F.A.Q. on U.S. Aid to Egypt: Where Does the Money Go—And Who Decides How It’s Spent?

by Marian Wang, ProPublica

The protests in Egypt have prompted renewed questions about the U.S.’s aid to the country—an issue that the U.S. government has also pledged to reconsider. We’ve taken a step back and tried to answer some basic questions, such as how as much the U.S. has given, who has benefited, and who gets to decide how its all spent.

How much does the U.S. spend on Egypt?

Egypt gets the most U.S. foreign aid of any country except for Israel. (This doesn't include the money spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.) The amount varies each year and there are many different funding streams, but U.S. foreign assistance to Egypt has averaged just over $2 billion every year since 1979, when Egypt struck a peace treaty with Israel following the Camp David Peace Accords, according to a Congressional Research Service report from 2009.

That average includes both military and economic assistance, though the latter has been in decline since 1998, according to Congressional Research Service.

What about military aid—how much is it, and what does it buy?

According to the State Department, U.S. military aid to Egypt totals over $1.3 billion annually in a stream of funding known as Foreign Military Financing.

U.S. officials have long argued that the funding promotes strong ties between the two countries’ militaries, which in turn has all sorts of benefits. For example, U.S. Navy warships get “expedited processing” through the Suez Canal.

Here’s a 2009 U.S. embassy cable recently released by WikiLeaks that makes essentially the same point:

President Mubarak and military leaders view our military assistance program as the cornerstone of our mil-mil relationship and consider the USD 1.3 billion in annual FMF as "untouchable compensation" for making and maintaining peace with Israel. The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the U.S. military enjoys priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace.

The military funding also enables Egypt to purchase U.S.-manufactured military goods and services, a 2006 report from the Government Accountability Office explained [PDF]. The report criticized both the State Department and the Defense Department for failing to measure how the funding actually contributes to U.S. goals.

Does this aid require Egypt to meet any specific conditions regarding human rights?

No. Defense Secretary Gates stated in 2009 that foreign military financing “should be without conditions.”

Gates prefaced that comment by saying that the Obama administration, like other U.S. administrations, is “always supportive of human rights.”

The administration of former president George W. Bush had threatened to link military assistance to Egypt’s human rights progress, but it didn’t follow through. When exiled Egyptian dissident, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, called on the U.S. government to attach conditions to aid to Egypt, U.S. officials dismissed the idea as unrealistic.

Who benefits from the military aid?

Obviously the aid benefits Egypt’s military and whatever government it supports, which has so far been Mubarak’s. Foreign military financing is a great deal for Egypt—it gets billions in no-strings-attached funding to modernize its armed forces and replace old Soviet weapons with advanced U.S. weaponry and military equipment.

According to the State Department, that equipment has included fighter jets, tanks, armored personnel carriers, Apache helicopters, anti-aircraft missile batteries and aerial surveillance aircrafts.

Egypt can purchase this equipment either through the U.S. military or directly from U.S. defense contractors, and it can do so on credit. In 2006, the GAO noted that Egypt had entered some defense contracts in advance of—and in excess of—its military assistance appropriations. Some of those payments wouldn’t be due in full until 2011, the GAO said.

The other group that benefits from this aid arrangement is U.S. defense contractors. As we reported with Sunlight Foundation, contractors including BAE Systems, General Dynamics, General Electric, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin have all done business with the Egyptian government through relationships facilitated by high-powered DC lobbyists.

What about economic aid?

U.S. economic aid to Egypt has declined over the years, but is generally in the hundreds of millions annually.

Some of this aid also comes back to benefit the U.S. through programs such as the Commodity Import Program. Under that program, the U.S. gives Egypt millions in economic aid to import U.S. goods. The State Department, on its website, describes that program is as “one of the largest and most popular USAID programs.”

Others were not as successful. A 2006 inspector general’s audit of a 4-year, $57-million project to increase jobs and rural household incomes found that the U.S. investment “has not increased the number of jobs as planned” among participants [PDF]. A 2009 audit of a $151 million project to modernize Egypt’s financial sector found that while the country’s real estate finance market experienced significant growth throughout the project’s duration, USAID’s efforts were “not clearly measurable [14]” [PDF] and the growth could be due to market forces or the Egypt’s actions.

Critics of the Obama administration’s economic aid to Egypt have noted that in 2007, for instance, such aid only amounted to $6 per capita, compared with the $40.80 per capita spent on Jordan that same year. Ahmad El-Naggar, economic researcher at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, criticized the U.S. in 2009 for focusing on “programs valued for strict ideological reasons,” and not on the country’s growing poverty and unemployment rate—two issues fueling the current protests.

What about funding for democracy promotion and civil society?

Funding for programs that promote democracy and good governance through direct funding to NGOs in Egypt averaged about $24 million from fiscal year 1999 to 2009. But these, too, had “limited impact,” due to “a lack of Egyptian government cooperation,” according to an October 2009 inspector general audit [PDF]:

The Government of Egypt has resisted USAID/Egypt’s democracy and governance program and has suspended the activities of many U.S. NGOs because Egyptian officials thought these organizations were too aggressive.

Recently released cables from WikiLeaks show that officials within the Egyptian government have asked that USAID stop financing organizations that were “not properly registered as NGOs” with the Egyptian government. AFP reports on a 2007 embassy cable that describes President Mubarak as “deeply skeptical of the US role in democracy promotion.”

Per the Egyptian government’s complaints, the U.S. now limits its funding to NGOs registered with the government, therefore excluding most human rights groups, Huffington Post reported. Such funding has also declined sharply under the Obama administration.

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McConnell Won't Rule Out Gov't Shutdown

Senate Republicans seem to be willing to force a shutdown of the federal government as part of negotiating deep cuts to the federal budget, according to comments made Sunday by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Appearing on NBC's Meet The Press, McConnell pointedly refused to rule out a government shutdown under direct questioning by moderator David Gregory.

McConnell simply repeated that a deadline to continue funding most government operations after March 4, and an impending need to raise the debt ceiling, represent "two opportunities" to address spending.

MR. GREGORY: But you won't take shutdown off the table if it comes to that?

SEN. McCONNELL: We have two opportunities to do something important for the country on spending and debt. We ought not to miss this opportunity. The president ought to step up to the plate with us and tackle it together.

Capitol Hill Republicans are eager to push $100 billion or more in spending cuts, cutting the federal budget back to 2006 levels.

A top Senate Democrat took McConnell to task for leaving open the potential for a shutdown, however.

“Too many Republicans seem like they are seeking a shutdown of the government when the current funding measure expires on March 4th,” says Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Policy and Communications Center. “This was a mistake when Newt Gingrich did it in 1995, and it would be an even bigger mistake now. It could have disastrous consequences like halting Social Security payments, and jeopardizing access to health care for our veterans and seniors on Medicare. We need to work together to address the deficit, but we would urge Republicans not to risk the shutting down of the government. That is playing with fire.”

The last duel between a Democratic president and congressional Republicans prompted two shutdowns of most of the federal government in 1995 and 1996. In that case, President Bill Clinton won the battle of public opinion, helping raise what had been sagging approval ratings.

It's less clear who would come out ahead -- President Obama or congressional Republicans -- in the minds of voters in a 2011 shutdown.

Sarah Binder, senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, last month predicted Republicans could be open to a government shutdown. A new shutdown, she says, likely would be more "strategic" in that Republicans would not force a shutdown of the more-popular aspects of government, such as the national parks.

Many Americans were angered during the 1990s shutdowns when they were turned away from national parks that were closed due to the budget stalemate.


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With Four Lawmakers Objecting, Senate Ends Practice of Secret Holds to Block Bills

by Marian Wang, ProPublica

The Senate voted last night to adopt a rule bringing more transparency to a practice long used to delay legislation. In a 92-4 vote, the Senate ended the “secret holds” that lawmakers used to anonymously hold up bills and nominees without having to explain their objections. The Senate’s new rule won’t prevent Senators from putting a hold on legislation—it’ll just make sure that senators who do so will have their name published in the Congressional Record.

As we noted a few weeks ago, secret holds allowed a single senator to sink the popular whistleblower protection bill at the end of the lame duck Congress. We still don’t know who that senator was, though the four senators who voted against ending secret holds yesterday could provide a clue.

