RSN: Republicans Should Not Assume That Climate Science Denial Can't Hurt Them, Inside the Pentagon's 'Slush Fund'

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Obama: I Plan to Fulfill My Constitutional Responsibilities to Nominate Scalia's Successor 
 
Daniel Politi, Slate 
Politi writes: "President Obama remembered late Justice Antonin Scalia on Saturday in a brief speech that was both personal and extremely political." 
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What Antonin Scalia's Death Means for the Supreme Court and the Country 
David S. Cohen, Rolling Stone 
Cohen writes: "Much will be written about his legacy in the coming days and weeks, but for now, the big question on everyone's minds is what this means - especially in a Supreme Court term with big issues like affirmative action, abortion, contraception, union rights and voting rights on the docket." 
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The Best Lines of the Republican Debate 
Paola Chavez, ABC News 
Chavez writes: "The Republican debate kicked off in Greenville, South Carolina. In the debate hosted by CBS and the Wall Street Journal the GOP hopefuls opened the night honoring the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Here are the best lines of the fiery debate." 
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Inside the Pentagon's 'Slush Fund' 
Paul D. Shinkman, US News 
Shinkman writes: "It's been called war planners' crack cocaine, a shifty accounting scheme or a habit-forming opiate imbibed government-wide. Barack Obama pledged to eliminate it at the beginning of his presidency, but its potency has only grown stronger since. Now, it accounts for the unregulated spending of $60 billion or more in taxpayer dollars per year, with no end in sight." 
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Air Force Pararescuemen participate in a rescue mission for a wounded Afghan policeman on 

July 29, 2010, during an ongoing firefight with the Taliban in Arghandab Valley, 

southern Afghanistan. (photo: US News)

Obama’s inability to eliminate the “OCO” budget leaves war planners awash with unregulated money.

t’s been called war planners’ crack cocaine, a shifty accounting scheme or a habit-forming opiate imbibed government-wide. Barack Obama pledged to eliminate it at the beginning of his presidency, but its potency has only grown stronger since. Now, it accounts for the unregulated spending of $60 billion or more in taxpayer dollars per year, with no end in sight.

Get used to the Overseas Contingency Operations budget.

The OCO was known from 2001 to 2009 as “the supplemental” and is now considered a de facto slush fund. It began as the war budget President George W. Bush needed for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan without having to go back to Congress every time the Defense Department needed to modify its main half-trillion-dollar budget to account for changing battlefield conditions or the development of new technology.

It is necessary at times. When insurgents intensified attacks using improvised explosive devices to blow up coalition convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military tapped the fund to quickly purchase and deploynewly developed mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs, which ultimately replaced Humvees.

But another benefit for war planners is that the Pentagon does not have to release details publicly on how specifically this money will be spent.

As a result, what was once restricted to a fund to replace blown-up tanks, get more bullets and transport troops in and out of faraway war zones has ballooned into an ambiguous part of the budget to which government financiers increasingly turn to pay for other, at times unrelated, costs.

The contingency fund has been used to buy sophisticated fighter jets that never dropped bombs on Middle East war zones, for example, or to pay soldiers while serving stateside. And it has not decreased under Obama’s withdrawals from protracted war in the Middle East. Quite the contrary – this year the proposed budget actually grew by $200 million despite thousands fewer combat troops in Afghanistan and, technically, none in Iraq.

It’s not just Obama. Limited during budget negotiations this year by sequestration caps, the Republican Congress proposed bypassing the across-the-board spending cuts by funneling increases in defense money into the contingency fund.

“Everybody in the whole system has drunk the magic elixir,” says Gordon Adams, a senior adviser for national security in Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget who served on Obama’s transition team in 2009. “The administration will put in their stuff they want to test the base budget with. The Pentagon has put the stuff in there that won’t stress out the service chiefs. The appropriators put stuff in there that serves their interests. And they move money around like Three-Card Monty.

“Now everybody’s corrupt with regard to OCO.”

The president this year released an OCO budget of $58.8 billion, in addition to the $582.7 billion base budget, up from the contingency fund’s $58.6 billion budget last year and a base budget of $580.3 billion. This year’s contingency actually accounts for an expansion of the U.S. presence overseas, including a new line item for counterterrorism operations in Africa and more than quadrupling the $800 million needed last year for operations in Europe to counter Russia’s aggression.

