Hillary Clinton

Barack Obama, May 21, 2009

I want to be very clear that our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for Guantanamo detainees – not to avoid one. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so going forward, my Administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.

Last night, the Washington Post and Propublica published a joint article reporting that the Obama administration was considering an executive order that would “reassert presidential authority to incarcerate suspected terrorists indefinitely,” according to three anonymous administration sources.

Such an order would embrace claims by former President George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

After months of internal debate over how to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, White House officials are growing increasingly worried that reaching quick agreement with Congress on a new detention system may prove impossible. Several officials said there is concern in the White House that the administration may not be able to close the facility by the president’s January 2010 deadline.

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt did not directly respond to questions about an executive order but said the administration would address the cases of Guantanamo detainees in a manner “consistent with the national security interests of the United States and the interests of justice.”

One administration official suggested the White House was already trying to build support for an executive order.

“Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order,” the official said. Such an order can be rescinded and would not block later efforts to write legislation, but civil liberties groups generally oppose long-term detention, arguing that detainees should either be prosecuted or released.

Civil liberties groups, including the Center for Constitional Rights immediately responded, leaving it clear that they were not at all supportive of prolonged detention. CCR’s Shane Kadida

Prolonged imprisonment without trial is exactly the Guantanamo system that the President promised to shut down. Whatever form it takes – from Congress or the President’s pen – it is anathema to the basic principles of American law and the courts will find it unconstitutional…. Another thing that’s odd about this is the idea that this detention authority would somehow be more transient if it were authorized through executive order (which can be reversed at the stroke of the president’s pen) rather than a statute (which could sit on the books indefinitely). If the last eight years have taught us anything, it’s that executive abuses, left to continue unchecked for many years, have a tendency to congeal into precedent.

Another anonymous administration official gave a denial of the story to Marc Ambinder, but other outlets including the New York Times and the AP appear to have separate confirmation. The denial itself, repeated in an AFP story, says only that the draft order does not exist, not that the administration is not considering the move.

This seems pretty clearly to be a trial balloon by the adminstration, using a Friday news dump to determine how much backlash there would be against this extremely controversial order. It’s a balloon that needs to be popped. A President saying that he has the unilateral power to hold anyone indefinitely outside of a theater of war is unacceptable after the past eight years of untrammeled executive authority. That a Democratic president would do so, after running and winning on a platform of transparency and the rule of law, is absolutely unacceptable. Not to mention unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly in the last decade against the Bush administration.

President Obama also said, in his inaugural address:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.  Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.

Which is precisely what this executive order would be: “”White House officials are increasingly worried that reaching quick agreement with Congress on a new detention system may be impossible.” It would be unilateral executive action for expedience’s sake.

Look at the example Marcy supplies: the evidence being used to hold Walid bin Attash, accused of involvement in the 2000 USS Cole bombing, comes from testimony from Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and is probably inadmissable because it was gained through torture. As Marcy says, “Will Walid bin Attash be deprived a day in Court because we’re covering up our own torture?”

This isn’t how to solve the thorny problem of the detainees in this ongoing war. It’s also not how to “move forward” from the legacy of torture and lawlessness of the past administration. Let’s pop this trial balloon, and fast.

McClatchy’s Kevin Hall is out with a new article raising more questions about the propriety of Mark Sanford’s trade mission to Argentina last summer.

Sanford had personally suggested adding Argentina to the trade mission, which originally planned a trip to Brazil. He met with his Argentine lover during the trip, which cost South Carolina taxpayers about $8,000. A Republican state lawmaker has already called for an independent investigation into whether Sanford misused state funds for personal profit.

Sanford says the trip was “entirely professional and appropriate,” but Hall’s article raises new questions about that claim. It turns out Sanford made the trip despite U.S. policy against such trade missions stemming from Argentina’s refusal to repay debt, including debt to independent U.S. farmers.

Argentina has been a financial pariah since it defaulted on its international debt after its decade-long effort to peg its currency to the U.S. dollar collapsed in late 2001. Argentina effectively told its creditors it was their fault that they’d lent to the nation and declined to pay or restructure much of its foreign debt.

…

The Commerce Department halted high-level trade missions to Argentina after Argentina reneged on its debts. A Commerce Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly, confirmed that Sanford’s visit contradicted federal policy.

Moreover, on the trip, Sanford met with Daniel Scioli, the governor of Buenos Aires, to discuss agribusiness.

