Sunday, January 11, 2009

Obama - Calderon So on Monday, President-elect Obama will be visiting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon. I don't expect much of real value to come from this meeting. But still, the lede in the AP story appearing in papers all over the country was depressingly, yet unsurprisingly, incoherent. MEXICO CITY -- With violence spilling over the Mexican border into the U.S., President Felipe Calderon should have little trouble securing support for his battle against drugs when he meets U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on Monday. Even ignoring the nonsensical "battle against drugs," there's quite a disconnect in this sentence. Note that AP writer Alexandra Olson didn't say "Given Obama's pro-prohibition statements, Calderon should have little trouble securing Obama's support for his drug war." That would be depressing, but factual and reasonable. No, she says "With violence spilling over the Mexican border into the U.S. as if it was the fact of the violence that should, obviously, mean that Obama would support the drug war. and that makes no sense at all. The structure of the sentence is as follows: Violence in Mexico was at level x Calderon instituted plan M. Violence increased dramatically as a direct result of plan M to level z, spilling into the U.S. Violence of this level is undesirable. Therefore, Obama will support plan M. Right. In the meantime, just in case the violence "spills" into the U.S., Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, known for supervising such tactical masterpieces as the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina, and the banning of shampoo on domestic flights, is prepared to provide a "surge" (whatever that means), which will include bringing in the military. Yeah, that'll end well. You see, violence won't simply "spill" over the border and manifest itself like British Redcoats marching to war where we can simply have our military take them down. No, the spillage will be the victims of violence. Those who commit the violence will find ways to enter undetected and commit violence from within (they're not completely stupid). And that's when having the military "surge" against the violence is going to mean putting a lot of innocent lives at risk for no gain. ... Another great letter in the El Paso Times: U.S.-Mexico drug war: We're clucking like chickens by Joe Muench. Very well done. And, of course, the expected comments didn't take long: Comment #9: Legalizing drugs will just mean more business for the drug dealers. Period. And some really, really bizarre: Everybody knows you jews are faking those doctor prescriptions and taking advantage of legalize mari j for medical use.That is the only reason you idiots are always pushing for legalization. [...] I guess you forgot what happened in Miami and Columbia during the 80âo[dot accent]s when we got tired of this s#$t. I am glad that these spineless elp politicians were not leading our country during WWII. The good news is that the only pro-drug-war folks left on these threads are the ridiculous ones. 9:34:46 PM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []

Site news You may have noticed a new thing on each post - the "share" button at the lower right. If you pass your mouse over it, it drops down to give a number of options for sharing the post with others. You can email it to a friend, post it on your Facebook profile, Digg it, etc. This is now also on most of the story pages. I've updated the Using this Site page -- it's available at the "Problem Commenting?" link at the top left of the home page. I've now included a full section about the problems some people encounter commenting here. If you try to leave a comment and get a message with 403 FORBIDDEN on it, don't panic. You haven't been banned, and you aren't forbidden. It just means that the stupid comment software thought it saw something that might normally exist in a spam comment, and decided to block it. As you know, people are always sending messages for via-gra, and po-ker, and cia-lis, etc. Well, the comment software once blocked the word "socialist" because it contained the word "cia-lis" in it! (that one got fixed). It also sometimes doesn't like links with a .info suffix, and will often block posts with links to URLs that are in the same domain as your listed Home Page (spammers usually link to their own site, that's why). So if you get the 403 message... Look for trigger words and try hyphenating them ("po-ker") or leaving them out. If you have links to .info sites, try replacing them with a short link from tinyurl.com Leave your homepage blank (or replace with tinyurl version) if you're posting a link to your own article on your home site. Send the comment to me and I'll try to post it for you. RSS Feed. No changes here, but a reminder that this site has an RSS feed. You can click on the RSS that usually shows up in the address bar above, or on the RSS feed link at the above left. This allows you to subscribe to all the posts if you use a newsreader (which is the only way I can keep track of the hundreds of sites I check each day). I use NetNewsWire, which is absolutely fantastic! It's free and syncs the news feeds on my home computer, office computer and iPod touch. DrugWarRant Tips. Finally, a reminder that reader tips are invaluable to me. I really appreciate all the emails with tips, ideas, suggestions, and corrections. And I apologize if I don't respond. I'm often terrible at getting back to everyone who writes, but I read every one. Thanks! 3:19:02 PM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []

Back to El Paso LEAP's Terry Nelson has an excellent guest column in the El Paso Times: Legalized drugs only way to halt cartels. Naturally, that's started the comment thread again -- this time the stupids seem to be focusing on #3 (no point legalizing - the cartels will just go into other crime). I got a great letter from Mark, an El Paso local who gave some helpful insight into the area, including the fact that El Paso has a major drug war enforcement industry there (including EPIC - The El Paso Intelligence Center). This could explain, in part, why so many of the commenters are hard core drug war supporters. As Mark says "It's paying the rent & plenty more for a lot of local families." 11:52:59 AM | drug policy | Related  | permalink | comment []