What this administration wants is a list of who the companies are who are contributors, and we saw last year, Jake, why, when we very publicly ran ads against the Patients Protections and Affordable Care Act, quoting the CBO, quoting the head of CMS, the Centers for Medicare Services, that it would not in fact bend the cost curve down, that it would bend the cost curve up as they testified before the senate finance committee, there was an attempt to try and find out who were the corporations that were contributing to that effort.

When some of those corporate names were divulged, not by us, by others, what did they receive? They received protests, they received threats, they were intimidated, they were harassed, they had to hire additional security, they were recipients of a host of proxies leveled at those companies that had nothing to do with the purpose of those companies. So we know what the purpose here is. It’s to harass and intimidate.

Much like we’ve seen in California with ballot initiatives — when the proponents of ballot initiatives’ names have been divulged to the public — those people were harassed, they were threatened with violence and they were intimidated.

Josten’s response is interesting for how closely it resembles the arguments being made by social issues groups like the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which advocated successfully against same-sex marriage in a number of states, including Maine and California, and is now fighting in the courts to keep the names of the donors to its campaign a secret. NOM — and the group’s Mormon and Catholic Church backers — aren’t exactly enjoying a lot of goodwill from a sizable portion of the electorate for swooping into state races and advocating against gay and lesbian rights, but this is part of the group’s argument. It claims that when donors to Proposition 8 were revealed in California, they faced intense harassment and boycotts by gay rights groups.

The Supreme Court, however, hasn’t been too sympathetic to this line of argument. It’s already ruled in a previous case involving a petition in Washington State that there are laws against intimidation and harassment already on the books, and that participating in the political process requires a degree of thick skin for dealing with those forms of political pushback that don’t cross any legal lines.

When it comes to the Chamber — an association of companies and not people — it’s even harder to imagine the specter of harassment evoking a great deal of sympathy from the average American. What kind of “harassment” should a multinational corporation be shielded from that a citizen who chooses to speak at a public forum should not? Josten himself conjures up a popular Supreme Court case to illuminate the threat of harassment that the Chamber might endure — the NAACP vs. the State of Alabama — but, again, it seems doubtful to me that this kind of analogy won’t throw the ridiculousness of the claim into sharp relief:

But the good government groups know as well as I do, because there’s been studies done on it, with respect to disclosure, that forcing people to comply with disclosure rules in order to exercise their First Amendment, ultimately results in people remaining silent or uninvolved with little or no benefit to the public because it squelches speech.

The seminal Supreme Court case, I would remind your listeners, was NAACP vs. the state of Alabama, in 1953 I believe, when certain people wanted to know who the white Americans that were promoting integration in this country over segregation and out those people to harass them. The Supreme Court decided then. Hell no was the answer.

Those supporting integration in the early 1950s South, however, were facing more than the prospect of a nasty email or the boycott of their hotel chain, however. They were all too often the subject of violent intimidation campaigns, and the suggestion that the Chamber’s corporate donors would face the same treatment seems to undercut, rather than strengthen, the sympathy that Josten is trying to evoke.

As I’ve noted before, prominent Illinois Democrats such as Sen. Dick Durbin have been strong supporters of the move. Congressional Republicans, on the other hand, led by Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), the GOP front-runner for Obama’s old Senate seat, have strongly opposed transferring terror suspects to their state.

Conservative Republicans and “tea party” activists are already planning their protests.

And how! Here’s Jake Tapper of ABC:

Eikenberry arguably “knows Afghanistan better than anyone else in the US government,” a senior administration official said. “He’s basically been there non-stop since 2003 in a range of capabilities, at a range of times, and in range of assignments,” having served as United States Security Coordinator for Afghanistan, Chief of the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan and Commander of the Combined Forces Command.

As leader of the civilian diplomatic corps as Ambassador, Eikenberry is “lead civilian Big Dog in this fight,” another official said. “The President really wants his unvarnished opinion.”

That’s one serious endorsement. I suppose a wag could say that Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is supposed to be the “lead civilian Big Dog,” but whatever. (Holbrooke is curiously going to … Russia, according to Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin.)

TAPPER:  President Obama last month in Pittsburgh said, of the Afghan elections and the aftermath, “What’s most important is that there’s a sense of legitimacy in Afghanistan among the Afghan people for their government.”  Is there a sense of legitimacy in Afghanistan among the Afghan people for the Karzai government?

GIBBS:  Well, I have no reason to believe there’s not.

Gibbs’ answer actually gets worse from there!

To be clear: there’s a good meta-point here, but it’s slathered underneath this nonsense. Americans should not substitute our judgments about the election for Afghan judgments. It’s the Afghans’ perspective that matters when it comes to the crucial question of governmental legitimacy, not ours. But at the same time, Gibbs has every reason to believe there isn’t a sense of legitimacy about Karzai among the Afghan people, because a full third of his votes were thrown out due to fraud concerns. Hundreds of thousands of ballots!

It will help to have a credible poll taken in the coming weeks to determine what Afghans think about Karzai’s legitimacy. That will actually determine the issue. But please — let’s not act like we’re without common sense.

Here’s an interesting example. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank with funding from the energy industry, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Treasury documents that suggested a cap-and-trade program would cost taxpayers more than the Obama administration claimed. Earlier today, CEI’s communications director Christine Hall needled Tapper via Twitter to report on the think tank’s findings.

“did u see the updated docs Treasury released late Friday?” wrote Hall. “~$300~ bil cap-n-tax costs, prev. redacted.”

Tapper fired back: “i wrote about it on sunday at my blog abcnews.blogs.com.”

Sure enough, Hall tweeted about the original report on Friday. Tapper wrote it up on Sunday in a story titled “A Secret Cap and Trade Tax of $1,761 Per Family?”, keying off Mitt Romney’s statement that the proposal would cost that much. In it, Tapper concluded that the figure itself was produced by sloppy math. It was “possible to see as false the assertions by Romney and other Republicans that the president has been hiding a $1,761 tax from the American people while also wondering if the Treasury Department is being as forthcoming and transparent as President Obama’s campaign promises would suggest.” He quoted CEI’s “Chris Holder” making the point. Hall tweeted to correct him: “@jaketapper – Horner. Chris Horner.”

jaketapper: WH says it needs to focus on Iran’s nuke program/support for terror, must deal w Iran we have not 1 we wish we had. response?

jaketapper: to translate from twitterese: WH says “We have to deal with the Iran we HAVE, not the one we WISH we had”…

SenJohnMcCain: that’s revisiting the cold war arguments on how we dealt with the Soviet Union

SenJohnMcCain: we must stand strong for democracy in Iran as we stood for Democracy in Poland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia

jaketapper: So if President Obama called u and asked your advice what would u tell him?

SenJohnMcCain: speak up for these young Iranians who deserve a free and fair election.

SenJohnMcCain: again, same old argument by the left during the Cold War – we’ve seen this movie before.

jaketapper: so bottom line, u think a stronger rhetorical show of support from PresObama — would that include a call for new election?

SenJohnMcCain: Absolutely!! Funny, how history repeats itself…

If this is indeed a repeat of the Prague Spring, McCain expects Iran to be free sometime circa 2031.

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