Obama’s immigration overhaul could put burden on states

President Obama’s looming announcement on major changes to the U.S. immigration system could take a financial and economic toll on the states, some critics say – as undocumented residents come out of the shadows and, in some cases, become eligible for benefits.
The White House has not confirmed the details or the timing of the president’s executive action plan, but the president has vowed to act before year’s end. As Fox News reported on Wednesday, the president could act as early as next week – and a draft document calls for giving millions of illegal immigrants a deportation reprieve as part of that plan.
This would immediately raise questions about the impact on states where illegal immigrant populations are concentrated.
"State and local governments and taxpayers will pay the price if President Obama takes immigration into his own hands,” Republican Texas state Sen. Kelly Hancock told FoxNews.com in a statement.
The draft Obama plan calls for expanding a program known as “deferred action,” which currently allows some undocumented residents who came to the U.S. as children to stay. The potential expansion would extend that to anyone who entered before they were 16, and before January 2010 – a change estimated to affect up to 300,000 people.
The bigger change would, according to the draft, extend the program to some illegal immigrant parents of U.S. citizens and legal residents – affecting up to 4.5 million people.
The impact on the states is a subject of speculation at this point, as it’s unclear whether states would give these newly protected immigrants access to things like driver’s licenses, health care and in-state tuition for college.
Dan Holler, spokesman for the conservative Heritage Action, said, for starters, “it will have a ripple effect on jobs” – because they likely would be handed a Social Security card and the ability to work in more varied occupations.
“That’s going to put extra pressure on a job marketplace that is, by most accounts, not doing so well,” he charged. “Some communities will be hit hard and others won’t, based on where the illegal immigration trends are, and what the job markets are like. There is a jobs component here that just can’t be ignored.”
While giving immigrants who are here illegally “deferred action” status likely would not make them eligible for green cards or the panoply of federal social services, including Medicaid, each state has its own laws dictating the level of state-funded benefits such as protected immigrants can get. Some are more generous than others. One guide would be how states reacted when the administration enacted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy in 2012.
After that measure, the U.S. approved 550,000 applications. Five states had 60 percent of the approvals: California, Texas, Illinois, New York and Arizona, according to a study by the Brookings Institution. Those DACA immigrants are now able to get driver’s licenses in 10 states and access to in-state college tuition in 17 states.
California, Washington, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and Washington, D.C., also now offer low-income DACA recipients health insurance. Others states like Texas and Nebraska offered no new benefits under DACA.
Under any future changes, states like California and Texas probably would see the biggest impact based on their populations.  
According to the most recent statistics by the Department of Homeland Security, there were 11.4 million people in the U.S. illegally in 2011. State Census figures in 2010 showed that 2.5 million lived in California and 1.6 million in Texas, representing 6.8 percent and 6.7 percent of their total populations, respectively. Many of those, particularly in California, may be eligible for new benefits, under any new deferred action policy. (Currently, however, 23 states already offer illegal immigrants a host of health care and other welfare services, with eligibility varying.)
“Right now it is up to the states what kind of care they want to give illegal immigrants. After DACA, some states gave illegal immigrants access to a full range of services, others did not,” said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes the push for an executive order.
“I think it is a very unsettled question, but I do believe the largest states will go ahead and make people eligible for their programs,” she added. “There’s not likely to be new tax revenue to pay for that [at the state level]. It’s just not there unfortunately.”
Not everyone sees the executive order plan as an economic negative. “There is a thorny constitutional question that needs to be addressed, but from a pure policy perspective such an action will have positive effects on the United States,” said Alex Nowrasteh, immigration policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute.
“Legalizing some parts of the unauthorized immigration population will allow them to come forward,” said Nowrasteh. “It will also allow these unauthorized immigrants to be legal workers which means they will become more productive, making higher wages, competing on a fair and even step with the rest of American workers.”
And as for paying for it, Wendy Feliz of the American Immigration Council said the millions of working immigrants who would be paying new taxes would be contributing to the revenue stream.
“They will get work permits now and that will ensure that 100 percent of them will be paying income taxes,” she told FoxNews.com “The states would benefit. Really, it would make them more accountable, it would make them pay more and they will be able to participate more.”  
Republican Texas state Sen. Charles Schwertner, disagrees, saying he believes the states will be more fiscally burdened because Obama’s executive actions would encourage more illegal immigrants to enter the U.S. in the long run. He said Texas will continue to resist offering new services to unauthorized immigrants, “protected” or not.
“I guess it will put a strain on our medical system, our social safety networks,” he told FoxNews.com. “It encourages further lawlessness, and it is unfair to those seeking to immigrate legally.
“Texas is going to take the stand it needs to – we’re going to protect our citizens.”

Transparency Cartoon

ISIS, Al Qaeda affiliate reportedly unite to fight US-backed rebels in Syria

ISTANBUL –  The two most brutal terror groups in Syria reportedly have struck an alliance, in a deal that poses serious problems for the Obama administration’s efforts to prop up “moderate” rebel factions in the country.
The Associated Press reported Thursday that militant leaders from the Islamic State and Al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, the Nusra Front, agreed during a meeting in northern Syria last week to stop fighting each other.
Such an accord could present new difficulties for Washington's strategy against the Islamic State. While warplanes from a U.S.-led coalition strike militants from the air, the Obama administration has counted on arming "moderate" rebels to push them back on the ground.
Those rebels, already considered relatively weak and disorganized, would face far stronger opposition if the two heavy-hitting militant groups now are working together. One official claimed the Islamic State and Nusra already have agreed to work toward destroying one prominent, U.S.-backed rebel group.
The Islamic State, which also operates in Iraq where U.S. troops already are stationed, had fought with the Nusra Front for more than a year to dominate the rebellion against Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Their new agreement, according to the sources in rebel groups opposed to both, would involve a promise to stop fighting and team up in attacks in some areas of northern Syria.
The developments came as the top two U.S. military officials testified on Capitol Hill about the status of the Islamic State fight in both Iraq and Syria. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, responding to some concerns about the progress of the war, said there is “no change in strategy.”
But he and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered a cautious assessment of the progress in the three-month-old war against Islamic extremists.
And Dempsey said an effort to move into Mosul, an area in Iraq now held by ISIS militants, or to restore the border with Syria would require more complex operations. He suggested this could involve U.S. forces.
"I'm not predicting at this point that I would recommend that those forces in Mosul and along the border would need to be accompanied by U.S. forces, but we're certainly considering it," Dempsey told the House Armed Services Committee.
Meanwhile, a U.S. official with access to intelligence about Syria told the Associated Press the American intelligence community has not seen any indications of a shift in the strategy by ISIS and the Nusra Front, but added that he could not rule out tactical deals on the ground.
According to a Syrian opposition official speaking in Turkey, the meeting where the deal was reached took place Nov. 2 in the town of Atareb, west of Aleppo, starting at around midnight and lasting until 4 a.m. The official said the meeting was closely followed by members of his movement, and he is certain that an agreement was reached. The official said about seven top militant leaders attended.
A second source, a commander of brigades affiliated with the Western-backed Free Syrian Army who is known as Abu Musafer, said he also had learned that high-ranking members of Nusra and ISIS met on Nov. 2. He did not disclose the exact location, but said it was organized by a third party and took place in an area where the FSA is active.
According to Abu Musafer, two decisions were reached: First, to halt infighting between Nusra and ISIS and second, for the groups together to open up fronts against Kurdish fighters in a couple of new areas of northern Syria.
The Nusra Front has long been seen as one of the toughest factions trying to oust Assad in a civil war estimated to have killed more than 200,000 since 2011. The Islamic State group entered the Syria war in 2012 from its original home in Iraq and quickly earned a reputation for brutality and for trying to impose itself as the leading faction in the rebellion behind which all pious Muslims should unite. Al Qaeda initially rejected ISIS’ claims to any role in Syria, and Nusra and other factions entered a war-within-a-war against it. But the Islamic State group swelled in power and became flush with weapons and cash after overrunning much of northern and western Iraq over the summer.
According to the opposition official, the meeting included an ISIS representative, two emissaries from Nusra Front, and attendees from the Khorasan Group, a small but battle-hardened band of Al Qaeda veterans from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The official said ISIS and the Nusra Front agreed to work to destroy the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, a prominent rebel faction armed and trained by the United States and led by a fighter named Jamal Maarouf. They agreed to keep fighting until all of the force, estimated to be 10,000 to 12,000 fighters, was eliminated, the official said.
During the meeting, ISIS also offered to send extra fighters to Nusra Front for an assault it launched last week on Western-backed rebels from the Hazm Movement near the town of Khan al-Sunbul in northern Syria, the official said. IS sent about 100 fighters in 22 pickup trucks but Nusra ended up not needing the assistance, he said, because Hazm decided not to engage in the fight. Sixty-five Hazm fighters defected to Nusra, he said.
Tom Joscelyn, an American analyst who tracks terror groups for the website Long War Journal, said he hasn't seen any messaging that would confirm that the two groups have formally joined forces on the battlefield. But he said there has been information emerging before the reported Nov. 2 meeting "that would seem to fit in with that being what they were driving at. There has been a big push on the al-Qaida side to get this (alliance) through."
If they work together, the jihadis will be more effective in Syria, he said. "If there is less blood being spilled against each other and they don't have to worry about that, that's going to make it easier for the jihadis to go after Assad or any Western-backed forces."