Those four were South Carolina Republican Jim Demint, Utah Republican Mike Lee, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, and Nevada Republican John Ensign.

Sens. Lee and Paul are freshmen members, so that rules them out. Sen. Demint and Sen. Ensign did not respond to repeated inquiries about whether they killed the whistleblower bill last year, according to a joint crowdsourcing effort by WNYC’s On the Media and the Government Accountability Project.

As Slate blogger Dave Weigel notes, Jim Demint, Mike Lee and Rand Paul are the three founding members of the senate’s Tea Party Caucus. Sen. Lee told Weigel that he opposed ending secret holds because he didn’t want to change the Senate’s rules.

A spokeswoman for Ensign told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the lawmaker voted to preserve secret holds because he was dissatisfied with another portion of the bill on how long senators are allowed to review bills before voting.

As for Demint, this is at least his sixth time trying to block efforts to end secret holds. He told The Hill last year that there are “a lot of pressing issues that we face as a country,” but secret holds are not one of them.

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DNC Promises To Promote Obama Agenda

The head of the Democratic National Committee is promising to help advance the agenda that President Obama laid out this week in his State of the Union address.

Democrats will make "crucial investments to support the President's agenda for our country's future -- from ads on the air to conversations on the ground, we're going to do everything we can to promote his vision for our country," DNC Chairman Tim Kaine says in a Friday email to supporters, soliciting funds to pay for the effort.

In his nationally televised speech from the chambers of Congress, Obama called for increased investment in such priorities as innovation, infrastructure and education.

"The President rose above the day-to-day politics that we know can slow the gears of change and prevent progress. He focused instead on how we can work together to build an economy that grows not just in the near term, but for generations to come," says DNC Chairman Tim Kaine, the former governor of Virginia. "This is what real leadership looks like -- and this speech set real energy in motion. Now, what matters is what we do to build on that energy. As the President said, in America, 'we do big things.' And we have a big message to send."

Republicans, who now hold a majority in the House of Representatives, are opposing additional spending. That makes a DNC effort to promote Obama's priorities potentially important to help build political support.

"His vision calls for a leaner, more efficient government that is more transparent and accountable to the citizens it serves," Kaine says of Obama's agenda. "And it drives home the point that, even amid uncertain and challenging circumstances, the future is bright -- and ours to win.

"But the President needs our support to maximize the impact of his speech. We can transform this inspiring moment into a dynamic force for a better future," Kaine adds. "The ball is in our court. We all heard the President's plan -- now, he needs us to get behind it and help make it a reality."


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Alaska Native Firms Shift Stimulus Work to Outsiders

by Michael Grabell and Jennifer LaFleur, ProPublica

When Alutiiq Manufacturing Contractors won a $28 million stimulus contract to replace windows at a federal building in Boston, it wasn’t just a win for Alutiiq natives on Alaska’s Kodiak Island.

The company, which can obtain large government contracts without competition under a program meant to help Alaska natives, took what’s become a common step. It subcontracted out $23 million, or about 80 percent of the project, to a more experienced firm—in Alabama.

Critics of Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs) say such pass-throughs increase costs for taxpayers and undermine the intent of the contracting privileges by diverting benefits to non-native firms. ANCs respond that they are simply trying to build the most-qualified team to do the government’s work.

ANCs have been under fire by some members of Congress who want to strip them of the special advantages they have over other minority firms. But some key questions have been unanswered in the debate: How often do ANCs use subcontractors? And who is getting a share of their business?

An analysis by ProPublica, drawing on detailed reports of federal stimulus projects, shows for the first time that ANCs turned to subcontractors at twice the rate of all other federal contractors and significantly more often than other small, minority-owned firms.

And at least some of this work has gone to large firms—General Electric, Kiewit and Lockheed Martin—the stimulus reports show, echoing government audits that have fueled the criticism of ANCs.

Through September, ANCs had won stimulus contracts worth $823 million for 742 projects, according to the most recent government data. More than 350 projects, or nearly half, rely on subcontractors to do at least some of the work.

By comparison, all other stimulus contractors subcontracted more than 5,600 of nearly 26,000 stimulus projects, or 22 percent. Other minority-owned firms hired subcontractors on 33 percent of their projects.

ProPublica’s analysis is based on government data compiled for our Recovery Tracker, an ongoing project to follow stimulus spending. The data offer a previously unavailable window into ANC activity because Congress specifically required stimulus recipients to report subcontractors to the public, unlike the rules governing other federal contracts.

ANCs receive more than $5 billion in federal contracts each year, so the stimulus projects account for a significant share of their revenue. Because subcontracting data isn’t available for other contracts, it’s possible that the overall subcontracting ratio for ANC projects could be different.

After reviewing ProPublica’s findings, Scott Amey, a contracting expert at the Project on Government Oversight, said the lack of complete subcontracting data is a barrier. At a minimum, Amey said, the analysis “raises a red flag with ANC contracts.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., released an investigation of ANCs in 2009 as chairwoman of a Senate subcommittee that oversees federal contracting. She has said outside contractors and consultants are cashing in at the expense of Alaska natives. McCaskill and Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., have introduced bills to roll back ANC privileges so they are no different than other small minority firms.

“Alaska Native Corporations are subcontracting huge amounts of their work, which is hindering the program’s ability to help Alaska natives,” McCaskill said in a statement to ProPublica. “Alaskans deserve a program that will provide a leg up for individuals,” she said, but the program “in its current form is not effectively achieving that goal.”

ProPublica reported last month on the Cape Fox Corporation in southeast Alaska, where outside consultants made millions in fees. While contract revenue skyrocketed over just a few years, Cape Fox’s native shareholders saw few jobs and no increase in their regular dividends as a result.

The Native American Contractors Association, which represents many tribal firms, says such cases are few and far between and that the program is working as intended.

The contracting program is “one of the only federal Indian programs that is working to improve the lives of native people,” Sarah Lukin, the association’s executive director said in December. “Now is not the time to roll back the clock on years of socio-economic progress.”

Helped by Special Exemptions

ANCs were created by Congress in 1971 to provide economic benefits, such as dividends and jobs, to natives whose ancient lands were taken for the Alaska oil pipeline. Congress later allowed ANCs to participate in the U.S. Small Business Administration’s business development program, which allows minority firms to receive no-bid contracts with a goal of eventually graduating to compete on their own.

In recent years, ANC subsidiaries have come to dominate the SBA program.

While other firms in the program have a limit of $3.5 million on contracts for services and $5.5 million on contracts for goods, ANCs are exempt and have won awards exceeding $100 million.

The exemption makes ANCs a potentially lucrative partner for large firms acting as subcontractors. And government contracting officers turn to ANCs to avoid lengthy competitions and meet their small business contracting goals. ANCs also may compete for contracts.

The stimulus reports suggest that ANC subcontracting sends a substantial portion of revenue to outsiders. Of the $470 million in ANC stimulus projects that are at least halfway completed, native corporations awarded about $200 million to other contractors, ProPublica found.

For example, Suulutaaq Inc., owned by Yup’ik Eskimos and Athabascan Indians in villages along the Kuskokwim River, won a $57 million contract to replace bridges on the flood-prone Napa River in California. It subcontracted two-thirds of the work, mostly to a division of Kiewit Corp., one of the largest construction firms in the world.

Facility Support Services LLC, owned by natives in Juneau, won a $14 million contract to build a testing facility for energy-efficient appliances at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, W. Va. It subcontracted 75 percent to TJR Enterprises, a Hispanic-owned firm that has worked at the lab for several years but doesn’t qualify for no-bid contracts anymore because it already completed the SBA program.

Under SBA rules, firms in the minority business development program cannot outsource more than 85 percent of construction contracts. The stimulus reports show that ANCs were above this limit in 40 construction projects. The largest ANC stimulus contractor, CCI Group, subcontracted 95 percent of some of its projects at the Army’s Fort Wainwright near Fairbanks, according to reports it filed.

The SBA says that doesn’t necessarily indicate a violation because the limit doesn’t apply until a contract is complete, and one contract may contain hundreds of projects over several years.

There’s no rule specifying what type of work a prime contractor has to perform. Many, such as Alutiiq Manufacturing Contractors, mainly do back office work managing the project. But at least some employees have to be doing construction, said SBA contracting official Calvin Jenkins.

