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From the Elders of Zion desk:

Tough time for anti-semites with a political bent. Not possible to hate Sheldon Adelson, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros at the same time. One of them is your man.

With apologies to dictionary.com

INTERSECTIONALITY

[in-ter-sek-shuh-nal-i-tee] noun

1.
the theory that the overlap of various social identities, as race, gender, sexuality, and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual (often used attributively): Her paper uses a queer intersectionality approach.
2.
the oppression and discrimination resulting from the overlap of an individual’s various social identities: The intersectionality of oppression experienced by black women.
3.
the antidote to identity politics: The intersectionality or “parallel problems” of economic disparity, gender inequality and institutional racism was the idea underpinning the presidential candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Synonyms: solidarity, comradeship.
Antonyms: capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, empire.
See, also: class consciousness, class struggle.

Extra credit:
"There will be no economic or political justice for the poor, people of color, women or workers within the framework of global, corporate capitalism. Corporate capitalism, which uses identity politics, multiculturalism and racial justice to masquerade as politics, will never halt the rising social inequality, unchecked militarism, evisceration of civil liberties and omnipotence of the organs of security and surveillance. Corporate capitalism cannot be reformed, despite its continually rebranding itself. The longer the self-identified left and liberal class seek to work within a system that the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls 'inverted totalitarianism,' the more the noose will be tightened around our necks. If we do not rise up to bring government and financial systems under public control—which includes nationalizing banks, the fossil fuel industry and the arms industry—we will continue to be victims." The Bankruptcy of the American Left by Chris Hedges (Truthdig)

A cross-racial and class conscious movement is the only foundation for effective freedom: Against National Security Citizenship by Aziz Rana (Boston Review)

"In the worlds of politics and nonprofits intersectionality has become a sneaky substitute for the traditional left notion of solidarity developed in the process of ongoing collective struggle against the class enemy. Intersectionality doesn't deny the existence of class struggle, it just rhetorically demotes it to something co-equal with the fights against ableism and ageism and speciesism, against white supremacy, against gender oppression, and a long elastic list of others. What’s sneaky about the substitution of intersectionality for solidarity is that intersectionality allows the unexamined smuggling in of multiple notions which directly undermine the development and the operation of solidarity. Intersectionality means everybody is obligated to put their own special interest, their own oppression first – although they don’t always say that because the contradiction would be too obvious." Intersectionality is a Hole. Afro-Pessimism is a Shovel. We Need to Stop Digging (part 1) by Bruce A. Dixon (Black Agenda Report)

"In the context of the real left, the community of those aiming to overthrow capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire—not two or three out of four but all four, the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric and branding to deceive the unwary and ensnare many bright, serious and sincere leftists into defending and promoting its fundamentally hostile project." Looking Down That Deep Hole: Parasitic Intersectionality and Toxic Afro-Pessimism (part 2) by Bruce A. Dixon (Black Agenda Report)

quote unquote: James Baldwin

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. -- James Baldwin

"It's like I don't recognize the country I'm living in."

It's more like we're getting to know the country we're living in.

We can't lose sight of the millions deported by the Obama administration. We can't deny decades of lynchings and Jim Crow. We must not forget "No dogs or Irish." We fought a brutal civil war over the holding of human beings as property. We still live in the shadow of slavery. We have never atoned for the near-extermination of Native Americans.

Fake news? We live a fake history.

Trump does not represent America.

"Americans disagree with President Donald Trump's immigration priorities, according to a new CNN/ORC poll, with nearly two-thirds of Americans saying they'd like to see a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants rather than deportations.

"Trump has made tough border security and strict enforcement of US immigration laws a focal point of his campaign and presidency -- using some of his first executive orders to pave the way for far more deportations and detentions as well as ordering the construction of a Southern border wall.

"But a CNN/ORC poll released Friday finds that the public is actually moving in the opposite direction since Trump has won election." -- CNN 2017-03-17

Raising a brown boy in the time of Donald J. Trump

Sikh-American civil rights advocate Valarie Kaur's plea to her country.

Hansen Unplugged: Signs of change

"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." - Albert Einstein.