Secret US spy program targeted Americans' cellphones

The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of cellphones through fake communications towers deployed on airplanes, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations.
The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program.
Planes are equipped with devices—some known as “dirtboxes” to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. unit that produces them—which mimic cell towers of large telecommunications firms and trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information.
The technology in the two-foot-square device enables investigators to scoop data from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight, collecting their identifying information and general location, these people said.
People with knowledge of the program wouldn’t discuss the frequency or duration of such flights, but said they take place on a regular basis.
A Justice Department official would neither confirm nor deny the existence of such a program. The official said discussion of such matters would allow criminal suspects or foreign powers to determine U.S. surveillance capabilities. Justice Department agencies comply with federal law, including by seeking court approval, the official said.
The program is the latest example of the extent to which the U.S. is training its surveillance lens inside the U.S. It is similar in approach to the National Security Agency’s program to collect millions of Americans phone records, in that it scoops up large volumes of data in order to find a single person or a handful of people. The U.S. government justified the phone-records collection by arguing it is a minimally invasive way of searching for terrorists.

Obama won't budge on Keystone ahead of House vote

The King has Spoken.

President Obama would not budge on the Keystone pipeline ahead of a key House vote on Friday, indicating during a press conference that he wants to let a review process run its course even as lawmakers threaten to send a bill fast-tracking the project to his desk.
The president spoke during a joint press conference in Burma with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. As the House prepares to vote on the pipeline -- and the Senate is set to vote next week -- Obama made clear his position has not changed. 
Obama said his administration believes the project should be judged on the basis of whether it accelerates climate change. Obama also insisted the pipeline would not be a “massive jobs bill” and would have no effect on U.S. gas prices.
The looming vote will mark the ninth time it has been voted on in the House as lawmakers look to finally secure approval of the delayed proposal after numerous environmental reviews, legal challenges to its route and politics. 
But the pipeline was only put on the lame-duck Congress agenda because Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu pushed it on the Senate side -- in an apparent effort to not only boost the energy industry, but boost her own re-election bid in a tough runoff next month. Landrieu’s race for re-election goes to a runoff next month against GOP-hopeful Bill Cassidy. Landrieu is considered an underdog in that election.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest, traveling with Obama in Myanmar, told reporters that the president takes a "dim view" of legislative efforts to force action on the project. Earnest stopped short of threatening a veto, but reiterated Obama's preference for evaluating the pipeline through a long-stalled State Department review.
Obama has repeatedly ordered such reviews under pressure from environmental groups, who say the project would contribute to climate change.
Senate Republicans and several moderate Democrats have pushed for the project to be approved for years, and backers of the project got a major win after Republicans took control of the Senate. Supporters say the construction of the pipeline would create tens of thousands of jobs.
But the project divides Democrats, with environmentalists in opposition while some unions as well as energy-state and business-minded lawmakers support it.
The Sierra Cub issued a statement opposing the measure, as did Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who urged Obama to veto the bill if it reaches his desk.
Supporters of the measure appeared to have at least 58 of the 60 votes they would need for approval next week. That included all 45 Republicans as well as 13 Democrats, among them Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, whose office confirmed his support during the day.
Another obstacle in the pipeline is getting approval for it to go through Nebraska.
The administration has put off announcing any decision pending a Supreme Court ruling in Nebraska on a challenge to the law that allowed the route of the pipeline to be set.
The Nebraska Supreme Court's decision is expected before the end of the year.
That case involves a lawsuit filed by landowners and activists opposed to the project who are seeking to overturn a 2012 state law that allowed Republican Gov. Dave Heineman to approve the pipeline's route through the state.

