One of the draft reports released by the commission yesterday said that the White House Office of Management and Budget denied a request by NOAA scientists to release worst-case flow-rate data. The White House has vehemently denied that claim, arguing that OMB sent back to NOAA a report on the spill because it didn’t adequately take into account a number of key factors. Gibbs stressed today that OMB never rejected the report and said it was not a flow-rate report.

“None of the scientific data was changed whatsoever,” Gibbs said, saying that the report, after it included information requested by OMB, was released.

Pressed by reporters about the commission’s report, Gibbs largely downplayed the findings, noting that it is just a draft and adding that the White House had some concerns about the accuracy of the reports.

Asked if the administration acknowledges any of the criticism in the report, Gibbs said, “There isn’t anybody in this building or anybody who worked on this that would say we did everything perfectly.” But he stressed that the administration mounted a “robust” response to an “unprecedented” disaster. The administration’s response, Gibbs said, “Prevented any of the worst-case scenarios from coming to fruition.”

Gibbs also said that White House climate and energy adviser Carol Browner misspoke “once” on television when explaining the administration’s much-criticized “Oil Budget” report. But the report clearly shows that Browner consistently mischaracterized the report.

Napolitano says Republicans should “finally” get to the table to tackle immigration at the same time border security is addressed. “We need a safe and secure border,” she says. “But as a nation, we also need immigration reform.”

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs adds that immigration will be addressed when Democrats and Republicans are “ready to be leaders.”

Napolitano declines to say what the administration’s timetable is for addressing immigration. “This is in the hands of the Congress, and they will need to address this in a bipartisan way,” she says. “The timetable question should be addressed to them.”

There are arguments to be made for the administration’s hesitance to push for a timetable for immigration reform, which of course is impossible without Republican support. Still, the statements on comprehensive immigration reform by Napolitano and Gibbs seem unlikely to please reform advocates, who argue the administration has not done enough to pressure Congress into taking up the issue.

Napolitano had stronger words for Republican such as Sen. Lindsey Graham who have called for changes to the 14th Amendment to remove automatic citizenship for U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants: “Any talk about amending the constitution is just wrong,” she said.

In an interview with The Hill, Gibbs vented further: “I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested.” On people who said that President Obama was too centrist, he said, “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

Rep. Ellison told The Huffington Post, “This is not the first time that Mr. Gibbs has made untoward and inflammatory comments and I certainly hope that people in the White House don’t share his view that the left is unimportant to the presiden. I understand him having some loyalty to the president who employs him, but I think he’s walking over the line.”

Ellison said that Gibbs’ resignation was warranted. “That’d be fair, because this isn’t the first time. And, again, people of all political shades worked very hard to help the president become the president. Why would he want to go out and deliberately insult the president’s base? And why would he confuse legitimate critique with some sort of lack of loyalty. Isn’t this what the far right does? Punishes people who are not ideologically aligned with President Bush?”

On the claim that the “professional left” would only be satisfied after the Pentagon was eliminated, Rep. Ellison said, “I know of none. So I think that was an inflammatory remark that is emblematic of his careless use of language and is an example of why he may not be the best person for the job.”

White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton said the “professional left” that Gibbs referred to were cable commentators. Gibbs said in a statement to The Huffington Post that his comments were “inartful” and “change hasn’t come fast enough for many Americans.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has said he wants to change the 14th Amendment so that children of illegal immigrants cannot obtain automatic citizenship for being born in the U.S. Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) threw his weight behind a push to reexamine the relevant Constitutional provisions.

“I don’t know if that was based on 2010 or 2012,” Gibbs said, referring to McConnell’s remarks. “But my hunch is it is based purely on politics.”

This is how a proposal with little chance of becoming reality balloons into a political sparring point. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for instance, told ABC’s “Top Line” he thinks Republicans are using the issue to score points before the election: “I think the way it is being presented now is 100 percent political.”

Of course, hearings on the 14th amendment are not only immigration issue that politicians are using to score points against each other. For his part, McConnell told Bloomberg News the Obama administration used their lawsuit against Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law as a political move. “The most blatant political move made lately was the administration’s decision to sue the state of Arizona and thereby heightening this issue even further,” he said.

