The White House has experienced difficulties moving its ill-conceived national security priorities through Congress. Yesterday, the Senate passed legislation banning waterboarding, defying a Bush veto threat. Also, House leaders have said they will not approve the Protect America Act with immunity for telecom companies.

After the Senate banned waterboarding yesterday, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino claimed the “left wing” was trying to overtake the intelligence community:

They’ll have to ask themselves, ‘Do you trust the intelligence community more than you trust Democrats who are beholden to their left-wing?‘ And that’s the debate that this country is going to have.

Perino also attacked Congress for holding a contempt of Congress vote on White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers instead of expanding Bush’s surveillance powers:

The American people will find it baffling that on a day that House leaders are trying to put off passing critical legislation to keep us safer from the threat of foreign terrorists overseas, they are spending scarce time to become the first congress in history to bring contempt charges against a president’s chief of staff and lawyer. … The ‘people’s House’ should reflect the priorities of the American people, not the fantasies of left-wing bloggers.

The line is a familiar one. When the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington revealed that the White House had destroyed millions of e-mails, Perino shrugged them off as the accusations of a “left-wing” group — but she later backtracked.

Congress’s priorities are reflected by the will of the public. A recent CNN poll showed that 68 percent of Americans said waterboarding was torture, and 58% said the U.S. should not use the technique. A January ACLU poll found 57 percent of likely voters opposed telecom immunity, compared to just a third who supported it.

Barack Obama wins the endorsement of the United Food and Commercial Workers. They’re one of the youngest unions around in terms of membership, and have a substantial presence in Ohio. There’s an interesting subtext in this race whereby Change to Win unions have tended to be sympathetic to Obama, while Clinton’s key pillar of support has been the public sector unions. This hasn’t really spilled over into any incredibly concrete policy controversy on the campaign trail, but probably has some implications as to how they would govern in that you naturally take the concerns of the unions who supported you a bit more seriously than those of the unions who tried to beat you.

UPDATE: I had initially intended to make a joke about “impressionable elites” showing up at the most unlikely places, working in supermarkets and slaughterhouses and such but I’d forgotten that unions with four-letter acronyms don’t count. AFT! NEA! AFSCME! Those are unions. HERE, UFCW, SEIU and so forth don’t make the cut.

Courtesy of Adam Bailey at DCist, a precinct-by-precinct map of the DC primary results. As you can see, Obama did best in the eastern half of the city (where there are no white people), Clinton did best west of Rock Creek park (where there are few black people). In the middle, things were in the middle. But Clinton lost all areas of the city. Indeed, out of the city’s 142 precincts, Clinton won zero. In my precinct, the rapidly gentrifying 22nd, Clinton managed to secure 32 percent of the vote. I’d been taking the fact that I didn’t see any Clinton signs in my area as an indication that her people really just weren’t putting any kind of DC campaign together, but some others hypothesized that maybe there just weren’t any Clinton supporters in the neighborhood. Evidently, though, about a third of my neighbors voted for Clinton, so perhaps if her team had put more of an operation together she might have managed to carry a precinct or two.

Clinton did best in Precinct 3, “the neighborhood including the Watergate, some G.W. housing, and the Foggy Bottom Historic District; but she still lost to Obama in a 275-243 vote.” Nobody ever goes there, but fortunately my office is located in the Watergate (fortunate for the purposes of this post, unfortunate in the sense that my office is in an inconvenient location where nobody goes) so I took an illustrative photo:

That’s some tiny Foggy Bottom Historic District-protected houses in the foreground, a slice of the Watergate complex in the back. The GW students must have put Obama over the top.

Americans For Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) — the coal industry front group that has sponsored multiple presidential debates and whose members paid for an advertisement comparing the governor of Kansas to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — has sunk to new lows.

On a website, LearnAboutCoal.org, ABEC uses cute young children to make the case for coal. Upon loading the site, viewers may encounter a cheerful “Daniella” who says, “I may be a kid, but we’re a lot alike. We both want affordable, reliable energy and a clean environment! Well, luckily, we can have our cake — and eat it too.”

Or viewers may encounter “Adam,” who says: “I’m pretty stoked about the future of energy in this country. One reason for that is that I’ve taken the time to learn more about American coal.” The site includes four “commercials” of kids marketing coal. ABEC’s scripts for the children ensure that Daniella and Adam’s “friends” who pepper the site are just as enthusiastic about coal as they are:

– ‘Sarah’: Sometimes it’s okay to rely upon other countries to get some of our energy, but it’s better to get it here at home. That’s why I’m glad to know that we have a 250 year supply of American coal available right here in America. … I’m doing my homework. You do yours too.

– ‘Connor’: Did you know that electricity from coal is half the cost of other fuels? Hey, look at the facts and you’ll agree. Electricity from coal? It’s a bargain.

– ‘Luke’: “Coal will remain the dominant fuel for electricity generation in our country for at least the next several decades — maybe even beyond that. … Is coal a fuel for America’s future? Actually, we can’t afford for it not to be. Learn about coal! You might surprise yourself.”

Yesterday, the Physicians for Social Responsibility blasted ABEC for its unethical exploitation of children to shill for an energy source that causes so many health risks for kids:

Coal-fired power plants also are the single largest source of mercury emissions in the U.S. Pregnant women and children are especially vulnerable to the toxic effects of mercury, which can damage the brain and cause learning disorders and impairments in motor function. No parent would allow their child to be exposed to such danger; yet, across the country, as many as 600,000 children are born each year with increased risk of developmental disorders because of mercury exposure in the womb.

As young “Adam” says on the ABEC website, “I bet you found out some things about coal you didn’t know before.” Indeed, the site reveals just how low the coal industry will stoop to disseminate propaganda.

Digg It!

As the Bush administration prepares to “renegotiate a long-term bilateral security agreement” with Iraq, a “deal-breaker for the Iraqis is contractor immunity” of the type that allowed Blackwater guards to escape punishment after killing 17 Iraqis in a Baghdad shoot-out. But “in interagency discussions arranged in preparation for the start of negotiations, the Department of Defense has said it wants to ask the Iraqis to maintain status quo.” The State Department “has argued strongly against that position.”