Fox News weighing decision on keeping Mike Huckabee

Ben Carson is off the Fox News payroll. Is Mike Huckabee next?
The former Arkansas governor, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, has been careful not to do anything that would shatter his status as a network contributor.
But some of his political moves have prompted a reevaluation.
Bill Shine, Fox’s executive vice president for programming, said in a statement:
“We are taking a serious look at Governor Huckabee’s recent activity in the political arena and are evaluating his current status. We plan on meeting with him when he returns from his trip overseas.”
The scrutiny was probably inevitable after Fox dropped Carson as a contributor on Friday. The trigger there was the Baltimore physician’s plan to run an hourlong infomercial on local stations as a prelude to a possible presidential run.
I addressed the development on Sunday’s “Media Buzz”: “This was a smart move by Fox. Because a guy who is more or less running for president shouldn't be on a network payroll. Which means Fox also faces a decision about former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee who is openly weighing a White House run as well.”
That got plenty of pickup, but the day of reckoning was inevitable. Huckabee, who hosts a Saturday night program, went through a similar dance in the 2012 cycle before deciding to stick with Fox rather than mounting a second presidential campaign.
The Washington Post reported today that Huckabee “is reconnecting with activists and enlisting staff to position himself in a growing field of potential Republican presidential candidates.” In fact, the Baptist preacher is leading a group of more than 100 pastors and Republican insiders from early primary states on an overseas jaunt to such locations as Poland and Britain.
Huckabee has also formed a nonprofit political advocacy group, America Takes Action.
Is he on the verge of running? “His heart is into it,” Huckabee’s daughter Sarah told the Post.
Asked about his Fox connection, Huckabee told the paper: “I have to be very careful about this” because he has “obligations in broadcasting.” He added that “I am not doing anything official at this point.”
Fox is obviously a great platform for a potential Republican contender. In an interview last week, Bill O’Reilly told Huckabee: “You must be happy because you, Paul, Rand Paul and Jeb Bush are all about 11 percent in the Real Clear political who Republicans would like to see run. That's taking Mitt Romney out of the equation. If Romney gets in, then he becomes the favorite. So, you know, it looks to me like you have a decent shot if you want to go to be president.”
Huckabee responded: “Well, I think it's quite a ways away to make that decision, but, you know, it's kind of comforting to know that at least there are 11 percent of the people that would like it.”
In 2011, Fox cut ties with two contributors, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, as they took steps to jump into the GOP primaries. Some network insiders said then that they were uncomfortable with Huckabee’s role. And he was conscious of the situation, saying: "If I run, I walk away from a pretty good income.”
The issue is a familiar one in cable news, going back to the days when Pat Buchanan kept returning to CNN after his presidential campaigns.
The Post says Huckabee has been sounding out potential consultants, including his former campaign manager Chip Saltsman. “According to Huckabee’s associates, the Fox News show may not be a runaway national success, but it has been useful to Huckabee’s political brand, keeping him in front of Republican primary voters but not turning him into a political celebrity whose every move draws attention.”
But now it may be drawing so much attention that both sides have to make a decision.

Source: Obama to announce 10-point immigration plan via exec action as early as next week

EXCLUSIVE: President Obama is planning to unveil a 10-part plan for overhauling U.S. immigration policy via executive action -- including suspending deportations for millions -- as early as next Friday, a source close to the White House told Fox News. 
The president's plans were contained in a draft proposal from a U.S. government agency. The source said the plan could be announced as early as Nov. 21, though the date might slip a few days pending final White House approval. 
Obama was briefed at the White House by Homeland Security officials before leaving on his Asia-Pacific trip last week, Fox News has learned. 
The plan contains 10 initiatives than span everything from boosting border security to improving pay for immigration officers. 
But the most controversial pertain to the millions who could get a deportation reprieve under what is known as "deferred action." 
The plan calls for expanding deferred action for illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children -- but also for the parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. 
The latter could allow upwards of 4.5 million illegal immigrant adults with U.S.-born children to stay, according to estimates. 
Critics in the Senate say those who receive deferred action, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, receive work authorization in the United States, Social Security numbers and government-issued IDs.
Another portion that is sure to cause consternation among anti-"amnesty" lawmakers is a plan to expand deferred action for young people. In June 2012, Obama created such a program for illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, entered before June 2007 and were under 31 as of June 2012. The change would expand that to cover anyone who entered before they were 16, and change the cut-off from June 2007 to Jan. 1, 2010. This is estimated to make nearly 300,000 illegal immigrants eligible. 
One of the architects for the president's planned executive actions at DHS is Esther Olavarria, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy's former top immigration lawyer. 
Under the changes, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers also would see a pay raise in order to "increase morale" within the ICE workforce. 
DHS also is planning to "promote" the new naturalization process by giving a 50 percent discount on the first 10,000 applicants who come forward, with the exception of those who have income levels above 200 percent of the poverty level. 
Tech jobs though a State Department immigrant visa program would offer another half-million immigrants a path to citizenship. This would include their spouses as well. 
The other measures include calls to revise removal priorities to target serious criminals for deportation and end the program known as "Secure Communities" and start a new program. 
The planning comes as immigrant advocates urge Obama to act. As lawmakers returned for a lame-duck session, Democrats in Congress on Wednesday implored Obama to take executive action. 
"We're begging the president. Go big. These [illegal immigrants] are a plus to our nation. Mr. President, please. You said you were going to do something. Do it. Act now," said Rep. Juan Vargas, D-Calif. 
House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer said: "I join with my colleagues in urging the president to take action. What he needs to do is give immediate relief to families who are being wrenched apart and living in fear." 
Angela Maria Kelley, vice president for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, touted deferred action as a "tried and true component of immigration policy used by 11 presidents, 39 times in the last 60 years." 
She said for many undocumented immigration who have been here for years, "there is no line for people to get into." 
Obama has vowed to act in the absence of congressional action and has claimed that congressional action could still supersede his executive steps. 
In a recent op-ed in Politico, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said Congress would stop Obama from taking executive action by adding language explicitly barring money from being used for that purpose. "Congress has the power of the purse. The President cannot spend a dime unless Congress appropriates it," Sessions wrote. He also pointed out that similar language in the past has prevented the president from closing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Yet another video shows ObamaCare architect disparaging voter intelligence

Yet another video has surfaced of ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber crediting the passage of the health care bill in part to American voters’ lack of intelligence.
The Daily Caller posted the third video Wednesday of the MIT professor, this time speaking at the University of Rhode Island in 2012.
Gruber was discussing the law’s so-called "Cadillac tax,” which he said was helped along by “hero” then-Sen. John Kerry. The “Cadillac tax” mandates that insurance companies be taxed rather than policy holders. He said that taxing individuals would have been “politically impossible,” but taxing the companies worked because Americans didn't understand the difference.
“So basically it's the same thing,” he said. “We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on higher prices that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing. It's a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”
The new video follows a second tape played on Fox News' "The Kelly File” Tuesday that showed Gruber speaking on a similar topic at an October 2013 event at Washington University in St. Louis.
Referring to the "Cadillac tax,” he said: "They proposed it and that passed, because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference."
This was similar to remarks he made at a separate event around the same time in 2013. In a clip of that event, Gruber said the "lack of transparency" in the way the law was crafted was critical. "Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass," he said.
After the first tape surfaced -- prompting Republican outrage -- Gruber went on MSNBC to express regret. On Tuesday, he said: "I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately, and I regret having made those comments."
But after Fox News played the second tape, GOP lawmakers said it proves what they've been saying all along.
"It confirms people's greatest fear about the government," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told Fox News on Wednesday. "Remember, it was Nancy Pelosi who said first you have to pass it before you get to find out what's in it."
As Congress returns for a lame-duck session, on the heels of midterm elections where Republicans won control of the Senate, GOP leaders say they will try once again next year to repeal the law -- or least change its most controversial provisions.