It’s not pretty, but it might explain why Majority Leader Harry Reid is so hesitant to move forward on any type of immigration legislation.

The Senate is taking a cloture vote today, and hopes to push through a majority-rules vote as soon as possible thereafter. The House needs to then approve the bill, which finally goes to President Obama’s desk to be signed into law. The reauthorization of benefits will extend retroactively to June 2, when 300,000 people a week started to be dropped from the rolls, until Nov. 30. The benefits will aid people who have been unemployed for more than six months in states with unemployment over 8 percent, providing up to 99 weeks of benefits.

Sam Stein at Huffington Post writes that, at a daily press conference yesterday, Gibbs argued the unemployment rate will likely be no better in November, meaning that the White House might push for more benefits:

Gibbs defended the president’s approach, calling unemployment benefits “emergency spending” at a time when the unemployment rate is 9.5 percent. Asked whether that same mindset would hold true at the end of November, when the soon-to-be-passed round of unemployment benefits expire, Gibbs replied:

“I think it is fair and safe to assume that we are not going to wake up and find ourselves at the end of November at a rate of employment one would not consider to be an emergency.”

The press secretary did not offer a definitive number at which the employment situation in this country would suddenly become more tolerable. But he did arbitrarily note that a rate of 9 percent of 8.5 percent would not be “something at where [sic] you decide not to continue unemployment [insurance].”

8.5 or 9 percent is still very, very high. Never before has Congress let emergency unemployment benefits lapse with unemployment over 7 percent. But economists do not expect unemployment to fall to that level until around 2013.

EPA regulation of emissions is the worst-case scenario for Republicans and many Democrats, who see regulation under the Clean Air Act as much more complicated than passing legislation to address the issue. Electric utilities, in recent negotiations on a utility-only cap-and-trade bill, have asked for preemption of EPA regulation and a number of requirements under the Clean Air Act.

In a 2007 decision, the Supreme Court found that EPA would have to regulate greenhouse gas emissions if it determined that they endangered public health. In its so-called endangerment finding, EPA concluded that greenhouse gas emissions do endanger public health, compelling the agency to regulate the emissions under the Clean Air Act, though the White House has stated its preference to deal with climate change in Congress.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) attempted to pass a resolution that would have overturned the endangerment finding, but it was rejected last month.

Here’s the exchange between Gibbs and the reporter, via a White House transcript of today’s briefing:

Q    The President has said that capping carbon emissions is critical to achieving his goals environmentally, on energy, and on the economy.  Does he feel strongly enough about that, that he’s committed to using his executive authority to the EPA if Congress will not cap carbon emissions, which is now very much in doubt?

MR. GIBBS:  Let me get some updated guidance.  I will say obviously that this entire debate, John, is based on — not on some grander policy design, but because a group of states sued the Environmental Protection Agency and the court said that the issue needed to be dealt with.

The question the President has asked and believes, rightly so, is that whether or not we’re going to do that indiscriminately or whether or not we can get everybody at the table and come up with some genuine common-sense ideas that create a path towards energy independence, that improve our national security so we can — we stop exporting hundreds of millions of dollars a day overseas, and to create a market for the very jobs that the President both highlighted last week in Michigan and that we have seen created as a result of some of the investments in the Recovery Act.

Q    But does he think the use of the regulatory authority is better than nothing if Congress can’t pass it?

MR. GIBBS:  Look, I think we — our great hope is still that Congress won’t find itself in that situation, but instead will do what is necessary to meet the obligations of the court suit and do so in a way that gives everybody input on that decision.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal (Louie Palu/ZUMApress.com)

By the time you read this, Gen. Stanley McChrystal may very well have lost his command in Afghanistan. McChrystal is headed to a White House Situation Room meeting with President Obama on Wednesday; Time’s Joe Klein reported Tuesday afternoon that the general offered to resign after making disrespectful comments about senior Obama administration officials to Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings. Whether Obama takes him up on his offer is a different story.

