Lizza’s story shows that, in many cases, the White House and the Senate were not on the same page on climate legislation.

But, in a piece on CAP’s website, Weiss writes:

Lizza gives short shrift, however, to the real reasons Senate passage of climate legislation was impossible in 2010: the deep recession, unified and uncompromising opposition in the Senate, and big spending by oil, coal, and other energy interests.

While it didn’t touch on the economy, Lizza’s story seemed to get the “uncompromising” opposition in the Senate part right, detailing the difficulty senators faced in finding Republican support for the bill. And though the story didn’t lay out the money the oil industry spent on lobbying, many of its nearly 10,000 words were devoted to the major role industry played in behind-the-scenes negotiations.

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 administration announced in March that it would expand offshore drilling — an effort to win support from Republicans for a climate bill. (The plan, Lizza reports, actually took some negotiating leverage away from the senators trying to negotiate a compromise). In expanding drilling, key administration officials downplayed the possibility of a spill.

According to Lizza:

The strategy had risks, including the possibility that expanded drilling off America’s coast could lead to a dangerous spill. But Browner, the head of the E.P.A. for eight years under Clinton, seemed to think the odds of that were limited. “Carol Browner says the fact of the matter is that the technology is so good that after Katrina there was less spillage from those platforms than the amount you spill in a year filling up your car with gasoline,” the White House official said. “So, given that, she says realistically you could expand offshore drilling.”

And Obama said the same thing:

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.

iStockphoto

Amid the obstructionists’ claims that health care reform is “socialist” or a means of speeding Grandma towards her deathbed, a large focus of the conservative position on health care reform has been that frivolous lawsuits drive up health care costs and require doctors to practice “defensive medicine” that’s costly and wasteful.

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Charles Krauthammer put “tort reform” on the top of his wish-list for reducing the costs of the health care system. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas in the Washington Examiner boasts that Texas tort reform that capped injured patient’s damages was the answer to his state’s problems. And the American Medical Association has said it won’t support any health reform bill that doesn’t reduce liability for doctors. “If the bill doesn’t have medical liability reform in it, then we don’t see how it is going to be successful in controlling costs,” James Rohack, president-elect of the organization, told Politico in March. “Why spend the political capital and energy in passing a bill if it is not successful?”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

So far Republicans have mostly focused on tearing apart any reform with a role for the federal government, portraying it as the government dictating how long old people get to live. But an undercurrent of those complaints is the insistence of doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and ideological conservatives that medical malpractice claims are out of control and a leading cause of rising health care costs.

The health economists and independent legal experts who study the issue, however, don’t believe that’s true. They say that malpractice liability costs are a small fraction of the spiraling costs of the U.S. health care system, and that the medical errors that malpractice liability tries to prevent are themselves a huge cost– both to the injured patients and to the health care system as a whole.

“It’s really just a distraction,” said Tom Baker, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and author of “The Medical Malpractice Myth.” “If you were to eliminate medical malpractice liability, even forgetting the negative consequences that would have for safety, accountability, and responsiveness, maybe we’d be talking about 1.5 percent of health care costs. So we’re not talking about real money. It’s small relative to the out-of-control cost of health care.”

Insurance costs about $50-$60 billion a year, Baker estimates. As for what’s often called “defensive medicine,” “there’s really no good study that’s been able to put a number on that,” said Baker.

Krauthammer cited a study by the Massachusetts Medical Society that found that five out of six doctors said they ordered additional tests, procedures and referrals to protect themselves from lawsuits. He also relies on a much-criticized study from the libertarian Pacific Research Institute on the civil justice system to conclude that “defensive medicine” wastes more than $200 billion a year.

Baker is skeptical, and makes the point that “defensive medicine” is not the same thing as wasteful medicine. “Like defensive driving, some defensive medicine is good,” he said. “To change behavior. When you drill down those studies, you see that what it means is, doctors are more careful with patient records. They spend more time with the patient. They’re more careful to say hello and goodbye to the patient. That’s good.”

Other health economists agree that “defensive medicine” is not the main driver of costs, and malpractice liability reform is not a panacea.

“If you were to list the top five or ten things that you could do to bring down health care costs that would not be on the list,” said Michelle Mello, a professor of Law and Public Health at Harvard.

Still, that doesn’t mean the medical liability system we now have is a good one. Mello estimates the costs of so-called “defensive medicine” to be far less than Krauthammer does — around $20 billion a year. “So there’s some savings to be had and frankly the health reform package has not come up with a lot of ideas for major savings.”

