REAL shock ‘n awe!

November 10th, 2008

Shocking — it’s all shocking … and in a good way. On election night, my daughter was working at her local polling station. As the clock neared 8 pm, I told the grandarlin’s … who were watching the election coverage with their Dad and me … that their Mom was going to be done with her job in just a moment. As the clock hit 8 … the West Coast turned blue … and just a moment later, Obama was announced as the winner. Tick - Tock - BAM!

Now, as we learn what has already been planned in the Obama presidency … it’s all a matter of tick, tock, bam! Bush is lingering like a ghost that won’t go away, but January will come quickly.

Gitmo closed. Stem cell given a green light. Sex ed and family planning back in vogue. Environmental protections reestablished. And more — things we thought lost … rethought, reconfigured, restored.

Shocking! And if you don’t think so, read the last article — even the Pentagon wants an end to it.

What a New Year’s gift, huh??

Jude

Obama Plans Guantanamo Close, US Trials
MATT APUZZO and LARA JAKES JORDAN, HuffPo
November 10, 2008

WASHINGTON — President-elect Obama’s advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice.

During his campaign, Obama described Guantanamo as a “sad chapter in American history” and has said generally that the U.S. legal system is equipped to handle the detainees. But he has offered few details on what he planned to do once the facility is closed.

Under plans being put together in Obama’s camp, some detainees would be released and many others would be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts.

A third group of detainees - the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information - might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks. Advisers participating directly in the planning spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans aren’t final.

The move would be a sharp deviation from the Bush administration, which established military tribunals to prosecute detainees at the Navy base in Cuba and strongly opposes bringing prisoners to the United States. Obama’s Republican challenger, John McCain, had also pledged to close Guantanamo. But McCain opposed criminal trials, saying the Bush administration’s tribunals should continue on U.S. soil.

The plan being developed by Obama’s team has been championed by legal scholars from both political parties. But it is almost certain to face opposition from Republicans who oppose bringing terrorism suspects to the U.S. and from Democrats who oppose creating a new court system with fewer rights for detainees.

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and Obama legal adviser, said discussions about plans for Guantanamo had been “theoretical” before the election but would quickly become very focused because closing the prison is a top priority. Bringing the detainees to the United States will be controversial, he said, but could be accomplished.

“I think the answer is going to be, they can be as securely guarded on U.S. soil as anywhere else,” Tribe said. “We can’t put people in a dungeon forever without processing whether they deserve to be there.”

The tougher challenge will be allaying fears by Democrats who believe the Bush administration’s military commissions were a farce and dislike the idea of giving detainees anything less than the full constitutional rights normally enjoyed by everyone on U.S. soil.

“There would be concern about establishing a completely new system,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the House Judiciary Committee and former federal prosecutor who is aware of the discussions in the Obama camp. “And in the sense that establishing a regimen of detention that includes American citizens and foreign nationals that takes place on U.S. soil and departs from the criminal justice system - trying to establish that would be very difficult.”

Obama has said the civilian and military court-martial systems provide “a framework for dealing with the terrorists,” and Tribe said the administration would look to those venues before creating a new legal system. But discussions of what a new system would look like have already started.

“It would have to be some sort of hybrid that involves military commissions that actually administer justice rather than just serve as kangaroo courts,” Tribe said. “It will have to both be and appear to be fundamentally fair in light of the circumstances. I think people are going to give an Obama administration the benefit of the doubt in that regard.”

Though a hybrid court may be unpopular, other advisers and Democrats involved in the Guantanamo Bay discussions say Obama has few other options.

Prosecuting all detainees in federal courts raises a host of problems. Evidence gathered through military interrogation or from intelligence sources might be thrown out. Defendants would have the right to confront witnesses, meaning undercover CIA officers or terrorist turncoats might have to take the stand, jeopardizing their cover and revealing classified intelligence tactics.

In theory, Obama could try to transplant the Bush administration’s military commission system from Guantanamo Bay to a U.S. prison. But Tribe said, and other advisers agreed, that was “a nonstarter.” With lax evidence rules and intense secrecy, the military commissions have been criticized by human rights groups, defense attorneys and even some military prosecutors who quit the process in protest.

