Later On

First, the cause:

Source: The Guardian (UK), May 12, 2009

"America’s oil, gas and coal industry has increased its lobbying budget by 50%, with key players spending $44.5 [million] in the first three months of this year in an intense effort to cut off support" for cap and trade legislation to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The campaign "involves industry front groups, lobbying firms, television, print and radio advertising, and donations to pivotal members of Congress," reports The Guardian. The goal "is to water down or kill off" cap and trade measures. "Despite its global significance, the fate of the draft ‘cap and trade’ bill now lies in the hands of just a dozen Democrats. … Seven of those pivotal Democrats received campaign donations in excess of $100,000 from the oil and gas industry, coal producers, and electricity firms during last year’s elections. … Another two received more than $90,000 last year."

Next, the result, as reported Mike by Lillis in the Washington Independent:

Even as House Democrats are celebrating their deal with conservative-leaning colleagues on climate change legislation, the real winners under the compromise have been the coal, electric and auto industries, who are largely the source of the nation’s carbon emissions to begin with.

Details of the compromise are still emerging, but already the chief sponsors of the measure — Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) — have been forced to lower carbon-reduction targets, cut renewable fuel standards and dole out billions of dollars in benefits to the nation’s largest polluting industries. Many environmentalists say the compromise comes at the too-high cost of undermining the bill’s very purpose, which is to slash emissions dramatically enough to prevent a warming planet from heating further. Some are asking Democrats either to bolster the environmental protections or to scrap the proposal altogether.

“We are not prepared to ‘give away the farm’ just so that we can say that we helped to get legislation passed,” Janet Keating, executive director of the West Virginia-based Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, said in a statement Friday. “There are some costs that are too high to pay when it comes to the environment, clean air and clean water. We urge Congress to either fix the Waxman-Markey bill or dump it and start over.”

The saga highlights the thorny congressional climate change debate, where partisan politics takes a backseat to regional interests, and the influence of the energy lobby is king. Indeed, the concessions from Waxman and Markey to this point have been made to satisfy conservative Democrats representing regions heavy with coal, oil and automaker interests.

The resulting dynamic is one of multi-layered tension that pits industry against environmentalists, regional interests against national and global interests, and congressional lawmakers against emission reforms that might help the planet, but could also cost jobs in their districts.

“I’m just trying to take care of the principal concerns that would impact my region, in particular my district,” Rep. Charles Gonzales, a Houston-based Democrat who’s pushing for more benefits for oil refineries in the House bill, told Politico Thursday.

In the eyes of many environmentalists, that brand of regional protectionism might yield short-term gains for some areas of the country, but will come at the cost of a deteriorating globe. They’re asking what good is it to protect polluters in a world where you can’t drink the water or breath the air, and the oceans are swallowing the coasts?

Erich Pica, director of domestic policy programs at Friends of the Earth, said the moderate Democrats are “holding hostage” the reforms necessary to tackle the problem in a way that reflects its urgency. “They have every right to protect their constituents,” Pica said. “But as members of Congress they also represent the entire country, and they should know when to sacrifice their regional interests for the sake of the larger common good. All they see is protecting oil or protecting coal. That’s not helpful.”

Indeed, the United Nations issued a report Thursday indicating that …

Continue reading.

Bernd Debusmann blogs at Reuters:

The U.S. armed forces, the world’s most powerful, outnumber the country’s diplomatic service and its major aid agency by a ratio of more than 180:1, vastly higher than in other Western democracies. Military giant, diplomatic dwarf?

The ratio applies to people in uniform (or pin-striped suits). In terms of money, the U.S. military towers just as tall. Roughly half of all military spending in the world is American. Even potential adversaries in a conventional war spend puny sums in comparison. The 2010 defense budget now before Congress totals $534 billion, not including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. China’s defense budget is $70 billion, Russia’s around $50 billion.

Is the huge imbalance between the size of the U.S. armed forces and the civilian agencies that make up “soft power” — chiefly the foreign service and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — destined to remain a permanent fixture in the political landscape?

The gap is not likely to shrink dramatically, despite a growing internal debate over how to balance the instruments of power. Ironically, the man who has provided some of the most memorable statistics illustrating the hard power-soft power gap is Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the only holdover from the cabinet of George W. Bush and President Barack Obama’s most inspired choice.

