis of the impact.”

And the Navy, too, will face severe consequences. Navy Rear Admiral Terence E. McKnight notes the shrinking save of the Navy and writes, “With the reductions in ships and manpower the Navy will be stretched to the limits and major mission areas and overseas commitments will have to be eliminated.”

McKnight writes: “The Navy will not have the forces to protect the high seas as in years past. . . . The Navy will no longer be able project power in such regions as the Caribbean, Mediterranean, or possibly the Middle East. . . . No matter what doctrine is implemented in the future, there will simply not be enough ships to cover the current commitments.”

Even the Coast Guard threatens to be severely constrained by these cuts. “The extent of possible reductions in Coast Guard funding remains undetermined, but would nevertheless seriously impact a traditionally underfunded agency in many areas, causing significant reductions in services to the public,” Rear Admiral James Olson (retired) warns.

The Marines, if Major General Larry S. Taylor (retired) is any indication, are most concerned about “shortages of spare parts for maintenance and ammunition for training.”

Read the whole report here.

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The Mystery of Iran's Wandering War Ships -- By Claudia Rosett, PJ Media

Did they dock in Syria, or didn’t they? Last week, two Iranian war ships, a destroyer and a supply ship, passed through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean. According to Iran’s government, they docked in the Syrian port of Tartus. According to the U.S. government, they did no such thing.

More specifically, on Saturday Iran’s state-owned PressTV reported that the two Iranian vessels had docked in the Syrian port of Tartus. On Tuesday, a Pentagon spokesman, George Little, told the press, “We have absolutely no indication whatsoever the Iranian ships ever docked in Syrian ports.”

What’s going on here? One day there are two Iranian ships docking in Syria. Three days later, it seems that, like the Flying Dutchman, they never made port. Whatever they did during their swing through the eastern Mediterranean, they are now reported as having left the area, heading back through the Suez Canal.

These are not phantoms, or flyspecks invisible to the hi-tech eye. These are ships, substantial objects, which the U.S. certainly has the ability to track. I can’t claim to know what actually happened, and, alas, I have no inside sources here. So this is pure speculation. But it sounds as if the Iranian ships were indeed heading for Tartus,  and then ran into some reason to back off — leaving the Iranian government to  bluster that the ships had docked, rather than admit they’d chickened out.

If so, what might have blocked those ships? We know this much: There was no “Freedom Flotilla” launched from, say, Turkey, to try to deflect the arrival of Iranian war ships potentially stuffed with supplies for the terror-sponsoring regime of Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, now using heavy weapons against his own people. There was no naval blockade mandated by, say, the United Nations, where China and Russia are now blocking any Security Council resolution on Syria. There was no grand effort put forth by the combined naval forces of the Arab League.

Assuming that something, or someone, intervened in some way to persuade those ships to wave off, that was good work. I’d like to think that the deciding factor was a sharp warning from the U.S. —  though if that was the case, it would have been far better had America found a way to deter Iran before those ships ever entered the Suez Canal. Or, as with too many showdowns on the front lines of Tehran’s aggression, was the job, and the risk, left to the Israelis?

And if the Tartus docking was an Iranian lie, it does not obviate the fact that Iran’s regime felt free to send war ships through the Suez Canal for the second time in a year, and this time felt free to boast they’d docked in Syria. Within the propaganda fog are real ships, real guns, real threats. What next?
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New Study: Tar Sands No Global Warming Threat -- By Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest

Renowned climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in Canada and his colleague Neil Swart have published a study in Nature [subscription required] that concludes that Canada’s oil sands are not as harmful to the environment as previously imagined. The science, once again, is not settled.

“Burning the proven reserve [of Alberta's heavy bitumen] would lead to a warming of 0.03°C,” they write. Canada’s oil sands are said to have 1.8 trillion barrels of oil-in-place, only a small fraction of which is “economically viable.” Burning even the entire 1.8 trillion barrels of oil would result in global temperature increase of only 0.36 degrees Celsius.

Much of the backlash against oil sands rightly targets the extremely detrimental environmental effects of extracting the resource, not its use. This study does not take the actual production of the oil sands into account, but it does shed light on the differences in cleanliness of our various sources of energy, from coal to oil to gas. Coal is the real villain, the study concludes, because it is much dirtier than oil or gas. But even this is only part of the picture: “The problem is dependence on fossil fuels.”

We will not achieve independence from fossil fuels in the near term, no matter how much we wish we could. The magic unicorns aren’t going to pull the sleigh, and we are going to just have to live with that fact. The tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline, far from drastically accelerating global warming as some claim, present an opportunity to lower America’s use of the dirtier fossil fuel, coal, and also to source energy from a friendly neighbor.

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Mexican Oil Good, Canadian Oil Bad? -- By Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest

The Obama Administration’s energy policy is looking more convoluted by the day. On the one hand, its controversial nixing of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried Canadian oil south to refineries in the United States, delighted his green base. On the other, the administration has also been behind plans to expand offshore drilling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. As with so many issues, Obama has managed to find the sour spot on energy, caving to green demands on vital jobs projects but still not doing quite enough to keep them happy.

The energy policy contortionism is about to get worse. The New York Times reports that America and Mexico have just inked a deal to further expand deep water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, despite concerns that Pemex, the Mexican state oil company, is too inexperienced to conduct the drilling in a safe manner.

