Kevin Drum

The New York Times reports today on a petition asking the SEC to require public companies to disclose their political donations. Needless to day, business lobbying groups are unamused:

Earlier this month, the leaders of three of Washington’s most powerful trade associations — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable — issued a rare joint letter to the chief executives of Fortune 200 companies, encouraging them to stand against proxy resolutions and other proposals from shareholder activists demanding more disclosure of political spending.

....“The Chamber believes that the funds expended by publicly traded companies for political and trade association engagement are immaterial to the company’s bottom line,” said Blair Holmes, a spokeswoman for the business group, who added that the advocates’ “apparent goal is to silence the business community by creating an atmosphere of intimidation under the cover of investor protection.”

You have to admire the chutzpah, don't you? Who else but the Chamber of Commerce would have the balls to claim that corporations don't believe that political donations have any effect on their earnings? I mean, that's pretty much the whole point of political donations, no?

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Here is the opening anecdote of a New York Times story devoted to demonstrating that President Obama is a wimp:

Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, asked President Obama’s administration for a little favor last month. Send your new interior secretary this spring to discuss a long-simmering dispute over construction of a road through a wildlife refuge, Mr. Begich asked in a letter. The administration said yes.

Four weeks later, Mr. Begich, who faces re-election next year, ignored Mr. Obama’s pleas on a landmark bill intended to reduce gun violence....But Mr. Begich’s defiance and that of other Democrats who voted against Mr. Obama appear to have come with little cost. Sally Jewell, the interior secretary, is still planning a trip to Alaska.

....The trip will also reinforce for Mr. Begich and his colleagues a truth about Mr. Obama: After more than four years in the Oval Office, the president has rarely demonstrated an appetite for ruthless politics that instills fear in lawmakers.

Wow! Obama really is a wuss. LBJ never would have put up with that kind of behavior. He would have reared right up on his haunches and — hold on a second. What's that? There's more to this story? OK, Olivier Knox, you have the floor:

The real reason for [Jewell's] visit—and the reason Obama agreed to give the road project a second look despite fierce opposition from environmentalists (and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)—was a deal last month between the administration and Alaska's Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Murkowski had vowed to block Jewell's confirmation by any means necessary unless the Interior Department reconsidered. The administration, eager to see the former REI executive confirmed, relented....Murkowski voted for Jewell's confirmation on April 10. She got what she wanted; the administration got what it wanted. If there was arm-twisting, the administration appears to have been the twistee. But the road's not built yet, Jewell is Interior secretary, and reports of the death of Obama's ability to work with Congress appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

So the reason that Jewell is still planning to visit Alaska is because of a promise Obama made to Murkowski, not Begich. She kept her end of the deal, so Obama is keeping his. That's it.

This was Exhibit A in the case against Obama's willingness to work his steely will on Congress. In fact, in the Times story, it was the only exhibit. And it was completely bogus. Next, please.

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Here's the latest on the Tsarnaev brothers:

Accused Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told FBI investigators that he and his brother were operating alone and did not receive assistance from outside terrorist groups, officials said Tuesday.

....Investigators separately have tentatively concluded that his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died early Friday morning after a shootout with police, did not meet with Islamist militants during his six-month visit to Russia last year, according a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official.

Experts say the brothers increasingly appear to have been self-radicalized “lone wolf” operators who worked independently, using bomb recipes gathered from websites.

I'm not really sure what this means, and obviously Dzhokhar might be lying. But apparently the current state-of-the-art thinking among interrogators is that the Tsarnaevs were motivated by "extremist Islamic beliefs"—specifically by "the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan"—but acted on their own.

There sure is something odd about that six-month trip to Russia, though. The story we've been told is that the Russians warned the FBI back in 2010 that Tamerlan might be connected with Islamic radicals. The FBI checks it out and finds nothing. Then Tamerlan goes to Russia in 2012. So what happened then? Did the Russians track him while he was there? If so, did they pass anything further along to the FBI? If not, why not? They're the ones who were supposedly convinced that Tamerlan was up to no good. So what happened?

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Sen. Lindsey Graham thinks the Boston bombing suspect should be held as an enemy combatant. Dave Weigel isn't convinced:

The 2001 authorization of force made official a war between the United States and terrorist organizations/state sponsors who could be tied to the 9/11 attacks. Yaser Esam Hamdi was an American citizen caught on the battlefield of Afghanistan, by the Northern Alliance. How do you stretch that case far enough to cover Tsarnaev?

Well, here's Graham last night on Greta Van Susteren's show making the case:

GRAHAM: I don't want to hold him for more than 30 days, but within 30 days he can petition a judge and say, hey, I'm not an enemy combatant....To hold him as an enemy combatant they'd have to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that you're tied to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or affiliated groups. Chechnyan Islamic groups are affiliated with al-Qaeda under our laws.

VAN SUSTEREN: So is it enough that he visited Chechnya for six months for you to conclude that there's a threshold met that he's part of a group?

GRAHAM: I think so. If I were president of the United States who makes this decision, I would say, this is clearly a mass terrorist attack. [Runs down evidence against the older Tsarnaev brother] ....All that would allow me as president to say that I want to find out more in the national security legal system, not the criminal justice legal system.

In a statement a few days ago, Graham and a few other senators made the same point he made last night: "any future trial" would be held in a civilian court, but Tsarnaev should be questioned by intelligence analysts in the meantime: "The questioning of an enemy combatant for national security purposes has no limit on time or scope. In a case like this it could take weeks to prepare the questions that are needed to be asked and months before intelligence gathering is completed."

The emphasis here is a little different than it was on Van Susteren's show, where she repeatedly mentioned the 30-day limit on questioning. So would Tsarnaev be held for 30 days or would he be held indefinitely? Technically the former, but Graham sure seems to think that indefinitely is a lot more likely, and he's OK with that.

It's all moot now, since President Obama has made the decision to keep Tsarnaev in the criminal justice system. As for Graham, he might not want to try Tsarnaev in front of a military commission, but I get the pretty strong impression that he'd be just fine with tossing Tsarnaev in a brig somewhere and keeping him there forever without any trial at all. Adam Serwer has more here.

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