Michelle Obama Cartoon

Reporter blocked from rally with first lady, free press groups cry foul

A Wisconsin reporter says he was blocked Tuesday from covering a Democratic rally in Madison headlined by first lady Michelle Obama -- a week after another reporter claimed she was told at a similar event in Milwaukee not to speak with people in the crowd. 
The latest incident has raised concerns from free press groups. 
The reporter, Adam Tobias, works for Wisconsin Reporter -- the Wisconsin arm of the news site Watchdog.org. He was trying to attend a rally for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke and claimed to have submitted his request for credentials on Saturday, "shortly after the Burke campaign sent a news release outlining the logistics." 
But the reporter was told he could not attend, and videotaped his encounter with a spokeswoman for the state Democratic Party on Monday. 
Spokeswoman Melissa Baldauff initially did not give a reason for denying entry to Tobias. But when the reporter told her they would write a story on press being turned away, she suggested Watchdog.org was not part of the press. 
"Well, you're not the press though, so, thanks," Baldauff said, closing the door. 
Wisconsin Reporter is one of more than two-dozen state news organizations under the umbrella of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. 
Franklin Center President Jason Stverak blasted the state party for preventing the site from covering Tuesday's rally -- one of two Michelle Obama was headlining for Democratic candidates. 
"The problem with our political process is a lack of transparency, and the most recent move by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin is an affront to free speech and the freedom of the press," he said in a statement. "Having said that, I think we understand what's at work here: Wisconsin Reporter has broken some of the most important stories in the state, not all of them comfortable for the Democratic Party leadership. We will continue to report the truth, and we won't be deterred by petty, partisan politics." 
According to Watchdog.org, free press groups voiced concern about the decision. "It seems to me that Wisconsin Reporter ought to be able to attend the event and report on it," Mark Pitsch, president of the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, said. 
The incident comes after a reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel claimed last week that she had an encounter with a White House aide during a separate Michelle Obama rally for Mary Burke. 
Meg Kissinger, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, posted on Facebook that she was "creeped out" after she was told by a White House aide and an aide for Burke not to speak with people attending the event. 
"This is what reporters do in America: we speak to people," she wrote. "At least that's how I've been doing things -- at all kinds of political events -- since 1979." 
Kissinger later said on Twitter that she did not comply with the aides' rule, and spoke with "plenty" of crowd members. Her report from the event contained interviews with multiple crowd members.

Who’s tending State Department’s cash cow?

EXCLUSIVE: The U.S. State Department has been handing over billions of dollars in grants for foreign projects -- ranging  from cultural exchanges to “climate change” activities -- without adequate oversight or adequate assessment of the risks involved, and sometimes without knowing whether the money was actually spent, according to the department’s Inspector General.
Moreover, these money-management problems have been going on for years, despite specific warnings, according to the watchdog IG’s office. It says it has designated State’s oversight of grants, contracts and “interagency agreements” (where State spends money on another department’s behalf) as one of the department’s “major management challenges” every year since 2008.
In a special “management alert” issued last month, the IG’s office reports that 61 out of 156 of all the watchdog’s inspections since 2010 of the State Department’s widely varying branches  have found “specific grant-management deficiencies,” such as lack of oversight, absent or incomplete documentation, or a lack of proper final closeout for the projects.
The overall implication of the alert is that State’s top managers, especially in the departments charged with administering the bureaucracy, have not been doing anywhere near enough to clean up the longstanding mess. 
The alert cites around 20 critical audits and inspections  in the past two years alone -- not to mention a previous management alert last March on “contract file management deficiencies,” which identified some $6 billion worth of contracts where files were “incomplete or could not be located at all.”

The State Department's top managers have not been doing anywhere near enough to clean up the longstanding mess