The logic here is baffling. Earlier this month, Obama rejected plans for a pipeline that would carry already-extracted oil from Canada to America on environmental grounds. Now he seems relatively unconcerned by inexperienced companies conducting far riskier drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico. While openness to new oil certainly represents a step in the right direction, Obama’s schizophrenic decisions suggest to us that his energy policy could use a bit more thinking through. CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content

1,100 -- By Battleland

– the U.S. has approximately 1,100 nonstrategic (a.k.a tactical, or short-range) nuclear weapons, according to a new Congressional Research Service report released Tuesday by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. A “few hundred” are deployed with U.S. aircraft in Europe, and the rest are stored in the U.S. “Estimates vary,” the CRS says, “but experts believe Russia still has between 2,000 and 6,000 warheads for nonstrategic nuclear weapons in its arsenal.”

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GAO: Pentagon Closing Whistleblower Reprisal Cases "Prematurely" -- By Nick Schwellenbach, Battleland

You’re in the military. You blew the whistle. Something bad happened to your career. You ask your military service Inspector General or the big Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG) to investigate what you believe is reprisal. You’re in good hands, right? Well, maybe not.

There are numerous problems with how investigators are handling these cases, according to a draft Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that POGO has obtained. Although the main thrust of the report is on how it takes too long, on average, for servicemembers of the military alleging retaliation to get the results of an investigation, perhaps the most concerning finding is that unclear guidance “has resulted in investigators closing cases prematurely,” according to the draft.

The guidance relates to “a key investigative question” on whether an adverse personnel action would be taken against the complainant in absence of whistleblowing. A “yes” answer to this question was estimated by GAO to be the cause, at least in part, for “65 percent of the cases closed between January 1, 2009 and March 31, 2011.”

The GAO did not say whether some of the cases prematurely closed might have been substantiated otherwise. The GAO did not try to assess whether the wrong conclusions were reached in any individual cases, according to the draft.

The unclear guidance comes on top of the higher evidentiary hurdle military whistleblowers face on this question compared to civilian government whistleblowers. As POGO noted last fall, this difference makes it more difficult for IGs to substantiate military whistleblower complaints of reprisal. And indeed few military reprisal allegations are substantiated. “For most of the reprisal allegations we reviewed,” an earlier 2003 GAO report stated, “management demonstrated to the satisfaction of an Inspector General that it would have taken the same course of action in the absence of a protected disclosure.”

According to the draft, historically around 80 percent of the whistleblower reprisal workload in DoD is related to military personnel, with civilian employees, contractors, and non-appropriated fund employees rounding out the rest of the DoD’s reprisal investigations caseload. The DoD IG is the central hub within the DoD’s whistleblower reprisal protection system. It investigates allegations of whistleblower reprisal and oversees the military service IGs’ reprisal investigations.

The draft report details several other problems, here are some:

• In some reprisal cases examined in an internal Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG) review, there was “insufficient documentation to support the findings or evidence that necessary investigative steps were completed.” Neither the internal review team nor the GAO assessed whether the evidence backed up the DoD IG’s conclusions in each case.
• The DoD took an average of 451 days to process a sample of reprisal cases examined by the GAO, well in excess of “the statutory requirement to provide reports on completed investigations 180 days after the date the allegation was made.” Furthermore, “in addition to not completing investigations in 180 days in most cases, DoD has not complied with the statutory reporting requirement to provide notification in those instances where the investigations go beyond 180 days, although it is taking steps to do so.”
• A DoD IG internal review, according to GAO, “found that the documentation demands required” during the whistleblower intake stage “could produce an onerous burden for the complainant and was inconsistent with DODIG guidance.” In response, the DoD IG is “instituting changes” to now have investigators speak directly with complainants “based on the standard that, ‘the alleged fact, if true, would raise the inference of reprisal,’” according to the draft GAO report.
• “The percentage of total cases that are fully investigated and substantiated has generally declined between fiscal year 2006 and the first half of fiscal year 2011, reaching its lowest point in both cases in fiscal year 2009.”
• “Only 1 in 5 servicemembers with whistleblower reprisal allegations substantiated by DODIG applied to BCMRs [Boards for Correction of Military Records] for relief during the time period we reviewed,” states the draft report. BCMRs are the main avenues servicemembers have to correct their military records. “Officials from DODIG, the service IGs, and the BCMRs indicated that they did not know the exact reason why so few servicemembers with substantiated reprisal allegations apply for relief.” However, the draft report notes that “Service and DODIG officials also stated that the length of time it takes for servicemembers to get their reprisal allegations substantiated may impact their willingness to engage in yet another process” and there “is a lack of understanding regarding the available remedies.” In addition, “the service BCMRs are not consistently identifying applicants who have substantiated reprisal cases as such and are therefore not providing all reprisal victims with the procedural privileges to which they are entitled.”

The draft, entitled “WHISTLEBLOWER PROTECTION: Actions Needed to Improve DOD’s Military Whistleblower Reprisal Program,” is dated January 31. The final version of the report is slated to be released at the end of February. The draft was sent to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for comments from the DoD.

