Politics

In Juneau this week, lawmakers are wrestling with the question of whether to take a larger stake in the Alaska LNG gas line project. Specifically, they must decide whether to buy out one of the state’s partners, TransCanada.

The decision would put the state on the hook for as much as $7-billion more in upfront construction costs if the project ends up going forward. But the governor and his team argue it’s worth it to get more control — and perhaps more revenue down the line.

Before we get into whether or not it’s a good idea to buy out TransCanada, let’s back up, and remember how we got here. Specifically, let’s head back to the era of Governor Sarah Palin.

Palin: And now it’s time for a new generation of energy for Alaska. It’s time for our gas line.

Palin signed the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, or AGIA, to try to jump-start work on a pipeline. Basically, the state put up to $500 million on the table to help develop a natural gas line from the North Slope to the Lower 48. The company that won that contract, in 2008, was TransCanada.
Fast forward to 2012 and cheap shale gas had swamped the market down South.

“It was like betting on the Cubs for the World Series,” said Larry Persily, who has followed the state’s gas line efforts as a state and federal official, and now advises the Kenai Peninsula Borough. “It was just a loser.”

A pipeline through Canada no longer made sense. So the three major North Slope producers — ExxonMobil, BP and ConocoPhillips — proposed a different plan: a pipeline that would export the natural gas to Asia.

That was the birth of the Alaska LNG project.

But the state was still committed to its partnership with TransCanada. By then, of course, Gov. Sarah Palin was out, and Gov. Sean Parnell was in. His team struck a deal with TransCanada, bringing it in as a partner on the state’s 25 percent share of the new project — as a way to get out of the old project.

“It was the cost of getting a divorce,” Persily said. “And, also, I think the state saw TransCanada as an experienced pipeline partner with expertise, with knowledge, with history. And TransCanada was willing to put up its share of that upfront money, and the state has not exactly been rolling in cash the last few years.”

That’s the deal that now-Governor Bill Walker would like to exit. For Walker, it’s all about control.
“Alaska needs to lead this project,” he said in an interview just before this week’s special session. “We should be the head of the team. We should be driving this effort.”

Right now, the state shares its 25 percent vote on project decisions with TransCanada. Walker said that’s simply not enough. He sees the gas line as the economic future of the state.
“It’s a must-have for us,” he said. “It used to be something on someone’s wish list in the past. But now it’s an absolute must-have, because of what it would do for Alaska. So no one is more motivated than we are to make sure this happens.”

The Walker administration also makes a second point: they say buying out TransCanada just makes economic sense.

Right now, TransCanada is essentially acting as the state’s banker. It’s paying the upfront costs for all of the work on the project. But under the current deal, the state must reimburse those costs. If the project falls through, the state will pay back anything TransCanada has spent — plus 7 percent interest.

If the project succeeds, the state will essentially pay those costs as part of its deal to ship gas down the pipeline.

Walker and his team think the state could finance the project more cheaply itself, and without a partner, make more money once the gas starts flowing.

Many lawmakers agree. But some, especially in the legislature’s Republican leadership, still have questions.

“It does sound good that we would be at the table 100 percent,” said Anchorage Republican Cathy Giessel, speaking on Tuesday’s Talk of Alaska. “But this is a $45 billion — minimum $45 billion — project.”

Giessel chairs the Senate Natural Resources Committee. Without TransCanada, she said, the state will have to come up with a lot more money in the near term.

“We need to make sure that the state can afford this, and what the financing would look like,” she said. “And so that’s what we’re digging into right now.”

The administration is asking for $158 million to buy out TransCanada’s share, cover agency costs, and finish the project’s early planning phase (called “pre-FEED” or pre-front end engineering and design).

But the real costs come down the line. If the state buys out TransCanada and the project goes forward, the state’s share of construction costs would be an estimated $14 to $16 billion — double what it is if TransCanada stays. Giessel says it might make more sense to let TransCanada face the challenge of coming up with that money, even if it cuts into the state’s revenue down the line.

“We have health care. We have public safety to deal with. There’s education,” she said. “All of these are calls on the cash that the state has. We have a broader responsibility than just building a gas pipeline.”