It’s not clear how Sanford, whose state generates 1.5 percent of all U.S. exports, arranged a meeting with the governor of Argentina’s most important agricultural state. A Scioli aide declined comment, saying the Argentine governor’s team didn’t want to deal with a distraction with imminent provincial elections in Argentina.

Sanford’s office wasn’t answering calls from reporters on Thursday.

All of this suggests, as Hall writes, that the motivation for Sanford’s Argentina trip didn’t have anything to do with the interests of South Carolina.

Sanford’s tearful news conference on Wednesday suggests that trade wasn’t the opportunity the South Carolina government sought in Argentina.

Even without taking into account Sanford’s AWOL excursion last week, it seems that South Carolina state legislators have the basic building blocks of a strong case for impeaching Sanford (if he doesn’t resign first), but if it turns out that Sanford’s lover stood to benefit from any of his actions, a strong case will become a slam dunk one.

Initial reports from Argentina said that Sanford’s lover was an executive at an agribusiness firm, Bunge Limited. Bunge, however, says this is incorrect.

Several media outlets reported that Chapur works for Bunge y Born, a multi-national agribusiness with deep roots in Argentina. Bunge y Borne is now known as Bunge Limited, based in White Plains, N.Y.

Stewart Lindsay, a spokesman for Bunge Limited, said Chapur has never worked for the company. He said the confusion may stem from published race results from a 2005 marathon in which Chapur ran alongside Bunge workers with whom she is friends.

“But she is not an employee and has never worked there,” Lindsay said.

Although she apparently never worked directly for Bunge, she did identify herself as affiliated with Bunge during that 2005 marathon. Unless there was a complete mixup, it does seem likely that she has some sort of relationship either to the firm or to the people who work there.

Given that the firm is focused on agribusiness interests, understanding whether there was in fact a relationship there may help explain Sanford’s Argentina itinerary.

At a minimum, it seems that Sanford organized the Argentina leg of his travel plans to satisfy his own personal needs. If he also used it to help benefit his lover, it will just make his official transgressions even worse.

• Despite multiple bombings in the past week, Iraq’s prime minister says the country is more than ready for U.S. forces to withdraw from the country’s cities by month’s end.
• Naked former mayor alert.
• The Cleveland Plain Dealer takes a long, hard look at members of the Senate Finance Committee who were doing some fishy stock trading as the market tanked last fall.
• The Onion: Female Boss Walking Around Like She Owns The Place.
• Never too early to start trying to make a dime off a tribute to Michael Jackson.
• Reality takes hold as the U.S. abandons efforts to wipe out poppy crops in Afghanistan. Richard Holbrooke flatly states the obvious: the efforts aren’t working. Find alternatives.
• One of the most thoughtful meditations on the meaning of the Mark Sanford episode was written by Ta-Nehsi Coates this week over at the Atlantic. He digs deep beneath the surface, tying together arrogance, conservatism, nationalism, the modern Republican Party, racism and American exceptionalism. Just a taste from this terrific essay:
  

  What you have, in both cases, is a hustle, a bait and switch, in which one claims to be hawking patriotism, but in fact, is selling jingoism. If patriotism is love of country, then much of the unquestioning GOP rhetoric fails on the rudiments. Is love of kin, love of siblings, love of spouse, telling your beloved, that they are the best person that’s ever existed in history? Or is that  sycophancy, fast talk proffered by loose friends, who in your darkest hours, appeal to your worst self.

  The religious right isn’t what’s wrong with the GOP. It’s the pervasive, unthinking, unreflective nationalism. It’s the arrogance of thrice-divorced adulterers reaching for the banner of traditional families, and it’s the arrogance of men who prosecuted a poorly planned war, on weak intelligence, presuming to lecture us on national security.

  Coates has become a must-read for me in the past several months. Just a great thinker all the way around.

• My nomination for worst Politico story ever. Share yours in comments. Competition is tough, I know.
• A solid look at the disease that has crippled the New York State Senate: rampant incumbentism.
• Fake news, for real.
• As we move into the critical stage of the specifics of health care reform, Kaiser Family Foundation has posted an enormously helpful integrated database that offers side-by-side comparisons of the various health care reform proposals. You can enter the criteria by which you want to search differences–and which plans you want to compare.
• It ain’t easy being a seer.

Not a bad week, but this stuff starts getting repetitive after a while. But there was one piece of hate mail so brilliant, I almost wept at its beauty. So I decided it deserved the day to itself and a poll. Check it out below the fold.

Whoa:

On Thursday, Sanford agreed to reimburse the state for part of a more-than $8,000 tab that enabled him to see his mistress on an official economic development trip to Argentina’s capital city. At a Cabinet meeting Friday, he told the head of the state Commerce Department he was sorry about the trip.