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Why Obama's corporate tax plan is a total bust -- By James Pethokoukis, The American

The current U.S. economic recovery is arguably the worst in modern American history. Incomes are flat, housing is moribund and the past three years have seen the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression. Yet President Barack Obama—with the backing of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner—has the temerity to propose a corporate tax reform plan that would actually raise the tax burden on American business (and de facto on workers, too) without lowering rates to an internationally competitive level. This is a terrible, terrible plan:

1. The Obama-Geithner plan would lower the statutory corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent, currently the second-highest among advanced economies. But that would still leave the combined U.S. corporate tax rate — state and federal — at 32.2 percent, far above the OECD combined average of 25 percent.  The U.S. combined rate would be a bit below slow-growing Japan and France but above the U.K. and Germany. That’s not nearly good enough. Canada just lowered its corporate tax rate, for instance, to 15 percent. So instead of having the second highest corporate tax rate in the world, the U.S. would probably be fourth behind Japan, France and Belgium.

2. The Obama-Geithner plan would establish, according to the New York Times, a minimum tax on multinational corporations’ foreign earnings to discourage “accounting games to shift profits abroad” or actual relocation of production overseas.

So instead of a carrot, Corporate America gets the stick. Instead of lowering the U.S. rate to a competitive level, Obama would raise the penalty on keeping profits overseas. Indeed, the United States is a huge outlier in that it taxes the foreign profits of multinational companies. Here is Obama’s own Jobs Council:

While most other developed nations have adopted territorial systems that exempt most or all foreign income from taxes when they are repatriated, the U.S. subjects all worldwide earnings to the corporate income tax when they are brought home to the U.S. This approach actually encourages U.S. companies to keep their earnings abroad rather than investing them here at home. Adopting a territorial tax system would bring us in line with our trading partners and would eliminate the so-called “lock-out” effect in the current worldwide system of taxation that discourages repatriation and investment of the foreign earnings of American companies in the U.S.

Obama’s debt commission made a similar recommendation.

3. To pay for the lower tax rate, Obama would eliminate ”dozens of tax loopholes and subsidies,” according to Politico. But some of the money would be used to “lower the effective rate on manufacturing to no more than 25 percent, while encouraging greater research and development and the production of clean energy,” according to the Times.

First, the effective manufacturing tax rate would be higher than 25 percent once you add back state taxes. Second, the White House is sticking to its clean energy agenda even as other advanced economies like Germany and Spain are abandoning such wasteful subsidies. Again, this is ideology trumping economic reality.

4. Obama and Geithner apparently still don’t understand how harmful corporate taxes are. Here’s the OECD: “Corporate taxes are found to be most harmful for growth, followed by personal income taxes, and then consumption taxes.”

5. Obama and Geither apparently still don’t understand who bears the burden of corporate taxes. It’s workers. AEI economists Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur have found that “corporate tax rates affect wage levels across countries. Higher corporate taxes lead to lower wages. A 1 percent increase in corporate tax rates is associated with nearly a 1 percent drop in wage rates.”

6. Obama and Geither apparently don’t understand that “corporate income taxes have a highly significant and negative effect on long-term growth,” according to the Tax Foundation:

7. Obama and Geither apparently don’t understand that U.S. corporate tax rates are so off the map that the best way to maximize revenue would be to flat out cut the top corporate rate 8.6 percentage points to 26.4 percent. You could then eliminate corporate welfare and take the rate even lower.

8. Obama and Geither would take the top individual tax rate to 40 percent, leaving a 12 percentage-point gap with the corporate tax rate. This creates a huge incentive for tax sheltering.

Bottom line: Real pro-growth corporate tax policy would eliminate tax breaks, dramatically lower tax rates, and only tax profits earned at home. The Obama plan would actually make the corporate tax code and the U.S. economy less competitive and less productive. But the proposal does neatly fit into the president’s Occupy-inspired campaign theme that wealthy Americans and greedy corporations are to blame for the Great Recession and rising income inequality. Besides, how can Democrats ever raise taxes on the middle-class to pay for all their spending ideas without first socking it to the 1 percent and to business?

Obama had no experience in the private sector before becoming president. The free market is a sort of theoretical construct he learned about in college. But Geithner should know better. He’s had lots of contact with all sorts of executives, both at Treasury and when he ran the New York Federal Reserve Bank. If he has any doubts about this plan, he should resign. And if he doesn’t, he never should have gotten the job in the first place. CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content

Santorum Talks About Iran, Spending, ObamaCare, and Why He Decided to Run -- By Jeffrey H. Anderson, The Weekly Standard

Just before the start of the holiday weekend, Rick Santorum gave a thoughtful and wide-ranging interview in Michigan.  Over the course of 25 minutes, he discussed Iran (4:05-6:55), saying, “Israel shouldn’t be leading this. This is a national security issue for the United States...we should be leading this.”  He discussed his spending record (8:14-11:31):  “I look at the things that they’re hitting us on, and they’re almost laughable.” He discussed Obamacare (13:33-15:22):  “I don’t think the government should be mandating coverages.”  And when asked what made him decide to run for President (12:20 to 13:33), he answered,

“President Obama . . . Obamacare in particular.  I just see this huge overreach of government . . . not just with the government trampling on people of faith, but the government trampling on your economic rights. . . . This is the future of America unless we get back and say, look, America was a great country not because the government told you what to do.  America’s a great country because we believed in limited government and free people, and building a great and just society from the bottom up, not the top down.”

At one point (14:24-15:22), in response to Santorum’s claim that health insurance shouldn’t cover things that are akin to having car insurance cover oil changes, Kathy Barks Hoffman of the Associated Press asked, “But aren’t there many people who don’t even go get preventative care because they can’t afford that $30 doctor visit, or they can’t afford to go spend $60 on medicine?”