Keystone pipeline re-emerges as political football as Landrieu, GOP rival call for vote

The lame-duck Congress has been in session a matter of hours, and the Keystone pipeline already is a political football.
Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., facing a tough runoff election next month, on Wednesday called for a vote on a bill approving the long-delayed project -- in an apparent bid to flex her clout on Capitol Hill. The Senate approved her request and teed up a vote for next Tuesday.
 Republicans responded swiftly to Landrieu's maneuvering, scheduling a vote in the House on Thursday on an identical bill sponsored by Rep. Bill Cassidy.
The back-and-forth amounts to a continuation of their bitter Senate campaign, with one of the most controversial energy projects in America caught in the middle. The TransCanada-built pipeline, which would cross over an aquifer in Nebraska, has been held up for six years by environmental and other concerns. 
White House spokesman Josh Earnest, traveling with President Obama in Burma, told reporters that the president takes a "dim view" of legislative efforts to force action on the project. Earnest stopped short of threatening a veto, but reiterated Obama's preference for evaluating the pipeline through a long-stalled State Department review. Obama has repeatedly ordered such reviews under pressure from environmental groups, who say the project would contribute to climate change. 
Landrieu, who is thought to be trailing Cassidy ahead of their Dec. 6 runoff election, wants to deliver a win for the energy industry by pushing Keystone. The measure was one she co-sponsored with Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., back in May. 
“We can pass the Keystone pipeline and answer the frustrations of the American people,” she said. “So they could rest next and say, oh my gosh the senators of the United States of America have ears and they have brains and they have hearts and they heard what we said and we can do this.” 
But the timing immediately raised Republican suspicions. 
Cassidy noted that the House has passed pro-Keystone legislation eight times, and "the Senate did not consider any of the eight." After Landrieu called for a vote, Cassidy and GOP leaders in the House said they would vote Thursday on a Cassidy-authored Keystone bill. 
"I hope the Senate and the president do the right thing and pass this legislation creating thousands of jobs," Cassidy said in a statement. "After six years, it’s time to build."
The legislative tug-of-war came a day after aides first said that Senate Democrats were considering bringing the pipeline to a vote in order to boost Landrieu ahead of the runoff election. (The two rivals are heading to a runoff because neither got more than 50 percent of the vote last week.) The pipeline is a popular project in oil industry-heavy Louisiana, and Landrieu has touted her support of the pipeline and her tenure as chairwoman of the Senate energy committee in her campaign.
On the Senate floor on Wednesday, Landrieu insisted she was not trying to gain political points, and said she didn’t even care if her name stayed on the bill. 
“I didn’t come here to see my name in lights,” she said. “I came to fight for jobs for my state.”
She also seemed to take credit for Cassidy's House bill, calling it "identical" to the legislation she co-sponsored.
However, Cassidy told Fox News' Greta Van Susteren that his rival's assertion that politics were not involved was obviously untrue. 
"I have to smile when Sen. Landrieu says politics are not involved," he said on "On the Record." "Clearly (Senate Majority Leader Harry) Reid did not care about the 40,000 jobs that would be created for families which are struggling, but he does care about Sen. Landrieu’s job. So finally he is going to take the bill up. I don’t think the president cares about those 40,000 people."
Senate Republicans and several moderate Democrats have pushed for the project to be approved for years, and backers of the project got a major win after Republicans took control of the Senate. Supporters say the construction of the pipeline would create tens of thousands of jobs. 
Landrieu said in an evening press conference that she does not have a commitment from Obama that he would sign the bill should it reach his desk, but she is "hopeful."
"We believe the bill we drafted could receive support in the House of Representatives and get the president's signature," she said.
Landrieu is facing a tough battle to keep her job after nearly 20 years in office. A Real Clear Politics average of recent polls has the senator trailing her rival by nearly 5 points ahead of the election on Dec. 6.

Ocean of People Cartoon

GOP adds another Senate seat as Sullivan wins Alaska

Republican candidate Dan Sullivan defeated Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Begich in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race Wednesday.
The win gives the GOP eight Senate pickups in the midterm elections. The party is also seeking a ninth seat in Louisiana’s runoff in December.
Sullivan ran a confident campaign, ignoring the debate schedule Begich established and setting his own terms.
He pledged to fight federal overreach, talked about energy independence and at seemingly every opportunity, sought to tie Begich to President Barack Obama and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who are unpopular in Alaska.
Begich complained that Sullivan offered little in the way of proposals for what he would do as senator.
Earlier Tuesday, election workers began counting absentee ballots and early indications were Sullivan maintained an 8,100 vote advantage over Begich. It proved to be true later that night.
With roots in Alaska, Sullivan recently served as the state’s natural resource commissioner. He also had spent seven years in the military and worked in Washington as assistant secretary of state. He returned to Alaska in 2009 and was appointed attorney general by former Gov. Sarah Palin.
Sullivan emerged from a hard-fought, three-way GOP primary to take on Begich, who had token opposition. Begich focused during that race on bolstering his homespun image, casting himself as an independent thinker unafraid to stand up to Obama, with a record of working across party lines, including with Alaska's senior senator, Republican Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski, who backed Sullivan after the primary and is in line to chair the Senate energy committee now that Republicans have taken over the Senate, told Begich to knock it off.
Ads denouncing the two candidates became a hot-button issue toward the end of the campaign.
One Bergich ad, seen as a turning point in the race, painted Sullivan as soft on crime. It featured a man identified as a former Anchorage police officer standing outside the home where an elderly couple was beaten to death and a family member sexually abused in 2013. It ended with the man saying Sullivan should not be a senator.
The ad, which Sullivan responded to with one of his own, was pulled following a demand from an attorney for the victims' family.
Sullivan will still receive criticism over his residency, his support of a permitting bill that critics said would have limited public participation in the state's permitting process and his stance on abortion.

What's next for ObamaCare?

Now that the midterm elections – featuring ObamaCare as a key issue – are over, the big question is what’s next for the president’s health care plan.
"ObamaCare was an issue for the candidates, it was an issue for the voters, and the voters are going to expect the people they elected to do something about ObamaCare," said health economist John Goodman.
But what? House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, made clear the House will start with repeal and replace. "And so the House next year, I'm sure will move to repeal ObamaCare because it should be repealed," Boehner said recently. "It should be replaced with common sense reforms that respect the doctor-patient relationship."
Some analysts say a simple repeal would cause problems because it would take insurance away from 10-15 million people.
"So if you repeal it, you're going to have to replace it with something," Goodman said. "And repeal and replace is just another way of saying we're going to change ObamaCare into something different and better."
Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center added, "you need to not only say you're against the ACA ( Affordable Care Act), but you're going to need to have a replacement plan to show people you have a better way of providing people with health insurance coverage."
Many Republicans want a new plan to replace the current one. Most of them would include tax subsidies -- in one case, up to about $72,000 a year for a family of four, to buy any insurance plan they want without the restrictions of ObamaCare.
They would also guarantee coverage of pre-existing conditions, allow children under 26 to stay on their parents' plans, and scale back many of the taxes in ObamaCare.  
But there's also bipartisan support to replace parts of the current law. 
Just after the elections, Sen.Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the presumed next Senate Majority Leader, said, "there are pieces of it that are deeply, deeply unpopular with the American people. The medical device tax, which has exported an enormous number of jobs. The loss of the 40-hour work week. Big, big mistake."
That is an issue also raised by unions, which complain that many employees are being shifted to less than 30 hours, so that employers are not required to provide insurance.
"A lot of employers reduce hours to avoid the mandate. A lot of them are outsourcing and using contract labor and temporary labor," Goodman said. "I think you might find a lot of support for simply getting rid of the employer mandate."
As for the medical device tax, 79 Senators from both parties are on record as opposing it, including key liberals.
Republicans also could act to guarantee that everyone who has an existing plan can keep it.
"I think that's the kind of thing that actually would be hard for many Democrats to oppose and resist because the president himself promised it,"Capretta noted.