The department had initially included only Brazil on the official itinerary but added meetings in Buenos Aires at the governor’s behest, said Kara Borie, a spokeswoman for the state Commerce Department.

Sanford did conduct business in Buenos Aires, although Borie said there were no specific economic development projects that have come from them.

The AP is also reporting that Republican State Senator Jake Knotts is calling for an investigation into Sanford’s taxpayer-funded travel in Argentina.

There were a couple of stories this week coming from Congressional work on health care reform that didn’t find wide distribution in the public debate, but need to be heard.

The first came from Wendell Potter, a former head of corporate communications for CIGNA, the country’s fourth-largest insurer. Mr. Potter did conduct a lengthy and important interview with CJR, but his story hasn’t been widely circulated. What he talked about in this interview, and in his testimony before Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s Commerce Committee, (provided here by Ezra, pdf) is how and why insurance companies do business. Here’s Ezra’s summation:

What drove Potter from the health insurance business was, well, the health insurance business. The industry, Potter says, is driven by “two key figures: earnings per share and the medical-loss ratio, or medical-benefit ratio, as the industry now terms it. That is the ratio between what the company actually pays out in claims and what it has left over to cover sales, marketing, underwriting and other administrative expenses and, of course, profits.”

Think about that term for a moment: The industry literally has a term for how much money it “loses” paying for health care.

The best way to drive down “medical-loss,” explains Potter, is to stop insuring unhealthy people. You won’t, after all, have to spend very much of a healthy person’s dollar on medical care because he or she won’t need much medical care. And the insurance industry accomplishes this through two main policies. “One is policy rescission,” says Potter. “They look carefully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-existing condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment.”

And don’t be fooled: rescission is important to the business model. Last week, at a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, Rep. Bart Stupak, the committee chairman, asked three insurance industry executives if they would commit to ending rescission except in cases of intentional fraud. “No,” they each said.

Potter also emphasized the practice known as “purging.” This is where insurers rid themselves of unprofitable accounts by slapping them with “intentionally unrealistic rate increases.” One famous example came when Cigna decided to drive the Entertainment Industry Group Insurance Trust in California and New Jersey off of its books. It hit them with a rate increase that would have left some family plans costing more than $44,000 a year, and it gave them three months to come up with the cash.

Which is precisely the problem with having no alternative for the majority of consumers but a for-profit insurance option. They have every incentive NOT to insure at precisely the time you need it the most. It’s only logical, just as it’s only logical that insurance companies will play fair only when they have serious competition from a provider big enough to compete with them–a government sponsored public plan.

The other fascinating testimony came from Mike Draper, owner of SMASH of Des Moines, IA, before the House Ways and Means Committee. Draper makes the case for small business–asking the federal government to tax his business to provide a rational health care system, one that he can plan for financially. Knowing how much he has to pay in taxes every year would be much simpler than having the wild fluctuation in premiums he’s experienced, trying to provide benefits to his growing staff.

[Starting at 2:55] Now when I hear “public option” I don’t hear “free option.” I am not here asking for free health care, a government handout. I am asking for rational health care. As a business owner, I would gladly pay 8 percent of my payroll into a public option since that would give me two things. One, peace of mind that my employees would be covered by something backed by the government, and two, more importantly, an ability to accurately budget per year for my company’s health care expenses. Right now my premiums and bills will fluctuate between 6 percent and 22 percent of payroll in any given year. An expense that large and unpredictable is what drives companies out of business, not a tax that they know they have to pay at the beginning of the year.

Now it may sound strange that I would be willing to pay a new tax, but rest assured, I am not a socialist. I am not here trying to undermine capitalism. Rather, the small mountain of money I send to you guys several times a year does not make me clamor for more government, but the unsustainable costs of my current health care, the one thing that could probably ruin the company, makes me clamor for an actual option.

Something tells me that Draper isn’t a member of the NFIB. But he speaks for small business everywhere who are particularly squeezed by the current system. Draper might not be able to send his employees over to the public option, depending on how this all pans out, but what a strong public option would do is to make his private insurer have to play fair. It would bring some rationality and consistency to his health care spending.

Austin has always been blue, now there’s a chance it could help turn the rest of the nation a healthy shade of luxuriant green. The Austin-American Statesman is reporting and sources at the Texas Environmental Defense Fund confirm to me that the city is seriously in the running to be the location of a new branch of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory focusing on green energy research.