Santorum replied:

“So, you’re making the assumption that people aren’t smart enough to figure out what’s best for them. . . . You figured, well, because insurance doesn’t cover oil changes, people don’t get their oil changed.  Well, as a matter of fact they do, because they figure out that that’s actually good for them in the long term.  And, you know, people will figure out that these are good things for them. . . . And you shouldn’t have government there to force people to cover things and do things that cost everybody more just because there may be some irresponsible people who don’t do what the right thing is. Guess what: There are people who don’t get their oil changes, they end up with higher bills, and they pay the consequences for it.  That’s how America works.”   

Watch the whole thing here.

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It's No 'Potemkin' Nuclear Enrichment Plant -- By Maseh Zarif, The Weekly Standard

An unnamed senior U.S. official responded to a report that Iran is building out the Fordow enrichment plant by describing the facility “as a ‘Potemkin’ plant, a façade that could not operate and was under close watch by the International Atomic Energy Agency,” according to NBC News. That characterization is grossly misleading.

Iran has accelerated its uranium enrichment activities at the Fordow facility, the once covert site buried into a small mountain outside of Qom, since the last IAEA report that detailed the regime’s weaponization work. It began producing uranium enriched to 20 percent there earlier this year, according to the IAEA, and now has the infrastructure to install and operate advanced centrifuges. These developments will, in fact, further reduce the time Iran would need to produce fuel for a nuclear weapon and accelerate the stockpiling of higher-enriched material. And while the IAEA has some access to the facility, its inspections regime in Iran is imperfect and vulnerable to manipulation, partly due to Iran’s refusal to implement the Additional Protocol agreement it signed in December 2003.

It would be a welcome relief if the Fordow facility was indeed a non-threatening Potemkin plant and if the IAEA had unfettered access and insight into the program along with an airtight inspections regime that could help prevent the emergence of a nuclear weapons-capable Iran. Unfortunately, the reality that must be confronted is much more complicated and dangerous.

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Who Is Responsible for the GOP? -- By Jay Cost, The Weekly Standard

As the nomination battle on the Republican side drags on, with no ostensible end in sight, I can’t help but ask myself: Who is responsible for the Republican party? What person or group is out there to make sure that the GOP does not shoot itself in the foot before November? Who is there to guarantee that the disputes between different factions are resolved amicably and efficiently? Who is looking out for the long-term prospects of the Grand Old Party?

In the pre-reform era, that was a fairly easy question to answer: the state and local party organizations were in charge. Political scientists often conceived of the old system as a “truncated pyramid,” with the local party organizations on the first rung, the state party organizations on the second, and really nobody above them (the national committees were mostly just figurehead organizations). The main vehicles for party business were the conventions – local, state, and national. This is where the party nominated candidates to compete for office and established the platform (once important documents that were actually read and indicated the party’s positions on the big issues).

The early 20^th century progressives hated this approach, and tried to foist primaries upon the parties as the way of selecting candidates, but the fad mostly died off after the 1910s. After the debacle of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, left-wing insurgents got hold of key Democratic reform committees, and shoved major changes down the party's throat. The eventual result was the primaries that we have nowadays.

This effectively destroyed the old party. In its place arose a candidate-centered political party – if the old system was a truncated pyramid, the new system was a series of disconnected circles, representing individual candidates and the organizations they build up to pursue elective office.  The party organizations were no longer responsible for selecting nominees, and the candidates (not the platforms) came to define the issues in the campaign. Unsurprisingly, the state and local parties atrophied, and the national convention devolved into the useless spectacle that greets us every August in a presidential year.

So, who is responsible for the well-being of the party in this new system? Consider the possibilities.

The people? The primary system gave the power of nominating candidates to the people writ large, rather than party organizations. But check out this chart from RealClearPolitics tracking the average of the national polls. What we see here is that a whopping five Republicans have had a lead at one point or another. This strongly suggests a mass electorate that is paying precious little attention – too little to be responsible for the reputation and success of the Republican party over the long haul. As I have argued before, without the competition between the parties to define the stakes of the campaign, we cannot hope for a responsible electorate. And thus intra-party competitions such as the primaries are bound to disappoint.

The national committee? It is a happy thought, for sure, and the media likes to bill the national committee chairman as the leader of the Republican party. But to be a leader, you have to have political power, and the national chairman has very little of that. Instead, his major role is to act as a legal money launderer to help the party’s presidential candidate get around the campaign finance laws. As past disputes have indicated, the national committee has, at best, only nominal control over the most trivial of matters, like when state parties hold their primaries.

The candidates themselves? One would hope so, but the reality is that candidates face a classic prisoners’ dilemma. Suppose you told a candidate that, for the good of the party, he has to drop out of the race. If he drops out, the party stands a 50 percent chance of winning, but if he stays in the probability of success drops to 20 percent. From the perspective of the party, this is a no-brainer, but what about the candidate? Maybe he would do the altruistic thing and withdraw, but it’s just as likely that he would conceive (correctly) that his chances would be better if he stayed in the race – a 20 percent chance of victory is greater than a 0 percent chance, after all. So, party be damned.

