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The Senate voted on Wednesday to roll back an Obama-era safety regulation.

Senators voted 50-48 to nix the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rule extending the amount of time a company can be penalized for failing to report workplace injuries and illnesses to five years.

Republicans are using the Congressional Review Act to take a hammer to rules instituted under the Obama White House. The law allows them to overturn recently published regulations with a simple majority.

Republicans argue that the Labor Department's rule is another example of the Obama administration overstepping its boundaries.

He added thatthe move to repeal the law will let companies focus "on actual safety of employees or on more bureaucratic paper pushing."

But Democrats counter that Republicans are putting special interests above worker safety.

"The pattern that is emerging is pretty clear. Republicans have no plans to improve the lives of American workers. Quite the opposite. Republicans are increasing the odds that workers will be injured or even killed," she added.

The rest is here:
Senate nixes Obama-era workplace safety rule - The Hill (blog)

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a thoughtful assessment of what President Donald Trumps approach to combating terrorism looks like. The bottom line: It looks a lot like President Barack Obamas. It is heavy on the use of special operations raids and American airpower, but it relies primarily on indigenous forces to provide the bulk of the ground forces.

To be sure, it is not a carbon copy. It is more open to risk authorizing more missions than Obama might have, and delegating more decision-making to his subordinate military commanders. But compared to the major alternatives a large conventional invasion, unrestricted airstrikes, a hands-off approach, or something else it is more like Obamas 2016 policy than not.

Lets be clear, Obamas 2016 policy was itself a repudiation of Obamas own earlier approach. From late 2011 until late 2014, Obama tried very hard to implement a different kind of global war on terror (GWOT), one much more in keeping with his preferred strategy of off-shore balancing. During this period, Obama emphasized withdrawing U.S. ground forces altogether and relying to an extraordinary extent on local forces to do all the heavy lifting. He also relied quite extensively on drone strikes for any kinetic action.

This phase of Obamas GWOT was optimized to avoid mistakes of commission at the price of accepting more mistakes of omission. Obama judged the risks to be acceptable during this phase because he argued that core al Qaeda was on the run, that the most lethal affiliates (like al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) could be handled primarily by local forces, and that other emerging terrorist groups like the Islamic State could be discounted because they were only junior varsity threats.

This was Obamas off-shore balancing phase, and he was not the first American leader to find off-shore balancing a tempting policy. But, as Hal Brands (a new Shadow Government denizen and my erstwhile Duke colleague) and I have shown elsewhere, the off-shore balancing approach failed him as it failed earlier leaders.

It failed so badly that at least some advocates of the policy have tried in vain to argue that Obamas approach should not be called off-shore balancing. I found that line of defense curious and so at a recent professional conference I asked the leading proponent of off-shore balancing, Christopher Layne, to adjudicate. He confirmed that Obamas approach to the Syria-Iraq-Islamic State problem during the 2011-2014 phase was, indeed, off-shore balancing. If it walks and quacks like an off-shore duck, it is an off-shore duck, even if it is something of a duck that has trouble staying afloat.

Once the rise of the Islamic State constituted threat powerful enough to destabilize the local balance of power a destabilization too calamitous to ignore Obama authorized the gradual shift to an on-shore approach. Initially, Obama tried to keep the shift as light-footprint as possible to the point of straining credulity, as when the Obama administration pretended the deployment of troops did not constitute boots on the ground. But over time, Obama gradually lifted arbitrary caps on numbers of deployed U.S. troops and gradually allowed for more permissive rules of engagement.

This new approach, call it a medium footprint approach, began to show results. By the end of his tenure, the president could boast with some accuracy that the United States was finally on a path to eventual success against the Islamic State. Obama and his partisan backers were considerably less candid about how their earlier approaches had failed in ways that might have contributed to the problem, but they were right to claim that they had finally found the best-of-the-alternatives approach to hand off to their successor.

Despite his scathing anti-Obama critique during the campaign, Trump seems to have agreed, since he has only modified that approach somewhat. He has stepped up efforts in keeping with his own campaign rhetoric about being bolder in the fight against the Islamic State but not in a way that would fundamentally alter the medium-footprint approach.

This leaves the question of what Trump will do if and when the Islamic State, in its current form, is finally defeated. Hal Brands and I tackle exactly that question in a new piece over at Foreign Affairs. (The directors cut version, lovingly rescued from the editors chopping block, is here. Hal writes his own Shadow summary here.)

We argue that the defeat of the so-called caliphate will be an important milestone in the GWOT, but it will not, in fact, end the terrorist threat once and for all. Some form of the threat will remain and U.S. policymakers will have to decide how to confront it.

We assess that Trumps options will look a lot like the range of options Obama and Bush considered before him: a) military disengagement, i.e. a shift back to the off-shore balancing approach Obama tried for in late 2011-late 2014; b) light-footprint counterterrorism, i.e. what Obama opted for in late 2014; c) medium-footprint counterterrorism, i.e. the direction in which Obamas approach was evolving in late 2016 and which Trump has so far extended; or d) a GWOT surge, the maximum approach the Bush administration opted for in 2007.

Each of these policies is tailored to a different understanding of the nature of the terrorist threat, and each has a different set of risks and rewards. In our judgment, none is ideal, but the least-worst is the medium-footprint approach. Assuming the Trump team does the same kind of analysis we do, we therefore expect the future of U.S. counterterrorism policy to look more like the recent past than either Obama or Trump might have promised during the presidential campaign.

Photo credit:JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

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Trump's War on Terror Rejects Obama's Off-Shore Balancing for Obama's Operational Raiding - Foreign Policy (blog)

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward warned on Wednesday that there are people from the Obama administration who could be facing criminal charges for unmasking the names of Trump transition team members from surveillance of foreign officials.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said earlier that he had briefed Trump on new information, unrelated to an investigation into Russian activities, that suggested that several members of Trump's transition team and perhaps Trump himself had their identities "unmasked" after their communications were intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials.

The revelation is notable because identities of Americans are generally supposed to remain "masked" if American communications are swept up during surveillance of foreign individuals.

During an interview on Fox News, Woodward said that if that information about the unmasking is true, "it is a gross violation."

He said it isn't Trump's assertion, without proof, that his predecessor wiretapped Trump Tower that is of concern, but rather that intelligence officials named the Americans being discussed in intercepted communications.

"You can learn all kinds of things from diplomats gossiping, because that's what occurs. Under the rules, and they are pretty strict, it's called minimization. You don't name the American person who is being discussed," Woodward said.

He noted that there are about 20 people in the intelligence community who, for intelligence reasons, can order this "minimization" be removed.

"But the idea that there was intelligence value here is really thin," Woodward said. "It's, again, down the middle, it is not what Trump said, but this could be criminal on the part of people who decided, oh, let's name these people."

He drove the point home, adding that "under the rules, that name is supposed to be blanked out, and so you've got a real serious problem potentially of people in the Obama administration passing around this highly classified gossip."

Also from the Washington Examiner

Rep. Thomas Massie believes the consequences of passing the American Health Care Act on Thursday could be catastrophic for the Republican Party and the process used to come up with the bill embarrasses him.

Massie said on MSNBC Thursday he believes the GOP replacement for the Affordable Care Act is a giveaway to insurance companies and won't actually make health insurance cheaper or healthcare better.

"The consequences of passing it and signing it are much worse for the Republican Party than the consequences of it going down today, and I hope it goes down today," Massie said.

Massie said the plan replaces mandates, subsidies and penalties paid to the government with mandates, subsidies and penalties paid to insurance

03/23/17 8:58 AM

View post:
Bob Woodward: Obama officials possibly facing criminal charges for unmasking scheme - Washington Examiner

House Intelligence Committee Ranking MemberAdam Schiff is in high dudgeonover the bad form of House Intelligence Chairman DevinNunes in reporting his bombshell -- that the chairmanhad been shown actual surveillance(not involving Russia)of the Trump transition team and possibly of the then president-elect himself -- to President Trump before he presented the evidence to the committee.

Bad form, quite possibly. But so what?

The facts are what they are.

What appears at this writing is thatTrump transition team members and possibly Trump himself had their identities revealed, were"unmasked" in the parlance, while foreign diplomats were being surveilled.The identitiesof American citizens werenot sufficiently "minimized," as they arerequired to be by law.This is a crime one would assume wouldput the perpetrators in prison. So far it hasn't. More than that, such behavior isa grave threat to a free society, to all of us.

In effect, Trump was wiretapped -- if not in the corny, old sense of the word, something very close. Technologically, he was wiretapped, as were several(actually many) others.

A fair amountofthis happened not long beforeBarack Obamasuddenlychanged the rules regarding raw intelligence, for the first timeeverallowing the NSA to share its data with 16 other intelligence agencies, thus making thedissemination of said data (i. e. leaking) many times more likely.That was done on January 12, 2017, just three scant days before Trump's inauguration. Why did the then president finally decideto make that particularchangeat that extremely late date, rather than on one of the previous seven years and three hundred fifty-three days of his presidency? You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes or Watson to smell a rat. Something's rottensomewhere -- and it's not Denmark.

Whether Barack Obama ordered the surveillance of Donald Trump during the transition is not the question. He would never have had to. In fact, he would have beenhighly unlikely to have done so for obvious legal and practical/political reasons. Instead, supporters of the thenpresident in a position to authorize or activate such surveillance would normally know or assume his wishesanywaywithout having to be told and could act accordingly.

That is the way of the world since there was a world.

