Cotton hints at specific GOP spending bill tactic to counter Obama executive action

Arkansas Sen.-elect Tom Cotton hinted on Sunday at exactly what he and fellow Republicans might do in response to President Obama's vow to use executive action on immigration reform: selectively block the president's spending like the GOP did on the Guantanamo Bay prison issue.
Cotton, a House member recently elected to the Senate, told “Fox News Sunday” that the GOP-controlled lower chamber could pass a spending bill that limits the president’s ability to spend on Social Security cards for illegal immigrants, who may be granted some type of U.S. residency status through executive action.
Cotton compared the strategy to House Republicans passing a Defense spending bill in June that included a provision that barred funding for transferring detainees in the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, established after the 9/11 terror attacks.
Republicans have opposed Obama’s plan to shutter the facility in part by sending detainees to federal prisons on American soil.
Congressional Republicans have been considering several strategies should Obama proceed before the new year with executive action, as he has vowed to do several times in the past couple of weeks.
Among the most drastic is to submit a spending bill that Obama would assuredly veto, which would temporarily shut down parts of the federal government after Dec. 11.
Cotton and Oklahoma Sen.-elect James Lankford, another GOP House member, each told Fox News on Sunday that they are not pushing for a shutdown, which is largely unpopular with Americans.
“I don’t think anybody wants to shut down government,” Cotton said.
Lankford said: “We’re not pursing some government shutdown.”
The president is expected, by as early as next week, to announce executive action on U.S. immigration law that would protect roughly 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation, change federal law-enforcement programs and expand business visas for non-citizens.
Among the other strategies Republicans are pushing are a temporary spending bill into next year when they control the Senate, suing the president to overturn his action, passing a stand-alone bill to try to stop him and House Republicans writing their own immigration bill to show they are serious about acting and pre-empt Obama.
The Democrat-controlled Senate last year passed bipartisan, comprehensive immigration-reform legislation.
The Defense spending bill also imposed a one-year moratorium on moving detainees to a foreign country, a sharp response to Obama’s decision to trade five Taliban leaders who had been held at Guantanamo Bay for more than a decade for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a captive for five years in Afghanistan.
Republicans said Obama broke the law by failing to notify Congress at least 30 days before the swap and increased the terrorism risk to the United States with the exchange.
“President Obama’s recent exchange of five high-level terrorists without notifying Congress illustrates his blatant disregard for its role as a co-equal branch of government,” Cotton said at the time.

Hagel says US speeding up training of Iraqi forces to fight ISIS

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Sunday that the U.S. military is speeding up its training and advising of Iraqi forces who are fighting the Islamic State militants after a recommendation from the commander of U.S. Central Command.
Hagel's announcement came the same day the White House confirmed a third American, aid worker and former Army Ranger Peter Kassig, had been beheaded by members of the militant group.
The Pentagon chief spoke to reporters after observing Army training in California's Mojave Desert on Sunday. He said U.S. special operations troops in Iraq's western Anbar province are getting an early start on the train-and-advise effort.
Hagel said the effort began a few days ago but did not provide any other details.
According to plans laid out last week, the U.S. expects to train nine Iraqi security forces brigades and three Kurdish Peshmerga brigades. Hagel said the speed-up was recommended by Gen. Lloyd Austin, the commander of U.S. Central Command.
Hagel's spokesman, Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby, said later that Austin believes getting an early start on training Iraqi forces in Anbar may prompt other countries with a stake in the fight against Islamic State to commit trainers to Iraq.
Approaching the problem of ill-trained and poorly motivated Iraqi soldiers as a coalition rather than as a unilateral U.S. undertaking is a key pillar of U.S. strategy. Partnership is seen as a way of undermining the ideological appeal of Islamic State.
Kirby said a number of countries have made verbal commitments to provide trainers, but he said he could not identify them because they have yet to publicly announce their intended contributions.
On Thursday, Hagel told Congress that the U.S. and coalition forces are making progress in the fight against the militant group, also known as ISIS of ISIL, but the American people must prepare for a long and difficult struggle.
"ISIL's advance in parts of Iraq has stalled, and in some cases been reversed, by Iraqi, Kurdish, and tribal forces supported by U.S. and coalition airstrikes," Hagel said in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee. "But ISIL continues to represent a serious threat to American interests, our allies, and the Middle East ... and wields influence over a broad swath of territory in western and northern Iraq and eastern Syria."
The testimony of Hagel and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came just days after President Barack Obama asked Congress for a new $5.6 billion plan to expand the U.S. mission in Iraq and send up to 1,500 more American troops to the war-torn nation.
Kassig is the fifth Western hostage killed by ISIS in less than three months, and the third American. Previous Western beheading victims were American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as Britons David Haines, a former Royal Air Force engineer, and Alan Henning, a taxi driver from northwest England. The group is also holding British photojournalist John Cantlie, who has appeared in several other videos released by the group functioning as a de facto spokesman.
The group has declared a self-styled Islamic caliphate in areas under its control, which it governs according to its violent interpretation of Shariah law, including massacring rebellious tribes and selling women and children of religious minorities into slavery.
The group's militants have also beheaded and shot dead hundreds of captives, mostly Syrian and Iraqi soldiers, during its sweep across the two countries, and has celebrated its mass killings in extremely graphic videos.
The Islamic State group has its roots in Al Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate but was expelled from the global terror network over its brutal tactics and refusal to obey orders to confine its activities to Iraq. It became even more extreme amid the bloody civil war in neighboring Syria and grew strong enough to launch a lightning offensive across Iraq.
Syria's war began as an uprising against President Bashar Assad. Activists say that conflict has killed more than 200,000 people.