President Obama at a recent town hall meeting said he wants to reduce doctors’ insurance premiums, but that, based on his conversations with health care experts, “the evidence at least is that that is a very small, maybe not even a measurable factor in the reason that health care costs are going up.”

“He gets it,” said Baker.

Although damage award caps could slightly limit the future growth of liability insurance premiums – about 6 to 13 percent over time, says Mello, “it tends to be oversold as a solution and it’s pretty unfair to patients.”

Annual jury awards and legal settlements involving doctors amounts to “a drop in the bucket” in a country that spends $2.3 trillion annually on health care, Amitabh Chandra, another Harvard University economist, recently told Bloomberg News. Chandra estimated the cost of jury awards at about $12 per person in the U.S., or about $3.6 billion. Insurer WellPoint Inc. has also said that liability awards are not what’s driving premiums.

And a 2004 report by the Congressional Budget Office said medical malpractice makes up only 2 percent of U.S. health spending. Even “significant reductions” would do little to curb health-care expenses, it concluded.

A study by Bloomberg also found that the proportion of medical malpractice verdicts among the top jury awards in the U.S. declined over the last 20 years. “Of the top 25 awards so far this year, only one was a malpractice case.” Moreover, at least 30 states now cap damages in medical lawsuits.

The experience of Texas in capping damage awards is a good example. Contrary to Perry’s claims, a recent analysis by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker found that while Texas tort reforms led to a cap on pain-and-suffering awards at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which led to a dramatic decline in lawsuits, McAllen, Texas is one of the most expensive health care markets in the country. In 2006, “Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per person enrolled in McAllen, he finds, which is almost twice the national average — although the average town resident earns only $12,000 a year. “Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns.”

Still, many health policy experts don’t believe the current malpractice liability system is either efficient or fair. Mello and others favor an alternative compensation system that takes the issue away from courts and juries and gives it instead to a panel of independent experts to judge whether malpractice occurred and what compensation should be provided. That’s unlikely to bring about significant cost savings, though, because it would encourage many more claims to be filed. Currently, only about two of every 100 patients injured by malpractice ever receive compensations. “The new system would make it a lot easier to file claims,” said Mello, and would reduce the uncertainty doctors complain about from jury awards.

Such a system implemented at a hospital could mean the hospital pays for malpractice insurance, with premium costs tied to the number of claims. The hospital then has an economic incentive to ensure its doctors are providing good care. Currently, Mello says, most insurance is not “experience-rated”, meaning premiums aren’t tied to the number of claims filed against the doctor.

But Mello, who has advised the Obama administration on malpractice reform, doesn’t expect to see such proposals coming out of Congress or the White House anytime soon. “Trial lawyers don’t embrace proposals that would remove their role in the malpractice system,” she said. And they have a lot of influence with Democrats in Washington.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (Maricopa County Sheriff's Office)

Sheriff Joe Arpaio has made a name for himself using controversial tactics targeting illegal immigrants in Arizona. The chief law enforcement officer of Maricopa County and author of the book “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” Arpaio boasts that he’s arrested some 30,000 undocumented immigrants, many of whom he’s put to work on chain gangs, paraded in pink underwear before news cameras, and housed in sweltering plastic tents clustered behind coils of concertina wire.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But as William Finnegan recently documented in The New Yorker, Arpaio’s publicity stunts – enabled by a federal immigration program known as 287(g) that deputizes local authorities to enforce federal immigration laws — aren’t just humiliating. Prisoners have filed thousands of legal claims of abuse against Arpaio and his deputies – and by families of those who’ve died under his watch. A federal investigation found Arpaio’s deputies used “stun guns” on inmates strapped into restraint chairs; some have died in those chairs. One lawsuit brought by a dead prisoners’ family ended in an $8 million settlement after “a surveillance video that showed fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating the prisoners, and after the sheriff’s office was accused of discarding evidence, including the crushed larynx of the deceased.”

Although Arpaio is now the target of a federal investigation for civil rights violations, he’s never lost his authority to enforce the federal immigration laws under the 287(g) program.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is in charge of that program, and recently announced its expansion to 11 more jurisdictions. The former U.S. Attorney and then Governor of Arizona, Napolitano was reportedly allied with the politically popular Arpaio and long tolerated his abuses, referring at a press conference to the lawsuit she settled with him while a federal prosecutor as “lawyerly paperwork.”

In announcing the expansion of the 287(g) program, which conservative and restrictionist groups have long been encouraging, Napolitano hailed its success at supporting “local efforts to protect public safety by giving law enforcement the tools to identify and remove dangerous criminal aliens.”

