U.S.-Funded Arab Station Bleeding Viewers, Poll Finds, But Spending is Up

By Dafna Linzer, ProPublica

Results from the largest public opinion poll in the Arab world indicate that Alhurra, the U.S.-funded Arab satellite station that has cost U.S. taxpayers more than half a billion dollars, is the least-watched station in the region and is losing viewers.

The annual poll, by the University of Maryland and Zogby International, was conducted in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Residents there were polled on a wide range of issues including their views of U.S. foreign policy, the American presidency and their media habits.

The 2008 poll showed Alhurra with about a 2 percent audience share across the Muslim world's largest and most-influential countries. That share fell in this year's poll to 0.5 percent. Shibley Telhami, a leading Middle East expert at the University of Maryland and The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said Alhurra's rating was so low that for the first time, it fell below the poll's margin of error.

"Alhurra is at the bottom of the list of stations," Telhami said in an interview. "It was low last year too, but obviously the numbers don't look good for them. It doesn't mean people never watch Alhurra – they surf and watch multiple stations. But it's not where they go for news, and those numbers were consistent from country to country," he said.

A poll by University of Maryland and Zogby International found Alhurra to have a viewership below the poll's margin of error. Letitia King, spokeswoman for the Broadcasting Board of Governors – the U.S. agency that oversees Alhurra –preferred the BBG's own data, which measures "audience reach" rather than audience preference.

"Alhurra now reaches 26.7 million people weekly across the Middle East, up almost one million in the last year," King said. "These are solid numbers by any measure for a foreign broadcaster," she said, noting that Alhurra faces intense media competition and operates in a region with high anti-Americanism.

Although King said Alhurra can be seen by more people now, the BBG reported in its budget request for fiscal year 2010 that Alhurra's Iraq broadcast is currently the fifth most-watched station in the country. Last year, the BBG said Alhurra was fourth in that market. Telhami doesn't poll in Iraq.

Still, its reach was not enough to lure President Obama on camera. Obama appeared to snub Alhurra in the earliest days after his election when he gave his first interview with an Arab language network to the more popular, Saudi-based Al Arabiya. Alhurra has since interviewed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is a nominal member of the board that oversees Alhurra.
Despite the low ratings and a series of managerial and content problems, Alhurra continues to expand and spend.

Since it went on-air in February 2004, Alhurra has cost U.S. taxpayers more than half a billion dollars. Its budget in the last two years alone has grown 20 percent. In 2008, it spent close to $100 million on a new three-hour morning show that began airing five days a week in March and hired 150 people in the Arab world to work on the show. It also plans to relaunch the station's Web site. The Broadcasting Board of Governors has asked Congress to increase Alhurra's funding from $110 million in 2009 to $113 million for 2010.

Alhurra, which broadcasts out of studios in Springfield, Va., and employs 650 people, many of whom were hired and moved to the area from the Middle East, was the brainchild of the former Bush administration.

The station, and its sister radio network, Sawa, were created to compete directly with Al-Jazeera, the longtime media dominator of the Arab-speaking world. According to the University of Maryland poll, Al-Jazeera is still the No. 1 source of news for 55 percent of the Arab world.
In launching what would be the largest and most expensive public diplomacy effort in decades, Bush administration officials said the networks would disseminate the truth about the United States to an Arab world that had been fed misinformation from anti-American broadcasts.

Both Alhurra and Sawa report to the BBG, which houses all overseas government broadcasting, including the Voice of America. A 2008 review of the federal workforce, conducted by the Office of Personnel Management, placed the BBG at the bottom of 37 government agencies in all four performance indexes measured by the office.

The list was not made public by the Bush administration, but Joe Davidson, a Washington Post columnist who writes about the federal government, obtained and published a copy in March.

King, the BBG spokeswoman, noted that the survey was conducted during a difficult time for the media industry as a whole. "Our experience, including the uncertainty of possible job losses, as we retool and shift to match media changes, is not unique." When asked how the BBG ranked in previous surveys, she said the agency's scores were "about the same."

She said BBG management was responding to issues raised by its employees in the survey "through a series of actions to improve communication and leadership" and working "to understand and address underlying concerns."

Alhurra was the subject of a joint investigation launched in June 2008 by ProPublica and CBS' 60 Minutes. The investigation and a series of ProPublica articles revealed serious staff problems, financial mismanagement and long-standing concerns inside the U.S. government and Congress regarding Alhurra's content.

Joaquin Blaya, a BBG board member who was appointed to the agency by President Bush, dismissed the series recently as "old news." But a recent study, commissioned by the BBG and conducted by the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy, found persistent problems. The center's report concluded last summer that Alhurra fails to meet basic journalistic standards, suffers from poor programming and is plagued by perceived bias.

The BBG attempted to withhold the USC report from public scrutiny but was forced by Congress to make it public.

ProPublica's stories and others led to congressional inquiries in the House and Senate last summer. Blaya has declined to speak with ProPublica but met with congressional investigators who are reviewing Alhurra's work last fall.

In an interview with The National, an English-language newspaper in Abu Dhabi, Blaya said Alhurra has the support of the Obama administration and Congress. However, a senior administration official told ProPublica that Alhurra's future is under review and that no decisions have been made.

International broadcasting has long been a sore spot for lawmakers who often support the notion of using broadcasts to influence foreign audiences but question the end results. Some congressmen limit their focus to broadcasts that target specific countries of interest to their constituents. But some efforts have few patrons.

Both the BBG and Alhurra have reached out to Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE). Kaufman was copied on an e-mail from Alhurra's president, Brian Conniff, congratulating the station's employees for their coverage of the November 2008 presidential election. Kaufman had served as a member of the BBG board, alongside Blaya, for the last decade. He stepped down after the election to fill the Delaware Senate seat vacated by his close friend and former boss, Vice President Joe Biden. Kaufman's interest in Alhurra is unclear. He was still on the board when it received copies of the USC study but his focus as a board member was on broadcasting into China.

One official who is likely to have a significant impact on Alhurra is Judith McHale, the new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. McHale's predecessors in the Bush administration struggled to defend or resolve systemic problems at Alhurra. But McHale's background is in television programming and international broadcasting. She was the president and CEO of Discovery Communications and instrumental in developing Discovery Channel, which now has 100 channels telecast in more than 170 countries and 35 languages to more than 1 billion subscribers.

McHale is close to Secretary Clinton and one administration official said she is now reviewing memos written by transition team members on Alhurra and the BBG.

The Obama administration's transition report on international broadcasting was sharply critical of Alhurra, according to a person who served as a consultant. The team was led by Ernest J. Wilson III, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at USC.

"The BBG was incredibly resistant to making any changes on Alhurra. I don't know what it will look like a year from now but no one on the transition team thought it was working," said the consultant, who offered to share private deliberations on the condition of anonymity.

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Do CIA Cables Show Doctors Monitoring Torture?

By Sheri Fink, ProPublica

Evidence is emerging that medical personnel monitored the medical effects of the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaida operative who was, according to government reports, subjected to the near-drowning at least 83 times in August 2002.

The new information comes from descriptions of cables, classified as top secret and relating to the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, that were transmitted from a Central Intelligence Agency field station to the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters nearly every day between Aug. 1 and Aug. 18 that year.

