Our sister publication The Florida Independent notes that LeMieux pushed back against the New Yorker story on Twitter today:

NewYorker piece is wrong. Care about energy indep, but never favored cap & tax– would cost Florida familes 30% ^ in energy costs.

LeMieux’s support for the cap-and-trade bill that was crafted by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) could have been the extra push the bill needed to move forward. But it’s ultimately unclear how much LeMieux’s support would have helped, given that Graham himself pulled his support for the bill after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations. At the same time, the New Yorker story also highlights a number of instances where the White House and the senators were not on the same page in terms of their climate strategy.

The story, by Ryan Lizza, is nearly 10,000 words, but it’s definitely worth a read. It documents, in extensive detail, how the White House and Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and (at least for a time) Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) were often not on the same page as they tried to hash out a climate bill.

For instance, the White House announced a plan in March to open up new areas of the Outer Continental Shelf to drilling. The plan was announced while Kerry, Graham and Lieberman were simultaneously negotiating a plan to open up more drilling in exchange for key industry groups’ support for their climate bill.

But, Lizza reports, the White House made its drilling announcement without consulting the senators, taking away their leverage in negotiations with industry.

The report — which is authored by CAP senior fellow Dan Weiss and special assistants for energy policy Susan Lyon and Tina Ramos — includes a prescription for a utility-only cap on carbon emissions that draws from bills authored by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.); Kerry and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.); and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). The bills are the American Power Act, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act and the Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal Act, respectively.

According to the report:

• Utilities should commit to do their share by reducing their emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 42 percent by 2030 (APA).
• The program should begin in 2013 (APA).
• Each emitter should have to have one pollution allowance for every ton of pollution it emits (APA, CEJAPA, CLEAR).
• Only power plants that emit 25,000 tons or more of greenhouse gases annually should be required to have allowances (APA, CEJAPA).
• The federal government should auction off the allowances, beginning with a minimum price of $14 per ton and a maximum price of $25 per ton in 2013. This floor price should level the price difference between dirty coal-fired power and cleaner natural gas generated electricity.
• The floor and ceiling prices should rise by 3 percent per year plus inflation (APA).
• Only covered emitters should be allowed to buy allowances, and unused allowances should be sold in a government auction. No allowance trading between emitters would be allowed (CLEAR).
• Two-thirds of the allowances should be given to the local distribution companies, which must return their value to their ratepayers (APA).
• The proceeds from auctioning the remaining one-third of allowances should be invested in additional protection for low-income households; clean energy technology research, development and deployment; carbon capture and storage technology research and pilot projects; deficit reduction; and protection of tropical forests (APA).

The report also includes recommendations on an oil spill response, energy efficiency and a renewable energy standard.

As I noted yesterday, the three sent a letter to President Obama yesterday — and blasted a press release to reporters — calling on the president to halt the “planned” transfer of six Yemeni detainees back to their home country, because it turns out that Yemen is chock full of terrorists. The three only learned this, it appears, after reading that the would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab spent some time there. But there’s no way that the three senators and their aides and press secretaries did not know that the Obama administration had already sent back the six Yemeni detainees in question at least ten days earlier. Just do a Google search — it was in thousands of news outlets around the world. And that was following a press release issued by the Department of Justice on Dec. 20.

What’s more, the six detainees, who the senators said in their letter (without naming them) “have been identified as threats to the United States and its allies” had actually all been determined by the administration’s Guantanamo Detainees Review Task Force not to be threats to the U.S. government. One of them had even been ordered freed by a U.S. federal judge.

Yesterday I searched for hours to find out if there were six more detainees hidden somewhere that the administration was about to send back, some particularly dangerous Yemenis about to leave Gitmo that maybe these senators knew about and the rest of us didn’t.  But no, there aren’t. The Justice Department and lawyers representing Yemeni detainees in Guantanamo, at least, knew nothing about such impending plans for another group of six. And when I asked Graham’s press office just which six Yemeni detainees they were talking about — Graham spokesman Kevin Bishop couldn’t name them, either.

The only logical conclusion is that the three senators were referring to six detainees who’d already been sent back to Yemen — and that they were doing so purely to try to embarrass the Obama administration and create yet another obstacle to closing down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. As I wrote back in February, what to do with the Yemenis, many of whom the administration has determined are not dangerous, remains one of the administration’s biggest obstacles to closing the prison camp.

