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	<copyright>Copyright 2012 Copyright © 2011  Los Angeles Wave.  All rights reserved. </copyright>
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	<pubDate>Wed, 8 Feb 2012 22:07:34 PST</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Don Lemon: Legacy of 'one drop' rule inspires search for family history]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/Don-Lemon-Legacy-of-one-drop-rule-inspires-search-for-family-history-138304994.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Sun, 29 Jan 2012 20:49:56 PST</pubDate>
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Editor's note: Don Lemon  anchors CNN Newsroom during weekend prime-time and serves as a  correspondent across CNN's U.S. programming. He is the author of the  memoir &quot;Transparent.&quot;

(CNN) &mdash; You never know from where inspiration will come.

I  am often envious of my friends who can recite stories about ancestors  that have been handed down through generations. I can't do that. As a  descendant of slavery in America, that hasn't felt possible for me.  Truthfully, I didn't think about it much until a few weeks ago, after I  was asked by CNN's In America team to write about the impact of a mixed  racial background on my life, the idea that &quot;one drop&quot; of black blood  makes you black.

In that article, I wrote about how my aunt and  grandmother in Louisiana often were mistaken for white. I wrote about  the extremes they went to in order to protect their husbands, who were  black, from beatings by white men, or worse.

As I began to write  the article, I sent a text message to my mother asking that she email  photos of my aunt and grandmother. She sent me what she had, but asked  why I wanted them. I told her I'd call to explain once I got home that  evening.

When I finished the draft of the article, I zipped off a  copy to her via email. A few minutes later, as I was driving home from  work, my phone rang. When my mother began to tell me the stories of my  aunt and grandmother, I had to pull over in a parking lot to take it all  in. Some of it I knew. Much of it I didn't.

My mother said, &quot;Don, your aunt and grandmother really are quintessential 'one drop' Americans.&quot;

&quot;Why, mom?&quot; I asked.

&quot;I  know you overheard some of this as a child, but your aunt's father was a  white man,&quot; she said. &quot;Your grandmother's father was a white man.&quot;

&quot;Yes,&quot; I said, &quot;I remember now.&quot;

My  aunt, my grandmother's eldest daughter and the one often mistaken for  white, was the product of rape, my mother told me. My grandmother worked  for a white family in a small Louisiana town in the 1920s. According to  my mom and other family members, the man of the house raped my  grandmother. She was barely a teenager at the time.

When her  grandfather found out about the rape, my mother said, he picked up a  shotgun intending to kill the man. But his siblings held him down long  enough for his anger to subside, long enough to talk him out of it. A  good thing, according to my mother - the man who raped my grandmother  was also the town sheriff.

It wasn't the first time it had  happened in my family. My grandmother's father also was white. Her  mother died during childbirth, and in 1919 Louisiana, it was all but  impossible for a white man to raise a black child. So, her grandparents  took her in.

Confused? I am too.

But that's what inspired  me: I want to trace my ancestry. I've reached out to an expert, Henry  Louis Gates Jr., to guide me through it.

Wish me luck.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of Don Lemon. Photo: For years,  the woman on the left in the photograph below could not be friendly to  her own husband in public. She would pretend she didn't know him or tell  people he was her driver. She didn't want him to be beaten in public as  he had many times before. Credit: Don Lemon/CNN.
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			<title><![CDATA[Is the Obama presidency 'built to last'?]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/Is-the-Obama-presidency-built-to-last-138024678.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:29:53 PST</pubDate>
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Editor's note: Julian Zelizer  is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He  is the author of &quot;Jimmy Carter&quot; (Times Books) and author of the  forthcoming book &quot;Governing America&quot; (Princeton University Press).


(CNN) &mdash; President Obama used the  State of the Union address to outline an agenda for the coming year and,  more importantly, to define what his goals would be should he be  re-elected in November.

As Republican presidential candidates  engage in a bitter civil war for the nomination to oppose him, Obama has  stepped up at this moment to offer a blueprint to strengthen the middle  class, diminish inequality and revitalize the economy.