Some larger ANCs have begun to question whether other ANCs are living up to the goals of the SBA’s program if they perform only the bare minimum of work.

“The intent is to create these long-term successful businesses,” said Aaron Schutt, chief operating officer of Doyon Ltd., an ANC that represents a vast area of central Alaska including Fairbanks. “One measure of success is how much you rely on subcontractors. There should in my opinion be a lessening of that reliance in your overall business as you mature in the program.”

The native contractors group says ANCs use subcontractors for the same reason other federal contractors do—to assemble a qualified team to handle the work in a timely and cost-efficient manner.

Lukin said the government’s stimulus reports provide only a snapshot of ANC contracts, making it impossible to discern whether firms are complying with the subcontracting limit. The only way to judge would be to examine the full contracts when they’re completed, she said.

But such information isn’t publicly available. Until the stimulus, federal agencies weren’t required to report subcontractors. The government began reporting subcontractor data on large contracts last fall, but that information won’t be available on most contracts until later this year.

Big Contractors Cash In

Past reports that large multinational corporations obtained work through ANC contracting preferences have helped drive the controversy over native corporations.

Olgoonik Corporation, based on Alaska’s North Slope, received $225 million in military construction contracts, but much of the work was done by Halliburton, according to a 2005 article in Mother Jones magazine.

In 2006, the Government Accountability Office reported that contracts to guard Army bases were awarded to Alutiiq LLC and Chenega Corp. but subcontracted to the giant security firms Wackenhut Services and Vance International.

Alutiiq’s heavy use of subcontractors also came under fire in 2009 by McCaskill’s subcommittee. The report used the Afognak Native Corporation, which owns Alutiiq, as a case study. It noted that from 2000 to 2008, Afognak paid subcontractors more than half the revenue on 91 of its nearly 300 contracts.

In addition to Kiewit, other large contractors received stimulus subcontracts from ANCs, though for lesser amounts. Lockheed Martin received $1.4 million, or 17 percent, of a NASA spacecraft project from ASRC Aerospace, an ANC firm representing natives on the North Slope. It also subcontracted 17 percent of another NASA project to GE Aviation Systems.

Alutiiq’s project in Boston calls for replacing windows at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building to make it more energy efficient.

The subcontractor, Physical Security LLC, based in Bessemer, Ala., describes itself as one of a handful of companies that make blast-resistant windows. It has worked on the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, the new Oklahoma City federal building and the Pentagon after 9/11.

In contrast, according to federal procurement records, Alutiiq Manufacturing Contractors has four employees and says it specializes in producing modular buildings for offices and health clinics. The JFK Building contract is seven times larger than the annual revenue of $3.7 million it reported in 2010.

Afognak spokeswoman Jana Turvey said the subsidiary now has 45 employees, and its parent company has prior experience with projects of similar size and complexity.

Unlike other minority businesses, ANC firms are allowed to cite the past performance and experience of other subsidiaries owned by their parent company when making the case for a contract.

Many federal agencies use no-bid minority contracts because they are quicker than soliciting and reviewing competitive bids. But GSA issued its first notice on the JFK project in May 2009—10 months before giving the no-bid contract to Alutiiq Manufacturing Contractors in March.

With Afognak’s reliance on subcontracting, it reported a profit margin of just 2 percent in 2009. But because Afognak has only 750 shareholders and had $733 million in contracts, it was still enough to pay the typical native shareholder about $24,000 in dividends.

Such a large dividend is unusual, however. Most ANC shareholders receive less than $500 a year in dividends, according to an earlier ProPublica review of ANC financial documents.

Perpetual Access to Contracts

The SBA program is meant to help minority-owned companies grow by giving them access to no-bid contracts for nine years or until they have the revenue and experience to graduate. But McCaskill and other critics say some ANCs have no intention of standing on their own.

Under SBA rules, minority business owners can participate in the program only once. But tribal corporations are exempt and can keep receiving no-bid contracts indefinitely.

ANCs may have multiple subsidiaries in the program at one time, and once a subsidiary grows too large for the program, an ANC can simply create a new firm in the same industry to remain eligible.

One example of this occurred with CCI Group, the stimulus contractor that subcontracted 95 percent of some of its projects. The company is owned by the Bristol Bay Native Corporation, which represents Yup’ik Eskimos and other natives in southwest Alaska.

According to the corporation’s 2008 annual report, CCI Group was formed in 2008 after another Bristol Bay subsidiary, CCI Inc., graduated from the SBA program, making it ineligible for no-bid contracts. But that didn’t mean Bristol Bay’s access was shut off.

“CCI Group was formed during 2008 to pursue work that CCI Inc. will no longer be able to accept,” the report said. Duncan Morrison, a top employee at CCI Inc., moved over to become president and CEO of CCI Group. Morrison declined to comment, and Bristol Bay did not return calls.

Under the stimulus, CCI Group has received $106 million in projects, more than any other ANC subsidiary. But much of that work has been subcontracted out, including 20 construction projects in which the subcontract exceeded 85 percent of the project cost.

The SBA hopes that after the agency invests government resources to help a firm, it will be successful, contracting official Jenkins said. But under the law, there’s nothing the agency can do if an ANC starts a new firm to keep getting no-bid contracts. Congress allowed it to foster economic development in the native communities and because some ANCs support thousands of natives.

In November, McCaskill and Thompson introduced bills that would eliminate ANCs’ ability to have more than one subsidiary in the SBA program and to subcontract to larger firms. “We’ve seen that a very small portion of these companies’ profits are reaching native Alaskans,” McCaskill said at the time, “so it’s time to acknowledge the fact that this program is not effective for either native Alaskans or taxpayers.”

In December, McCaskill told the Tundra Drums newspaper, which is owned by an ANC, that she would be open to alternatives to help Alaska natives, but not through “noncompetitive, huge multimillion dollar contracts.”

The legislation hasn’t received much attention in the new Congress yet and has been widely criticized by ANCs, native groups and Alaska’s congressional delegation.

“In Washington, we are forced to respond to attacks on your success in the 8(a) program,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told attendees at the 2010 annual convention of the Alaska Federation of Natives. “All of these unfortunate situations remind us that we must remain vigilant against those who would try to reverse the progress that’s been made over the last 50 years.”

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Think Again: Call It 'Craven News Network'

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman

It’s no simple matter to sum up all that’s wrong with the “thinking” that characterizes contemporary news coverage. But if I had to pick a potent symbol of just how rudderless are the allegedly “responsible” media executives making the decisions about who and what constitute “news” these days, I’d have to go with CNN’s decision to carry Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

Remember, Rep. Bachmann is just a mere member of the House of Representatives. She was actually rebuked by her own party when she ran for a leadership position in the current congressional class. She has no standing whatsoever to represent anything other than a majority of her Minnesota district to the rest of the nation. And yet CNN decides to treat her rant as an alternative State of the Union because the Tea Party—representing fewer than a fifth of the nation’s views according to most polls—anointed her as its spokesperson. To get a liberal equivalent of Rep. Bachmann, CNN would have had to turn over their cameras right afterward to Ward Churchill.

How do they justify it?

CNN Political Director Sam Feist defended the decision: “Based on our news judgment, we decided it was worthwhile to take it live. We did five hours of live coverage of the State of the Union address. Certainly this was part of the debate around the State of the Union.”

He added: "The Tea Party has become a major force in American politics and within the Republican Party. Hearing the Tea Party's perspective on the State of the Union is something we believe CNN's viewers will be interested in hearing and we are happy to include this perspective as one of many in tonight's coverage."

Dave Weigel, notes The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, adds crucial context, observing that "CNN has a longstanding romance with the Tea Party Express," the political action committee that is promoting Rep. Bachmann's speech. In fact, CNN and the Tea Party Express are co-sponsoring a GOP presidential debate later this year.

Now ask yourself: What is it about Rep. Bachmann that makes her views so compelling to CNN? Is it:

• Her belief that “the very founders that wrote those documents [the U.S. Constitution] worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States."
• Because she called for Minnesotans to be "armed and dangerous" in response to President Barack Obama's energy plans.
• Because she looked at Glenn Beck’s rally, when the only independent estimate of the crowd size on the National Mall was 87,000, and declared: “We're not going to let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today.”