The party establishment? Recent scholarly work has suggested that this shadowy group has more power than originally thought, but that is not to imply that it has a lot of power, or that it is capable of behaving responsibly for the good of the whole party. In terms of its capacity to be responsible, the establishment nowadays is mostly the candidates for and occupants of various political offices, and the donors, strategists, and hangers-on that orbit in their particular circles. Thus, it suffers from the same potential prisoners' dilemma as declared candidates do. In terms of its power, the establishment works almost exclusively through ad hoc, informal channels that are nowhere near as dominant as the formal rules that governed the almighty pre-reform conventions.

So, in their zeal to reform the party system, the lefty do-gooders of the late 1960s and early 1970s denuded those supposedly vile party organizations and replaced them with…nothing. In reality, nobody is responsible for the well-being of the party, to manage its reputation and maximize its chances for a broad victory in November and beyond.

We have seen the problems with such an arrangement in the current cycle. The differences between candidate voting blocs are fairly insubstantial this time around – mostly dependent on different tenors and tones from the candidates, or regional affinities, or what have you. In the grand history of the parties, these sorts of disagreements are par for the course, and would usually be ironed out within 10 or so ballots at the national convention. The local and state parties would send their representatives to Chicago (or some other central city), they’d haggle a little bit, but come to an agreement in short order, and probably all head home happy.

But not this time. Because there is no such governing body, we have this mess that possibly might stretch on for months, leave lingering bad blood between the factions, and ultimately give Barack Obama a boost in the general election. That’s the difference between having somebody in charge and having nobody in charge.

We implicitly take for granted the idea that the way things are done now is either the way they have always been done, or that it was changed from the old ways for good reasons. Perhaps it is the march of technology or the seemingly endless growth in the American economy that gives us confidence that today’s rules of the road are better than yesterday’s. But it is not so in the case of the party operations. The sad truth is that Americans who lived and died 150 years ago – who didn’t have modern medicine, personal computers, cars, airplanes, easy access to higher education, "sophisticated" manners and all the rest – had a much better party system than we do today.

And the Republican party is paying the price for this right now.

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The Effrontery of Rick Santorum -- The media can't tolerate social conservatism -- By Rich Lowry, National Review

The media has unleashed the hounds on Rick Santorum.

He was last seen a step ahead of the braying pack, trying to explain that he hadn’t accused President Barack Obama of being a crypto-Muslim. The former Pennsylvania senator criticized the president’s environmentalism as representative of a “phony theology.” The press snipped the remark out of the context and played it as Santorum donning his finest Grand Inquisitor garb and reading the president of the United States out of the Christian faith.

 This followed immediately upon an ill-considered joke by Santorum backer Foster Friess about aspirin as a contraceptive that drove a couple of days of coverage insinuating the comment told us something important about Santorum’s own views.

Santorum is a standing affront to the sensibilities and assumptions of the media and political elite. That elite is constantly writing the obituary for social conservatism, which is supposed to wither away and leave a polite, undisturbed consensus in favor of social liberalism. Santorum not only defends beliefs that are looked down upon as dated and unrealistic; he does it with a passionate sincerity that opens him to mockery and attack.

If Santorum had the social views of a Barbara Boxer, he would be hailed in all the glossy magazines as a political virtuoso. He has fought a front-runner with all the advantages to a jump ball in Michigan. His aides can’t provide advance texts of his speeches because he always extemporizes and speaks from a few notes. He is indefatigable, willing to lose on behalf of what he believes and committed to trying to convince others of his positions.

In the wake of his surprise showing in the Iowa caucuses, news coverage focused on Santorum arguing about gay marriage with college kids at his New Hampshire events. It was taken as a sign of his monomania. Yet he genuinely — if naïvely — wanted to convince them. If the cauldron of a presidential campaign is not the best place for Socratic exchanges on hot-button issues, Santorum was trying to do more than repeat sound bites back at youthful questioners.

Although his critics will never credit him for it, Santorum’s social conservatism brings with it an unstinting devotion to human dignity, a touchstone for the former senator. The latest position for which he’s taking incoming is his opposition to a government mandate for insurance coverage of prenatal testing often used to identify handicapped babies who are subsequently aborted. For his detractors, his respect for the disabled is trumped by his unforgivable opposition to abortion.

Santorum conceives of his social views as a badly needed support for economic aspiration. It’s no accident that the Republican candidate most committed to the traditional family and associated virtues is also the one who talks most about the struggles of the working class. He frequently cites research from the Brookings Institution showing that simply getting a high-school diploma, getting a job, and getting married before having children — the so-called success sequence — are powerful tools against poverty.

As Jeffrey Bell, author of the new book The Case for Polarized Politics, notes in a Wall Street Journal interview, Santorum’s style of social conservatism is deeply American. No other Western country saw the rise of such a social-conservative movement after the social upheaval of the 1960s. Bell traces American social conservatism back ultimately to the God-given natural rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Sure enough, Santorum is given to quoting the Declaration.

That won’t stop Santorum-haters from portraying him as threateningly un-American. He can play into the negative image of him. In one interview last year, he said that as president he would warn people of the dangers of contraception, a task better suited to a youth minister or Catholic premarital counselor than the leader of the free world.

Santorum occasionally needs to curb his enthusiasms. But the implicit message of his candidacy is unassailable: Denounce and dismiss it as you please; American social conservatism is here to stay. CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content

Obama's Double Talk on Sky-High Gas Prices -- IBD Editorial

Energy: When gas prices hit $4 a gallon in 2008, candidate Barack Obama said it was due to previous failed energy policies. Now that prices are heading still higher, President Obama calls it progress.

