Today is the 9th anniversary of the receipt of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Center for Constitutional Rights is holding events for "Obama's Guantanamo", beginning at 11:45 this morning with a Demonstration with street theater, signs, and speakers, and announcement of 12-day fast at White House Plaza, between Lafayette Park and “picture postcard” zone.

To mark the beginning of the ninth year of detention without charge or trial at Guantánamo on Monday, January 11, activists and lawyers of detained men will rally, march and hold a briefing to outline current issues related to President Obama’s Guantanamo, demand that the president make good on his pledge to close the prison, and declare their opposition to any plan for holding prisoners without charge or trial in the U.S.

...This is Obama’s Guantánamo now. He has failed in his pledge to close the island prison from a lack of leadership, bowing to the pressures of partisan grandstanding, and vigorous attempts to keep all cases out of the courts. The transparency we were promised has been discarded. This is an anniversary that should not have come.”

Details of today's events are below:

One of the more interesting conundrums of the health bill negotiations is the desire to increase the affordability provisions of the bill (in essence, the subsidies, the Medicaid eligibility will almost certainly remain at 133% of FPL as set by the Senate bill) while at the same time cutting the reach of the excise tax (without replacing it with with the House surtax on the wealthy.) E.J. Dionne writes:

Almost everyone in both houses wants to find ways of making insurance more affordable. Steps in this direction would include more generous subsidies for the purchase of insurance than those in the Senate bill and expanding its Medicaid provisions. The bill's price tag will grow from the Senate's $871 billion over a decade, probably to somewhere between $930 billion and $950 billion.

Expanding Medicaid eligibility would actually make the bill cheaper, because Mediciad will be less expensive than subsidizing the purchase of private insurance. Of course, it will not happen because that takes away market share from the insurance companies. The question then is how would the expanded subsidies be paid for? The excise tax is under assault:

Matt Yglesias riffing off of E.J. Dionne:

Something I think it’s sometimes difficult for “sensible liberal” pragmatists of my own ilk to keep in mind is that it’s a good thing for the cause of sensible meliorationist liberal pragmatism to see some feisty folks with a more radical vision gaining some traction in the public discourse. Being sensible and pragmatic only works when there’s some people out there anchoring the debate and giving you the opportunity to be the sensible pragmatist rather than the wild-eyed radical.

Why it is difficult to keep that in mind is beyond me. I for one have been writing about the potential for the Left blogosphere to play that role for years. People like Yglesias are intent on being Very Serious People (I call them Village Bloggers for a reason.) The Left blogs needed to resist that siren call. More . .

The reason there is such a complete merger of interest among low-life tabloids, Matt Drudge, reality shows and the Washington political press corps is precisely because they are indeed indistinguishable -- merged. -- Glenn Greenwald

The old saying is that "politics is show business for ugly people." The new book by Mark Halperin and John Heileman proves this as well as anything recently has. Glenn Greenwald writes:

A federal court in San Francisco today will hear gay marriage arguments in a first of a kind non-jury trial today:

The nation's first trial on same-sex couples' right to marry - and the voters' power to forbid those marriages - begins today in a San Francisco federal courtroom that will serve as a forum for two diametrically opposed worldviews.

The main issue:

whether Prop. 8 violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender, or whether it validly reserves marital status for those who can naturally conceive children.

The Judge is Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, a 1989 appointee of President George H.W. Bush. Barring a last minute intervention, you can watch the proceedings on a delayed basis on You Tube here.

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument at 11:30 a.m. Monday on Briscoe, et al., v. Virginia (07-11191). This is unusual, in that the Court is going to hear the same arguments it ruled on last June in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts (opinion here.)

In June, the court ruled for the defense, which had objected to the state's reliance on an affidavit to prove a substance was cocaine. The defense said it was entitled to the live testimony of the chemist so it could cross-examine him or her. The Court agreed with the defense that live testimony was required under the Sixth Amendment's right to confront witnesses.

Scotus blog says since the ruling, 26 states and the District of Columbia have urged that the decision be overruled, hence, arguments tomorrow at which the Court may also decide to limit the right.

It's an important right, and I tell a story here about how having that right changed the outcome in one of my cocaine cases many years ago.

Professor Paul Campos makes some good points equating the failed war on drugs with the war on terror, also doomed to be a failure the way we're approaching it now:

After spending hundreds of billions of dollars and imprisoning millions of people, it's slowly beginning to become possible for some politicians to admit that fighting a necessarily endless drug war in pursuit of an impossible goal might be a bad idea. How long will it take to admit that an endless war on terror, dedicated to making America a terror-free nation, is equally nonsensical?

What then is to be done? A little intelligence and a few drops of courage remind us that life is full of risk, and that of all the risks we confront in America every day, terrorism is a very minor one. Taking prudent steps to reasonably minimize the tiny threat we face from a few fanatic criminals need not grant them the attention they crave. Continuing to play Terrorball, on the other hand, guarantees that the terrorists will always win, since it places the bar for what counts as success for them practically on the ground.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Monday, a federal judge in New York will hear arguments in the case of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the former Guantanamo detainee charged in the 1998 African Embassy attacks.

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first Guantanamo Bay prisoner to be prosecuted in a civilian U.S. court, says charges against him should be dismissed because he was not given a speedy trial. He is charged in the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. They killed 224 people, including a dozen Americans.

His lawyers say he was arrested in Pakistan on July 24, 2004 and held in secret camps where he was questioned until September 2006, when he was moved to Guantanamo.

The Government insists in this the delay was necessary for national security reasons: "lives were at stake." [More...]

Gen. David Petraeus (Will Forte) and President Ali Abdullah Saleh (Fred Armisen) host a press conference on U.S. aid to Yemen and al Qaeda last night on SNL.

First, Ezra Klein's fairy tales:

The subsidy scheme: This one's really a no-brainer. The House's legislation makes insurance more affordable than the Senate's does. And really, that's what this process is all about. The House would expand Medicaid coverage to households with incomes of up to 150 percent of the poverty level, rather than the 133 percent proposed by the Senate. And between 150 percent and 300 percent of the poverty level, the House's subsidies are stronger, helping people buy better insurance, at a lower cost, with less out-of-pocket risk, than the Senate bill. For decades, Democrats have worked to ease the plight for folks who can't afford insurance. To come this far only to choose the less generous subsidy scheme would be like building a grand house only to decide to save a few bucks by not putting locks on the doors.

(Emphasis supplied.) Yet that is exactly what is going to happen. The price tag for the bill is set at less than 900 billion. It ain't changing. So what then Ezra? More . . .

More NFL playoffs. The Ravens travel to Foxboro to play the Pats. I like Baltimore (+3.5).

The Packers are road favorites over Arizona. The Packers beat the Cardinals last week. The Packers look the better team. I like the Cardinals (+2).

In the real world, neither games seems bettable to me.

This is an Open Thread.

I'm told there's a football game on, so I guess that's what BTD is up to.

The TL kid is coming over for dinner. He asked me to make one of my mother's recipes he loved as a kid: chicken in a pot, with mashed potatoes. He doesn't know it but all you do is saute some onions and garlic in olive oil, add some chicken breasts, salt, pepper and paprika, and then after they are brown on both sides, add some chicken broth and 1/2 cup sweet vermouth.

If you're not watching football, ABC is replaying the opening episode of The Bachelor. It's already been leaked who wins (I won't tell here), so now watching it is all about the edit and the melt-downs along the way.

And in the election department, Public Policy Polling has the Martha Coakley senate race at a toss-up: Republican Scott Brown leads her by one point. Good.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.