State’s outright bestowals of grant money to individuals and organizations, as opposed to its broader aid and development programs, has been growing:  from $1.6 billion in fiscal 2012, to $1.8 billion last year. The number of individual grants, meanwhile, rose from about 14,000 to 16,800 over the same period.
Grant-making has been on the rise in part because the State Department has been moving, often with much fanfare, to rely more on private individuals and non-governmental organizations to carry out a wide variety of social, humanitarian and environmental tasks -- often because of the corruption risks and inefficiencies associated with governments in developing countries.
Spending on such new areas of business as “climate change” has also accelerated, with warnings of attendant widespread oversight problems getting flagged two years ago. 
One of the main reasons for the continuing mess: the number of State Department officers overseeing the cash gusher has been nowhere near up to the task.
Only some 570 grant overseers work at State, with more than 500 of them abroad. In many cases they are under-trained, and in virtually all cases overworked -- the alert cites one overseer who is managing 500 grants -- and they usually perform their oversight part-time while doing other Foreign Service jobs. Turnover among the overseers is high, which, the alert notes, “hampers the development of institutional memory.”
The continuing bureaucratic inaction, after numerous warnings about the lack of proper care for a pile of cash that by definition is bestowed without formal contracts, is the major reason behind the special warning sounded by the department’s aggressive new Inspector General, Steve Linick, who was appointed just more than a year ago.
Management alerts, an innovation under Linick, don’t break new ground but are intended to underline the “serious nature” of the issues involved, and flag the topmost reaches of the State Department about problems.
The current management alert is essentially a lengthy compilation of lapses, poor practices and inattention outlined in previous audits and inspections that have failed to spur managers into changing the situation, at least to the Inspector General’s satisfaction.
This particular alert goes further, by also citing a series of reports from the independent Government Accountability Office, or GAO, which run along similar lines.
In the most recent GAO report, published  in July, the outside watchdog noted  that a numbing array of State Department offices were authorized to hand out grants -- some 27 offices and bureaus, not to mention a wide variety of consulates and embassies.
Much of the cash, however, was spent by fewer than a dozen bureaus and agencies, including the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ($397 million in 2012), the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration ($352.6 million) and an office in the Bureau of Administration ($393 million).
GAO did not investigate all of the spending, but examined a sampling of about $172 million worth of grants and similar hand-outs by State in fiscal 2012. The result was not reassuring.
GAO’s bottom line:  A combination of poor and often missing documentation and “inadequate” analysis of the risks involved in handing out the cash meant that State “cannot be certain that its oversight is adequate or that it is using its limited oversight resources effectively.”
CLICK HERE FOR THE GAO REPORT
For example, GAO noted that none of the State Department risk-assessment checklists for evaluating grants mention corruption as a factor for evaluating whether to award a grant, even though side notes in a grant file might mention that corruption was rampant in the country where the money was being handed over.
Since corruption wasn’t on the official checklist, any observations about it did not factor into the overall determination of the riskiness of the grant -- nor did they show up “anywhere else in the grant file documentation,” the GAO observed.
Even when grant recipients themselves had bad records for prior financial mismanagement, the GAO report noted, grants were awarded “without addressing how the risk could be mitigated.” In many cases, over plans for how to monitor grants both for performance and for financial probity were simply missing.
The Inspector General’s alert found many of the same things in its own review of the inspection record. Only 6 of 37 files examined to see if they contained proper documentation to close out a grant award -- meaning that the project and the money had been properly accounted for -- had anything like the proper paperwork, the alert discloses.
Even worse, out of 60 sample files requested for inspection, “10 had been prematurely destroyed, 3 were missing and one was mislabeled.”  In another State Department office, intended to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, more than 280 grant awards “could not be closed out because of missing documentation.” 
In all, the alert notes, “since 2013, nine inspections have identified grant documentation deficiencies.”
The lack of paperwork, the alert emphasizes -- citing its previous management alert on contracts for emphasis -- “creates conditions conducive to fraud, where corrupt individuals may attempt to conceal evidence of illicit behavior by omitting key documents from grant files.”
CLICK HERE FOR THE ALERT
What to do about it? Given the growing size of the problem, the Inspector General’s office saw the solution as relatively simple, starting with hiring more people to watch over the money. 
The watchdog’s recommendations, addressed to State’s Under Secretary of State for Management, Patrick Kennedy, and Assistant Secretary of State for Administration, Joyce A. Barr, also called for more training, and a quality-control program that would sample the paperwork on grant projects to see that it was properly completed. 
The results of the sampling, the alert said, should be fed back to the bureaus that handed out the cash, to ensure that overseers “are held accountable” for their performance.
The State Department’s response was also simple. All of the alert’s recommendations have been accepted. What that means, however, will take a while to tell.
To ensure that the number of grant overseers increases appropriately, the State Department says it will  create a portentiously-named Grants Human Capital Plan to match spending with oversight capability on a department-wide basis --something it has never done before.
The new plan, a State Department spokesman told Fox News, “will provide information needed by bureaus to request staff and funding to implement their individual needs, and allow the department’s management to review individual bureau requirements in an overall context.”
The grants planning mechanism will start grinding into action in fiscal 2015.
The department also has developed a “mandatory internal control documentation checklist” to be completed before any grant can be closed out, and created a new job -- the File Audit Coordinator -- to audit its treatment grant files. 
Additional staffing will be “considered as needed,” the spokesman told Fox News -- not exactly an enthusiastic affirmation of the Inspector General’s concern about the size and importance of the State Department’s cash giveaway problems.
George Russell is editor-at-large of Fox News and can be found on Twitter: @GeorgeRussell or on Facebook.com/George Russell

