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Defense Secretary Leon Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June — before Iran enters what Israelis described as a “zone of immunity” to commence building a nuclear bomb. Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon — and only the United States could then stop them militarily. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t want to leave the fate of Israel dependent on American action, which would be triggered by intelligence that Iran is building a bomb, which it hasn’t done yet.
A U.S. Justice Department source has told The Daily Caller that at least two DOJ prosecutors accepted cash bribes from allegedly corrupt finance executives who were indicted under court seal within the past 13 months, but never arrested or prosecuted.
The sitting governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, his attorney general and an unspecified number of Virgin Islands legislators also accepted bribes, the source said, adding that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is aware prosecutors and elected officials were bribed and otherwise compromised, but has not held anyone accountable.
The bribed officials, an attorney with knowledge of the investigation told TheDC, remain on the taxpayers’ payroll at the Justice Department without any accountability. The DOJ source said Holder does not want to admit public officials accepted bribes while under his leadership.
TransCanada Corp. (TRP) may shorten the initial path for its rejected Keystone XL project, bringing oil from Montana’s Bakken Shale to refiners in the Gulf of Mexico and removing the need for federal approval.
“There certainly is a potential opportunity to connect the Bakken to the Gulf Coast,” Alex Pourbaix, TransCanada’s president of energy and oil pipelines, said in a telephone interview today. “That is obviously something we’ll be looking into over the next few weeks.”
TransCanada’s $7 billion Keystone XL proposal to bring crude from Canada’s oil sands to the Gulf was rejected yesterday by the Obama administration. The project required U.S. approval because it crossed the border with Canada. The company may seek that approval after it builds the segment from Montana to the Gulf, Pourbaix said.
The Bakken shale-rock formation is estimated to hold as much as 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in North Dakota and Montana, according to a 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report. Oil production in North Dakota surged 42 percent to 510,000 barrels a day in November, exceeding the output of Ecuador.
Production in the Bakken field may reach 750,000 barrels a day this year, Edward Morse, managing director of commodities research for Citigroup Inc., said at a conference in Calgary today.
President Barack Obama’s decision yesterday to reject a permit for TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL oil pipeline may prompt Canada to turn to China for oil exports.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in a telephone call yesterday, told Obama “Canada will continue to work to diversify its energy exports,” according to details provided by Harper’s office. Canadian Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver said relying less on the U.S. would help strengthen the country’s “financial security.”
The “decision by the Obama administration underlines the importance of diversifying and expanding our markets, including the growing Asian market,” Oliver told reporters in Ottawa.
Currently, 99 percent of Canada’s crude exports go to the U.S., a figure that Harper wants to reduce in his bid to make Canada a “superpower” in global energy markets.
Canada accounts for more than 90 percent of all proven reserves outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, according to data compiled in the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Most of Canada’s crude is produced from oil-sands deposits in the landlocked province of Alberta, where output is expected to double over the next eight years, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top officials have delivered a string of private messages to Israeli leaders warning about the dire consequences of a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Stepping up the pressure, Mr. Obama spoke by telephone on Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and U.S. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will meet with Israeli military officials in Tel Aviv next week.
The U.S. military is preparing for a number of possible responses to an Israeli strike, including assaults by pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, according to U.S. officials.
The U.S. believes its embassy and other diplomatic outposts in Iraq are more vulnerable following the withdrawal of U.S. forces last month. Up to 15,000 U.S. diplomats, federal employees and contractors are expected to remain in Iraq.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the last 12 months, a net of 1.5 million more Americans found work. This sounds like good news, but the civilian non-institutional worker population increased by 1.7 million over the same period, and the raw percentage of Americans working has basically flatlined at 58.5 percent. To the extent there are new jobs, it has more to do with the fact that there are more people creating more demand, not with any fundamental expansion in the economy.
An analysis posted last week at the Zero Hedge website looked at what the unemployment picture would be if participation rates were held steady. Using more realistic long-term average participation rates, the study calculated a current unemployment rate of 11.4 percent. While the Obama administration’s numbers keep getting better, rates based on long-term participation do not. Factor in the number of Americans who hold down two or three jobs just to get by, and those who are chronically underemployed make the picture even grimmer.
It was bad enough that the 2012 defense authorization bill signed by President Obama set America on a downward spiral of military mediocrity.
He also issued a signing statement, something he once opposed, saying that language in the bill aimed at protecting top-secret technical data on the U.S. Standard Missile-3 — linchpin of our missile defense — might impinge on his constitutional foreign-policy authority.
Betraying our secrets is easy for a president who betrayed allies Poland and the Czech Republic to placate Moscow.
As we gut our military budget and scrap major weapons systems, Russia continues to rearm. It recently announced the deployment of its new RSM-56 Bulava submarine launched ballistic missile — a three-stage weapon that can carry up to 10 individually targeted warheads.
A just-released Syracuse University study indicates that the government is overstating its enforcement of the immigration laws by a staggering amount.
According to TRAC, Syracuse’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has overstated the number of immigration law violators apprehended by a 5:1 ratio. And that’s the good news. Deportations were overstated by 24:1 and detentions by 34:1.
TRAC says that ICE has represented, not only in press releases but in congressional testimony, that in 2005 it apprehended 102,034. The records it produced, however, show only 21,339. It further claimed 166,075 deportations but documented only 6,906; and said it had detained 233,417 when the paperwork shows only 6,778.
TRAC notes that the Obama administration delayed complying with its FOIA request for nearly two years (it was submitted in May 2010). TRAC argues that ICE has either geometrically inflated its performance or grossly violated FOIA in withholding information. ICE, according to TRAC, has also attempted to obstruct compliance with FOIA by claiming that Syracuse University is not an academic institution, by insisting that previously provided statistical data was suddenly considered “unavailable,” and by charging over a half-million dollars in processing fees.
