Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) (WDCpix)

To hear the Democrats tell the tale, the extension of jobless benefits enacted over the weekend will provide those living in high-unemployment states with an additional 20 weeks of insurance.

Well, not quite.

Because the bill was held up for so long in the Senate, an end-of-the-year filing deadline will prevent anyone from accessing the final six weeks of benefits, according to state officials and sources on Capitol Hill. On Friday, President Obama signed into law legislation extending jobless benefits by 14 weeks nationwide, with an additional six weeks for those states where unemployment rates top 8.5 percent. Those benefits kicked in on Sunday. But there’s a glitch. The new law treats the 20-week extension as two separate extensions of 14 weeks and six weeks, with participants required to exhaust the first 14 weeks before applying for the next six. However, the current law keeps a Dec. 31 application deadline, roughly seven weeks from now, making collecting the full 20 weeks impossible.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

As a result, some members of Congress are already eying another sweeping unemployment extension, which would both address the deadline glitch and provide additional help — well beyond the six weeks in question — to those unable to find work next year, when jobless rates are expected to hover near double digits.

The Orange County Register first reported on the deadline glitch last week.

In a state like California, where unemployment currently stands above 12 percent, that technicality would prove significant. Loree Levy, spokesperson for California’s Employment Development Department, said Monday that an estimated 92,000 residents had exhausted all of their available unemployment by the end of October, and roughly 285,000 will be eligible for the newly enacted benefits by the end of the year. Whether they can get 20 weeks or only 14, though, depends on whether Congress extends the filing deadline.

Some in Congress are well aware of the problem. The office of Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) said Monday that he’ll be pushing a proposal to provide as much as an additional year’s worth of jobless benefits. The proposal will be wrapped into a package to include other provisions designed to ease Main Street’s pain amid the downturn, including money to subsidize COBRA health benefits, as well as a provision to extend the full federal funding of a traditionally state-federal unemployment insurance program called FedEd, which got full federal funding under the stimulus bill. Without congressional action, states would again have to pick up part of the FedEd tab at the end of 2009.

McDermott doesn’t have an easy task. The pricetag for extending just the unemployment benefits for one year is roughly $80 billion, the McDermott aide said. With deficit spending having topped $1 trillion in the last fiscal year — and with an enormous health reform proposal in the works — the congressional appetite for expensive new proposals is hardly ravenous. Still, with national unemployment at 10.2 percent — and no wave of new jobs on the horizon — even the most ardent small-government conservatives would have a tough time voting against additional relief.

These latest documents provide a glimpse of the early struggles between the FBI and the Pentagon over just how to conduct the “war on terror” and how to interrogate and treat that war’s detainees. Sadly, they reveal that the FBI knew perfectly well — and repeatedly warned Defense Department officials, as well as Justice Department lawyers — that the abusive interrogation techniques being used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay were likely to be ineffective and make subsequent prosecutions impossible.

As one memo says, while the interrogation techniques based on tactics used in the U.S. Army Search, Escape, Resistance and Evasion (SERE) training “may be effective in eliciting tactical intelligence in a battlefield context, the reliability of information obtained using such tactics is highly questionable, not to mention potentially legally inadmissible in court.”

That memo was written in May 2003.  The “enhanced” interrogation techniques, such as stress positions and prolonged sleep deprivation, were still being used and justified in memos as late as July 2007. The memo raises several important questions. Did the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers drafting those later memos for the CIA not know about the FBI’s earlier objections? Or did they just dismiss them out of hand? Were they told to ignore those earlier conclusions?

Then there’s the fact that senior officials from the Criminal Investigative Task Force, including the chief psychologist with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service “repeatedly argued for implementation of a rapport-based approach” and “lamented the fact that many DHS [Defense Human Intelligence Services] interrogators seem to believe that the only way to elicit information from uncooperative detainees is to use aggressive techniques on them.”

“Despite objections raised by the [Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI], the DHS initiated an aggressive interrogation plan for #63,” who elsewhere in the document is identified as Mohammed al-Qatani. “This plan incorporated a confusing array of physical and psychological stressors which were designed, presumably, to elicit #63’s cooperation. Needless to say, this plan was eventually abandoned when the DHS realized it was not working and when #63 had to be hospitalized briefly.”

Officials from the Criminal Investigative Task Force and the Behavioral Analysis Unit drafted a letter “reiterating the strengths of the FBI/CITF approach” and providing “a detailed historical record of the development of interagency policies regarding aggressive interrogation techniques in GTMO.” The letter also argued that they were a bad idea.

Not only did the officials not succeed in convincing DHS to abandon the techniques, but the document described how the military and DHS inaccurately portrayed to the Pentagon that the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit approved of and helped design the very techniques that the BAU warned would backfire.

