Politics

President Obama made the announcement on Friday

President Obama nominated Ashton Carter as Defense Secretary on Friday, a week after Chuck Hagel announced he would resign from the post last week.

Carter comes with experience—he served as Deputy Defense Secretary until last December. As TIME’s Mark Thompson wrote earlier this week, he’s “by far Obama’s safest, most predictable choice”:

Carter’s 2011-2013 background as the Pentagon’s No. 2 civilian, largely responsible for the building’s day-to-day management, primes him for the military’s tough budget environment. He’s also an expert on nuclear weapons and military technology, having served as the Defense Department’s top weapons buyer from 2009 to 2011.

Unlike Hagel—who served as an Army sergeant in Vietnam and was wounded twice—Carter has never worn a U.S. military uniform. And, also unlike Hagel—twice elected as a Republican senator from Nebraska—Carter hasn’t engaged in partisan politics.

Of course, given Hagel’s vague tenure and unceremonious dumping from his Pentagon post, the value such experience affords may be dubious.

[WSJ]

The Iranians reportedly attack ISIS targets in Iraq with U.S.-built 'Mad Men'-era F-4s

Think of it as the return of the Phantom.

Fly boys of a certain age perked up with reports Thursday that F-4 Phantom II’s belonging to the Iranian air force — or what’s left of it — have attacked targets belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) in recent days.

The strikes, confirmed by U.S. officials (but denied by Tehran), took place northeast of Baghdad in eastern Iraq. Conveniently, the U.S. military, which is also conducting air strikes against ISIS targets, has been confining its bombing runs to the western part of the country.

If true, the Iranian attacks represent a return to the spotlight for the McDonnell Douglas F-4. The plane was originally designed for the Navy, which flew it first in 1960. It last flew for the U.S. military, specifically for the Air Force, in 1996 (it also was the only aircraft flown by both services’ airshow outfits, the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds).

The two-seat fighter-bomber was the backbone of U.S. air power in the 1970s and ’80s before being replaced by Air Force F-15s and F-16s, and Navy F-14s and F-18s. Capable of flying more than twice the speed of sound, the F-4 could carry nine tons of bombs and missiles. It is the last plane to carry pilots who became “aces” by shooting down five enemy aircraft each over Vietnam.

The U.S. built 5,200 F-4s and sold many of them to 11 nations. Iran bought 225 in the ’60s and ’70s under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown in 1979’s Islamic revolution. But the mullahs kept his jets (along with the 79 F-14 Tomcats the shah had also purchased).

Nearly all the surviving F-4s have been retired for decades at the Pentagon’s boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. But some have gotten a second lease on life as targets for more modern warplanes. Over the past 16 years, more than 300 have been converted into QF-4 aerial targets. They can be flown both with and without pilots, and are used to train air crews to detect aircraft with radar and other technologies.

These repurposed QF-4s have flown more than 16,000 manned and 600 unmanned training missions. About 250 of the unmanned missions have ended with Air Force pilots actually shooting the QF-4s out of the sky.

There are only 39 QF-4s still flying. But not to worry: they’re being replaced with QF-16s.

Obama criticized Republicans for not working on their own immigration bill

On the same day that House Republicans voted for a no-chance bill to overturn his recent executive action on immigration, President Obama criticized them for failing to pass a comprehensive reform bill and instead working to “force talented young people” out of the country.

“The immigration issue is, I recognize, one that generates a lot of passion, but it does not make sense for us to want to push talent out,” Obama said.

Speaking at a White House summit on College Opportunity Thursday, Obama denounced a symbolic bill that passed the House along party lines later on Thursday, the Preventing Executive Overreach on Immigration Act of 2014. (219 members voted for the bill, while 197 against it.) Introduced by Republican Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida, the bill would nullify Obama’s plan to grant work permits and temporary legal status to about 5 million undocumented immigrants.

“Notwithstanding any other law, the executive branch of the Government shall not— exempt or defer, by Executive order, regulation, or any other means, categories of aliens considered under the immigration laws,” the bill text reads.

The vote offers Republican lawmakers an opportunity to formally express their disdain for the president’s executive action. The bill has no chance of passing the current Senate, but Obama would veto it anyway. It also comes amid the pending struggle to ensure that the government stays funded after Dec. 11, which many speculated could be held up if the President acted alone on immigration.

The vote will also come as 17 states including Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Montana and Louisiana sued the federal government over the actions. Texas governor-elect Greg Abott is leading states’ charge against the action, saying it “tramples” the U.S. Constitution.

Obama and the White House, however, are holding firm. Next Tuesday, the President will appear in Nashville to again tout his actions.