[Security1] And in some ways, it’s a less important decision than another one Obama must make: whether to take the opportunity to change the course of the administration’s strategy in Afghanistan. But if Obama has a chance to use the McChrystal controversy to overhaul his strategy, all signs indicate that he’s not interested.

The past two months in Afghanistan have been brutal. Since returning from a Washington summit with Obama, President Hamid Karzai acrimoniously parted ways with two of his top security officials, men trusted by the U.S. who believe Karzai’s attempts at outreach to the Taliban to bring the war to a close represent capitulation. A United Nations report released this weekend documented a rise in violence in southern Afghanistan ahead of a crucial attempt at pushing the Taliban out of Kandahar, the south’s most populous city. McChrystal had to slow down his push to provide what he calls a “rising tide” of security for Kandahar in order to secure buy-in from residents, as Karzai pledged his support for the operation at a mostly supportive local shura only last Sunday.

What remains unclear from any Kandahar planning is the effect even a successful operation will have on the overall strength of al-Qaeda’s allies in Afghanistan — and al-Qaeda itself, across the border in Pakistan. “There was good reason to drive al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, but there’s no good reason to stay in the place,” said Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and a skeptic of counterinsurgency. “I don’t see any evidence [Obama's] suddenly going to summon the wherewithal to change course, but frankly this is an opportunity for him to do precisely that.”

If Robert Gibbs’ press briefing Tuesday was any indication, Macgregor has a point about Obama’s wherewithal. Gibbs, the White House press secretary, couched his and the president’s disapproval of McChrystal’s comments by questioning whether McChrystal was committed to implementing Obama’s strategy. “We’re here to implement a new strategy,” Gibbs said in his Tuesday briefing, and “that’s what we want everybody from the ambassador to the combatant commander to anybody else involved with this to focus on.” Gibbs emphasized that the mission in Afghanistan “is bigger than anybody on the military or the civilian side” — signaling that no officer is irreplaceable — and that it’s incumbent on the administration’s national security team “not to re-litigate” the internal autumn debate over Afghanistan strategy.

It was a surprising remark from Gibbs. McChrystal’s comments to Rolling Stone didn’t express any dissatisfaction with either the strategy or the resources he’s received to implement it. That’s probably because Obama ultimately embraced most of McChrystal’s favored approach: a rededication to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, backed by an increased complement of 30,000 new troops until July 2011, after which Afghan police and soldiers are to gradually assume primary security responsibilities. In the article, McChrystal merely sniped at his civilian superior, Vice President Joe Biden, who favored a more modest course in Afghanistan, and disrespected two of the senior State Department officials who are key to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan this year, Amb. Karl Eikenberry and Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But while McChrystal may not have meant to damage the strategy he helped create, the dismissive attitude toward the Obama team that he and his senior aides displayed to Rolling Stone put the president in a corner. “To take McChrystal out now and keep the deadline in place means that everything goes somewhat rudderless while time advances,” said a former senior U.S. diplomat who would not talk for the record because of the sensitivity of Obama’s impending decision. “That would be very deleterious to the policy. But to keep him in place would be harmful to the president’s authority. He has to decide what hit he wants to take.”

An additional factor: The short list for replacing McChrystal is heavy on counterinsurgents, further underscoring Gibbs’ emphasis on fidelity to the current strategy. Army Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez is McChrystal’s deputy, head of the International Security Assistance Force’s Joint Command, responsible for overseeing day-to-day military operations. Marine Gen. James Mattis, the head of U.S. Joint Forces Command, is perhaps the Marines’ leading counterinsurgency advocate. (A spokeswoman for Mattis told The Washington Independent on Tuesday, “General Mattis serves at the pleasure of the President, and is completely focused on his assignment as Commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command.”) Marine Lt. Gen. John O. Allen is the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, where he serves under the military’s foremost counterinsurgency theorist-practitioner, Gen. David Petraeus. A choice that would indicate Obama intends to shift course would be Navy Adm. Eric Olson, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, who recently criticized counterinsurgency for an insufficient focus on “countering the insurgents” — that is, battling them instead of securing populations from them — but Olson said at a recent conference that many of his criticisms are issues of degree, rather than wholesale rejection.

