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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldworldnet who wrote (465050)	1/14/2012 1:06:47 AM
From: FJB	3 Recommendations Respond to of 793731

Fast and Furious: Mystery of the White Guns Has yet another "gun walking" operation been uncovered? by John Hayward 01/13/2012 humanevents.com The House Oversight committee is looking into yet another Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms operation in which, as a source told the L.A. Times, “apparently guns got away again.” Hopefully the Bureau doesn’t lose track of alcohol and tobacco as often as they let firearms “get away” from them, or we’ll be looking at the kind of public health crisis the White House actually cares about. The operation currently on the desks of “gun walking” investigators Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) was called Operation White Gun. Despite the odd code name, it had nothing to do with cracking down on heavily armed white supremacists. It was all about arming the Sinaloa cartel, the same murderous Mexican gang who got all those guns from Operation Fast and Furious. Operation White Gun was supposedly more like a normal sting operation, where Fast and Furious simply threw 1,700 American guns across the border, without any real attempt to track them. As the L.A. Times recounts it: According to documents that the ATF sent to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, an umbrella group of U.S. agencies that seeks to disrupt major drug trafficking and money laundering, White Gun targeted nine leaders of the Sinaloa cartel. The list included Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, who heads the cartel and is Mexico's most wanted drug suspect. In ATF reports, MacAllister wrote that U.S. intelligence showed cartel members were setting up military-type training camps in the Sierra de Durango mountains, near Guzman's northern Mexico hide-out, and wanted to bolster their arsenal with grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns. The agents focused first on Vicente Fernando Guzman Patino, a cartel insider who was identified as one of their weapons purchasers and who often used code words and phrases, saying "57" for "OK," for instance. In fall 2009, the ATF team sent an undercover agent posing as an arms dealer to Guzman Patino. Photos of weapons, including a Dragon Fire 120-millimeter heavy mortar, were emailed to his "Superman6950" Hotmail account. According to the ATF documents, Guzman Patino told the undercover agent that "if he would bring them a tank, they would buy it." He boasted he had "$15 million to spend on firearms and not to worry about the money." He wanted "the biggest and most extravagant firearms available." Well of course you’re not going to get a tank, Mr. Patino. U.S. politicians aren't interested in pushing any tank-control legislation. The upshot of this little email exchange between the undercover ATF agent and the gun-happy Sinaloa quartermaster was a classic crime-drama meet outside a restaurant in Phoenix, where the ATF man popped open his trunk and showed the delighted Patino a stockpile of weapons, including “a Bushmaster rifle and a Ramo .50 heavy machine gun.” And then… … well, we don’t know what happened next. The investigation suddenly ended. No documentation unearthed so far confirms whether Patino got any White Gun weapons or not. Some lower-level stooges got busted by the same undercover agent after they tried to trade crystal meth for shoulder-launched missiles, but none of the cartel bigwigs targeted by White Gun seem to have been taken down in the operation. ATF agent Hope McAllister, a leader in the Operation Fast and Furious disaster, reportedly spent some time in Mexico during the summer of 2010 looking for White Gun weapons among the ordnance seized from cartel killers by the Mexican government. That behavior is not consistent with a tightly-controlled sting operation run by people who know exactly where all the contraband merchandise went. “Sooooo… you guys wouldn’t happen to have seized any of the guns on this list, would you? No? Oh, well, just thought I’d ask. Adios!” This is all very strange, because usually the Obama Justice Department is so meticulous with its paperwork, and so eager to show it off to congressional investigators and the public. The L.A. Times’ source inside the investigation said of the White Guns, “How many got into Mexico? Who knows?” I’ll bet the answer to that question, at least initially, will not be “Attorney General Eric Holder.”

To: goldworldnet who wrote (465050)	1/14/2012 1:40:59 AM
From: KLP	2 Recommendations Respond to of 793731

Senators warn new EPA rules would raise gas prices By Judson Berger Published January 13, 2012 \| FoxNews.com advertisement Senators from both sides of the aisle are warning that looming EPA regulations on gasoline could impose billions of dollars in additional costs on the industry and end up adding up to 25 cents to every gallon of gas. The senators, in a letter this week to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, urged the agency to back off the yet-to-be-released regulations. Though the EPA has not yet issued any proposal, they claimed the agency is planning to call for a new requirement to reduce the sulfur content in gasoline. Citing the nearly $3.40-a-gallon average price of gas and the state of the economy, the senators said "now is not the time for new regulations that will raise the price of fuel even further." They said it would be "expensive" for companies to meet the sulfur targets and cited a study that found it could add up to $17 billion in industry-wide, up-front expenses, in addition to another $13 billion in annual operating costs. This could in turn add between 12 and 25 cents to an average gallon of gasoline "depending on the stringency of the proposed rule," they wrote. "If the EPA does not proceed carefully with its regulations, the nationwide price of fuel could increase to the further detriment of consumers and businesses," the senators warned. The lawmakers on the letter were: Sens. James Inhofe, R-Okla.; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; John Barrasso, R-Wyo.; Mary Landrieu, D-La.; David Vitter, R-La.; and Mark Begich, D-Alaska. The EPA did not comment on the senators' complaints. Asked Friday for a response to the concerns, the EPA said: "EPA is still in the process of developing the proposal." An EPA official said publicly in November that the agency was developing the so-called "Tier 3" standards proposal during a House subcommittee hearing. Margo Oge, director of the EPA's Office of Transportation and Air Quality, told lawmakers that the proposal would help the country meet its "clean air goals." "Motor vehicles and their fuel are an important source of compounds that form air pollution," she said. Oge said reducing sulfur in gasoline would make emission control technology more effective, and "the end result would be cleaner air." If the EPA formally issues the proposal, it would probably take more than a year for the agency to review public comments and finalize any plan. A Senate Republican aide said the authority to tighten the sulfur standards comes from the Clean Air Act but noted that EPA has the discretion to either impose the standards or not. The current sulfur standard is 30 parts per million in gasoline -- that's down from a prior standard of 300 parts per million. The new proposal could bring the standard down to 10 parts per million, according to the senators who wrote to Jackson The aide said there was a "bigger benefit" when the standard dropped from 300 to 30 parts per million. But squeezing that down to 10 parts per million, the aide said, might not offer as much bang for the buck. "They're extraordinarily expensive relative to the last round of sulfur reductions," the aide told FoxNews.com. URL foxnews.com Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/13/senators-warn-new-epa-rules-would-raise-gas-prices/print#ixzz1jPcQFzda