Anna MacKinnon is co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee. She brought up another issue: expertise. Without TransCanada at the table, do state agencies like the Alaska Gasline Development Corporation and the Department of Natural Resources have the expertise to manage the state’s share of the project?

“There may be the technical expertise at the state,” she said. “We need to understand that to make the decision.”

Despite these reservations, lawmakers — including MacKinnon — seem to be leaning toward the buy-out. MacKinnon said for her, it comes down to a new way of doing business. When the trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline was built, the state didn’t own any of it. (The state gets its revenue through royalties, and production and property taxes.) This time, the state wants to own a piece of the pie, with all the risk — and reward — that entails.

The White House and congressional leaders are close to reaching a two-year budget deal that would set new, higher spending caps and increase the nation’s borrowing authority.

Congressional aides, who confirmed the ongoing talks, said an announcement could come as early as Monday evening.

House Speaker John Boehner’s impending resignation, coupled with a Nov. 3 deadline to raise the nation’s debt limit, have accelerated progress on budget talks that have been underway since mid-September.

Boehner is eager to reach a deal, in part, to allow his presumed successor, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to start with a clean legislative slate.

House Republicans are expected to nominate Ryan to serve as the next speaker on Wednesday. The full House would vote to confirm the nomination on Thursday.

The two-year budget deal would keep the government funded and largely eliminate the threat of government shutdown or a debt default until after the presidential election.

The federal government is currently funded by a stopgap measure that runs out Dec. 11.

The deal would ease tough and unpopular spending caps put in place by a 2011 budget law. It would allow Congress to spend more money on defense and domestic programs, by providing for savings elsewhere in the federal budget.

Leaders are also eyeing a fix to prevent a sharp increase in Medicare premiums that would affect about 30 percent of beneficiaries, according to congressional sources.

Democrats are eager to include in the package a provision to raise the debt ceiling, the nation’s borrowing authority, until March 2017. Republicans have balked at raising the limit without commensurate spending cuts attached, but the White House reiterated Monday that they would not negotiate on the debt ceiling.

“Congress has a fundamental responsibility to ensure that bills that they have authorized get paid fully and on time,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “That is, in some ways, the dictionary definition of fiscal responsibility and it is the expectation that the American people have for Congress that they will fulfill this basic function.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

If there’s anything more central to Iowa’s identity than its first-in-the-nation presidential caucus, it’s probably corn. So, insulting both in a single tweet is a pretty serious offense for a presidential candidate.

Serious enough, it seems, to get Donald Trump to concede the closest thing to an apology that he has issued since he entered the presidential race.

The initial tweet came Thursday. It’s since been deleted, but @realDonaldTrump retweeted a supporter who wrote: “#BenCarson is now leading in the #polls in #Iowa. Too much #Monsanto in the #corn creates issues in the brain? #Trump #GOP.”

(Monsanto is the agriculture giant that sells engineered seeds to farmers across the country.)

Within hours, Trump had deleted this tweet, and posted an explanation that didn’t exactly mirror President Harry Truman’s “the buck stops here” style of leadership:

The young intern who accidentally did a Retweet apologizes.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 22, 2015

The plot thickened Friday, when a Trump intern told the International Business Times that, hey, interns don’t have access to Trump’s Twitter account and its 4.7 million followers. “From my understanding and what I’ve been informed of by superiors is that Mr. Trump’s tweets and Twitter responses are done by him personally,” Garrison Groeschke, a Fordham University student, told the outlet. That jibes with the multiple profiles that have been written about Trump and his unorthodox, aggressive approach to the social media platform. Here’s what the New York Times reported earlier this year: “He usually dictates messages to his assistant during the day and types them himself at home or on the golf course, from which he has sent more than 100, according to geographic data embedded in his tweets. The most frequently used words in his tweets: ‘great’ (more than 700 times), ‘winner’ or ‘winners’ (43), and ‘loser’ or ‘losers’ (34). In all, he has sent more than 28,000 tweets — the rough equivalent of 12 a day.” Last month, Mother Jones conducted a thorough study into how often Trump himself is sending tweets, and how often staffers are doing the posting. The whole episode underscores one question that these articles haven’t addressed, though — just how the heck Trump retweets his supporters. Retweets from fans and voters constitute a large chunk of Trump’s Twitter output. But Trump’s retweets all take a strange form. Instead of simply reposting the supporters’ tweets, as Twitter’s software now automatically does when a user hits the “retweet” button, Trump writes the messages from his own account, but within quotation marks. The style mirrors outdated, earlier Twitter software, which would take the tweet you wanted to post, add quotation marks, and insert “RT” in front of it. This has many people wondering whether Trump has simply never bothered to update his phone. Another explanation is that Trump is copying tweets, pasting them into his own message field, and adding quotation marks. That’s what Sen. Rand Paul’s chief digital strategist, Vincent Harris, seems to think:

