How Harry Reid Carpet-Bombed the South

When the latest round of polls in key states showed vulnerable Democratic senators holding their own and the GOP’s dream candidate, Rep. Tom Cotton, an Iraq veteran and Harvard grad, down 10 points in his race against Arkansas Senator David Pryor, Republicans blamed the Senate Majority PAC as the chief culprit in shifting the landscape and upending the numbers.

Formed in 2011 and staffed by former aides to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, it has been spending heavily and early in races that will determine which party controls the Senate after November, and of course whether Reid keeps his job as leader.

Uncontrolled Immigration is like having a tree with too many apples.

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Climategate II? Scientific community accused of muzzling dissent on global warming

Some are calling it the new "Climategate."
A paper by Lennart Bengtsson, a respected research fellow and climatologist at Britain's University of Reading, was rejected last February by a leading academic journal after a reviewer found it "harmful" to the climate change agenda. The incident is prompting new charges that the scientific community is muzzling dissent when it comes to global warming.
"[Bengtsson] has been a very prolific publisher and was considered one of the top scientists in the mainstream climate community," said Marc Morano, of the website ClimateDepot.com, which is devoted to questioning global warming.
Bengtsson had grown increasingly skeptical of the scientific consensus, often cited by President Obama, that urgent action is needed to curb carbon emissions before climate change exacts an irreversible toll on the planet with extreme drought, storms and rising seas levels.
The president repeatedly has rejected naysayers in the climate debate -- most recently, when he spoke May 9 in Mountainview, Calif. "We've still got some climate deniers who shout loud, but they're wasting everybody's time on a settled debate,” he said.
The administration recently released a comprehensive climate report that critics worry will be used to justify additional environmental regulations.
Bengtsson's paper, submitted to the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that greenhouse gas emissions might be less harmful and cause less warming than computer models project. For that, Morano said, Bengtssonpaid a steep price.
"They've threatened him. They've bullied him. They've pulled his papers. They're now going through everything they can to smear his reputation. And the ‘they’ I'm referring to is the global warming establishment," Morano said.
The Times of London reported that Bengtsson resigned from the advisory board of a think tank after being subjected to “McCarthy-style pressure” from other academics. Pressure even reportedly came from one U.S. government scientist.
Bengsston told the Times of London this week: "It is an indication of how science is gradually being influenced by political views. The reality hasn't been keeping up with computer models."
He added, "If people are proposing to do major changes to the world's economic system we must have much more solid information."
His view helps to illustrate the cavernous divide in this debate. Climate scientists who question the consensus often say they're demonized -- unable to publish, unable to find research funding. The scientific establishment presses on -- frustrated with anyone who, in their view,would impede saving the planet.
The debate raises a question about whether consensus in science is even relevant. As the novelist and global warming skeptic Michael Crichton argued,"The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with consensus."
The Bengtsson allegations recall a similar controversy in 2009, dubbed “Climategate,” when hundreds of emails were leaked, several of which raised questions about whether scientists were overstating the climate change case.

