AttackWatch.com is the Administration's Latest Propaganda Arm

President Obama's official re-election campaign has set up a website ostensibly to defend him against false attacks, but its obvious purpose is to smear Republicans and propagandize. What could be more shameless??      
Jim Messina, Obama's re-election campaign manager, in a fundraising email announcing the website, said: "Forming the first line of defense against a barrage of misinformation won't be easy. Our success will depend on a team of researchers and writers to stay on the lookout for false claims about the President and his record, bring you the facts, and hold our opposition accountable."?      
Does any rational person believe these people anymore? They trade in lies and misinformation, and the only chance they have to re-elect Obama -- and it's still slim -- is to grossly distort Obama's record and fabricate fantasies about his opposition.?      
That's what this new website is all about. It's called "AttackWatch.com," but it should be called "AttackDog.com." It has already proved that in its first few days of existence. When I opened the website for the first time, I saw revolving pictures of Obama's currently front-running GOP rivals, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, with the accompanying captions "Rick Perry's massive jobs lie" and "Romney's job chart shows flawed understanding of the facts." Glenn Beck's photo also rotates into view with the line "Glenn Beck twists the facts on Israel."?      
Do you ever remember a White House -- and make no mistake about who's behind this ruse -- soliciting hordes of followers to do opposition research for it? Then again, we've never before had a community organizer in the Oval Office.?      
The pseudo-indignation of Obama's supporters rings hollow when measured against Obama's very mode of operation throughout his term of office. On every major issue, Obama's practice has been to select, isolate and demonize a target, from fat cat bankers to insurance companies making obscene profits to the greedy rich who didn't want to pay their fair share of taxes to Chrysler's secured creditors who were slandered because they resisted his scandalous debt restructuring scheme.?      
The concept of this website is perversely amusing when you consider the administration's history of manipulating the Internet for political gain. I reported in my book "Crimes Against Liberty" that the Obama-Holder Justice Department had formed a secret in-house blogging group to participate on websites to influence public opinion. Dubbed the "Blog Squad," this political operation was operating out of the very halls of the institution dedicated to administering justice in the United States. On the taxpayers' dime, it was paying partisan political operatives to scour the Internet for news stories, commentaries and blog posts critical of the administration's agenda and then post comments supporting the administration -- all without identifying who was behind the posts.?      
Some of the administration's advisers didn't even disguise their intent to use the Internet deceitfully for political purposes. One of Obama's "closest confidants," Cass Sunstein, as head of the administration's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has openly advocated the government's use of fake websites and outside 501(c)(3) interest groups to front as independent supporters of government policy and to -- get this -- "cognitively infiltrate" opposing websites.?      
What, you ask, is "cognitive infiltration"? That's easy. Salon's Glenn Greenwald -- no right-wing extremist -- wrote that while at Harvard Law School in 2008, Sunstein co-wrote "a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-'independent' advocates to 'cognitively infiltrate' online groups and websites -- as well as other activist groups -- which advocate views that Sunstein deems 'false conspiracy theories.'"?      
In other words, one of Obama's right-hand men suggested that government employees masquerade as private citizens to "infiltrate" websites and try to influence public opinion as if they were just random citizens. Before you pooh-pooh this because it purports to be in opposition only to "conspiracy theories," remember that this administration's Justice Department used government publications to defame tea party protesters and returning veterans as conspiracy theorists, racists, religious nuts and domestic terrorists. If you think Sunstein's proposed surreptitious activities are limited to the innocuous exposure of crazies, you have another think coming.?      
If Obama were to run on his actual record in office -- the worst of any president in modern history -- he would receive a smaller percentage of votes than any president in history. The poverty rate is at a 50-year high, and we have catastrophic unemployment, especially black unemployment, an economy near depression, a doubling of the national debt and a trail of corruption involving untold billions from Stimulus Sr., of which Solyndra is just one example.?      
The recent New York and Nevada elections and Obama's ever-cratering approval ratings show how desperately he is hemorrhaging support. He has no choice but to divert our attention from the record and onto red herrings he can generate through false characterizations of his opponents. That's what AttackWatch.com is about. That's what the entire re-election effort is about.

The Cash-for-Visas Program

As part of his warmed-over jobs plan, President Obama is repackaging "Buy American" stimulus subsidies to help hard-hit homegrown businesses. At the same time, however, Congress is pushing to expand a fraud-riddled investor program that puts U.S. citizenship for sale to the highest foreign business bidders.?      

Call it the Buy America Cash-for-Visas plan.?      
As I first reported 10 years ago, the EB-5 immigrant investor program was created under an obscure section of the 1990 Immigration Act. The law allows 10,000 wealthy foreigners a year to purchase green cards by investing between $500,000 and $1 million in new commercial enterprises or troubled businesses. After two years, foreign investors, their spouses and their children all receive permanent resident status -- which allows them to contribute to U.S. political campaigns and provides a speedy gateway to citizenship. The program is set to expire in 2012.?      
On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee's Immigration subpanel entertained calls to save the EB-5 law. Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren is sponsoring a bill to salvage the immigrant investor visas. The legislation (sponsored by open-borders Democrat John Kerry and Republican Richard Lugar in the Senate) also creates a second program with lower barriers to entry that would provide "start-up visas" for foreign entrepreneurs. They would be granted unconditional permanent-resident status if they create a government-determined number of jobs.?      
And there's the rub. Obama's make-believe math on stimulus jobs saved or created -- coupled with the snowballing $535 million, stimulus-funded Solyndra solar company bankruptcy scandal -- tells you all you need to know about Washington's credibility in picking economic winners and losers.?      
If the feds can't be trusted to invest government subsidies wisely in American companies, how can they possibly determine which overseas investors will be successful here? And if top U.S. loan officials have demonstrated such sloppy, politically driven disregard for financial due diligence on risky half-billion-dollar enterprises, how can immigration officials be trusted to better protect the national interest??      
Answer: They can't. In fact, the benefits of the EB-5 economic development plan have gone to former Immigration and Naturalization Service officials who formed lucrative limited partnerships to cash in on their access, and to shady foreign fraudsters.?      
Whistleblowers told me how immigrant investors paid token fees to these partnerships. The partnerships secured promissory notes for the remainder of the foreign investments, which were forgiven after investors received their permanent green cards. Former INS employees, working for these partnerships, aggressively lobbied their old colleagues to accept such bogus financial arrangements. As a result, according to an internal U.S. Justice Department investigative report, "aliens were paying $125K" instead of the required $500,000 to $1 million minimum, and "almost all of the monies went to the General Partners and the companies who set up the limited partners."?      
In 2007, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that the "program between 1995 and 1998 was frequently abused when would-be immigrants were allowed to pay a small amount in cash for a green card, signing a promissory note for the balance. The note didn't come due for several years -- long after the two-year conditional period built into the EB-5 visa had ended and permanent residency had been granted."?      
An earlier Baltimore Sun investigation found "only a tiny fraction of the money ever made it to the companies seeking assistance." Many of the distressed U.S. firms that the program intended to help have closed because they never received promised funding.?      
Instead of allowing the troubled program to sunset, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has "streamlined" the EB-5 immigrant investor green card process -- guaranteeing processing within 15 calendar days for foreign business "projects that are fully developed and ready to be implemented." The same expedited rush for government-directed investments gave us Solyndra. What's worse in this case is the sordid peddling of the privileges of citizenship.?      
Twenty years ago, when the program's failures were first exposed, Rep. John W. Bryant, a Texas Democrat, protested on the House floor: "This provision is an unbelievable departure from our tradition of cherishing our most precious birthright as Americans. Have we no self-respect as a nation? Are we so broke we have to sell our birthright?"?      
Apparently so.