Trump’s Monsanto tweet wasn’t push of retweet button, it was longer copy/ paste process showing political carelessness that will b downfall — Vincent Harris (@VincentHarris) October 22, 2015

A Twitter spokesman, noting many people have been asking this question, floated another possibility: that Trump may be using a third-party software platform like Tweetbot or Hootsuite. But many of the tweets in question say they’re coming from Twitter’s android app.

NPR asked Trump’s campaign for an explanation of how it retweets supporters. We have not heard back from them.

Do you have any theories? Leave them in the comment section.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Make America Great Again. It’s Donald Trump’s campaign slogan. It’s on the caps his campaign sells to admirers, and it’s also the name of an ostensibly independent superPAC.

Or it was until this week, when the superPAC said it was going out of business. It ran aground on stories in the Washington Post, revealing connections linking the superPAC with Trump’s campaign and his office.

The Post reported that Colorado political consultant Mike Ciletti has business ties to Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and also runs the superPAC. The paper also reported that Ciletta seemed to be soliciting superPAC contributions from Trump business contacts. Federal law bars candidates and their campaigns from soliciting big, unregulated contributions for superPACs.

Ciletti is also a principal in a company called Wizbang Solutions. The Trump campaign paid Wizbang $41,300 in the third quarter for printing, design and direct mail. Ciletti didn’t respond to NPR’s request for comment.

Trump’s campaign finance lawyer, former Federal Election Commission chairman Donald McGahn, wrote to MAGA and eight other pro-Trump superPACs on Wednesday, telling them to stop using Trump’s name and image. McGahn said Trump appreciates small, unsolicited contributions, but didn’t want donors misled into “supporting an unauthorized effort, one which is subject to no oversight.”

MAGA got a $100,000 contribution this summer from the mother-in-law of Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

Another link between Trump and MAGA is its very name. Donald Trump filed in 2012 to trademark the phrase Make America Great Again for use with a political action committee. He first used it this past May – an essential step in the application process – and the Patent and Trademark Office registered it in July.

McGahn and the campaign didn’t respond to questions about the name and usage rights.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Read Original Article – Published OCTOBER 24, 2015 7:54 AM ET

Trump Squashes ‘Make America Great Again’ SuperPAC

As Democrats gain from the nation’s growing diversity — attracting solid majorities among Hispanic and African American voters — Republicans are gaining among white, working-class voters, a group that was once a Democratic stronghold.

Nowhere is this clearer than in West Virginia, where the president touched down this week to talk about drug addiction.

A few hours before Air Force One was due to land in Charleston, an anti-Obama rally took shape outside the state capitol building.

A dozen speakers, including local officials and state and federal office holders took turns attacking the president for environmental policies they say are killing the coal industry.

“We are going to win the war on coal. We have to stay strong, we have to stand together, and we absolutely have to get through the [2016] election,” said Chris Hamilton of the state-funded West Virginia Coal Forum.

About 75 people stand listening, some with signs. There was: “Obama your change destroyed our hope.” And another that exclaims, “Obama is not West Virginia’s president!”

Today there are few places where Obama is less liked. For decades, though, Democrats could count on West Virginia voters in presidential contests, with only rare exceptions. But Bill Clinton is the last Democrat to carry the state, and in 2012 Obama received just 35 percent of the vote.

Charlotte Kainser, who’s married to a retired miner, holds a sign that says “Coal Miners Matter.” She shakes her head at the state’s worst-in-the-nation jobless rate.