Obama has  attempted to turn his source of weakness, the laggard condition of the  economy, into his strength by going on the offensive about how to make  things better. Whereas Mitt Romney and other Republicans have defined  Obama's policies as a form of European socialism, Obama has argued that  protecting the middle class is the only way to reclaim American values.

The  final State of the Union address for a first-term president is always a  mix of policy and politics. Tuesday night, the president brought  together a number of themes that have been shaping his speeches since  September. The speech blended some of President Jimmy Carter's harsh  realism with President Ronald Reagan's endless optimism.

Obama  warned of the growing economic divide between the wealthy and the rest  of the nation. He spoke about the challenges that middle-class  Americans, the backbone of our economy, face every day. Whereas he  started his presidency focused on the stability of financial  institutions, now he has turned his attention to the stability of  American families. He is no longer just talking about economic recovery.  The remainder of his time in office, we know now, will be about  economic revitalization.

&quot;Think about the America within our  reach,&quot; the president proclaimed, &quot;A country that leads the world in  educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of  high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we're in  control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren't so  tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where  hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.&quot;

Rather than  running away from Washington, President Obama embraced the historical  value of government. He said: &quot;During the Great Depression, America  built the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. After World War II, we  connected our states with a system of highways. Democratic and  Republican administrations invested in great projects that benefited  everybody, from the workers who built them to the businesses that still  use them today.&quot;

The speech is certainly a good start to his  re-election effort. It comes at a time when Newt Gingrich's attacks on  Mitt Romney have ironically fueled a critical discussion that emerged  from Occupy Wall Street about the damaging consequences certain kinds of  economic behavior can have and about the inequity of the tax system  enabling some Americans to enjoy growing riches when so many others are  struggling to get by. Tuesday night Obama put himself squarely on the  side of the middle class and economic fairness.

But the speech is  not a game changer. The truth is that the State of the Union address is  not what it used to be. The reality is that fewer Americans are tuned in  given the endless menu of cable stations and websites that offer voters  something else to see.

Moreover, economic conditions are still  poor. Even with some signs of progress, unemployment remains extremely  high and household security is fragile. If voters are going to make  their decision based on the health of the economy, many might very well  decide to move toward the GOP.

Given how difficult it has been  for Congress to handle the most routine decision, voters will be  skeptical about President Obama's ability to handle the kinds of issues  he discussed in his speech.

How can a president and Congress  transform the infrastructure of the economy if they can't even pass  regular appropriations bills without a high-stakes showdown? A speech  about economy and promises of policy are not the same as improved  economic conditions.

Finally, in our short-attention-span  political culture, speeches this far away from the election only have  limited effect. What matters will be what the president is saying, what  events are taking place, and how the Republicans are doing in September  and October.

Notwithstanding these limits, the speech is a good  start in terms of outlining the issues that President Obama needs to  emphasize if he is to excite Democrats and attract independents.

Rather  than entering in a defensive posture, focusing just on crisis and  conflict, President Obama has instead chosen to define the terms of the  debate and to offer a positive vision for the future. He has argued that  the values of his administration are as American as apple pie. When the  Republicans are done squabbling among themselves and select a nominee,  they will face the burden of offering a vision of their own rather than  simply being the anti-Obama alternative.

Then we will find out whether the Obama presidency, like the economy he discussed Tuesday night, is built to last.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Julian Zelizer.
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			<title><![CDATA[Beyond 'Red Tails,' more hidden heroes of American history]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/Beyond-Red-Tails-more-hidden-heroes-of-American-history-137741188.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:07:28 PST</pubDate>
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Editor's note: Sana Butler is a  contributor to Newsweek magazine and wrote &quot;Sugar of the Crop: My  Journey to Find the Children of Slaves,&quot; about her 10-year search to  find and interview the last surviving children of slaves. Those original  interview tapes will be stored in the Smithsonian's National Museum of  African American History and Culture.

(CNN) &mdash; The next few days will  determine if &quot;Red Tails,&quot; the World War II action film about the  Tuskegee Airmen, is a box office success. But the story of the Airmen's  real-life courage is already in the record book that counts: history.

