Tuesday Open Thread [5.21.13]

Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R), the Republican nominee for Attorney General in Virginia, had introduced legislation in 2009 to require women to report their miscarriages to their local police department. Not only that, these devastated women would have to provide information in their report on the location of the fetus’ remains. Or else what, you ask? Well, if the mother did not report her miscarriage to the police, she would be charged and presumably be found guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor, which in Virginia carries a maximum sentence of “confinement in jail for not more than twelve months and a fine of not more than $2,500.” And they wonder why women, nationwide and in Virginia, have a problem voting Republican. Hey Assshain, oh excuse me, Obenshain, a woman’s miscarriage is none of your goddamn business, nor the government’s. It is a horrible tragedy for expectant mothers to go through. And you want to make their pain worse. Go fuck yourself.

You want proof that Hillary is running in 2016, and trying to secure her left flank that gave her such problems in 2008? Then check out these reports that Clinton was the one over the last four years trying to close Gitmo.

One recent plea, two sources told Newsweek, came from Hillary Clinton, who, just before she left office in January 2013, sent a two-page confidential memo to Obama about Guantánamo. Clinton had, during her years in the administration, occasionally jumped into the fray to push her colleagues to do more on the issue. One of those occasions was at a White House meeting of Obama’s national-security principals in August 2010. “We are throwing the president’s commitment to close Guantánamo into the trash bin,” she chastised White House aides, according to three participants in the meeting. “We are doing him a disservice by not working harder on this.”
But at the end of the day, Clinton had little leverage to get the White House to act. Now, in one of her last moves as secretary of State, she was making a final effort to prod her boss to do more. Her memo was replete with practical suggestions for moving ahead on Gitmo. Chief among them: Obama needed to appoint a high-level official to be in charge of the effort, someone who had clout and proximity to the Oval Office. Further, Clinton argued that Obama could start transferring the 86 detainees who’d already been cleared for release. (Congress has imposed onerous restrictions on the administration’s ability to transfer Gitmo detainees—including a stipulation that the secretary of Defense certify that detainees sent to other countries would not engage in acts of terrorism. In her memo, Clinton pointed out that the administration could use “national-security waivers” to circumvent the restriction.)

The Clinton missive perturbed White House aides, who viewed it as an attempt to put them on the spot, according to a senior administration official. It’s unclear how Obama himself reacted to the memo; there’s no evidence that it spurred him to action. (The White House declined to comment for this story.) But whether or not the memo played a role in changing the president’s thinking, the mere fact that Clinton felt the need to write it was noteworthy, because it suggested the degree to which Guantánamo, four years into the Obama presidency, remained an irritant for her—and for many other high-level administration officials as well.