One of Gates’ favorite examples: The 6,600 foreign service professionals of the State Department equal the number of personnel of one (out of 11) aircraft carrier strike group.

The Pentagon spends slightly more on health care for the military than the State Department spends on looking after foreign affairs. And the United States employs more military musicians than professional diplomats…

Continue reading.

Olga Pierce and Brian Boyer reporting for ProPublica:

President Barack Obama’s March 20 memo [1] was quite clear on stimulus lobbying: every communication between a lobbyist and a government agency regarding the stimulus has to be documented, and those records have to be posted.

We know that, like any giant pot of government money, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act attracted lobbyists’ interest. Lobbyists have long been required to give Congress quarterly disclosure reports outlining their lobbying efforts. In the latest quarterly reports, no less than 871 lobbyists [2] indicated lobbying on the stimulus. 

But only 12 of those lobbyists appear in the filings that agencies are now required to post online almost immediately after they speak to a lobbyist. (See our full list of lobbyist communication disclosures. [3])

Given that lobbyists’ job is to serve as go-betweens for their clients and government agents, what are the droves of stimulus lobbyists now doing?

There were only a few days of overlap between the start of the March 20 requirement for agencies to report conversations with lobbyists and the filing deadline for the first-quarter reports to Congress. So much of the lobbying shown in the congressional reports did not require agencies to post records.

Still, the first-quarter lobbying reports show that there were many stimulus lobbyists with many stimulus clients. The fact that so few of those lobbyists have made contact with agencies over the two months is striking.

Holland & Knight, a lobbying firm that boasted [4] to the Washington Post in March about having 240 stimulus clients [4], hasn’t filed a single one of the contact disclosures appearing on agency Web sites. 

The same holds for Kinghorn, Hilbert & Associates, which indicated in its first-quarter filings that it lobbied federal agencies on behalf of clients seeking stimulus funds. In the firm’s filing for Hardeesville, S.C. [5], for example, it says the departments of Justice, Transportation and Agriculture were lobbied for “stimulus funding.” (Neither firm has returned our requests for comment.) 

But those agencies report no contacts from the firm after the new regulations went into effect.

“Nobody’s losing business on the stimulus,” said Dave Wenhold, president of the American League of Lobbyists.

Instead, lobbying firms are handing off formal lobbying duties to lawyers and junior staffers who are not registered lobbyists. (Among the rules [6]: Anybody who spends more than 20 percent of their time lobbying has to register.)

Meanwhile, lobbyists are training their clients to attend meetings on their own.

“The lobbyists will bring in clients, train them, then have them meet,” said Wenhold. Some lobbyists will even go so far as to “go right up to the meeting point and drop them off, kind of like dropping a kid off at school,” he said.

Other lobbyists are helping their clients while still apparently keeping arms-length from agencies…

Continue reading.

From the Center for American Progress:

Yesterday, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee unveiled what Clean Air Watch President Frank O’Donnell called "a cynical Republican alternative to the clean energy jobs legislation being developed by committee Democrats." Barton maintains his plan is a "viable alternative to a mandatory cap and trade plan." Writing at The Wonk Room, O’Donnell explained that, in reality, Barton’s plan is "basically a PR stunt aimed at conning the public to stay stuck in the same dirty energy rut that is destroying our economy and environment." A summary of Barton’s plan includes plans to define both nuclear power and "advanced coal" technology as "renewable" sources of energy, preempt state authority to reduce climate-related emissions, and repeal the Supreme Court decision that said the Environmental Protection Agency could limit greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. As O’Donnell concludes, "While not quite ignoring the threat of climate change…[Barton's proposal] would guarantee that U.S. emissions would continue to increase without bound for the foreseeable future. … Barton is just blowing smoke: new subsidies for oil, coal, and nuclear, rollbacks of environmental standards, Orwellian language, and denial of the science of climate change. Wasn’t eight years of planetary and economic destruction enough?"

From the Center for American Progress:

The debate over accountability for torture authorized by the Bush administration heated up this week. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) led a hearing on Wednesday on Bush-era interrogation practices, featuring testimony from the former counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Philip Zelikow. Notably, Zelikow endorsed an investigation into torture: "The U.S. government adopted an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment to extract information. … Precisely because this was a collective failure, it is all the more important to comprehend it and learn from it." Though the hearing was a significant step forward for accountability for Bush officials, the White House announced on the same day that it would no longer release hundreds of photographs showing detainee abuse by U.S. troops. At the same time, while progressives continue to advocate investigations, the right wing is attempting to foil moves toward accountability for the real torture culprits, senior Bush officials, instead conjuring up a new attack on congressional officials who were briefed on so-called enhanced interrogation tactics.

