* Secretary Clinton speaks the disturbing truth about drugs

 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this week …

• “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade.”
• “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border … causes the deaths of police, of soldiers and civilians.”

LMW COMMENT …

Secretary Clinton has honestly and forthrightly stated the previously unspoken and frightening truth: there is no solution to the problem of illegal drugs which focuses on those who supply the drugs. The problem is those who use the drugs, who create the demand.

As long as there is demand, there will be supply. Wipe out all of today’s suppliers; a new group will be in place tomorrow. It is a fool’s errand which can never succeed.

So what should we do? Arrest the addicts? Mandate that they undergo treatment? Legalize the drugs and dispense them through a medically controlled process? None of these approaches are attractive, except when you compare them to the nonsensical policies we are currently pretending will work.

Prohibition of the sale of alcohol in the 1920’s was a failed policy that never worked. Somewhat more successful, but hardly a role model, has been our campaign to reduce smoking, especially among young people.

But the bald facts are that many people in our society, and in all societies since history has been recorded, are drug users. Most of these people are drug users because they want  to be, not because they are trapped by suppliers.

There is no solution to this problem, now expressed in a series of vicious murders that is damaging the Mexican tourist industry and threatening to spill over into our border cities in Texas and New Mexico, which fails to address the facts as they are, not as some moralists would like them to be.

The U.S. clearly has, as Secretary Clinton said, a “shared responsibility” for the drug-fueled violence sweeping Mexico. Pious declarations and a war on drug suppliers are a ridiculous unproductive response, a pretense of action to make some people feel good while we stick our heads in the sand and ignore the real problem.

Will we have the courage and the intelligence to actually develop policies that might work? Hillary Clinton has laid down the challenge. Let’s see who picks it up.

 

* let’s help President Obama invest in America’s future; the alternative is truly frightening

Sharon Begley writes in Newsweek (3-23-09) …

• Even if we scale up existing technologies to mind-bending levels, such as finishing one nuclear plant every other day for the next 40 years, we’ll still fall short of how much low-carbon energy will be needed to keep atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide below what scientists now recognize as the point of no return.
• Hence the need for Nobel-caliber discoveries.
• Yet despite the pressing need, DOE spent a pitiful $2 billion to $3 billion on nondefense, basic energy R&D last year, less than one fifth what we spent in the 1970s and 1980s. A new report from the Brookings Institution calls for $20 billion to $30 billion a year and—to improve the odds of success—revamping the nation’s energy labs, which today are “too far removed from the marketplace to produce the kind of transformational research we need for new energy technologies,” says Brookings’s Mark Muro.
• The clock is ticking.

LMW COMMENT …

Similar articles could be (and have been) written about our thus far pathetic efforts to control healthcare costs and educate our population, the other two prongs of President Obama’s plans for investing in America’s future.

Obama’s talk last night emphasized that the alternative of not investing in our future is a sure path to the continued decline of America’s standard of living, our ability to lead the world, and although the president did not go this far, to our very existence as a force of civilization (think Egypt! Think Rome! Think the British empire!).

How different is Obama’s perspective from the ideological Republicans and some conservative Democrats who oppose him, from the Wall Street and other corporate folks whose primary motivation is the blatant greed to take what they can from this year’s profits, however transient and destabilizing such actions may be.

How fortunate for America that we elected a president with vision, patient and persistence. Now our job is to support him, not mindlessly in every detail, but enthusiastically in terms of his overall perspective and direction.

The leadership we need is now in the White House. Let’s do everything we can, in each Congressional district, to get the Obama budget passed, and to avoid the politics-as-usual, small-minded distortions that Congress so often epitomizes.

This is our moment. This is our chance to restore the American dream. We cannot afford to blow this opportunity. Here’s what you can do (and it will make a difference) … 

CALL or EMAIL your Representative and Senators and tell them you want them to support President Obama’s budget.

 

Read the entire Begley column at … http://www.newsweek.com/id/189293

* Obama … doing the best that can be done to play a very bad hand; we need patience not destructive criticism

Joe Nocera writes in the NYT (3-21-09)

• Can we all just calm down a little?

• Yes, the $165 million in bonuses handed out to executives in the financial products division of AIG was infuriating.

• But how does outing these executives fix skewed compensation incentives, which have created that unjustified sense of entitlement that pervades Wall Street?

• I’m worried that the political response is making the crisis worse. The Obama administration appears to have lost its grip on Congress, while the Treasury Department always seems caught off guard by bad news.

• it is in the taxpayers’ best interest to position A.I.G. as a company with many profitable units, worth potentially billions, and one bad unit that needs to be unwound. Which, by the way, is the truth.

• What the country really needs right now from Congress is facts instead of rhetoric.

