Later On

Take a look. Very cool.

The Wife will like this.

Only not what we want:

Source: New York Times, March 3, 2009

American International Group (AIG), "which is receiving its fourth taxpayer bailout, has four public relations firms on its payroll" — Kekst & Company, Sard Verbinnen, Hill & Knowlton and Burson-Marsteller — in addition to its own PR staff. While bailout recipients have been criticized for planning lavish retreats (which AIG has done repeatedly), using private jets and retaining lobbying firms, "some taxpayers and members of Congress could view public relations as unnecessary expenses," warns the New York Times. AIG "may legitimately need help talking to the crowds of journalists, regulators, legislators and investors," but the insurance giant has "given little clarity on taxpayer losses to date, or provided much communication directed towards taxpayers at all." Meanwhile, AIG’s "public relations army" hasn’t seemed to make its executives PR savvy. On a conference call, AIG chief restructuring officer Paula Reynolds "unwisely quipped that it might be ‘better to go to jail’ than have to deal with the intricacies of securities laws as they apply to AIG’s situation."

Bad:

Source: Washington Times, March 2, 2009

"At the same time the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) was paying one of [Senator Orrin G. Hatch's] sons, Scott, to be its lobbyist in Congress," it and its drug company members were making major donations to a nonprofit organization that Senator Hatch helped found and actively supports. In 2007, the Utah Families Foundation received $40,000 from PhRMA, $30,000 from Barr Pharmaceuticals, $27,500 from Sepracor, $25,000 from Eli Lilly, $25,000 from Becton Dickerson, and another $25,000 from AstraZeneca. Information about the nonprofit group’s major donors was mistakenly included in public postings of its report to the IRS. Because Senator Hatch isn’t on Utah Families Foundation’s Board of Directors, the drug industry donations to the nonprofit didn’t trigger federal disclosure requirements. Pharmaceutical and health-product companies have donated $1.25 million directly to Senator Hatch’s campaigns since 1998, and paid for seven trips he took in 2006 alone. Scott Hatch, a lobbyist at the firm Walker Martin & Hatch — which counts PhRMA, drug and medical companies among its clients — says he doesn’t lobby his dad.

Good sign. Daphne Eviatar (what would we do without her?) in the Washington Independent:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled today — four years after it was asked — that Guantanamo Bay prisoners have more rights to information about why they’ve been imprisoned without charge than the Bush administration had contended.  SCOTUSblog has an in-depth analysis of the court’s decision, and a link to the document.

Lawyers for habeas petitioners are pleased to hear that the federal court, and not just the Pentagon and Department of Justice, has a role to play in determining what information about their clients they’re allowed to see. But the fact that it took four years to get that ruling, which only kicks the case back to the district court for further determinations on each separate habeas corpus case, suggests there will be months more legal wrangling to come before the lawyers ever even get to see the documents.

In the meantime, their clients, who have been imprisoned at Gitmo for up to seven years with no right to see the evidence against them, let alone to meaningfully challenge their detention, will have to wait even longer.

Today’s decision ruled that …

Continue reading.

David Weigel in the Washington Independent:

This situation is, as Matthew Yglesias says, pretty ridiculous.

President Barack Obama’s economic advisers are increasingly concerned about the U.S. Senate’s delay in confirming the nominations of Austan Goolsbee and Cecilia Rouse to the White House Council of Economic Advisers … they weren’t placed on the confirmation slate for the full chamber, leading some administration officials to conclude that Senate Republicans were retaliating against the Democrats because President George W. Bush’s nominations for the same slots languished in the Senate for months at the end of his second term.

This is really the fault of the Obama administration, which has as its disposal an incredibly popular president; the largest Democratic congressional majority since disco; a massive liberal media infrastructure (like the Center for American Progress, which hosts Yglesias’s blog); and a Democratic National Committee chairman who isn’t making an idiotic gaffe every 30 seconds.

In 2005, the conservative media infrastructure did a fantastic job of shaming Democrats into giving Republican judicial nominees a — say it with me now — “up or down vote.” Not every nominee survived, but the campaign rattled Washington and galvanized conservative donors. The names of Miguel Estrada and Janice Rogers Brown became famous. And in retrospect, whether or not a judge got appointed to a circuit court seems rather less urgent than whether the president has a full economic team during the greatest crash since 1980-1982.

If the White House wants its nominees, the president needs to start attacking Republicans for dragging their feet in a way they won’t even go on the record to defend.

