It's Thursday morning.

This is an Open Thread.

The Bureau of Prisons has confirmed that Bernie Madoff has been transferred from the medium security prison section of Butner Correctional Complex to its Federal Medical Center. It won't say why, but months ago denied he had been diagnosed with cancer or was terminally ill.

The Federal Medical Center at Butner last week housed 946 inmates . It's an administrative facility that houses male inmates of all security levels.

Being sent to a medical center doesn't mean you're catastrophically ill. Former Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham is serving his sentence at the Butner Medical Center, as is blind Sheikh Omar Ahmad Rahman (sentenced to life.)

The final hurdle to a full Senate vote on the health care bill was overcome today. WaPo has more here. The Senate will vote Xmas eve morning at 7 am.

Then it's off to Hawaii for President Obama and family, who postponed the trip a day so he would be in D.C. when the final vote is taken.

As to the health care bill, after it passes the Senate, it's on to the House-Senate conference in January where the bills will be reconciled.

Criminal defense attorney Gerry Shargel makes the argument today at Daily Beast that isolating Guantanamo detainees in a new Supermax facility may be a worse fate and unnecessary.

Do the untried and unconvicted Guantanamo inmates require this level of security? Absent a particularized showing of need, locking up a "detainee" in virtual isolation—unearned suffering—is abject cruelty.

He does a good job of summarizing the draconian conditions at a supermax facility: [more...]

A recent scientific study in Israel has found marijuana may help alleviate PTSD and reverse the effects of stress on memory processes.

The study was conducted by members of the psychology department at Israel's University of Haifa. It was published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Together, our findings may support a wide therapeutic application for cannabinoids in the treatment of conditions associated with the inappropriate retention of aversive memories and stress-related disorders.

[More...]

Balloon Boy parents Richard and Mayumi Heene were each sentenced to stints in the county jail today as conditions of probation for perpetuating the hoax that transfixed the nation a few months ago. (In Colorado, a defendant can be sentenced to up to 90 in days as a condition of probation for a felony and 60 days for a misdemeanor.)

Richard Heene, who last month pleaded guilty to a felony charge of attempting to influence a public servant, will have to serve 30 days of the sentence full-time in the Larimer County jail, with the remaining 60 days served on work-release. Larimer County Court Judge Stephen Schapanski said Heene would start serving the jail sentence on Jan. 11. "I will delay this until after the holiday in fairness mostly to his children,"

Mayumi Heene, who helped hatch the scheme and who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of false reporting, was sentenced to 20 days of jail, to be served through a program that allows her to perform jail-supervised community service a couple days a week and return home at night.

[More...]

Good post from Ezra:

Ben Nelson is getting a lot of blowback for the deal he struck exempting Nebraska from paying for its Medicaid expansion. But though it was his deal, it wasn't his preference. It was Harry Reid's. And Reid made the right decision. [. . .] That's created a few days of bad press, but as Tom Harkin points out, it could eventually lead to good policy. "When you look at it, I thought well, God, good, it is going to be the impetus for all the states to stay at 100 percent [federal funding]," Harkin told reporters. "So he might have done all of us a favor."

Harkin is right about this. One of the best things the bill could do would be to federalize Medicaid, and federalizing the Medicaid expansion is a good first step.

(Emphasis supplied.) If this bill serves as a camel's nose under the tent for federalizing Medicaid while expanding it, it would indeed be one of the most progressive pieces of legislation in some time. It would be ironic if Ben Nelson were the catalyst for that.

Speaking for me only

I'm off to a rocky 1-2 start in the bowl games. Here are my picks for games from 12/23-30, using (using these lines):

Cal (-2.5) over Utah tonight. Nevada (-13) over SMU tomorrow night. In the December 26 games, I like Marshall (+3) over Ohio U., North Carolina (+3) over Pitt and Southern Cal (-7.5) over BC. In the December 27 game, I like Kentucky (+7) over Clemson. In the December 28 game, I like Georgia (-7) over Texas A&M. In the December 29 games, I like UCLA (-4.5) over Temple and the U (of Miami) (-3.5) over Wisconsin. In the December 30 games, I like Bowling Green (-2) over Idaho and Arizona (-1.5) over Nebaska.

This is an Open Thread.

As I have written many times, campaign promises are not worth the paper they are written on. And of course, politicians lying about what they said on the campaign trail was first seen in the time of Pericles. Obama was not the first and will not be the last. His broken promise and dissembling regarding the public option was not HIS first nor will it be his last (NAFTA renegotiation anyone?) Which leads me to my point, They All Disappoint:

And it has regarding the division between proponents of the Senate bill and Senate bill skeptics. Scott Lemieux writes:

I think Nate Silver's decimation of the reconciliation dodge is definitive. Granted, I roughly share his ideological priorities [. . .]

(Emphasis supplied.) Of course, having established himself as a proponent of the regulatory reform framework, there is little reason to read any more of Lemeiux's post. It ends up being a confession, much like President Obama's yesterday, that he did not really care one way or the other about the public option. Silver's "decimation" is really just an argument for the "regulatory reform framework" over the public insurance reform framework:

Closing Guantanamo may not happen until 2011 -- at the earliest. There's no money to buy Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois, and funding possibilities are a long-shot and won't come up for months.

Even once the money is obtained, it will take another 8 to 10 months to turn it into a Supermax, which is a requirement before any transfers take place.

It's obvious Republicans oppose the plan, but some Democrats who support closing Gitmo are uncomfortable with the idea that Obama may hold people at Thomson indefinitely without charges.

The answer: Send them all home or to third countries, except for those against whom criminal charges are filed. Trial here or release. If the Administration only plans to charge 10 to 20 detainees, Thomson is an extravagance. The Southern District and Eastern Districts of New York are up to the task of prosecuting terror cases, as are numerous other districts (including Colorado, where Supermax is located.) Then we'd save a lot of money, Gitmo could be closed soon and there would be no indefinite detention without charges down the pike.

After spending the past 3 hours reading discovery in a new drug case, the only thing that's popping into my mind is this 1984 video by Glenn Frey, a song later made famous by Miami Vice. (Great lyrics too.) Some things are still the same as in 1984 -- informants and wiretaps still rule the day. The differences seem to be drugs are cheaper, Mexico predominates, the busts involve smaller overall quantities but bond is harder to get and sentences are much longer ... and cell phone records bring everybody down.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.