LMW COMMENT …

Nocera’s article shows uncommon good sense. But I fear he is spitting in the wind.

Congress, elected every two years in 435 districts, is structurally incapable of acting professionally and responsibly, in the manner Nocera (and I) would prefer. Our form of government specifically prohibits the Obama administration, or any administration, from “controlling” Congress.

The individual greed and lack of responsible financial behavior on the part of many Americans is as much to blame as similar qualities on Wall Street and AIG, because it is all part and parcel of the same thing.

We have collectively lived beyond our means for many years and now we must pay the price.

President Obama is, as some are starting to say, and even his fervent supporters (like me) have always known, inexperienced. He has not run companies and he has not run government. But so what? Have those who did run our financial companies and did run our federal, state and local governments show any particular skills that should now be emulated? Does anyone think the McCain/Palin/right wing ideologues would be doing any better?

Obama was handed an incredible mess by the Bush administration. His power to get things straightened out is constrained, by Congress and many other factors over which he nor anyone else will never have control.

However, the most intelligent politician any of us has ever seen is patiently working his way through the issues, with imperfect but still discernible results. I think he is by far the best bet we have of getting to a better if still imperfect place.

Obama is a great threat to the “politics as usual” crowd on both sides of the aisle, which is why the opposition is so fierce. In my view, the political opposition and the 24 hour news media are a counter-productive disgrace, committed as they are to petty argument and destruction. They should be ignored to the greatest extent possible.

We should instead, as responsible citizens, try to consider rationally and generally support the steps Obama is taking, both to solve the financial mess he inherited from those who are now so critical, and to move this country forward toward energy independence, healthcare reform and educational excellence, all of which are essential to our future success as a nation and as a leader of the world. 

                                         

Read Nocera’s entire article at … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/business/21nocera.html?_r=1&hp

 

* the religious right, a creation of Republican cynicism, exits from where it never should have been

Frank Rich writes in today’s NYT (3/15/09) …

•  Someday we’ll learn the whole story of why George W. Bush brushed off that intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

  • But surely a big distraction was the major speech he was readying for delivery on Aug. 9, his first prime-time address to the nation. The subject — which Bush hyped as “one of the most profound of our time” — was stem cells.
  • For a presidency in thrall to a thriving religious right (and a presidency incapable of multi-tasking), nothing, not even terrorism, could be more urgent.

• What has happened between 2001 and 2009 to so radically change the cultural climate?

• Americans have less and less patience for intrusive and divisive moral scolds; the former moral “majority” has been downsized to more of a minority than ever.

LMW COMMENT … What a pleasure to see the retreat of the religious right out of politics where they do not belong. It would be well, however, to reflect on how they became so intrusive. It was the purposeful, cynical strategy of the Republican party to mislead many middle-class Americans who would never benefit from their favor-the-wealthy policies into voting against their own self-interest. Those who voted in such an ignorant manner got what they deserved; unfortunately, the rest of us suffered as well from the worst president in our history.

Read the entire article at … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15rich.html?ref=opinion

 

* Obama ignores his critics; good

Eugene Robinson writes in the Washington Post (3/13/09)

• Critics of the Obama administration counsel the president and his aides to spend every waking hour on the paralyzing financial crisis.

• What these critics really want, though, is to delay or derail the progressive reforms that voters elected President Obama to carry out.

• Fortunately, Obama seems to be ignoring all the chatter. It’s about honoring a clear mandate.

• Obama’s political opponents have a subtler motive: to occupy, exhaust and impoverish the administration, making its promised domestic initiatives impossible.

• I would argue that a laser-like focus on the financial crisis, to the exclusion of everything else, is unlikely to improve the situation and may actually make things worse.

• I don’t fault the White House or the Treasury for a lack of haste. If there were an obvious, guaranteed solution, we’d know it by now. Unfortunately, there isn’t.

LMW COMMENT … Sometimes I worry that I am supporting President Obama too consistently, that perhaps his critics have a point. Then I think real hard about what the critics are saying, and why, and my support for Obama remains undiminished. He is the clearest thinker on the political scene, struggling to fix Bush’s multiple messes while implementing the policy mandates he made an integral part of his campaign. He deserves all the support he needs, and a plague on the greedy ideologues who want him (and us) to fail.

Read the entire article at … http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/03/honor_the_mandate_not_the_fix.html

 

* should we be working with states whose beliefs and practices we abhor?

Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek (3/9/09) …

• The (Islamic) militants are bad people and this is bad news. But the more difficult question is, what should we—the outside world—do about it? That we are utterly opposed to such people, and their ideas and practices, is obvious. But how exactly should we oppose them?

