Free Stuff Cartoon

Obama threatens veto on immigration, regulatory bills

WASHINGTON –  Another week, another round of veto threats from President Obama.
The White House says Obama would veto legislation backed by House Republicans that would undo the immigration executive orders the president issued late last year. The GOP wants to include provisions blocking the executive actions in a spending bill to fund the Homeland Security Department.
The president is also threatening to veto House legislation that aims to rein in what Republicans say are unnecessary regulations. Obama also issued a formal veto threat Monday against a bill that would weaken his financial regulatory law, though the White House had previously stated its opposition to the bill.
Obama rarely used his veto power, but has said he expects to do so more often now that Republicans control Capitol Hill.

US threatens money cut-off to UN agency over Afghan police corruption scandal

EXCLUSIVE: The United Nations Development Program, which for years has run a multibillion-dollar trust fund to pay salaries for Afghanistan’s 150,000 national police, has been hit with a harsh ultimatum: come up with a plan to verify the true number of police officers on the Afghan payroll by the end of this month -- or else.
The “else” is something that UNDP, the UN’s anti-poverty agency, has never faced before: a shutoff of a U.S. portion of the millions in fees the agency charges to run the police financing program, which is slated to cost nearly $300 million in the first six months of this year alone for “Phase VII” of its existence. UNDP’s piece of the action for managing the fund is 4 percent of the tally, or nearly $12 million.
All told, some $3.8 billion has been spent on the so-called Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, or LOTFA, which has been administered by UNDP since its creation in 2002. The U.S. contribution amounts to more than $1.3 billion -- and since 2006, U.S. government auditing agencies have been finding mammoth problems with the personnel records and payroll data associated with the program.
How much money overall has been siphoned off by police payroll corruption, in particular by Afghan officials who can exploit holes in the system, is still a mystery -- in large part because the data needed to solve the puzzle, and computer systems that can speak to each other to correlate the information, still does not exist.
In past months the crisis has hit new heights of tension, with European Union donors temporarily withholding $100 million in contributions to LOTFA while they expressed concerns about its management.

How much money overall has been siphoned off by police payroll corruption is still a mystery.

Just before Christmas, President Ashref Ghani called LOTFA a “cash cow” for UNDP and demanded that his bureaucrats develop a plan to bring it under government control within the next six months -- the length of time allotted to LOTFA.
The latest ultimatum toward UNDP is buried in the final pages appended to a new audit report on the police payroll scandal by the Special U.S. Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, published today.
It represents part of an apparently determined multinational effort to drain the longstanding police payroll swamp -- which is rife with tens of thousands of “ghost” personnel, phony food ration claims, and IDs that never retire from the system, even when the police do.
Among other things, the report declares that the “window of opportunity” to clean up the longstanding mess “is narrowing.” It added that “this may be the international community’s last chance” to reform the financial support for police ,who will become more important than ever with the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces.
That effort is one that UNDP also says it supports -- even though as recently as last fall it has claimed that dealing with many of the problems was “outside UNDP’s current areas of responsibility,” and attempted to lay most of the blame for the mess on the Afghan government. That was followed by President Ghani’s hostile pushback.
Many of the problems that SIGAR outlines in its report have been made public before, either by SIGAR itself or the Pentagon’s Inspector General, among others.
Among the ones mentioned in the new report:

• There are twice as many Afghan national police ID cards in circulation as there are national police;

• For most of the past decade, two electronic human resource systems, one managed by UNDP and one by the Afghan government, haven’t been able to talk to each other, with disastrous results. The UNDP system manages payroll; the government system manages personnel records. 

A match between the two is supposedly provided by the police ID cards and their numbers. But in fact, MOI tallies have been accepted without much questioning by everyone.

• The UNDP payroll system, the report noted, “was not fully functional at all provincial headquarters,” meaning payroll and staffing information mostly comes from police posts without much verification (where crooked officers have the most incentive to inflate staffing and posts that receive extra hazard pay). In some cases, more police are reported working than are even authorized.

• Time sheets for rank-and-file police are written up by their officers, another opportunity to falsify information and siphon off the resulting pay.

• 20 percent of Afghan national police are at risk of not receiving their full salaries because they are paid in cash by a “trusted agent,” appointed by the Afghan MOI, and often unsupervised.  SIGAR deems that “a process that lacks documentation and accountability,” where as much as half of these payments are possibly diverted.

• UNDP contracts with an “independent monitoring agent” who is supposed to cross-check and verify personnel information. But, according to SIGAR, the monitoring agent did a haphazard job of sampling, and may have inflated the percentage of “verified” police personnel by more than 40 percent.