“The economy’s bad – bad, bad, bad,” Kainser says. “So why would you really want to come to West Virginia? Why would you want to live here?”

Young people are leaving the state in search of jobs, and the overall population is aging.

Kainser says she’s still a registered Democrat, but one who can’t remember the last Democratic nominee she voted for. That’s not uncommon. As for this year, she kind of likes Mike Huckabee — and Donald Trump.

“I vote for the best person,” she says. “When it comes down to the main election I would vote for Trump on top of Hillary Clinton,” and probably over any of the Democrats, she adds.

A couple hours north is the campus of West Virginia University. Twenty-year-old Dakota Workman grew up in coal country and comes from a family of Democrats going back many generations. But when Workman registered to vote for the first time, he declared himself a Republican.

“My mom called my grandma and told her, ‘You’ll never believe your grandson just came home registered Republican.’ And my grandma was like, ‘Well, good job, I voted Republican since Bush’s first election,’ ” he says, even though she was registered as a Democrat.

Workman, vice chair of the local College Republicans, is a perfect example of what has happened in the state.

White, working-class Democrats are abandoning the party over environmental issues like coal, and on things like gun rights and abortion. There’s been a similar shift among such voters nationally.

Meanwhile, still loyal Democrats in the state, like Samantha Shimer, are frustrated by the turn of events.

“For West Virginia, I would say that I feel kind of rock bottom,” says the West Virginia University sophomore. “However, my views on the political shift in the country as a whole is it’s shifting progressively.”

That’s good news nationally, she says, but she feels her home state is being left behind, using an analogy:

“West Virginia is one of those little speed bumps,” she says. “But that’s the boat West Virginia is in right now.”

The state may be a speed bump for progressive Democrats, but it’s a rising stronghold for Republicans.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski has a pretty big gavel to pummel the Department of the Interior with as chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which oversees the department. Nominees for high office at DOI and other departments have to clear her committee before Senate confirmation.

With three nominees from DOI and three from the Department of Energy before her, Murkowski wasn’t shy Tuesday morning in tying the nominees to their bosses and declaring favorites. The senator says she likes Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.

“He works with us. He listens to us. I think he deserves to have a team in place to support him,” Murkowski said. “Unfortunately, I’m not able to say the same when it comes to the secretary of the Interior.”

Murkowski homed in on Kristen Sarri, the nominee to be assistant secretary of the Interior for Policy, Management and Budget. Murkowski went through a list of her complaints about the department, such as: Not opening enough of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to exploration, being slow with permits, the “heartless” denial of an emergency road for King Cove, and, most recently, the decisions on offshore Arctic leases. Murkowski says the department created a “deteriorating regulatory environment” that thwarts development and was a factor in Shell’s decision to give up on Arctic drilling.

“So if you’re an Alaskan and you’re reading the headlines, you have to wonder, what’s going on within Interior? Why do they have it out for us?” the senator said.

Sarri, who is already working in the policy office at Interior, says the department isn’t against Arctic development.

“Let me just first start by saying, really quickly that Alaska is incredibly important obviously to energy production in this country and the safe and responsible development in the Arctic is an important part of the picture,” Sarri said.

Murkowski told her that’s not evident from the administration’s actions.

“I was not involved in either of the decisions announced on Friday,” Sarri said, referring to the cancellation of Arctic lease sales and the refusal to extend existing leases held by Shell and other companies.

Sarri says the offshore leasing decisions came from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which are in Interior but lower down the organizational chart. Murkowski pressed on, and Sarri continued to say she wasn’t responsible for the actions Murkowski objects to.

Dozens of nominations are pending in Congress. Senators sometimes hold them hostage by the fistful to extract concessions from a president. Murkowski didn’t say whether she’d block anyone.

Even if she did put a hold on Interior nominations, Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, says it’s unlikely to cause the Obama administration to reverse course. But, Binder says, by voicing her opposition, Murkowski does plant a flag on the issue.

“She’s taking a position, right?” Binder says. “And senators get rewarded for being on the right side of issues, even if they can’t get the outcome that they want.”

A Murkowski spokesman says the senator will wait for more information before deciding how to vote on Sarri’s confirmation.