Although we knew before that the FBI had disagreed with the so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques and refused to participate in them, this latest release of previously classified information reveals the extent to which FBI officials made both the legal and practical case to senior Pentagon and Justice Department officials for why the usual rules on interrogations should be followed.

That they were so blatantly ignored suggests more than just bad judgment. It suggests a deliberate indifference to the facts and the law, which cries out for a more thorough investigation.

09 Memos

Detroit has 80,000 abandoned lots and buildings, according to the city’s planning department. Old housing projects, homes, strip malls and even high-rise buildings sit empty across much of the city. Motown has more vacant office, retail and industrial space than nearly every other big city in the country.

Like many of Detroit’s abandoned buildings, though, it’s anything but deserted. Rather, it’s a hive of activity, buzzing with scavengers, vandals, late-night revelers, arsonists, photographers and urban explorers who brave the crumbling buildings’ many hazards and create a good number of their own. The complex remains unguarded.

“Mayhem. That’s what they should call the place,” says John, a 36-year-old telephone-line repairman who spends his spare time exploring Detroit’s legendary industrial ruins. “If you decide you want to push a dump truck out of a window, this is the place to do it.”

There’s more to this. The pranksters’ playground of empty and abandoned properties represents a deep and lasting betrayal of the needs of urban America.  Some cities in the Rustbelt, hit first by the abandonment of their inner cores and then utterly devastated by foreclosures, bear scars from which they are unlikely to recover and that few seem to see. Years after the financial crisis ends, I wonder if we’ll look back at this as a time when we stood by and let some of the country’s once-great communities simply fall into disrepair and die.

In Washington, Congress ceded to the lobbying efforts of powerful interests like the National Association of Homebuilders, and passed an extension of a homebuyer’s tax credit that costs more than it delivers and puts money into the pockets of people who don’t need it. There are no lobbying groups for people who live in neighborhoods with foreclosures that even banks have abandoned because they aren’t worth the expense of taking back.

However, there are some bright spots in the overall dark landscape. As TWI’s sister site, The Michigan Messenger, pointed out last week, urban gardening has taken hold in parts of Detroit, which now boasts more than 700 urban farms within its city limits. The idea behind some of those farms is to present a healthy alternative to the liquor stores, gas stations, and convenience stores where residents often turn for high-cost groceries and fast food.

Like urban gardening, the best solutions to the abandonment crisis will come from the bottom up. But those efforts need government support to take hold and expand. In order to take off, any possible solution requires a sense of urgency among policymakers about the huge problems facing cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago — and even the outer exurbs in the boom markets of California and Arizona, where foreclosures have caused property values to sink and have left communities stuck in a downward spiral.

But there’s  been no big national push for possible solutions like land banks, which would allow local communities to seize and reuse vacant land and buildings. There’s been no national summit to talk about the tragedy of declining neighborhoods due to foreclosures. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner apparently picks up the phone and chats with his Wall Street friends several times a day. Hey, Secretary Geithner — How about making a call to a homeowner surrounded by foreclosed homes? Or maybe taking a stroll down one of those blocks in Detroit where every single home is owned by a real estate speculator? In America’s abandoned neighborhoods, they’ve been waiting to hear from you, or from anyone in Washington, for a long time. And they’re still waiting.

The United States economy shed 190,000 jobs in October, and the unemployment rate reached a 26-year high of 10.2 percent, up from 9.8 percent in September, the Department of Labor said Friday in its monthly economic appraisal.

While the pace of the job losses has slowed significantly since the peak of the recession last winter, the unemployment rate, which measures the number of people actively seeking work, continues to climb, and economists do not foresee relief until well into next year.

“There’s no doubt that the slashing and burning of jobs has abated quite a lot,” said Allen L. Sinai, the founder of Decision Economics, a research firm. “The economy is recovering, but it is a very soft recovery.”

The agency also revised September’s losses to 219,000 from 263,000.

Not surprisingly, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele was quick to pounce with this statement:

“Since President Obama’s inauguration, the nation has watched the unemployment rate continue to climb, and unfortunately the month of October was no different.  More than 190,000 Americans lost their jobs in the month of October and the national unemployment rate increased yet again to 10.2 percent.  With so many families looking for work, it is time the Obama administration stop spreading their phony ‘saved or created’ talking points and start creating the dependable jobs America needs.  President Obama promised jobs during his campaign for president, and the elections in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday were a clear referendum on his failure to deliver on this promise.”