Few  can argue the Tuskegee Airmen were one of the best fighting groups in  the United States Air Force, then called U.S Army Air Force. Their  record speaks for itself.

In a 2005 speech to introduce bipartisan  legislation awarding the unit a Congressional Gold Medal, Michigan  Senator Carl Levin pointed out that the Tuskegee Airmen's superior  skills during combat missions landed them in history books as the first  aerial unit to sink a battleship with only machine guns.

In fact,  white U.S bomber pilots and crew would put in specific requests to be  escorted over Europe by Tuskegee pilots because they were the only unit  to have never lost a bomber to German fighter planes.

But due to the politics of collective memory, African-American heroes are often left out of the American story.

I  learned this when I was independently confirmed information collected  during my interviews with the children of slaves. Over 10 years, I found  some 40 sons and daughters whose parents were born before 1865.

One  interview in particular stands out as an example of the failure to  document significant historical contributions made by black Americans  during the founding formative years.

The interview was with  102-year-old William Lincoln Dunlap in Mira Loma, California. I spent  most of the week asking questions about his grandfather, former  Mississippi state Senator George Washington Albright.

Born in 1846  in Holly Springs, Albright spoke English, Portuguese and Spanish and  was an oilman in Los Angeles before the Rockefeller family forced him to  sell his land.

He was a state senator by 1874, but outside a freshman photo, little evidence exists about his voting record or speeches.

As  a local legislative historian pointed out, white Democratic colleagues  set out to erase the existence of African-Americans in the state Senate  by ordering the destruction of public records that referenced them. This  revision of history was not uncommon in capitol buildings throughout  the south.

During my interview with Albright's grandson, William  Lincoln Dunlap mentioned that his grandfather was also a member of the  &quot;4-Ls&quot;, known as Lincoln's Legal Loyal League.

Members of the  league were responsible for telling &quot;the slaves that they were free, to  keep them informed and in readiness to assist the Union.&quot; They also were  spies for the North in the early days of the Civil War, before slaves  were allowed to carry weapons.

&quot;We had to work in dead secrecy,&quot; Albright told a newspaper in 1937. &quot;We had knocks and signs and passwords.&quot;

Albright  said the clandestine league started when he was 15, after &quot;a committee  of six went to Washington to see Lincoln.&quot; And he named the six:  Frederick Douglass, John Langston, James Lynch, and three white  abolitionists, Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Sumner and Harriet Beecher  Stowe.

Excited and intrigued, I emailed the curator at the Abraham  Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Illinois to learn more: I  had never heard of such of an organized committee run by slaves.

The  curator's response: &quot;The outright lies of people in the 1890s astound  me, and after that, well, one gives latitude to older people whose  memories invent their past for them ... this, too, likely falls into  another category of historical re-creation: seeing an outcome from  chaos, some will assign a planned movement that brought about that  outcome.&quot;

But with additional investigation, I found that the  comments from a &quot;old&quot; Mr. Albright were, in fact, correct. I found a  book written in 1883 by U.S. Secret Service Chief Allan Pinkerton, based  on classified and de-classified papers prepared for President Lincoln.  In &quot;The Spy of the Rebellion,&quot; Pinkerton tells of &quot;trusty&quot; Loyal League  messenger that had direct access to him and his office.

And while 4-Ls aren't as well-known as the Tuskegee Airmen, their existence was also critical in American war victories.

In  fact, slaves were considered to be enemy number one by Confederate  General Robert E. Lee in the early days of the Civil War, even before  they signed up to join the Union Army. In a letter in 1863, Lee wrote:  &quot;The chief source of information to the enemy is through our Negroes.&quot;

I  share this history when I visit colleges and universities during Black  History Month. Every time, without fail, eyes pop open when I tell  students about Mr. Dunlap and his grandfather, even at historically  black institutions.