One could go on…

I’ll admit I never thought to pay any attention to Rep. Bachmann until I was asked to write a piece about her in the spring of 2009. Doing some rather causal research, I discovered she had made the observation “that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter,” and “just think[s] it's an interesting coincidence” that the new swine flu was taking place under Barack Obama. She was apparently either unaware or unconcerned that Gerald Ford was president during the previous outbreak of the virus—not that it would have explained anything at all if it had been Carter.

Ditto her analogies back then to what she called the "Hoot-Smalley Tariff," which she argued led Franklin Delano Roosevelt to turn the “recession into a depression.” Never mind, once again, that it was the Smoot-Hawley Act (not “the Hoot-Smalley Tariff”) that raised tariffs to historic levels and that it was signed by a Republican president over a year into the Great Depression.

The Minnesota bloggers Dylan and Ethan Ris of Politics Daily admitted back in 2009, "We're seriously tempted to stop doing any work and simply replace our blog posts with an RSS feed of stories about Rep. Michele Bachmann.” They were thinking of Bachman’s complaints that we are "running out of rich people in this country"; that her fellow representatives have "a real aversion to capitalism”; and that following FDR and LBJ, Barack Obama represents “really the final leap to socialism.”

Not to put too fine a point on this but the woman is clearly insane. She knows or admits less about American history than any decently educated fourth grader and is aggressive rather than embarrassed about her ignorance. (“We're not going to let anyone get away with saying the sky is blue.”)

So why is CNN promoting her as a legitimate alternative to the president of the United States? Is it because they really hate the Tea Party and conservatives generally and think by exposing the ignoramuses they chose as their representatives they will naturally discredit themselves? Possibly, but doubtful, since CNN is co-sponsoring a debate with the Tea Party and CNN debates usually double as cheerleading sessions.

Is it because they want to marginalize the president himself, by placing this far-right nincompoop in the limelight and thereby making the conservative Republican response by Paul Ryan appear as the reasonable “center?” Fox News has that job, but the possibility can’t be eliminated.

Or is it because they think Tea Party types watch a lot of cable—witness the success of Fox News—and they couldn’t care less what they put on the air as long as those folks are willing to watch it?

I’m going with C.

Call it “Craven News Network.”

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College. He is also a columnist for The Nation, Moment, and The Daily Beast. His newest book is Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama.

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Senate Leaders' Agreement Called 'Significant Step' Toward Filibuster Reform

The Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate late Thursday announced a new agreement to reduce obstruction in the chamber, after a more-forceful effort toward filibuster reform was killed.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the floor to outline the shape of their deal, in lieu of a rules reform package which had been advanced by Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).

The push for reform is aimed at the intense use of the filibuster by Republicans in recent years so as to try to derail priorities of the Democratic majority.

“We are making these changes in the name of compromise, and this agreement itself was constructed with the same respect for mutual concession,” Sen. Reid said. “Senator McConnell and I both believe that our reverence for this institution must always be more important than party. And as part of this compromise, we have agreed that I won’t force a majority vote to fundamentally change the Senate – that is, the so-called ‘constitutional option’ – and he won’t in the future. The five reforms we are making, however, are significant. They will move us five steps closer to a healthier Senate.”

Under the agreement, which came during a colloquy between Reid and McConnell, McConnell agreed to reduce GOP use of the filibuster on motions to proceed and Reid agreed to reduce the use of a parliamentary procedure known as “filling the tree” which blocks all Republican amendments to a bill.

Under the terms of the agreement the Senate will hold votes on:

· Eliminating secret holds, including the right of senators to pass their secret holds to another anonymous senator to keep a rolling secret hold;

· Eliminating the delaying tactic of forcing the reading of an amendment that has already been submitted for 72 hours and is publicly available;

· Legislation to exempt about one third of all nominations from the Senate confirmation process, reducing the number of executive nominations subject to Senate delays, which will be scheduled at a future date under the terms of an agreement reached by McConnell and Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), along with Reid and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

“While we didn’t get everything we wanted to, the Senate will be a significantly better place with these changes,” Schumer says. “As a result of this agreement, there should be more debate, more votes and fewer items blocked by a single senator or a small minority of senators. Make no mistake about it: this agreement is not a panacea, but it is a very significant step on the road to making the Senate function in a better, fairer way. This would not have been possible without the continued insistence on change by Senators Tom Udall, Jeff Merkley and Tom Harkin. Their push to establish the Jimmy Stewart-style filibuster, which would require senators to actually hold the floor if they want to block a bill, is one I hope will be accepted by the other party in the future.”


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Race and Beyond: DREAM to Nightmare for Stellar Student

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Sam Fulwood III

For most 22-year-old college students like Mario Perez, a mathematics and statistics major at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, a routine traffic stop wouldn’t be such a big deal. But for Perez, whose parents crossed the U.S.-Mexico border when he was 4 years old, the traffic citation was the start of a continuing nightmare.

Sitting in his car in the midnight glare of the police lights, waiting for the officers to complete their paperwork on the traffic stop, Perez typed a frantic text message on his cell phone. In his moment of dire need, he reached out to the only people who shared his secret—his brothers in the Iota Mu chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc., the nation’s oldest black Greek-letter fraternity.

“Hey, Bruhs,” he tapped. “I just got pulled over.”

His fraternity brothers knew precisely what that meant because they were well aware Perez is an undocumented immigrant. He didn’t know about that part of his personal history until he was a high school senior, needing a Social Security number to apply for college. Without proper papers, Perez discovered for the first time in his life that he was one among the estimated 65,000 undocumented young people in college living in a hellish limbo through no fault of their own. That traffic stop last April changed everything in Perez’s previously blissful life.

“I’m taking my life one day at a time now,” Perez told me in a phone conversation earlier this week. “When I think about being here as an undocumented (person), it interferes with my focus on school and studying. So I try not to think about it too much.”

Not thinking about it became all the more difficult when that simple traffic stop set loose a chain of events that prompted federal immigration officials to detain the model student in a county jail. Perez now is in the crosshairs of a deportation threat. A hearing in Houston on March 9 may determine his fate, depending on whether a judge orders him deported or allows him special dispensation to stay to complete his final few courses toward a college degree.

Beyond the human drama of one young person caught in the Kafkaesque rules of U.S. immigration policy, Perez’s plight brings to public attention the remarkable demonstration of brotherhood that contradicts commonly held misperceptions about the immutability of race, culture, and politics in the immigration debate. Black Americans aren’t unaware, unconcerned, or unconnected to the travails of immigrants in their communities.

Despite the anti-immigration rhetoric spewed by conservatives seeking to drive a wedge among minority groups, African Americans and Latino immigrants often share a common appreciation for fairness in the administration of federal law. Such was the example in Perez’s case as immediately after his arrest, word raced across the country on the Alphas’ grapevine and brothers responded to offer him help. His Iota Mu chapter brothers contacted an alumni chapter in Houston, which raised the $1,500 needed to release Perez from jail. Another member of the fraternity found a lawyer to represent him pro bono. “I love the brothers,” Perez said, noting he joined the fraternity in spring 2009.

Jacob Monty, a Houston attorney who specializes in immigration cases, said that as he considered taking Perez’s case, about 20 Alphas showed up at his office in a show of support for Perez. “His biggest supporters are African Americans,” Monty said during a phone interview. “If you listen to the debate on immigration, especially from the voices on the conservative side, you wouldn’t know that these African Americans are in favor of the DREAM Act, and that they don’t fear losing jobs or anything to people like Mario.”

The DREAM Act proposed a pathway for law-abiding undocumented immigrants who are in college or the military to become U.S. citizens. The legislation called for tight rules that would allow some 65,000 young people an opportunity to emerge from the shadows and become productive Americans. The fraternity’s leadership seized upon Perez’s plight to urge its members to lobby congressional leaders to support the ultimately unsuccessful effort late last year to pass legislation that provides a pathway for citizenship for people just like Perez.

(Full disclosure: I’m a member of Alpha Phi Alpha and became aware of Perez’s plight from the countless email and Facebook appeals I received from the fraternity’s national office and other Alphas.)

Perez said passage of the DREAM Act could have been the answer to his prayers. “It would have stopped the whole prosecution I’m going through,” he said. “When it didn’t pass I was really hurt.”