ObamaCare architect says lack of transparency helped law pass, cites 'stupidity of the American voter'

 

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 ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber said that lack of transparency was a major part of getting ObamaCare passed, and that it was written in such a way as to take advantage of "the stupidity of the American voter." 
Gruber, the MIT professor who served as a technical consultant to the Obama administration during ObamaCare’s design, also made clear during a panel quietly captured on video that the individual mandate, which was only upheld by the Supreme Court because it was a tax, was not actually a tax.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that.  In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass… Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.” 
[The video was from an Oct. 17, 2013 event hosted by the University of Pennsylvania.]

US troops arrive in Iraq's Anbar province amid ISIS fight

A team of about 50 military personnel are visiting a U.S. military airbase in Iraq’s Anbar province after President Obama authorized the deployment of up to 1,500 more American troops to bolster Iraqi forces in the region in the fight against the Islamic State.
A Defense Department spokesperson confirmed to Fox News that the group was visiting the Al-Asad Air Base to “conduct a site survey of facilities for potential future use as an advise and assist operation location in support of Iraq Security Forces.”
The spokesperson added that some of the personnel were carrying weapons, but strictly to protect the force.
The military personnel were surveying the area for a planned deployment in Anbar province, where fighting with Islamic State militants, also known as ISIL or ISIS, has been fierce.
On Friday, U.S. President Barack Obama authorized the deployment of up to 1,500 more American troops to bolster Iraqi forces in that province and elsewhere. The plan could boost the total number of American troops in Iraq to 3,100. There now are about 1,400 U.S. troops in Iraq, out of the 1,600 previously authorized.
A U.S.-led coalition has been launching airstrikes on Islamic State militants and facilities in Iraq and Syria for months, as part of an effort to give Iraqi forces the time and space to mount a more effective offensive.
The Islamic State had gained ground across northern and western Iraq in a lightning advance in June and July, causing several of Iraq's army and police divisions to fall into disarray.

VA secretary pushes major overhaul, firings at agency

Veterans Affairs Secretary Bob McDonald on Monday announced a complete restructuring in the wake of the scandal over excessive wait times and poor care that critics blamed for patient deaths. 
The changes come a day after the secretary revealed on CBS' "60 Minutes" his intention to fire or otherwise discipline more than 1,000 workers -- and hire thousands more doctors and health care workers. 
Asked during the interview how many employees should be fired, McDonald said the disciplinary report given to the Veterans Affairs committees in the House and the Senate "has about 35 names on it" and he's got "another report that has over 1,000" names. All VA firings are subject to review by an administrative judge, complicating any push to remove employees. 
The separate overhaul announced Monday, on the eve of Veterans Day, is designed to make it easier for veterans to access the sprawling department and its many websites. McDonald called the restructuring the largest in the department's history and said it will bring a singular focus on customer service to an agency that serves 22 million veterans. 
"As VA moves forward, we will judge the success of all our efforts against a single metric: the outcomes we provide for veterans," McDonald said. The VA's mission is to care for veterans, "so we must become more focused on veterans' needs," he said. 
As part of the restructuring the department will hire a chief customer service officer and create a single regional framework that will encompass all aspects of the agency, from health care to benefits, loan centers and even cemetery plots, McDonald said. The VA now has nine organizational maps and at least a dozen websites, many with their own user names and passwords. 
Eventually, McDonald would like all veterans to have one user name and password for all VA services. McDonald hopes to complete the reorganization, nicknamed "MyVA," within a year. 
Meanwhile, the new secretary discussed his plans for cleaning house at the VA during the interview with CBS' "60 Minutes." 
“I was incensed. I was incensed,” McDonald said of the scandal and cover-up at his agency. “Our veterans have earned these benefits. They earn them with their lives in danger.”
In the interview, McDonald said the VA is taking "aggressive, expeditious disciplinary action, consistent with the law" against more than 1,000 of its 315,000 employees.
McDonald's comments represent a departure from his previous public remarks. At a news conference last Thursday, he said the VA has proposed disciplinary action — up to and including firing — against more than 40 employees nationwide since June.
Asked in the “60 Minutes” interview how many doctors and nurses and other medical professionals he needs to hire, McDonald said “we probably need about 28,000.”
In a live streaming seminar at the Washington Post on Monday on veterans hiring, McDonald said the VA is making progress in other areas.
“We've cut the disability claims backlog by 60 percent in the last 20 months. We completed 1.3 million claims for veterans in 2014,” he said. “That’s 150,000 more than last year.”
He added: "Veterans give VA health care higher ratings than patients at most private hospitals."
The hardest part of McDonald’s mission thus far is hiring the thousands of new doctors, nurses and medical staff. He's in the midst of a recruiting campaign at medical schools and universities where he points out to prospective employees that, for all its faults, the VA is at the forefront of medical care in the treatment of traumatic brain injury and PTSD and in the use of prosthetic limbs. 
As for the looming disciplinary measures, some Republican lawmakers have criticized the VA for moving too slowly to fire managers involved in covering up wait times and other problems.
But McDonald said the agency is moving as fast as it legally can. 
"We've got to make it stick," McDonald told CBS. "We propose the action, the judge rules and the individual has a time to appeal."
Only one of four senior employees recently targeted for removal by the VA has been fired, a fact Republican lawmakers cite in criticizing McDonald's implementation of the new law, which gives McDonald wide authority to fire poor-performing employees and streamlines the appeals process.
Two of the targeted employees retired. A third was granted an extension allowing her more time to reply to the VA's decision.
The VA has been under intense scrutiny since a whistleblower reported that dozens of veterans may have died while awaiting treatment at the Phoenix VA hospital, and that appointment records were falsified. Since then problems have been revealed at VA health care sites across the country.
The scandal led to the ouster of former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and to a new law making it easier for veterans to get VA-paid care from local doctors. The agency has been overwhelmed by the influx of veterans from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the aging of Vietnam War veterans and expanded eligibility for benefits as a result of exposure to Agent Orange and other problems.

Veterans, families, sue six banks claiming they helped Iran fund terror groups

 More than 200 veterans and their families have filed a lawsuit against six banks, accusing them of helping Iran transfer millions of dollars to groups targeting U.S. soldiers during the war in Iraq. 
The Wall Street Journal reports that five of the banks accused in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Brooklyn Monday, are HSBC, Barclays, Standard Chartered, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Credit Suisse. A sixth bank named in the suit is the Britain-based subsidiary of Bank Saderat Iran.
The suit alleges that the banks helped Iran move billions of dollars through the U.S. financial system, with some of the money ending up with Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxies like Hezbollah, which orchestrated attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq. 
The Journal reports that several of those attacks are documented in the lawsuit, including one in 2007 in which four U.S. soldiers were abducted and later executed. The suit claims that documents retrieved from captured militants implicated Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guard Corps in that incident.
The lawsuit comes on the heels of a September jury verdict that found Jordan's Arab Bank liable for providing financing to the Hamas terror group. In that case, the jury ruled that the bank must compensate victims of over two dozen attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories linked to the group. Arab Bank is currently appealing the verdict.
The veterans' lawsuit asks for a jury trial and unspecified damages. 
Some multinational banks have already paid millions of dollars to settle similar actions brought by the Justice Department. In 2010, Barclays paid $500 million to avoid prosecution for allegedly engaging in transactions with banks in countries targeted by U.S. sanctions, including Iran, Cuba, Libya, and Sudan. Earlier this year, France's largest lender, BNP Paribas agreed to pay $8.9 billion to settle claims it covered up $30 billion in transactions with Iran, Syria, and Sudan as recently as 2009.