Read the rest of this entry »

Zachary Roth reporting for TPMmuckraker:

At last, the torture debate looks to be heading toward what’s been the big question lurking in the background all along: was the Bush administration using torture in large part to make a political case for the invasion of Iraq?

Writing on The Daily Beast, former NBC producer Robert Windrem reports that in April 2003, Dick Cheney’s office suggested that interrogators waterboard an Iraqi detainee who was suspected of having knowledge of a link between Saddam and al Qaeda.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse was questioned on the issue today in two TV interviews. Speaking to CNN, Whitehouse allowed: "I have heard that to be true." To MSNBC, he noted that there was additional evidence of this in the Senate Armed Services committee report, and from Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell. "This thing is just getting deeper and deeper," said Whitehouse, noting that if it were true, it would significantly bolster the case for prosecutions.

And MSNBC’s Chris Matthews also picked up on the issue this evening, as did Ed Schultz of the same network.

So let’s look at the evidence that’s emerged.

In a blog post today, Wilkerson wrote: …

Continue reading.

Watch a live webcast of the Wolfram|Alpha system being brought online for the first time. Friday, May 15, beginning at 7pm CST.

Last night as I watched Where Eagles Dare, one scene involved tuning in a radio. The sound of tuning a superheterodyne radio to the right frequency, with the squeals and the gradual fading in of a clear signal. With digital radios, you don’t hear that sound anymore, not to mention the glow of tubes heating up, the faint smell of dust frying on the heated tubes, the fascinating look of the interleaved variable capacitor. And, somewhere in the background of the memory, the sounds of favorite programs: Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, the Great Gildersleeve (and his nephew Leroy), The Shadow, Johnny Dollar, Amos and Andy, Our Miss Brooks, Henry Aldrich, Duffy’s Tavern, and more.

I loved to take apart radios and contemplate their mysteries. Much more interesting than a brick of solid state devices. So it goes.

A great bacon discovery: Lately I’ve been roasting my bacon as the best and easiest way to cook it: Line a rimmed baking sheet with foil, put in a wire rack, and lay the rashers across the rack. Then put that into a 400º oven for 19 minutes (for the thick-cut bacon I use): perfectly done, with no attention paid during the cooking. (It is important that all the rashers be the same thickness: if you mix thick-cut and thin-cut, the result will not be so good or easy.)

Looking at the bacon lying there, awaiting the oven, it occurred to me that I could dress them up a bit: dust them with, say, ground chipotle or ground jalapeños or ground ancho chilis—or, hell, cinnamon, cloves, and what have you—brown sugar, for example.

I tried it with the chipotle: great result.

Geo. F. Trumper Almond, like D.R. Harris Almond, has a terrific almond fragrance. It’s no secret that, on the whole, I like shaving soaps. When I first resumed rational shaving, I had trouble building lather with a soap, so I stopped using shaving cream altogether until I mastered shaving soap. Having mastered it, I suppose I like to practice my skill, silently wowwing myself in the morning with a great lather from a soap.

But shaving creams have much stronger fragrances than a soap can carry, and that is pleasant. Plus they do produce great lather, like this morning’s made with the Plisson Chinese Grey brush.

The Merkur HD, a stalwart of a razor, did an excellent shave with the PolSilver blade already in it. And Pashana is one of my favorite aftershaves. And I have a cup of tea right here, and the laundry is already in. Good start.

Where Eagles Dare. Terrific.

The smelt were delicious. I’m resisting cooking up the second pound—I want it for lunch tomorrow.

James Fallows:

The CIA vs. Sen. Bob Graham: how to keep score at home

It’s easy! If the CIA says one thing and former Sen. Graham says another, then the CIA is lying. Or, "in error," if you prefer.

(Background here and here, in which Graham says that some of the briefings in which he was allegedly filled in about waterboarding and related techniques never occurred. This matters, because the CIA’s claims are part of the same argument that Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in Congress had known about and acquiesced to waterboarding all the way along.)

Part of the payoff of reaching age 72 and having spent 38 years in public office, as Graham has, is that people have had a chance to judge your reputation. Graham has a general reputation for honesty. In my eyes he has a specific reputation for very good judgment: he was one of a handful of Senators actually to read the full classified intelligence report about the "threats" posed by Saddam Hussein. On the basis of reading it, despite a career as a conservative/centrist Democrat, he voted against the war and fervently urged his colleagues to do the same. "Blood is going to be on your hands," he warned those who voted yes.

More relevant in this case, Graham also has a specific reputation for keeping detailed daily records of people he met and things they said. He’s sometimes been mocked for this compulsive practice, but he’s never been doubted about the completeness or accuracy of what he compiles. (In the fine print of those records would be an indication that I had interviewed him about Iraq war policy while he was in the Senate and recently spent time with him when he was on this side of the world.)

So if he says he never got the briefing, he didn’t. And if the CIA or anyone acting on its behalf challenges him, they are stupid and incompetent as well as being untrustworthy. This doesn’t prove that the accounts of briefing Pelosi are also inaccurate. But it shifts the burden of proof.

Spencer Ackerman:

As first noticed by Marcy Wheeler this morning, former Senate intelligence committee chairman Bob Graham (D-Fla.) went on the Brian Lehrer radio show and said the CIA has conceded to him that it made some errors in its account of which members of Congress were briefed and when about “enhanced interrogation techniques.” (You can hear what Graham said around the 4:30-4:55 minute mark.) That’s the briefings timeline that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said was “misleading” today. Graham:

When I asked the CIA when was I briefed, they gave me four dates, two in April and two in September of ‘02. On three of the four occasions, when I consulted my schedule and my notes, it was clear that no briefing had taken place, and the CIA eventually concurred in that. So their record keeping is a little bit suspect.

If Graham is telling the truth, then the CIA is aware of at least some errors in its timeline of congressional briefings, which gives an additional layer of meaning to CIA Director Leon Panetta’s statement that “in the end, you and the Committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened.” And if Graham is right about identifying three errors, it raises the question about whether there are other errors, and if CIA will update its account of the congressional briefings.

The question might be raised, but it’s not answered. I asked CIA spokesman George Little whether Graham is telling the truth and he declined comment.

Marcy Wheeler, aka emptywheel, has a plethora of good and detailed posts on the torture hearings. I suggest that you just browse her blog (after you bookmark it).

Typical:

Source: Washington Post, May 11, 2009

Richard Scott, "a multimillionaire investor and controversial former hospital chief executive, has become an unlikely and prominent leader of the opposition to health-care reform," reports the Washington Post. But the public relations firm promoting Scott and his front group is a usual suspect. CRC Public Relations — the conservative PR firm previously known as Creative Response Concepts — is the firm "that masterminded the ‘Swift boat’ attacks against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry." The firm is working with Scott and his group, Conservatives for Patients’ Rights. "While disorganized Republicans and major health-care companies wait for President Obama and Democratic leaders to reveal the details of their plan before criticizing it, Scott is using $5 million of his own money and up to $15 million more from supporters to try to build resistance to any government-run program." The campaign includes television ads featuring "horror stories" of Canadian and British residents who "allegedly suffered long waits for surgeries, couldn’t get the drugs they needed, or had to come to the United States for treatment" — the same scare tactics industry groups used to respond to the 2007 Michael Moore movie "Sicko."

From Glenn Greenwald’s column today:

… We’re currently occupying two Muslim countries.  We’re killing civilians regularly (as usual) — with airplanes and unmanned sky robots.  We’re imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims with no trial, for years.  Our government continues to insist that it has the power to abduct people — virtually all Muslim — ship them to Bagram, put them in cages, and keep them there indefinitely with no charges of any kind.  We’re denying our torture victims any ability to obtain justice for what was done to them by insisting that the way we tortured them is a “state secret” and that we need to “look to the future.”  We provide Israel with the arms and money used to do things like devastate Gaza.  Independent of whether any or all of these policies are justifiable, the extent to which those actions “inflame anti-American sentiment” is impossible to overstate.

And now, the very same people who are doing all of that are claiming that they must suppress evidence of our government’s abuse of detainees because to allow the evidence to be seen would “inflame anti-American sentiment.”  It’s not hard to believe that releasing the photos would do so to some extent — people generally consider it a bad thing to torture and brutally abuse helpless detainees — but compared to everything else we’re doing, the notion that releasing or concealing these photos would make an appreciable difference in terms of how we’re perceived in the Muslim world is laughable on its face.

Moreover, …

Read the whole thing. It’s a powerful column.

Matthew DeLong in the Washington Independent:

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Gil Kerlikowske, the newly minted head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, is calling for a radical refocus of the nation’s efforts to fight drugs — beginning with the elimination of the Nixon-era term, “War on Drugs.”

The Obama administration’s new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting “a war on drugs,” a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.

In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation’s drug issues.

“Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he said. “We’re not at war with people in this country.” [...]

The Obama administration is likely to deal with drugs as a matter of public health rather than criminal justice alone, with treatment’s role growing relative to incarceration, Mr. Kerlikowske said.

Indeed, as The Journal notes, the administration has already begun moving away from the policies of recent decades. The Justice Department, under Attorney General Eric Holder, has announced it will no longer raid medical marijuana dispensaries operating legally under state law, and it has called for Congress to eliminate the sentencing disparity for crimes related to crack and powder cocaine.

However, those who favor a “tough-on-crime” approach to deal with the drug problem probably need not worry the United States will turn into the Netherlands, known for extremely liberal drug policies, anytime soon. When Obama was asked directly about the prospect of legalizing marijuana during an online town hall in March, he cracked a joke and dismissed the seriousness of the question.

But the government’s apparent recognition that America’s tough drug control policies have failed to stem drug use or availability — while ballooning the nation’s incarceration rate — is certainly welcome news for those who support a more realistic and compassionate approach to tackling the drug problem.

Interesting analysis by Daphne Eviatar of the Washington Independent:

A Senate panel appeared to lay the groundwork on Wednesday for a possible prosecution of former Bush administration officials for the torture and abuse of detainees in the “war on terror,” despite strong opposition from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).  Specifically, findings by several testifying witnesses that Bush administration lawyers deliberately distorted the law in drafting legal memoranda that offered legal cover for “enhanced interrogation” policies could support future criminal prosecution.

The Office of Legal Counsel memos defining and justifying torture and other abusive interrogation techniques — the so-called “torture memos” — are “a legal train wreck,” testified David Luban, a professor of legal ethics at Georgetown University, to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts. “The torture memos fall far short of candid advice and independent professional judgment,” he said. They “cherry pick the law” and “read as if they were reverse engineered to reach a predetermined outcome.” If that outcome was unlawful, then the lawyer has crossed an ethical line.”The rules of professional ethics forbid lawyers from counseling or assisting clients in illegal conduct,” he said.

Although Luban’s testimony was directed at the ethical implications of the legal conclusions drawn by recently released Bush-era memos and whether the lawyers drafting them acted in “good faith,” a finding that the lawyers knowingly helped White House officials engage in illegal conduct could also support criminal liability of both the lawyers and the policymakers who instructed them.

That the OLC lawyers never once cited the case of United States v. Lee, for example, in which the Reagan administration’s Justice Department prosecuted a Texas sheriff who had waterboarded suspects to extract confessions, is revealing, said Luban. The case, decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 1983, refers to waterboarding as “torture” at least a dozen times.  It is “the single most relevant case on water torture” in United States jurisprudence, said Luban. (Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who has cited the case frequently in previous statements, in separate questioning agreed.) The authors of the Office of Legal Counsel memos, while relying on an obscure Medicare reimbursement law to define torture extremely narrowly, as Whitehouse pointed out, ignored the most obvious and readily accessible recent U.S. federal case law on torture. “It’s hard to avoid concluding that they did not mention it because it cast doubt on their legal conclusions,” said Luban.

The memos authorize conduct that “comes very close to President Nixon’s statement that when the president does it, it’s legal,” said Luban. Only President Nixon was saying it as a throwaway line when put on the spot in an interview with a journalist; the claim wasn’t written as an authoritative memo interpreting the law, Luban said…

Continue reading.

Take a look.

Always a good question to ask, and the attempt to answer that question for herself and her own happiness eventually resulted in Joanna Field writing the fascinating book A Life of One’s Own, which I frequently recommend. Now there’s a very interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly about that very question. The article’s blurb:

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

Worth reading.