Rural New Mexico county fights feds over water rights

WEED, N.M. –  The latest dispute over federal control of land and water in the West has erupted along the banks of the Agua Chiquita, a small spring-fed stream in the mountains of southern New Mexico where the federal government has installed metal fences and locked gates to keep cattle out.
The move has enraged one rural county, where the sheriff has been ordered by the county commission to cut the locks. The U.S. attorney for the district of New Mexico hoped a meeting Friday would ease tensions enough to avoid an escalation like the armed standoff last month over grazing rights in Nevada.
The discussion resulted only in more frustration and disappointment.
Otero County Commissioner Ronny Rardin said after the meeting that the dispute was far from over.
"Ultimately, it is incumbent upon the commission, the sheriff and the citizens of Otero County to stand up for our constitutional rights," he said.
In a statement, U.S. Attorney's Office in New Mexico said no resolution was reached during the meeting and that the office will continue to monitor the situation "to ensure that public safety is preserved" in Otero County.
"To that end, the U.S. Attorney's Office will make every effort to facilitate a dialogue between county officials and the Forest Service," the office said.
Decades in the making, the dispute in Otero County centers on whether the Forest Service has the authority to keep ranchers from accessing Agua Chiquita, which means Little Water in Spanish. In wet years, the spring can run for miles through thick conifer forest. This summer, much of the stream bed is dry.
The Forest Service says the enclosures are meant to protect what's left of the wetland habitat. Forest Supervisor Travis Moseley said the metal fences and gates simply replaced strands of barbed wire that had been wrecked over the years by herds of elk.
The Otero County Commission passed a resolution earlier this week declaring that the Forest Service doesn't have a right to control the water. Ranchers say they believe the move is an effort by the federal government to push them from the land.
"If we let them take over our water rights, that's the first step. Then we would have nothing left here," said Gary Stone, head of the Otero County Cattleman's Association.
U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M., said what's happening in Otero County is another example of overreach by the federal government.
"These disputes could be easily avoided if federal bureaucrats would stick to their constitutional oath and respect property rights," he said.
With no resolution in sight, Sheriff Benny House said Friday he plans to continue investigating whether forest employees are breaking state law by fencing off the water. The commission is also seeking a congressional hearing on the matter.
Rancher Ed Eldridge is next in line to see a fence erected around the water on his allotment.
"I don't think any foreign power could take us over, but we might lose our country from within our borders if we lose our constitutional rights," Eldridge said.
Still, Eldridge, Stone and other residents said they aren't looking for an armed standoff with the federal government. They just want their water and property rights recognized and respected, they said.
Attorney Blair Dunn, who is representing the county, said he's worried that transparency and a media spotlight could be the only things that prevent the dispute from reaching a dangerous boiling point.
"Generally, cooler heads prevail when we're able to sit everybody down and figure out something that works," Dunn said.
Moseley of the Forest Service said he's not surprised by the conflict, given the pressure the agency is under to manage the land for different uses.
"I can't speak to a broader spectrum of federal regulations and how they affect private businesses and lives, but I don't believe there is a conspiracy per se," he said when asked about ranchers' claims of being pushed from the land.
County Commissioner Tommie Herrell disagreed. Describing the agency's actions as tyranny, he said the Forest Service is unwilling to temporarily open the gates while the parties search for long-term solutions.

More than 1 million Americans may be receiving wrong ObamaCare subsidies

Hundreds of thousands of Americans signed up for coverage under ObamaCare may be receiving incorrect subsidy payments -- some bigger than they actually deserve -- from the federal government, The Washington Post reported.
The government has identified the errors, which are the result of discrepancies in income listings on insurance applications and those on file with the Internal Revenue Service, but has been unable to fix the problem, according to the report.
Since income information is used to determine subsidy eligibility under the law, the federal government may be paying insurance subsidies that are too generous or not enough for more than 1 million Americans with income discrepancies. 
Only a fraction of consumers notified about the discrepancies have responded to federal health officials' requests to submit pay stubs or other proof of their income. Officials told The Washington Post they do not yet know the percentages of overpayments or underpayments.
According to internal documents obtained by the newspaper, income discrepancies exist on 1.1 million to 1.5 million out of nearly 4 million applications containing inconsistencies. About 650,000 pieces of evidence for income verification have reportedly been submitted by consumers.
Because technology does not exist to match income "proof" with applications, officials plan to start the work of sorting out inaccurate incomes and subsidies by hand starting this summer, Obama administration officials told The Post. 
Americans receiving excess subsidies are currently required to return any unwarranted payments next year, according to the report.
Julie Bataille, communications director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that despite the inaccurate subsidies, the federal health insurance marketplace has processed tens of millions of pieces of data successfully.
"While most data matched up right away during the application process, we take seriously the cases that require more work and have a system in place to expeditiously resolve these data inconsistencies," Bataille told The Post.
She added that federal health officials are "working every day to make sure individuals and families get the tax credits they deserve and that no one is receiving a tax credit they shouldn’t."
During last year's budget negotiations, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius vowed to vet income information that people submitted as part of their health insurance applications after Republican lawmakers voiced concerns about the potential for fraud. 
Consumer advocates told The Post they are concerned about the consequences of inaccurate income information for ObamaCare enrollees. 
"I have this sick feeling that there are these people out there who have made unintentional errors, and in a few years will be subject to massive tax bills," Jessica Waltman, senior vice president for government affairs at the National Association of Health Underwriters, told the newspaper.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