Already, pump prices are higher than they've been in previous years, suggesting they will top $4 soon and possibly reach an unprecedented $5 this summer.

President Obama is starting to notice the political implications. So he sent Robert Gibbs — now a top campaign adviser — out to tell the public not to worry.

"Just on Friday, the Department of the Interior issued permits that will expand our exploration in the Arctic," Gibbs said Sunday. "Our domestic oil production is at an eight-year high, and our use of foreign oil is at a 16-year low. So we're making progress."

"Progress" isn't exactly how Obama described the country's energy picture in 2008, when gas prices were closing in on $4 a gallon. Then, it was a clear sign of "Washington's failure to lead on energy," which was "turning the middle-class squeeze into a devastating vise-grip for millions of Americans."

"For the well-off in this country," Obama said in May 2008, "high gas prices are mostly an annoyance, but to most Americans they're a huge problem, bordering on a crisis."

In August that year, he declared rising energy costs to be "one of the most dangerous and urgent threats this nation has ever faced" and that gas prices "are wiping out paychecks and straining businesses."

While Gibbs is right that domestic production has climbed in the past three years, Obama's policies had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Oil coming from offshore wells was in the pipeline, so to speak, during the Clinton and Bush years, when those permits were issued. And the oil pouring out of North Dakota is the result of drilling on private lands.

Obama, in fact, has made it clear for years that he has no real interest in boosting domestic production.

When President Bush announced plans in 2008 to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling, Obama dismissed it, saying "it would merely prolong the failed energy policies we have seen from Washington for 30 years."

"Offshore drilling," he said, "would not lower gas prices today, it would not lower gas prices next year and it would not lower gas prices five years from now."

In a big energy speech he gave in August 2008, Obama argued that "if we opened up and drilled on every single square inch of our land and our shores, we would still find only 3% of the world's oil reserves."

And while in office, Obama's done everything he can to limit production — slow-walking offshore permits, killing the Keystone XL pipeline, making it even harder to get oil out of federal lands.

Instead of aggressively expanding oil production, he offered a set of ridiculous alternatives — hugely wasteful "green" energy subsidies, a call for a million electric cars by 2014 and costly fuel economy mandates that won't make a dent in consumption for decades.

With gas prices up 93% since Obama took office, we're seeing just how well this approach works. CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content

Documents show Obama's FCC used regulatory muscle to destroy LightSquared's competition -- By Matthew Boyle, The Daily Caller

The Daily Caller has obtained documents, emails and communications showing how President Barack Obama’s Federal Communications Commission demolished wireless broadband company LightSquared’s competition through a pattern of regulatory decisions apparently aimed at establishing an “open-access” Internet in the United States.

The FCC successfully green-lighted LightSquared’s corporate formation in 2009 by allowing Wall Street hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners to purchase majority ownership in satellite company SkyTerra. A major obstacle that still remained in LightSquared’s way was competitor GlobalStar.

GlobalStar had a similar operation to the one LightSquared was building at the time. A major difference, though, was GlobalStar’s already-orbiting satellites, and the broadband Internet access it was already providing to Americans in rural areas of the country.

GlobalStar leased terrestrial spectrum to Open Range Communications, a company that provided broadband Internet access to customers in underserved parts of rural America. Open Range’s business model depended on a 2008 loan, worth $264 million, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service.

In 2008 the FCC gave GlobalStar a 16-month waiver from so-called “gating” rules, which required it to guarantee that its satellite service would be continuously available everywhere it offered broadband service, and also required it to maintain spare satellites in case of an urgent need. GlobalStar had said the issues its system faced would be fixed when it could launch 24 new satellites, which it planned to do by July 1, 2010.

The waiver was meant to allow GlobalStar and Open Range to continue building their networks while GlobalStar fixed those issues. Open Range depended on GlobalStar for its continued operation.

Then, the unthinkable happened: On April 6, 2009 an earthquake struck L’Aquila, Italy, damaging a factory that made component parts essential to GlobalStar’s satellites. The factory closed, reopening eight months later in early December 2009.


Citing the earthquake and disruptions because of the global financial meltdown, GlobalStar filed a request with the Obama administration’s FCC on Dec. 14, 2009, asking for an additional temporary waiver from the agency’s requirements so it could continue building its network.

The FCC didn’t acknowledge receipt of the extension request until March 5, 2010, and didn’t open it up for public notice until four weeks later, on April 2.

During the months while GlobalStar’s request languished in the FCC’s slow-moving bureaucracy, the agency was helping to finalize the sale of SkyTerra to Harbinger. That company would ultimately become LightSquared.

On Feb. 26, 2010, one week before the FCC acknowledged GlobalStar’s request, Harbinger and the FCC agreed on conditions that would forbid LightSquared from selling to Verizon and AT&T any spectrum it would later acquire.

Verizon and AT&T are the nation’s two largest wireless carriers.

FCC spokeswoman Tammy Sun did not answer when The Daily Caller asked her to explain why GlobalStar’s waiver extension request was delayed for 75 days, during the same time the FCC was finalizing its deal with LightSquared executives.

Also during those late spring months in 2010, several advocacy groups funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros were advocating for the adoption of “open-access” Internet rules. Soros’ Open Society Institute has donated more than $1 million to the four organizations that comprise the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition. He is reported to have invested $200 million personally in Harbinger.