This isn’t a surprising turn of events. In the run-up to the Sept. 12 march on Washington, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) were surprise guests at a Sept.  10 rally outside the Capitol. That event was actually identical to this one–protesters fanned out after the rally to talk to their members of Congress. But the crowd at that rally was smaller and more controlled, with most protesters holding FreedomWorks signs that had been passed out. The crowd at this rally was far less on-message. By the end of the day, the images that made it out of the rally were of protesters waving signs comparing health care reform to the Holocaust, and the video that made it out of the protest was heavy on Bachmann — one of the people Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) seemed to be referring to in a cryptic October comment about how to deal with a “problem member” who keeps making news.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) (WDCpix)

How effectively will the House health care bill cover children? Turns out, it depends on where they live.

The $894 billion health reform bill working its way toward a House vote this week would repeal the Children’s Health Insurance Program, shifting some low-income kids into Medicaid and others into private plans that would both cost more and guarantee fewer benefits. Which program the youngsters tumble into hinges, not on need, but on the state where they live – a design some advocates call “the lottery of geography.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Created in 1997, the state-federal CHIP partnership was designed to cover kids in families too wealthy to qualify for Medicaid but not wealthy enough to afford private insurance. States were granted broad discretion to fashion the program to fit their needs, with some carving out a separate CHIP program, some using CHIP funds to expand Medicaid eligibility, and still others opting for some combination of the two.

The House bill, which would eliminate CHIP in 2014, approaches those models very differently. While it expands Medicaid eligibility to 150 percent of poverty and shifts all kids living above that level to private plans contained on a proposed insurance marketplace, or exchange, the proposal also carves out an exception in states which augmented Medicaid in lieu of creating a separate CHIP program. In those cases, the youngsters would remain in Medicaid.

The distinction carries both coverage and cost implications. Under current law, all state Medicaid programs are required to offer a blanket system of preventative care known as the early periodic screening, diagnosis and treatment program, or EPSDT. The exchange plans, on the other hand, don’t have the same mandate. (Although states with stand-alone CHIP programs are not bound to cover EPSDT services, some of them do.)

And because states have vastly different income-eligibility levels for Medicaid and CHIP, the House bill offers no guarantee that the most vulnerable kids would receive the most robust benefits. In New Jersey, for example, Medicaid covers youngsters up to 200 percent of poverty, at which point CHIP takes over and covers kids up to 350 percent. Minnesota, by contrast, covers kids up to 275 percent of poverty under Medicaid but has no stand-alone CHIP plan.

The result? Children living at 275 percent of poverty in Minnesota would, under the House bill, still pay almost nothing for care under Medicaid — including EPSDT coverage — while families living at the same income level in New Jersey will be responsible for 22 percent of the cost of their exchange plans, without the assurance of EPSDT services.

The patchwork has led some state health departments to support the House proposal and others to oppose it.

“My members are split,” said Ann Kohler, director of the National Association of State Medicaid Directors.

Still, there are more New Jerseys out there than Minnesotas. Currently, about 5.3 million (or 72 percent) of the 7.4 million CHIP kids live in states with stand-alone CHIP programs, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.

“They’re going to be paying a lot more out of their pockets and getting fewer benefits,” warned Alison Buist, director of child health at the Children’s Defense Fund.

Supporters of the shuffle from CHIP to private plans argue that it will increase enrollment by allowing entire families to gain coverage under the same plan. They also point out that CHIP must be reauthorized every few years, leaving the very existence of the program to the fancy of Congress. Still, the proposal to repeal CHIP has put Democrats in the uncomfortable spot of defending the elimination of a program they spent much of the last two years fighting to preserve.

Then there’s the cost issue. A recent report conducted by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a financial consulting firm, found that most CHIP enrollees living at 175 percent of poverty pay nothing at all for their health services, while those living at 225 percent pay about 2 percent of costs. Shifted into private plans on the exchange, the researchers found, those same families would pay between 5 percent and 35 percent of health costs, respectively — a situation “greatly increasing their financial burden and leaving low-income children worse off as a result of health reform.”

Indeed, examining a similar CHIP repeal offered in the Senate, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf recently noted that “some of those children would be eligible for subsidized coverage in the exchanges but would not be enrolled in an exchange plan (owing at least in part to the higher premiums and higher out-of-pocket costs that they would typically face in such a plan).”

Some House lawmakers recognize the potential problems. During the markup of health reform legislation in the Education and Labor Committee, for example, lawmakers passed an amendment — offered by Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) — requiring that all exchange plans offer EPSDT services. That proposal, however, was stripped out in the final bill.

Another amendment, offered by Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Col.), would have prevented the shift from CHIP to private plans unless the White House provided certification that the private plans offered comparable benefits. That proposal passed the Energy and Commerce Committee, but was also removed in the final bill.

DeGette’s office said earlier this week that the certification language was removed “to reflect some budgetary constraints.”