Congress Likely to Cram Down Solyndra Billionaire

Sources close to the Congressional investigation into the loans that the Obama administration made to bankrupt solar company Solyndra, say that Congress is likely to attempt to scuttle an agreement that the administration reached last February that allowed major investors to take precedent over US taxpayers in the liquidation of the company.

In February 2011, Solyndra renegotiated with creditors, including the United States Government, in order to try to avoid bankruptcy. In that deal, an investment group funded by Obama donor George Kaiser, gave Solyndra $75 million in additional money in the form of debt on the condition that the US Government took a subordinated position in any bankruptcy after the first $150 million was returned to the government.

What that means is that in a liquidation of Solyndra, the administration will allow that the first $150 million goes to the government, the next $75 million  goes to Kaiser's fund. That would leave the government with a balance of $377 million outstanding unless a liquidation fetches more than $225 million.

In that case, the Kaiser investor group would likely control the amount of money that is eventually paid out to the government and other creditors and shareholders. This is a technique, known as a "cram down," that is often used by investors looking to gain control of a troubled company at the expense of other investors.

Democrat Senator Michael Bennet from Colorado used the same tactics to take control and combine three ailing movie theater groups in 2002. Bennet bought the senior debt of the companies while they were going down the tubes. This in turn allowed him to cut out other investors as the companies liquidated. Teachers' pension funds and other investors were forced to take pennies on the dollar for their investment because the Bennet group owned the senior position.

Within two years Bennet's group paid themselves back every penny they spent on the investment, gave Bennet $11 million, took on another billion dollars in debt, while public investors saw the price of the stock tank from $24 to $12 currently.

This is what the Louisiana Teachers' Pension Fund said at the time:

“…(T)he real explanation for draining the Company of its cash is that the Board is looting Regal and its subsidiaries to pay the individual Board members hundreds of millions of dollars in dividends, which have no legitimate business purpose and provide absolutely no benefit to the company.”

“(O)utrageous transfer of cash, which is leaving Regal in a clearly weakened and precarious condition… Anschutz and the Board are using Regal’s funds for their own personal purposes, leaving shareholders at risk of another trip through bankruptcy. There is simply no reasonable business objective for the Dividend.”

Yes, these are the guys who we send to the US Senate. In 2010, Bennet circulated a letter demanding that the country pass Obamacare with a public option. These are the guys we let design our healthcare system. Any questions?

The same "cramdown" technique could potentially allow the Kaiser group to force other investors in Solyndra into taking smaller amounts than the full value that they either invested or loaned to the company.   

Sources familar with the law that governs the loan made under the Solyndra program however say that a plain reading of the law prevents the administration from allowing investors to jump ahead of government guaranteed loans under any circumstances. 

Instead, members of Congress are likely to try to "cram down" the investment the Kaiser group made in February in an attempt to recover taxpayers' money.    

Extortion Funds Enviro Left Through Taxpayer Settlements

I’d never heard of the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) until five years ago. Likewise, I’d never given environmental groups much thought. Like most Americans, I knew groups like the Sierra Club existed and I assumed they did nature hikes or watched birds—or something.
When I accepted a position at the organization I now head up, my eyes were opened and my view changed.
I met Jim Chilton, a rancher and a businessman. He served on the board. His story was one of the first articles I ever wrote.
Jim Chilton is a fifth generation rancher—a cowboy. His ranch includes a grazing permit for 21,500 acres of Federal Forest Service lands south of Tucson, AZ. In 2002, when the USFS renewed his permit for another ten years, CBD went on the attack. The group published a news release and photographs online, alleging that Chilton was mismanaging his allotment.  This was not Chilton’s first altercation with CBD. He’d been a victim of previous unfounded attacks and allegations and was not surprised when they refused to take down the libelous and defamatory post and photos.
As a “cowboy,” Chilton says, “You stand up and fight for truth, justice, integrity, and honor.”
In June of 2003, Chilton filed suit against the CBD. With numerous rulings back and forth, a decision was reached in January 2005 that awarded $600,000 in favor of Chilton in a defamation lawsuit—allowing him to recoup a portion of monies spent in the battle.
CBD had distorted the facts and claimed photos were from the Chilton ranch—when in fact they were not. Referencing the CBD, the jury foreman said: “They acted irresponsibly, and they should have tried to work it out instead of wasting everybody’s time.” In May 2005, CBD asked the judge to throw out the verdict. Finally, on December 6, 2006, an Arizona District Court of Appeals upheld the decision in favor of Chilton—validating the rulings of the lower court.
Addressing the experience, Chilton says, “They lie and distort. They are not on the side of truth. The jury agreed because they voted 10 to 0 that the CBD had defamed me intentionally and with malice.”
The CBD has a record of winning lawsuits, however.
Faced with their record, Chilton viewed them as a “school-yard bully.” The CBD financial records indicate that a substantial portion of their operating costs comes from settlements with the Federal Government. A Government Accountability Office report released on August 31 affirms that environmental groups profit from millions of taxpayer dollars gained through litigation.
CBD has recently beefed up its coffers using federal funds—which ultimately come from the taxpayer. This time the attack was not against a rancher, but against a renewable energy project: BrightSource Energy’s enormous, $2 billion, utility-scale solar project. In February of 2010, BrightSource received $1.37 billion in loan guarantees from the US Department of Energy for the project near the California/Nevada border. Saying the BrightSource project would eliminate tortoise habitat, environmental groups have objected to its location and filed lawsuits to prevent it from going forward. CBD threatened to sue BrightSource. Unlike Chilton, BrightSource settled—believing that the bad press could have a “material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.”
BrightSource’s Media department told me that the specifics of the agreement are confidential, so we do not know how much the settlement was, and, in fact, little news can be found on the deal, but we can assume that a tidy sum was involved to get CBD to walk away from their preferred litigation posture. An AP article on the subject quotes Richard Frank, head of the University of California  Davis Law School’s California Law and Policy Center: “I do believe a number of environmental groups have gotten more savvy and politically sophisticated and have become less ideological and are interested in getting the best deal they can.” Was it ever really about the tortoises?
“The act of securing money, favors, etc. by intimidation” is the definition of extortion. No wonder BrightSource won’t talk about it.
This group of lawyers with a history of questionable tactics such as distortion and extortion is who pushed for the Endangered Species Act listing of the sand dune lizard. When a group of scientists investigated the science behind the listing proposal, CBD could not defend the science so they aimed for distraction—calling the release of the report a “public relations stunt, not a science review.”
In the CBD press release titled “New Mexico Politician Leads Farce ‘science’ Panel on Endangered Species Act Protection for Rare Lizard,” they do not take the report’s accusations apart one-by-one, instead they attack the messengers—specifically NM State Rep. Dennis Kintigh and Congressman Steve Pearce (both vocal opponents of the lizard listing). Jay Lininger, the only ecologist on a staff weighted with attorneys, accused Kintigh and Pearce of making “outlandish claims,” but fails to delineate and prove wrong the specifics of the report. Instead, Lininger makes a sweeping statement claiming that, “the decision to list should be based on science, not baseless rhetoric”—which is exactly why Kintigh led an investigation into the science. Lininger does reference the group’s own “study” to debunk the elected officials’ claims that the ESA listing would be detrimental to the region’s economy.
Instead of blindly believing environmental groups positions, the public needs to look for distortion, extortion, and distraction. As the GAO report found, massive amounts of taxpayer monies are going to these groups through litigation and settlements—leaving one to wonder if it was every really about the critters. Are they really law firms masquerading as zoological societies?