Supreme Court could weigh in on same sex marriage bans by next June

With a ruling last week by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on same sex marriage bans, it appears likely the Supreme Court will ultimately weigh in on the contentious issue, possibly before their term ends in June 2015.
Until recently, all of the federal appeals courts that considered state bans on same sex marriage had struck them down. Then the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals broke with that trend last week, upholding bans in four states. In a 2-1 decision, the Sixth Circuit essentially held that states should have the authority to decide questions regarding marriage.
Appeals regarding same sex marriage bans did reach the nation's highest court earlier this year, but because there was no conflict in the federal circuits, the Justices declined to hear the cases.
Now that a split exists, the Court is much more likely to have to confront the subject, possibly by the middle of next year. Advocates both for and against same sex marriage agree on that, but not much more.
Elizabeth Wydra, Chief Counsel for the Constitutional Accountability Center, said, "Simply because a majority of people vote to ban same sex marriage does not mean they can ignore the guarantees and requirements of the Constitution."
Wydra is among those who believe same sex couples have a "fundamental right" to marriage, based on the Equal Protection Clause found in the 14th Amendment. She remains cautiously optimistic that a majority of the Justices will agree.
Supporters of traditional marriage see a chance to argue before the Supreme Court as a new opportunity, at a time when many are urging them to give up the fight.
Jordan Lorence, Senior Counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, said he believed "public policy" issues should be at the top of the Justices' considerations, adding, "The Supreme Court should step out of the way and let this be decided by the people, by the state legislatures."
If an appeal from the Sixth Circuit moves expeditiously, and the Justices agree to take up the case, it could be heard in the spring and decided by late June 2015. It's also highly possible that the procedural timeline pushes the case into the Court's next term, starting in October 2015.
Also Monday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted an emergency request from Kansas officials who argued they should not be forced to begin issuing same sex marriage licenses while the legal dispute over the state’s law remains active. Sotomayor has ordered the opposing parties to file a response by 5pm ET on Tuesday.

Obama calls for more regulation of Internet providers, industry fires back

President Obama threw down the gauntlet Monday with cable companies and Internet providers by declaring they shouldn’t be allowed to cut deals with online services like YouTube to move their content faster.

It was his most definitive statement to date on so-called “net neutrality,” and escalates a battle that has been simmering for years between industry groups and Internet activists who warn against the creation of Internet “fast lanes.” The president’s statement swiftly drew an aggressive response from trade groups, which are fighting against additional regulation.

"We are stunned the president would abandon the longstanding, bipartisan policy of lightly regulating the Internet and calling for extreme" regulation, said Michael Powell, president and CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the primary lobbying arm of the cable industry.

Obama, in his statement, called for an “explicit ban” on “paid prioritization,” or better, faster service for companies that pay extra. The president said federal regulators should reclassify the Internet as a public utility under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.

"For almost a century, our law has recognized that companies who connect you to the world have special obligations not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over access in and out of your home or business," Obama said in his statement. "That is why a phone call from a customer of one phone company can reliably reach a customer of a different one, and why you will not be penalized solely for calling someone who is using another provider. It is common sense that the same philosophy should guide any service that is based on the transmission of information -- whether a phone call, or a packet of data."

Obama's statement puts him in the middle of a debate between industry groups and the Federal Communications Commission, which is under public pressure – now from Obama as well -- to prevent broadband providers from creating the “fast lanes.”

The FCC is nearing a decision on how far to go to protect Internet consumers from deals between broadband providers like Verizon and AT&T and content companies like Netflix or YouTube.

But industry groups pushed back, with Powell arguing that such regulation would slow Internet growth.

This "tectonic shift in national policy, should it be adopted, would create devastating results," Powell said, claiming only Congress should make a policy change of this magnitude.”

Likewise, CTIA-The Wireless Association called Obama's proposal a "gross overreaction" that would ignore other viewpoints.

Last January, a federal court overturned key portions of an open Internet regulation put in place by the FCC in 2010. The court said the FCC had "failed to cite any statutory authority" to keep broadband providers from blocking or discriminating against content.

That ruling sent the FCC back to the drawing board. Until the FCC can agree on new regulations that satisfy the court's requirements, Internet service providers could block or discriminate against content moving across their networks with impunity.

Internet activists say the FCC should reclassify the Internet as a public utility under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act to ensure it has enough power to regulate the Internet effectively. That's exactly what industry doesn't want to happen. Industry officials say they are committed to an open Internet in general but want flexibility to think up new ways to package and sell Internet services.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has said he is open to using a "hybrid" approach that would draw from both Title II and the 1996 Telecommunications Act. But Wheeler said Monday that so far, those options have presented "substantive legal questions."

"We found we would need more time to examine these to ensure that whatever approach is taken, it can withstand any legal challenges it may face," he said.

South Korean troops fire warning shots after Northern soldiers approach border

SEOUL, South Korea –  South Korean troops fired warning shots Monday after North Korean soldiers approached too close to the border separating the rival countries, Seoul defense officials said.
About 10 North Korean soldiers retreated without returning fire after South Korean troops fired 20 rounds of warning shots, the officials said on condition of anonymity, in line with office policy. There were no reports of casualties.
The incident happened near the military demarcation line inside the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone that was created when the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice.
Tensions between the Koreas remain high following two incidents last month involving exchanges of gunfire, though no casualties were reported in either one.
In the first incident, troops from the two countries traded gunfire over propaganda leaflets South Korean activists floated across the border. In the second, North Korean soldiers were seen too close to the border, triggering a gunfire exchange. The North said its soldiers were engaging in routine patrol missions.
At the center of their recent animosities is North Korea's demand that South Korea ban activists from launching the anti-Pyongyang leaflets. South Korea has said it cannot do so, citing freedom of speech.
The Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war because the Korean War armistice has not been converted to a peace treaty.

Obama: 'I’m going to do what I need to do' on immigration

President Obama repeated Sunday that he intends to change U.S. immigration law through executive action, over Republican leaders’ repeated requests to wait and dire warnings about the consequences of sidestepping Congress.
“I’m going to do what I need to do,” Obama told CBS’ “Face the Nation,” in an interview taped on Friday.
As he has said before, the president said he would prefer that reform legislation come through Congress, but that he has waited for more than a year for House Speaker John Boehner to pass a bill like the Democrat-controlled Senate has done.
“If a bill gets passed, nobody would be happier than me,” Obama said.
His remarks followed similar ones made Wednesday, which brought dire warnings from Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that were followed by more on Sunday.
“I believe [executive action] will hurt cooperation on every issue,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told “Fox News Sunday.” “I think it would be like the president pulling the pin out of a hand grenade and throwing it in as we are trying to actually work together. I am hoping that cooler heads at the White House can prevail."
The comments by Barrasso, chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, followed Boehner warning Obama that using executive action would “poison the well” and McConnell, who will likely be the Senate majority leader next year, comparing it to waving a flag in front of a bull.
“Their time hasn’t run out,” Obama told CBS, arguing that legislation passed by Congress would supersede his executive action.
To be sure, the president is under pressure to use executive action on immigration reform, after promising Americans that he would by the end of summer, then delaying any action until after the midterms, which upset Democrats’ strong Hispanic base.
Obama also said Sunday that inaction is a “mis-allocation of resources” and that the country cannot continue to deport people who should be allowed to stay and keep those who should leave.