These funds could go to bolstering the U.S. drone base in Djibouti, or pay for special operators to infiltrate Libya to fight the Islamic State group. Or, as it has previously, the fund could purchase new F-22 Raptor fighter jets, which are used in a limited capacity overseas, or to modernize the M-1 Abrams tank fleet – all items that should be included in the bulging, but public, defense base budget.

Add to that the $53 billion budget request Director of National Security James Clapper announced this week – a classified budget he said the intelligence community will use to contribute further to the contingency fund.

Obama through the OMB asserted early in his administration that he wished to do away with OCO spending in keeping with his campaign pledge to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We haven’t made a lot of progress on that,” Mike McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and general budget guru told reporters this week. “And I would say the budget deal that was enacted last November went exactly the opposite direction from that.”

This leaves the future of the contingency fund uncertain, particularly as government officials prepare to turn over responsibility to a new administration. The next president will likely take a new look at that part of the budget to add more predictability to overall budget requests, but the lack of progress during this administration doesn’t bode well.

“And I think the battlefield’s fairly confused now, I have to say,” McCord said, “In terms of, ‘Is there going to be an OCO budget in the future that looks like it does now?’”

It almost certainly will.

Congressional action to reign in spending on what should be the war budget has failed in recent years. Rep. Mick Mulvaney attempted to add an amendment to the military budget in 2014 that would have limited the contingency budget. The South Carolina Republican framed the restrictions around a memo OMB put out in 2010, cataloguing specifically what could and could not be included in OCO.

“The war budget has been used for years as a slush fund of sorts to get around budget limits,” Mulvaney told McClatchy at the time.

This rule would have prohibited, for example, the Air Force buying more F-15s, since none were lost in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or purchase more Stryker vehicles for the Army, which should be included in its long-term planning. It also would have stopped, as Mulvaney frequently cited, the purchase of a V-22 Osprey destroyed during a training exercise in Florida.

Janine Davidson, who is awaiting Senate confirmation to become undersecretary of the Navy, wrote last year about the perils of letting this budget remain unchecked.

“Without a frank conversation about these defense spending trends and (perish the thought!) a bit of bipartisan compromise, the OCO may instead become a ‘second defense budget,’ stuffed with items from the Pentagon’s base budget request. This will frustrate long-term planning and impair congressional oversight – a bad bargain for all parties involved,” she co-wrote in a blog post for the Council on Foreign Relations.

Adams believes the increased reliance on this budget “fractures budget discipline” for the Defense Department and demonstrates that normal budget process “is completely broken.” It leaves the Defense Department all the money it needs for operations and paying its bills, and then some.

“When you’ve done that, you’ve basically said to all the people who run the Pentagon, ‘You’re awash with money. Priority-setting is no longer necessary.’”

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35191-inside-the-pentagons-slush-fund

Corporate PR Flacks Are Trying to Convince You the Trans-Pacific Partnership Will Benefit Workers 
Jim Hightower, InTheseTimes 
Hightower writes: "The basic problem facing the corporate and political powers that want you and me to swallow their Trans-Pacific Partnership deal is that they can't make chicken salad out of chicken manure." 
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Central African Republic Voters Seek Leader to End Chaos 
Krista Larson, Associated Press 
Larson writes: "Central African Republic went ahead with a presidential runoff vote Sunday that many hope will solidify a tentative peace after more than two years of sectarian fighting left untold thousands dead and forced nearly half a million people to flee to neighboring countries." 
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Republicans Should Not Assume That Climate Science Denial Can't Hurt Them 
Ben Adler, Grist 
Adler writes: "The perception of Republicans as backward, ignorant, and anti-science is a liability among these voters. That's why many suburbs in crucial swing states have become bluer." 
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GOP operatives might be thinking too narrowly. (photo: Shutterstock)

olitico surveyed anonymous political insiders — “a panel of activists, strategists and operatives in the four early-nominating states” — about whether the candidates’ views on climate science could affect the presidential election. All the major Republican candidates deny the scientific consensus on human-induced climate change. The two Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, accept the science, call for reducing carbon pollution, and are fighting over who has the stronger climate action plan. Most Americans, including pluralities of independents and moderates, also accept climate science and support regulating carbon pollution.

The Democratic operatives surveyed were split on whether the issue of climate change could benefit their candidate in the general election. The Republicans overwhelmingly said climate science denial is not a liability for them in the general election. From the article:

“Climate change is simply not a front-burner issue to most people,” said one South Carolina Republican, who, like all respondents, completed the survey anonymously.