Instead of shoveling taxpayer money into the coffers of private companies, the government is starting to retake its mission. From Congressional Quarterly:

The Treasury Department’s decision to end the use of private companies to collect delinquent taxes — a key victory for the union representing IRS employees — drew applause from House Democrats but sharp criticism from the top Senate Republican tax writer.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Thursday he would end the Internal Revenue Service’s use of private debt collectors. The omnibus appropriations bill (HR 1105) currently on the Senate floor also includes language that would shut down the program, which started in 2006, following failed Democratic attempts to do so in past years.

Opponents of private debt collection, including the National Treasury Employees Union, say federal workers can do the job more efficiently and safely.

“I commend the Obama administration for doing what the last administration refused to do: provide an honest evaluation of the merits of contracting out this public service to private agencies,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer , D-Md., said in a statement, referencing an IRS-commissioned study on the program released this week. The report concluded that using private collectors was less cost-effective than using government employees.

“Now that we have the facts, ending this wasteful policy — which has come at great cost to taxpayers — and putting the job of tax collection back with the trained professionals at the IRS is the right thing to do,” Hoyer said…

Continue reading.

Read about it here. I’m going to give it a go.

Matt Finkelstein has this on ThinkProgress:

Yesterday, at a news conference promoting a Republican amendment to continue D.C.’s school voucher program, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) — a longtime cheerleader for vouchers — suggested that students in D.C. public schools are more likely to join gangs than graduate. “If you send a kid to [public] school in D.C., chances are that they will end up in a gang rather than graduating,” he said. City officials were quick to respond, noting that “gross misjudgments like that one” bolster the argument for giving D.C. full voting rights in the House. In fact, nearly 70 percent of D.C. students graduated last year, putting the District “in line with the national average,” while Sen. DeMint’s home state of South Carolina had a graduation rate of “almost 56 percent,” the fourth worst in the nation.

Excellent post by Fallows:

I have never met Chas Freeman, the man whose reported selection as head of the National Intelligence Council has drawn such criticism, including from my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg. Not having had a chance to assess him first hand, and not having put in time studying his views, I have not felt comfortable weighing in on the dispute about whether his outlook was unacceptably extreme. Here’s the gist of the argument against him: that he is too close to the Saudis (as a former US Ambassador to the Kingdom, and now head of a think tank that has received Saudi funding); too tolerant of repression in China (because of comments saying the Chinese regime had no choice but to crack down in Tiananmen Square); and too deaf to the moral claims of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East.

But very recently I met with a friend who had worked years ago with Freeman  — on China, not the Middle East — and was upset about what he called the "self-lobotimization" of US foreign policy that the campaign to discredit Freeman represented. As I’ve looked into it, I’ve come to agree.

His first point was that Freeman was being proposed for a post within the president’s discretionary appointment power, like one of his White House aides, and therefore didn’t have to reflect the Senate’s sense of who should be in the job. The more important point, he said, was that Freeman’s longstanding contrarian inclination to challenge conventional wisdom of any sort, far from being an embarrassing liability, was exactly what a president needed from the person in this job.

A president’s Secretary of State had to represent the country’s policies soberly and predictably around the world. His National Security Advisor had to coordinate and evenhandedly present the views of the various agencies. His White House press secretary had to take great care in expressing the official line to the world’s media each day. His Director of National Intelligence had to give him the most sober and responsible précis of what was known and unknown about potential threats.

For any of those roles, a man like Freeman might not be the prudent choice. But as head of the National Intelligence Council, my friend said, he would be exactly right…

Continue reading.

Via Daphne Eviatar.

Apparently. Take a look at this chart.

Marci Hamilton, a FindLaw columnist, is the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and author of Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge 2008). A review of Justice Denied appeared on this site on June 25, 2008. Her previous book is God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press 2005), now available in paperback. She writes:

Recently, the Supreme Court decided an interesting case that will confound Free Speech and Establishment Clause jurisprudence for years to come. Pleasant Grove City v. Summum presented the Court with a case at the intersection of three dubious doctrines: the government speech doctrine, the public forum doctrine, and the doctrine that uses the Free Speech Clause to suppress Establishment Clause values. In this column, I’ll analyze and critique the Court’s decision.

The Facts, the Summum Religious Group’s Arguments, and the Ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit

The facts of the case are straightforward: The Summum religious group offered to donate a monument to its beliefs, The Seven Aphorisms, to be placed in a public park in Pleasant Grove City, Utah. The monument was crafted to appear as weighty and as large as the Ten Commandments monument that was already in place at the park, which had been donated by the Fraternal Order of the Eagles (the same group that had also donated the Ten Commandments monument the Court earlier upheld in Van Orden v. Perry).