Obama's Pet Billionaire at Solyndra Make Take White House Down

A high profile, politically well-connected California solar energy company that had won a $535 million loan guarantee from the Obama Administration declared bankruptcy earlier this month and closed its doors sending 1100 workers to the unemployment line.   The demise of Solyndra has already sparked an FBI investigation, congressional hearings, and raised numerous questions of political cronyism and corruption connected to the highest levels of the Obama Administration.
While the White House and Congressional Democrats feign surprise at the collapse of what was described as "the most hyped startup in the crowded Solar Energy field," it appears Obama Administration representatives were either easily duped or willingly blind to the facts.  ABC News reports that Department of Energy officials have been regularly attending Solyndra board meetings for months as the company "careened towards bankruptcy" after blowing through the more than half a billion taxpayer dollars. 
Early press reports following Solyndra's bankruptcy announcement disclosed that hundreds of thousands of dollars were contributed by shareholders and executives of Solyndra to the Obama 2008 campaign.  One of the company's largest investors, George B. Kaiser of Tulsa, reportedly contributed $53,500 personally and bundled large amounts more for Obama in 2008.  Kaiser is a billionaire with banking and oil and gas interests that rank him among the wealthiest people in the world.  Kaiser also visited the White House 16 times between 2009 and 2011.  The White House public records indicate that three of Kaiser's visits were on March 12, 2009 and one the following day in which he met with "a Senior Advisor, the former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, the Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council, and the Deputy Director of the National Economic Council."  The $535 million loan was officially approved one week later. 
That loan guarantee agreement negotiated on behalf of Solyndra was fast-tracked through approval by  Obama Administration officials at the Department of Energy and "included the lowest interest of all the green projects" benefitting from DoE funding, according to ABC News.  The guarantee also subordinated the taxpayer's credit position to private investors, like George Kaiser, should the company go bust.  Republicans warned that the deal "put taxpayers at unnecessary risk" but their warning went unheeded.   This means Kaiser will be at the front of the distribution line when Solyndra assets are liquidated.  Chances of any recovery for the taxpayers is somewhere between slim and none.
The startup company also spent over a million dollars lobbying Washington politicians in the last three years; $550,000 in 2010 alone. 
At the invitation of company execs, Barack Obama made a highly publicized visit to the Solyndra facility in Fremont, California in 2010.  Just weeks before his visit to Solyndra, PricewaterhouseCoopers issued the results of an audit of the company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 16, 2010 that should have given the President and the White House considerable pause.   Noting that in the first five years of operation the company had sustained $558 million in losses, the audit report said Solyndra "has suffered recurring losses from operations, negative cash flows since inception and has a net stockholders' deficit that, among other factors, raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern." 
Undaunted, Obama arrived amid great fanfare on May 26 and highlighted the solar energy company as the poster child of the $25 billion green energy grants and subsidies doled out through his ill-fated Economic Stimulus.  Obama confidently proclaimed that companies "like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future." 
The same week, solar energy investment analysts were already warning that Solyndra's business model was seriously flawed and that the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the company "are going to be a huge waste."   The same analysts criticized the Obama Administration's green energy policy as "misguided" for throwing vast sums at "a fledgling startup" (Solyndra) while the established solar companies like Evergreen Solar in Massachusetts were already struggling for market share and economic survival.  A few months later, Evergreen closed US operations, laid off 800 workers, and moved their company to China. 
Less than two months ago, Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison visited Capitol Hill "trumpeting the company's successes and praising the [government] loan."  According to Henry Waxman (CA) and Diana DeGette (CO), Harrison assured them that Solyndra was in a "strong financial position."  Apparently, Harrison's verbal reassurance was enough due diligence oversight on behalf of the taxpayers to satisfy the two leading Democrat green energy evangelists.   They now express surprise that Harrison "did not convey to us the perilous condition of the company." 
The Solyndra debacle is rapidly becoming a White House scandal.  It is far too symptomatic of an Administration that is founded not on principle, but on Chicago-style cronyism and political corruption in the worst sense of the term.  With the passage of his Stimulus, Obama professed great pride that it was free of "earmarks and pet projects" that he said are fraught with "abuse."   Apparently, it's only pork, a pet project, and abusive if somebody other than Obama does it.   
Completely oblivious to scandalous failures like Solyndra and other claims of cronyism from the first Stimulus hanging over the White House, Obama summoned the theater of a joint session of Congress this week to press for another half trillion dollars for Son-of-Stimulus – he prefers to call it the American Jobs Act.  He offered a weak, glancing one line reassurance to Congress that the White House could be trusted to be good stewards of the money; "And to make sure the money is properly spent, we're building on reforms we've already put in place.  No more earmarks.  No more boondoggles." 
What?  At least this time he didn't say he was putting Joe Biden in charge of the checkbook. 

Obama's Solyndra-Gate Won't Go Away

In a preview of what’s likely to become a common occurrence in the Obama energy strategy, a California manufacturer of solar systems that was financed by a half-a-billion loan through the Obama administration announced that it would seek bankruptcy protection last week.
Last month publicly-traded Evergreen Solar filed for bankruptcy protection as the solar market continues to shake out on declining government handouts and fierce competition.
More trouble is expected in the solar industry in the weeks to come. Some of it will come from Congress.
"Last February, the House Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation. Now that Solyndra has bit the dust, the DOE loan guarantee program will be Republican’s crosshairs," says the blog on SmartPlanet.com. "This joint statement issued Wednesday from committee chairman Fred Upton and the panel’s oversight subcommittee chairman Cliff Stearns is a good indicator of how intense this investigation is about to become."

We smelled a rat from the onset. As the highly celebrated first stimulus loan guarantee awarded by the DOE, the $535 million loan for Solyndra was suspect from day one.

It is clear that Solyndra was a dubious investment, but the DOE doubled down in March of this year and restructured the loan, possibly further increasing taxpayers’ liability. That is a question we want answered. In this time of record debt such disregard for taxpayer dollars cannot be tolerated.

It doesn't help the administration that the decision to make the loans in the first place has crony capitalism written all over it.
Big time Obama donors and bundlers have a financial interest in Solyndra.
In May, the left-wing leaning Center for Public Integrity blasted Obama for putting the welfare of donors above that of taxpayers by killing important safeguards in the process of making the loans.
"The Energy Department in March 2009 announced its intention to award Solyndra Inc.a $535 million loan guarantee before receiving final copies of outside reviews typically used to vet such deals," wrote CPI. "An independent federal auditor who has reviewed the energy loan program said moving so quickly without completing thorough reviews exposed the program to perceptions of political influence and put taxpayers at greater risk.

From CPI:
There’s a consequence if you don’t follow a rigorous process that’s transparent, said Franklin Rusco, an analyst with the Government Accountability Office . It makes the agency more susceptible to outside pressures, potentially.

"Fueling that perception was the fact that George Kaiser, one of Solyndra’s top investors, raised about $50,000 for Obama’s presidential campaign," writes the Hertiage Foundation.

"The company benefited from another loan guarantee, this one for $10.3 million, as part of the Export-Import Bank’s Renewable Express program, which was created to encourage exports in the renewable energy industry. The Export-Import Bank’s president and chairman, Fred Hochberg, was also a major Obama donor, bundling an estimated $100,000 for his campaign."

The bankruptcy by Solyndra puts at risk $535 million in government loan guarantees granted in 2010 by the administration. Ironically, the company cited “regulatory and policy uncertainties in recent months” as one of the prime reasons the company “could not achieve full-scale operations.”

