Well, looky here. Harry Reid is sending a not-so-veiled message to the insurance industry: You want to play dirty? We can play dirty, too. Here's hoping this legislation has a chance of getting passed:

In a rare appearance as a witness at a Senate hearing, the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, told the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that it should repeal a 1945 law that granted the insurance industry limited exemption to national antitrust laws by allowing states to regulate insurers.

The law, the McCarran-Ferguson Act, is often cited by Mr. Reid and other critics of the health insurance industry as a reason why coverage can be so expensive for many people. They say the law allows insurers to monopolize markets and fix prices in ways that are usually illegal.

“Since 1945, the insurance industry has enjoyed exemption from federal antitrust laws because of the McCarran-Ferguson Act,” Mr. Reid said. “Pat McCarran, who was the senior senator from Nevada at the time, lent his name to this piece of legislation. Although we’re both Nevadans, I’m not sure what Pat McCarran had in mind when he pushed this bill. And if Pat were around today, he couldn’t be happy with the state of the insurance industry.”

“Providing an exemption for insurance companies to antitrust laws has been anticompetitive and damaging to the American economy,” Mr. Reid continued. “Health insurance premiums have continued to rise at a rapid rate, forcing businesses to cut back on health insurance coverage and forcing many families to choose between health insurance and basic necessities.”

He added: “Insurance companies have become so large they dominate entire regions of the country. They have become so powerful they block start-up businesses from entering the market, and they put smaller companies out of business. They have become so dominant that they dictate business practices. They are so influential that they exert tremendous influence over public policy.”

The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, has introduced a bill — the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act — that would repeal the insurance industry’s limited exemption.

And some senior Democrats, including Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, have begun calling for Mr. Leahy’s bill to be included in the major health care legislation that is now advancing in Congress.

That effort could gain momentum as Democrats continue to hit back at a main industry trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, which issued a report on Sunday night asserting that the Democrats’ legislation would lead to a steep rise in health insurance premiums.

The White House, Congressional Democrats and other supporters of the legislation have worked to discredit the industry report, which was prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The firm has acknowledged that it looked at only four provisions in the huge health care bill and that it did not take into account federal subsidies that would be made available to help moderate-income Americans buy insurance.

Mr. Schumer, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, issued a news release Wednesday accusing the health insurance industry of trying to “sucker-punch” the Democrats’ health care legislation by issuing the report the day before the Finance Committee voted on its version of the bill.

Spencer was at a Senate hearing and this is very disturbing.

Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective. Asked by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) the politically difficult but entirely fair question about whether terrorism detainees acquitted in courts could be released in the United States, Johnson said that “as a matter of legal authority,” the administration’s powers to detain someone under the law of war don’t expire for a detainee after he’s acquitted in court. “If you have authority under the law of war to detain someone” under the Supreme Court’s Hamdi ruling, “that is true irrespective of what happens on the prosecution side.”

Martinez looked surprised. “So the prosecution is moot?” he asked.

“No, no, not in my judgment,” Johnson said. But the scenario he outlined strongly suggested it is. If an administration review panel “determines this person is a security threat” and “for some reason is not convicted of a lengthy prison sentence, I think we have the authority to continue to detain someone” under “law of war authority” as granted by the September 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, Johnson said. And beyond that source of authority “we have the authority in the first place.” I’m no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like Johnson is claiming inherent presidential authority from the Constitution to detain someone after he’s been acquitted in court if the president believes that person to be a security threat. [Update: I think I'm wrong about that. Johnson is claiming authority from the law-of-war construct for such detentions, and that doesn't stem from any constitutional interpretation of inherent power. Apologies.]

Oh, and Johnson also suggested that the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay might remain open after January 2010, since “you can’t prosecute some significant subset of 220 people before January.” He said the administration will continue to detain some of those Guantanamo detainees, “whether at Guantanamo or somewhere else.”

Glenn Greenwald has much more about the "Unjustice system."

Via Democracy Now!, David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of the HBO series "The Wire," testified Wednesday at a Senate hearing on the future of journalism. He warned that "high-end journalism is dying in America."

"And unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else. The internet is a marvelous tool, and clearly it is the information delivery system of our future. But thus far, it does not deliver much first-generation reporting. Instead, it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from aggregators and abandon its point of origin, namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host.

He points out that most bloggers aren't hanging out at City Hall or at cop bars, trying to cultivate sources:

"... High-end journalism is a profession. It requires daily full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out. Reporting was the hardest and, in some ways, most gratifying job I ever had. I’m offended to think that anyone anywhere believes American monoliths as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs presenting the task — pursuing the task without compensation, training or, for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care who it is they’re lying to or who they’re withholding information from.

Well, yeah. But let me point out here that naive and inexperienced reporters are not unique to blogs. When I was a journalist, I used to run into neophyte Ivy League-grad reporters all the time, and I'd have to explain the simplest things to them. They were baffled when I'd call out some elected official for violating the state Sunshine Act: How did I know that? I'd carefully explain that reporters had attended all the public work sessions, a topic had never been discussed on the record, but there was just a unanimous vote in its favor - with no apparent discussion.

"Oh!" they'd say. But they didn't really understand, and didn't seem to care, either.

Simon also points out that old media can't completely blame new media for the financial pressures that led to its current state:

Anyone listening carefully may have noted that I was brought out of my reporting position in 1995. That’s well before the internet began to threaten the industry, before Craigslist and department store consolidation gutted the ad base, before any of the current economic conditions applied. In fact, when newspaper chains began cutting personnel and content, the industry was one of the most profitable yet discovered by Wall Street. We know now, because bankruptcy has opened the books, that the Baltimore Sun was eliminating its afternoon edition and trimming nearly a hundred reporters and editors in an era when the paper was achieving 37 percent profits.

In short, my industry butchered itself, and we did so at the behest of Wall Street and the same unfettered free market logic that has proven so disastrous for so many American industries. Indeed, the original sin of American newspapering lies in going to Wall Street in the first place.

When locally based family-owned newspapers like the Sun were consolidated into publicly owned newspaper chains, an essential dynamic, an essential trust between journalism and the community served by that journalism was betrayed. Economically, the disconnect is now obvious. What do newspaper executives in Los Angeles or Chicago care whether readers in Baltimore have a better newspaper, especially when you can make more money putting out a mediocre paper than a worthy one? Where family ownership might have been content with ten or 15 percent profit, the chains demanded double that and more. And the cutting began, long before the threat of new technology was ever sensed.

I would really love to sit down and have a beer with this guy.