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Politics

Limbaugh: I Fear Obama’s Repeal Of Bush-Era Secrecy Rules ‘Make It Easier’ To Hold Bush To Account

By Ryan Powers on Jan 21, 2009 at 7:15 pm

Earlier today, President Obama issued his first set of executive orders. One of these orders instructs “federal agencies to handle requests for information from the public and press under the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] with an eye toward disclosure, not refusal.” The order reportedly returns to “pre-Bush administration policies” regarding FOIA.

In response to the “new standard of openness,” conservative talker Rush Limbaugh said that he fears that the more open FOIA rules will make it easier for Bush to be held to account for any misdeeds he committed as president:

LIMBAUGH: What I’m afraid of is that what Obama did with this executive order is actually make it easier for the media to go get Bush documents. Because you know Pelosi and some of the guys over in congress are talking about war crimes trials and charges and so forth. [...]

What I’m afraid of is what Obama’s done here is made the gathering of the information for this kind of stuff– This is not American. This is not America. This is not what America does. We don’t– This is Banana Republic kind of stuff.

Watch it:

With any luck, Limbaugh’s fears of an open and accountable government will be realized. When he entered office in 2001, President Bush heralded a new era of secrecy, directing then-Attorney General Ashcroft to issue new rules that essentially neutered FOIA:

[The Bush administration's 2001 FOIA] directive encouraged federal agencies to reject requests for documents if there was any legal basis to do so, promising that the Justice Department would defend them in court. It was a stark reversal of the policy set eight years earlier, when the Clinton administration told agencies to make records available whenever they could, even if the law provided a reason not to, so long as there was no ”foreseeable harm” from the release.

As a result of that directive, the government’s FOIA compliance rate deteriorated. By 2006, 2 in 5 FOIA requests were left unprocessed, the number of exceptions cited to justify withholding information increased 83 percent, and the Justice Department’s grant rate fell 70 percent.

While a number of influential figures, including Obama, have expressed some reluctance to pursue independent investigations of Bush administration officials or programs, Obama’s FOIA order may at least provide journalists and other interested parties with the tools they need to, as Limbaugh put it, “go get Bush documents.”

Yglesias

Requests We Can Believe In

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 21, 2009 at 6:46 pm

What’s up in the new Age of Obama? Personally, I’m wondering what this all means for progressive blogging in particular and the new progressive institutions of the Obama era more generally. But I don’t have any answers. So what are you wondering about?

Yglesias

New York Needs a Senator!

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 21, 2009 at 6:12 pm

Chris Bowers says:

First, at a Senate progressive media summit today, Senator Charles Schumer said that he was unhappy about the amount of stimulus money set aside for mass transit and rail. He indicated that several other Senators from highly urbanized states were also unhappy about this portion of the stimulus, and that when the legislation reached the Senate, they would be jointly pushing for an increase in money set aside for mass transit and rail. The current amount for mass transit and rail in the stimulus bill is only $10 billion.

This reminds me of something. Around seven percent of the nation’s population lives in New York State. But the constitution allocates just two percent of the nation’s senators to my home state. That’s too bad, and it’s particularly a problem in policy areas such as transportation where we get a structural bias away from the needs of places like New York. But do you know what’s even worse? Right now New York really has only one Senator since Hillary Clinton obviously isn’t focusing her energy on this matter, but David Patterson hasn’t gotten around to naming a replacement yet. He’s doing a disservice to his constituents and to residents of big cities everywhere.

UPDATE: Speaking of which, Caroline Kennedy is withdrawing from consideration.

Politics

California ABC affiliate refuses to air ad promoting same-sex marriage.

By ThinkProgress on Jan 21, 2009 at 6:04 pm

During the inauguration yesterday, Los Angeles ABC affiliate K-ABC refused to air an ad from GetToKnowUsFirst.org expressing the message, “Marriage promotes families. Support marriage equality.” The station claimed that the ad’s content was “too controversial [because] many families will be watching.” The rejected ad features two black men raising five children. Watch it:

The ad did play on CNN, ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today Show, and even Fox News.

- Michael Wilson

Climate Progress

Antarctica has warmed significantly over past 50 years, revisited

By Joe Romm on Jan 21, 2009 at 5:58 pm

The rest of the media is finally catching up to my post from last month (see “Another AGU stunner: Evidence that Antarctica has warmed significantly over past 50 years“).

That’s because Nature published the peer-reviewed paper that was first reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting and Nature‘s own blog (!), “Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year” (subs req’d, abstract below).

antarctica2.jpg

Scientists know the Antarctic ice sheet is losing mass “100 years ahead of schedule” (see “AGU 2008: Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003” and “Antarctic ice sheet hits the fan“).