1,100 employees lost their jobs immediately by the move, although the administration previously claimed that the company “saved or created” 3,000 jobs with the loan.
Regulatory and policy uncertainties from this administration? Nah.
In 2010, Solyndra spent $550,000 on lobbying the federal government. In 2011, so far they have spent only $220,000 on lobbying. The administration is likely hopeful that this will teach others not to cut their lobbying budget.
Solyndra employees contributed over $10,000 to various Democrat candidates and committees in 2010 including Harry Reid, Gabrielle Gifford, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Diane Feinstein and Barbra Boxer.       
The bankruptcy announcement by the struggling solar company comes amidst a glut of solar panels on the market, combined with tough financing conditions for an industry that can’t compete with old-fashioned fossil-fuel created electricity.
“Solyndra could not achieve full-scale operations rapidly enough to compete in the near term with the resources of larger foreign manufacturers,"  "This competitive challenge was exacerbated by a global oversupply of solar panels  ,"  and a severe compression of prices that in part resulted from uncertainty in governmental incentive programs in Europe and the decline in credit markets that finance solar systems.”
In May, Italy announced that they would be cutting back subsidies to solar companies by about 35 percent with another 23 percent to be chopped off in 2012. With other European subsidies in doubt, private financing is becoming tougher for an industry that can’t scale up to commercial size without significant spending by governments.
In fact, Solyndra was forced in March to scrap plans for a $300 million initial public offering as the financial markets deteriorated and competition from China made the economics a tougher sale for the company.
Instead, the company was forced to take money from inside investors, according to the website Seeking Alpha.
“[Solyndra] had to take $175 million more from their existing investors,” wrote the site in June, “likely at onerous ‘cramdown terms.’ Earlier investors and stock-holding employees end up with shrinking equity shares of the company.”
All told, Seeking Alpha reports that the company received a billion dollars in venture capital plus the $535 million federal loan guarantee. While not all of the money included in the guarantee has been doled out apparently, it’s unclear how much money the government is on the hook for.
Even in June, the company’s viability was being questioned by Seeking Alpha’s green correspondent Green Tech Media, “a business to business site [that covers] daily news and market analysis” on green technology: “What are the repayment terms for the DOE loan?” asked Green Tech. “How does the U.S. expect to get this money back from a company that is losing cash with every shipment?”
Those are good questions that probably should have been asked by the Department of Energy before guaranteeing a half-a-billion in project financing.
Are the Obama folks the only ones now who believe their own rhetoric? I mean if you’ve lost Green Tech Media, haven’t you lost the war?
Last week we criticized the Department of Energy for guaranteeing a $133 million loan to Abegnoa, a Spanish biomass company. The loan will help build a biomass plant with technology that has yet to prove commercially viable despite decades of research and test plant construction.
“If the biomass plant made any sense at all economically the company would be able to get a loan on the strength of its balance sheet,” I wrote in Palin Thumps Harvard, “rather than having to rely on guarantees from the Department of Energy. Because in the end, this plant won’t make money, won’t make the rent and certainly won’t make enough ‘green’ fuel to power Kyle Orton’s Prius for a week.”
So far the Department of Energy has guaranteed $38.7 billion in green loans under Obama, loans that are little more than empty calories salted generously by government cash.
They claim that the program “created or saved” 68, 578 jobs.
Minus 1,100.
Expect the fallout to continue with proposal expected by Obama that will propose fruther stimulus spending on supposed job-creation.
  

Timeline of Energy and Commerce Committee Investigation

February 17, 2011 - Committee Leaders submit a letter to Energy Secretary Chu seeking documents and information about the $535 million loan guarantee that the DOE Loan Guarantee Program awarded Solyndra, Inc. DOE complies with the request.

March 14, 2011 - Committee Leaders submit a letter to OMB requesting key documents and information concerning the review of the Solyndra loan guarantee. A two week deadline is set.

March 17, 2011 – Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations holds a hearing on DOE Recovery Act Spending.

March 28, 2011 – OMB fails to meet the Committee deadline. 

June 7, 2011 – After weeks of back and forth, an in camera review takes place with Committee staff and OMB staff. OMB selected eight emails between OMB and DOE to make available to Committee staff, and refused to produce the rest of the emails or the agreed-upon internal OMB emails and documents.

June 23, 2011 - Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns responded in a letterto OMB after it refused to share requested documents by the Committee regarding the Solyndra loan guarantee investigation. 

June 24, 2011 - The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing regarding OMB’s Role in the DOE Loan Guarantee Process. Sole witness Jeffrey Zients, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget was a no show. 

July 11, 2011 - Committee staff conduct a second in camera review. Committee staff asked OMB about the production of the other categories of documents sought by this Committee, specifically, OMB’s internal communications and documents relating to Solyndra, and its communications with the White House. As the OMB had done for months, OMB staff refused to provide and answer about whether they would produce these materials, and instead maintained that the OMB-DOE communications sufficiently show whether or not OMB had has done its job with regard to Solyndra. 

July 12, 2011 - Energy and Commerce Committee leaders announced the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations were to hold a business meeting on Thursday, July 14, 2011 to consider a motion authorizing the issuance of a subpoena for certain records of the Office and Management and Budget relating to the Department of Energy’s issuance of a loan guarantee to Solyndra, Inc. on September 2, 2009.

July 13, 2011 - Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns wrote a letter to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to provide a final opportunity to avoid the issuance of a subpoena.  OMB refused.

July 14, 2011 - The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a business meeting to consider the issuance of the subpoena. The Subcommittee voted to issue the subpoena 14 to 8.

July 15, 2011 – The subpoena is issued to OMB, setting a July 22, 2011, deadline.

July 22, 2011 – OMB fails to meet the subpoena’s dealing. Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns informs OMB that they have failed to comply with the subpoena issued on July 15, 2011 regarding the Solyndra loan guarantee. Chairman Stearns requested that OMB produce the documents no later than 9:00 a.m. Monday, July 25, 2011.

July 25, 2011 – OMB fails to produce the documents by 9:00am deadline.

August 2011 – OMB agrees to produce all documents necessary to the Committee's investigation, with appropriate safeguards relating to proprietary information. Production continues.

Tea party forcefully shaping 2012 GOP race

The tea party is forcefully shaping the race for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination as candidates parrot the movement's language and promote its agenda while jostling to win its favor.
That's much to the delight of Democrats who are working to paint the tea party and the eventual Republican nominee as extreme.
"The tea party isn't a diversion from mainstream Republican thought. It is within mainstream Republican thought," Mitt Romney told a New Hampshire newspaper recently, defending the activists he's done little to woo, until now.
The former Massachusetts governor is starting to court them more aggressively as polls suggest he's being hurt by weak support within the movement, whose members generally favor rivals such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Romney highlighted an outsider image at a Tea Party Express rally Sunday night in Concord. Romney may have run for office multiple times, but he has only won one election.
"I haven't spent my whole life in politics," he said. "As a matter of fact, of the people running for office, I don't know that there are many that have less years in politics than me."
Romney's shift is the latest evidence of the big imprint the tea party is leaving on the race.
Such overtures come with risks, given that more Americans are cooling to the tea party's unyielding tactics and bare-bones vision of the federal government.
After Washington's debt showdown this summer, an Associated Press-GfK poll found that 46 percent of adults had an unfavorable view of the tea party, compared with 36 percent just after last November's election.
It could give President Barack Obama and his Democrats an opening should the Republican nominee be closely aligned with the tea party.
Yet even as the public begins to sour on the movement, Romney and other GOP candidates are shrugging off past tea party disagreements to avoid upsetting activists.
That includes Perry, who faced a tea party challenger in his most recent election for governor and who has irked some tea partyers so much that they are openly trying to undercut his candidacy. Instead of fighting back, Perry often praises the tea party.
In his book "Fed Up!" Perry wrote, "We are seeing an energetic and important push by the American people _ led in part by the tea party movement _ to give the boot to the old-guard Washington establishment who no longer represent us."
There's a reason for the coziness. Voters who will choose the GOP nominee identify closely with the movement.

Obama Uses Euphemism to Obscure His Unpopular Agenda

This week, as President Obama prepares for a big jobs speech (yet again!), even his partisans have begun to lose hope that he’s going to have any new or effective ideas about how to create jobs in America’s stalled economy.  But one thing is certain: Whatever he says, it will be cloaked in euphemism.