Monty said it’s uncertain how the case will be resolved. Armed with letters of support from Perez’s fraternity brothers and school officials that attest to the young man’s sterling character and avoidance of legal trouble, he’s preparing to ask federal officials to exercise prosecutorial discretion, which is within their ability under law. That would dismiss the deportation proceedings but it wouldn’t make Perez a citizen and he still wouldn’t have a legal right to work in the United States.

“The ironic thing in Mario’s case is that he could have gotten married to his girlfriend or he could have gotten her pregnant and become eligible to get a green card that would allow him to stay here legally,” Monty said. “But he didn’t believe that was right. He thinks you should finish your education before you get married or start a family. He was trying to do the right thing and he’s being prosecuted for it.”

For his part, Perez views his situation philosophically. He said he once had plans to become an engineer. But given all that’s happened to him over the past year, he suspects it may be a heaven-sent message telling him to change the course of his life. “What if I’m in this situation because God wants me to go through this to prepare me to help other people,” he said. “What if I’m supposed to go into law and do something like that so other people won’t have to go through what’s happening to me?”

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

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Women in Congress Outperform Men, Scholar Finds

Congresswomen consistently outperform their male counterparts on several measures of job performance, according to a recent study by University of Chicago scholar Christopher Berry.

The research comes as the 112th Congress is sworn in this month with 89 women, the first decline in female representation since 1978. The study authors argue that because women face difficult odds in reaching Congress – women account for fewer than one in six representatives – the ones who succeed are more capable on average than their male colleagues.

Women in Congress deliver more federal projects to their home districts than men do, even when controlling for such factors as party affiliation and ideology, according to the research by Berry, assistant professor in the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, and his former student Sarah Anzia, now a doctoral student at Stanford University. Congresswomen also sponsor and co–sponsor more legislation than their male counterparts, the authors found. The study has recently been accepted for publication at the American Journal of Political Science.

The authors interpret their findings as a by–product of voter discrimination against female candidates. When women confront such bias, only the most talented, politically ambitious females will attempt to run for office, and voters will tend to elect the most highly capable women. Because of one or both of these factors, the women elected will on average be higher performing than their male colleagues.

“Women run for and are elected to public office at lower rates than men. This might be because women perceive themselves as less qualified to run than they actually are, or it might be because bias against women in the electorate produces a barrier to entry for them,” Berry says. “In either case, the central implication of sex–based political selection is that the women we observe in office will, on average, outperform the men.”

Since there is no direct way to measure legislator capability, the researchers measured performance in two ways. First, using Federal Assistance Award Data, a comprehensive compilation of federal domestic spending programs, the authors examined data from 1984 to 2004 showing the amount of federal program dollars that members of Congress brought to their home districts. The analysis encompassed discretionary spending, including most earmarks, but not entitlement programs or defense spending and other procurement programs.

Berry and Anzia found that congresswomen on average obtain 9 percent more in federal discretionary programs for their home districts—about $49 million per year—than congressmen, even when taking into account variables such as party affiliation, majority party status, seniority, electoral vulnerability, ideology, committee assignments, and district traits.

The authors also compared changes over time in spending within districts, to gauge how much a given district received when represented by a woman rather than a man. This method ensured that the estimated advantage for females was not simply a result of the types of districts they represent.

Second, the researchers examined the policymaking activities of women and men in Congress. They found that women sponsor and co–sponsor significantly more bills than men, and that bills sponsored by women get more co–sponsorship support from their colleagues. More generally, congresswomen score higher on various statistical measures of “network centrality,” meaning that they have stronger networks of collaboration than their male counterparts.

“Two fundamental jobs of congressional representatives are constituency service, which includes bringing home federal projects as well as other direct work with constituents, and legislating, which means writing bills and shepherding them through the lawmaking process,” says Berry. “The evidence shows that the women in Congress outperform the men on both levels.”

In what they dub “the Jackie (and Jill) Robinson Effect,” Berry and Anzia relate this “sex–based selection” to the experience of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play Major League Baseball. It is not surprising that Robinson is widely considered to be one of the best players in the sport’s history, argue the authors, because he had to be the best in order to overcome the racial discrimination of the time.

Similarly, women running for Congress must be more motivated and more highly qualified than their male counterparts to win a seat. In fact, the worse the voter discrimination against women, the better women from those districts fare in Congress: the researchers found that congresswomen elected in more conservative districts, where they may face greater sex–based selection, achieve even larger advantages in spending than the average congresswomen.

“We emphasize that we are not arguing that women have more innate political talent than men, nor do we claim that all female candidates outperform their male counterparts,” Berry says. He pointed out that widows who enter Congress to fill their deceased husbands’ seats do not outperform congressmen, possibly because they bypassed the sex–based selection of elections.

“Our theory simply identifies a connection between the economics of discrimination and models of political agency: when sex discrimination is present among voters, women must be better than their male counterparts to be elected,” Berry says.


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Filibuster Reform Falters In Senate

Three Senate Democrats failed to win enough support to push forward with rules changes that would have made it more difficult to obstruct legislation.

Sens. Tom Udall of New Mexico, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, had introduced measures that would have made it more difficult for a minority of the Senate to stand in the way of passage of bills favored by the majority.

However, Wednesday night Senate Republicans objected to allowing the Senate to debate and vote on their rules reform. The Senate GOP have used the filibuster nearly constantly over the last two years in an effort to hold up Democratic priorities.

“It is far too ironic that last night, Senate Republicans prevented debate on a resolution the sole purpose of which is to restore true debate. If that does not exemplify the challenges that the Senate faces, I do not know what will,” says Harkin, the only one of the three not a freshman senator. “Reform is not about one party or one agenda gaining an unfair advantage; it is about the Senate as an institution operating more fairly, effectively and democratically. Unfortunately, because of the extraordinary abuse of the filibuster, the ability of our government to address critical problems is severely jeopardized. While we will continue to fight for a government that can address our nation’s challenges, Senate Republicans continued to stand for gridlock, obstruction and a continued broken government.”

Since 2006, there have been more filibusters than the total between 1920 and 1980, the Democratic trio note. As a result, in the last Congress the Senate was unable to pass a single appropriations or budget bill, left more than 400 bills sent over by the House unconsidered, and left key executive appointments and judicial nominations to languish, they add in a joint statement.

The three reformers say they will continue to fight for their cause.

“Reform is not for the short-winded,” says Udall. “After witnessing years of obstruction and abuse of the Senate rules, I first proposed the Constitutional Option last year to tackle the Senate’s dysfunction head-on with a simple majority vote. While I’m disappointed this body lacks the necessary will to enact truly substantive reforms, we have certainly succeeded in bringing reform to the forefront and shining a light on the sources of our dysfunction. In the long term, this fight is far from over and I’m committed making sure the Senate is more than just a graveyard for good ideas and we are able to address the challenges we face as a nation.”

The rules reform resolution introduced by the three Democrats proposed to do the following:

Eliminate the Filibuster on Motions to Proceed: Makes motions to proceed not subject to a filibuster, but provides for two hours of debate. This proposal has had bipartisan support for decades and is often mentioned as a way to end the abuse of holds.

Eliminate Secret Holds: Prohibits one senator from objecting on behalf of another, unless he or she discloses the name of the senator with the objection. This is a simple solution to address a longstanding problem.

Guarantee Consideration of Amendments for both Majority and Minority: Protects the rights of the minority to offer amendments following cloture filing, provided the amendments are germane and have been filed in a timely manner.

Talking Filibuster: Ensures real debate following a failed cloture vote. Senators opposed to proceeding to final passage will be required to continue debate as long as the subject of the cloture vote or an amendment, motion, point of order, or other related matter is the pending business.

Expedite Nominations: Provide for two hours of post-cloture debate time for nominees. Post cloture time is meant for debating and voting on amendments – something that is not possible on nominations. Instead, the minority now requires the Senate use this time simply to prevent it from moving on to other business.


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Study: Not Clear If Use Of Dispersants In BP Oil Spill Went As Planned

Key chemical components of the 770,000 gallons of oil dispersants applied below the ocean surface in the Deepwater Horizon spill did mix with oil and gas spewing out of the damaged wellhead and remained in the deep ocean for two months or more without degrading. However, it was not possible to determine if the first deep ocean use of oil dispersants worked as planned in breaking up and dissipating the oil, scientists report.