(Last October, UNDP’s own Office of Audit and Investigation did a “desk review” of the agency’s oversight of the “independent monitoring agent,” which declared the effort to be “unsatisfactory,”  and recommended UNDP take “prompt” action to fix the situation. UNDP declared that it accepted the review’s recommendations, and published the news a month later.)
CLICK HERE FOR THE “DESK REVIEW”
The get-tough suggestion appears at the end of SIGAR’s dismal findings  in a draft response from the U.S.-led multinational military command structure that remains to support President Ghani as his government takes the lead responsibility for national security.
In a handwritten note on a copy of the audit, Maj. Gen. Todd Semonite, deputy commander of the international security group known as the Combined Security Transition Command – Afghanistan (CSTC-A), declares that “this command is committed to achieving dramatic results” on the police payroll issue.
He urges SIGAR’s auditors to “pay particular attention” to the sections of his response that “reflect the increased fiscal discipline, oversight and policy adherence stipulated to UNDP to effect change.” He also underlines  his  “intent not to transfer” U.S. Department of Defense funds to UNDP  “until we can be assured of revised process control.”
CLICK HERE FOR THE NOTE
CSTC-A’s response also turns up the heat on Afghanistan’s Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to clean up its act. The CSTC-A sets a March 15 deadline for the ministry to upload “100 percent” of the accurate police personnel records into a database under its control, and a January 2016 deadline to make sure that all of that information is integrated with the payroll system managed by UNDP that actually dispenses cash.
Failure to do either one, the military response says, will result in a 5 percent cut in payments to the ministry for “operations and maintenance” -- a sum that is not disclosed in the document.
All of the reforms for U.N. bureaucrats and Afghan government officials alike are supposed to be wrapped up in “commitment letters” between the international military command, UNDP and the Afghan government, which were supposed to take effect on January 1, but are still in draft form. 
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL AUDIT REPORT
In response to questions from Fox News, a spokesman for UNDP said that the agency is “recruiting 17 officers who will “verify payroll processes at the provincial and district level;” put out an international bid for a new monitoring agent; launched a “two-month end-to-end review of the entire payroll process”; and “developed a poster series in local languages informing police of their salary rights which will be distributed to police stations in 2015.”
The agency also is updating U.S. and other Western donors to LOTFA on a weekly basis about its efforts.
In the near future, however, UNDP may also find that its role has come to an end. The six-month Phase VII of LOTFA, according to project documents on the UNDP website, “marks the beginning of a transition phase during which LOTFA activities are transitioned” to Ghani’s government.
That announcement is heavily laden with escape clauses that include reference to nebulous “activities that may carry over beyond June 30 and cannot be arbitrarily ended.”
But they also include a minimum 90-day announcement period  for the Afghan government to terminate UNDP’s “partnership” in LOTFA entirely.
Asked about the possibility of a parting of the ways in Afghanistan over policing, the UNDP spokesman told Fox News that “a central goal of UNDP’s work worldwide is to build capacity of national counterparts with a view to phasing out its assistance in due course.”

Dems pitch controversial plan to tax Wall Street, to pay for new middle-class credit

Influential Democrats are pushing a new plan to give middle-class Americans a big tax break, but only by imposing a new tax on Wall Street traders and other top earners -- drawing a rebuke from majority Republicans who say the proposal would hurt the economy. 
"Our economy is still struggling to create jobs -- and the last thing we need is a new trillion-dollar tax hike added to the current broken tax code," said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. 
Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., unveiled the tax plan on Monday at the Center for American Progress. 
His plan would give a tax credit of roughly $2,000 per year to middle-class families, reportedly defined as couples making under $200,000. According to The Washington Post, the windfall would add up to roughly $1.2 trillion over the next decade. 
However, to pay for the plan, Van Hollen wants to charge a fee on financial transactions, and curtail tax breaks for other top earners, effectively transferring wealth from Wall Street and beyond to everyone else. 
Van Hollen on Monday said middle-class families need to keep more of what they earn, calling for a "fair" tax code that rewards work, and not just those who make money from making money -- a dig at Wall Street. 
House Republicans urged Democrats to work with them on reforming the tax code to eliminate loopholes and bring down rates overall. But they said Van Hollen's plan is not the right approach. 
"Just as the sun rises in the east, Washington Democrats propose another massive tax increase," said Brendan Buck, spokesman for House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. "Here in the House our focus is going to be on cleaning up the tax code so that we can lower rates for all taxpayers and help create good-paying jobs, not scaring them off with punitive tax hikes." 
The plan stands little chance of advancing, given that Republicans have a tighter grip on the House and have taken control of the Senate, in the wake of the November midterms. 
But it immediately puts congressional Republicans and Democrats at odds, once again, over the tricky topic of taxes and tax reform, which some hoped might be a priority in the new Republican-controlled Congress. 
The House Democrats' plan is more aggressive than anything touted by the Obama administration last year. 
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fired back at Boehner on Monday, saying in a statement, "Apparently House Republicans only like tax relief if it's for their millionaire friends and special interest backers, not for hardworking middle class families." 
Van Hollen's office argues that the plan aims to grow paychecks for everyone, "not just the wealth of a few." They stress it is fully paid for. 
The Washington Post first reported that the plan would give a credit of $1,000 to individuals and $2,000 to couples making under the wage cap. It would also increase the tax credit for child care and make a few other changes. 
Democrats reportedly would fund this with a .1 percent fee on stock trades; limits on tax breaks for the top 1 percent; and new rules for deductions for high-value executive performance bonuses.