If Obama ends up making no changes to his strategy ahead of a scheduled December review and opts to keep his chastened commander, McChrystal will have to repair his relationship with his civilian partners if he’s to have any hope of achieving the unity of effort that counterinsurgency theory considers imperative. “I don’t know if I’d say it’s untenable, but he’s obviously in a difficult position,” said Mark Moyar, the author of a recent book on command in counterinsurgency who will arrive in Afghanistan next month to advise the U.S. military. “Most of [the offensive comments] came from his staff. Perhaps if he changed some members of his staff, it’d be possible to salvage” McChrystal’s command.

Sean McFate, a fellow with the New America Foundation and foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign who used to work for McChrystal as a young officer with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, said the administration’s approach in Afghanistan had yet to resolve a fundamental “disunity” that stretches beyond the personalities at the top of particular civilian and military billets. “The national security establishment has to decide if this is ultimately a civilian mission or a military mission,” McFate said, echoing a discarded proposal last year to appoint an official to oversee the implementation of both civilian and military aspects of the strategy. The Rolling Stone article “points to a fallacy of the ‘whole-of-government’ approach. It’s not clear if it’s civilian or military, and it’s certainly not both.” McFate made it clear that he has not spoken to McChrystal in years.

Officials and analysts cautioned that not all of the 30,000 surge troops have yet arrived in Afghanistan, making firm judgment on the strategy’s prospects ahead of December premature. Administration officials pledged last year that as they implement their strategy, they will take “a hard look at the strategy itself” in a review scheduled for December, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress. But last week, Petraeus and Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy played down the importance of the review, characterizing it as a more aggressive version of the monthly administration-wide examinations of progress — which McChrystal will attend on Wednesday.

In his only public comments on Tuesday ahead of meeting with McChrystal, Obama said his decision would be “determined entirely on how I can make sure that we have a strategy that justifies the enormous courage and sacrifice that those men and women are making over there, and that ultimately makes this country safer.”

But that only begs the question of whether that’s Obama’s current strategy or some alternative. In Kabul and Islamabad, the former diplomat said, the U.S.’s chosen Afghan and Pakistani partners are looking for guidance as to the meaning of Obama’s July 2011 timeline, regardless of how often administration officials have publicly stated they want “long-term partnerships” with both Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Is it a conditions-based start of a slow process [of withdrawal], as Petraeus and Flournoy said, or is it more [in line with] quotes from Biden and impressions given by the president stressing the deadline” as the beginning of the end of the U.S. military presence in the country, the diplomat asked. “That’s a strategic question, one that only Obama can ultimately provide guidance on.”

But Gibbs also made all of his comments in the context of the administration’s current counterinsurgency strategy. Some observers have speculated that the prospect of cashiering McChrystal is an opportunity for overhauling the strategy. Andrew Exum, a former adviser to McChrystal on Afghanistan who also served under the general, noted, “If you feel the strategy in Afghanistan needs a radical change, this would be the ideal time to change commanders.” That wasn’t where Gibbs’ head was at in his press briefing this afternoon.

“Personality disagreements aside, we’re here to implement a new strategy” for the nine-year Afghanistan war, Gibbs repeatedly said. He emphasized that all senior officials and military leaders, including McChrystal, had an opportunity to contribute during the fall debate over strategy, and all left those meetings pledging to support and implement that agenda. “Over the course of many weeks, the strategy was refined and developed, which every member of the team pledged to implement, and agreed with that strategy,” Gibbs said. “That’s what we want everybody from the ambassador from the combatant commander to anybody else involved with this to focus on.”

None of that sounds like a White House that’s ready to scrap its counterinsurgency strategy in the year to go before it begins to shift to a heavier focus on training Afghan forces and withdrawing troops. But McChrystal will have to reiterate his commitment tomorrow to working with the team that, in many ways, signed onto a strategy he himself largely convinced the president to support. “This is bigger than anybody on the military or the civilian side,” Gibbs said. Translation: McChrystal can go or stay, but the strategy has been set. And that may be the greatest irony of the entire McChrystal imbroglio.

