Julian Assange unlikely to be charged in US

The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting US news organisations and journalists, United States officials say.
The officials stressed that a formal decision has not been taken and a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks remains impanelled, but they said there is little possibility of bringing a case against the Australian, who has sought asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, unless he is implicated in criminal activity other than releasing online top secret military and diplomatic documents.
The Obama administration has charged government employees and contractors who leak classified information - such as former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning - with violations of the Espionage Act.
But officials said that although Assange published classified documents, he did not leak them, something they said significantly affects their legal analysis.
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"The problem the department has always had in investigating Julian Assange is there is no way to prosecute him for publishing information without the same theory being applied to journalists," former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/julian-assange-unlikely-to-be-charged-in-us-20131126-2y7uk.html

Corporate Donors Stick With GOP Hardliners After the Shutdown (warning:Graphic Image)

—By Patrick Caldwell|



October's tea party-inspired government shutdown was awful for big businesses. The anti-Obamacare crusade led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and House tea partiers kept the government closed for 16 days and won zero policy victories for the GOP, but their showboating robbed billions from the economy. Because of the shutdown, Standard & Poor's revised its economic growth projections for the last quarter of 2013 downward from 3 percent to 2.4. percent. The harm to the economy would have gone from unpleasant to catastrophic if Cruz and his partners in crime had their way and let the government hit the debt ceiling.

Throughout the shutdown, corporations begged the Republicans to step back from the ledge and keep the government funded. Their protestations fell on the deaf ears of new members of Congress who feel less beholden to corporate donors than past generations of Republicans. For a moment after the shutdown was resolved, it seemed like big business finally had enough with the GOP's hardliners. Moderate GOP candidates jumped into primary challenges against tea partiers with the blessing of corporate donors immediately after the shutdown.

The dissatisfaction of Big Business didn't last all that long. Reuters analyzed donations from the biggest business political action committees and found that they are still funneling money to the Tea Partiers who wanted the government to crash and burn last month. Since Congress voted to re-open the government on October 16, the eight biggest corporate PACs have donated nearly $85,000 to the 162 Republicans who voted against the deal to raise the debt ceiling and end the shutdown. For context, those same PACs have also given $246,000 to the 366 members of Congress who voted for the deal. Reuters found that some companies, such as Honeywell, were still donating to hardline Republicans even while they were railing against the government shutdown.

Even if corporate America despise the tea partier's methods, it turns out business still cares more about lower marginal tax rates and lax regulation than a functioning government.

more
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/11/corporate-donors-stick-gop-after-shutdown

The US has 43 nuclear power plants’ worth of solar energy in the pipeline

The boom in solar energy in the US in recent years? You haven’t seen anything yet. The pipeline of photovoltaic projects has grown 7% over the past 12 months and now stands at 2,400 solar installations that would generate 43,000 megawatts (MW), according to a report released today by market research firm NPD Solarbuzz. If all these projects are built, their peak electricity output would be equivalent to that of 43 big nuclear power plants, and enough to keep the lights on in six million American homes.

Only 8.5% of the pipeline is currently being installed, with most of it still in the planning stages. Some projects will inevitably get canceled or fail to raise financing.



But there’s reason to believe that a good chunk of these solar power plants and rooftop installations will get built over the next two years. That’s because a crucial US tax break for renewable energy projects is set to fall from 30% to 10% at the end of 2016. So there will be a rush to get projects online. In 2012, for instance, wind developers installed a record 13,131 MW as a key tax credit was set to expire, accounting for 42% of all new US electricity capacity that year. (The US Congress subsequently renewed the tax break for another year.)

One sign that solar developers like First Solar and SunPower are gearing up to meet the 2016 deadline is that the balance of projects is shifting to smaller installations that can quickly obtain permits and get built fast. While eight of the 10 largest photovoltaic power plants came online in 2012—those in the 100 MW to 250 MW range—over the past 12 months the number of solar projects under 30 MW has jumped by 33%, according to the report.


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http://qz.com/150887/the-us-has-43-nuclear-power-plants-worth-of-solar-energy-in-the-pipeline/

The Feds Have No Idea Who's Flying Drones

It bears repeating: The federal government has only a vague sense of which government entities are flying unmanned aerial vehicles, particularly at the state and municipal levels. Lax oversight and lack of coordination between departments are precisely what landed police in Brunswick, Georgia, the Justice Department money to buy its drone without any of the pesky oversight or requisite approvals.

As of last year, the city of Brunswick had 15,640 residents and four annual homicides to its name. Located on the Georgia coast about 30 miles north of Florida, the self-styled “Shrimp Capital of the World” has fewer than 100 sworn officers on its police payroll. And since 2011, documents reveal, the Brunswick Police Department has had a drone on hand for “hostage negotiations,” funded by a grant from the federal Justice Department.

This will be news to both the Federal Aviation Administration, which approves the deployment of drones by all government entities nationwide, as well as to the Justice Department itself. The purchase underscores a curious blindspot in the domestic dronescape: The DOJ has the funds to buy and fly drones, only those privileges, or seemingly any record of them, don't appear to be crossing with the FAA.

In a September 2013 report (pdf), the Justice Department (DOJ) Inspector General chided DOJ grantmaking offices for handing out cash to state and local law enforcement agencies without so much as noting which were buying drones with the money. The Inspector General’s review found three known instances from 2001 to 2013 when DOJ funds were granted to buy drone equipment: police in Miami, North Little Rock and Gadsen, Alabama, all purchased their unmanned aerial vehicles using Justice Department grants during that time.


more
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-feds-have-no-idea-whos-flying-drones

Want to Cut Government Waste? Find the $8.5 Trillion the Pentagon Can’t Account For

By Lauren Lyster

Special Enterprise Reporter Scot Paltrow unearthed the “high cost of the Pentagon’s bad bookkeeping” in a Reuters investigation. It amounts to $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never been accounted for. (The year 1996 was the first that the Pentagon should have been audited under a law requiring audits of all government departments. Oh, and by the way, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with this law.)

We talk to Paltrow in the accompanying video about his findings.

Here are some some highlights he found among the billions of dollars of waste and dysfunctional accounting at the Pentagon:

The DOD has amassed a backlog of more than $500 billion in unaudited contracts with outside vendors. How much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known.
Over the past 10 years the DOD has signed contracts for provisions of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury is a mystery.
The Pentagon uses a standard operating procedure to enter false numbers, or “plugs,” to cover lost or missing information in their accounting in order to submit a balanced budget to the Treasury. In 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in these reconciling amounts. That was up from $7.41 billion the year before.

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http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/want-cut-government-waste-8-5-trillion-pentagon-142321339.html

Yet all the repubs can scream about are "Solyndra!!!" and "Fisker!!!"

Tuesday Toon Roundup 3- The Rest

Economy





ACA



Tday

Tuesday Toon Roundup 2- Iran Deal

Tuesday Toon Roundup 1- The Distraction Party

I Will Direct My Apologies Elsewhere

By Dr R Scott Poppen

....So everyone is now apologizing to folks in the individual health insurance market who can’t renew their current cherished policies, some of which are so crummy that it is a stretch to call them insurance, and will be paying much more in the Marketplaces because they make too much money to qualify for a subsidy.

So, since repentance is the order of the day, here is mine.

To the woman who testified at my state’s Medicaid expansion hearings last July I’m sorry that you developed advanced breast cancer several years ago, lost your job during your radiation and chemotherapy treatments, couldn’t afford your COBRA payments to keep up your insurance, and had to stop your chemo prematurely. I’m glad you got a new job, albeit without health insurance benefits. I was so sorry, and sad, to learn that your breast cancer has returned, is metastatic, and that you have no insurance.

I’d like to apologize for a member of our legislature, a health care provider himself, who an hour after your testimony stated publically that he didn’t want to hear anymore testimony from patients. You see, his innate compassion for your situation is colliding with his anti-government ideology producing painful cognitive dissonance. His only option is avoidance.

Perhaps, if you are still alive, you can sit down with some of the folks who are going to have to pay more for their insurance and help them find a cheaper cell phone plan, alternatives to cable Tv, or more affordable vacation options. That is, of course, if you are still alive.

more

http://www.drsforamerica.org/blog/i-will-direct-my-apologies-elsewhere

Oldest Buddhist shrine holds clues to Buddha's birth

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN

There are about 500 million Buddhists worldwide, but it's unclear exactly when in history this religion began. The Buddha's life story spread first through oral tradition, and little physical evidence about Buddhism's early years has been found.

Now, scientists for the first time have uncovered archaeological evidence of when the Buddha's monumentally influential life occurred. Excavations in Nepal date a Buddhist shrine, located at what is said to be the Buddha's birthplace, to the sixth century B.C.

The research, published in the journal Antiquity, describes the remains of a timber structure about the same size and shape as a temple built at the same site in the third century B.C.

Archaeologists also found reason to think that a tree grew at the center of this ancient structure, lending support to the traditional story that the Buddha's mother held onto a tree branch while giving birth to him.

"This is one of those rare occasions when belief, tradition, archaeology and science actually come together," lead study author Robin Coningham, professor at Durham University in the United Kingdom, said at a press briefing Monday.

more
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/25/world/asia/buddha-birthplace-buddhist-shrine/