Their study, the first peer-reviewed research published on the fate of oil dispersants added to underwater ocean environments, appears in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

The chemical dispersants were used last year to clean up oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for months after the explosion of BP's leased Deepwater Horizon drilling platform. The resultant oil spill became the worst in U.S. history. Dispersants are made up of toxic chemicals, and the use of them during the BP crisis was regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Elizabeth Kujawinski and colleagues note ongoing concern about the environmental fate of the 1.4 million gallons of dispersant applied to the ocean surface and the 770,000 gallons of dispersant pumped to the mile-deep well head during the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Many studies show that dispersants added to surface oil spills prevent them from coating and harming sensitive coastal environments, but no large-scale applications of dispersants in deep water had been conducted until the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Thus, no data exists on the environmental fate of dispersants in deep water, the scientists say.

The scientists collected and analyzed seawater samples from the Gulf of Mexico for the presence of a key dispersant ingredient, called DOSS (dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate), during the active oil flow and again after the flow had ceased. They found DOSS became concentrated in the deepwater plumes of suspended oil and gas at depths of up to three-quarters of a mile and did not mix with the surface applications of dispersant. They also detected the dispersant ingredient at distances of nearly 200 miles from the well two months after deepwater dispersant applications ceased, indicating it was not rapidly biodegraded. Their data is not sufficient to resolve whether the dispersant was effective in dispersing the oil coming out of the wellhead. However, the scientists argue that the persistence of the dispersant over long distances and time periods justifies further study of the effects of chemical dispersant and oil mixture exposure.


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In Houston, Rep. Giffords Could Receive Brain Injury Treatment Thousands of Troops Do Not

by Marian Wang, ProPublica

As Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords begins rehabilitative therapy in Houston after being shot in the head in Tucson earlier this month, she was transferred today to TIRR Memorial Hermann, a premier rehabilitation hospital renowned for its treatment of traumatic brain injuries.

On its website, the hospital calls itself “one of very few hospitals in the country designated as a model system for traumatic brain injury.” Among the techniques it relies on is cognitive rehabilitation therapy, a tailored type of medical treatment designed to retrain the brain to do basic tasks.

It’s a treatment that Rep. Giffords will likely end up receiving, if doctors’ general descriptions of her care plan are any indication. Dr. John Holcomb, a retired Army colonel and trauma surgeon at Memorial Hermann, has described Giffords’ treatment as a “tailored and comprehensive rehab plan” that includes “speech, cognitive, physical rehabilitation.”

If Giffords does end up receiving it, she’ll be getting a treatment that many troops don’t. As we’ve reported, the Pentagon’s health program, Tricare, has refused to cover cognitive rehabilitation therapy for the tens of thousands of service members who have suffered brain injuries in the line of duty. Tricare, which provides insurance-style coverage to troops and many veterans, does cover speech and occupational therapy, which are often part of cognitive rehabilitation.

We’ve called the hospital to get further details about Giffords’ treatment plan but have not yet received that information. News reports have described her treatment as using “high-tech tools to push the brain to rewire itself,” with a focus on [10] her physical abilities, speech, vision, cognitive skills and behavior.

Traumatic brain injuries have different types and levels of severity, according to the Office of the Surgeon General. They can include penetrating injuries—like Giffords’—or mild brain trauma like the kind often sustained by troops in an explosion. The latter, as we’ve reported, has been called one of the signature wounds of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and tens of thousands of cases have been left undiagnosed by the military’s medical system.

Though top brain specialists have endorsed cognitive rehabilitation as an effective treatment for brain injury, Tricare officials have said that scientific evidence does not justify providing it comprehensively to troops.

To support that position, officials cite a 2009 Tricare-funded assessment of cognitive rehabilitation therapy—an assessment that internal and external reviewers have called “deeply flawed,” “unacceptable” and “dismaying,” as we reported last month with our partners at NPR.

Last week, Sen. Claire McCaskill, chairman of the subcommittee on contracting oversight, cited our findings while announcing an investigation into the Pentagon’s decision to deny treatment of traumatic brain injuries to troops. In 2008, McCaskill was one of 10 senators—including then-Senator Barack Obama—who signed a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates urging the military to provide Tricare coverage of cognitive rehabilitation “so that all returning service personnel can benefit from the best brain injury care this country has to offer.”

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Many Say They Are Ready To Help President Obama 'Win The Future'

President Obama's decision to make such priorities as research, infrastructure and education key themes in his State of the Union speech won wide acclaim from diverse sets of advocates following Tuesday night's address.

Obama urged the adoption of policies intended to facilitate enhanced innovation, improved infrastructure, and access and quality of education as key means of creating new American jobs.

"We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time," the president says. "We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit and reform our government. That’s how our people will prosper. That’s how we’ll win the future."

The Obama agenda won praise from across the country, including a group which represents U.S. mayors.

"The nation's mayors are pleased that President Obama spoke about unity and bipartisanship as we move forward to solve the challenges facing America and address this country's deteriorating infrastructure," says Elizabeth Kautz, the mayor of Burnsville, Minn., and president of the nonpartisan U.S. Conference of Mayors.

"For years, The U.S. Conference of Mayors has pushed infrastructure modernization as a means of job creation and economic development," Kautz says. "A multi-modal transportation system is critical to effectively moving the nation's goods and services and people -- 85 percent of whom live, work and travel in metropolitan areas -- through the nation's cities both large and small."

The unemployment rate in the nation's cities continues to be the first priority of mayors as statistics show that one-third of the nation's 363 metro areas will still have an unemployment rate higher than 10 percent at the end of 2011, Kautz says.

"We know that the nation's recovery will be driven by the economic engines of the metropolitan areas, and without job growth in the metropolitan areas, there can be no sustained national recovery," she says. "Mayors are pragmatic – we work for the good of all people we serve. As a national nonpartisan organization that represents mayors who get things done everyday in their own cities, we stand ready to work with the President and the Congress to bring Washington together to get things done on the national level. We also are working with business leaders to forge a national consensus in support of job creation and infrastructure investment."

Meanwhile, the head of the Environmental Law & Policy Center in the president's hometown of Chicago, says that Obama's proposed investments in clean energy and rail infrastructure will create green jobs and economic growth in the Midwest.

"Hundreds of old-line Rust Belt manufacturers are retooling to produce equipment for the growing clean energy economy, as shown by the Environmental Law & Policy Center's recent reports," says the center's executive director, Howard Learner. "Federal investments in renewable energy are spurring job growth and revitalizing the Midwest manufacturing sector. The Michigan solar company highlighted in the President's speech is a good example. After decades of decline, America's clean energy industry is creating new manufacturing jobs and making us more globally competitive.

"We can't build a 21st century economy with a 19th century transportation infrastructure. In Illinois and Michigan, federal investments in high-speed rail are creating construction and supply chain jobs today that will improve and expand transportation options tomorrow," Learner says. "Modern, fast, comfortable and convenient rail development will improve mobility, reduce pollution, create new jobs and spur economic growth. The President's clean energy and high-speed rail proposals are investments in America's future. Here, in the Midwest Heartland, let's seize these opportunities to strengthen our economy, create jobs and improve our environment in ways that make good sense and make our nation more competitive."

The president of the renowned Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh says his institution, and others like it, are ready to help carry out new U.S. innovation.

"While the U.S. faces intense competition in the global economy, our country has one asset that no other nation has yet duplicated: the capacity of university-based research to launch high-growth companies," university President Jared Cohon says. "As a pioneer in computer science, robotics, cybersecurity and other high-tech fields, Carnegie Mellon is at the forefront of job creation through innovation.

"We support continued investment in biomedical research, information technology and clean energy technology because we know they are proven catalysts for using public investment and converting knowledge, innovation, and expertise into start-ups, entrepreneurship, economic renewal and job growth," Cohon adds.

In the last 15 years, Carnegie Mellon has helped to create more than 200 start-up companies and 9,000 jobs in the Pittsburgh region, the university says in a statement. An emerging initiative with Pittsburgh leaders is providing a prototype of how the building blocks of national economic renewal can be integrated into a cohesive regional strategy, the statement adds.