The operative question is whether these recorded conversations then ever wound up on Obama's desk or whether he knew about themin some other manner... and, if so, when.If the worst istrue, itis a scandal that makesWatergate seem like a child's prank. Even Watergate's own Bob Woodward seemed to acknowledge as much on The O'Reilly Factor on Wednesday night.

This is why any legitimate investigation by a congressional committee or anyone else must encompass both Obama and Trump. This is a two-part story. If both parties are not investigated -- they cannot be separated -- this is no more than a partisan show. Further, the press cannot even faintly be trusted to investigate or adjudicatethis matter. Their bias is so overwhelming it would sink the Titanic twice.

See more here:
Time to Investigate Obama, not Just Trump - PJ Media

We checked a statement by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif.

In his opening statement at a closely watched hearing about possible Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., criticized United States policy toward Russia under President Barack Obama.

"In recent years, committee members have issued repeated and forceful pleas for stronger actions against Russian belligerence, but the Obama administration was committed to the notion, against all evidence, that we could reset relations with Putin," Nunes said.

This description of the Obama administrations position struck us as one-sided, so we took a closer look. We asked Nunes's office for comment, but didn't hear back.

We concludedits misleading for Nunes to have ignored at least three years of the Obama administration in which the reset policy was dead, replaced by a much tougher line on Moscow.

How the reset came about

In March 2009, about two months after Obama was sworn in, his administration initiated a new policy toward Russia called the "reset." The official kickoff came in Geneva on March 6, 2009, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov a red button.

The new policy came less than a year after conflict flared in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two regions of Georgia, an independent country that was previously part of the Soviet Union. Obamas foreign policy team had decided that the United States had a window of opportunity to find common ground on certain issues with Russia, given that Dmitry Medvedev had replaced Vladimir Putin as president in mid 2008.

The administration -- and some outside observers -- credit the reset with some achievements, at least initially.

During the period when the reset was U.S. policy, the two nations signed a nuclear-arms treaty; reached an agreement to allow U.S. troops and weapons destined for Afghanistan to be sent through Russian territory rather than Pakistan; collaborated on tough United Nations sanctions against Iran; achieved Russian membership in the World Trade Organization; and agreed that Russia would not use a U.N. Security Council veto to block a bombing campaign in Libya by the United States and its European allies.

As time went on, though, the reset drew increasing criticism. In 2011, former chess champion and human-rights activist Garry Kasparov criticized both Obama and Putin, telling the Daily Beast that the reset was "a disaster." And Douglas J. Feith, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy during the George W. Bush administration, co-wrote an article in Foreign Policy that called the reset "a head-shaking disappointment."

The reset peters out

The era of cooperation began to come apart in 2012 -- not coincidentally, the year Putin returned to the presidency after Medvedevs term.

Large street protests in his 2012 presidential campaign "had unnerved Mr. Putin, and he accused Mrs. Clinton of instigating them," the New York Times reported. "White House officials had hoped the hostile talk was just for domestic campaign purposes, but even after Mr. Putin formally won re-election, he kept it up."

Relations worsened further in 2013, when Russia took in Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who had leaked a large trove of sensitive intelligence.

The last straw, however, came in 2014 with Russias intervention in Ukraine. A popular revolution overthrew pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine, another former Soviet republic that became independent after the end of the Cold War. Russia responded by applying military pressure in pro-Russian regions of Ukraine and eventually annexing Crimea.

In addition to strongly condemning Russias actions, the United States worked with its European allies to impose a series of escalating sanctions on Moscow starting on March 6, 2014.

The sanctions "inflicted real costs on Russia," said Dan Nexon, a Georgetown University foreign service professor.

Emma Ashford, a research fellow with expertise on Russia at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that while the reset was "dying" between 2012 and 2014, the sanctions were a turning point.

"By 2014, with turmoil in Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Crimea, there was no longer any real attempt to seek the reset," she said. "In fact, the Obama administration pursued a strong sanctions policy against Russia, and contributed troops to bolster NATO forces in Eastern Europe."

Other experts agreed.

"Certainly by March 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, there was no evidence of any ongoing Obama administration commitment to the reset," added Susan H. Allen, a foreign policy specialist at George Mason University. "The U.S. condemnation of the annexation of Crimea was clear and unequivocal."

"By 2014, I don't know how anyone could credibly argue that U.S. policy was the reset policy," added Richard Nephew, a research scholar at Columbia University.

Our ruling

Nunes said, "In recent years ... the Obama administration was committed to the notion, against all evidence, that we could reset relations with Putin."

Nunes summary of U.S. policy toward Russia is at best incomplete. The Obama administration did pursue a reset policy, and kept it up arguably as late as 2014. But observers agree that the policy was dead no later than early 2014, when Russia intervened in Ukraine, and was already in question for two years before that.

Nunes statement is misleadingly oversimplified, so we rate it Half True.

Originally posted here:
Devin Nunes oversimplifies timeline of Obama 'reset' with Russia - PolitiFact