The descriptions of the cables (here and here) reveal that a daily "medical update" and "behavioral comments" along with status and threat updates were sent to CIA headquarters throughout that period. On five occasions between Aug. 4 and Aug. 9, an additional cable was sent containing "medical information" along with such information as the strategies for interrogation sessions, raw intelligence, the use of interrogation techniques to elicit information, and the reactions to those techniques. The fact that medical information was included in these cables hints that Abu Zubaydah was medically monitored during or after being subjected to those techniques. Both professional organizations and human rights groups have rejected as unethical any monitoring role for medical personnel.

A summary of the 34 cables and of a handwritten log book were released to the American Civil Liberties Union earlier this month on orders of U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who is presiding over a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the group. The lawsuit was based on a request for records related to detainee treatment that the ACLU and four other advocacy groups made of the U.S. Departments of Defense, Justice and State and the CIA in 2003. The new summary, known as a Vaughn Index, was released in response to a motion that the ACLU filed in 2007 after then-CIA director Michael Hayden acknowledged that the agency had destroyed videotapes of detainee interrogations in 2005.

The cables themselves have not been made public, and the agency is contesting their release. In response to a request for more detail on the medical information included in the cables and the reasons that information was transmitted from the field site to CIA headquarters, CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano wrote in an e-mail to ProPublica: "The materials speak for themselves."

The U.S. Department of Justice gave the ACLU other documents this month that suggest the cables are among nearly 550 interrogation-related cables sent from field stations to CIA headquarters between April and December 2002. Among those analyzing the new documents are National Public Radio's Ari Shapiro, the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman and Firedoglake's Marcy Wheeler.

The documents are the latest installment of an ongoing story about the role of doctors and psychologists in the government's efforts to pry information from suspected terrorists. Professional organizations of doctors, nurses, public health practitioners and psychologists have stated their opposition to health professionals' involvement in torture. "The AMA has taken the clear stand that the participation of physicians in torture and interrogation is a violation of core ethical values," the American Medical Association said in a statement last Friday. Last month, the AMA sent a letter to President Barack Obama reiterating, as it did during the Bush administration, that the association's ethical code prohibits physicians from participating in torture or coercive interrogation.

However, there is evidence that health personnel, at least some of them physicians, have been involved in interrogations. For example Col. Thomas M. Pappas, former chief of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, who was interviewed as part of the Taguba investigation, testified that a psychiatrist and another doctor monitored interrogations at the prison and had the final say in what aspects of the interrogation plan were implemented.

The question raised by the cables is, How deep was the involvement of physicians or other health professionals in the actual interrogations at CIA "black sites" such as the one where Abu Zubaydah was held?

Previously released documents show that Bush officials overseeing the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah saw the involvement of medical personnel as crucial because it could help prevent prosecution of interrogators under U.S. law. As ProPublica previously reported, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee signed a memo on August 1, 2002 spelling out those concerns and the terms under which interrogators could waterboard and slap Abu Zubaydah, subject him to "cramped confinement" and stress positions, and shove him into flexible walls.

"The constant presence of personnel with medical training who have the authority to stop the interrogation should it appear it is medically necessary indicates that it is not your intent to cause severe physical pain," the memo said.

Abu Zubaydah began cooperating in late April under questioning by Ali Soufan, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who said he did not use coercive methods. In congressional testimony this month, Soufan disclosed that there was a "CIA medical team supporting us" when he and other FBI and CIA personnel first spoke with Abu Zubaydah. Soufan said the medical team insisted that Abu Zubaydah, who was injured during capture and in danger of dying, be taken to a hospital for treatment.

It is unclear whether the same CIA medical team that evaluated Abu Zubaydah's health problems in the spring was still caring for him in August when he was waterboarded. Nor is it clear precisely how health personnel might have been asked to cross the line from providing medical care to participating in or supporting the interrogations, which Soufan and other sources have described as becoming increasingly abusive under the instruction of a former military Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training psychologist contracted by the CIA. Soufan and others, including another psychologist employed by the CIA, protested the escalating techniques and left the site. The new documents do not indicate whether medical personnel might also have objected.

In a cover letter accompanying the new Vaughn Index, acting U.S. attorney Lev L. Dassin wrote, "The Government is ... acknowledging that August 2002 was the month during which Abu Zubaydah was subjected to the most intensive interrogations." An Aug. 4, 2002, cable with the subject "Abu Zubaydah Interrogation" is a typical entry in the Vaughn Index:

This is a four-page cable from the Field to CIA Headquarters. The cable includes information concerning the strategies for interrogation sessions; the use of interrogation techniques to elicit information on terrorist operations against the U.S.; reactions to the interrogation techniques; raw intelligence; a status of threat information, and medical information.

The news that medical information was being transmitted regularly to CIA headquarters throughout the time Abu Zubaydah was being repeatedly waterboarded troubled medical ethics experts interviewed by ProPublica. Normally, health professionals who work at U.S. prisons share inmates' medical information with authorities only "if there's a need to know; for example if someone has a seizure disorder, we put in a medical order for a bottom bunk," Dr. Dean Rieger, chief medical officer for Correct Care Solutions, a healthcare management company for correctional facilities, said in an interview with ProPublica. Rieger, who has been involved in corrections for more than three decades and who coauthors a column on medical ethics for the Society of Correctional Physicians, said it would be problematic to continue sharing an inmate's medical information with authorities overseeing a system "that creates the harm in the first place."

University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan agreed. At that point, "you gotta start protesting and stop transmitting," he said in an interview. "The issue isn't privacy violations, it's complicity ... You're part of the torture team at that point if you're assessing injuries and saying whether the person's capable of enduring more."

Legal memos written in 2005 suggest the CIA had reached precisely the opposite conclusion -- that waterboarding and other harsh interrogations should involve personnel from the CIA's Office of Medical Services, including its physicians.

A recently declassified Justice Department memo discussed the involvement the OMS eventually had in supporting interrogations. That memo, quoting still-classified OMS guidelines from December 2004, said that the "use of the waterboard requires the presence of a physician." Another memo said that OMS doctors and psychologists had been consulted about the effects of using several techniques together, such as "when an insult slap is simultaneously combined with water dousing or a kneeling stress position, or when wall standing is simultaneously combined with an abdominal slap and water dousing" and concluded they would not cause severe pain.

Medical personnel were also given the responsibility of monitoring the interrogations for safety. "Should it appear at any time that Abu Zubaydah is experiencing severe pain or suffering, the medical personnel on hand will stop the use of any technique," Bybee's 2002 memo said.

It is unclear whether the "medical personnel" designated to monitor Abu Zubaydah's interrogation included M.D.s. "There is no role for physicians in those practices," Dr. Otmar Kloiber, secretary-general of the World Medical Association, told ProPublica. Kloiber said that physician involvement in interrogations increases the chances that questioning will devolve into abuse and torture. A physician's reassuring presence can give questioners a green light to escalate physical and mental pressure.

In a confidential International Committee of the Red Cross report made public by New York Review of Books contributor Mark Danner last month, Abu Zubaydah described to ICRC interviewers days of being waterboarded to the point he believed he would die, slammed into hard and flexible walls, and confined in a small box where one of his wounds reopened and began to bleed. "Eventually," Abu Zubaydah said, "the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor."

The ICRC report also reveals that other detainees who spent time in the CIA's black sites perceived that some staff who treated them or monitored their interrogations were physicians.
The potential presence of physicians as opposed to other types of personnel raises crucial questions.

Numerous officials, both Republican and Democrat, have characterized waterboarding as torture. There is widespread agreement among doctors -- whether employed by the military, other government agencies, or not -- that ethical standards prohibit physicians from using medical knowledge or information about patients to support torture.