White House admits should have sent 'higher-profile' official to Paris rally

The White House acknowledged Monday that it erred in not sending a higher-level representative to the massive rally in Paris against Islamic terrorism, after facing bipartisan criticism over the meager U.S. presence at the march -- which was attended by more than 40 world leaders. 
"We should have sent someone with a higher profile to be there," Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Monday. 
But he also explained that the planning for the rally began on short notice and President Obama's personal attendance, given the security challenges, would have had a "significant impact" on the march. Earnest said they had only 36 hours to prepare, and suggested the outdoor event with large crowds posed security risks. 
Earnest said the U.S. still stands "four-square behind our allies in France." 
The rally on Sunday was a historic show of unity that drew more than a million people -- but none higher representing the U.S. than its ambassador to France. While the administration dispatched Attorney General Eric Holder and a top homeland security official to Paris for meetings over the weekend, the only U.S. official of note to attend Sunday's rally was Ambassador Jane Hartley. 
The White House wouldn't say why Holder did not attend the march, suggesting only that he or some other top official should have gone. 
Secretary of State John Kerry initially dismissed the criticism as "quibbling," and announced a trip to the French capital later this week. 
A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Paris told Fox News that Holder did not attend Sunday's march because he was "not available at the time." A Justice Department spokesman said Holder had to return to Washington that afternoon, but was "proud" to join world leaders at the summit before the rally. 
But the White House absorbed heavy criticism on Sunday and Monday for the thin U.S. presence, as well as for continuing to avoid calling last week's attacks an act of Islamic terror. 
On Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., questioned the logic in even sending Holder for the Paris counterterrorism meetings, suggesting the president is not confronting the matter as Islamic terrorism. 
"Last time I checked we're at war. I wouldn't send my attorney general if I were president to deal with Islamic radical terrorists. We're at war here," Graham said. "[Obama] thinks it's a crime out of control." 
Speaking on CBS News, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., suggested he can understand how security may have played a role in the decision for Obama not to attend but said, "I think, in hindsight, I would hope they would do it differently" next time. 
Others were tough on the administration's decision. 
"Not an excuse in universe can explain why US failed to send to Paris a more visible rep. than Holder," tweeted Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official who now works at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, calling Obama, Kerry and Vice President Biden "MIAs." 
James Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral who previously led U.S. European Command, also said on Twitter: "I wish our US President had gone to Paris to stand with our European allies." 
Amid the criticism, Kerry, who is traveling on official business in India, rearranged his schedule to make it to Paris later in the week. He announced his plans at a press conference in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, where he had made a long-scheduled appearance at an international investment conference Sunday ahead of Obama's planned visit to that country later this month. 
"I would have personally very much wanted to have been [in Paris]," Kerry said, "but couldn't do so because of the commitment that I had here and it is important to keep these kinds of commitments." 
When asked about criticism directed at the Obama administration for not sending a high-ranking official to take part in the march, Kerry said earlier, "I really think that this is sort of quibbling a little bit in the sense that our Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was there and marched, our ambassador [to France Jane Hartley] was there and marched, many people from the embassy were there and marched." 
Nuland attended a march in Washington. 
A senior administration official stressed that Hartley attended the Paris march, and that Obama has shown U.S. solidarity with France by placing a call to their president, stopping by the French embassy and directing U.S. officials to work on helping the French in the wake of last week's terror attack. 
The official also said "it is worth noting that the security requirements for both the President and VP can be distracting from events like this -- this event is not about us." 
Kerry, at the news conference, said that U.S. officials, including himself and Obama, had been "deeply engaged" with French authorities almost immediately after the first attack occurred Wednesday and had offered intelligence assistance. 
More than 40 world leaders -- press reports put the number at 44 -- along with more than a million ordinary French citizens, marched arm in arm through the streets of Paris Sunday to rally for unity and freedom of expression and to honor the 17 victims killed in three separate terror attacks last week. 
Among the world leaders who did march, under heavy security, were French President Francois Hollande, British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. 
Shibley Telhami, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, tweeted, "What's missing in this picture? American leaders. Even Palestinian and Israeli leaders in front line of Paris march." 
Democratic strategist Doug Schoen, in a column on FoxNews.com, said Obama has "morally abdicated his place as the leader of the free world." The decision to stay in Washington, Schoen wrote, "sent a clear message to the world: Obama just doesn't care." 
He also lamented that Obama "is the only Western leader who has refused to call this attack Islamic terrorism, even though President Hollande has declared that France is it at war with radical Islam." 
Kerry said he is going to France to reaffirm U.S. solidarity with America's oldest ally. He said as soon as he heard about the march, he asked his team what the earliest time was that he could go. 
"That is why I am going there on the way home and to make it crystal clear how passionately we feel about the events that have taken place there," he said. "I don't think the people of France have any doubt about America's understanding about what happened, about our personal sense of loss and our deep commitment to the people of France in this moment of trial." 
Kerry will arrive in Paris on Thursday after stops in Sofia, Bulgaria and Geneva, Switzerland. Kerry will be the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit France since the terrorist attacks on a French newspaper and a kosher supermarket. Authorities say one of those involved in the attacks pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group in a video. He and two other suspected extremists were killed during police raids. 
Meanwhile, the White House said Sunday it will hold an international summit next month in Washington on thwarting violent extremism. 
The summit is scheduled for Feb. 18 and will focus on domestic and international efforts to "prevent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting and inspiring individuals and groups in the United States and abroad from committing acts of violence," the White House said.