The DREAM Act, Latino Perspective

Latinos, a key bloc which helped Democrats squeeze out victories in Nevada and elsewhere in the otherwise-bleak 2010 midterms, also signaled support for Obama's direction.

"The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) is encouraged that President Obama made job creation and moving the economy forward a central message in his address to the American people," the organzation, which represents more than 6,000 Latino elected and appointed officials, says in a statement. "Latinos have been disproportionately affected by the recession and job losses, and we urge the White House and Congress to work on policies to assist Latino families as they work to preserve their piece of the American dream.

"We are energized by the President's remarks highlighting the key role immigrants play in our nation's economy. We are a unique nation founded by immigrants, and should recognize that immigrants are crucial to our economic recovery. We also join the President in urging passage of the Dream Act, so that, in his words, we 'stop expelling talented, responsible young people... they grew up as Americans and pledge allegiance to our flag, and yet live every day with the threat of deportation.' Yet the Dream Act is but one element of an overall comprehensive immigration reform which is necessary today."

Obama in the address specifically called for passage of the DREAM Act, to help some children of illegal aliens obtain U.S. citizenship. Senate Republicans blocked the legislation in the previous Congress during December.

NALEO, however, cited an area of the political process Obama failed to mention, and that is the every-10-years re-drawing of congressional districts. Redistricting often can become highly political and is soon to get underway nationwide.

"As legislatures and commissions take on the decennial task of redrawing legislative districts, we must insist that the processes be open, transparent and ensure everyone has the opportunity to fair representation. We call upon the U.S. Department of Justice to ensure full adherence to the Voting Rights Act as the new legislative maps are drawn and implemented across the country," the group's statement says.

"NALEO appreciates the President's call for continued bipartisan cooperation," the statement adds. "As demonstrated recently by Latino members of Congress at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute and the Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute gathering which welcomed new members, the only way we can effectively address the issues of critical importance to our nation and the Latino community is by working together across party lines to strengthen our nation and our democracy."


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Sen. Harry Reid: 'We Have To Reintroduce Truth Into The Public Debate'

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid urged his colleagues not only to restore civility to public discourse, but also to debate issues without bending the truth.

Hours before President Obama's State of the Union, Reid (D-Nev.) addressed the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords as he reconvened the Senate for the first time since the Arizona Democrat was shot in the head.

“There is no evidence that partisan politics played any role in this monstrous attack. Even so, we should be more civil anyway. Being more mindful of the weight of our words always helps. We have much more to gain than to lose from civility and discretion,” Reid says in floor remarks. “In this new year, I hope we will return to the respect that has always been a hallmark of the United States Senate. I hope my colleagues will join in renewing our commitment to productive debate.”

However, Reid says that elevated debate means more than avoidance of "inflammatory allegations or hate speech," or even refraining from questioning the patriotism of political adversaries.

Senators, Reid says, must also remember that they do not have the luxury, as the Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) used to caution, "to choose our own facts."

"If we are really going to change the way we speak in the hope of changing the way we do business, we have to reintroduce truth into the public debate," Reid says.

As an example, Reid cites ongoing conservative attacks against healthcare reform.

“That doesn’t mean just rephrasing an attack line from ‘job-killing’ to ‘job-destroying,’ as House Republicans have done in response to the shooting," Reid adds, referring to the debate just a few weeks ago in the House, which voted to repeal the healthcare reform law. "It means that if there is no proof that a policy takes away jobs – if in fact the evidence shows the opposite – we shouldn’t pretend any differently. The nonpartisan referee we rely on for this data, the Congressional Budget Office, found that when it comes to health reform – which is what House Republicans were talking about in this case – the claim is simply not true. Changing our rhetoric requires us to debate the facts, not invent them.


'Shared Respect For Facts'


“In the coming weeks, much of the discussion on the Senate floor will revolve around health care, the deficit and the debt limit. Each of these issues affects the number-one issue in America – jobs – and each issue is complex. If we are going to make the right decisions and point our economy back in the right direction, we have to start with a shared respect for the facts.”

Reid also took issue with the frequent conservative attack line that last year's healthcare reform law represents a "government takeover."

The nonpartisan FactCheck.org, called that claim plainly "false," Reid notes. Another, PolitiFact, a project of the St. Petersburg Times, called it the "Lie of the Year."

“So if we’re going to have an honest debate about the health reform law we passed last year, retiring this scare tactic would be a good place to start," Reid says.

The results of the November 2010 elections -- a GOP-led House and a Democratic-controlled Senate -- demand cooperation, the Democratic leader says.

“We cannot cooperate without an honest debate. And we cannot have an honest debate if we insist that fiction is fact.”


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Climate Benefits of Natural Gas May Be Overstated

by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica

10:36 a.m.: This post has been corrected.

The United States is poised to bet its energy future on natural gas as a clean, plentiful fuel that can supplant coal and oil. But new research by the Environmental Protection Agency—and a growing understanding of the pollution associated with the full “life cycle” of gas production—is casting doubt on the assumption that gas offers a quick and easy solution to climate change.

Advocates for natural gas routinely assert that it produces 50 percent less greenhouse gases than coal and is a significant step toward a greener energy future. But those assumptions are based on emissions from the tailpipe or smokestack and don’t account for the methane and other pollution emitted when gas is extracted and piped to power plants and other customers.

The EPA’s new analysis doubles its previous estimates for the amount of methane gas that leaks from loose pipe fittings and is vented from gas wells, drastically changing the picture of the nation’s emissions that the agency painted as recently as April. Calculations for some gas-field emissions jumped by several hundred percent. Methane levels from the hydraulic fracturing of shale gas were 9,000 times higher than previously reported.

When all these emissions are counted, gas may be as little as 25 percent cleaner than coal, or perhaps even less.

Even accounting for the new analysis, natural gas—which also emits less toxic and particulate pollution—offers a significant environmental advantage. But the narrower the margins get, the weaker the political arguments become and the more power utilities flinch at investing billions to switch to a fuel that may someday lose the government’s long-term support.

Understanding exactly how much greenhouse gas pollution comes from drilling is especially important, because the Obama administration has signaled that gas production may be an island of common political ground in its never-ending march toward an energy bill. The administration and Congress are seeking not just a steady, independent supply of energy, but a fast and drastic reduction in the greenhouse gases associated with climate change.

Billions of cubic feet of climate-changing greenhouse gases—roughly the equivalent of the annual emissions from 35 million automobiles—seep from loose pipe valves or are vented intentionally from gas production facilities into the atmosphere each year, according to the EPA. Gas drilling emissions alone account for at least one-fifth of human-caused methane in the world’s atmosphere, the World Bank estimates, and as more natural gas is drilled, the EPA expects these emissions to increase dramatically.

When scientists evaluate the greenhouse gas emissions of energy sources over their full lifecycle and incorporate the methane emitted during production, the advantage of natural gas holds true only when it is burned in more modern and efficient plants.

But roughly half of the 1,600 gas-fired power plants in the United States operate at the lowest end of the efficiency spectrum. And even before the EPA sharply revised its data, these plants were only 32 percent cleaner than coal, according to a lifecycle analysis by Paulina Jaramillo, an energy expert and associate professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

Now that the EPA has doubled its emissions estimates, the advantages are slimmer still. Based on the new numbers, the median gas-powered plant in the United States is just 40 percent cleaner than coal, according to calculations ProPublica made based on Jaramillo’s formulas. Those 800 inefficient plants offer only a 25 percent improvement.

Other scientists say the pollution gap between gas and coal could shrink even more. That’s in part because the primary pollutant from natural gas, methane, is far more potent than other greenhouse gases, and scientists are still trying to understand its effect on the climate—and because it continues to be difficult to measure exactly how much methane is being emitted.

In November the EPA announced new greenhouse gas reporting rules for the oil and gas industry. For the first time under the Clean Air Act, the nation’s guiding air quality law, thousands of small facilities will have to be counted in the pollution reporting inventory, a change that might also lead to higher measurements.

The natural gas industry, in the meantime, has pressed hard for subsidies and guarantees that would establish gas as an indispensible source of American energy and create a market for the vast new gas reserves discovered in recent years. The industry would like to see new power plants built to run on gas, automobile infrastructure developed to support gas vehicles and a slew of other ambitious plans that would commit the United States to a reliance on gas for decades to come.