More whistleblowers detail VA abuses, suffer retaliation

The allegations of wait times, delayed care for veterans and cooked books began in Phoenix, but new revelations by two more Veterans Affairs whistleblowers in two different states suggest the VA problems are endemic.
“What really bothered me was that this delay was a direct result of this extremely low sense of caring for the patient,” said Dr. Jose Mathews, the chief psychiatrist for the VA Medical Center in St. Louis starting in Nov 2012.
Mathews and another whistleblower in Texas detailed their concerns to Fox News.
According to Mathews, he noticed that the doctors he oversaw who were responsible for seeing veterans with post-traumatic stress and other acute mental health issues were working just a few hours a day. They were seeing about half the patients they could, Mathews alleged in a federal whistleblower complaint filed last year. Meanwhile, there were mounting suicides among veterans being treated at his facility -- and officially, the St. Louis VA was reporting to its headquarters in Washington that its productivity was among the highest in the nation.
“They all got bonuses -- that's the sad part. Because in reality we were not really doing a good job, but it shows up on paper as if we are,” Mathews told Fox News.
When Mathews complained, he was removed from his job, assigned to an isolated office to oversee pensions and compensation. He was told not to contact the other doctors or patients.
“I think they have some form of moral blindness or something. They're not able to see that this is not right, what they're doing is not right,” said Mathews, a soft-spoken psychiatrist who says the veterans would have to wait a month or more for mental health treatment.
Spokesman Paul Sherbo, of the St. Louis VAMC, said in a written statement: “The St. Louis VA Medical Center leadership is aware of and is addressing the alleged issues. VA is committed to providing the best quality of care that all our nation's Veterans need and deserve."
A second whistleblower -- from Harlingen, Texas – Dr. Richard Krugman accused the VA facility he oversaw in southeast Texas of delaying life-saving colonoscopies in order to cut costs. He provided a memo from his boss from 2011 outlining the shift in policy. He, too, was fired.
“I was treated like an animal. I was treated like a leper. I was treated like, how dare you attack me, or how dare you say what you're saying,” said Krugman, a former associate chief of staff at the Veterans Affairs health care system.
He argued that his boss told them to require three successive fecal occult blood tests before sending the patient for a colonoscopy, a delay that could cause potential colon cancer to go from a treatable stage 1 to a deadly stage 4, if unaddressed.
His boss -- now a VA director in Texas -- pushed back, issuing the following response:
"Allegations such as the [VA] stopped sending patients for colonoscopies because the agency could not afford non-VA care and instead utilized a fecal occult blood test instead of colonoscopies was not substantiated" by the independent Office of Special Counsel that investigated Krugman’s charges and closed the case last November, according to the statement provided by Jeff Milligan, former director of VA Texas Valley health network. Krugman disputed the claim.
The Office of Special Counsel found none of Krugman's claims to be substantiated. But when it closed the case, it admitted in a report and letter written to President Obama last November that it was forced to rely on an internal investigation carried out by the VA itself. It did not have the ability to independently investigate Krugman’s claims. The investigative panel assigned to get to the bottom of Krugman’s allegations was appointed by VA Under Secretary of Health Robert Petzel, who resigned Friday.
As first reported by Fox News last September, Petzel told congressional oversight committee members he had “no regrets” about awarding $63,000 in bonuses to hospital administrators in Pittsburgh after more than five veterans died of preventable Legionnaire’s disease contracted at a VA facility. 
“What I really got upset about was, over the last couple of weeks, everybody is now saying, ‘Oh, I never knew that. Oh, I didn't see that,” Krugman said in an interview with Fox News. “The reports have been there since 2010, 2011, and each article, or each new material that I received, I purposely sent to those different gentlemen, with a backup copy, just so that they can't say, ‘Oh, I never knew this, or I never knew that because every time that they say, ‘I don't know this or I don't know that,’ somebody else dies.”
Veterans' groups met in Washington this week to call for secure hotlines so that more whistleblowers feel they can come forward and not face retaliation.
Jennifer Griffin currently serves as a national security correspondent for FOX News Channel . She joined FNC in October 1999 as a Jerusalem-based correspondent.