Another South Carolina Republican was blunter: “‘I really like their jobs plan, but, boy, I don’t know about their position on climate change,’ said no blue-collar swing voter, ever.”

One Nevada Republican compared the issue of climate change to another topic on which the polls are lopsided, but few voters actually choose candidates on that basis.

“It’s like campaign finance reform,” the Republican said. “Everybody was for it, but few voted on it as a determining issue.”

They are undoubtedly right about that. It’s virtually unheard-of for an issue other than war or the economy to single-handedly determine the outcome of a presidential election. And climate change doesn’t even rate highly among second-tier issues. Just look at the polls if you want to get depressed about how few Americans list climate change, or any environmental issue, as their top concern. It ranges from 1 to 3 percent, and those voters are probably all Democrats anyway.

But these GOP operatives might be thinking too narrowly. Working-class voters are not the only possible swing voters. There are also college-educated, usually more affluent, swing voters. Concentrated in the suburbs of major cities, they used to constitute the moderate wing of the Republican Party. Now there is no moderate wing, and those voters are either Democrats or independents.

The perception of Republicans as backward, ignorant, and anti-science is a liability among these voters. That’s why many suburbs in crucial swing states have become bluer. Consider Pennsylvania, which has maintained its slight Democratic lean even though central and western Pennsylvania have become more Republican over the last 20 years. During the same period, that trend has been offset by the Philadelphia suburbs voting steadily more Democratic. Nate Silver wrote in The New York Times in 2012:

The Northeast corridor — stretching from Philadelphia’s suburbs in the south up through the Lehigh Valley and into Scranton’s Lackawanna County — has become more left-leaning over the past two decades. Part of the shift toward the Democratic Party, particularly in the Philadelphia suburbs, has been driven by women, as the Republican Party became increasingly associated with social issues like opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. The realignment occurred throughout the Northeast and New England … white college graduates and minorities — groups that skew Democratic — have increased as a share of eligible voters in the Philadelphia suburbs, the Lehigh Valley and the Harrisburg-York-Lancaster region in south-central Pennsylvania.

Virginia and Colorado used to lean Republican, but rising diversity and an increasingly well-educated populace in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. and Denver allowed President Obama to carry them twice.

This is not mostly about climate change. It reflects a larger divergence between the two parties, starting with civil rights and women’s rights in the 1960s and ‘70s, and continuing to this day with issues such as abortion, gay rights, access to contraception, embryonic stem cell research, education funding, and the environment. It’s basically the flip side of the social wedge issues that have driven working-class whites in the South and Appalachia away from the Democratic Party.

For most of the last half-century, this division benefited Republicans. But the ranks of non-white voters and college-educated voters has grown into a majority: the Obama coalition.

As the Republican National Committee acknowledged in a bracing postmortem on the 2012 election, Republicans are widely perceived as intolerant or uncaring by young people and non-whites. They have to make some inroads among these voters to win presidential elections. The RNC has launched outreach programs aiming to win them over.

But that won’t be easy. As I wrote in a piece last year, younger, more educated, urban, and non-white voters have some negative images of Republicans: That they are know-nothings who reject science, that they are selfish, greedy, or in the pocket of big business, and that they are old and out of touch. And Republicans’ response to climate change reinforces all of those assumptions.

The Politico survey, which only included people in the early-voting states, is tilted toward Republican operatives who are less attuned to these problems. The first four states in the primary race are Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. Just as that skews the presidential nomination process against environmental progress, so does it skew this survey. Except for Nevada, those states are more rural than the nation as a whole. None are home to major knowledge-economy cities. The South Carolina Republicans are surely right that blue-collar South Carolinians don’t care about climate change. White-collar Coloradans, Pennsylvanians, and Virginians, however, are different people with different priorities.

Climate change alone won’t determine how they vote either. But it is part of the package of issues that leads them to view Republicans with skepticism. That’s why Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner misleadingly claimed to support wind energy during his race in 2014. That’s also why Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate ran ads against targeted climate science deniers that tied their positions to negative perceptions about Republicans: that they favor powerful corporations and rich individuals — like the fossil fuel industry and the Koch brothers — and that they are ignoramuses.

There isn’t much evidence yet that those attacks have swung any elections. The fact that President Obama, Clinton, and Sanders all mock Republicans for denying climate science might suggest that they think it could peel off moderates, or it might just be a way to feed red meat to their base. But if Republicans think that they don’t have a science problem, then they haven’t been paying attention.