The World Medical Association, which lists 85 countries including the U.S. as members, was established in 1947 to uphold independence and ethical behavior among physicians after the horrors of Nazi medicine were revealed. It is arguably the world's key arbiter of medical ethics.

Earlier this month, the group's governing council issued a resolution reaffirming the group's long-standing position that physicians are forbidden from "participating in, or even being present during, the practice of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading procedures" and must denounce those acts whenever they're aware of them.

According to officials from the WMA and the Norwegian Medical Association, which put forward the resolution, the original draft made specific reference to U.S. detention facilities. At the WMA council meeting in Jerusalem earlier this month, intense discussion ensued between normally staid physicians over whether to remove mention of the U.S. and make the language more generic.

WMA officials declined to say who took up which side.

"It got heated enough I had to call a short recess and have a cooling-off period," WMA chair Dr. Edward Hill told ProPublica. Hill, a former president of the American Medical Association, said the U.S. delegation stayed out of the debate.

But the American delegation made its views clear, according to Dr. Trond Markestad, who drafted the original resolution and who chairs the ethics committee in the Norwegian Medical Association. "They felt it was a bit unfair, wasn't really correct, to single out that one [example] since there were so many wars going on and so many things happening all over the world and since they'd already addressed this nationally."

The final version of the WMA resolution passed unanimously after language naming the U.S. was removed. The resolution condemns "reports worldwide" of "deeply unsettling practices by health professionals, including direct participation in the infliction of ill-treatment, monitoring specific methods of ill-treatment, and participation in interrogation processes."

The group also resolved to support physicians who refuse to participate in or condone torture. Kloiber told ProPublica that WMA members are concerned, for example, that physicians in areas where sharia law is adopted are being asked to carry out punishments such as amputations.

The WMA resolution calls on national medical associations, such as the AMA, to investigate breaches of fundamental medical ethics among physicians. But the AMA has not made public whether its ethics and judicial body has ever investigated or sanctioned physicians for participating in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Last Friday, the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York launched an advocacy campaign that aims "to hold accountable healers that have harmed." The group is encouraging citizens to file complaints against health professionals suspected of participating in torture and to support legislation, such as a proposed bill in New York state, that prohibits health professionals from participating in torture or the improper treatment of prisoners at home or abroad.

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Flashpoint California: Following Marriage Decision, Obama Called Out On Gay Issues

Long-simmering tensions between President Obama and the gay community have erupted full force. Activists are now pressing Obama to show more national leadership on gay rights in the wake of this week's California Supreme Court decision to uphold a ban on same-sex marriage.

As a candidate, Obama was vocal in supporting many stronger protections for gay Americans, including ending the "don't ask, don't tell" policy prohibiting open homosexuals from serving in the military. Obama, however, has been much more circumspect since being sworn in.

Gay activists had largely held their fire, until now. A Los Angeles-based health and services facility for gays and lesbians released a letter to Obama, timed to Obama's planned visit to the Golden State. Obama's California trip comes only days after the state's highest court let stand Proposition 8, approved by voters to overturn the court's earlier ruling which allowed gay marriage.

"Welcome to California, Mr. President. I welcome you with a heavy heart because of the California Supreme Court's decision to uphold Prop. 8, relegating same-sex couples to second-class status and denying us that most noble promise of America, 'liberty and justice for all,'" writes Lorri Jean, chief executive officer of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center. "You are arriving in Los Angeles on the heels of emotional demonstrations throughout California and our nation and your silence at such a time speaks volumes. LGBT people and our allies have the 'audacity to hope' for a country that treats us fairly and equally and for a President with the will to stand up for those ideals. From you we expect nothing less."

In a statement, the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center provides a broad array of services for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community, welcoming nearly a quarter-million client visits from ethnically diverse youth and adults each year. The center provides health, social, educational, and other services.

Jean notes the general patience the gay community, despite Obama's continued silence on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," as well as other key rights issues.

"We know the country faces many serious challenges and we have strived to be patient. We've waited for the slightest sign you would live up to your promise to be a 'fierce advocate' for our equal rights while watching gay and lesbian members of the armed forces, who have never been more needed, get discharged from the military. And so far you have done nothing. No stop loss order. No call to cease such foolish and discriminatory actions that make our nation less safe," Jean says.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has been asked more than once about Obama's intentions toward "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Gibbs replied that using the president’s power to halt the firings was "not the way to seek any lasting or durable solution” to the problem, and that the “only durable solution” is for Congress to make the change. But Nathaniel Frank, senior research fellow at the Palm Center, a University of California think tank on gay issues, says the White House is misstating the case.

“An executive order would stop the bleeding overnight,” says Frank, who is author of Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America. “Reinstating the gay ban after that would be very unlikely. Politically, it would be tough given that three quarters of the public supports equality. Operationally it’s even tougher: once you let gays serve openly, you can’t exactly stuff them back into the closet. What are you going to do, order everyone to forget what they already know?”

In addition, Jean notes that Obama promised to support a "complete repeal" of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) "and pledged to advocate for legislation that would give same-sex couples the 1,100+ federal rights and benefits we are denied, including the same rights to social security benefits," Jean adds. "You said, 'Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples.'"

Signed by President Bill Clinton, the Defense of Marriage Act prohibits states from recognizing same-sex marriages legal in another state. It also prohibits the federal government from recognizing such marriages.

"What of those promises, Mr. President?" Jean asks. "Your commitment to repeal DOMA has been removed from the White House Web site. Your promise to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell was removed and then replaced with a watered-down version. And in the aftermath of yesterday's California Supreme Court ruling, you have remained silent while your press secretary summarily dismisses questions about the issue.

"We not only need to hear from our President, we need his action. And we need it now," Jean says.

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Stimulus: The First 100 Days

By Michael Grabell, ProPublica

President Obama will appear at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada this afternoon to mark the stimulus package’s first 100 days.

So how is the stimulus working? A few measures:

We’re likely to hear a new figure for how much of the $787 billion has made it into the pockets of American workers. According to data on Recovery.gov , that number is $31.1 billion. But that doesn’t include tax cuts. A story in the New York Times on May 12 puts the total at $45.6 billion.

The bulk of the money so far has come in the form of federal assistance to prevent cuts in Medicaid, a middle-class tax break and increased unemployment benefits and food stamps. The infrastructure projects that many people imagine are only just beginning, with 545 under way as of the end of April, according to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. A total of $116 billion, about 15 percent of the plan, has been “obligated. That is defined as money made available to state and local governments or committed to a specific project.”

We’re also likely to hear that the stimulus package has created or saved more than 150,000 jobs and will create or save another 600,000 jobs by August. These estimates are based on economic models by the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. So how many jobs have really been created? As my colleague Olga Pierce has noted, the world may never know.

As of April 30, the transportation and infrastructure projects have created or saved 7,700 jobs, according to a recent congressional report. But the main source of jobs so far has probably come in layoffs averted. For example, the stimulus package enabled Virginia to prevent cutting 13,000 school janitors, secretaries and other administrative employees, according to a report released yesterday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The liberal-leaning think tank concludes that federal aid to states has closed roughly 30 percent to 40 percent of state budget gaps.

But CNN reports that one of earliest stimulus achievements—the rescue of 25 Columbus, Ohio, police recruits who were about to be laid off—is in peril. Those same recruits could lose their jobs at the end of the year if city voters don’t pass a tax hike.

One more indicator today: Dow Jones announced today that it has created an economic stimulus index composed of 50 construction, alternative energy and telecom stocks expected to benefit from the recovery act. As of yesterday’s close, the index was up 1.62 percent since the start of the year.