There’s an old cliché insisting that fuzzy speaking means fuzzy thinking.  Somehow, however, the Obama Administration has managed to turn the aphorism on its head.  The President and his supporters resort to the use of euphemisms not because their thinking is fuzzy, but because they believe that ours is.

Take, as an example, the host of euphemisms that’s been trotted out as part of the Obama Administration’s approach to the war on terror.  Since 2009, “rogue states” have become “outliers”; vague phrases like “overseas contingency operations,” “man-caused disasters,” “countering violent extremism” and – most recently – “kinetic military action” have entered the national lexicon.

It’s not an accident, and it’s not because the administration is unaware of the ugly facts about the war on terror; in fact, President Obama has retained most of the Bush-era policies.  It’s because members of the administration hope that watered-down language will help Americans forget the existential threat our country still faces from Islamic jihadists – and thus more willingly accede to a less powerful, less exceptional America, content to “lead from behind.”

Similarly, when the President addresses the nation on Thursday night, be prepared to hear a lot about “investment” rather than “government spending.”  The term “stimulus” – discredited by his earlier, failed almost-trillion-dollar boondoggle – will be replaced with the innocuous-sounding “targeted measures.”  Realize that when he advocates higher taxes on “millionaires and billionaires,” he’s really talking about individuals earning more than $200,000 per year, or couples earning more than $250,000. And just know that when the President invokes “revenue enhancement” and “shared sacrifices” and “a balanced approach” and “making spending reductions in the tax code,” he’s trying to make his single-minded obsession with tax increases more palatable to a government-weary, overtaxed electorate.  Put simply, however novel (or creative) the words, the song will be the same: More taxing, more government spending, and more efforts to “spread the wealth around.”

Certainly, per the old cliché, it would be dispiriting to believe that President Obama’s constant resort to euphemism is a result of fuzzy thinking.  But it’s even more unpleasant to know that it’s part of an effort to obscure a far-left agenda to which Americans are deeply (and increasingly) hostile.  And most of all, it’s profoundly insulting to realize that the President thinks that we are “intellectually challenged” (read: stupid) enough to fall for it.

Obama Done in by Own Econ Strategy: First Family Underwater by $700K on Chicago Home

So just how much is President Obama underwater today? Believe it or not, we're referring to the value of the President's residence in Chicago and not to the President's standing in the latest polls!
To find out, we went back into our previous analysis of the value of the President's primary residence in Chicago, Illinois, and updated it using the Federal Housing Finance Agency's latest revised data for how housing prices have changed in the Chicago metropolitan area over time.
Using that revised and updated data, we found that the value of President Barack Obama's Chicago house has fallen in value more than $682,000 below the amount he paid for it back in the second quarter of 2005. We estimate that the property for which he paid $1.65 million for then is worth less than $1 million today.

That figure isn't helped by the fact that then Senator-elect Obama overpaid nearly $220,000 for the house at the time when he bought it. Using the FHFA's housing price change data and the previous owner's purchase price of $1,237,500 back in the third quarter of 2000, we've projected that the home's value was approximately $1,430,000 in the second quarter of 2005, far below the $1,650,000 price Obama negotiated for it.
We note that then Senator-elect Barack Obama's first two offers for the house of $1,300,000 and $1,500,000 were consistent with this estimated value, as well as the value of similar properties in close proximity to the house.
If accurately reported at the time, this largest transaction in Barack Obama's personal finance history would have provided the clearest signal to American voters that the presidential candidate had an alarming tendency toward extremely wasteful spending where his own finances were concerned, a trait we have since observed to now apply to the nation's public finances.
Overall, because then Senator Obama purchased a section of an adjacent property (the so-called "Rezko" lot) in the months following his original house purchase, we estimate the current total value of President Obama's Chicago residence to be approximately $1,022,000. We estimate the current value of the portion of the President's property that was originally purchased in the second quarter of 2005 to be approximately $968,000.
Using the projected value of President Obama's Chicago residence as a proxy for looking at the change in the value of Chicago's real estate market over time, we see that home values in Chicagoland do not appear to have yet bottomed.
That's remarkable in that Chicago's real estate market did not participate in the speculative real estate bubble that characterized the middle years of the decade of the 2000s in other regions of the United States. As such, the decline in real estate values in Chicago are more representative of the general decline in the U.S. economy that has occurred since Barack Obama was first sworn into office as a U.S. Senator in January 2007 and that has continued after his being sworn into office as U.S. President in January 2009.

Previously on Political Calculations

Is Obama Underwater?

We wondered if President Obama, like many Americans, was underwater on the house he purchased in 2005. It turned out that he was!

How Much Was Obama's House Really Worth When He Bought It?

We take you through the data for how we nailed down the value of Barack Obama's house in Chicago at the time he bought it.

How Much Is Barack Obama's House Worth Today?

We find, using the value of a comparable property sold in August 2008, that 1.43 million seems to be right after accounting for the luxury features his house incorporates! That doesn't include the additional strip of land he bought in January 2006, but turns out to be amazingly close to what we found using projecting data forward from the past. We've got the values bookended!

Return to the Rezko Lot

New information about the appraised value of the "Rezko Lot" led us to revisit our analysis of the transactions involving this lot and 2008 Democratic party presidential candidate Barack Obama we had originally presented in The House That Obama Bought

The House That Obama Bought

Now obsolete! Here, using that data and assumptions that we have replaced with new information, we showed that at a minimum, 2008 Democratic Party presidential nominee and current Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) paid $360,738 more than his house in Chicago was worth in 2005. At a maximum, he overpaid by as much as $468,502 for the property where his family now resides.

Barack Obama's Big Mac Attack

Our tongue-in-cheek look into the negotiations and transactions surrounding Senator Obama's purchase of his current home - kind of a fun introduction to the relative valuations involved, all in the context of a trip to McDonald's! Remarkably, even though we've redone all our calculations, this post stands the test of time!

Does Senator Joe Biden Have a House Problem? (Part 1)

We looked into suggestions that Senator Biden unduly benefited from the purchase of the property where he built his current home. We introduced our analytical method for projecting the value of real estate properties in this post.

Does Senator Joe Biden Have a House Problem? (Part 2)

Here, we looked into long-standing allegations that have dogged Senator Biden regarding whether or not he unduly profited from the sale of his previous home in 1996. We originally couldn't make a determination, but thanks to one of our intrepid readers, we were able to find that he did not.

Illegal Aliens Get Billions in Tax Credits from IRS

According to a Treasury Inspector General audit, Individuals Who Are Not Authorized to Work in the United States Were Paid $4.2 Billion in Refundable Credits

Redaction Legend:
1. Tax Return/Return Information
2(f). Risk circumvention of agency Regulations or Statutes

IMPACT ON TAXPAYERS
Many individuals who are not authorized to work in the United States, and thus not eligible to obtain a Social Security Number (SSN) for employment, earn income in the United States. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) provides such individuals with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) to facilitate their filing of tax returns. Although the law prohibits aliens residing without authorization in the United States from receiving most Federal public benefits, an increasing number of these individuals are filing tax returns claiming the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC), a refundable tax credit intended for working families. The payment of Federal funds through this tax benefit appears to provide an additional incentive for aliens to enter, reside, and work in the United States without authorization, which contradicts Federal law and policy to remove such incentives.

WHAT TIGTA FOUND
Claims for the ACTC by ITIN filers have increased from $924 million in Processing Year 2005 (the calendar year in which the tax return was processed) to $4.2 billion in Processing Year 2010. Clarification to the law is needed to address whether or not refundable tax credits such as the ACTC may be paid to those who are not authorized to work in the United States. *********************2(f)*********************************** Also, employees in the Accounts Management Taxpayer Assurance Program are not taking steps to notify taxpayers when it is obvious their SSNs and names have been compromised.
TIGTA also found that a feature on tax preparation software programs which automatically takes the taxpayer identification number and enters it as the identifying number for the taxpayer’s Wage and Tax Statements ******************2(f)*************************************.