“I don’t think we need to completely reinvent the wheel, but we need a better tribunal process that is more transparent,” Schiff said.

That means something different would need to be done if detainees couldn’t be released or prosecuted in traditional courts. Exactly what that something would look like remains unclear.

According to three advisers participating in the process, Obama is expected to propose a new court system, appointing a committee to decide how such a court would operate. Some detainees likely would be returned to the countries where they were first captured for further detention or rehabilitation. The rest could probably be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts, one adviser said. All spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing talks, which have been private.

Whatever form it takes, Tribe said he expects Obama to move quickly.

“In reality and symbolically, the idea that we have people in legal black holes is an extremely serious black mark,” Tribe said. “It has to be dealt with.” ++

Obama Positioned to Quickly Reverse Bush Actions
Stem Cell, Climate Rules Among Targets of President-Elect’s Team
Ceci Connolly and R. Jeffrey Smith, The Washington Post
Sunday, November 9, 2008

Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition.

In some instances, Obama would be quickly delivering on promises he made during his two-year campaign, while in others he would be embracing Clinton-era policies upended by President Bush during his eight years in office.

“The kind of regulations they are looking at” are those imposed by Bush for “overtly political” reasons, in pursuit of what Democrats say was a partisan Republican agenda, said Dan Mendelson, a former associate administrator for health in the Clinton administration’s Office of Management and Budget. The list of executive orders targeted by Obama’s team could well get longer in the coming days, as Bush’s appointees rush to enact a number of last-minute policies in an effort to extend his legacy.

A spokeswoman said yesterday that no plans for regulatory changes had been finalized. “Before he makes any decisions on potential executive or legislative actions, he will be conferring with congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, as well as interested groups,” Obama transition spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said. “Any decisions would need to be discussed with his Cabinet nominees, none of whom have been selected yet.”

Still, the preelection transition team, comprising mainly lawyers, has positioned the incoming president to move fast on high-priority items without waiting for Congress.

Obama himself has signaled, for example, that he intends to reverse Bush’s controversial limit on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, a decision that scientists say has restrained research into some of the most promising avenues for defeating a wide array of diseases, such as Parkinson’s.

Bush’s August 2001 decision pleased religious conservatives who have moral objections to the use of cells from days-old human embryos, which are destroyed in the process.

But Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said that during Obama’s final swing through her state in October, she reminded him that because the restrictions were never included in legislation, Obama “can simply reverse them by executive order.” Obama, she said, “was very receptive to that.” Opponents of the restrictions have already drafted an executive order he could sign.

The new president is also expected to lift a so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal, said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he rescinded the Reagan-era regulation, known as the Mexico City policy, but Bush reimposed it.

“We have been communicating with his transition staff” almost daily, Richards said. “We expect to see a real change.”

While Obama said at a news conference last week that his top priority would be to stimulate the economy and create jobs, his advisers say that focus will not delay key shifts in social and regulatory policies, including some — such as the embrace of new environmental safeguards — that Obama has said will have long-term, beneficial impacts on the economy.

The president-elect has said, for example, that he intends to quickly reverse the Bush administration’s decision last December to deny California the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles. “Effectively tackling global warming demands bold and innovative solutions, and given the failure of this administration to act, California should be allowed to pioneer,” Obama said in January.

California had sought permission from the Environmental Protection Agency to require that greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles be cut by 30 percent between 2009 and 2016, effectively mandating that cars achieve a fuel economy standard of at least 36 miles per gallon within eight years.

Seventeen other states had promised to adopt California’s rules, representing in total 45 percent of the nation’s automobile market. Environmentalists cheered the California initiative because it would stoke innovation that would potentially benefit the entire country.

“An early move by the Obama administration to sign the California waiver would signal the seriousness of intent to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and build a future for the domestic auto market,” said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. ++

Barack Obama ‘to reverse Bush policy on stem cell research and oil drilling’
Times Online
November 10, 2008

Barack Obama, the US president-elect, will use executive powers to reverse his predecessor’s policies on stem cell research and oil exploration in national parks, a senior aide has indicated.