Public Interest Spectrum Coalition member groups hold the position that spectrum “belongs to the public” and should be subject to as little corporate influence as possible. Their goal is to create a community-oriented, taxpayer-subsidized and highly regulated broadband system, essentially making Internet access a public utility.

With GlobalStar’s July 1, 2010 compliance deadline fast approaching, and still no solution on the table, the FCC granted the company two brief extensions of its temporary waiver. The first of those brief extensions, approved on June 30 of that year, moved GlobalStar’s deadline back to Aug. 2.

Documents obtained by TheDC show Obama administration officials and LightSquared’s allies nailing down details of their plans during that same timeframe. Henry Goldberg, a Harbinger lawyer, emailed the administration contact with whom he and Harbinger owner Phil Falcone had met at the White House just a few months earlier.

“It’s happening,” Goldberg emailed Obama’s White House Science and Technology Policy chief of staff Jim Kohlenberger on July 20, 2010. “Thanks for your help and encouragement. As we bolt together the network, we’ll come in with details.”

“Congrats,” Kohlenberger replied. “Very exciting.”

About a week after Goldberg sent that email, several senior FCC officials met behind closed doors to discuss “LightSquared on [a] 4G network.” The meeting, which official records indicate occurred on July 28, 2010, also included FCC Office of Strategic Planning Chief Paul de Sa, FCC Office of Engineering Technology Chief Julius Knapp and FCC International Bureau Chief Mindel De La Torre.

With the new GlobalStar compliance deadline just around the corner after that July 28 meeting, and the LightSquared plan apparently still not set in stone, FCC officials approved a second waiver extension for GlobalStar the next day, on July 29, setting Sept. 15 as the company’s final deadline.

During the next few weeks, activity heated up again. On Aug. 2, White House visitor logs show that de Sa, Knapp and FCC Telecom Bureau Deputy Chief John Leibovitz, among others, met with Jason Furman, the deputy director of Obama’s National Economic Council.

Those visitor log records also show that Gary Epstein, who served on Obama’s White House transition team before becoming a senior leader at LightSquared predecessor SkyTerra in 2009, met with Phil Weiser, Obama’s senior adviser for technology and innovation, at the White House on Sept. 8.

Epstein disclosed on his LinkedIn profile that he left SkyTerra in June 2010. There is no indication that before Epstein’s departure he sold the several thousand shares of SkyTerra he acquired. His SkyTerra stock eventually became LightSquared stock after the merger.

Open Range continued to operate, meanwhile, still depending on LightSquared competitor Globalstar for its continued viability. On Sept. 10, just two days after Epstein’s meeting with Weiser, Rural Utilities Service administrator Jonathan Adelstein, who oversaw Open Range’s operating loan, wrote to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski about concerns he had that Open Range’s business plan was “predicated on the continued use of the GlobalStar, Inc., spectrum.”

After explaining to Genachowski the importance of the loan, Adelstein pointed out that the FCC could ultimately force Open Range to fail, leaving the Rural Utilities Service — an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture — on the hook for millions if the company couldn’t repay what it owed.

“[T]he Open Range loan represents the single largest loan of the [Rural Utilities Service] Broadband Program,” Adelstein wrote. “A loan failure of a large magnitude could significantly affect the subsidy rate of the program and necessitate larger congressional appropriations, or would otherwise result in what could be a major reduction of the agency’s present funding levels.”

Adelstein then said Genachowski and the FCC needed to make a “commitment” that Open Range would have access to the spectrum it needed to continue building and operating under the conditions of its loans. Otherwise, he said, the company — and its $264 million loan –would fail.

Documents show that on Sept. 13, three days after Adelstein sent his email, Obama’s technology adviser Phil Weiser hosted another White House meeting. Attendees included Adelstein, de Sa and several other high-ranking officials in the FCC and USDA.

Later that day, after the meeting, Adelstein emailed de Sa in what appears to be an indication of what transpired.

“Thanks for taking so much time for the helpful meeting today,” Adelstein wrote. “Would you mind letting the Harbinger folks know I will call them soon so we look like a coordinated effort so they don’t feel they have unlimited leverage to stick it to Open Range?”

“Happy to hook you up,” de Sa replied, “although one thought is that at the moment the ball is in openrange [sic] court (in that they have the term sheet), so I wonder if rather than spending your intervention bullet now when [there are] no issues with negotiation, whether it would be better to wait until if/when a problem arises after the fcc order comes out?”

de Sa added, regarding Adelstein’s concern that the parties involved “don’t want to give harbinger any ideas about sticking it to openrange,” that it was “totally your call tho, just let me know what u prefer.”

GlobalStar’s final request for an extension on its rule waiver was denied on Sept. 14, the very next day.

The emails obtained by The Daily Caller may indicate that the White House officials who met with Adelstein on Sept. 13, 2010 already knew GlobalStar would be rendered unable to operate just one day later.

Another possible interpretation is that the FCC, or some other agency in the Obama administration, had already informed LightSquared executives that their main competitor would be denied its waiver extension.

It is also possible, however unlikely, that Adelstein’s concern about LightSquared executives having “unlimited leverage to stick it to Open Range” indicated that the FCC and the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service were planning to keep Open Range in business without GlobalStar by making it dependent on LightSquared’s broadband spectrum instead. If LightSquared executives were already aware that GlobalStar would soon lose its regulatory permission to operate, they were also aware that their company would soon enjoy a practical monopoly.