States hurry to fix healthcare exchange websites in new enrollment period

Several states whose health exchange websites failed their first test during last year's inaugural ObamaCare open enrollment period have adopted different approaches for the second round, which began Saturday.
Some, like Oregon and Nevada, folded and decided to go with the federal exchange. Others, like Maryland and Massachusetts, fired their technology contractors and are hoping for better results this time.
It hasn't been cheap.
The original cost of Massachusetts' website was estimated at $174 million. That has jumped to $254 million. When launched, the website, designed by the same contractor that worked on the troubled Healthcare.gov, was incompatible with some browsers and was riddled with error messages and navigational problems. The problems were so bad, federal officials gave the state three extra months to meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Gov. Deval Patrick issued a public apology and health care officials were forced to adopt a series of manual workarounds, creating a backlog of more than 50,000 paper applications.
Patrick told the Associated Press that there won't be a repeat of the disastrous roll-out this time around, saying the state has "been testing and retesting" the revamped website.
Minnesota's state-run exchange, MNsure, wasn't ready for prime time when it launched in 2013. Some of the technical glitches that frustrated consumers remained unresolved by the time the open enrollment period closed. MNsure officials are promising a better experience this time -- with more call center workers and a website that's 75 percent faster. But they also acknowledge the system won't be perfect.
California's exchange also was ill-prepared to handle the high volume of calls, triggering long wait times at help centers and forcing the state to extend open enrollment for two weeks beyond the original March 31 deadline.
"It swamped us," said Covered California Executive Director Peter Lee, promising increased website capacity and extra call center staff.
Maryland's website crashed on the day it opened last year. The state decided there were too many bugs to completely fix Maryland's original system for the new enrollment period, and the board overseeing the exchange fired its prime information technology contractor and is transitioning to a new system with technology used by Connecticut.
The problems at Washington state's health care exchange occurred after people signed up for insurance. At least 24,000 people who obtained private insurance couldn't use that coverage when they went to the doctor because of problems crediting payments and sending those dollars on to insurance companies.  It took about nine months to fix those problems.
In Vermont, officials announced in August they were scaling back their relationship with the prime contractor on the state's exchange, CGI, reducing the company's role from developing and hosting the Vermont Health Connect site to just hosting it.
Development of the site was switched to another contractor, Optum, the same health care technology firm retained by Massachusetts to revamp its website after it also cut ties with CGI.
Other states fared better.
Colorado's exchange experienced minimal disruptions and the state was able to sign up about 148,000 people.
Kentucky also had a successful rollout, signing up more than 421,000 people for health insurance during the first round of open enrollment. Obama even pointed to Kentucky as an example of the success of his health care law during his State of the Union address this year.
The states were so successful that when Massachusetts was casting around for solutions to its website troubles, it looked to Kentucky and Colorado for what it called "a proven, off-the-shelf solution."
Connecticut was also able to claim bragging rights: After the launch of its marketplace, Access Health CT, officials there predicted the state's uninsured rate would drop to from 7.9 percent to 6.5 percent. Instead it fell to 4 percent.
"We had an office pool going on about what this percentage was going to look like," said Access Health CT CEO Kevin Counihan. "No one expected we'd be down to 4 percent."
In Massachusetts, the experience of finding insurance through the website is beginning to turn around for some.
Christopher Doty lost his insurance when he lost his job in marketing last month. The 32-year-old Boston resident, who has asthma and needs medicine on a regular basis, said he was quickly able to sign up for insurance through MassHealth, the state's Medicaid program.
"Losing my job and knowing I needed some kind of health insurance at first was super-stressful," Doty said. "I basically had coverage within a couple of days."
On Sunday, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell told NBC's "Meet the Press" that 100,000 people had submitted new applications this weekend via the federal website serving 37 states. That's a big difference from last year, when only a handful of customers managed to enroll on the first day.
Burwell also said that a half-million people who already have coverage through the program were able to log into their accounts this time.
There were reports Saturday that returning customers had problems, but some of that may have been confusion trying to remember user names and passwords.
Patrick said one way to avoid future problems is heightened vigilance.
"Outsourcing and privatizing -- this is not the solution." Patrick said. "The solution is to make sure that there's very close oversight even when we use an outside vendor."