“The President took action after leaving the door as wide open as possible for bipartisan action,”said a senior administration official. “He took an important first step and he will continue to press the case for that step and for Congress to do it’s job and fix the immigration system that is broken.”

Similar effort to Republicans' post-election autopsy in 2013

A month after its midterm election drubbing, the Democratic National Committee has selected a panel of party leaders, allies, and operatives to examine where it went wrong in 2014.

DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced the formation of the “Democratic Victory Task Force” Thursday to conduct a review of Democratic Party and allied organizations operations in the 2014 cycle, when Democrats lost control of the Senate and saw defeats in House, gubernatorial and state legislative races across the country.

The committee is made up of Democratic fundraiser Naomi Aberly, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, DNC Vice-Chair Donna Brazile, political operative Maria Cardona, party lawyer Marc Elias, former Obama digital guru Teddy Goff, marketing and event planning veteran Maneesh Goyal, Colorado Democratic Party Chair Rick Palacio, AFSCME President Lee Saunders and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Democrats maintain a structural advantage in presidential cycles, when a larger and more diverse electorate goes to the polls, but they have suffered in two consecutive midterm years from lower, less diverse turnout, as well as frustration with President Barack Obama. The committee will review areas where the party needs to improve both its midterm election operations, as well as areas where it must act to gear up for the 2016 presidential campaign.

“We are proud to announce the members of the Democratic Victory Task Force, and are eager to work with them to build on what we’ve done that works, identify and prioritize challenges and ultimately improve our party’s performance in future elections,” Wasserman Schultz said in a statement. “This diverse group of Democratic Party officials, strategists and advocates will each bring with them expertise from their fields to collaborate on a holistic review of the Party’s past performance and present actionable areas for improvement moving forward.”

The panel follows a similar effort by the Republican National Committee after its 2012 defeat. The “Growth and Opportunity Project” recommended operational and policy changes to the Republican Party when it released its report in early 2013.

Wasserman Schultz said the group will report its initial findings at the DNC’s winter meeting in February 2015 and make final recommendations by mid-2015.

But latest Pentagon survey shows some signs of progress

Just like the Pentagon’s recent real-world wars, its latest dispatch from the front in the battle against sexual assault contains both good and bad news.

There are enough numbers crammed into the document that military boosters can hail the progress that has been made, while critics can claim the Defense Department still isn’t doing enough.

“There have been indications of real progress,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said as he released the report Thursday afternoon, but “we still have a long way to go.”

According to that latest accounting, the bad news is that reported assaults continue to rise—from 3,604 in 2012, to 5,518 last year, and to 5,983 in 2014 (the report charts fiscal years, which end Sept. 30). That’s an 8% jump in the past year.

The good news, the 1,136-page report says, is that reforms in handling sexual assault have encouraged more victims to come forward and not cower in secret. The study estimates that while only 10% of alleged victims came forward in 2012, 25% did in 2014. The number of active-duty women complaining about unwanted sexual contract dropped from about 6.1% last year to 4.3% in 2014 (for men, the number fell from 1.2% to 0.9%).

An anonymous Rand Corp. survey of military personnel projected that approximately 19,000 had been subject to unwanted sexual contact in 2014 (55% of them male), 27% less than the 26,000 estimated in 2012. It was that spike—up from 19,300 in 2010—that focused attention on the problem and led to a host of changes into how the military investigates and prosecutes alleged sexual assaults.

Commanders are no longer free to reverse court-martial convictions, and each alleged victim is assigned a lawyer. When a commander and prosecutor disagree over whether a court martial is warranted, civilians are called in to review such cases. Statutes of limitations on such crimes have been scrapped. Anyone convicted of sexual assault in the U.S. military gets at least a dishonorable discharge.

But the tribal nature of military service persists: 62% of the women alleging unwanted sexual contact felt they had been shunned or punished for complaining. “The Department was unable to identify clear progress in the area of perceived victim retaliation,” the study said. “The news is a mixed bag,” says Elspeth Ritchie, a retired Army colonel who dealt with the issue as a military psychiatrist. “The numbers persist despite all the public education campaigns.” Reducing retaliation “is the key to further progress,” she adds. “It is very frustrating that so little progress has been made.”

The Pentagon has spent decades trying to rid its ranks of sexual predators—and encouraging victims to come forward—but progress has been slow. “An estimate of 20,000 cases of sexual assault and unwanted sexual contact a year in our military, or 55 cases a day, is appalling,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., said. “There is no other mission in the world for our military where this much failure would be allowed.” Gillibrand plans to renew her push to take prosecution of such cases away from the alleged perpetrator’s commanders and give it to a corps of independent military lawyers.