• Reports from Nigeria to Bosnia to Indonesia show that Islamic fundamentalists are finding support within their communities for their agenda, which usually involves the introduction of some form of Sharia—Islamic law—reflecting a puritanical interpretation of Islam. No music, no liquor, no smoking, no female emancipation. The groups that advocate these policies are ugly, reactionary forces that will stunt their countries and bring dishonor to their religion.

• But not all these Islamists advocate global jihad, host terrorists or launch operations against the outside world—in fact, most do not. There are certainly elements of the Taliban that are closely associated with Al Qaeda. But the Taliban is large, and many factions have little connection to Osama bin Laden. Most Taliban want Islamic rule locally, not violent jihad globally.

• The Bush administration spent its first term engaged in a largely abstract, theoretical conversation about radical Islam and its evils—and conservative intellectuals still spout this kind of unyielding rhetoric. By its second term, though, the administration was grappling with the complexities of Islam on the ground. It is instructive that Bush ended up pursuing a most sophisticated and nuanced policy toward political Islam in the one country where reality was unavoidable—Iraq.

• “We won the war in Iraq chiefly because we separated the local militants from the global jihadists,” says Fawaz Gerges, a scholar at Sarah Lawrence College, who has interviewed hundreds of Muslim militants. “Yet around the world we are still unwilling to make the distinction between these two groups.”

• Would a strategy like this work in Afghanistan? David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert who has advised Petraeus, says, “I’ve had tribal leaders and Afghan government officials at the province and district level tell me that 90 percent of the people we call the Taliban are actually tribal fighters or Pashtun nationalists or people pursuing their own agendas. Less than 10 percent are ideologically aligned with the Quetta Shura [Mullah Omar's leadership group] or Al Qaeda.

• Beyond Afghanistan, too, it is crucial that we adopt a more sophisticated strategy toward radical Islam.

• This should come naturally to President Obama, who spoke often on the campaign trail of the need for just such a differentiated approach toward Muslim countries.

• Recognizing the reality of radical Islam is entirely different from accepting its ideas. We should mount a spirited defense of our views and values. We should pursue aggressively policies that will make these values succeed. Such efforts are often difficult and take time—rebuilding state structures, providing secular education, reducing corruption—but we should help societies making these efforts.

• The mere fact that we are working in these countries on these issues—and not simply bombing, killing and capturing—might change the atmosphere surrounding the U.S. involvement in this struggle. The veil is not the same as the suicide belt. The truth is that all Islamists, violent or not, lack answers to the problems of the modern world. They do not have a world view that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women. We do. That’s the most powerful weapon of all.

 LMW COMMENT … Zakaria’s article runs totally counter to the thinking of conservative ideologues. But it is also thought-provoking, and perhaps troubling, to those of us who are more liberal. Do we have to accept beliefs and practices which we find abhorrent? Zakaria says no, but argues that we must work with Islamic states as we find them, perhaps inducing change by examople and over time. Maybe he’s right. Maybe that’s the only way we can make this world of ours work.

read the entire article at … http://www.newsweek.com/id/187093

* Republicans, following Limbaugh, refuse to be responsible

David Brooks writes in today’s NYT (3-10-09)

• The Democratic response to the economic crisis has its problems, but let’s face it, the current Republican response is totally misguided.

• after a decade of profligacy, the Republicans have decided to demand a rigid fiscal straitjacket at the one moment in the past 70 years when it is completely inappropriate.

• The G.O.P. leaders have adopted a posture that allows the Democrats to make all the proposals while all the Republicans can say is “no.”

• If the Republicans wanted to do the country some good, they’d embrace an entirely different approach.

  • First, they’d take the current economic crisis more seriously than the Democrats.

  • Second, Republicans could admit that they don’t know what the future holds, and they’re not going to try to make long-range plans based on assumptions that will be obsolete by summer.

  • Third, Republicans could offer the public a realistic appraisal of the health of capitalism.

  • Fourth, Republicans could get out in front of this crisis for once.

  • Finally, Republicans could make it clear that that the emergency has to be followed by an era of balance.

LMW COMMENT … Brooks offers intelligent suggestions, which could form the basis for intelligent debate, and could become part of the Obama program. But, and it’s a huge but, Republicans would rather be ideological than pragmatic, would rather attack Obama than contribute to real solutions, would rather listen to Rush Limbaugh than David Brooks. Meanwhile, Obama sails on, implementing the transformational programs he promised.

Read the entire column at … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/opinion/10brooks.html?ref=opinion

* Obama: transforming our society, exactly as he said he would, which is why Republicans are terrified

Bob Herbert writes in today’s NYT (3-10-09) …

• Working families were in deep trouble long before this megarecession hit.

• But too many of the public officials who should have been looking out for the middle class and the poor were part of the reckless and shockingly shortsighted alliance of conservatives and corporate leaders that rigged the economy in favor of the rich and ultimately brought it down completely.

• The seeds of today’s disaster were sown some 30 years ago. From 1980 (the year Ronald Reagan was elected) to 2005 … the average income for the vast majority of Americans actually declined

• The right-wingers were crafty: You smother the dream by crippling the programs that support it, by starving the government of money to pay for them, by funneling the government’s revenues to the rich through tax cuts and other benefits, by looting the government the way gangsters loot legitimate businesses and then pleading poverty when it comes time to fund the services required by the people.

• Now, with the economy in free fall and likely to get worse, Americans — despite their suffering — have an opportunity to reshape the society, and then to move it in a fairer, smarter and ultimately more productive direction.

• The right-wingers do not want that to happen, which is why they are rooting so hard for President Obama’s initiatives to fail. They like the direction that the country took over the past 30 years. They’d love to do it all again.

LMW COMMENT …

As he does so often, Bob Herbert gets it right. So, of course, does Barack Obama. He is implementing one campaign promise after another, despite the horrendous problems he inherited from the Bush administration.

Ideological Republicans led by the close-minded Rush Limbaugh, fearful of ever winning another election if Obama succeeds, are blindly ‘just saying no’ to every Obama proposal, criticizing him mercilessly for not solving in 7 weeks the economic mess that took them 28 years to create.

Obama sails on, intelligent, thoughtful, determined, unflustered, transforming our American society exactly as he said he would before we elected him, which is why we elected him. We are witnessing an example of political leadership the likes of which have rarely been seen. I find it thrilling.

Read Bob Herbert’s  entire coulumn at … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/opinion/10herbert.html?ref=opinion

* the one man who most needs to be patient — our president — will be

Bob Herbert writes in today’s NYT (3/7/09) …

• Barack Obama has only been president for six weeks, but there is a surprising amount of ire, anger, even outrage that he hasn’t yet solved the problems of the U.S. economy, that he hasn’t saved us from the increasingly tragic devastation wrought by the clownish ideas of right-wing conservatives and the many long years of radical Republican misrule.

• conservatives are busy trying to blame this epic economic catastrophe — a conflagration of their own making — on the new president. The right-wingers would have you believe this is Obama’s downturn.

• I don’t know whether President Obama’s ultimate rescue plan for the financial industry will work. 

• What I know is that the renegade clowns who ruined this economy, the Republican right in alliance with big business and a fair number of feckless Democrats — all working in opposition to the interests of working families — have no credible basis for waging war against serious efforts to get us out of their mess.

• Maybe the nuns in grammar school were right when they counseled that patience is a virtue. The man has been president for six weeks.

LMW COMMENT … from all we know, we can take comfort that the one man who most needs to be patient — our president — will be, even as he moves forward on a breathtaking agaenda of initiatives to transform this country, exactly as he said he would. Republicans, you lost, we rejected your nonsense, and we are also, as the latest polls clearly show, rejecting your ‘just say no’ approach. You have been reduced to abject name-calling – falsely labelling Obama a socialist or a communist – which accomplishes nothing but show your own true and uninformed colors.

Read Bob Herbert’s entire column at … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/opinion/07herbert.html?ref=opinion

 

* Joe Scarborough is the one who doesn’t get it! The public knows who created this economic mess, and who has the best chance of fixing it.

First Read: The day in politics by NBC News for NBC News reports (3-4-09)

• To paraphrase Dickens, the last six weeks have been the best of times for Obama and the Democrats, and the worst of times for the Republicans. Just consider the latest findings from our NBC/WSJ poll:

• Obama’s favorability rating is at 68% (an all-time high in our survey), 67% say they feel more hopeful about his leadership, 60% approve of his job in the White House, and 49% have a positive view of the Democratic Party (which is also near a high).

• On the other hand, just 26% view the GOP positively (an all-time low in the poll), respondents blame Bush and congressional Republicans for most the partisanship in DC, 56% think the GOP’s opposition to Obama is based on politics, and Republicans lose by nearly 30 percentage points on the question about which party would do a better job of leading the country out of recession.

• The public doesn’t blame Obama for the economy; 84% say Obama inherited this economy, and two-thirds of those people think he has at least a year before he’s responsible for it.

LMW COMMENT … As we listen to commentators like Joe Scarborough (Morning Joe on MSNBC)  and a whole range of “just say no” Republicans screaming that Obama doesn’t get it and that his program of change is bad for America, it is good to know that the people who elected Obama remember why they did so. On with the change we need.

Read the entire post at … http://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox/11fd1de2b592e89d