Democrat-led Senate set to finally vote this week on Keystone, in odd turn of political events

The Democrat-controlled Senate is expected to take a long-awaited vote Tuesday on approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline -- in an unexpected and politically-charged turn of events for legislation that has languished in the upper chamber for roughly six years.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will allow the vote in part to give Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu an opportunity to vote “yea” and perhaps help her win her runoff election next month with Republican challenger Rep. Bill Cassidy.
However, Landrieu’s political future and the fate of the bill remain highly uncertain.
Most political analysts think Landrieu’s effort to win a fourth term by trying to show voters in oil-rich Louisiana how much she supports Keystone is a lost cause, with reports of Washington Democrats pulling out and polls showing Cassidy ahead by double digits.
South Dakota GOP Sen. John Thune said on “Fox News Sunday” the vote will be a “cynical attempt to save a Senate seat in Louisiana," considering Reid has blocked the vote for years.
President Obama appears to be giving every indication that he will veto the bill, repeatedly saying the only way the $8 billion pipeline can be approved is after the completion of a long-stalled State Department review. There is also the pending outcome of a legal challenge to the pipeline's route through Nebraska.
And during his recent trip to Australia for an economic summit Obama said: “I have to constantly push back against this idea that somehow the Keystone pipeline is either this massive jobs bill for the United States or is somehow lowering gas prices.”
Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse told “Fox News Sunday” that he hopes Obama will veto the bill, considering the oil is “the filthiest fuel on the planet.”
Whitehouse said he thinks the new Senate Republican majority “has long despised and denigrated this president and if they can roll him I think they would like to.”
He also argued that Senate Republicans twice passed on voting on a Democrat-sponsored Keystone bill.
The analysts think the 100-member Senate is now one vote shy of the 60 needed for passing Keystone. (They have the 59 votes as 14 Democrats and all 45 Republicans.)
The GOP-controlled House on Friday passed legislation, sponsored by Cassidy, to move forward with Keystone, which would carry crude oil from Canada and several U.S. states to Midwest and Gulf Coast refineries.
However, neither chamber appears to have the two-thirds majority to override a presidential veto.
Completion of the pipeline, supporters say, will create hundreds of new jobs and help the U.S. become less dependent on foreign oil.
Critics, like Whitehouse, say the oil from Canada is extremely dirty and unearthing it would result in the release of high amounts of greenhouse gases. They also say the jobs are temporary.
Environmentalists have framed the issue as a significant test of Obama's commitment to addressing climate change.
The State Department said in a Jan. 31 report that the 1,179-mile project would not significantly boost carbon emissions because the oil was likely to find its way to market by other means. It added that transporting it by rail or truck would cause greater environmental problems than if the pipeline were built.
The debate in Congress is centered on the pipeline's proposed northern leg, which would run from Alberta, Canada, through Montana and South Dakota to Nebraska, where it would connect with existing pipelines to carry more than 800,000 barrels of crude oil a day.
The Gulf Coast segment of the project began carrying oil earlier this year from the northern Oklahoma town of Cushing. A study commissioned by the Consumer Energy Alliance shows the Gulf Coast project, which began in 2012 and became operational in January, pumped $2.1 billion into Oklahoma's economy, including more than $1 billion in wages and $72 million in total taxes.
The bill passing the House marked the ninth time the lower chamber has voted in favor of speeding up the pipeline's construction.
Landrieu pushed the Senate to hold its upcoming vote on the measure.
In a recent call with reporters from Louisiana, where she was campaigning, Landrieu called herself the "sparkplug" to get the Keystone bill through Congress.
The House bill is identical to one introduced by Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and Landrieu in May.
Landrieu has said she doesn’t know Obama's plans but that he “most certainly understands my position" and that at least 15 other Senate Democrats “really want to build the Keystone pipeline."
If the bill fails to pass the Senate next week, Hoeven said he would reintroduce it next year when Republicans will control the chamber.
That would make it one of many showdowns expected with Obama over energy and environmental policy after Republicans take full control of Congress in January.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, recently said it was time for Obama to listen to the American people, especially after Republican gains in last week's midterm elections, and sign the bill.
"The president doesn't have any more elections to win, and he has no other excuse for standing in the way," Boehner said.