Thanks to the movie &quot;Red Tails,&quot; more will  know about the Tuskegee Airmen. But there are many more American heroes'  stories to tell.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Sana Butler.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Opinion: I will support as many 'Pariahs' as I can]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/Opinion-I-will-support-as-many-Pariahs-as-I-can-137263333.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:33:46 PST</pubDate>
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 	                                 Editor's note: R. Ashley  Jackson is an LGBT community advocate with the Southern Poverty Law  Center. She is the former coordinator of the Mississippi Safe Schools  Coalition, an organization that advocates on behalf of lesbian, gay,  bi-sexual and transgender students in Mississippi. &quot;Pariah,&quot; a feature  length film by director Dee Rees, opens in more cities January 13.

(CNN) &mdash; For months I've been  hearing the buzz surrounding &quot;Pariah,&quot; the film directed by Spike Lee's  prot&eacute;g&eacute; Dee Rees, about a teen-aged, black lesbian learning to love and  accept herself in a home where her sexuality makes her an outcast. I  have been especially excited to see the movie because like Alike, played  by Adepero Oduye, the 17-year-old protagonist in the story, I am a  young, black woman who has struggled with acceptance and rejection in my  life.

As I watched &quot;Pariah,&quot; I laughed and cried right along with  Alike. I felt her pain and loneliness as her mother, played by Kim  Wayans, ignored her feelings and her thoughts and tried to do things  like choose the young woman's friends and clothing. They were desperate  attempts to steer Alike from a &quot;gay lifestyle.&quot;

In the film  Alike's rejecting experiences &mdash; from her family and from her community &mdash;  help to make her stronger, and shape her vision for her future. That is  exactly what happened to me.

The night of December 24, 2005  changed my life forever. It was my 22nd birthday. The evening began with  dinner and dancing with 15 close friends. I was the life of the party,  full of jokes and laughter. You would think I was having the time of my  life, but actually I was feeling quite alone, lost and sad. It's because  I was living a lie. I was secretly in a relationship with a woman for  the first time in my life and I didn't think I could tell anyone &mdash; not  any of my 15 friends in attendance and especially not my mother, a  non-denominational minister. I knew she didn't approve of homosexuality.

Before  I'd entered that inaugural relationship I had started drinking, mostly  entire bottles of cheap wine and more than a few shots of whatever was  offered to wash it down. It was all about trying to suppress the  feelings I had for women. The alcohol made it easier to date men and  pretend to be happy. But there weren't enough drinks to fill the  emptiness I felt.

That night, after having an argument with my  girlfriend, despite being too drunk to drive, I tried anyway. Not  wearing a seat belt and speeding up I-55 in Jackson, Mississippi, I  passed out and fell into the passenger seat. When my head hit the cloth,  I realized what was happening, and said to myself, &quot;Ashley, get up, you  are driving.&quot; At that moment I used my left hand for leverage to sit  upright, yanking the car to the left across four lanes and smashing into  a concrete barrier. It was close to 4 a.m. I was alone, bloody and  injured. To this day, I don't know how long I was there or who found me.  Flashing in and out of consciousness, I remember thinking the ambulance  engine sounded like a school bus.

The hours and days after are a  blur of doctors, pain, shame, confusion and fear. Instead of opening  presents and blowing out candles, I was having surgery to correct the  broken bones in my foot and ankle while trying to take in the fact that I  may walk with a limp for the rest of my life. I ended up with a  concussion and short-term memory damage that prompted me to write down  everything so I wouldn't forget conversations I'd had 10 minutes ago. I  had bruises, scars and stitches from head to toe. My face was blackened  and full of stitches. Unable to care for or bathe myself meant I had to  move out of my apartment and once again begin living with my mother.

The  worst part of all of this is that I did it to myself. Fear of rejection  and not having anyone to talk to led me to destructive behavior. I felt  alone and isolated. I didn't belong in the heterosexual world and  didn't believe I belonged in the homosexual world either. Going through  the motions &mdash; acting as everyone around me expected &mdash; was the only way I  could keep myself going every day.

Lying in that hospital gave me  time to think, time to let all of those suppressed feelings and  emotions take over. I remember thinking, &quot;I am gay. I am a lesbian.&quot; A  huge weight lifted off of me, and I cried. I let it all out.

