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Friday, May 18, 2018
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Pot calls kettle black...Elizabeth Warren: ‘The President of the United States Lies for Sport’
Tuesday at the Center for American Progress “2018 Ideas Conference,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said President Donald Trump lied “for sport.”
Warren said, “The debates I see happening around me in Washington these days —they aren’t real. Most of them are just for show. The real deals get cut behind closed doors like the one and a half trillion dollar tax bill drafted in secrecy and rammed through without so much as a single public hearing, let alone a real debate.”
She continued, “And the debates we actually do have are plagued with misinformation which is another part of the problem. The President of the United States lies for sport and gets away with it.
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Oil prices surging — and that means gasoline prices are going up, too
Gas prices in the county are pushing hard on $4 per gallon with some stations already breaking that mark, like this 76 station at Garnet and Mission Bay Drive. (John Gibbins / San Diego Union-Tribune)
Rob NikolewskiContact Reporter
Gas prices in the county are pushing hard on $4 per gallon with some stations already breaking that mark, like this 76 station at Garnet and Mission Bay Drive. (John Gibbins / San Diego Union-Tribune)Crude oil prices have hit their highest levels in nearly four years and that means motorists are paying more for gasoline just as the upcoming Memorial Day weekend moves the summer driving season into high gear, pushing the price at some stations in San Diego over the $4 a gallon mark.
Brent crude — the international benchmark for oil prices — cracked the $80-a-barrel mark during the trading day Thursday for the first time since November 2014 before finishing at $79.30.
West Texas Intermediate (WTI) — the benchmark price for most crude produced in the U.S. — finished the trading day at $71.49 a barrel. WTI traded at $72.30 on Nov. 28, 2014.
“It’s kind of a sign of what’s to come, which is more gas price increases,” said Patrick DeHaan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, a tech company that helps motorists find the cheapest gasoline in a given area. “That’s not exactly what people want to hear ahead of the Memorial Day weekend but it’s like all of our worst fears are coming true.”
At the start of the week, the average price of regular gasoline in the U.S. was $2.873, an increase of nearly 18 cents a gallon in five weeks, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
The average price in California was $3.599 a gallon, seven cents higher than five weeks ago. Gasoline prices are higher in the Golden State due to higher taxes and the special blending requirements for fuel aimed at reducing air pollution.
The average price of gasoline in San Diego on Thursday morning was $3.72 a gallon, according to GasBuddy. DeHaan pointed out one station in the desert along Route 66 charging $5.24 a gallon.
Gasoline prices move in tandem with oil prices and crude has been on a steady upward trajectory, especially in recent months.
Increasing geopolitical tensions, tightening of production by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and dwindling stocks of crude have all pushed up prices.
In recent years, oil inventories were flush but that’s not the case now.
“The glut is over my friend,” said Dan Steffens, president of the Energy Prospectus Group, based in Houston. “The world oil supply is below the five-year average today and demand exceeds supply by over a million barrels a day.”
Crude oil inventories in the U.S. dropped by 1.4 million barrels in the weekly report put out by the EIA on Wednesday.
Shale oil companies in places such as the Permian Basin in Texas and southeastern New Mexico have been producing record amounts of crude but Steffens said the U.S. uses about 17 million barrels a day while domestic production comes to about 10.5 million barrels a day.
“We still import vast amounts of crude oil every day,” Steffens said. “We’re dependent on a global market.”
President Donald Trump announced last week he would withdraw the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal and bring back sanctions on the oil-producing country. Steffens said the U.S. does not buy Iranian crude but many countries in Europe do through OPEC, which partly explains why the international Brent price is higher than the domestic WTI price.
View of oil platforms on Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, May 2018. The country's state-controlled oil company, PDVSA, has struggled to maintain output in recent years. (FEDERICO PARRA / AFP/Getty Images)
Venezuela is another flashpoint. Though a member of OPEC and owner of the largest amount of proven oil reserves in the world, Venezuela’s economy is in shambles. An economist at Johns Hopkins estimates the country’s annual inflation rate at 15,657 percent.
Oil prices may be surging but Venezuela has not been able to take advantage of it because the country’s state-run oil company is so badly mismanaged.
“The crude coming out of Venezuela right now is crap,” Steffens said. “The refiners won’t take it. (The Venezuelans are) not cleaning it up before they send it over.”
Global oil conditions are a far cry from little more than two years ago when oil prices crashed below $30 a barrel. There’s now talk that $100-a-barrel oil may return for the first time since June 2014.
Steffens thinks the price won’t get that high. He expects the price of Brent in the low 80s, with the average price of gasoline in the U.S. to reach about $3.50 a gallon by the end of the year. That would mean about $4.25 a gallon in California.
“A little shortage causes a big impact on (gasoline) price,” he said.
DeHaan thinks current price may be a bit overextended, leading to push-back from consumers.
“I think the sweet spot (for oil producers) is a little lower” than $80 a barrel, DeHaan said. “All these headlines about the highest gas prices since 2014 I think will contribute to a little negative sentiment for the traveling public. It probably won’t curtail them but … people may be cutting back on discretionary spending.”
In the meantime, DeHaan advises drivers to shop around.
“The most simple mistake is putting yourself in a situation where, oh no, (my gas tank) is on E and I need gas and I can’t get home where there is a cheaper station,” DeHaan said.
Organizations such as GasBuddy and AAA offer apps showing drivers the stations offering the lowest prices.
A few cents a gallon may not seem like much but motorists who drive 15,000 miles a year in a vehicle getting 25 miles per gallon will end up buying 600 gallons in that time period. “If you save 25 cents a gallon by not picking the expensive station, you’ll save 150 bucks,” DeHaan said.
Higher gasoline prices come as the price at the pump in California went up 12 cents per gallon last November, due to the implementation of the gas tax, passed last year by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown.
Money from the Road Repair and Accountability Act is earmarked to fix the state’s highways, bridges and transportation infrastructure.
A second iteration of the tax goes into effect in 2019 and will increase the price per gallon an additional 5.6 cents.
Supporters of a proposition to repeal the gas tax turned in more than 940,000 signatures last month to get their effort placed on the state ballot in November.
Mueller may be in HUGE legal trouble (conspiring with Russians?!)
by Frank Holmes, reporter
Not only has special counsel Robert Mueller’s year-long legal witch hunt to impeach President Donald Trump not uncovered any criminal activity by the president – but experts say Mueller may have used the presidential probe to conceal his own law-breaking shenanigans.
Left-wing legal analysts say Mueller may have to face the music for breaking federal law.
What’s more, Mueller’s incompetent indictment is falling apart, as he tried to slap charges against an organization that does not even exist.
Mueller’s legal woes go back to 2009, when he still served former President Barack Obama as director of the FBI.
He and deputy director Andrew McCabe recruited a Russian aluminum magnate to help rescue a former FBI agent captured by Iran.
That oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, was allegedly linked to organized crime. But he agreed to spend $25 million of his own money on a secret mission to locate an American intelligence agent.
The mission worked and Deripaska did Mueller a huge favor – even if former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ultimately blew the deal.
Then FBI agents tried to lean on Deripaska as part of the infamous “Steele Dossier,” compiled by the dirtiest D.C. firm Fusion GPS.
“He told them in his informed opinion the idea they were proposing was false. ‘You are trying to create something out of nothing,’ he told them.”
Mueller went on to indict former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort over his business ties to… none other than Deripaska.
Here’s where it gets murky: Mueller never revealed how he begged Deripaska for help back in 2009 – or how the Russian oligarch helped the FBI, or him.
After federal agents stormed Manfort’s home, Mueller personally seized everything related to Deripaska – and put it all under seal.
Liberal legal scholars say Mueller may be guilty of a conflict-of-interest, since he didn’t mention their cozy relationship.
Mueller may have been trying “to avoid the kind of transparency that is really required by the law” by leaving Deripaska out of the indictment, said Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz.
Mueller could face legal action for even approaching an alleged Russian crime boss in the first place, according to a rabid-left legal activist.
Melanie Sloan, who worked for former President Bill Clinton and Senator Chuck Schumer, said, “It’s possible the (FBI’s) arrangement with Mr. Deripaska violated the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the government from accepting voluntary services.”
So, Mueller may be trying to sweep everything under the rug in this investigation. How convenient!
“If the operation with Deripaska contravened federal law, this figure could be viewed as a potential embarrassment for Mueller,” said Jonathan Turley, a respected liberal professor of constitutional law at George Washington University.
“The question is whether he could implicate Mueller in an impropriety.”
The strain of knowing he could face prison time himself has driven Mueller to the edge of a breakdown – and possibly destroyed his case.
Facing pressure to produce something related to Russia, Mueller indicted 3 companies and 13 Russian individuals for allegedly trying to sway Americans against voting for Hillary.
The problem is, according to testimony in a federal courtroom, at least one of the groups didn’t even exist at the time!
Inside a D.C. federal district court on May 9, the judge asked lawyer Eric Dubelier if he represented all 3 firms being indicted – including a group called “Concord Catering.”
“That company didn’t exist as a legal entity during the time period alleged by the government,” Dubelier told U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey, according to the court transcript.
“Your Honor, is I think we’re dealing with a situation of the government having indicted the proverbial ham sandwich” – a play on the observation that the grand jury’s legal bar is so low, “you could indict a ham sandwich.”
Mueller is just trying to “justify his own existence” by getting the scalp of “a Russian – any Russian,” the company fired back in its own legal brief – even a Russian who didn’t exist.
It also accused Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein of compromising the “integrity of the DOJ” by authorizing Mueller to prosecute “a case that has absolutely nothing to do with any links or coordination between any candidate and the Russian Government.”
