The WonkLine: September 17, 2009

Last night, at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s award’s ceremony, President Obama announced: “My commitment is real and so is my desire to get this (immigration reform) done.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities have settled a lawsuit against them and agreed to no longer detain immigrants for weeks in cramped rooms with no access to drinking water, sanitary napkins or toothbrushes.

Immigrant rights advocates are “offering harsh words to the White House and congressional Democrats” who they accuse of backing health care provisions that will make it difficult for undocumented immigrants to purchase insurance at full cost and severely limit access to public benefits for poor legal immigrants.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) predicted Wednesday that “Congress will wind up approving a ‘public option’ insurance program as part of its health reform effort, even though such an option was not included in a prominent proposal released” by Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT).

Live Pulse points out that according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Baucus plan would reduce the federal deficit by $16 billion in 2019, and after that, the added revenues and cost savings would grow more rapidly than the cost of the coverage expansion, according to the CBO analysis.”

How Does Baucus Protection Stack Up? Not very well, it seems.

Bloomberg reports that “credit-default swaps have lost their stigma for disaster and are contributing to the growing confidence in the credit markets.”

The Commerce Department announced that housing construction rose in August to the highest level in nine months and was described as “another sign that the nation’s housing industry has begun to recover from its worst downturn in decades.”

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo issued subpoenas to the five directors on Bank of America’s audit committee at the time of their purchase of Merrill Lynch.

The Washington Times reports that “authorities in the United Arab Emirates earlier this year quietly broke up a major terrorist ring affiliated with al Qaeda that had plotted to blow up targets in Dubai.”

Commenting on the news that the Obama administration “will shelve plans to deploy its controversial anti-ballistic missile shield in Eastern Europe,” Robert Farley writes that “this is a huge victory for common sense over fantasy, and for responsible defense budgeting… No convincing strategic logic could ever be provided for the program.”

CNN reports that “at least 16 people were killed, including international soldiers, and 55 were wounded when a car bomb rocked parts of Afghanistan’s capital Thursday.”

“The U.S. State Department issued an international proposal jointly with the governments of Canada and Mexico this week to phase down the production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs),” super greenhouse gases with a climate warming impact many thousands of times greater than CO2.

“Representatives of the world’s 17 biggest carbon polluters” are beginning “a week of high-level and high-stakes talks on climate change at a meeting in Washington, “before moving to New York next week and then to Pittsburgh, to try to patch up differences and generate momentum for a much heralded meeting in Copenhagen.”

Global ocean temperatures in August were the warmest in recorded history, following a record-hot June and July, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports.

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