“The 287(g) program is an essential component of DHS’ comprehensive immigration enforcement strategy,” said ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton on July 10. “The new agreement strengthens ICE’s oversight of the program and allows us to better utilize the resources and capabilities of our law enforcement partners across the nation.” Perhaps in part because of the 287(g) program, criminal prosecutions of immigrants over the past year were up almost 150% over five years ago.

That’s not an unmitigated success in the eyes of immigrants’ advocates, however.  Last week, 25 civil rights and community groups denounced DHS’s plans to expand the 287(g) program, citing previous findings of its abuse.

“DHS is fully aware that the abusive misuse of the 287(g) program by its current slate of agencies has rendered it not only ineffective, but dangerous to community safety,” said Andrea Black, Coordinator of the Detention Watch Network in a statement. “It is surprising Napolitano did not simply shut this program down,” she added. “Expanding this failed program is not in line with the reform the administration has promised.”

In addition to expanding the program’s reach, Napolitano promised to create new standardized agreements between DHS and local law enforcement authorities that would specify the extent and limits of local authority and emphasize that the point is to stop violent crime, not to apprehend undocumented immigrants. Those limits have been criticized by some restrictionist groups who support the current program.

Those changes attempt to respond to a report released in March by the General Accountability Office, which concluded that the 287(g) program, instead of concentrating on serious crime as intended, was being used by some local police to have immigrants deported for such minor infractions as speeding, carrying an open container of alcohol and urinating in public. Advocates have also claimed the program encourages widespread racial profiling.

The new standardized agreements do little to get at the problem, critics claim. In fact, it may make the situation worse by concealing how the program operates.

The changes make “no serious attempt at discouraging illegal racial profiling or reducing the conflict between sound community policing principles and the expansion of this program,” said Omar Jadwat, staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, in a statement issued last week. In addition, “the new MOA [Memorandum of Agreement] actually takes several disturbing steps backward, particularly in the area of transparency.”

For example, the new agreement restricts the release of information about the program and its use, saying all information “obtained or developed as a result of this MOA is under the control of ICE and shall be subject to public disclosure only pursuant to the provisions of applicable federal laws, regulations, and executive orders.” Documents created by the agency or developed pursuant to the agreement “shall not be considered public records.”

“ICE claims that they have responded to a lot of the concerns around the 287g program,” says Brittney Nystrom, legal director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrants’ advocacy group. But “the language in the new standardized agreement is not substantially different than the old agreement. In some ways it’s even a step backward.”

The tightly controlled information is one of those steps back, she says. “More data is needed around the 287g program,” specifically concerning who is being arrested and whether the arrest is for a minor infraction or a serious crime. “That would address whether these are pretextual arrests” — arrests that use the immigration laws to target generally law-abiding immigrants — “or whether ICE is doing what it claimed, focusing on serious dangerous criminals. If most arrests are for things like traffic violations or fishing without a license, that would raise a red flag.”

The new agreement doesn’t specify whether DHS is collecting that kind of data, but it does specify that any data it does collect will not be made public. “Before it was not clarified one way or the other,” said Nystrom. “It’s always been a concern that data collection is insufficient. Any change that would limit the amount of data around these programs is a step in the wrong direction,” she said.

DHS shouldn’t have expanded the program without first determining whether the changes solve the problems, say many advocates. “Any changes should have been made first, and evaluated before expanding the program,” said Nystrom.

Past abuses of the program include the deportation of a developmentally disabled U.S. citizen to Mexico, the shackling of an undocumented pregnant women in labor, and the arrest of an immigrant who’d called on police to protect her sister from domestic violence. Many more have reportedly been deported under the program despite being lawful residents or having legitimate claims to remain in the United States.

Such incidents have generated widespread fear in immigrant communities, say advocates and many law enforcement officers. The head of a national police officers’ association in March testified to Congress that the program actually hurts law enforcement efforts because it drains resources and “undermines the trust and cooperation with immigrant communities that are essential elements of community policing.”

In February, Justice Strategies, a nonprofit research organization, found that 87 percent of jurisdictions participating in the program did not have high crime rates but were “undergoing an increase in their Latino populations higher than the national average.” Instead of focusing on serious crime, Justice Strategies found, “police resources are spent targeting day-laborers, corn-vendors and people with broken tail-lights.”

Although the new DHS agreements now state more clearly the program’s objectives, “not mentioned in there is how they’ll enforce those priorities,” said Joan Friedland, Policy Director for the National Immigration Law Center.