Not that the end of CHIP is final. In the Senate, members of the Finance Committee last month passed an amendment to reauthorize CHIP through 2019. The sponsor of that amendment, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), is already vowing to fight for that provision all the way to the White House.

“We need to make sure children can keep their CHIP coverage and not be forced into untested private coverage,” Rockefeller said in a statement this week. “Health care reform should improve the coverage children have — not take their coverage away.”

The Graham amendment is expected to come to a vote today during consideration of the Commerce/Justice/Science appropriations bill. The earlier Homeland Security and Defense Department spending bills already include restrictions on transferring Guantanamo detainees to the United States.

This restriction, which is reportedly backed by 150 family members of victims of the 9/11 attacks, would bar the trials of the alleged 9/11 plotters in civilian federal courts, effectively forcing them to be tried by military commissions.

The Obama administration has suggested that it wants to try the 9/11 suspects in federal court, and so far has fought to retain the power to decide where the terror suspects will be tried. Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder warned Senate leaders that Graham’s amendment “would be unwise, and would set a dangerous precedent.”

The administration has said it will begin announcing where it wants to try the terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay by November 16.

In the video clip after the jump, Huckabee continues his verbal assault on Scozzafava and explains why he waited so long to endorse Hoffman.

My issue with that race and personal involvement was first of all I was never gonna support Dede. I made that clear, I said that on national television repeatedly. Her position on life alone was reason enough. That for me a non-negotiable. It’s not a political issue for me, it’s a moral issue. I’m not gonna vote for somebody who is not to the sancuaty of life. Just simple. I’m not gonna do it. They can be a Republican. I’ll share the convention with them. I’ll share the party with them. But I’m not gonna vote for ‘em. I’ll give them money.

So that issue plus the fact that she was an ACORN-sponsored, union-backed, left-of-center, cap-and-trade supporting,  other than those things, plus same-sex marriage and a dozen others, I mean, she was fine.

But there were two issues for me, one of which was I felt like that, as bad as the party’s process was, it was the party process in that district. Secondly, I had a personal issue because I had been invited over a year ago by the Conservative Party to go to Syracuse and speak at an awards banquet, which was last week or two weeks ago. And they had specifically asked me to not get involved in their race because they felt that if I came and made it a campaign event or injected myself into the race, it would be distracting from what they have been planning a year to do, which was honor five of their local Conservative Party heroes.

So it was part because I needed to fulfill my commitment to them and honor their request that I not get involved. They specifically asked me not to get involved.

Huckabee goes on to say that once Scozzafava dropped out, his decision to endorse Hoffman over Democrat Bill Owens was an easy one.

What made [NY-23] the mess that it turned out to be was that the party process by which they selected a nominee was at best hideous. To get 11 party bosses together without really thinking through the implications of what that candidate believe, to go to the pizza place and get back there and stuff themselves with pepperoni and be completely oblivious to the philosophy and the ideology of the candidate was insane.

And to put forth a candidate that was more liberal than 85 percent of the most liberal members of the Democrats in Congress didn’t make any sense. So it gave an opening for Hoffman to run as an independent. But the problem always in independent candidacies or third-party candidacies is it tends to guarantee the election of the one you like even less. And it was sort of born out of this.

Now when Dede left, as she should have, then you had a two-person race, but her then throwing her support to the Democrat showed her true colors. But it was just a train wreck, a total train wreck. I don’t blame Hoffman, I don’t even blame Dede, I blame the Republican Party establishment bosses who created the issue by putting somebody as the nominee that clearly was out of step with the Republican mainstream.

Of course, Scozzafava may have been out of step with Huckabee and other prominent conservatives, but in New York, as a study of ideology in state legislatures found, Scozzafava was actually slightly to the right of the average GOP legislator. In retrospect, perhaps she was a better match for her district than Hoffman, who lost to Bill Owens — the first Democrat elected to represent the district since the 1870s.

Here’s the video:

Multiple sources have confirmed that Michelle Marston, a veteran Hill aide, is leaving Bachmann’s office.

In an e-mail exchange with POLITICO, Marston declined to say why she’s going.

“I’m just not talking about it, and frankly I don’t think there’s a story here,” Marston wrote. “Now, the thousands of people calling our office to tell us [they’re] coming to Capitol Hill tomorrow – that’s a story.”

Marston is referring to Bachmann’s planned anti-health care reform rally on the Capitol steps Thursday, after which she said she plans to lead attendees through the halls of several congressional office buildings to confront members of Congress and voice their opposition to Democratic health care reform legislation.

On a wholly unrelated note, Politico quotes an anonymous GOP member of Congress offering this explanation for Marston’s departure:

“When your captain’s crazy, it’s time to find a new ship,” the lawmaker said.

(Via Eric Kleefeld)