John Podesta, who is handling Mr Obama’s preparations to take over in the White House on January 20, said that Mr Obama was reviewing Mr Bush’s executive orders on those and other issues - believed to include funding family planning in third world countries - as he prepares to put his own stamp on policy after eight years of Republican rule.

“As a candidate, Senator Obama said that he wanted all the Bush executive orders reviewed, and decide which ones should be kept, and which ones should be repealed, and which ones should be amended. And that process is going on. It’s been undertaken,” Mr Podesta said last night.

“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that.

“I think that he feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set.”

Use of executive authority is the quickest way for a new president to exert his power, given that passage of new laws by Congress can be a painfully slow process, even when the chief executive enjoys a legislative majority.

Mr Podesta pointed specifically to two particularly controversial Bush executive orders as candidates for reversal.

“I think across the board, on stem cell research, on a number of areas, you see the Bush administration even today moving aggressively to do things that I think are probably not in the interest of the country,” Mr Podesta said, in what appeared to be a warning shot across the bows of the Bush administration not to press ahead with controversial policies in the dying days of the presidency.

The Senate voted on July 19 to remove restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, only for Mr Bush to veto the legislation the following day. Mr Obama, by contrast, has supported stem cell research in an effort to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

The federal Bureau of Land Management has said that it is opening about 360,000 acres (145,000 hectares) of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling, leading to protests from environmentalists. “They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah,” Mr Podesta said. “I think that’s a mistake.”

Other members of Mr Obama’s team have confirmed that the 44th president intends to “hit the ground running”, in a manner reminiscent of the start of the Blair premiership in Britain in 1997.

Rahm Emmanuel, Mr Obama’s chief of staff, said that the president-elect would spend the next two months putting his team in place and honing his ideas.

“I think that the basic approach has been he’s going to be … in Chicago, setting up his economic, not only his economic team, but the policies he wants to outline for the country as soon as he gets sworn in, so we hit the ground running,” Mr Emanuel said.

Mr Obama has also pledged to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office, although says he will consult the Iraqi government and US commanders before ordering any drawdown.

Speaking on Fox television, Mr Podesta said that Mr Obama was working to build a diverse Cabinet likely to include Republicans and independents, part of the broad coalition that supported Obama during the race against McCain.

Robert Gates, Mr Bush’s Defence Secretary, may also be kept on in post. “He’s not even a Republican,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said on CNN. “Why wouldn’t we want to keep him? He’s never been a registered Republican.”

Congress is to debate a second economic stimulus package in hopes of stopping America’s downward economic spiral during a forthcoming session already written off as “lame duck”.

Mr Obama said at a news conference on Friday that his priority on taking office was such a package that he would work to push through if Congress fails to pass the legislation or if should Mr Bush veto it.

Mr Emanuel would not commit to a Democratic proposal to help the failing American auto industry with some of the $700 billion approved last month by Congress to help the financial sector.

Valerie Jarrett, co-chair of the Obama transition team, told NBC television that Michelle Obama, the next first lady, would first focus on settling her daughters into their new life at the White House.

Then, Ms Jarrett said, the next first lady wanted to help women juggling a career and motherhood, assist military spouses and promote volunteerism.
Today Mr Obama sets foot in the Oval Office for the first time when he meets Mr Bush for a private sit-down talk to discuss the transition of power, a rite of passage between presidents and successors that extends for decades.

The two men are expected to review the nation’s enormous economic downturn and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr Obama will also be given a tour of his new home.

“I’m going to go in there with a spirit of bipartisanship, and a sense that both the president and various leaders of Congress all recognise the severity of the situation right now and want to get stuff done,” Mr Obama said last week. ++

Obama to use executive orders for immediate impact
STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press
Sun Nov 9

WASHINGTON – President-elect Obama plans to use his executive powers to make an immediate impact when he takes office, perhaps reversing Bush administration policies on stem cell research and domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.

John Podesta, Obama’s transition chief, said Sunday Obama is reviewing President Bush’s executive orders on those issues and others as he works to undo policies enacted during eight years of Republican rule. He said the president can use such orders to move quickly on his own.

“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” Podesta said. “I think that he feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set.”