WHAT TIGTA RECOMMENDED
TIGTA recommended that the IRS work with the Department of the Treasury to seek clarification on whether or not refundable tax credits may be paid to individuals who are not authorized to work in the United States. TIGTA also recommended the IRS require individuals filing with ITINs and claiming the ACTC to provide specific verifiable documentation to support that their dependents meet the qualifications for the credit, including residency, and that questionable Child Tax Credit (CTC) and ACTC claims on ITIN returns **********2(f)*******************************. The IRS should also notify taxpayers when their SSNs are compromised and ensure that software packages do not auto-populate an ITIN onto Wage and Tax Statements.
IRS management agreed to discuss with the Department of the Treasury the issue of ITIN filers’ ACTC eligibility. The IRS did not agree to require additional documentation to support CTC and ACTC claims on ITIN returns ********************2(f)*********************************** The IRS is exploring options to alert taxpayers whose SSNs have been compromised and plans to address software that auto-populates an ITIN onto Wage and Tax Statements and take sanctions for noncompliance.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Made Fraud Easier The Washington Post commented on the fraud in Undocumented workers got billions from IRS in tax credits, audit finds

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, On Friday announced plans to examine the refunds.
“The disconcerting findings in this report demand immediate attention and action from Congress and the Obama Administration,” Hatch said in a statement.. “With our debt standing at over $14.5 trillion and counting, it’s outrageous that the IRS is handing out refundable tax credits...to those who aren’t even eligible to work in this country.”
Wage earners who do not have Social Security numbers and are not authorized to work in the United States can use what the IRS calls individual taxpayer identification numbers. Often these result in fraudulent claims on tax returns, auditors found.
Their data showed that 72 percent of returns filed with taxpayer identification numbers claimed the child tax credit.
Changes to tax law are partly to blame for the explosion in refunds for additional child tax credits in recent years, auditors found. Before 2001, filers needed to have three or more children to qualify — and to owe more Social Security taxes than earned income credits.
But those requirements have been eliminated and the allowable refund for each child doubled. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 also made the refund easier to get, auditors found

Fraud and government programs go hand-in-hand.
In my opinion we should kill this ridiculous program entirely. The next best alternative is to not grant any credits to anyone who does not have a social security number and is not a US citizen.

Why Al Qaeda is Unlikely to Execute Another 9/11

It is Sept. 1, and that means we are once again approaching the anniversary of al Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. In the 10 years that have passed since the attacks, a lot has happened and much has changed in the world, but many people can still vividly recall the sense of fear, uncertainty and helplessness they felt on that September morning. Millions of people watched United Airlines flight 175 smash into the south tower of the World Trade Center on live television. A short while later they heard that another plane had struck the Pentagon. Then they watched in horror as the World Trade Center’s twin towers buckled and collapsed to the ground.
It was, by any measure, a stunning, cataclysmic scene, a kind of terrorist theater that transformed millions of television viewers into vicarious victims. Excerpts of the just-released memoir of then-Vice President Dick Cheney demonstrate that it was not just ordinary people who were affected by the attacks; America’s leaders where shocked and shaken, too. And judging from the statements of foreign citizens and leaders in the wake of 9/11, those who proclaimed, “We are all Americans,” it was also apparent that the toll on vicarious victims did not stop at the U.S. border.
One result of this vicarious victimization and the fear and helplessness it produced was that many people became fixated on the next attack and began anxiously “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” This spawned an entire industry of fear as dire warnings were propagated by the Internet of the impending “American Hiroshima” that was certain to result when al Qaeda detonated all the nuclear devices it had hidden in major U.S. cities. Chain emails were widely circulated and recirculated quoting a dubious Israeli “security expert” who promised simultaneous catastrophic terrorist attacks against a number of American cities — attacks that never materialized outside of Hollywood productions.
Fast forward a decade and we are now commemorating 9/11’s 10th anniversary, which seems more significant somehow because it is a round number. Perhaps of more meaningful significance is that this anniversary closely follows the death of al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden on May 2, 2011. Indeed, the buzz regarding this coincidence has caused many of our clients and readers to ask for our assessment of the terrorist threat inside the United States on this 10th anniversary of 9/11.
While we believe that today holds some degree of symbolism for many, the threat of an attack on Sept. 11, 2011, is no higher than it was on Aug. 11 or than it will be on Sept. 12, and below we explain why.

The State of Al Qaeda and the Jihad

All threats have two basic components: intent and capability. Al Qaeda’s leaders have threatened to conduct an attack more terrible than 9/11 for nearly a decade now, and the threats continue. Here’s what Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al Qaeda’s No. 1, said to his followers on Aug. 15, 2011, in a message released on the internet via as-Sahab media:
“Seek to attack America that has killed the Imam of the Mujahideen and threw his corpse in the sea and then imprisoned his women and children. Seek to attack her so history can say that a criminal state had spread corruption on earth and Allah sent her his servants who made her a lesson for others and left her as a memory.”
The stated intent of al Qaeda and the rest of the jihadist movement is, and has been, to strike the United States as hard and as often as possible. It logically follows, then, that al Qaeda would strike the United States on Sept. 11 — or any other day — if possible. With intent thus established, now we need to focus on capability.
One of the primary considerations regarding al Qaeda’s capability to strike the United States is the state of the jihadist movement itself. The efforts of the U.S. government and its allies against the core al Qaeda group, which is based in Pakistan, have left it badly damaged and have greatly curtailed its operational ability, especially its ability to conduct transnational attacks. In January we forecast that we believed the al Qaeda core was going to be marginalized on the physical battlefield in 2011 and that it would also struggle to remain relevant on the ideological battlefield. Indeed, it has been our assessment for several years now that al Qaeda does not pose a strategic threat to the United States.
Since we published our 2011 forecast, bin Laden has been killed as well as senior al Qaeda leader Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, who reportedly died in a strike by a U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle Aug. 22 in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region. We continue to believe that the al Qaeda core group is off balance and concerned for its security — especially in light of the intelligence gathered in the raid on bin Laden’s hideout. The core group simply does not enjoy the operational freedom it did prior to September 2001. We also believe the group no longer has the same operational capability in terms of international travel and the ability to transfer money that it had prior to 9/11.
Some people believe there is a greater chance of an attack on this year’s 9/11 anniversary because of the killing of bin Laden, while others note that al-Zawahiri may feel pressure to conduct an attack in order to prove his credibility as al Qaeda’s new leader.
Our belief, as noted above, is that al Qaeda has been doing its utmost to attack the United States and has not pulled any punches. Because of this, we do not believe it possesses the ability to increase this effort beyond where it was prior to bin Laden’s death. As to the pressure on al-Zawahiri, we noted in December 2007 that the al Qaeda core had been under considerable pressure to prove itself relevant for several years and that, despite this pressure, had yet to deliver. Because of this, we do not believe that the pressure to conduct a successful attack is any heavier on al-Zawahiri today than it was prior to bin Laden’s death.
Finally, we believe that if al Qaeda possessed the capability to conduct a spectacular attack it would launch the attack as soon as it was operationally ready, rather than wait for some specific date. The risk of discovery is simply too great.
There are also some who still believe that al Qaeda maintains a network of “sleeper operatives” inside the United States that can be called upon to conduct a spectacular terrorist attack. We do not believe this for two reasons. First, because the pressure on the core al Qaeda leadership to conduct an attack in the United States has been so high for several years there is no reason that it would not have activated any sleepers by now. It would certainly not be in the group’s best interest to keep any such operatives idle for a decade, especially since U.S. intelligence has made such headway in rolling up the organization. Al Qaeda has been faced with a use-it-or-lose-it scenario.
Second, while there is a long history of al Qaeda and other jihadist groups employing covert operatives and inspiring jihadist grassroots operatives or lone wolves like Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, there is no history of al Qaeda employing true sleeper operatives, that is, operatives who burrow undetected into a society and then remain dormant until called upon to act. Because of this, we remain extremely skeptical that al Qaeda has ever had a sleeper network in the United States. If it had, it would have used it by now.
Would the al Qaeda core leadership like to conduct a spectacular terror attack on the 9/11 anniversary? Absolutely. Does it have the capability? It is unlikely.