In  the months after, unable to get from room to room on my own, I spent my  days and nights on the Internet searching for a community. I found it! I  was amazed to discover people in Jackson, Mississippi, who would accept  me for me. I found my friends, my &quot;urban family,&quot; where I didn't have  to hide and pretend. And I was able to kick the alcohol I had been  leaning on.

Soon after I found the reason I was given a second chance.

One  year after my car accident, a friend came to me and asked if she could  bring her 12-year-old nephew to my house. He had confided in her that he  was gay and afraid his father would disown him if he found out. My  friend wanted him to meet an out-of-the-closet gay person living openly  in Mississippi. When they arrived at my home, he was timid and very  quiet. After I coaxed him into helping me chop veggies for our falafel  and pita dinner, he opened up. We chatted away about his friends, music  and movies. We talked about his school and his family. Seeing his face  light up when he was given the opportunity to tell me about his life and  dreams was one of the most amazing experiences I've had.

That  very night, I sat on my on my sofa and decided I had to do something for  the LGBT youth feeling alone and afraid. I had to speak up for the ones  who had no one to talk to, no one allowing them to be themselves, the  ones with no support system. These are the youth represented by Alike in  the film, &quot;Pariah.&quot; She's a smart young woman with good grades, a  talented writer and big dreams. She's like so many dreamers I meet,  growing up in a world where they're told they're defective or not good  enough.

I began my mission by attending community meetings. It  evolved to helping with a local LGBT support group. I eventually became a  founding member of the Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition, an  enormously successful LGBT youth-led organization in the state of  Mississippi. Even though we were discouraged and told that a group  advocating on behalf of gay and transgender kids would never work in  Mississippi, we stood strong and worked hard.

To me, Alike  represents the young people I come in contact with everyday: the boy  being abused by his father because he's not man enough, the boy being  bullied so much by students and teachers he dropped out of school at 13,  the girl who tried to take her own life because her mother wouldn't  acknowledge her and forced her from home.

I was so happy to see at  least one adult in Alike's life who she felt at ease around and who  wasn't trying to change her. It was her English teacher Mrs. Alverado ,  played by Zabryna Guevara. They didn't discuss dating or relationships.  It wasn't necessary. When Alike walked into that classroom, her face lit  up. She wasn't guarded or sad. She had a safe space and someone to  listen to her. That's so important. All young people coming out deserve  this: a safe, accepting adult.

Many of the youth I've worked with  don't have a safe space, especially not at home. I know I can't give  these young adults new homes but I can help them stay strong, become  leaders and help each other.

Everyone should see &quot;Pariah,&quot;  especially parents and adults working with youth. We have a duty to  prepare, nurture and encourage them. It is up to us to make sure they  are well adjusted and ready to take charge of their future. That will  never happen if we are discouraging creativity and individualism.

I  tried to run away from my feelings and ended up being stopped in my  tracks, literally, by a 10-foot concrete barrier in the middle of a  dark, empty Mississippi highway. I've been given a second chance to do  something and that something will be to support, comfort, inspire, and  energize the lives of as many of the Alike's of the world as I can.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of R. Ashley Jackson.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Interfaith cooperation on campus and the legacy of MLK]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/137231508.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jan 2012 20:24:44 PST</pubDate>
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(CNN) &mdash; Editor's Note:  Cassie Meyer is director of content and oversees training and curriculum  development at Interfaith Youth Core. She has a master's degree from  the University of Chicago Divinity School.

As we lead up  to the 83rd anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth next  week, the organization that I work for, the Interfaith Youth Core  http://www.ifyc.org/, will be at Emory University for our January  Interfaith Leadership Institute.  http://www.ifyc.org/content/leadership-institutes More than 160  students, faculty and staff members from colleges and universities  across the country will gather in King's hometown to tackle questions of  what it means to engage religious diversity constructively when so much  of our public discourse about religion is fraught with ignorance,  misunderstanding and outright bigotry.