Podesta also said Obama is working to build a diverse Cabinet. That includes reaching out to Republicans and independents — part of the broad coalition that supported Obama during the race against Republican John McCain. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been mentioned as a possible holdover.

“He’s not even a Republican,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said. “Why wouldn’t we want to keep him? He’s never been a registered Republican.”

Obama was elected on a promise of change, but the nature of the job makes it difficult for presidents to do much that has an immediate impact on the lives of average people. Congress plans to take up a second economic aid plan before year’s end — an effort Obama supports. But it could be months or longer before taxpayers see the effect.

Obama could use his executive powers to at least signal that Washington is changing.

“Obama’s advantage of course is he’ll have the House and the Senate working with him, and that makes it easier,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. “But even then, having an immediate impact is very difficult to do because the machinery of government doesn’t move that quickly.”

Presidents long have used executive orders to impose policy and set priorities. One of Bush’s first acts was to reinstate full abortion restrictions on U.S. overseas aid. The restrictions were first ordered by President Reagan and the first President Bush followed suit. President Clinton lifted them soon after he occupied the Oval Office and it wouldn’t be surprising if Obama did the same.

Executive orders “have the power of law and they can cover just about anything,” Tobias said in a telephone interview.

Bush used his executive power to limit federal spending on embryonic stem cell research, a position championed by opponents of abortion rights who argue that destroying embryos is akin to killing a fetus. Obama has supported the research in an effort to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Many moderate Republicans also support the research, giving it the stamp of bipartisanship.

On drilling, the federal Bureau of Land Management is opening about 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling. Bush administration officials argue that the drilling will not harm sensitive areas; environmentalists oppose it.

“They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah,” Podesta said. “I think that’s a mistake.”

Two top House Republicans said there is a willingness to try to work with Obama to get things done. But they said to expect Republicans to serve as a check against the power held by Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress.

“It’s going to be a cheerful opposition,” said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. “We’re going to carry those timeless principles of limited government, a strong defense, traditional values, to the American people.”

Pence, of Indiana, is expected to take over the No. 3 leadership post among House Republicans.

In other transition matters, Obama’s new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would not say whether Obama would return to the Senate for votes during the postelection session this month. Obama’s presence would be extraordinary, given his position as president-elect, especially if Congress takes up a much-anticipated economic stimulus plan.

“I think that the basic approach has been he’s going to be here in Chicago, setting up his economic, not only his economic team, but the policies he wants to outline for the country as soon as he gets sworn in, so we hit the ground running,” Emanuel said.

Also, Emanuel would not commit to a Democratic proposal to help the auto industry with some of the $700 billion approved by Congress to for the financial bailout.

Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a letter Saturday to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that the administration should consider expanding the bailout to include car companies.

Podesta appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” as did Pence, and CNN’s “Late Edition,” where Reid also was interviewed. Emanuel spoke on ABC’s “This Week” and CBS’ “Face the Nation.” ++

Pentagon board says cuts essential
Tells Obama to slash large weapons programs
Bryan Bender, Boston Globe
November 10, 2008

WASHINGTON - A senior Pentagon advisory group, in a series of bluntly worded briefings, is warning President-elect Barack Obama that the Defense Department’s current budget is “not sustainable,” and he must scale back or eliminate some of the military’s most prized weapons programs.

The briefings were prepared by the Defense Business Board, an internal management oversight body. It contends that the nation’s recent financial crisis makes it imperative that the Pentagon and Congress slash some of the nation’s most costly and troubled weapons to ensure they can finance the military’s most pressing priorities.

Those include rebuilding ground forces battered by multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan and expanding the ranks to wage the war on terrorism.
“Business as usual is no longer an option,” according to one of the internal briefings prepared in late October for the presidential transition, copies of which were provided to the Globe. “The current and future fiscal environments facing the department demand bold action.”

The briefings do not specify which programs should be cut, but defense analysts say that prime targets would probably include the new F-35 fight er jet, a series of Navy ship programs, and a massive Army project to build a new generation of ground combat vehicles, all of which have been skyrocketing in cost and suffering long development delays.

Such cuts would affect the New England economy. General Dynamics builds warships and submarines in Maine and Connecticut, while Raytheon, Massachusetts’ largest employer, is involved in numerous weapons programs from ships to missile defenses and satellites.