Pilot dies in crash of air tanker fighting northern California wildfire

The pilot of an air tanker fighting a wildfire near California's Yosemite National Park died Tuesday when the aircraft crashed.
California Fire spokeswoman Alyssa Smith said in a statement that crews reached the wreckage several hours after the crash and confirmed the pilot's death. The pilot's identity was not released because all immediate family had not yet been notified. 
"This crash underscores just how inherently dangerous wildland firefighting is and the job is  further compounded this year by extreme fire conditions," Chief Ken Pimlott, Cal Fire director, said in the statement. "We have secured the crash site and will be cooperating with the NTSB on their investigation."
Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman told the Associated Press that the plane went down at approximately 4:30 p.m. local time less than a mile from the western entrance to the park. 
 California Highway Patrol Sgt. Chris Michael said he was stopping traffic along state Route 140 at the west entrance to the park about 4:24 p.m. when he witnessed the crash.
"I heard a large explosion, I looked up on the steep canyon wall and saw aircraft debris was actually raining down the side of the mountain after the impact," he told The Associated Press by telephone. "It hit the steep side of the canyon wall. It appeared from the direction he was going, he was trying to make a drop down the side of the canyon when he hit the canyon wall."
The fire was spreading up the canyon wall, and it appeared the pilot was trying to lay down fire retardant to stop its progress, Michael said.
"It most definitely did disintegrate on impact," he said. "It was nothing. I didn't see anything but small pieces."
Pieces of the aircraft landed on the highway and came close to hitting fire crews on the ground nearby, but no one on the ground was injured, he said.
"It came pretty close to hitting them, but they were far enough away that it missed them, fortunately," he said.
The airplane, manufactured in 2001, is an S-2T air tanker, which is flown by a single pilot and normally has no other crew members. The tanker uses twin turbine engines and is capable of carrying 1,200 gallons of fire retardant, said another CalFire spokesman, Daniel Berlant.
Don Talend, of West Dundee, Illinois, said he also may have seen the plane go down. Talend and friends were vacationing at the park when they stopped to snap some photographs of the fire, which was several miles away.
The plane "disappeared into the smoke and you heard a boom," he told The Associated Press by phone.
"I couldn't believe what I saw," Talend said. "There was actually a ranger there behind us. ... He had a look of disbelief on his face."
The pilot is an employee of DynCorp., a contractor that provides the pilots for all CalFire planes and maintenance for the department's aircraft, California department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokeswoman Janet Upton said.
The fire had broken out about 90 minutes earlier Tuesday near Route 140, which leads into the heart of the park. It had grown to about 130 acres by Tuesday evening and forced the evacuation of several dozen homes near the community of Foresta.
FAA records show the plane is registered to the U.S. Forest Service, which originally provided the plane to CalFire, Upton said.
The last time a CalFire air tanker crashed was in 2001, when two tankers collided while fighting a fire in Mendocino County, killing both pilots, Berlant said.
The agency had another plane crash in 2006, when a fire battalion chief and a pilot were killed while observing a fire in a two-seat plane in Tulare County.

White House reportedly frustrated with Turkish inaction against ISIS

The White House is growing more frustrated with Turkish inaction against Islamic State fighters as Kurdish forces desperately battle to keep the Syrian border town of Kobani from falling into militants' hands, according to a published report. 
The New York Times quoted a senior administration official who slammed the Ankara government for "dragging its feet to act to prevent a massacre less than a mile from its border."
"After all the fulminating about Syria’s humanitarian catastrophe, they’re inventing reasons not to act to avoid another catastrophe," the official continued. "This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from their border."
The Times reported that Secretary of State John Kerry had spoken with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu multiple times over the prior 72 hours in an effort to resolve tensions between the two sides. 
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the U.S.-led coalition's air campaign launched last month would not be enough to halt the Islamic State group's advance. Turkish troops have been massed near the border since the assault on Kobani began, but have so far not taken an offensive posture.
"Kobani is about to fall," Erdogan told Syrian refugees in the Turkish border town of Gaziantep, according to The Associated Press. The Turkish president called for greater cooperation with the Syrian opposition, which is fighting both the extremists and forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
"We asked for three things: one, for a no-fly zone to be created; two, for a secure zone parallel to the region to be declared; and for the moderate opposition in Syria and Iraq to be trained and equipped."
The Times reported that President Obama prefers that Erdogan not tether the fight against Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS, to the effort to overthrow Assad. U.S. officials also tell the paper that Erdogan's demand for a no-fly zone against the Syrian Air Force is meaningless on the grounds that the airstrikes have created a no-fly zone in all but name. 
On Tuesday, U.S. Central Command said that five strikes against ISIS positions and hardware near Kobani had been carried out over the past two days. The BBC reported that the strikes represented the most sustained coalition action in the area since the airstrikes began Sept. 23. A BBC reporter said that fighting in the city had died down Tuesday afternoon, and only occasional gunfire could be heard. Reuters reported clashes on the north and northeastern edges of Kobani, with one Kurdish official saying ISIS was using heavy weapons and shells to hit the city. 
 Also Tuesday, the United Nations envoy for Syria issued a call for "concrete action" to prevent "humanitarian tragedies."
"The world has seen with its own eyes the images of what happens when a city in Syria or in Iraq is overtaken by the terrorist group called ISIS or Da'esh: massacres, humanitarian tragedies, rapes, horrific violence," Staffan De Mistura said. "The international community cannot sustain another city falling under ISIS.
"The world, all of us, will regret deeply if ISIS is able to take over a city which has defended itself with courage but is close to not being able to do so," De Mistura added. "We need to act now."