“It is unfair to the commanders to put them in this position,” said Don Christensen, who recently retired as a top Air Force prosecutor. “It is a system set up for failure.”

Dealing with sex among young men and women—especially when there is a commander-commanded relationship, and liquor, or other such substances, are involved—is difficult under the best of conditions. And the military lacks the best of conditions, given its stresses, its work-hard, play-hard ethos, and the fact that the service attracts its fair share of dolts (like the sailor, according to a report Wednesday, who allegedly filmed female officers showering aboard their shared submarine).

As women have become an increasing share of the U.S. military—they now account for 15 of every 100 Americans in uniform—the service’s macho culture hasn’t kept pace. “Sexual harassment stems from certain widespread cultural attitudes that have been prevalent through the ages,” a 1993 Army report said. “Women have lived under male protection–benevolent or otherwise–thereby being forced to live by the rules of men who dominate them.”

That’s slowly changing, with the emphasis on slowly.

The word doesn't mean the same thing to medical examiners

New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner on July 17 when he grabbed him by the neck and, with other officers, threw him to the ground and pinned him there. But did he commit homicide? And if so, was it a crime?

Everyone from Charles Barkley to Judge Andrew Napolitano has weighed in with an opinion on the matter. The resulting confusion has the potential to take the hard, painful question of equal justice in America and make it harder and more painful.

The key to clearing up the confusion is to understand the difference between two uses of the word “homicide” and to focus not on the medical cause of Garner’s death but on Pantaleo’s behavior.

On Aug. 1, a New York City medical examiner determined that the cause of death in the Garner case was “homicide,” specifically the neck compressions from the Pantaleo’s chokehold and “the compression of [Garner’s] chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police,” according to spokeswoman, Julie Bolcer.

But “homicide” in this context doesn’t mean what you think. It’s one of five categories medical examiners use to label causes of death and it indicates that “someone’s intentional actions led to the death of another person,” says Gregory G. Davis, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. The other four labels are suicide, accident, natural, and undetermined, Davis says.

So in a medical examiner’s report “homicide” just means one person intentionally did something that led to the death of someone else. It doesn’t mean the death was intentional and it doesn’t mean it was a crime.

Criminally negligent homicide, on the other hand, is a class E felony in New York State. Someone who commits it can go to jail for around one to four years. A lot of things are class E felonies in New York State, like arson, computer trespass, auto stripping and residential mortgage fraud.

Was Pantaleo criminally negligent in killing Garner? He was, according to New York State law, if he failed “to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk” that Garner would die from his actions, and that failure was “a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe in the situation.”

Nobody should dispute that Pantaleo committed homicide—that fact was determined Aug. 1. Was Pantaleo’s behavior a gross deviation from the standard of care that a police officer should take when confronting an unarmed father of six whom he suspects may have been selling cigarettes illegally? Napolitano and many others who have watched the video of Garner’s killing think Pantaleo’s behavior was criminally negligent. The Staten Island grand jury apparently did not.

As to the confusion about the different uses of “homicide,” why don’t medical examiners try using a different word to indicate someone has killed someone else so that it doesn’t get mistaken for a legal judgment?

“There are only so many words that we have,” says the National Association of Medical Examiner’s Davis.

The bill would grant the Administration to train and equip the Syrian opposition through the end of 2016

Congress appears ready to give the President authorization to train and equip the Syrian opposition for two years as part of major annual defense legislation expected to pass the House Thursday, despite concerns that the weapons will turn up in the wrong hands.

The likely passage of the $557 billion defense bill underscores that talk of the president’s recent immigration action “poisoning the well” doesn’t apply to matters with broad bipartisan support. And Congress’ begrudging acceptance of the extended train-and-equip authority—many hawks don’t believe it will be enough to accomplish the American goals in Syria and Iraq—also emphasizes the lack of other politically viable options.

“This effort on the part of the President will ultimately fall short,” says Republican Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona, who supports American boots on the ground to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria [ISIS]. “I think unfortunately it will be too little too late.”

Still Franks says he will likely vote for the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes the provision.

“I’m Mr. National Security—I’m not going to vote against the NDAA unless they absolutely force me to do so,” he added.

Other Republicans said they would likely vote for the bill even if they don’t yet trust the Administration’s vetting process. The bill requires the Administration to inform Congress at least 15 days before the first transfer of the goals of the assistance, what is provided and the number of U.S. armed forces personnel involved, in addition to periodic updates.

“The big concern has always been how do you keep these guys on our side and what do they do with the weapons a year or two after the conflict,” said Republican Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, who is leaning to support the bill. “I don’t know that the Administration has adequately answered that question, however, having said that, we’re in a damned-if-we-do and damned-if-we-don’t [situation] because American people don’t want boots on the ground.”