Pentagon insiders and defense budget specialists say the Pentagon has been on a largely unchecked spending spree since 2001 that will prove politically difficult to curtail but nevertheless must be reined in.

“The forces arrayed against terminating defense programs are today so powerful that if you try to do that it will be like the British Army at the Somme in World War I,” said Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the liberal Center for Defense Information in Washington. “You will just get mowed down by the defense industry and military services’ machine guns.”

Since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, funding has grown for both the annual defense budget and emergency spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The latest Pentagon budget, for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, is an estimated $512 billion, not including more than $800 billion in additional war spending that has been allotted since 2001.

But a series of forces are now at play that make such large expenditures untenable, according to the Defense Business Board, the Pentagon oversight group, which includes about 20 private sector executives appointed by the secretary of defense.

The board, which meets at least four times a year, has a full-time staff and is an official government body. Because the board’s report has not been made public, a Pentagon spokesman would not comment on it.

One factor is historical. Since the end of World War II there have a been four periods of significant increases in US defense spending and all were followed by significant decreases in funding from Congress, the group says.

Added pressure on the Pentagon budget comes from what the briefing calls “fiscal constraint in a tough economy” that is saddled with rising deficits and growing political support for increased government spending in other areas.

“We are all acutely aware there is a financial crisis going on,” said a senior defense official closely involved in the transition process.

Exacerbating the problem, according to the advisory group, are the rising costs of military personnel, their healthcare, and overhead. The documents estimate that more than half the annual defense budget now goes to “people costs,” including $60 billion a year for the healthcare of service members and retirees.

They will almost certainly grow, even with a reduction in US troops in Iraq, given that the Pentagon has said it will increase ground forces by more than 70,000 troops over the next few years.

That leaves dozens of weapons systems and other equipment under development as prime areas for cost-savings, according to Steven Kosiak, vice president of budget studies at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

“The areas most likely to get cut are acquisition and procurement,” Kosiak said. “As long as the administration is committed to increasing troop strength you have to pay those people costs, and there is not a lot of flexibility when it comes to benefits.”

A recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, assessed the Pentagon’s 95 largest weapons programs and found that as of March 2008 they had collectively increased in cost by nearly $300 billion over initial estimates.

“None had proceeded through development while meeting the best-practice standards for mature technologies, stable design, and mature production processes all prerequisites for achieving planned cost and schedule outcomes,” the GAO said in documents published last week to help guide the presidential transition.

It added: “Over the next five years, [the Defense Department] expects to invest more than $357 billion on major defense acquisition programs. Much of this investment will be used to address cost overruns rooted in poor planning, execution, and oversight.”

All the branches of the military are in a similar situation. The Army plans to invest an estimated $160 billion in the coming years on a set of new combat vehicles collectively known as the Future Combat System. But their capabilities “are still early in development and have not yet been demonstrated,” according to GAO.

The Navy, meanwhile, has continued to bust its budget for shipbuilding. The service’s six most recent new ship designs have experienced cumulative cost growth of $2.4 billion over original estimates, according to GAO. Their delivery has also been delayed, on average, by 97 months.

The Air Force’s portfolio for new equipment, meanwhile, “will demand unprecedented levels of funding,” according to GAO’s transition materials. Its development costs have increased nearly 50 percent above original estimates and eight separate programs have had to report cost breaches to Congress.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter - designed for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps and the most costly aircraft procurement effort in history - “faces considerable risks stemming from its decision to reduce test assets and the flight-test program to pay for development and manufacturing cost increases,” according to the GAO.

Other programs suffering from big cost increases and delays include space systems such as satellites and the national missile defense system, the largest research and development program on the Pentagon’s books.

Together these programs constitute a military crisis in their own right, according to the internal Pentagon documents.

The Pentagon, one document states, “cannot reset the current force, modernize and transform in all portfolios at the same time. Choices must be made across capabilities and within systems to deliver capability at known prices within a specific period of time.”

And a few cuts here or there won’t do the trick, they add. “Taking cuts at the margin won’t work this time, nor will pushing things off to later years.” ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves