Mojo - November, 2009

The White House will announce soon whether President Barack Obama will make an appearance at the Copenhagen climate summit in December.

The administration also expects to be able to announce a target for US emissions reductions before the meeting. The figure will likely fall somewhere between the targets set by the House climate bill (which mandates a 17 percent reduction below 2005 levels by 2020) and the Senate measure (which calls for a 20 percent reduction over the same time period.)

Whether Obama shows up at the summit or not, the administration is working hard to convince observers that his administration has already made significant progress on the climate front, despite Congress' failure to enact legislation before the international talks begin. "We have done more than anyone could have ever expected us to do in a relatively short time frame," a senior administration official told reporters on Monday. "[Obama's] turning around an ocean liner and he has done an extraordinary amount to turn that ocean liner around."

What will climate change cost the US economy? To date, the political debate has been fixated almost exclusively on fears that carbon regulations will impose heavy burdens on American companies. But what about the costs that companies will incur if climate change continues unabated? Or the new opportunities that a carbon cap may create for some businesses, such as firms that make windmills or solar panels? Faced with a lack of reliable analysis of the full costs and benefits of both climate change and climate policies, a group of major investors wants the Securities and Exchange Commission to step in. On Monday, the investors wrote to the SEC asking the agency to come up with guidelines to help businesses properly account for climate-related factors that will affect their bottom lines.

The letter was signed by 20 institutional investors from the US and Canada who represent $1 trillion in assets. Signatories include the state treasurers from Oregon, North Carolina, Connecticut, Maryland and Vermont, Florida’s Chief Financial Officer, the Environmental Defense Fund, Ceres, a sustainable business coalition, and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), the biggest public pension fund in the US. "CalPERS protects workers’ retirement benefits, and climate change poses both great risks and opportunities to these investments,” said CalPERS CEO Anne Stausboll in a statement. "The SEC should strengthen and enforce its current requirements so investors' decisions fully account for climate change’s financial effects."

Last month, the SEC issued new rules at the behest of Ceres and investor groups that require companies to disclose how climate regulation could affect their earnings, if investors request such information. But most companies haven't even started to assess these potential financial risks, in part because the tools for doing are still in their infancy. This latest investor request is an attempt to hurry up the process of ensuring that clmate change is factored into every company's balance sheet—and a sure sign that business leaders and investors believe some kind of climate regulation is coming, and coming soon.

Photo from the Obama-Biden transition team via flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.Liberals have not done enough public wrestling with Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf's Time article on the ouster of White House counsel Gregory Craig. Perhaps that's because they don't want to deal with the article's troubling implications. As Kevin explains, Craig was "the White House lawyer tasked with dismantling Bush-era interrogation and detention policies. At first, Obama was on board with Craig's plans.  Then, reality set in."

By "reality," Kevin presumably means "political reality." Time says that as soon as Obama's positions on Bush era torture—releasing the torture photos, for example—became politically difficult, the president jettisoned them. He did this despite the fact that he had been "prepared to accept — and had even okayed" those same positions "just weeks earlier":

First to go was the release of the pictures of detainee abuse. Days later, Obama sided against Craig again, ending the suspension of Bush's extrajudicial military commissions. The following week, Obama pre-empted an ongoing debate among his national-security team and embraced one of the most controversial of Bush's positions: the holding of detainees without charges or trial, something he had promised during the campaign to reject.

But perhaps the most damning part of the Time piece is this sentence, near the beginning, that summarizes exactly what has happened in Obama's White House:

[Obama] quietly shifted responsibility for the legal framework for counterterrorism from Craig to political advisers overseen by Emanuel, who was more inclined to strike a balance between left and right.

Take a minute to think about how the left would respond to this if Obama was a Republican president. Obama delegated the responsibility for determining what to do about detainees to his political advisers. If George W. Bush had charged his political advisers, including Karl Rove, with crafting such policy, the entire blogosphere would have melted down from outrage overload.

Obama's actions here are deeply at odds with the public image he cultivated during his campaign—idealist, civil libertarian, constitutional law professor, someone who rose above politics. You can claim that the president is a "pragmatist," and always has been, but Obama draped himself in idealism and principle during the campaign. The left always complained that Bush let politics drive his policy decisions. But in this instance, couldn't Obama be accused of the same thing?

US Army Military Police officers cross a bridge outside Surkhani Village after leaving an Afghan police checkpoint in eastern Kunar province, Afghanistan, Nov. 11, 2009. The Soldiers are assigned to the 49th Military Police Company, 759th Military Police Battalion. US Army Military Police regularly offer assistance and mentorship to their emerging Afghan police partners. (US Army photo by Pfc. Cody A. Thompson.)

Today's must reads: 

• Viggo Mortensen, King of The Road (MoJo)
• Health Care Cost Savings (The Atlantic)
  
• Public Option at Center of Health Care Debate (WaPo)
• Members of Congress: Eating Their Own Dog Food (MoJo)
• Taibbi on Sarah Palin: "Poor Rush is an anachronism" (Matt Taibbi) 
• In 3 Tacks for Afghan War, a Game of Trade-Offs (NYT)
• On the Anniversary of Kennedy's Death, Extremism Lives On (Esquire)
• Judge David Hamilton and the fight over God's secular title. (Slate)
• A Condemnation of Sparkly Vampires (The Atlantic)
• Sewers at Capacity, Toxic Waste Poisons Waterways (NYT)
• Jack Goldsmith and Jim Comey Defend Holder's KSM Decision (WaPo)
• The Sunday Shows in Five Bullet Points (The Atlantic)
• "Sometimes, the Majority of Americans Are Really Stupid" (The Atlantic)

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The West Virginia Chamber of Commerce is playing dirty with health care reform. It's pressuring its homestate Democratic senators, Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller, to block health care legislation unless the Obama administration ends what the Chamber calls a "war on coal."

The Obama administration and Congress have waged "a growing campaign against the mining and use of coal," said West Virginia Chamber President Steve Roberts in a press release. He cited both the administration's efforts to cut carbon emissions via climate legislation, as well as its tougher enforcement of environmental standards for mining practices. "This needs to end before irreparable damage sets in," Roberts threatened. "It seems counterintuitive to ask taxpayers in this country to pour money and take on a trillion dollars in future debt to expand health care coverage and benefits while at the same time the Obama administration and Congress are working to destroy jobs, eliminate good health care benefits and hurt people's well-being."

Coal, however, does not "improve the health and well-being" of either miners or local residents. Coal mining, combustion, and disposal can cause serious health problems, including black lung, asthma, and mercury pollution, to name a few. And the number of coal-related jobs is on the decline in West Virginia and the rest of the country, in part because coal has laid off workers after mechanizing much of its operations. There are fewer than half as many jobs in the coal sector now as there were in the early '80s, according to the Energy Information Administration. There are now more jobs in the wind industry than in mining.

A third of non-elderly West Virginians were uninsured at some point in 2007-2008—most of them for six months or more. Yet the state's Chamber wants its congressional delegation to block legislation that would provide those residents with access to health care. "Votes to advance national health care reform are at razor-thin margins in both houses of Congress," Roberts concludes. "West Virginia’s congressional delegation needs to use this time—and their clout and seniority—to get this anti-coal situation stopped."

President Barack Obama talks alone with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the Oval Office. (White House photo.)Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won praise on the left for including a public option in the health care bill that he's bringing to the floor of the Senate. But Reid's coming up on a big decision: while he may be able to wrangle the 60 votes to start debate on the bill tomorrow, there's evidence to suggest he many not be able to hold the Democratic caucus together to get the 60 votes necessary to end debate on a bill that includes a public option and move to a final vote. That's because conservative Democrats like Nebraska's Ben Nelson and Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln see a lot of potential value in bucking their party. So the left is bracing for Reid to betray them by removing the public option from the bill in order to earn the vote of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). Current DC conventional wisdom says that if Snowe votes for cloture on the bill, allowing it to come to a final vote, conservative Dems will almost certainly join her. Here's FDL's Jon Walker arguing that Reid can't be trusted:

Many of Snowe’s top demands managed to make their way into the bill.

Harry Reid decided to take the terrible "free rider" provision championed by Snowe from the Senate Finance committee bill instead of the employer mandate from the [Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee] bill. Reid went with a very much weaker individual mandate more in keeping with the wishes of Snowe. He also kept the terrible “nationwide plans” from the [Senate Finance Committee] bill. Snowe strongly backs the nationwide plans and claimed it was one of the reason she voted for the bill in committee....

...If progressives find out that Reid’s support of the public option was purely for show, while at the same time he secretly worked with Snowe to kill it with a trigger, that would not go over well with the base. Reid does have the power to get a public option passed, there is no good excuse for failure.

The left isn't taking Reid's support as a given. On Saturday, as the Senate moves towards an initial vote on Reid's health care bill, the Progressive Choice Campaign Committee (PCCC) will be canvassing Reid's home state of Nevada with robocalls praising his efforts. The call will reach at least 10,000 households every day for the next two weeks "so long as Reid stays strong" on the public option. The message: "If Reid Fights, We'll Get His Back." The implication, of course, is that if Reid doesn't keep fighting for the public option, the left won't back him in his tough reelection battle next year.

If Reid can figure out how to secure the votes he needs for cloture without enraging the left, he'll look like a political genius. But if he fails to get the votes, he'll look like a fool. And if he gets the votes but loses the left by gutting the public option, he may find himself out of a job next November. It's a tough spot to be in.

One of the big pieces of news that came out of Eric Holder's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday was Holder's promise that the long-awaited Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility report on torture will be out by the end of the month. In practice, that means that the report will probably come out next Wednesday evening (the night before Thanksgiving), next Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving), or, best-case scenario, this evening.

It's called a doc dump, and you don't have to tolerate it. Whenever the report does come out, come here and help us read through it. If we can teach the administration that the things they don't want covered are going to get covered no matter what, then maybe we won't have to deal with the doc dump so much in the future.

The main reason we can't get a health reform bill enacted is because the pharmaceutical and insurance industries aren’t happy with their piece of the action. This despite the fact that when politicians talk about cutting costs, what they really mean is cutting services to us so these two big industries can enhance their profitability.

One reason drug companies need additional revenue is because employee whistleblowers have found the nerve to report the industry's crooked business practices—leading to multi-million dollar payouts to injured patients plus fines for legal violations. "I was trained to do things and did things that were blatantly illegal," David Franklin, a Parke-Davis whistle-blower, told the Boston Globe in 2003. "I knew my job was to falsely gain physicians' trust and trade on my graduate degree. If he was a cardiologist, I was an expert in cardiology. If he was a neurologist, I was an expert in neurology." Under the False Claims Act, whistleblowers themselves stand to make millions of dollars for turning in their bosses.

But in the end we're the ones who pay for drug company malfeasance—in the form of higher prices. And when it comes to health care reform, we'll pick up the tab for their underhanded dealings in the form of reduced medical care—especially in the Medicare program—negotiated by our representatives in the name of fiscal restraint.

In early November the Indianapolis Star ran down some of the big payouts by the drug companies:

Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith, who both served in the Justice Department during the Bush administration, have an op-ed in Friday's Washington Post defending Eric Holder, Obama's Attorney General. Comey and Goldsmith say Holder's decision to try 9/11 "mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court was "reasonable," because military commissions really aren't everything the right is cracking them up to be:

[Critics of Holder's decision] place undue faith in military commissions as an alternative to civilian trials.... Tne reason commissions have not worked well is that changes in constitutional, international and military laws since they were last used, during World War II, have produced great uncertainty about the commissions' validity. This uncertainty has led to many legal challenges that will continue indefinitely -- hardly an ideal situation for the trial of the century.

By contrast, there is no question about the legitimacy of U.S. federal courts to incapacitate terrorists. Many of Holder's critics appear to have forgotten that the Bush administration used civilian courts to put away dozens of terrorists, including "shoe bomber" Richard Reid; al-Qaeda agent Jose Padilla; "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh; the Lackawanna Six; and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was prosecuted for the same conspiracy for which Mohammed is likely to be charged. Many of these terrorists are locked in a supermax prison in Colorado, never to be seen again.

Goldsmith and Comey also say that concerns about the KSM trial making New York a more attractive target for terrorists are unwarrented, since "If al-Qaeda could carry out another attack in New York, it would." The column should be politically useful for Holder and the Obama administration ("even Bush administration officials defend our decision"). Read the whole thing.