But if it turns out that natural gas offers a more modest improvement over coal and oil, as the new EPA data begin to suggest, then billions of dollars of taxpayer and industry investment in new infrastructure, drilling and planning could be spent for limited gain.

“The problem is you build a gas plant for 40 years. That's a long bridge,” said James Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, one of the nation’s largest power companies. Duke generates more than half of its electricity from coal, but Rogers has also been a vocal proponent of cap-and-trade legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Rogers worries that a blind jump to gas could leave the country dependent on yet another fossil resource, without stemming the rate of climate change.

“What if, with revelations around methane emissions, it turns out to be only a 10 or 20 percent reduction of carbon from coal? If that's true,” he said, “gas is not the panacea.”

The American Petroleum Institute said in an e-mailed response that federal offshore drilling rules are already cutting down on the emissions tallied by the government. Spokesmen for the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the natural gas lobbying groups Energy in Depth, American Clean Skies Foundation and America’s Natural Gas Alliance, which have all been pushing to expand the use of gas, declined to comment on the EPA’s new figures and what they mean for the comparison between gas and coal.

But industry groups point out that gas looks attractive compared to the alternatives.

Nuclear energy is less polluting than gas from a climate-changing perspective, but it is costly and viewed skeptically in the United States because of the dangers of disposing of radioactive waste. So-called “clean coal”—including underground carbon sequestration—could work, but the technology has repeatedly stalled, remains unproven, and is at least 15 years away. Renewable sources like wind and solar are being developed rapidly, but the energy is expensive and won’t provide a commanding supply of electricity for decades.

Gas, on the other hand, is plentiful, accessible and local.

Methane Is a Potent Climate Gas

Measuring the amount of natural gas that is leaking during drilling is one challenge. Getting a grip on how that gas—which is mostly methane—affects the environment, and what effect it will have on global warming, is another. And on that, some scientists still disagree.

Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide, as well as methane, propane and lesser-known gases that also affect climate change. For the purposes of standardization, all these gases are described together using the unit Co2e, or carbon dioxide “equivalent.” But because each gas has a different potency, or “warming” effect on the atmosphere, a factor is applied to convert it to an equivalent of carbon dioxide.

Methane, the primary component of natural gas and among the more potent greenhouse gases, has far more of an effect on climate change than carbon dioxide. But determining the factor that should be applied to measure its relative warming affect is still being debated.

To crunch its numbers, the EPA calculated the average concentration of methane in the atmosphere over a 100-year period and determined that over that period methane is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Using that equation, a ton of methane emissions is the equivalent of 21 tons of carbon dioxide.

But some scientists argue that the impact of methane gas should be calculated over a shorter time period, because methane degrades quickly, and because gas drilling releases large quantities of methane into the atmosphere all at once, likely concentrating and amplifying the effect.

Robert Howarth, an environmental biology professor at Cornell University, used research from the United Nations to calculate that if methane’s potency were considered over 20 years rather than 100 years, it would be 72 times as powerful as carbon dioxide in terms of its warming potential.

Figured that way, the climate effect of methane from natural gas would quickly outpace the climate effect of carbon dioxide from burning coal. Howarth’s research is incomplete and has been criticized because at first he failed to figure in methane emissions from coal mining. But he said that after correcting his error, the emissions from coal barely changed, and the data still showed that the intensity of methane could erase the advantages of using natural gas.

“Even small leakages of natural gas to the atmosphere have very large consequences,” Howarth wrote in a March memorandum, which he says is a precursor to a more thorough study that could begin to scientifically answer these questions. “When the total emissions of greenhouse gases are considered … natural gas and coal from mountaintop removal probably have similar releases, and in fact natural gas may be worse in terms of consequences on global warming.”

Howarth says his latest calculations show that the type of shale gas drilling taking place in parts of Texas, New York and Pennsylvania leads to particularly high emissions and would likely be just as dirty as coal.

Environmental groups say factual data on how much methane is emitted from gas fields—and what the warming affect of that methane is—should be locked down before major policy decisions are made to shift the nation toward more reliance on gas.

“You can’t just assume away some of these sources as de minimus,” said Tom Singer, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council who focuses on emissions reporting in New Mexico. “You need to get a handle on them before you can make a determination.”

Less Pollution Means More Profit

The EPA tracks fugitive and vented methane emissions through a program called Natural Gas STAR and then works to get drilling companies to save money by stanching their leaks and selling the gas they capture for profit. It was a discrepancy in the Gas STAR data that prompted the EPA to sharply revise the government’s greenhouse gas statistics late last year.

According to Gas STAR’s most recent figures, at least 1.6 percent of all the natural gas produced in the United States each year, about 475 billion cubic feet, is assumed to be leaked or vented during production. But those numbers were reported before the EPA adjusted its greenhouse gas estimates, and they are expected to rise when the new estimates are plugged into the calculation. If companies could capture even the gas leaked in Gas STAR’s current estimates, it would be worth $2.1 billion a year at today’s prices and would cut the nation’s emissions by more than 2 percent right off the bat. Several studies show that maintaining and installing equipment to capture the emissions pays for itself within 24 months.

Gas STAR has seen some success in pushing companies to use these capture tools. The EPA’s 2010 greenhouse gas inventory, using 2008 data, shows that even though more gas is being produced from more wells, total emissions from that production have decreased by more than 26 percent since 1990, mostly due to the progress of Gas STAR. But while these figures demonstrate that Gas STAR is effective in lowering the annual rate of emissions, the EPA’s new figures essentially move the starting point, and, when recalculated, 2008 emissions are now understood to have been 53 percent higher than emissions in 1990.

That doesn’t mean the program isn’t working—it is. It simply means that the road to making reductions significant enough to affect the rate of climate change is much longer than expected.

The EPA now reports that emissions from conventional hydraulic fracturing are 35 times higher than the agency had previously estimated. It also reports that emissions from the type of hydraulic fracturing being used in the nation’s bountiful new shale gas reserves, like the Marcellus, are almost 9,000 times higher than it had previously calculated, a figure that begins to correspond with Robert Howarth’s research at Cornell.

Clean Enough to Count On?

Getting a solid estimate of the total lifecycle emissions from natural gas is critical not only to President Obama’s­­—and Congress’–decisions about the nation’s energy and climate strategy, but also to future planning for the nation’s utilities.

Even small changes in the lifecycle emissions figures for gas would eventually affect policy and incentives for the utility industry, and ultimately make a big difference in how gas stacks up against its alternatives.

Rogers, the Duke executive, says the country’s large promised reserves of natural gas must also hold up for gas to prove beneficial, in terms of both cost and climate. If domestic reserves turn out to be smaller than predicted, or the nation runs out of gas and turns to liquefied gas imported from overseas, then the greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas would be almost equal to coal, Jaramillo pointed out in her 2007 lifecycle analysis, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. That’s because the additional processing and shipping of liquefied gas would put even more greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere.

“In the 60’s we put a needle in one arm—it was called oil,” Rogers said. “If the shale gas doesn't play out as predicted, and we build a lot of gas plants in this country, and we don't drill offshore, we're going to be putting the needle in the other arm and it's going to be called gas.”

The utilities are in a bind because they have to build new power plants to meet the nation’s demand for energy, while anticipating an as-yet-undefined set of federal climate and emissions regulations that they believe are inevitable. Do they build new gas-fired plants, which can cost $2 billion and take three years to bring online? Or do they wait for proven systems that can capture carbon from coal-fired plants and sequester it underground?

If carbon sequestration works, coal-based power emissions could drop by 90 percent, said Nick Akins, president of American Electric Power, the nation’s largest electric utility and the number-one emitter of greenhouse gas pollution. That suggests to Akins that natural gas may not be the solution to the nation’s energy needs, but rather the transitional fuel that bridges the gap to cleaner technologies.

"Going from a 100 percent CO2 emitter to a 50 percent solution when you could go beyond that is something we need to turn our attention to,” said Akins. “If there is a 90 percent solution for coal, and other forms like nuclear, and renewables, then obviously you want to push in that direction as well.”

Correction: The article originally misstated that methane, at least 21 times more potent than CO2, is the most potent of greenhouse gases. The article should have stated that it is among the more potent greenhouse gases.


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