When firms allegedly tied to the Russian mafia accuse you of ethics problems, it’s time to hang it up.
Robert Mueller may have spent more than a year breaking the law, indicting phantom companies, and putting national secrets in peril – all to settle the Democrats’ political score against the our Republican president.
Frank Holmes is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”
Jeff Sessions ends Obama-era ‘de facto’ court amnesty for illegal immigrants
By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times
Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the Department of Justice’s budget on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 25, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a new directive to immigration judges Thursday telling them they can no longer shunt deportation cases off onto permanent wait-lists and leave illegal immigrants free to roam the U.S.
Known as administrative closure, the wait-list move had become a favorite tactic of the Obama administration, serving to protect low-priority illegal immigrants from deportation.
Rather than pursue those cases, government lawyers would propose — and judges would grant — administrative closure, shipping more than 200,000 cases to the suspension list in what analysts said became a “de facto” amnesty.
Mr. Sessions, flexing his attorney general powers, ruled Thursday that policy rested on shaky legal ground. He issued a new precedent telling judges to decide the cases in front of them, rather than rely on administrative closure.
“No attorney general has delegated such broad authority, and legal or policy arguments do not justify it. I therefore hold that immigration judges and the Board [of Immigration Appeals] lack this authority except where a previous regulation or settlement agreement has expressly conferred it,” Mr. Sessions said in his decision.
The ruling could, in the short term, speed up deportation decisions on the children and families that have surged into the U.S. over the last five years.
Indeed, it was one of those Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) cases that spurred the case Mr. Sessions weighed in on.
A 17-year-old juvenile named Reynaldo Castro-Tum was nabbed crossing the border illegally in 2014. He was sent to live with his brother-in-law while he awaited deportation.
Mr. Castro-Tum was supposed to come back for his hearing but ignored all five summonses sent from the court to his brother-in-law’s address. Rather than order him deported in absentia, the immigration judge granted an administrative closure in the case, essentially giving the now-adult illegal immigrant a tentative pass.
He’s one of more than 215,000 cases shunted onto the administrative closure list from fiscal year 2012 through fiscal year 2017, sending the total off-calendar backlog to more than 350,000 cases. When combined with some 690,000 other pending cases, the immigration court has more than 1 million cases awaiting rulings.
Mr. Sessions’ decision does not immediately reopen the 350,000 cases on the closure list. He said he feared overwhelming the already stressed immigration courts.
But even before his ruling, the government had been making headway in cutting the backlog slightly, suggesting an interest in getting those cases off the wait list and onto deportation dockets.
“Attorney General Sessions is doing what should have been done long ago, which is trying to ensure that illegal aliens are actually found deportable, then removed from the United States, rather than leaving them here in limbo, still illegal but living under color of law,” said Rosemary Jenks, government relations manager for NumbersUSA, which pushes for stricter immigration limits.
Under President Obama, administrative closure was part of his response to Congress failing to take action to legalize illegal immigrants. Left without a permanent solution, Mr. Obama ordered his aides to find other ways to protect illegal immigrants from deportation through “prosecutorial discretion.”
One answer was the 2012 DACA policy, which not only protected “Dreamers” from deportation but also granted them work permits, Social Security numbers, and some taxpayer benefits, giving them a more firm footing.
For other migrants who didn’t qualify for DACA but still had only low levels of criminal behavior, the Obama administration ordered Homeland Security not to lodge deportation cases against them, and ordered immigration judges to close out their cases without deporting them, when circumstances warranted.
Immigrant-rights groups were still digesting Mr. Sessions’ ruling Thursday evening, but their early reading was grim. They said the attorney general was stripping immigration judges of long-held discretion.
“The decision is bad law, bad policy, and harmful to immigrants and their communities,” said Trina Realmuto, an attorney with the American Immigration Council, who accused Mr. Sessions of showing “anti-immigrant animus.”
The immigration council said Mr. Sessions was not an impartial arbiter and should not have used his attorney general powers to refer Mr. Castro-Tatum’s case to himself for a final ruling.
Even as Mr. Sessions moved to speed up deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it’s already arresting and deporting more people in the interior of the country.
Through the first half of fiscal year 2018, ICE arrests were up more than 26 percent, nearly reaching the 80,000 mark. ICE deportations, meanwhile, were up 17 percent.
That’s still well under the rates achieved during the height of the Obama administration, when Mr. Obama earned the label “Deporter-in-Chief” from angry immigrant-rights groups.
But it does suggest changes at Homeland Security to make more migrants eligible for deportation.
Corey Price, assistant director for enforcement and removal at ICE, said under Obama-era policies, they’d been told not to bother with illegal immigrants who didn’t have major criminal records. That’s changed.
“Under this administration we have been asked and told under the executive orders to open that aperture back up,” he said.
Helen and Moe Lauzier
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