Federal firewall reportedly struggles against increasing number of cyberattacks

Federal employees and contractors are unwittingly undermining a $10 billion-per-year effort to protect sensitive government data from cyberattacks, according to a published report. 
The Associated Press says that workers in more than a dozen agencies, from the Defense and Education departments to the National Weather Service, are responsible for at least half of the federal cyberincidents reported each year since 2010, according to an analysis of records.
They have clicked links in bogus phishing emails, opened malware-laden websites and been tricked by scammers into sharing information. One was redirected to a hostile site after connecting to a video of tennis star Serena Williams. A few act intentionally, most famously former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who downloaded and leaked documents revealing the government's collection of phone and email records.
Then there was the federal contractor who lost equipment containing the confidential information of millions of Americans, including Robert Curtis of Monument, Colorado.
Curtis, according to court records, was besieged by identity thieves after someone stole data tapes that the contractor left in a car, exposing the health records of about 5 million current and former Pentagon employees and their families.
"I was angry, because we as citizens trust the government to act on our behalf," Curtis told the AP. 
At a time when intelligence officials say cybersecurity now trumps terrorism as the No. 1 threat to the U.S. -- and when breaches at businesses such as Home Depot and Target focus attention on data security -- the federal government isn't required to publicize its own brushes with data loss.
Last month, a breach of unclassified White House computers by hackers thought to be working for Russia was reported not by officials but The Washington Post. Congressional Republicans complained even they weren't alerted to the hack.
"It would be unwise, I think for rather obvious reasons, for me to discuss from here what we have learned so far," White House press secretary Josh Earnest later said about the report.
To determine the extent of federal cyberincidents, which include probing into network weak spots, stealing data and defacing websites, the AP filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, interviewed hackers, cybersecurity experts and government officials, and obtained documents describing digital cracks in the system.
That review shows that 40 years and more than $100 billion after the first federal data protection law was enacted, the government is struggling to close holes without the knowledge, staff or systems to outwit an ever-evolving foe.
"It's a much bigger challenge than anyone could have imagined 20 years ago," said Phyllis Schneck, deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, which runs a 24/7 incident-response center responding to threats.
Fears about breaches have been around since the late 1960s, when the federal government began shifting its operations onto computers. Officials responded with software designed to sniff out malicious programs and raise alarms about intruders.
And yet, attackers have always found a way in. Since 2006, there have been more than 87 million sensitive or private records exposed by breaches of federal networks, according to the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, which tracks cyberincidents at all levels of government through news, private sector and government reports.
By comparison, retail businesses lost 255 million records during that time, financial and insurance services lost 212 million and educational institutions lost 13 million. The federal records breached included employee usernames and passwords, veterans' medical records and a database detailing structural weaknesses in the nation's dams.
From 2009 to 2013, the number of reported breaches just on federal computer networks -- the .gov and .mils -- rose from 26,942 to 46,605, according to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. Last year, US-CERT responded to a total of 228,700 cyberincidents involving federal agencies, companies that run critical infrastructure and contract partners. That's more than double the incidents in 2009.
And employees are to blame for at least half of the problems.
Last year, for example, about 21 percent of all federal breaches were traced to government workers who violated policies; 16 percent who lost devices or had them stolen; 12 percent who improperly handled sensitive information printed from computers; at least 8 percent who ran or installed malicious software; and 6 percent who were enticed to share private information, according to an annual White House review.
Documents released to the AP show how workers were lured in.
In one incident around Christmas 2011, Education Department employees received an email purportedly from Amazon.com that asked them to click on a link. Officials quickly warned staff that it could be malicious. The department did not release information to the AP about any resulting damage.
Reports from the Defense Department's Defense Security Service, tasked with protecting classified information and technologies in the hands of federal contractors, show how easy it is for hackers to get into DOD networks. One military user received messages that his computer was infected when he visited a website about schools. Officials tracked the attacker to what appeared to be a Germany-based server.
"We'll always be vulnerable to ... human-factor attacks unless we educate the overall workforce," said Assistant Secretary of Defense and cybersecurity adviser Eric Rosenbach.
Although the government is projected to spend $65 billion on cybersecurity contracts between 2015 and 2020, many experts believe the effort is not enough to counter a growing pool of hackers whose motives vary. Russia, Iran and China have been named as suspects in some attacks, while thieves seek out other valuable data. Only a small fraction of attackers are caught.
For every thief or hostile state, there are tens of thousands of victims like Robert Curtis.
He declined to talk about specifics of his case. According to court records, a thief in September 2011 broke into a car in a San Antonio garage and stole unencrypted computer tapes containing the Pentagon workers' information. The car belonged to an employee of a federal contractor tasked with securing those records.
Criminals have tried to get cash, loans, credit -- even establish businesses -- in Curtis' name, according to court records. He and his wife have frozen bank and credit accounts. A lawsuit brought by victims was dismissed.
"It is very ironic," said Curtis, himself a cybersecurity expert who worked to provide secure networks at the Pentagon. "I was the person who had paper shredders in my house. I was a consummate data protection guy."

European think tank says Russian brinksmanship at Cold War levels

A report from a European think tank has identified more than 40 dangerous incidents involving forces from Russia and those of NATO member states over the past eight months. 
The report, released Monday by the London-based European Leadership Network (ELN), specified three incidents in the past year that could have sparked open conflict between Russia and the West. 
"We believe [the incidents] are a very serious development, not necessarily because they indicate a desire on the part of Russia to start a war but because they show a dangerous game of brinkmanship is being played, with the potential for unintended escalation in what is now the most serious security crisis in Europe since the cold war," the report's authors wrote. 
The report was released following this weekend's celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, during which ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev warned that Russia and the West were in danger of entering a "new Cold War."
The 83-year-old accused the West, particularly the United States, of giving in to "triumphalism" after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the communist bloc. The result, he said, could partly be seen in the inability of global powers to prevent or resolve conflicts in Yugoslavia, the Middle East and most recently Ukraine.
The first incident noted by the ELN, in March of this year, involved a near-collision between a civilian airliner and a Russian spy plane that had turned off its transponders, making it nearly impossible to be tracked by civilian air traffic controllers. The aircraft, which was traveling from Copenhagen to Rome at the time of the near-miss, was carrying 132 people on board. The report said that the civilian aircraft's pilots were only just able to avert a tragedy when they spotted the Russian plane through their window. 
The second major incident was the September abduction of Eston Kohver, an Estonian secret service operative who was taken from a border post on Estonian territory. Kohver was later brought to Moscow and accused of espionage. The third incident was last month's hunt by Sweden's armed forces for the source of what Stockholm termed "foreign underwater activity." Rumors that the military was searching for a Russian submarine were never confirmed by officials.
The report maps most of the encounters as having taken place around the Baltic Sea, but incidents have also occurred over the Black Sea and along the U.S. and Canadian borders. 
In September, military officials said that two F-22 fighter jets intercepted six Russian military airplanes that were flying about 55 nautical miles from the coast of Alaska. The Russian planes were identified as two IL-78 refueling tankers, two Mig-31 fighter jets and two Bear long-range bombers. They looped south and returned to their base in Russia after the U.S. jets were scrambled.
Hours after that encounter, two Canadian CF-18 fighter jets intercepted two of the long-range Russian Bear bombers about 40 nautical miles off the Canadian coastline in the Beaufort Sea.
In both cases, the Russian planes entered the Air Defense Identification Zone, which extends about 200 miles from the coastline. They did not enter sovereign airspace of the United States or Canada.
The report recommends that Moscow "urgently re-evaluate" its posture, adopted in the midst of ongoing fighting in Ukraine; that both Russia and NATO improve communications, including the development of a joint crisis management arrangement in the event of a deadly incident; and that both sides exercise "military and political restraint."