Austin is an ideal candidate. It’s a progressive city, home of the Pecan Street Project where researchers and entrepreneurs have a chance to develop, test and implement the smart grid, creating the urban energy system of the future. It’s a technology hub with strong semiconductor and software sector bases – two critical players in tomorrow’s energy economy. Austin Energy already runs the nation’s largest green power program and has committed to 100 MW of solar and 30% renewables by 2020. It’s a great American city, with cool, dry winters and hot spicy food, nestled in lush green hills and meandering spring fed streams and rivers. Residents can go hiking, jogging, or mountain biking on their lunch break right in the middle of town. If we as a nation are ready to get serious, establish our energy independence, and address climate change, Central Texas is ready and able to become the Silicon Valley of green technology.

• Speaking of the environment and alternative energy, Real Climate sets the record straight for putative policy experts who fall hook, line, and sinker for the latest hoax promulgated by fossil fuel front group known as the “Competitive Enterprise Institute.”
• Chris Mooney and coauthor Sheryl Kirshenbaum have  a great new site up outlining the public communication challenges facing the scientific/writing community:
  

  For every five hours of cable news, less than a minute is devoted to science; the number of newspapers with weekly science sections has shrunken by two-thirds over the past several decades. Just 18 percent of Americans personally know a scientist to begin with, and exceedingly few can name a living scientist role model …

• What’s science without a little culture? Well, because of science, we now know that almost 30,000 years before some people think the world was created, humans were making music in Europe:

  A bird-bone flute unearthed in a German cave was carved some 35,000 years ago and is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archaeologists say, offering the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture.

• Lastly, Oh Kossacks, give this man some trafficking love! Short version: if you’re still worried progressives are bringing roses to a gunfight, this fella took the AMA apart surgically over health-care with those unpleasant things called facts, and then dragged the burning remains behind a barn and put them out of their misery.

In an unprecedented move, the White House retracted yesterday the embargoed text for the president’s usual weekly address, which it generally sends to news outlets the evening before the official Saturday remarks are posted on the White House website. The first address sent was focused on health care reform; the replacement discussed—and praised to the heavens—the energy bill that passed the House yesterday afternoon.

Clearly, the measure’s passage prompted a nimble switch in presidential priorities for the address, which President Obama often uses as the first salvo in setting messaging for the coming week—and for putting friend and foe alike on notice about what’s on the administration’s upcoming agenda. In fact, he’s so adamant about pushing his slant on the energy bill that today’s weekly address is mostly a reprise of a speech he gave earlier in the day yesterday, with a framing he clearly wants to drive home:

It’s all about the jobs, baby.

In the very first sentence, in fact, the President doesn’t just refer to the measure as an energy bill—it’s a piece of legislation that “will open the door to a clean energy economy.” In fact, this is—make no mistake, he says—a jobs bill.

The energy bill that passed the House will finally create a set of incentives that will spark a clean energy transformation in our economy.  It will spur the development of low carbon sources of energy – everything from wind, solar, and geothermal power to safer nuclear energy and cleaner coal.  It will spur new energy savings, like the efficient windows and other materials that reduce heating costs in the winter and cooling costs in the summer.  And most importantly, it will make possible the creation of millions of new jobs.

Make no mistake:  this is a jobs bill.

A laundry list of the kinds of jobs he anticipates will be created through “energy transformation” follows. New businesses, new industries, new jobs jobs jobs will result. Also, he says, the legislation will make us safer by lessening dependence on foreign oil, which is a vital national security issue. But don’t forget … jobs.

He mentions jobs eight times in the short talk, the economy four times. And now that the bill has passed the House, he targets a very select group of people for addressing directly:

Now my call to every Senator, as well as to every American, is this:  We cannot be afraid of the future.  And we must not be prisoners of the past.  Don’t believe the misinformation out there that suggests there is somehow a contradiction between investing in clean energy and economic growth.  It’s just not true.

That rhetorical flourish of “We cannot be afraid of the future. And we must not be prisoners of the past.” is some first-class oratory there. And he ends with a superb wedding of high rhetoric and practical political stumpin’:

So I want to congratulate the House for passing this bill, and I want to urge the Senate to take this opportunity to come together and meet our obligations – to our constituents, to our children, to God’s creation, and to future generations.

Oh, and did I mention that he mentioned … jobs?

The full address can be found beneath the fold, or on the White House website.

Conflicting signals from the White House on gay issues reflect a broader paradox: as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases, political divides remain.

President Obama changed the subject of his weekly address after the House passed energy legislation on Friday.