Dems change tune after mocking GOP for ‘drill, baby, drill’

Back when gas topped $4 a gallon, Republicans chanted "drill, baby, drill' at rallies across the country -- arguing more domestic drilling would increase supplies, reduce dependence on foreign oil and boost the U.S. economy. 
Democrats, almost universally, mocked the GOP plan. In 2012, President Obama called it "a slogan, a gimmick, and a bumper sticker ... not a strategy." 
"They were waving their three-point plans for $2-a-gallon gas," Obama told a laughing audience during an energy speech in Washington. "You remember that? Drill, baby, drill. We were going through all that. And none of it was really going to do anything to solve the problem." 
"'Drill, baby, drill' won't lower gas prices today or tomorrow," Rep. Janice Hahn, D-Calif., echoed on the floor of Congress in 2012. "But it will fuel our addiction to fossil fuel." 
Today, Democrats are singing a different tune, as increased domestic drilling has led to a record supply of domestic crude, put some $100 billion into the pockets of U.S. consumers and sent world oil prices tumbling. 
The price of a gallon of regular gasoline on Monday was $2.13 nationwide, and below $2 in 18 states. 
"Of course [Obama] was wrong. We've seen oil prices fall internationally now by half since last June," said American Enterprise Institute economist Ben Zycher. "The U.S. is now the biggest oil and gas producer in the world, or almost that, and the effect has been to drive prices down as we've seen." 
Most of the domestic increase is due to "fracking" for tight oil in shale deposits across the U.S., as well as advances in directional drilling, where numerous pipelines diverge from a single platform in numerous directions, for a large cost savings. 
But the gains, according to oil experts, come off private, not federal, lands. 
Oil production on federal lands -- those under the president's control -- fell 6 percent since 2009, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, while production on private lands increased 61 percent. 
Nevertheless, Obama is touting the lower prices, which injected billions into the improving U.S. economy. 
"America is the number one producer of oil, number one producer of gas. It's helping to save drivers $1.10 a gallon at the pump over this time last year," the president told a crowd last week in Detroit. 
Zycher, a former UCLA economist who also served on President Reagan's President's Council of Economic Advisers, called it "rather disingenuous for the president to take credit for the decline in oil prices and gasoline prices and the increase in incomes generated by increasing production." 
He added: "It's somewhat amusing. He's taking credit for an increase in production that has happened largely on private land and had nothing to do with federal government policies."