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Tipping The Scales: Lining Up For, Against Historic Sotomayor Nomination

Much of the reaction to President Obama's announcement to nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court was as predictable, as it was quick to follow the morning White House announcement.

Sentiment from the right, particularly, was both speedy and foreseen. As anticipated, many conservatives sought to portray the 54-year-old jurist of Puerto Rican heritage as slavishly an abortion rights supporter, as she is an opponent of gun ownership -- all the while warning that Sotomayor is a heedless "judicial activist."

Such a response among Obama's loudest opponents certainly wasn't a surprise.

And certainly it should not have been unexpected that Hispanic and Latino leaders would rally as quickly to praise Sotomayor, who would be the first Latina on the high court. Yet that the words of support came as strongly, and from as wide a cross-section of the Latino community as they did, demonstrated a political community eager to exercise its increasing muscle and influence in Washington.

While conservative Christian leaders, such as Gary Bauer and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, tried to rally the faithful in opposition to Sotomayor, the founder and president of the largest Hispanic faith-based evangelical network in the country threw his arms around the fellow New Yorker.

"Judge Sotomayor and I grew up in the same neighborhood, only a few years apart. I am delighted that a woman raised in one of our neighborhoods, who knows firsthand the struggles our people face everyday, has received this remarkable honor," says Rev. Luis Cortes, the founder and president of Esperanza. "Judge Sotomayor's perseverance and intellectual independence will serve her well in the high court. I trust that she will carry her past into her future as she faces the toughest legal decisions of our time.

"I am thrilled to know the Supreme Court will have the benefit of her legal expertise and remarkable life story," Cortes adds. "The Hispanic Church will pray for her to get through the nomination process speedily and that God would give her wisdom for the decades to come for the good of our nation."

The National Hispana Leadership Institute (NHLI) calls the nomination of Sotomayor to replace retiring Justice David Souter a "sign of change for communities across the nation."

"President Obama has made history with the nomination of Judge Sotomayor, but this is not just about a demographic pick, Sotomayor has the intellect, integrity and empathy to excel as Supreme Court Justice, and she has more judicial experience than anyone confirmed in the last three decades. We applaud and commend this choice," says Cristina Lopez, NHLI president.

That Latino leadership clung so closely to Sotomayor likely will prove to be a headache for Republicans, who already have lost ground with Latino voters over the last four years. While George W. Bush won 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2004, four years later GOP nominee John McCain could attract only 31 percent.

“It’s absolutely urgent. The demographics are there in black and white,” former Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-Texas) is quoted as saying. “If we don’t figure out a way to open our party up to more Hispanic voters, nothing else we do will matter. Mathematically, we can’t get there from here.”

Although it will be a delicate dance for Republican leaders to oppose Sotomayor without offending a wide swath of that all-important Latino voting bloc, conservatives dearly want to fight.

"While conservatives will put forth a massive effort to defeat Sotomayor's nomination, win or lose, we will reap major benefits in the 2010 and 2012 elections," says prominent conservative activist and author Richard Viguerie.

The right clearly has the resources to mount a strong offensive against the nomination. Time will tell if this burgeoning Latino influence can go toe-to-toe with the entrenched right -- or whether their support for Sotomayor extends only to kind words.

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Bailed-Out Bank Tries Golden Parachute Loophole

By Paul Kiel, ProPublica

When is a golden parachute not a golden parachute? Associated Banc-Corp of Wisconsin, which received $525 million in TARP money last year, seems to have found an answer to the riddle.

Congress passed legislation in February forbidding any golden parachute payment to an executive leaving a bank that had received TARP money. A golden parachute was defined simply as money given for nothing except that the executive was leaving. (As the legislation puts it, compensation can only be given “for services performed or benefits accrued.”)

Earlier this month, Lisa Binder, Associated Banc-Corp’s president and chief operating officer, resigned. But she didn’t leave empty-handed: The bank agreed to pay her $1.65 million.
Binder’s severance agreement, filed last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission, acknowledges the ban on golden parachutes. But Binder’s payment isn’t a golden parachute according to the agreement: It’s compensation for “services rendered.” Those services? Not competing with the bank.

Binder has agreed not to work for a company that is headquartered in Illinois, Wisconsin or Minnesota, or to otherwise help any company compete with Associated for one year. In other words, it’s money for not doing something.

“That seems to me to be cheating,” Paul Hodgson of the Corporate Library, a corporate-governance research firm, told ProPublica.

The agreement anticipates that the arrangement might not fly with government officials. According to the agreement (see Page 6), if the Treasury Department or the bank’s regulators determine that it breaks the ban on golden parachutes, the bank will try to work something out – either by tempering the agreement to conform to compensation restrictions or getting a waiver to break them. If that doesn’t work, the agreement says Ms. Binder will just have to wait until the restrictions are changed or the bank pays back the TARP funds. Then she’ll get her money in a lump sum.

The special inspector general for the TARP is conducting a review of executive compensation at the banks that received bailout money. That audit might be released as soon as July, a spokeswoman said.

Binder, who received compensation of more than $1.8 million in 2008, quit to “take a step back and think about her priorities,” Paul Beideman, the bank’s CEO, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Associated did not reply to our requests for comment. We haven’t been able to track down Binder. In the press release announcing her resignation, she said, “I look forward to the next chapter in my career.”

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Fear And Loathing: 'Backlash' Potential As Bailed Out Carmakers Still Bleeding Jobs

Lawmakers plan to haul the heads of Chrysler and General Motors to Washington next month to testify how their companies will hemorrage tens of thousands of U.S. jobs -- even as the carmakers operate with taxpayer-paid bailout funds.

Anger is rising on Capitol Hill, as some warn of a political backlash over the federally bailed out carmakers purposely throwing 100,000 or more Americans out work.

In a letter dated May 22, the chairman and ranking Republican of the Science and Transportation Committee told the CEOs of the bailed out corporations, General Motors and Chrysler, to expect to testify next month to address the jobs issue, which is being excaserbated by the expected closure of hundreds of GM and Chrysler dealerships nationwide. A recent increase in claims for unemployment insurance was directly attributable to job losses in the auto industry.

“Small businesses need Congress to stand up for them, especially in these trying economic times,” says Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate commerce panel. “Nearly 2,000 dealerships are closing throughout America and over 100,000 jobs are at risk. This is unacceptable – we need Chrysler and General Motors to immediately address the insufficient transition period, helping dealerships recoup full inventory costs, minimizing job loss, and providing consumers with access to quality service. These companies cannot be allowed to take taxpayer funds for a bailout and then leave local dealers and their customers to fend for themselves with no real notice and no real help.”

Outrage at the auto industry is bipartisan, as the conservative ranking Republican on the Senate committee, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, also expressed her displeasure.

“Many of the local car dealers being affected by the Chrysler bankruptcy are the largest employers in their communities and have been running successful businesses for years," she says. "They have been an integral part of their cities or towns and helped sustain their local economies. They support high school sports programs, and they donate time and money to local charitable activities. As the U.S. car manufacturers work to remain solvent, these dealerships and their employees are taking a heavy blow – and through no fault of their own. They didn’t make the business decisions that have placed the auto industry in this position. We must ensure that the auto dealers are treated equitably and have the opportunity to unwind their operations in a manner that will minimize hardships to employees who lose their jobs and communities that are adversely impacted.”

The action on Capitol Hill comes as prominent individuals and watchdog groups, such as Ralph Nader and Public Citizen have written leading congressional Democratic and Republican lawmakers, warning that jobs issue will lead to a full political backlash.