Who got $$ from Brunei's Islamic law government? The Clinton Foundation

As Hollywood hotshots protest the iconic Beverly Hills Hotel over its ownership by Brunei's sultan -- and his recent full-fledged embrace of Islamic law -- it turns out the Brunei government has financial connections to another American institution: The Clinton Foundation. 
The nonprofit foundation lists Brunei alongside Kuwait, Oman and Qatar as donors that gave between $1 million and $5 million through last year. The foundation confirmed the donation from Brunei was made in 2002, in connection with the construction of the Clinton Presidential Library in Arkansas. 
"The Clinton Foundation's impact would not be possible without the generous support of our donors," the foundation's website reads. "Their contributions have made a difference in the lives of tens of millions across the world."
The contribution could prove an uncomfortable detail in the foundation's financial records, particularly as Hillary Clinton weighs a possible presidential run. Though The Clinton Foundation has thus far avoided any major controversy over the matter, a Brunei connection has caused headaches for the Beverly Hills Hotel on the other side of the country.
Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah has come under heavy criticism since the ultra-wealthy leader, who has been in power for decades, embraced a harsh Islamic penal code for his southeast Asian nation of roughly 408,000 residents. The change would make adultery, abortion and same-sex relationships offenses punishable by ancient methods -- flogging, or even stoning. 
The development led Beverly Hills’ city council to unanimously pass a resolution calling for Brunei to change its laws or divest its ownership of the iconic hotel property, which opened in 1912 and has since been designated a historic landmark. Affectionately known as the “Pink Palace,” the hotel boasts 208 rooms over 12 acres, including a presidential suite for $20,000 nightly and a seven-day minimum stay. 
A growing number of Hollywood groups and luminaries have since relocated events typically held at the hotel in protest, including the International Women’s Media Foundation and the Barbara Davis Carousel of Hope. Celebrities including Jay Leno and Ellen DeGeneres have also called for boycotts of the hotel.
“This is 2014, not 1814,” Leno, the former “Tonight Show” host, told dozens of protesters earlier this month.
Leno told The Los Angeles Times that local residents had been too absorbed by the controversy surrounding Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling and his remarks on race to properly pay attention to the Brunei developments. 
“I mean, we get so upset when a team owner says something inappropriate,” Leno told the newspaper. “Here are people being killed, stoned to death. ... It's just a matter of priorities, that's what it is.”
It's unclear whether the Clinton Foundation would consider returning its own Brunei donation, but a statement from the foundation said it does not anticipate any more. 
"The Foundation received a one-time donation from the government of Brunei in 2002. We have not received any additional donations from them since, and we do not expect any in the future," the statement said. 
In total, the Clinton Foundation has received at least $492 million since its inception in 1997 through 2007. Other notable names or entities within the high-donation bracket include filmmaker Steven Spielberg, the Boeing Company and The Walmart Foundation.
Meanwhile, the Beverly Hills Hotel reportedly tapped a former Clinton aide to perform damage control in the growing saga. Mark Fabiani, known for his aggressive style during the Clinton administration, was hired last week to oversee crisis management, Politico reported.
In 2008, the Clinton Foundation disclosed the names of its 205,000 donors, ending a decade of resistance to identifying the sources of its money. Some 12,000 donors gave $10 or less, while at least $46 million was received from Saudi Arabia (which also imposes strict Islamic law), Norway and other foreign governments. 
The New York Times reported recently on alleged financial issues at the foundation, and said Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton were readying for a $250 million fundraising push.

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