None of this is new, and certainly McCain, who as a presidential candidate last year actively campaigned to close Gitmo, knew that. Apparently that won’t stop anyone from using a high-profile averted holiday disaster for his own political gain.

The provision was proposed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Ct.), as Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News explains, specifically “to thwart a successful FOIA lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union” which wants the government to turn over photos documenting abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody.  I wrote about the bill and its progress last week here. Although a federal appeals court ruled last year that the government must produce those unclassified photos under the Freedom of Information Act, the government has refused, and filed a petition to the Supreme Court for review.

The Supreme Court hasn’t yet decided whether it will hear the case, though, and given that Congress may resolve the matter by hiding the unclassified photographs with this legislation, Solicitor General Elena Kagan last week asked the court to put off deciding, since it looks like Congress is prepared to decide the matter — and conceal the photographs — on its own.

“From an open government point of view, it is dismaying that Congress would intervene to alter the outcome of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act proceeding,” writes Aftergood in his blog, which has done a terrific job of exposing the government’s efforts to hide what’s supposed to be public information. Aftergood adds that the move reveals Congress doesn’t have much confidence in its own Freedom of Information Act, the federal courts interpreting it, or the principles behind it, if it feels the need to exempt this specific set of photos from the law’s purview.

On the other hand, he notes that it could be worse: the Supreme Court could have taken the case and upheld the Obama administration’s right to exempt the photos “simply because they may pose an unspecified danger to unspecified persons.” “Such a Supreme Court ruling would have left a gaping hole in the Freedom of Information Act even larger than what the Obama Administration and Congress have now created,” writes Aftergood.

Or, of course, the Supreme Court might have just done its job, and recognized, as the two lower courts who’ve heard this case did, that unclassified documents can’t be concealed based simply on the executive’s fear that exposing government wrongdoing will incite anger at the United States and endanger national security. After all, if preventing anger at the United States were a legitimate reason to conceal unclassified information about the government, then there would be considerably less Information left for the Act to protect.

According to the Federal Election Commission, Lieberman’s 2006 reelection campaign and its treasurer, Lynn Fusco, made payments to get-out-the-vote canvassers of more than $100 in cash. Under FEC law, disbursements to individuals over $100 must be made in check form.

The committee also failed to accurately document individuals it paid $200 or more over the course the year, another FEC requirement.

And Lieberman’s campaign misreported payments to two consultants as well as a $75,000 disbursement.

Oddly, the FEC did not say that Leiberman had done anything wrong.

“On that specific point I totally disagree. Over the 20 years I’ve been here, I’ve been briefed constantly by the CIA, and I’d say they’ve told me the truth as they see it.”

It’s been my experience that any attempt to generalize about the CIA is wrong. It’s not an organization of liars and it’s not an organization of torturers and it’s not an organization of liberals and it’s not an organization of barbarians and it’s not an organization of brave truth-tellers and it’s not an organization of risk-averse bureaucrats and it’s not an organization of lawbreakers and it’s not an organization of whiz kids and it’s not an organization of mediocrities. But come on.

The greatest intelligence officer the CIA ever produced was convicted of lying to Congress. I regret that I don’t have my copy of Tim Weiner’s definitive “Legacy of Ashes” handy to document quickly how routinely the CIA lied to Congress through its history.

More evidence needs to be introduced before concluding that the CIA lied to Pelosi. But no additional evidence needs to be introduced to conclude that it wouldn’t.

While no announcement was made after the meeting, a Reid aide told the Associated Press that the Senate leader is “leaning toward” stripping Lieberman of his chairman duties.

Lieberman gave no indication about his future, telling reporters this afternoon that he will spend a “few days thinking about what Sen. Reid and I discussed.”

It’s not as high profile as stumping for McCain, but Lieberman’s performance as oversight chairman was also a betrayal of the Democratic Party– and, more important, Congress’ role as a check on executive power.

While colleagues like Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) and Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) spent the past two years investigating the Iraq war and torture, Lieberman never probed any Bush administration conduct related to national security.

A piece I did in February looked at how Lieberman refused a request to investigate Blackwater after its security employees opened fire on civilians in an Iraq public square. Since February, the Senate oversight committee has held hearings on important topics like FEMA’s response to Hurricane Ike and the workplace rights of government employees. But Lieberman has steadfastly refused to use his subpoena power to investigate the biggest administration scandals.

Besides foreign policy, Lieberman was also noticeably silent on the financial crisis. Maybe he would be more interested in investigating an Obama administration. But it looks like he won’t get the chance.