Saturday Catchup 2010-05-22

Nicole Belle on CrooksAndLiars.com: Many people "...didn't think things could get worse  than jingoism and dishonesty of the Bush/Cheney years....that more than a year into the Obama presidency that things like the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1968 Fair Housing Act would be considered less than settled matters....that thinking that the world's superpower should be able to offer health care to its citizens would make one a Maoist/Stalinist/Communist, despite the fact that most Americans want it too...Or that suddenly the existence of undocumented workers has become so intolerable that we must address them with huge fences, detention camps, moats and all other matter of law enforcement, despite the fact that there have always been an underclass of undocumented workers and not one person has proposed focusing energy on reducing demand by going after the employers of said workers. What I came away with from all these conversations is that the dialogue in this country is fundamentally dishonest, just as these members of the People's Front of Judea are. I mean, honestly, apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? Change PFJ to 'Tea Party' and change Romans to 'government' and you've got an idea of the intellectual dishonesty rampant:

An OA meeting. The setting is a dingy meeting room in a church basement. Seated in a circle on rickety folding chairs are LP Record, VHS Tape, 8-Track, Cassette Tape, Compact Disc, Video Rental Store, SLR Camera, Instant Camera, TV Antenna, Dot Matrix Printer, Copy Machine, Fold-Out Map, Typewriter, others.
Moderator: Welcome to Obsoletes Anonymous! I've gathered you all here to welcome our latest member, the Print Industry.
Print Industry: Hello, everyone. But there's been a mistake. I don't belong here.
(chuckles all around)
Print Industry (continues): I'm serious. I'm not obsolete. I'm relevant. Print books have been around for hundreds of years. They're never going to be replaced.
VHS Tape: Yeah, we all thought like that once.
LP Record: It's called denial. It's tough to deal with at first. -- Is Print Dead? by J.A. Konrath (Huffington Post 2010-05-21).

R.I.P.: Martin Gardner, 1914-2010 (Discover 2010/05/22)


The Nature of Things / Martin Gardner from Wagner Brenner on Vimeo.

All of the survivors feel hatred toward the United States. It is a real problem,this rising hatred: "People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying. 'You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,' a former CIA officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack....Human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: 'squirters.'" -- Drones and Democracy by Kathy Kelly and Joshua Brollier (truthout 2010-05-20).

WalMart isn't the only American organization to have brought something home from China: With rendition, suspension of habeas corpus, and other Bush-era human rights violations continuing and worsening under Obama, the report by Think Progress, Why Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Failed, has taken on new relevance and urgency.

Oops!: Arizona seems about to say it's sorry.

Watch on YouTube.

We have a dream, too, and it's nothing like Dr. King's: "To understand Rand Paul's agonized contortions over America's civil rights consensus, let's review the tainted pedigree of the movement that reared him. Specifically, both the Kentucky Republican Senate nominee and his father, Ron Paul, have been closely associated over the past two decades with a faction that described itself as 'paleolibertarian,' led by former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell and the late writer Murray Rothbard. They eagerly forged an alliance with the 'paleoconservatives' behind Patrick Buchanan, the columnist and former presidential candidate whose trademarks are nativism, racism and anti-Semitism." -- The roots of Rand Paul's civil rights resentment by Joe Conason (Salon 2010-05-21). Or as Bill Maher put it the other night: "The shit doesn't fall far from the bat."

Change Watch: "Over the past couple years, I've written numerous times about the serious left-right coalition that had emerged in Britain -- between the Tories and Liberal Democrats -- in opposition to the Labour Government's civil liberties abuses, many (thought not all) of which were justified by Terrorism.  In June of 2008, David Davis, a leading Tory MP, resigned from Parliament in protest of the Government's efforts to expand its power of preventive detention to 42 days (and was then overwhelmingly re-elected on a general platform of opposing growing surveillance and detention authorities).  Numerous leading figures from both the Right and Left defied their party's establishment to speak out in support of Davis and against the Government's growing powers. Back then, the Liberal Democrats' Leader, Nick Clegg, notably praised the right-wing Davis' resignation, and to show his support for Davis' positions, Clegg even refused to run a LibDem candidate for that seat because, as he put it, "some issues 'go beyond party politics'." Now that this left-right, Tory/Lib-Dem alliance has removed the Labour Party from power and is governing Britain, these commitments to restoring core liberties -- Actual Change -- show no sign of retreating. Rather than cynically tossing these promises of restrained government power onto the trash pile of insincere campaign rhetoric, they are implementing them into actual policy. Clegg, now the Deputy Prime Minister, gave an extraordinary speech last week in which he vowed "the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832." -- The Tory/Lib-Dem Government endorses actual change by Glenn Greenwald (Salon 2010-05-21).

Time saver: Eclectic Method remixes all of Phish’s list of "99 Albums":

Eclectic Method Goes Phish :: 99 Albums in 4:20 from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.

"It's alive!" As a non-believer educated by Jesuits and likeminded cultivators of inquiring minds, I've never understood the objection to "playing god." Why would a higher being be irked by his creatures' clumsy efforts to figure out what he had in mind? So I don't see it as a moral or ethical dilemma that researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute have created a new organism by injecting man-made genetic material into the empty body of a cell. Artificial organisms almost certainly will provide solutions to many serious health and environmental difficulties, from cancer to oil spills. The only real question, just as it is with other scientific developments such as nuclear power and genetically modified food and life-prolonging drugs and technology, is whether "synthetic life" is worth the risks as a matter of public safety.  Constructing artificial creatures "has unimaginable potential risks," naysays Oxford ethics professor Julian Savulescu, since by "engineering organisms that could never naturally exist," we expose ourselves to possible calamities — from bio-weapon terrorism to environmental catastrophes — so destructive they could wipe out life as we know it. Such an outcome is certainly undesired, but, counters Ken MacLeod in the Guardian, worries about blowback from playing god are entirely "misguided:" our "biosphere comes up with natural resistance to entirely new organisms every day;" and while the threat of bio-terrorism "may be great," it's "not in principle greater than those posed by natural organisms" that already exist; besides, the potential upsides are so phenomenal, practical benefits ought to trump whatever squeamishness anyone may have over theoretical disasters. One can more easily imagine a bacterium that sucks carbon from the air than one that leeches poison into our water supply. I'm with David Ropeik, author of How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts, that the "almost unimaginable promise" of being able to create life "to our specifications" shouldn't be sacrificed just because we've seen too many movies about Dr. Frankenstein, although his caution is well taken that "far less of that promise will be realized if the people doing this work" treat it, as Venter seems to, simply as a race to fame and fortune, and "fail to recognize and address [the public's concerns] about what they are doing."

Editorial: The debt that the public owes to police officers for taking the risks that they take can never be repaid. -- Growing risk for the police -- Extreme views behind the West Memphis tragedy: Two officers are dead after a shootout with a delusional conspiracy theorist (The Commercial Appeal, Memphis TN 2010-05-22).

Resource: The earliest gangs of New York were not criminal groups. Many street gang members were employed, mostly as common laborers. Some were bouncers in saloons and dance halls, as well as longshoremen. A few were apprentice butchers, carpenters, sailmakers, and shipbuilders. “They engaged in violence, but violence was a normal part of their always-contested environment; turf warfare was a condition of the neighborhood." Gangs formed the “basic unit of social life among the young males in New York in the nineteenth century.” More dangerous street gangs than previously seen emerged around 1820 from the persistent disorder that gripped the city slums, tenements, saloons, and dance halls. The Forty Thieves gang was characterized as “the first important and decisively dangerous gang of the quarter century.” It and other new groups of gangs that emerged in this period were centered in criminal enterprises as much as in territorial disputes. “It is axiomatic that the more sophisticated the gangs became, the more violent they grew as well.” -- History of Street Gangs in the United States (pdf) by James C. Howell and John P. Moore (National Gang Center Bulletin 2010-04).

Cartoon Beatles do the Dead Kennedys' California über alles:


The truth is out there: The only way to debunk an enshrined falsehood is with maximum reportorial firepower. Toting big guns and an itchy trigger-finger is American University professor W. Joseph Campbell, whose new book, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, flattens established myths that you were brought up to believe were true: that Orson Welles sparked a national panic with his 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast; that the New York Times suppressed news of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba at the request of the White House; that Edward R. Murrow destroyed Sen. Joseph McCarthy; that publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst told an illustrator, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war," before the Spanish-American war started; and more. -- The Master of Debunk: W. Joseph Campbell corrects the record on 10 important misreported stories by Jack Shafer (Slate 2010-05-21).

Here comes the sun: One year ago this Friday, U.S. chief information officer Vivek Kundra launched an ambitious website called Data.gov to make the government’s vast stores of data available to the public. The thinking behind the site then, as now, was to give app developers access to these rich, comprehensive datasets on all sorts of topics — health care, education, energy, the environment and so on — in the hope that they would create useful tools for analyzing a range of information, from air quality by county to crime statistics by neighborhood and foreign aid by nation. To make good on incoming president Barack Obama's promise of transparency and open government, Data.gov launched with 47 datasets. By its first anniversary on Friday, Data.gov had ballooned to more than 250,000 datasets and racked up 97.6 million hits — not bad for a website whose main attractions are massive databases and wonky graphs. However, the sailing has not been entirely smooth. Federal Computer Week complained that Data.gov was a demonstration of “how not to do open government” because it didn’t pass “the ‘mom test.’” By that, FCW meant it was too hard for the average person to figure out what to do on the site and where everything was. Kundra’s team redesigned the entire Data.gov with that sort of feedback in mind, and the new homepage is markedly more intuitive and user-friendly. -- Sneak Peek: Obama Administration’s Redesigned Data.gov by Eliot Van Buskirk (Epicenter 2010-05-19).

This is about all you need to know about Lost:

Public Policy: How the War on Drugs gave birth to a permanent American undercaste

The War on Drugs would be a laughable waste of dollars and public resources, if not for the horrible toll it has taken in lives lost and destroyed. Ostensibly a prohibition campaign, it has resulted in the militarization, economic colonization and literal poisoning of vast swatches of other countries, especially in the Americas, and has been used to justify military campaigns against leftist political movements and insurgencies in various parts of the world. Here at home, it has resulted in the destruction of the lives of millions of Americans, especially young black males, as this article by Michelle Alexander explains.

Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.” Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality.  There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you.  If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you.  Trust us.  Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars.  You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand.  Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Most people don’t like it when I say this.  It makes them angry.  In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race.  Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

• There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
• As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery.  The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life.  (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status.  They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

Excuses for the Lockdown
There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates.  Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime.  We’re told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared.  Quintupled, in fact.  And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs.  Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal — complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods — but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought.  This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth.  Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime.  That’s why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class suburbs.  Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell.  It has nothing to do with race; it’s all about violent crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action.  In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks.  The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities.  The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence.  The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.

The plan worked like a charm.  For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news.  Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes — sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.

Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs.  In President Bill Clinton’s boastful words, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.”  The facts bear him out.  Clinton’s “tough on crime” policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the “New Democrats” championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal, if you’ve been labeled a felon.

Facing Facts
But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn’t the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that’s where the violent offenders can be found?  The answer is yes… in made-for-TV movies.  In real life, the answer is no.

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders.  Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses.  What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests.  To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80% of the cash, cars, and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.

The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses.  In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales.  Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity.  In fact, during the 1990s — the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war — nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.

In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time — a new Jim Crow system.  Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.

Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality.  Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers — not to mention president of the United States — causes us all to marvel at what a long way we’ve come.

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth.  In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America.  Nearly a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968.  The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then.  Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries.  And that’s with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our “colorblind” society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure — the structure of racial caste.  The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. This is not the promised land.  The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.

There is a small chance that some of this damage can be repaired. New York has rolled back the Draconian drugs laws imposed when then Gov. Nelson Rockefeller sought to appear tough on crime in GOP presidential primaries. Cash-strapped California can no longer afford it's huge prison system; the natural way to reduce it is to release nonviolent drug offenders. Colorado is aggressively pushing medical pot production and California voters are likely to legalize -- and tax -- cannabis. Even in New Hampshire this week, the state assembly overwhelmingly decriminalized possession of small quantities of marijuana.

On the other hand, although the Obama administration doesn't plan to significantly alter drug enforcement policy, according to Gil Kerlikowske, the current director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, it's counted as progress that it won't use the term "War on Drugs" because it's counter-productive. Still, the next national drug control budget proposed by the Obama Administration will increase spending on prevention and treatment of drug abuse.

Undoing the damage caused by hapless drug policy will not be cheap or easy. But it must be done. The growing support for legalization in the states and in other countries offers a way out. Although proponents of legalization have won the moral and intellectual debate, political leadership is unlikely to come from the White House or Congress, as irrational and dysfunctional here as in so many other policy areas. But with drug use being decriminalized (or legalized de facto) from Concord to Sacramento and from Berne to Mexico City, the end of the War on Drugs may be in sight.

Michelle Alexander's essay was originally published on TomDispatch.com

To track the $ billions that have been burned in the drug war, visit the Drug War Clock, at DrugSense.Org, supported by Media Awareness Project and Drug Policy Central

Further reading:
Brief History of The War on Drugs by Claire Suddath (Time 2009-03-25)
Drug faqs from the Schaffer Library of Drug Policy, sponsored by a company that promotes the commercialization medical marijuana
What's Wrong With the Drug War? by the Drug Policy Alliance Network
The War on Drugs Is a Failure by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, César Gaviria And Ernesto Zedillo (Wall Street Journal 2009-02-23)
War on drugs is insane by Jack Cafferty (CNN 2009-03-31)
Ending the 'War on Drugs' by Misha Glenny (New York Times 2009-09-18)

2008: Newt's a beaut

Since we can expect the Republican Party will find it expedient to look for its nominee outside the current covey of self-declared bush league White House wannabes, we should consider keeping track of Newt Gingrich and Fred Thompson. Here, to get us started, is a tasty bit of racism from this year's gathering of the Conservative Political Action Committee:

"How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane."

Aside from what it suggests about how "uneducated" Newt is -- the people of the Ninth were not done in by wind and rain but by the failure of inadequately funded levees, the ex-speaker's remark is a classic example of the American ruling class' familiar stratagem of misdirecting attention from its own misdeeds by blaming the victims of its policies.

Because Gingrich appears loathsome to most progressives, they underestimate his chances. In polling at CPAC 2007, for example, even though Gingrich is undeclared, he came in a strong fourth, narrowly trailing Romney, Giuliani and Brownback. More interestingly, Gingrich tied Giuliani as the attendees' second choice. If the Democrats don't choose their candidate wisely, in 2008 he could be the nation's first choice.