The FCC officially denied GlobalStar’s waiver extension request on Sept. 14, 2010, a move that crippled the company and cleared the way for the politically-connected LightSquared to build its own network without competition from its biggest rival.

FCC spokeswoman Tammy Sun didn’t answer when TheDC asked her specifically about who knew what, and when, about the Obama administration’s refusal to give GlobalStar its final requested rule extension — a decision that essentially doomed Open Range.

Sun also didn’t reply when TheDC asked her if anyone in the federal government had informed LightSquared that GlobalStar would soon no longer be permitted to operate.
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Congressional investigations sought over IRS 'assault' on tea party groups -- By David Martosko, The Daily Caller

On Tuesday, Jamie Radtke, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Virginia, asked California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa to investigate what she said was unfair treatment of tea party groups by the Internal Revenue Service. Issa chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Radtke is a former president of the Richmond Tea Party, a group which applied for tax-exempt charitable status in December 2009.

“After waiting two and a half years for approval,” Radtke wrote, “the IRS recently communicated a new set of overly-burdensome and invasive demands for information that exceed the scope of the IRS code.”

Those demands, Radtke said in a press release, included the answers to “12 additional questions in 53 separate parts.” The Richmond Tea Party was also ordered to hand over a list of all its donors and volunteers.

“The IRS,” Radtke added, “states that such information will be made available for ‘public inspection.’”

The Daily Caller has obtained copies of two letters to the organization from the IRS, dated September 10, 2010 and January 9, 2012. The earlier letter contains 17 separate requests for information, including “copies of your materials on Face Book [sic]” and “copies of any sponsorship agreements.”

The more recent letter, which Radtke addressed, does indeed contain 53 additional demands for information before the IRS can designate the group as a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization.

The federal government’s latest requirements include copies of “all the [web] pages that are accessible only to your members,” along with an accounting of all ”donations, contributions, and grant income for each year,” including “names” and “amounts” of every contributor.

“How did you use these donations, contributions, and grants?” the IRS asks. “Provide the details.”

The agency also asked for “the time, location, and detailed description” of every event and program the Richmond tea Party has conducted since October 22, 2010, along with “copies of handouts”; “the names and credentials of the organizers”; “detailed contents of … speeches or forums, names of the speakers or panels, and their credentials”; “the amount … each person” was paid; and “the names of persons from your organization and the amount of time they spent on the event or program.”

In a press release, the Richmond group noted that both letters demanded detailed replies in only two weeks. The September 10, 2010 letter from the IRS, it said, came after nine months of waiting.

The response to that letter, the group added, “was curiously due on the opening day of the inaugural Virginia Tea Party Convention, for which RTP was a central organizer.”

Another conservative grassroots group, the Ohio Liberty Council, said on Feb. 16 that it had received a similar letter from the IRS after waiting for 18 months for the agency to approve its application for the same non-profit tax status.

That letter, dated Jan. 26, included 34 separate questions for the organization to answer.

In its reply to the IRS, the Ohio Liberty Council said it would “refuse to comply,” and that it had asked its congressional representatives “to investigate your actions and intentions.”

“I defy any American to read this list of demands by the IRS and not be outraged,” fumed Tom Zawistowski, a spokesman for the Ohio Liberty Council and executive director of the Portage County TEA Party. “This is the kind of personal information that this government is going to be demanding from your church, your doctor, your hospital, your business and your favorite charity going forward.”

The Richmond Tea Party said it would ask Congress to “investigate whether or not the IRS is operating under specific instructions to delay the granting of tax-exempt status for Tea Parties and similar organizations.” CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content

David Rosenberg on Taxation-Shock-Syndrome -- By Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge

While nothing is more certain than death and taxes (and central bank largesse), David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff uncovers The Unlucky Seven major tax-related uncertainties facing households and businesses that will likely lead to multiple compression in markets (rather than the much-heralded multiple expansion 'story' which appears to have topped the talking-head charts - just above 'money on the sidelines' and 'wall of worry', as 'earnings-driven' arguments are failing on the back of this quarter). As he notes the radically changed taxation climate in 2013 and beyond will have an impact on all economic participants as they will probably opt to bolster their cash reserves in the second half of the year in preparation for the proverbial rainy day.

First, the top marginal personal tax rate rises to 39.6% from 35% as the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2012.

Second, a limit on itemized deductions will add a further 1.2 percentage points to the top rate.

Third, a new 0.9% Medicare tax on incomes over $200,000 gets imposed ($250,000 for joint filers).

Fourth, the top 15% rate on long-term capital gains rises to 20%.

Fifth, dividends will once again be taxed at ordinary rates — 39.6% for the top income earners.

Sixth, a new 3.8% tax on investment income gets introduced for incomes over $200,000 ($250.000 for joint filers).

Seventh, the top estate tax rate goes from 35% to 55% (60% in some cases). The estate tax exemption falls to $1 million from $5 million (the gift-tax exemption also drops to $1 million and the rate adjusts hither to 55%).

Forty-one separate tax provisions expire this year — see page 32 of the Economist. Of course, there is always the chance that after the November 6th election, a Congress that can never seem to allow anything temporary to meet its expiry date will pass an extension — for more on all this, see More Uncertainty for 2013 on page B9 of the Weekend WSJ.
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