"The drive to bankruptcy -- and the apparent excessive closure of plants, dealerships and possibly brands, along with an unconscionable increase in outsourcing -- will result in avoidable suffering around the country," says a letter to congressional leaders, signed by Nader; Sidney Wolfe, acting president, Public Citizen; Clarence Ditlow, executive director, Center for Auto Safety; and Robert Weissman, director, Essential Action.

"The resultant dislocation will have significant political consequences, as the public rightly asks, 'Why are we bailing out the auto companies and then facilitating their moving production overseas? Why aren't we leveraging the public investment to protect jobs and manufacturing capacity, as well as facilitate investments in environmentally appropriate technologies?'" the letter warns.

"Members of Congress will not be immune to this political backlash," the letter says. "Indeed, the public will demand an explanation for why Congress abdicated its responsibility to oversee and legislate regarding the auto rescue. They will note the extraordinary sums poured into AIG ($180 billion, plus), Citigroup ($330 billion in loans and guarantees) and other financial firms to preserve the financial industry as contrasted to the much smaller amounts needed by the auto companies, and demand an explanation for the bias for speculation over production."

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Saying Private Competition Isn't Cutting It, Leahy Defends Public Health Option

Competition among private insurers alone isn't containing skyrocketing health costs, which is why a senior Democratic senator says he supports offering a public health option in reform of U.S. healthcare. That a coalition of health organizations recently came together to control costs should not preclude a public option, says the lawmaker, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

"Competition among private insurers has not driven down costs to consumers and the current private insurance market has a clear incentive to offer coverage only to the healthiest Americans," says Leahy, one of the most progressive members of the Senate. "Comprehensive health care reform can change this calculus and that is why I support the creation of a federally backed, public health insurance option. For those who are satisfied with their current insurance there is no need to change.

"A public option would only give consumers more choices to purchase an affordable and quality health insurance plan and will help drive down overall health care costs by introducing real competition into the health care market," Leahy adds. "I was proud to join Senator [Sherrod] Brown [D-Ohio] and over 20 other Senators to introduce a resolution stating our support of a public option as part of comprehensive health care reform legislation."

Republicans, as well as some Democrats, oppose a government-run option to be a part of the comprehensive healthcare package now being put together on Capitol Hill.

Even the news that the healthcare industry met with President Obama to agree to cut a cumulative $2 trillion over the next decade doesn't remove the need for a public option, Leahy says.

"I appreciated the recent news that leaders of the health care industry are working with the Obama administration and have unveiled a plan to voluntarily trim roughly $200 billion in health care costs per year," he says. "While this is a movement in the right direction, this should not distract from the fact that coverage must be affordable for Americans or the larger goal of reducing overall costs will not be realized. A public option should recognize an individual’s ability to pay and offer subsidies for those who are still unable to afford care. Leaving individuals without insurance drives up health care costs for us all, and we must work toward a goal of insuring all Americans."

Healthcare reform must also ensure enough healthcare professionals are available to meet the needs of all Americans, Leahy says.

"Insuring more Americans is of no use unless we work toward incentivizing people to become nurses, doctors, and health care professionals," he says. "My wife, Marcelle, is a nurse, and I understand the threat that nursing shortages pose to health care access and safety. Additionally, with the costs of a medical education rising, many aspiring physicians are choosing to specialize instead of pursuing a career in primary care. Especially in a rural state like Vermont, we are struggling to maintain primary and preventative care services throughout the state. I have heard from far too many Vermonters who use the emergency room for everyday health care needs because there are not enough primary care physicians to handle the demand for services. I support efforts to establish programs to help students repay their loans should they choose to practice in underserved fields or areas high in need of physicians and nurses across the country."


Seeing how healthcare costs continue to rise, Leahy argues against those who say Americans cannot afford healthcare reform in this current economic climate.

"What we cannot afford is to stick with the status quo, which is crippling our economy and neglecting millions of Americans who want coverage but cannot afford it," he says. "Health care costs currently consume 16 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product, which is expected to double in the next decade if nothing is done to slow the trend."

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Obama’s Preventive Detention Problem: Breaking It Down

By Chisun Lee, ProPublica

President Barack Obama's support for preventively detaining terrorism suspects undoubtedly surprised some of his longtime backers. Holding prisoners at Guantanamo, without the certainty of trial or release, was a defining feature of the previous administration's counterterrorism policy – and some of its fiercest critics expected Obama to change the policies.

But the possibility had been percolating for months. With his pledge in January to close the Guantanamo prison within a year, Obama set off a fierce, mostly under-the-radar debate among legal experts about whether it will be possible to meet the goal he announced yesterday: to build "a legitimate legal framework" for imprisoning terrorism suspects indefinitely.

The question affects more than Guantanamo. The fates of 169 detainees there remain undecided, according to Obama's numbers yesterday, and administration officials have suggested that they will be unable to prosecute as many as 100. But the legal status of thousands more held by the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas also hangs in limbo, and any detention policy will have ongoing effects as the fight against al-Qaida continues.

Here are some of the key issues facing the architects of a new preventive detention system, or, as it's sometimes called, a "national security court":

President Obama said yesterday that some suspected terrorists "cannot be prosecuted." How could that be – haven't there been plenty of previous cases involving terrorism?

Yes, there have been. A significant number of people have been convicted of terrorism-related offenses in federal trials, including several accused of acting on behalf of al-Qaida. From September 2001 to May of last year, the government won 145 convictions against terrorism suspects, according to an analysis by former federal prosecutors for the progressive legal nonprofit, Human Rights First.

That's not to say it's easy. The criminal justice system was built to safeguard the rights of defendants. Prosecutors can't win a case without enough admissible evidence. Sometimes, as in this week's arrest of four suspects in New York, investigators have tape-recordings of the alleged illegal activity. But more often than not, they depend on witnesses. They can't use testimony obtained through abusive interrogations. And intelligence agencies are typically loath to collaborate with a public prosecution that puts their sources on a witness stand.

Recent court filings by the Obama administration in cases challenging the legality of Guantanamo detentions offer a glimpse of possible hurdles to prosecuting an accused terrorist.

Criminal defendants have the right to see information in government files that could help show their innocence, so prosecutors have a duty to search for all plausibly relevant documents to turn over. Officials said in the filings that evidence about the Guantanamo detainees tops 1.8 million pages, total. All of those would need to be searched for exculpatory information. A test query for several detainees yielded between several hundreds and tens of thousands of "hits" each.

Isn't detention without trial illegal on its face?

Not necessarily. The traditional laws of war permit preventive detention of both enemy soldiers and hostile civilians until the end of the fight. Standards like the Geneva Conventions require humane treatment of these detainees.

Holding aggressors without any intention of trying them is a time-honored right of fighting nations. Why? In wartime, combatants are supposed to fight – so, fighting itself is not a crime. Fighting dirty – for instance, purposefully killing innocent civilians – is prosecutable as a war crime. But even then, there's no right to a speedy trial, and the captor nation can take its time deciding when or even whether to press charges. It has long been accepted that a nation at war has the right to protect itself by keeping enemies from returning to the battlefield, without having to invest resources or risk public release of military secrets in full-blown trials.

Every trial risks the possibility that a defendant could be acquitted or receive a moderate sentence. Under the laws of war, governments don't need to take that risk.

The possibility that convicted terrorists could win relatively quick release isn't just theoretical. Of the three military commission convictions so far at Guantanamo, two resulted in sentences of, essentially, time served. One of those convicted was Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver, for providing material support to al-Qaida. He was sentenced last year to five-and-a-half years in prison – six months more than time served – and now lives free in Yemen, in a case where the government had sought life imprisonment.