The Summum group freighted its entire argument on a free speech theory. In particular, there were three pegs in the doctrine on which they sought to hang their hat. First, there was the rule against viewpoint discrimination. The group argued that because the City had accepted the Ten Commandments monument, it also had to accept the Summum monument; if it did not, it was preferring one view above another. Second, the group invoked the "public forum doctrine," asserting that because public parks have been deemed public for a since time immemorial, the City could not refuse the monument. Governments must have an extremely good reason to reject any speech in a longstanding public forum, and the Summum group said there was no good reason to do so here. Finally, the group invoked Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, in which the Court had invoked the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to hold that a university may not refuse to fund a religious student organization (even if its primary activity is worship and proselytizing) if the university provides funds for other student groups.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled that the public park was a public forum and, therefore, the City’s decision and reasons were subject to strict scrutiny – the most demanding standard of review a court can apply in a constitutional case. The City claimed its decision to reject Summum’s donation of the monument was driven by two criteria: (1) the monument had to have some relationship to the history of the City; and (2) private donations would only be accepted from those with close ties to the community. The City lost because the Tenth Circuit concluded that it was unlikely the City’s reasons could survive strict scrutiny.

The Supreme Court’s Ruling, and the Role a Strong Set of Amicus Briefs May Well Have Played

Continue reading.

Very good column, which begins:

A shining city on a hill can’t have dungeons in its basements

It turns out that even the most paranoid among us were right to be afraid of what George W. Bush’s White House and Justice Department were up to in the days and months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

This week the Justice Department declassified and released two memos and seven so-called legal opinions that, taken together, informed President Bush that, as a wartime chief executive, he had unfettered dictatorial powers.

We already knew that Bush dispensed with the Fourth Amendment, suspended the right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures and ordered warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of untold billions of e-mails and telephone calls to and from American citizens.

But who knew that his political appointees in the White House counsel’s office and the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel were telling him that he could also suspend the First Amendment in a nation that was founded on guarantees of freedom of freedom of speech and of the press?

The Republican legal vultures — John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury — told the panicked cowboy president that he could do anything he chose, anyway he saw fit, and not only was it legal, it also wasn’t subject to any congressional or judicial oversight.

In other words, the United States of America — the home of the free — was for a time on the brink of falling into the hands of a dictatorship.

The Bush administration authorized the detention without charges or trial of American citizens — a de facto suspension of the right of habeas corpus.

Continue reading. Of course, the last paragraph above seems to reflect the position of the Obama Administration as well, though not (yet) its actions.

That is, to imprison citizens on the President’s say-so, with no charges, no trial, and no access to an attorney or to anyone outside the prison. In effect, Obama seems to think it is important that he be able to "disappear" citizens if he wants to. Here’s the article in the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court dismissed a challenge Friday by suspected al-Qaida sleeper agent Ali Al-Marri to the president’s authority to detain people without charges, granting an Obama administration request to end the high court case.

The Supreme Court also threw out, as moot, the federal appeals court ruling al-Marri was challenging that affirmed the president’s power to detain people in the United States without trial.

Last week, President Barack Obama ordered al-Marri transferred from military to civilian custody to face federal charges of conspiracy and providing support to terrorists.

But Obama has not renounced the use of preventive detention, which was pursued and defended aggressively by the Bush administration after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The administration’s silence on this issue was the main reason al-Marri’s lawyers pushed the court to hear the case even after their client got what he was seeking — if not his release, a trial at which he could answer criminal charges…

Continue reading. How do you like the US now?

Giving the President/Dictator the right to abduct citizens without filing charges or due process and to keep them imprisoned indefinitely was once something the US would not have stood for. Today, it seems, it’s okay. Glad I’m getting old: the future looks bleak.

Mark Benjamin has an interesting article in Salon, which begins:

The revelation that the CIA destroyed 92 tapes showing the brutal interrogation of terror suspects provided another stark reminder of how much remains unknown about national security mischief during the Bush administration. On Monday, the Justice Department also released a raft of previously undisclosed legal opinions drafted during the Bush era articulating additional wartime power for the president, on issues ranging from curtailing free speech to conducting warrantless searches.

Against that troubling backdrop, on Wednesday the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin to study how to conduct an investigation of national security issues during the Bush administration, focused mostly or exclusively on torture. Staff say committee leaders remain genuinely undecided about almost every facet of how to proceed, including the mandate, scope and membership of any investigative body. The hearing will zero in on how, exactly, to move forward.