A Grassroots Focus

As we noted in our annual jihadist forecast, we believe the greatest threat to the United States and the rest of the West in 2011 emanates from grassroots jihadists and regional franchises. However, the civil war in Yemen and developments in Somalia have preoccupied the attention of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al Shabaab — the two regional jihadist franchises that have shown the intent and capability to conduct transnational attacks — leaving them very little opportunity to do so. Therefore, we believe the greatest threat of an attack on the 9/11 anniversary will come from the grass roots.
The bad news is that grassroots operatives can be hard to identify, especially if they operate alone; the good news is that they tend to be far less capable than well-trained, more “professional” terrorist operatives. And this means they are more likely to make critical mistakes that will allow their attacks to be detected and thwarted.
As the past few years has demonstrated, there are almost certainly grassroots jihadists operating in small cells or as lone wolves who are presently planning attacks. In fact, we know that since at least 1990 there has not been a time when some group of grassroots jihadists somewhere in the United States has not been planning some kind of attack.
Is it possible, then, that such individuals could be inspired to try to conduct an attack on the 9/11 anniversary if they can coordinate their attack cycle in order to be ready on that date. However, given the increased law enforcement vigilance that will be in place at hard targets on that day and the capabilities of most grassroots operatives, we can anticipate that such an attempt would be conducted against a soft target rather than some more difficult target such as the 9/11 Memorial or the White House. We also believe that any such attack would likely continue the trend we have seen away from bombing attacks toward more simple (and effective) armed assaults.
It must be remembered that simple terrorist attacks are relatively easy to conduct, especially if the assailant is not concerned about escaping after the attack. As jihadist groups such as AQAP have noted in their online propaganda, a determined person can conduct attacks using a variety of simple weapons, from a pickup truck to a knife, axe or gun. Jihadist ideologues have repeatedly praised Nidal Hassan and have pointed out that jihadists operating with modest expectations and acting within the scope of their training and capability can do far more damage than operatives who try to conduct big, ambitious attacks that they lack the basic skills to complete.
And while the authorities in the United States and elsewhere have been quite successful in foiling attacks over the past couple of years, there are a large number of vulnerable targets in the open societies of the West, and Western governments simply do not have the resources to protect everything. Indeed, as long as the ideology of jihadism survives, its adherents will pose a threat.
All this means that some terrorist attacks will invariably succeed, but in the current context, it is our assessment that a simple attack in the United States or some other Western country is far more likely than a complex and spectacular 9/11-style operation. In their primary areas of operation, jihadists have the capability to do more than they do transnationally.
Indeed, despite the concept of a “war on terrorism,” the phenomenon of terrorism can never be completely eliminated, and terrorist attacks can and will be conducted by a wide variety of actors (recently illustrated by the July 22 attacks in Norway). However, as we’ve previously noted, if the public will recognize that terrorist attacks are part of the human condition like cancer or hurricanes, it can take steps to deny the practitioners of terrorism the ability to terrorize.

"Why Al Qaeda is Unlikely to Execute Another 9/11 is republished with permission of STRATFOR."

Barney Frank's Mob Violence

It’s about time that someone stood up with a bludgeon and beat back against Obama progressives who are pushing the rest of us around because they can’t think of anything better to do.
Um, you know, since it's been shown they have no plan to save the country and never really had one to begin with.  
Thank you Senate Republicans for fighting back. 
In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Democrat deviant Barney Frank, who has committed the worst kind violence on America through his flawed view of himself and the place he occupies in the world, railed against Senate Republicans “for refusing to consider President Barack Obama’s nominees to federal agencies” writes Politico, unless the Democrats start to trim back legislation that’s hurting the rest of the country.
The prime GOP demand is that Congress gut Frank’s perverted bank-reform bill known as Dodd-Frank.
Dodd-Frank can be called a lot of things, but it’s the furthest away from bank-reform that legislation can get. Dodd-Frank will accomplish a lot of things too, but few of them will be good for America. 
“Dodd-Frank has failed to please anybody, however, partly on account of the arbitrary distinctions it draws between those activities that are proper to banking and those that are not, and partly because it is already seen to be failing as a means of preventing the revival of market practices that led to the 2007-08 crisis," said Stephen Lewis, the chief economist at Monument Securities in London in a research note according to CNBC via Yahoo Finance.
"I think we have seen this movie before" said Ted Price, from Canada's Office of the Financial Institutions according to the same article. "But the amazing thing is we continue to expect a different ending."
In the op-ed, Barney equates the principled Republican opposition to the disaster that is Dodd-Frank to a “mugging” and generally uses other rhetoric denoting violence.
So much for the civility lesson.
“While they are entitled to that opinion,” wrote Frank, “Senate Republicans are not entitled to use the confirmation power as a bludgeon to get their way when they cannot do so through the normal legislative process.”
No, not quite.
The conservative loyal opposition have shown that they are willing to do anything within the law to delay, to obstruct and otherwise stop an administration that cares nothing about executing the law. Obama and his cronies, like Barney Frank, care only about what they can get away with.
The truth is that Republicans haven’t gone half far enough in their opposition to an administration that shows itself not only leaderless, but rudderless as well. That’s because, put simply, the Democrats have shown themselves to be wholly unfit for power.
They can’t even live up to the precepts that they say they represent.
The spent the winter lecturing the rest of us about civility, after the Giffords shooting, when they should have been preparing a budget.
Since then their rhetoric has grown increasingly shrill, increasingly threatening, increasingly mean-spirited, hate-filled and violent.
Well there is only one way to deal with bullies like that.
It’s with a legal, rhetorical and electoral bludgeon.
Wield it Republicans. The country will back you.

The Fragile Obama Whackosystem

Another guy with nice hair and a good tan is working on the Obama job plan. He’ll be a great addition at Martha’s Vineyard.
This ought to work out as well as Geithner doing his own taxes.
This week, Obama announced his new econ czar would be Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist who figured out that if you gave billions away to the auto industry in price incentives, auto sales would go up.
OK. Sales only went up temporarily.  But he’s the only member of the Obama administration who possesses an understanding of the relationship between price and sales. Maybe that’s progress for an administration that seems to sabotage every economic plan they come up with.
However, count me as skeptical.
Krueger likes taxes.
He likes them a lot.
He likes taxes on the rich, the poor, carpools, employers, employees.
Did I say he likes taxes? He really, really does.
He proposed a national sales tax- he calls it a consumption tax- that would be a hardship on the poorest Americans and be a direct drag on the economy, as even he admits.
“The main downside of this proposal,” he said of his sales tax scheme, “is that taxes reduce economic activity. But the government must make critical trade-offs, and a consumption tax could be the most efficient means to raise revenue to finance essential government functions.”
Taxes reduce economic activity? A startling admission from an Obama administration official, especially one who is an economics professor. I never thought they’d figure that part out.
But then Krueger goes on to strain credibility by claiming we have “essential government functions.” I didn’t know we had a government that functioned at all, yet alone essentially.
They don’t work off a budget; they don’t pass bills that accomplish what they propose to do; they fight more wars even as they condemn the cost of war; they shut down energy production even as they decry our increased dependence on foreign oil; they kill jobs in industries they don’t favor, like oil even while they complain that rich people aren’t doing their fair share to help create jobs.
“That’s our money,” the government’s ketchup-stained court jester Michael Moore told us.
How about we just stop killing jobs? No?
“The Administration believes that it is no longer sufficient to address our nation's energy needs by finding more fossil fuels,” says Krueger, “instead we must take dramatic steps towards becoming a clean energy economy.”
Forget finding new oil. Can we just use the oil we have?
We are sitting on 4.3 trillion barrels of oil in the western US, enough to keep us going for 600 years without importing another drop. This is oil that would keep $400 billion in our economy every year and reduce our trade imbalance by 2/3rds. And the economics professor says no?
Did he use TurboTax to deduce this?
They strained might and main to raise taxes on the rich most of this year- which conservatives opposed- yet now, by appointing Krueger as the new czar of the Obama whackosystem, they seem to be signaling that they will be willing to compromise by agreeing to raise taxes on everyone, rich and poor alike.
“Another downside is that a consumption tax,” Krueger says as an aside, “is a greater burden for the poor, who spend a relatively high share of their income.”
But the government really needs the money so that they can help the poor, says Obama.
The poor being taxed to help the poor. Finally the Obama administration has come full circle.
Now you know what happens when socialists run out of other people’s money: They tax the poor.