A detention system premised on the laws of war would permit Obama to keep his promise of yesterday: "We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security."

So is the United States at war with terrorists?

A trickier question than it might seem. Terrorists don't wear uniforms or rush to a battlefield. The front, many argue, could be anywhere – a hotel room in Albania or an alley in Manila.
For its part, al-Qaida declared war on the United States in 1998, shortly before its operatives blew up American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Obama has expressed no skepticism on this point, saying in his speech: "We are indeed at war with al-Qaida and its affiliates." He was able to say so because Congress, which has the constitutional power to declare war, issued the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force after the 9/11 attacks.

That means some terrorists can be held indefinitely as prisoners of war, according to David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor long associated with civil liberties causes. Cole recently stunned the progressive legal community by supporting preventive detention for some detainees in a Boston Review essay.

Cole explained in an interview, "You might not have evidence that would satisfy the criminal-conviction standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but perhaps you have very good evidence that a person was a fighter for the Taliban. Should we just release him to go back to the caves and start shooting at U.S. soldiers, just because we don't have sufficient proof to convict him of a crime?"

Retired U.S. Army Major General John Altenburg, who until resigning in November 2006 had the task of deciding which Guantanamo detainees would be slated for military commission trials, said the Bush administration's "arrogance and naiveté" about public perception had tarnished the otherwise valid notion of detaining terrorism suspects under a wartime rationale. He said in an interview, "What the previous administration did was allow critics to define the terms of the debate to be the terms of domestic criminal law. So the public is reacting with, ‘What about their lawyer? What about their right to a speedy trial?'"

In fact, Altenburg said, the al-Qaida detainees are not entitled to a speedy trial any more than German prisoners of war in World War II were.

If wartime detention is OK, and the U.S. is at war with terrorists, then why does the nation need a new detention law?

This appears to be as much a question of political support as one of legal reasoning.

Obama said yesterday that he'd seek a law spelling out procedures for preventative detention for reasons of political legitimacy. He said he wanted to avoid his predecessor's "ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism."

Earlier this week, top Obama aides invited the most ardent opponents of preventive detention, including the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, to a two-and-a-half-hour meeting. Although administration officials have not publicly discussed that session, some guests were startled by the argument that the president already has sufficient authority to preventively detain terrorism suspects. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said afterward on a conference call with reporters that there was a "surprising misapprehension about what the laws of war permit."

The legal authority that courts have recognized for the current military detentions of "enemy combatants" is the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which doesn't even mention detentions. If captives are moved to U.S. soil, they'll likely be able to invoke greater legal protections than they've got now, according to a January analysis by Congressional Research Service lawyers. Possibly, some will even be able to seek political asylum under immigration laws. Long-term preventive detention would therefore require a new law and possibly amendments to others.

Part of the legal puzzle has to do with trying to apply traditional laws of war to the "novel" type of conflict that is terrorism, says Harvey Rishikof, professor of law and national security studies at the National War College. It's just harder to tell who's a combatant – and therefore detainable as a POW – and who's a criminal suspect due for trial, because terrorists are "stateless actors" eschewing uniforms and avoiding battlefields.

Attorney General Eric Holder hinted at the complexity of the "battlefield" question as it applies to terrorist combatants at his confirmation hearing. "There are physical battlefields, certainly, in Afghanistan," he said. "But there are battlefields, potentially, you know, in our nation. There are cyber battlefields." He went on, "There's a battlefield, if you want to call it that, with regard to the hearts and minds of the people in the Islamic world."

Major General Altenburg said, "I personally think the battlefield has to be beyond the ground of an Afghanistan, because al-Qaida is everywhere. Now, there's no [court] holding anywhere that says that is the law of war, because again, this is unprecedented."

How would preventive detention of terrorism suspects work?

The closest the public has gotten to a legislative blueprint for preventive detention of terrorism suspects appeared in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain. They called for a "uniform set of standards and procedures administered by a civilian judge," who would decide the challenges to the legality of detention that the Supreme Court has said are a detainee's right, and "an annual interagency review" to determine whether a detainee continues to threaten national security and should be held. The senators are expected to be influential voices as any new policy develops.

But before looking at the procedures, policymakers will have to decide who will face detention. The Bush administration initially claimed that it could indefinitely detain anyone the executive branch deemed an "enemy combatant." The courts trimmed back that sweeping view, saying that the authority was shared with Congress and subject to judicial review.

The question is especially acute for terrorism detention, says Harvard law professor and former Bush official Jack Goldsmith, who with Neal Katyal – then a Georgetown law professor, now Obama's principal deputy solicitor general – was one of the earliest proponents of a new legal regime for terrorism suspects. Because this enemy doesn't wear a uniform and, to the contrary, takes pains to blend with civilians, identifying candidates for military detention is harder. But since the end of this conflict may similarly be hard to know, there's a risk that wrong decisions could harm innocent people for a very long time, Goldsmith warns.

One way to get lawmakers to seek utmost accuracy in any detention system, said Goldsmith at a recent Brookings Institution forum, would be to apply it to U.S. citizens as well. "The threat of terrorism can come as easily from a U.S. citizen," he said. He noted, though, that the idea "is controversial and probably a nonstarter." It could also be struck down by the Supreme Court, where there are some strong views that citizenship comes with special constitutional protections.

Cole, the Georgetown law professor, stressed that only detainees fitting a classic war-captive profile – members of an organization against whom Congress has authorized the use of military force, who deliberately act or plan harm in order to advance the military goals of the enemy – should be considered for preventive detention. Other terrorists, he said, "should be dealt with through the criminal law." Broadening the field, he said, would be "a first step on a slippery slope of a broader use of preventive detention for other crimes."

Some opponents of preventive detention say it's Orwellian that such a system would imprison a person based on future dangerousness. But, says Cole, even if "we can't predict the future," it is possible to measure whether there is "a substantial risk that someone will engage in future dangerous conduct. Waiting for a wrong is not adequate." Such judgments are made all the time, he said, in civil commitment proceedings, bail hearings and immigration decisions. He said that the key was to focus the inquiry narrowly, not on suspects' character or beliefs, but on "whether they pose a risk of returning to the battle."

Retired U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, who as a military lawyer represented Hamdan in his commission trial, worries that a preventive detention option will allow inaccurate judgments of dangerousness. He said that, after hearing all the evidence, "military [jurors] didn't view Mr. Hamdan as a substantial war criminal." But someone like Hamdan would be a prime candidate for indefinite detention over prosecution, he said: "The indicia of his criminality were extremely low, but his proximity to bin Laden was extremely high. The adversary system helped show how Hamdan was not dangerous – the question is, whether a national security court would allow that."

Crucial questions will have to be answered about what burden of proof the government would have to meet to put someone in preventive detention. In civil trials, the prevailing party has to win by a preponderance of the evidence – meaning it's more likely than not that the party is right. The criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is much higher. Cole advocates that preventive detention be permitted if the government shows "clear and convincing evidence" that the detainee fits certain dangerousness criteria – the current standard for deciding whether an ordinary criminal suspect can be released on bail.

Proponents agree the government should have to periodically renew its case for detaining a person. While wartime detention permits imprisonment until the end of hostilities, no one assumes that it will be clear when hostilities with al-Qaida and its affiliates have ended. Holder said at his confirmation hearing that he could see such reviews happening annually.