Washington state's health care exchange shut down hours after open enrollment begins

SEATTLE –  Washington's health care exchange shut down after the first few hours of open enrollment Saturday as state officials and software engineers tried to resolve a problem with tax credit calculations.
Officials at the exchange said Washington Healthplanfinder, which opened at 8 a.m., appeared to be working fine at first. When the exchange's quality control system reported the problem, they decided to shut the whole system down at about 10:30 a.m. to fix it.
The tax credits were off by just a few dollars in some cases, exchange CEO Richard Onizuka said. He said the system would remain down until it can give consumers who want to buy health insurance accurate information.
On Saturday afternoon, officials estimated the site wouldn't reopen until Sunday morning, but the actual timing will depend on how soon a software fix can be tested for potential side-effects.
Exchange officials could not say how many people had signed up for insurance before the problem was discovered, but spokesman Michael Marchand said about 2,000 people were using the exchange each hour during the two hours it was open on Saturday morning.
Officials decided to shut down the exchange -- which was working well otherwise -- instead of fixing the problem later because they learned after the previous open enrollment period that even small issues are difficult to fix after registrations are complete, Marchand said.
"It's really bittersweet," Marchand said. "The site worked so much better than last year."
It was also disappointing because the quality control group did such a good job catching the problem just by looking at numbers on a spreadsheet, he added.
"It's a feat that would make auditors jealous," Marchand said.
Katie O'Brien, 21, who stopped by a signup event for the Washington exchange on her way to work at Southcenter Mall in Tukwila, Washington, said she was happy to pick up some information since she has a health condition that requires medication and she recently lost her insurance when she quit working at Starbucks.
O'Brien said she didn't have time to sign up on Saturday, because she was almost late for work at Hot Topic, so she wasn't concerned that the exchange website was down.
O'Brien, who makes less than $400 a month, said she was happy to learn that she may be eligible for nearly free insurance.
"I'm actually pretty uneducated about it," she said of insurance available through the exchange.
Open enrollment for health care insurance continues through Feb. 15, and officials are hoping as many as 85,000 people sign up in Washington state this season. They also hope all of the about 145,000 people who bought insurance during the first open enrollment period, which began Oct. 1, 2013, will renew for another year.
Those who run the exchange had been hoping their computer system would handle traffic better than it did last year, when it shutting down and rejected applications for reasons like a hyphen in a last name. About a thousand people who bought insurance the first time around are still having problems getting their payments credited and that money transferred to their insurance companies.
Gregory Boxly, 62, who has been paying more than $500 a month for insurance since he retired, said the Healthplanfinder event at Southcenter Mall reminded him he needed to do more research to find out if he could get cheaper insurance through the exchange.
He said he was concerned that insurance through the exchange may not pay for dental or vision care, but he'll check out the choices when the website is working again. He wasn't concerned about waiting to log on.
"I worked in IT," he said with a smile, adding that computer problems are inevitable.
People who do not buy insurance will have to pay a fine when they file their income taxes. Those fines start at $95 or 1 percent of 2014 household income, but the minimum fine in 2015 will be $325 per uninsured person or 2 percent of household income.
Consumers will find more choices this time around, with more insurance plans and more companies on the state's exchange. Rates have gone up slightly overall but some people will find cheaper insurance.