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Fast and Furious II? Justice Department watchdog faults agency over grenade probe

Federal agents and prosecutors in Arizona made multiple errors in their investigation of a U.S. citizen who was suspected of smuggling grenade components to Mexico, including failing to arrest him when there was more than enough evidence to do so, the Justice Department watchdog said in a harshly critical report Thursday.
The inspector general's report found parallels between the investigation into Jean Baptiste Kingery by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and "Operation Fast and Furious," an ATF gun-running operation along the Southwest border that relied on flawed tactics and became a political firestorm for the Justice Department. Those similarities include poor supervision, weak oversight and a failure "to take or insist on overt enforcement action against the subjects of the investigations."
"Our reviews of both cases concluded that, in failing to act, they did not adequately consider the risk to public safety in the United States and Mexico created by the subjects' illegal activities," the report states.
In a statement, the Justice Department said that in the past six years it had taken "aggressive action" to ensure that the mistakes of the Kingery case "are not repeated."
The department said the officials responsible for the operation have either left the department or have been reassigned. It also noted that the deputy attorney general last year issued guidance to U.S. attorney's offices around the country about "overseeing sensitive operations." The ATF has also developed specialized training to deal with intelligence matters and legal issues.
According to the report, the ATF learned in 2009 that Kingery was ordering grenade components from an online military surplus dealer that agents suspected were being transported into Mexico and converted into live grenades for use by drug cartels.
Agents over the next few months intercepted two deliveries of grenade components that were intended for Kingery. But instead of trying to arrest him for the illegal export, agents marked the components so they could be identified later, delivered the items to his shipping address and set up surveillance to determine whether the parts were being taken into Mexico.
The operation came under public scrutiny in 2011 after Mexican soldiers involved in a shootout with members of a drug cartel found grenade hulls bearing markings similar to the ones the ATF made as part of its investigation.
The inspector general's report also faults the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona for failing to prosecute Kingery after he was stopped at the border in June 2010 transporting hundreds of grenade hulls and fuses. A prosecutor said Kingery was not arrested because the ATF wanted him as an informant, though ATF agents said he was never used as an informant and that prosecutors simply refused at the time to bring charges, according to the report.
Kingery returned to Mexico, where he was arrested in August 2011. Mexican authorities are prosecuting him for allegedly violating organized crime laws.
In "Operation Fast and Furious," federal agents permitted illicitly purchased weapons to be transported unimpeded in an effort to track them to high-level arms traffickers.
Federal agents lost control of some 2,000 weapons, and many of them wound up at crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S. Two of the guns were found at the scene of the December 2010 slaying of border agent Brian Terry near the Arizona border city of Nogales.

For Hillary Clinton, an uncertain return to the campaign trail

She is the leading global voice championing the empowerment of girls and women, but of the eight Democratic women Hillary Clinton stumped for in the 2014 midterm cycle, only one was declared a winner.
She is the prospective frontrunner for her party’s presidential nomination in 2016, but of the 26 Democrats Clinton campaigned for in the midterms, 12 won, 13 lost, and one – Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana – lingers in uncertainty, facing a Dec. 6 runoff election against her Republican opponent.
This cycle marked Hillary Clinton’s return to the arena of electoral politics for the first time since her failed presidential bid in 2008 – secretaries of state traditionally abstain from partisan activity – and for those scouring the newly refashioned landscape for indications of how Clinton’s White House prospects may be affected, the results are decidedly mixed.
Supporters of the former secretary of state argue that, despite having eschewed the rough and tumble of politics for six years, she used her time on the stump this fall to good effect, forging new and strong ties with local party chieftains in states where such connections will prove valuable to a presidential run in two years.
“I think Hillary Clinton did yeoman's work in campaigning out there for Democrats,” said Patti Solis Doyle, a former Clinton campaign manager in 2008, in an interview with Fox News. “She did what she could to help her friends, and very strong Democrats out there. She raised money for them; she campaigned for them.” 
Solis Doyle emphasized that neither Clinton’s name nor her policies were on the ballot on Tuesday – but that hasn’t stopped some of her potential rivals from spreading the word that the big GOP gains marked a major setback for her aspirations. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the GOP’s 2012 vice presidential nominee, told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that Tuesday’s verdict “tells you that she’s not inevitable. I think she’s very beatable.”
More pointed was Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who took to Twitter with unabashed glee to brand the 13 unsuccessful candidates Clinton stumped for “Hillary’s Losers.” “The 1990s was a long time ago,” Paul said on “Fox and Friends” on Friday morning. “I don't think there is such a Clinton cachet as there once was. ... There is a message here about Hillary Clinton as much as there is a message about the president.”
Doug Schoen, a former pollster for President Clinton, dismissed Sen. Paul’s suggestions that Mrs. Clinton remains, in the public imagination, tied at the hip to the unpopular incumbent in the White House. “This election was a repudiation, first and foremost, as every Republican I've heard say, of President Obama,” Schoen said on Fox News' “Happening Now” on Wednesday. “I think that the Clinton brand is separate and distinct from President Obama. I don't think this has an appreciable impact on her fortunes and future.”
With long memories of the central role that Florida and Ohio have played in recent presidential contests, Clinton and her Democratic colleagues cannot have looked favorably upon the Republicans’ success on Tuesday in holding onto the governor’s mansions in those critical battleground states. Some have argued that she will benefit from the GOP wave by being able to run against the GOP Congress.
Yet in the actual business of campaigning – the deployment of rhetoric and charisma to sway persuadable hearts and minds – Clinton’s performance again left some feeling as though she has still not worked out the kinks on display in her rocky book tour this spring. Perhaps Clinton’s most memorable statement as a surrogate speaker during this cycle was her assertion, during an Oct. 24 appearance in Boston on behalf of (doomed) Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley: “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.”
That statement prompted criticism from Charles Lane, the left-leaning opinion writer for the Washington Post. “ I thought NBC created a job for Chelsea [Clinton], so there is at least one corporation that has created a job,” he quipped on the Oct. 27 edition of Fox News' “Special Report with Bret Baier.” “She has made quite a few gaffes now since this unofficial presidential campaign has gotten underway.”
Solis Doyle, who recalled chatting amiably with Clinton at a Georgetown event last month, thought her former boss effectively used the campaign cycle to regain her footing as a stump speaker after a long absence from the trail and the difficulties of the "Hard Choices" rollout. “There has been some criticism over the book tour,” Solis Doyle said. “But I think what was good about that is that it was able to get some of the, you know, not-great performances out of the way, and she’s sort of back in her game. ... I thought her performance on the stump during the 2014 midterm elections was pretty good.”