Any new system will also have to build in rights for people facing detention. Should they have lawyers of their own choosing? Can hearsay evidence – the testimony of people who don't have to show up in court and answer for themselves – be accepted against them, as it is under certain exceptions in ordinary court proceedings?

Should detention hearings be open or secret? Federal courts are permitted to seal documents or close sessions in cases involving classified or other sensitive information. The presumption, however, is that the courts are open. Goldsmith said preventive detention proceedings should also be presumed public, calling it "essential" to establishing legitimacy here and abroad.

Finally, there is the question of who will decide. The Supreme Court has said that a neutral decision-maker is required to ensure due process for detainees. One of many criticisms of Guantanamo's Combatant Status Review Tribunals – instituted by the Bush administration and still in effect today – is that the decision-makers are subordinates of the very military commanders who claim the detainees should be held as enemy combatants. Most current proposals for a new detention system say independent federal judges should make the final call.

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

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EPA Administrator Forecasts Potential Shift on Bush-Era Drilling Loophole

By Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica

Signaling the potential for an important policy reversal, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a congressional hearing on Tuesday that the agency would consider revisiting its controversial position that a popular natural gas drilling technique doesn't harm groundwater.

A 2004 study (PDF) conducted by the EPA concluded that hydraulic fracturing -- a process that involves pummeling the earth with millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals to extract natural gas -- causes "no threat" to underground drinking water.

The study is often used by the gas industry to rebut concerns over drinking water contamination. It was also the main basis for a provision in a 2005 energy bill that exempts hydraulic fracturing from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The bill says the process is exempt because it doesn't harm groundwater. Opponents of the exemption are trying to repeal it, and a new study from the EPA would add muscle to their argument.

A ProPublica investigation co-published with BusinessWeek last November identified serious flaws in the EPA's 2004 study. We found that the agency negotiated directly with the gas industry before finalizing its conclusions and ignored evidence that the process might indeed contaminate water supplies.

Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) expressed concern [5] about these issues and recent reports of contamination near drill sites. At a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior hearing on Tuesday, he asked Jackson whether the emerging evidence would prompt the EPA to revise its previous conclusions.

Jackson said she recognized that the current regulations restrict the EPA's ability to protect groundwater and said the issue "was well worth looking into." But she didn't say how the EPA would approach the problem or whether the 2004 study would be revised.

A spokesperson for Jackson would not elaborate on her remarks.

The statement has stirred optimism among environmentalists who have been urging the EPA and Congress to repeal the exemption. They feel it's a sign that the Obama administration is willing to take a fresh look at the Bush administration's legacy on gas drilling.

"Big ships turn slowly," said Bruce Baizel, an attorney with the Oil and Gas Accountability Project, "but I think this is the first time EPA has acknowledged that maybe their previous conclusions were not entirely supported by sound science."

Industry representatives contend that fracturing is safe and dispute the claim that the process has been linked to water contamination. They also maintain that fracturing is best regulated by individual states, rather than the federal government.

"The EPA study is one of several studies done by a variety of different interests in the past decade, and I don't believe that there is any compelling evidence that the risk has changed since 2004," said Lee Fuller, vice president of government relations for the Independent Petroleum Association of America. "The reports mentioned (in the hearing) have been analyzed to show that they are not related to hydraulic fracturing."

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The White House Is Open to Your Suggestions on Openness

by Jennifer LaFleur, ProPublica

Got suggestions for how to open the federal government to citizens? The Obama administration is ready to listen.

In a notice published in today's Federal Register, the president's Office of Science and Technology Policy called on the public to send recommendations via a new White House Web page -- www.whitehouse.gov/open -- or via e-mail at opengov@ostp.gov.

Today's solicitation follows up on a memo (PDF) that President Obama issued on his second day in office, which called for his chief technology officer, the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration to write a directive for making government more open. Obama pointed to three key principles of open government: transparency to help citizens know what their government is doing, citizens' participation in government, and tools for collaboration across all levels of government.

Whether your suggestion is about a specific agency or directed across the board, the administration is seeking answers to some of these questions:

What information should be available online?
How can government be more transparent?
How can citizens better participate in decision-making?
How can the effectiveness of openness be measured?

Get thinking -- the deadline for submissions is June 19. Comments, even those that come in by e-mail, may be made available to the public.

For one open-records advocate, Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, getting agencies to manage electronic records is her No. 1 recommendation. "We now have no assurance that the records of the government that are being created electronically are being managed and preserved," she said.

She also hopes to see a culture shift from federal agencies' seeing information as belonging to them rather than to the public.

"We're glad the process is finally in place," she added.

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Stunning 91% of Conservatives Call Obama 'Socialist,' 'Marxist,' 'Communist' Or 'Fascist'

An overwhelming 91 percent of the conservative Republican base label President Obama a socialist, Marxist, communist, or fascist, according to a new online poll conducted on a conservative website.

Some 1,848 self-identified conservatives, 46 percent label Obama "socialist," 24 percent as "Marxist," 11 percent as "communist," and 10 percent as "fascist."

Only 7 percent responding to the poll on the ConservativeHQ.com website consider the president to be a liberal (5 percent), or a progressive (2 percent). The poll was conducted May 12 through 19, according an announcement of the poll results.

The poll results come amidst official efforts by the Republican National Committee to label Democrats as the "Democrat Socialist Party."

"While this is not a scientific poll of conservatives, it is a meaningful indicator that most conservatives (the GOP base) see Obama as a dangerous radical," says Richard Viguerie, chairman of ConservativeHQ.com and a longtime conservative author and activist. "Rather than Americans coming together as a result of the election, it appears that America is becoming much more polarized.

"Because so many conservatives see President Obama as a radical leftist, Republican politicians will be under pressure to step up their criticism of President Obama and the Democrats who are closely cooperating with him," says Viguerie, author of Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause.

The strong perception among conservatives likely will make Obama's outreach to the GOP for bipartisanship more difficult.

"It will also make compromise more difficult for GOP officials. Any Republican who wants to be a national leader will feel obligated to view Obama as the vast majority of the GOP base sees him," says Viguerie, credited as a pioneer of political direct mail.

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Analysis Shows Bill Would Curb Billions In Credit Card Penalty Charges

A full 82 percent of credit cards allow penalty interest rate hikes that could last indefinitely, giving responsible cardholders no right to return to the originally agreed upon interest rate, according to a new issue brief from The Pew Charitable Trusts' Safe Credit Cards Project. A unique Senate proposal known as a "cure period" will help curb penalty interest charges that add billions to Americans' credit card debt, the analysis finds.

Pew's analysis also finds:

Americans are on track to pay credit card penalty interest charges of more than $7 billion annually.

The median allowable penalty rate was 28 percent (double the average non-penalty rate), adding $500 in penalties per year to a typical cardholder's account.

Both the U.S. House and Senate recently passed legislation that will halt many harmful and widely used credit card practices. But only the Senate bill contains a "cure period" that will ensure that cardholders have the opportunity to return to their original interest rate after six months of on-time payments. The cure period would significantly curb penalty interest charges.

The House today passed a final, stronger, Senate version of the credit card reform bill by a vote of 361 to 64. The Senate passed the bill yesterday and it now goes to President Obama, who is expected to sign it into law later this week.

"Hardworking families shouldn't be penalized indefinitely, month after month, simply for making a late payment," says Nick Bourke, manager of Pew's Safe Credit Cards Project. "The cure period in the Senate bill gives consumers the ability to earn back a fair interest rate by making consistent, on-time payments. This is a common sense provision that helps ensure that both credit card companies and consumers are using credit responsibly; and it is critical that a cure period be part of the final bill signed into law."