What Obama has accomplished Cartoons

New ISIS video claims beheading of American hostage Peter Kassig

The Islamic State terror group has claimed to have beheaded American hostage Peter Kassig, an aid worker and former Army Ranger, in a graphic new video.
In the nearly 16-minute video uploaded to social networks on Sunday, a black-clad militant with his face concealed stands before a severed head that he claims is that of the U.S. aid worker.
The authenticity of the footage has not been verified. National Security Council spokesperson Bernadette Meehan said in a statement that intelligence officials were "working as quickly as possible to determine its authenticity.
"If confirmed, we are appalled by the brutal murder of an innocent American aid worker and we express our deepest condolences to his family and friends," Meehan said. The video was posted shortly after President Obama departed for Washington from the G-20 summit in Australia.  
Ed and Paula Kassig, Ed's parents, released a statement early Sunday saying they were aware of the reports of their son's death and were awaiting confirmation of their authenticity. They also asked that media outlets not post any images or video distributed by Islamic State, better known as ISIS. 
"We prefer our son is written about and remembered for his important work and the love he shared with friends and family," the statement read, "not in the manner the hostage takers would use to manipulate Americans and further their cause."
The video also showed what appeared to be the mass beheading of more than a dozen captured Syrian soldiers, but did not show the beheading of the person identified as Kassig. Showing the execution of the soldiers is a departure from previous videos, which did not depict the act of beheading. The soldiers' executioners are not wearing masks in the video and warn they will carry out similar actions outside the region.
The new video is longer than its predecessors and shows multiple hostages executions as opposed to concentrating on a single hostage's death. It also attempts to tie ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to Usama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, from which Islamic State claims descent. 
Sky News reported that the man featured in the video spoke in English with a British accent. The Associated Press reported that his voice had been distorted to make him harder to identify. It was not immediately clear whether he was the same militant who has appeared in other beheading videos and has been referred to as "Jihadi John" in accounts given by former hostages of their captivity. 
The video identifies the militant's location as Dabiq, a small town in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo, near the Turkish border. The urban setting is another departure from previous beheading videos, which were filmed in the remote desert of northeastern Syria. 
Kassig would be the fifth Western hostage killed by ISIS, in less than three months, and the third American. Previous Western beheading victims were American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as Britons David Haines, a former Royal Air Force engineer, and Alan Henning, a taxi driver from northwest England. The group is also holding British photojournalist John Cantlie, who has appeared in several other videos released by the group functioning as a de facto spokesman. 
It is not clear when the video was filmed. Last month, a Twitter account linked to ISIS posted a message warning that Kassig had only days to live. Sources in the intelligence community told Fox News that the message was being tracked. 
ISIS has beheaded and shot dead hundreds of captives -- mainly Syrian and Iraqi soldiers -- during its sweep across the two countries, and has celebrated mass killings in a series of slickly produced but extremely graphic videos. The group has declared an Islamic caliphate in the areas under its control in Syria and Iraq, which it governs according to a harsh version of Shariah law. The U.S. began launching air strikes in Iraq and Syria earlier this year in a bid to halt the group's rapid advance and eventually degrade and destroy it.
A video released last month appeared to show Kassig, of Indianapolis, kneeling as a masked militant says he will be killed next, after Henning's purported beheading. Kassig had been held in Syria since October 2013. 
Kassig formed the aid organization Special Emergency Response and Assistance, or SERA, in Turkey to provide aid and assistance to Syrian refugees. He began delivering food and medical supplies to Syrian refugee camps in 2012 and is also a trained medical assistant who provided trauma care to injured Syrian civilians and helped train 150 civilians in providing medical aid.
After he appeared in the video, Kassig's parents released a public plea for their son's release, which included claims that Kassig had converted to Islam while in captivity and taken the name Abdul Rahman. 
The release of the video comes approximately a week after Syrian friends of Kassig called for his  release, also saying that he had converted to Islam and was trying to help those afflicted by the country's three-year-old civil war. 
One of the friends, Amjad al-Moghrabi, told reporters in the northern Lebanon city of Tripoli: "We are demanding the Islamic State to release him, if they know Islam. He is a Muslim and has not participated in what his country is doing", a reference to the airstrikes
Dr. Ahmad Obeid, a friend of Kassig said "our demand is to release him and to return to his family because as a person he helped us and we should ask for mercy for him."
"He is unfortunately detained so we are calling for his freedom because he supported our cause and we cannot leave him and let them hurt him," Obeid said.

Rep. Issa to Homeland Security Sec. Johnson: Turn over Secret Service report by Monday

Rep. Darrell Issa wants Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to turn over by Monday evening a readable copy of a report detailing Secret Service missteps during a Sept. 19 White House security breach.
Among the problems revealed in the report is that a White House security tactical unit had never before entered the White House and were not trained to navigate the interior of the mansion.
The Ohio Republican congressman, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, set a Monday deadline for Johnson to turn over the report, which details how a mentally unstable man was able to scale a White House fence and enter far inside the mansion.
Lawmakers have been able to view the report, but parts have been blacked out and they were not allowed to keep a copy for further review.