No decisions have been made on the question of whether, when and how to prosecute Bush officials who may have broken the law. There are certainly attorneys who believe the Obama administration should prosecute such officials for torture, and that the truth will come tumbling out during their trials while justice is also served. There may be more attorneys who believe those prosecutions would fail on both counts. Experts on government fact-finding missions interviewed by Salon, however, articulated surprisingly similar advice for Congress on how to conduct spadework on the torture issue, including unanimity on exactly who should not participate in an investigation: current members of Congress.

"My thought is that is probably not the way to go in this case," said Kenneth Kitts, author of Presidential Commissions & National Security: The Politics of Damage Control. Kitts noted that Congress has investigated abuses by the CIA before, such as the famous 1970s-era Church Committee review of domestic spying and other issues. In general, though, Kitts said, current lawmakers complicate progress by bringing their own political agenda into the hearing room. (President Ford labeled the Church Committee "sensational and irresponsible," according to Kitts’ book.)

"Whenever you talk about a committee composed of members of Congress, however good and however well-intentioned they are, they bring a lot of partisan baggage to the table and they are going to be encumbered by political considerations that those removed from active government service would not have," Kitts said.

Kitts and other experts suggested the creation of an independent commission, buoyed by force of law, generously funded and staffed and focused almost exclusively on detention and interrogation issues during the Bush administration. It would be something along the lines of the 9-11 Commission…

Continue reading.

In the NY Times today, this interesting article:

When food industry giants like Kellogg want to ensure that American consumers are being protected from contaminated products, they rely on private inspectors like Eugene A. Hatfield. So last spring Mr. Hatfield headed to the Peanut Corporation of America plant in southwest Georgia to make sure its chopped nuts, paste and peanut butter were safe to use in things as diverse as granola bars and ice cream.

The peanut company, though, knew in advance that Mr. Hatfield was coming. He had less than a day to check the entire plant, which processed several million pounds of peanuts a month.

Mr. Hatfield, 66, an expert in fresh produce, was not aware that peanuts were readily susceptible to salmonella — which he was not required to test for anyway. And while Mr. Hatfield was inspecting the plant to reassure Kellogg and other food companies of its suitability as a supplier, the Peanut Corporation was paying for his efforts.

“The overall food safety level of this facility was considered to be: SUPERIOR,” he concluded in his March 27, 2008, report for his employer, the American Institute of Baking, which performs audits for major food companies. A copy of the audit was obtained by The New York Times.

Federal investigators later discovered that the dilapidated plant was ravaged by salmonella and had been shipping tainted peanuts and paste for at least nine months. But they were too late to prevent what has become one of the nation’s worst known outbreaks of food-borne disease in recent years, in which nine are believed to have died and an estimated 22,500 were sickened.

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Krugman has a pointed column today. It begins:

Last month, in his big speech to Congress, President Obama argued for bold steps to fix America’s dysfunctional banks. “While the cost of action will be great,” he declared, “I can assure you that the cost of inaction will be far greater, for it could result in an economy that sputters along for not months or years, but perhaps a decade.”

Many analysts agree. But among people I talk to there’s a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over Mr. Obama’s failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern.

Here’s how the pattern works: first, administration officials, usually speaking off the record, float a plan for rescuing the banks in the press. This trial balloon is quickly shot down by informed commentators.

Then, a few weeks later, the administration floats a new plan. This plan is, however, just a thinly disguised version of the previous plan, a fact quickly realized by all concerned. And the cycle starts again.

Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that troubled assets, often referred to these days as “toxic waste,” are really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them — and that if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away…

Continue reading.

Via Mark Bittman: the current issue of Mother Jones has some good articles on food. The main article is here and an interview with Michael Pollan here.

Marion Nestle raises a good point:

Senator Dick Durbin (Dem-IL) has introduced The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act to give this beleaguered agency the tools and resources to do its job properly.  The proposed Act got immediate endorsements from food industry trade groups: grocery manufacturers, producers of fresh vegetables, and producers of frozen foods, for example.

How come food lobbying groups suddenly want a stronger FDA?  No doubt because the alternative is a single food safety agency that would impose real rules with real teeth, and would oversee the safety of food from farm to table.  Rosa DeLauro introduced just such a bill in the House.

And how’s this for today’s rumors (most definitely unconfirmed): Michael Osterholm is up for USDA undersecretary for food safety and Michael Taylor for head of the White House Office of Food Safety.  Caroline Smith DeWaal, a strong consumer advocate for foods safety is out of the running; she works for Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).  These are just rumors.  If they turn out too be true, I will have more to say about the potential nominees.