The Pew Safe Credit Cards Project studied all credit cards offered online by the largest 12 issuers, which control nearly 90 percent of outstanding credit card debt in America. This study included more than 400 credit cards. The project specifically examined the consumer cost of penalty interest rates, which are imposed by credit card issuers on existing and future balances when a payment is received late. In 82 percent of cases, the higher interest rate can apply for as long as the consumer owns the card.

"By preserving the cure period in the final credit card bill, Congress can throw a lifeline to consumers who are struggling to pay their debts responsibly," says Bourke. "The cure period is essential to comprehensive credit card reform and we strongly urge congressional leaders to include this provision in the final version of the bill sent to President Obama."

The Pew Safe Credit Cards Project develops and promotes standards for consumer-friendly credit cards to help ensure the financial security of all Americans. The project, which is operated by The Pew Charitable Trusts, developed the Standards in partnership with the Sandler Foundation.

Other consumer groups also hailed the credit card reform.

"We commend the leadership of Senator [Chris] Dodd [D-Conn.] and Senator [Richard] Shelby [R-Ala.], the Senate Banking Committee and the senators whose votes ensured passage of H.R. 627, the Credit CARD Act," says Michael Calhoun, President of the Center for Responsible Lending. "This bill, which received overwhelming bipartisan support, will provide consumers with significant protections from industry practices that extract billions of dollars in unfair fees and interest from cardholders every year."

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Is the Stimulus Stimulating Jobs? We May Never Know for Sure

by Olga Pierce, ProPublica

The Obama administration has unveiled its plan for measuring how well the stimulus package works, and the bottom line is: Many questions will remain unanswered.

While pitching the stimulus package, the administration batted around the number 3.5 million when talking up how many jobs would be created or saved, based on an estimate by Christina Romer, an economist who now heads the Council of Economic Advisers, and a colleague in what was then the office of Vice President-elect Joe Biden.

The administration’s jobs estimate relied on some broad rules of thumb (otherwise known as multipliers), assuming, for example, that every one percent of GDP the government spends will result in a 1.6 percent increase in GDP and that every one percent increase in GDP equals about 1 million jobs saved or created.

But that was just an estimate to pitch the plan, and soon hard numbers will start flooding in from agencies and contractors telling us exactly how many workers the $787 billion stimulus package has saved, right?

Not exactly.

A report recently released by the Council of Economic Advisers (PDF), a three-member team tasked with advising the president on economic affairs, suggests that real-world data will not supply a firm standard of accountability for stimulus spending any time soon. The report is the first in a series of quarterly reports tracking the effects of the stimulus.

In the short run, the council instructs agencies to use the rule that $92,000 equals one job-year (one job for one year) to determine how much employment their programs are generating. The $92,000 number is derived using the administration’s earlier macroeconomic assumptions and, the report says, is intended to make agency estimates mirror the administration’s. This will make the agencies’ numbers a poor check on the administration’s job figures.

Later, data will begin to come in from recipients of stimulus funding, which are required to carefully report how many jobs are created or saved. This is more complicated than it seems.

Surely you count the employees of the construction contractor hired to renovate the government building, for example, but do you count the subcontractors hired by the contractor? And what about workers at the paint factory who would have been laid off without business from the construction project? What about workers at the nearby grocery store who keep their jobs because of increased business from hungry construction workers and paint manufacturers?

The report offers a sneak peek at the final guidelines the Office of Management and Budget is expected to release soon for addressing these very questions.

In the renovation example above, the construction contractor’s employees and the subcontracted workers would count as jobs created or saved, but the other jobs wouldn’t, according to the guidelines.

The contractor would then submit a report with the number of jobs created and saved, expressed in full-time equivalents (the total hours of work created divided by the number of hours worked by a full-time worker), along with a brief description of the types of work involved, which will later be used to evaluate the quality of jobs created by stimulus funding.

Lest employers be tempted to cheat, the OMB will check the data for “completeness and plausibility” by looking for outliers among similar projects and cross-checking information about expenses and wages with labor market data from the region.

Why can’t we just add up the numbers from these reports to find an aggregate number of jobs created by stimulus spending? There are several problems with this, according to the report.

The first is that those reports will only document job creation from the $271 billion in direct government spending – the rest of the stimulus was spent on tax cuts, state fiscal relief and transfer payments like Social Security and food stamps. No direct reports will ever come in on the number of jobs created by those expenditures.

The second is that the reports will only measure direct job creation (think of the construction example above) and not indirect effects, even though the administration is counting on indirect job creation to reach its 3.5 million job mark at the end of 2010.

Finally, the council apparently doesn’t trust those reports very much.

“There will likely be inconsistencies and measurement error across the individual reports,” the council writes. “This limitation is present whenever thousands of recipients with very different types of projects are asked to provide information.”

But the Obama administration does have a rough estimate of how many jobs will be created by direct government spending. (For the record, $100 billion creates 1,085,355 job-years.) So what happens if its estimate differs from the direct job-creation reports?

The answer, given by a senior administration official, is enough to make any social scientist squeamish: “It will be a two-way test of how good the numbers we get back will be and also a test of multipliers.”

In other words, if the job-creation numbers the administration gets from real-world data disagree with its estimates, they reserve the right to blame the data. From an accountability perspective, this will make it difficult to assess the stimulus’ successes and failures.

But Romer and her associates propose some avenues for evaluating their own estimates, like regular checks to see if money has gone out on schedule, microeconomic analyses to estimate the number of indirect jobs that result from government spending, and comparisons of the unemployment rate with baseline forecasts of the unemployment rate without stimulus.

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Hearing Airs Horror Stories on Abuse of School Kids

By Christina Jewett, ProPublica

Members of Congress expressed outrage at a hearing this afternoon, and it had nothing to do with freewheeling finance titans or fairy-tale financial devices.

The Government Accountability Office presented them with horror stories of another kind: One teacher duct-taped children to a chair. Another put kids as young as 6 years old in strangleholds. Another killed a student by sitting on him, and then continued teaching in another state.

The stories were straight from a report released by the GAO today and discussed with the House Committee on Education and Labor. It examines the issue of children, many with disabilities, being restrained or put in isolation in schools and institutions.

We noted a report on the topic released in January, which described the problem in chilling detail -- and put it in historical context. Laws passed in 1978 led to the full inclusion of disabled children in public schools. But in the 31 years since then, few teachers have been trained to handle the difficult behavior issues some of the children present.

At today's hearing, Toni Price testified about the death of her foster son, Cedric, who had been emotionally traumatized in his birth home.

She knew the 14-year-old was having trouble with his eighth-grade teacher. But that didn't prepare her for a call that her son was being rushed to the hospital, not breathing. She later learned that when her son had refused to stay in his seat, his 230-pound teacher sat on the 129-pound boy's back as he lay prone on the floor. The death was eventually ruled a homicide, but no criminal charges were filed.

The teacher was put on a Texas registry of people found to have abused children, but she turned up teaching in Virginia.

"If I'd treated Cedric that way at home, I'd be in jail," Price said.

The report pointed to a lack of uniform regulations, policies or laws on the topic. There is no national law, nor any legislation in 19 states, regulating the restraint and seclusion of children in public or private schools. Existing laws form a patchwork of guidelines.

At the end of the hearing, Rep. George Miller said the committee would reconvene.

"It's clear that the current situation is unacceptable and cannot continue in the manner that it has," he said.

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