The new agreement attempts to address racial profiling and pretextual arrests by requiring law enforcement to pursue criminal charges to their resolution.  But advocates say it’s not clear what that means, or if that will really address the problem.

“Will police interpret that as, we have to convict people? What happens to deferred prosecution?” asked Friedland. In the past, police could defer prosecution for a minor crime in exchange for a monitored period of good behavior.

“If they’re trying to combat profiling and pretextual arrests we applaud them for their intent,” said Nystrom. “I’m just not sure this is the right path.”

Here’s Whitehouse, in one of his characteristically articulate speeches:

The “umpire” analogy is belied by Chief Justice Roberts, though he cast himself as an “umpire” during his confirmation hearings. Jeffrey Toobin, a well-respected legal commentator, has recently reported that “[i]n every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.” Some umpire. And is it a coincidence that this pattern, to continue Toobin’s quote, “has served the interests, and reflected the values of the contemporary Republican party”? Some coincidence.

For all the talk of “modesty” and “restraint,” the right wing Justices of the Court have a striking record of ignoring precedent, overturning congressional statutes, limiting constitutional protections, and discovering new constitutional rights: the infamous Ledbetter decision, for instance; the Louisville and Seattle integration cases, for example; the first limitation on Roe v. Wade that outright disregards the woman’s health and safety; and the DC Heller decision, discovering a constitutional right to own guns that the Court had not previously noticed in 220 years. Over and over, news reporting discusses “fundamental changes in the law” wrought by the Roberts Court’s right wing flank. The Roberts Court has not lived up to the promises of modesty or humility made when President Bush nominated Justices Roberts and Alito.

Some “balls and strikes.”

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As I reported earlier, the 34-year-old computer consultant of Syrian descent was apprehended by U.S. authorities in 2002 while he was changing planes at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, on his way home to Canada after visiting relatives in Tunisia.

After a harsh interrogation without access to counsel in New York, he was flown to Syria against his will, where he was kept in a tiny underground prison cell and tortured until he eventually “confessed” to training for terrorism in Afghanistan; in fact, he’d never even been there.

For those with a strong stomach, here’s the federal district court’s description of Arar’s early days in Syrian detention, which he claims was coordinated with US authorities:

During his first twelve days in Syrian detention, Arar was interrogated for eighteen hours per day and was physically and psychologically tortured. He was beaten on his palms, hips and lower back with a two-inch-thick electric cable. His captors also used their fists to beat him
on his stomach, face and back of his neck. He was subjected to excruciating pain and pleaded with his captors to stop, but they would not. He was placed in a room where he could hear the screams of other detainees being tortured and was told that he, too, would be placed in a
spine-breaking [*11] “chair,” hung upside down in a “tire” for beatings and subjected to electric shocks. To lessen his exposure to the torture, Arar falsely confessed, among other things, to having trained with terrorists in Afghanistan, even though he had never been to Afghanistan
and had never been involved in terrorist activity.

Arar was eventually deemed innocent and returned home to Canada in 2003, where the Canadian government confirmed that he’d done nothing wrong and apologized for its role in his arrest.

With the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Georgetown law professor David Cole, in 2004 Arar sued American officials in a U.S. federal court for sending him to Syria to be tortured.  But his case was dismissed on the grounds that an investigation might reveal state secrets and harm national security.  The court also ruled that, as a foreigner deported by immigration authorities, he had no right to challenge his treatment by the United States.

Although a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling, holding that Arar has no right to sue federal officials no matter what was done to him, the full court  of appeals in August made the highly unusual decision to re-hear the case.  All 12 active judges of the court are scheduled to hear the arguments from both sides at 3 p.m. in New York.  The argument will stream live on C-Span.org.

For more on the Arar case and the US government’s program of extraordinary rendition, check out Jane Mayer’s excellent piece on the subject in the New Yorker.

Admittedly, among the many vile and incendiary charges leveled against Obama, this latter one was at least moderately clever. But California GOP leaders, among them Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, recognized that an attack of this sort have no place on a party website and urged county party chairman Craig MacGlashan to take it down.

You can take a look at a screenshot of the since-removed material, including two invocations of Obama’s wife, Michelle, on the Sacramento Bee website.

And you can see what it looks like for a civilian to get waterboarded here:

If you’re still feeling a little masochistic after watching that, take a look at the anti-Obama political cartoons, more vitriolic than funny, that now dominate the Sacramento GOP site.