It is really only the warming of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) that you should worry about (at least for this century) because it’s going to disintegrate long before the East Antarctic Ice Sheet does — since WAIS appears to be melting from underneath (i.e. the water is warming, too), and since, as I wrote in the “high water” part of my book, the WAIS is inherently less stable:

Perhaps the most important, and worrisome, fact about the WAIS is that it is fundamentally far less stable than the Greenland ice sheet because most of it is grounded far below sea level. The WAIS rests on bedrock as deep as two kilometers underwater. One 2004 NASA-led study found that most of the glaciers they were studying “flow into floating ice shelves over bedrock up to hundreds of meters deeper than previous estimates, providing exit routes for ice from further inland if ice-sheet collapse is under way.” A 2002 study in Science examined the underwater grounding lines–the points where the ice starts floating. Using satellites, the researchers determined that “bottom melt rates experienced by large outlet glaciers near their grounding lines are far higher than generally assumed.” And that melt rate is positively correlated with ocean temperature.

The warmer it gets, the more unstable WAIS outlet glaciers will become. Since so much of the ice sheet is grounded underwater, rising sea levels may have the effect of lifting the sheets, allowing more-and increasingly warmer-water underneath it, leading to further bottom melting, more ice shelf disintegration, accelerated glacial flow, and further sea level rise, and so on and on, another vicious cycle. The combination of global warming and accelerating sea level rise from Greenland could be the trigger for catastrophic collapse in the WAIS (see, for instance, here).

Read more

Yglesias

Free Speech

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 21, 2009 at 5:54 pm

One reader wrote in with regard to my post on this Dutch hate speech prosecution objecting that my criticisms seemed too pragmatic and insufficiently focused on the question of principle.

So to be clear: I think as a matter of principle that people should be permitted to make offensive analogies about the Koran or anything else they care to. That said, I do think that principled belief in free speech is ultimately tied to practicalities. If I was genuinely convinced that for people of diverse faiths to coexist peacefully required an elaborate set of legal restrictions on offensive speech—with the only alternative being bloodshed and many deaths—then I’m not going to pretend that I might not flinch away from principle. But the principle of freedom of expression as a good solution for life in a diverse society has, I think, stood the test of time in the United States of America. And it does work, in part, precisely because it’s understood as a principle, as a civic commitment to a shared value. Which is perhaps a more complicated answer than some people are hoping for, but I think that in the real word questions of principle and questions of pragmatism are more intertwined than people sometimes care to admit.

Economy

Zandi On Distressed Homeowners: ‘Their Problems Are Clearly Everyone’s Problems’

By Pat Garofalo on Jan 21, 2009 at 5:40 pm

zandi.jpgToday, Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, released his analysis of the stimulus plan House Democrats put forth last week. Zandi concluded that the plan “will not reverse the current recession, but it will provide a vital boost to the flagging economy”:

With the stimulus, there will be 4 million more jobs and the jobless rate will be more than 2 percentage points lower by the end of 2010 than without any fiscal stimulus. Without stimulus, unemployment will rise well into the double digits by this time next year, and the economy will not return to full employment until 2014.

Zandi also highlighted an important point that has been somewhat lost in the hoopla surrounding the stimulus: a solution to the housing crisis — the very root of the economic downturn — has still not been found. Data shows that foreclosures in 2008 increased 80 percent from 2007 and 225 percent from 2006. Zandi rightly noted that these problems facing homeowners “are clearly everyone’s problems“:

[P]olicymakers’ most serious missteps so far have come from acting too slowly, too timidly, and in a seemingly scattershot way…Debate about whether it is fair to help stressed households stay in their homes appears quaint. Their problems are clearly everyone’s problems. Only concerted, comprehensive and consistent government action will instill the confidence necessary to restore financial stability and restart economic growth.

Indeed, the foreclosure epidemic hurts everybody, as foreclosed properties drag down home values, making it harder for neighbors to sell or refinance, which could result in even more foreclosures.

Zandi suggested that money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) be used “to fund a much larger and more comprehensive foreclosure mitigation plan.” This is an approach long-advocated by the Center for American Progress, and since the Senate voted last week to release the second tranche of TARP funds into the waiting arms of the Obama administration, there is a golden opportunity to implement it.

Politics

Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias selected as Gitmo prosecutor.

By Satyam Khanna on Jan 21, 2009 at 5:39 pm

In an interview with a local New Mexico station today, fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, a JAG corps member, said that he has been tapped to be part of a special team of prosecutors for Guantanamo detainees. “One hundred percent of what I’m doing is prosecuting terrorist cases out of Guantanamo,” he explained. “We want to make sure that those terrorists that did commit acts will be brought to justice — and those that did not will be released.” Watch it:

Politics

Graham Endorses ‘Indefinite Detention’ Of Guantanamo Detainees

By Ali Frick on Jan 21, 2009 at 4:45 pm

Yesterday, President Obama ordered a halt to all prosecutions of Guantanamo detainees in order to “review the military commission process.” The AP reports today that Obama is circulating a draft executive order calling for closing Guantanamo Bay within a year.

Unlike other conservatives, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has supported the goal of closing Guantanamo. However, on Fox News today, Graham whole-heartedly endorsed the “indefinite detention” of some Guantanamo detainees

GRAHAM: I do believe we can close Gitmo, but what to do with them? Repatriate some back to other countries makes sense, if you can do it safely. Some of them will be tried for war crimes. And a third group will be held indefinitely because the sensitive nature of the evidence may not subject them to the normal criminal process, but if you let them go, we’ll be letting go someone who wants to go back to the fight. … So we’ve got three lanes we’ve got to deal with: Repatriation, trials, and indefinite detention.

Watch it:

According to Graham, some detainees can’t be legally tried because of “sensitive evidence” holding them. In fact, as Ken Gude has explained, our criminal justice system is already equipped to hold full legal trials while protecting classified evidence and state secrets. Rather than a security concern, the real reason some detainees’ trials have been derailed is because the “evidence” against them was obtained through torture, and thus inadmissible.

Graham’s blunt language affirms his complete departure from his earlier, principled stance against the detention system set up by Donald Rumsfeld. In 2003, he joined Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) in writing a letter to then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld urging him to immediately create a system “to formally treat and process the detainees as war criminals or to return them to their countries for appropriate judicial action.”

As late as last September, Graham supported at least some form of judicial process for military detainees, saying that “military commissions are the right approach to deliver justice and protect our nation in the War on Terror.” However, now Graham has apparently embraced the far-right notion that some detainees can be imprisoned forever, without legal recourse.

Update

Ken Gude reacted to Graham’s statements: “U.S. courts have tried some of the most dangerous terrorists the world has ever known, and done so while both protecting classified information and the rights of the accused to ensure the verdict is fair, legitimate, and accurate. … Of course these prosecutions will not be easy, but the admissibility of classified evidence is not an insurmountable obstacle to trials of Guantanamo detainees.”

Health

On The Reluctance To Adopt Health IT

By Igor Volsky on Jan 21, 2009 at 4:32 pm

At the National Journal Online, health policy analyst Uwe Reinhardt explains why the United States is lagging behind other industrialized nations in the adoption of health information technology (like electronic medical records or electronic prescriptions):

One explanation is that our health system has not been spending enough on HIT overall. It often is the stepchild in the budgeting process of hospitals and medical practices….A second reason for our lagging in HIT is that, by the very nature of our pluralistic health system and the equally pluralistic HIT industry, we have produced a veritable HIT Tower of Babel….A third reason for our lagging in HIT is that there have been too many fly-by-night outfits in this industry, often elaving their clients in the lurch over the longer run. HIT applications must be serviced reliably, over the long haul. Many users have been sorely disappointed in that area in the past.

But underlying all the questions about health IT is the question of who should pay for it. That is, while insurance companies could benefit from reduced costs in moving from a paper-based system to electronic health records, the costs of implementation are far higher for providers.

An analysis by the Center for Information Technology Leadership (CITL), for instance, found that “while providers are footing the bill for HIT, they may experience only 11 percent of the potential gain. Other stakeholders, payers principally among them, may reap 89 percent of the gain.”

Also, as Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet speculates, “there’s another, deeper problem. Fear“:

Many doctors fear automation because documentation invites lawyers. As one correspondent put it: The Democrats love it because it will make it much easier to sue physicians. Auditing care will find mistakes, and mistakes will lead to lawsuits. Mistakes are inevitable, however, so don’t put anything down and maybe no one will be able to find out.

Still, according to a new Commonwealth Fund opinion survey of health care leaders, 78 percent of respondents thought that investment in health information technology was a very important or “absolutely essential element of a stimulus package.” In other words, the benefits of health IT — in terms of eliminating health errors, creating jobs and containing health costs — far outweigh its perceived dangers. The fear that doctors face in terms of increased litigation costs can certainly be addressed by designing a system that dismisses unmeritted or flimsy lawsuits, while at the same time punishing doctors for real medical errors. Smart policy can make that distinction, no?

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