Christi Parsons reports for the Chicago Tribune:

Writing to members of the Illinois delegation in Congress, Asst. Atty. Gen. Ronald Weich reaffirmed the administration’s “commitment to acquiring the facility this year,” and provided details about steps planned for the next few months.

The Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons plans to hire and train employees while other administration officials “work with Congress to obtain authorization and funding for a portion of the Thomson facility,” Weich wrote in the letter, obtained by the Tribune Washington bureau.

No timetable for the purchase, though. Will Obama punt on this until after the midterm elections?

President Obama addresses the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday night. (epa/ZUMApress.com)

In his speech to the nation from the Oval Office Tuesday night, President Obama laid out a three-step plan to mitigate the damage from the BP oil spill and compensate affected residents along the Gulf Coast.

Missing from his address, however, was a concrete proposal for how to wean the country off of fossil fuels like oil. And environmental activists who had hoped the president would take the opportunity to call on the Senate to pass carbon-capping climate legislation likely came away disappointed.

[Environment1] In the past, Obama has argued that the only way to end the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and become the world leader in clean energy production is to put a price on carbon emissions. And on a call with reporters before the president’s speech, a senior administration official said Obama “absolutely” believes that a price on carbon is the only way to achieve a clean energy future.

But in his address from the Oval Office, the president avoided any mention of a cap on carbon — or the terms “climate change” or “global warming.” Instead, he spoke vaguely about the need to move away from fossil fuels, telling the nation that “the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.” As for how to get there, he applauded the “strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill” passed by the House of Representatives last June but did not call on the Senate to follow suit.

“I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party — as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels,” Obama said, adding that some approaches with “merit” include energy efficiency measures, renewable energy targets and more funding for research and development.

“But the one approach I will not accept,” he continued, “is inaction.”

Still, with Senate Democrats meeting on Thursday to discuss the fate of an energy bill — one that now appears unlikely to include a declining cap on carbon emissions — advocates of a carbon pricing system had been counting on the president to throw his weight behind at least a limited emissions control scheme.

A carbon pricing system has support from diverse sectors of the economy — including BP itself. In his testimony to the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee today, Lamar McKay, the chief executive of BP America, told the lawmakers, “BP still firmly believes that the best way to move this process along and tackle man-made climate change is by putting a price on carbon. A price reflecting tightening constraints on carbon would both drive energy conservation and make lower carbon energy choices more cost competitive.”

And despite arguments to the contrary by some opponents of carbon pricing, polls show that a cap on greenhouse gas emissions remains fairly popular among the American public. A Pew poll released Monday found that by a margin of 66 percent to 29 percent, most Americans support “including limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions in comprehensive energy legislation.” Pew also reported that 56 percent of respondents said that protecting the environment is a higher priority than keeping energy prices low.

But 68 percent of respondent wanted the country to expand its exploration and development of coal, oil and natural gas — a position Obama has likewise embraced.

On Tuesday, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) has taken the lead in crafting a climate bill with carbon controls, admitted that his bill did not yet have the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. “We don’t have the 60 votes yet,” he said. “I know that. But we’re close, enough to be able to fight for it, and we’ll see where we wind up.”

For this reason, some Democrats have been hoping for the president’s intervention to urge the Senate to pass some form of carbon cap. The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group, responded to the speech with a mix of faint praise and disappointment that Obama didn’t call for provisions like those being pushed by Kerry and Lieberman.

“We’re glad to hear the president wants to move toward cleaner energy policies,” the Center said in a statement, “but they can’t simultaneously include incentives for more offshore drilling or the gutting of our nation’s flagship environmental laws — like the current Kerry-Lieberman bill — and they must reduce carbon to levels that scientists say will help avoid the worst effects of climate change.”

Following the speech, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took questions from people throughout the country via YouTube. In response to a question about the need to transition to clean energy, Gibbs said, “I hope you heard the president commit once again to doing everything in his power to pave the way for a clean energy future for our country.”

Advocates of a cap on carbon aren’t so sure they did.