---

Obama's Newest $700 Billion Bank Bailout

President Obama is in Fantasyland or in some alternate universe. He wants to strengthen the housing market provided

• The plan helps a broad swath of homeowner
• The plan stimulates the economy
• The plan costs next to nothing

So says the New York Times in U.S. May Back Refinance Plan for Mortgages

The Obama administration is considering further actions to strengthen the housing market, but the bar is high: plans must help a broad swath of homeowners, stimulate the economy and cost next to nothing.

One proposal would allow millions of homeowners with government-backed mortgages to refinance them at today’s lower interest rates, about 4 percent, according to two people briefed on the administration’s discussions who asked not to be identified because they were not allowed to talk about the information.

A wave of refinancing could be a strong stimulus to the economy, because it would lower consumers’ mortgage bills right away and allow them to spend elsewhere. But such a sweeping change could face opposition from the regulator who oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and from investors in government-backed mortgage bonds.

Investors may suspect a plan is in the works. Fannie and Freddie mortgage bonds had been trading well above their face value because so few people were refinancing, keeping returns on the bonds high. But those bond prices dropped sharply this week.

Uninspiring Nonsense
Frank E. Nothaft, the chief economist at Freddie Mac, said the federal action could instill confidence.

"It almost seems to me you want to have some type of announcement or policy, program or something from the federal government that provides that clear signal that we are here supporting the housing market and this is indeed a good time to really consider buying," Mr. Nothaft said.

Quite frankly that is idiotic as one of my readers noted in an email. That government needs to step in and artificially support housing prices is not inspirational.

Moreover, two tax credits that blew up just proved it.

The idea that you can do something at no cost to fix the housing market is pure lunacy. I am not sure which of the following terms applies best

1. Holy Grail of Housing
2. Free Lunch
3. Perpetual Motion Device
4. Fountain of Youth
5. Pain with No Gain

I like number 1 best, but 1, 2, and 5 are solid choices.

The Keynesian clowns are of course very supportive of the general idea, led this time by Treasury Secretary Geithner and Christopher J. Mayer, an economist at the Columbia Business School.

Mayer says "This is the best stimulus out there because it doesn’t increase the deficit, it accomplishes monetary policy, and it reduces defaults in housing"

Mayer is obviously another believer in various free lunch ideas that cost nothing but will save housing.

Tom Lawler (on Calculated Risk's site) slammed some of these ideas back in July in Lawler: “Slam-Dunk” Stimulus? MS = Missing Something!!!!

The last few paragraphs of the article are rather interesting.

The government has already encouraged some refinancing through the Federal Housing Administration and through Fannie and Freddie, but participation is limited. For example, the Home Affordable Refinance Program excludes homeowners who owe more than 125 percent of the value of their house. To spur more refinancing, the government may decide to encourage Fannie and Freddie to lift such restrictions.

But government officials cautioned that Fannie and Freddie do not do the administration’s bidding, even though they are essentially owned by taxpayers.

A broader criticism of a refinancing expansion is that it would not do enough to address the two main drivers of foreclosures: homes worth less than their mortgages, and a sudden loss of income, like unemployment. American homeowners currently owe some $700 billion more than their homes are worth.

Got That?
Fannie and Freddie are owned by US taxpayers. The Obama administration wants to dump all of these proposals on the backs of taxpayers, perhaps without addressing the problem that "American homeowners currently owe some $700 billion more than their homes are worth."

Supposedly this can be done at "little to no cost".

Obama is either too dumb to see what's going on or he simply does not care what it costs to buy votes. I believe both.

Bank Bailout in Disguise

Depending on precisely how the proposal is implemented, the effect may be to take poor performing loans off the balance sheets of banks and hedge funds and dump the risks squarely on the backs of taxpayers via Fannie and Freddie.

It's no wonder Geithner supports it.

Time for the Timid President

Decision time for a real energy policy is near for a president whose critics on both the left and the right have declared him “timid.”
The State Department gave a thumbs-up on late Friday to the Keystone Pipeline project designed to help bring up to 3 million barrels of oil per day to the US from Canada. The State Department was required to evaluate the project for environmental impact.  
"There would be no significant impacts to most resources along the proposed pipeline corridor," Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES) Assistant Secretary Kerri-Ann Jones told reporters according to CNN.
The decision by the State Department puts Obama in a bind.
The decision to approve the pipeline now rests on the desk of the president, who likely doesn’t relish approving the pet project of then-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Expect him to use every day of the 90-day waiting period.
He is timid after all.    
He can approve the pipeline easily on economic grounds- the project will create 20,000 construction jobs, plus another 350,000 ancillary jobs-  but he’s being bullied by his friends on the left to stop the project in its tracks. The green meanies want him to put their anti-growth, anti-development, anti-job, misanthropic agenda above the welfare and prosperity of US citizens…again.      .
Environmental whackos have been getting arrested by appointment at the White House for the last two weeks hoping to put pressure on Obama to scuttle the most significant development in energy for our country in the last 50 years.
If successful, they Keystone pipeline will not only significantly reduce US imports of oil from place like the Middle East and Latin America, but it will also help open up huge new oil resources in the United States by providing the confidence to develop oil reserves in the Rocky Mountain region.
While it’s estimated that Canada may have as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil in reserves, “the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the [US] has 4.3 trillion barrels of in-place oil shale resources centered in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, said Helen Hankins, Colorado director for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management” according to the Associated Press.
4.3 trillion barrels is 16 times the reserves of Saudi Arabia or enough oil to supply the US for 600 years.
"The road to viability for the oil shale industry is reliant on a predictable regulatory structure and an environment in which companies can invest in research and development and create jobs," said Congressman Scott Tipton (R-CO), who accuses Obama of delaying the commercial extraction of shale oil by adding regulatory obstacles.
"The proper implementation of our environmental and safety regulations already on the books is a far better strategy than adding additional layers of bureaucracy to the process," said Tipton who held hearings recently on the subject in Colorado.
Earlier this summer the high priest of climate change, Nobel Prize winner, Al Gore blasted Obama for being timid on environmental matters,  perhaps because he senses a sell-out coming.
It will be a tough sell to the American people struggling under massive unemployment that the 400,000 jobs that will be created by Keystone aren’t more important than the worries of environmentalists who think that a grouse has more value than a baby.
After all, the oil shipped through Keystone will replace oil that is being purchased from countries that don’t like us very much.
OK Obama; this is an easy one.
We’re waiting.
And you’re timid.

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