House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that he wanted President Obama next year to submit a new authorization for the use of military force to defeat ISIS, which some outside legal experts say is necessary since Obama is relying on congressional authority provided more than a decade ago in the aftermath of 9/11.

“The White House needs to show some urgency because the strategy isn’t reversing the terrorist momentum on the ground,” said Boehner. “I’ve got grave concerns that the plan he’s put in place is not going to accomplish the goal of defeating and destroying [ISIS]. We need a more robust, comprehensive strategy and that should start with a new authorization of the use of military force.”

Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, made sure on the House floor Thursday that his colleagues knew there was no such authorization in the NDAA, knowing that it could imperil support for the bill, which has passed every year for the past 53 years.

“I really wish to emphasize for this body that this train and equip authority is just that,” said Smith. “It in no way, shape, manner or form authorizes the use of military force. And I think it’s the best approach. I don’t want U.S. troops fighting this war. We have learned that U.S. troops cannot win the battle against the evil ideology that Al Qaeda and ISIS have promoted. We need local partners and that’s what this bill helps us do.”

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin led the NDAA effort, and both will retire after this year after decades in Congress. On the floor Thursday, McKeon concretely summarized how difficult it would be for a Congressman to explain why he would vote against the NDAA.

“What makes this bill such an important piece of legislation are the vital authorities contained within,” said McKeon. “It provides resources for the mission in Afghanistan. It funds our military operations against [ISIS] in Iraq and Syria. It pays our troops and their families. It keeps our Navy fleet sailing and military aircraft flying. It maintains a strong nuclear deterrent.”

The lawsuit says Obama violated the Constitution with his recent executive actions

17 states are suing President Barack Obama over his recent executive actions on immigration, which shields from deportation up to 5 million people who are in the country illegally.

The lawsuit claims that Obama violated the ‘Take Care Clause’ of the U.S. Constitution that limits presidential power, that the federal government violated rule-making procedures, and that the order will “exacerbate the humanitarian crisis along the southern border.”

The lawsuit is led by Texas Attorney General and Governor-elect Greg Abbott, who said in a statement that Obama’s executive action “tramples” the Constitution. Abbott is scheduled to meet with Obama in the White House tomorrow with other newly-elected governors.

The states involved in the lawsuit are Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The House has also introduced a bill to restrict Obama’s power on immigration, but in a statement released today the White House said the bill “would have devastating consequences” and that Obama would likely veto it if it passes.

"She's a mother, a daughter, and through it all she's a loving wife."

Poll confirms findings of GOP "autopsy" on 2012 election

Immigration reform is a threshold issue for most Hispanic voters, a new poll out Thursday finds, putting the Republican Party at a disadvantage heading into 2016.

The poll conducted by Democratic and Republican pollsters for the Michael Bloomberg-backed immigration reform group Partnership for a New American Economy, finds broad support for immigration reform among the Hispanic community, in particular providing a path to citizenship for the more than 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.

The poll confirms many Republicans’ worst fears, including the party’ own autopsy into the 2012 election results which warned that the GOP “must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform” in order to win national elections. House Republicans blocked a bipartisan Senate-passed comprehensive immigration reform bill this Congress, and the prospects of a similar bill passing in the Republican-controlled Congress beginning in January are slim to none.

Illustrating the problem for the GOP was a hypothetical matchup between a liberal candidate opposed to immigration reform and a conservative candidate who supports it. While Hispanic voters have consistently voted with Democrats, 51 percent of those polled said they would support the conservative who supports immigration reform, compared to 31 percent who would support the liberal. In practice, Republicans won’t have that opportunity, with likely Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton supporting comprehensive immigration reform.

Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, is the most outspoken potential Republican candidate on immigration issues, but his calls for reform have put him out of step with his party’s primary voters. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who backed the Senate immigration bill, has since cooled on the issue. Other Republicans have either remained silent on immigration issues or opposed immigration reform efforts.

The poll found that jobs and the economy are still the most important issues for Hispanic voters at the polls, but that opposing immigration reform could be an immediate disqualifier for a candidate.

Nearly twice as many Hispanic voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, and Nevada would vote for the Democratic nominee over the Republican, 52 percent to 28 percent, if the 2016 Presidential election were held today, with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton holding even larger margins in head-to-head match-ups with likely Republican candidates.

The poll was conducted by The Tarrance Group and Bendixen & Amandi International nationally and the five battleground states from November 16-18 and surveyed 1,684 Hispanic voters. The poll has a margin of error of ± 2.45 percent.

The poll results are below: