More than three months after Melissa Hathaway, the acting senior director for cybersecurity at the National Security Council, resigned, Obama still hasn't appointed a czar. Federal Times reports that the White House may be preparing to announce someone soon, perhaps around Thanksgiving.
President Obama admitted today that Guantanamo Bay prison will not close by his January 2010 deadline, and while he said he hoped to shutter it sometime next year, he declined to give a new deadline.
"People, I think understandably, are fearful after a lot of years where they were told that Guantanamo was critical to keep terrorists out," Obama said. Closing the prison is "also just technically hard," he added
A team of liberal activists and Web sites -- including AMERICAblog and Daily Kos -- announced a kind of backward pledge drive in response to what it views as empty promises by President Obama to the gay community.
The groups are asking supporters to "pledge" they will not donate any money to the Democratic National Committee, Organizing for America or the Obama campaign until the president's campaign promises are fulfilled -- meaning he must sign the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the Defense of Marriage Act.
"LGBT Americans, our families, and our friends kept our promise at the ballot box, we now expect President Obama to keep his in the White House," wrote bloggers at AMERICAblog.
The pledge drive -- also termed a "boycott" and a "pause" by media and bloggers -- is the latest uprising by Obama's gay supporters, who are growing outwardly dissatisfied with the rate of progress on issues important to them.
The House passed its health care reform bll, which requires all individuals to have insurance coverage. According to CBO estimates, the plan would cover 96 percent of Americans.
Because there will be no cost-of-living raise in Social Security benefits in 2010, Obama announced plans for seniors to recieve an extra $250 check sometime next year. The White House did not say how the program would be funded, but said it would keep benefits going in a year when they were not scheduled to increase due to inflation.
By Emily Vaughan
In early September, the Obama administration released a series of draft reports about restoring the Chesapeake Bay. Largely overlooked, these reports could serve as a blueprint for tightening regulations on farms across the country.
Federal agencies tasked with helping restore the Chesapeake Bay drafted the reports following a May executive order. The Environmental Protection Agency, given the goal of defining "the next generation of tools and actions" to improve water quality, set its sights in one of the reports on Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs): large-scale animal farms that the Clean Water Act regulates as a point-source for pollution.
As much as 25 percent of all pollution in the Bay originates at CAFOs in the form of animal waste runoff, said Chuck Fox, the EPA's senior adviser to the administrator for the Chesapeake Bay. Agricultural practices are the largest contributors of the nutrient and sediment pollution that makes it into the Bay, the EPA report says. Excess amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus, the main pollution culprits, wash into waterways and cause destructive algae blooms that create dead zones, areas where there isn't enough oxygen in the water to support life.
Excess manure at CAFOs is the source of the problem. Current federal regulations require farmers to outline how they will deal with animal waste. But the regulations only cover what happens in the production area at the farm, a big loophole for farmers who can escape federal oversight by taking the manure off-site.
It's no surprise that the EPA's recommendations include tightening restrictions on factory farms. Currently, many such facilities must obtain National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits. The EPA's plans in the Bay hinge on expanding the number of legally defined CAFOs so they fall under this permit system.
The EPA also recommends revising the definition of CAFOs to cover smaller operations, and wants to institute "next generation" nutrient management plans and better recordkeeping of the waste farmers move off their property. Fox anticipates that federal rulemaking would take two to three years, though if the recommendations were implemented through individual states in the watershed, all of which currently have stricter standards than the EPA, the time could be cut in half.
"Unlike past documents that focused on goals, this one focuses almost entirely on actions," said William Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, in a statement the day after the release of the reports.
Thus far, the recommendations remain local. "We got very direct directions from the president with respect to the Chesapeake, so we're focusing a lot of our attention on the Chesapeake," said Mike Shapiro, deputy assistant administrator for water at the EPA. "And we're also still in the process of implementing our new CAFO regulations nationally."
Just because specific policies would work in the Chesapeake "wouldn't necessarily mean that the same requirement would be justified or necessary on a national basis," Shapiro said. But he conceded that with additional study, some of the practices could be put in place in other areas. "I can't exclude the possibility that we may be modifying our national regulations as well," he added.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced joint regulations that increase the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards and create the first-ever federal standard to cut greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. According to the agencies, the tougher rules will help conserve 1.8 billion barrels of oil.
Speaking at a White House briefing Tuesday afternoon, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the oil conservation will aid in “significantly reducing our dependence on foreign fuel. That will help protect us from oil price spikes that shook our economy last summer."
The FCC, through its new broadband.gov blog, has requested comments from the public on what "broadband" means. As Carlos Kirjner, senior broadband adviser to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, said in his post, "if we want to decide who has and who does not have broadband, we actually need to agree on what we mean by broadband."
The call for comments is part of the FCC's efforts to draft the National Broadband Plan, which is due to Congress in February.
The IRS announced a new information-sharing agreement with the Swiss bank UBS to track possible U.S. tax evaders. UBS will provide access to thousands of accounts, as per IRS requests sent through the Swiss government. The IRS has charged that as many as 4,450 UBS accounts are being used to dodge billions of dollars in U.S. taxes.
"As this agreement demonstrates, the world of international taxes has dramatically changed," said IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman, "and people hiding assets and income offshore and from the IRS need to get right with the government now."
The Obama administration is persuading states to expand the use of test scores in judging teachers by connecting the practice to the $4.3 billion in stimulus money to be given out by the Education Department.