At Interfaith Youth Core,  our mission is to make interfaith cooperation a social norm; we have  always seen King not only as a key architect of the Civil Rights  Movement but as what we call an &quot;interfaith leader&quot; for his ability to  mobilize people of different religious and non-religious identities  toward a common end. At the institute, we'll ask how students and their  allies from across the country can build on this facet of King's legacy,  making interfaith cooperation a reality on their campuses.

According  to Harvard professor Diana Eck, America is the most religiously diverse  country in the world and the most religiously devout nation in the  West. Given the fractured nature of religious discourse in our country,  institutions of higher education are uniquely positioned to equip a new  generation of leaders with the skills to constructively engage our  religious diversity. Campuses have played a proactive and holistic role  in engaging social issues such as multiculturalism; gay, lesbian and  transgender issues; and gender equality, which has led to shifts in  attitudes and behaviors beyond campus. This is not by chance. Broadly  speaking, higher education is about preparing students for global  citizenship, contributing to the common good and strengthening social  cohesion. If colleges and universities -- with leadership from students,  faculty, staff members and administrators -- engage religious diversity  with the same ambition and resources they dedicate to other identity  and diversity issues, there is an opportunity for lasting impact beyond  the sphere of higher education in the broader culture.

Further,  college students have played a crucial leadership role in many of the  social change movements. As a student training to be a Christian leader,  King found himself surprised by the way Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu, used  the Christian gospels as a ground for nonviolent resistance. King went  on to collaborate with leaders of diverse backgrounds, including Rabbi  Abraham Joshua Heschel and Buddhist leader Thich Nat Hahn. More broadly,  students across the country were instrumental to the civil rights  movement through the organizing power of the Student Nonviolent  Coordinating Committee.

Throughout the institute, faculty and  staff members will think about how campuses can be models of interfaith  cooperation. Networking with their peers from across the country,  they'll consider what it looks like for a campus to make interfaith  cooperation an institutional priority. They'll look at how their  campuses create opportunities for positive interactions between students  of diverse religious and non-religious identities, how this is  reflected in their institutions' mission and vision and reinforced in  curriculum. We'll train students to be organizers and movement builders,  asking them how they can mobilize their fellow students of diverse  religious and non-religious identities around service and action through  our nationwide Better Together campaign.

In our opening training  session at the Interfaith Leadership Institute, called &quot;The Power of  Interfaith Cooperation,&quot; we'll ask students and their allies to reflect  on why interfaith cooperation matters personally to them and imagine how  their campuses might play a role in shaping how the broader culture  responds to the challenges of religious diversity. Often, the students  we work with will struggle to articulate why these personal moments are  the makings of a movement, what they can possibly say to the pressing  reality of religious misunderstanding and conflict they see when they  turn on the news.

Here's where King comes in, that young seminary  student with a revelation from a Hindu. In understanding the civil  rights movement as a movement where interfaith cooperation was a key  strategy for creating real social change, students begin to see that the  work they are doing has the potential to change not just their lives  but also the patterns of how religious and non-religious people  interact. They begin to see that what they're doing might indeed be  building what King called the &quot;beloved community&quot; and that their work on  their campuses and in their local communities just may spill over to  impact the world beyond. They realize that although the work they're  doing on their campus may be small, they're working in partnership with  students on campuses across the country. They begin to see King not just  as the hallowed leader but as a student, like them, who took action  because he saw how his values could be enriched by appreciating the  values of others.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Cassie Meyer.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Opinion: It's not easy being first lady]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/137224453.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:46:25 PST</pubDate>
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Editor's note: Carl Sferrazza Anthony is an author and historian on the political and social roles of first ladies. 


(CNN) &mdash; In &quot;The Obamas,&quot; the new  book causing a stir with its speculation about the extent of the first  lady's political influence, author Jodi Kantor recounts an anecdote: A  young schoolgirl tells Michelle Obama that she hopes to someday become a  president's wife herself one day. &quot;Doesn't pay well,&quot; Mrs. Obama  wittily cracks.

Truth be told, pay is the least of the drawbacks  of being a first lady. The unelected, unaccountable and unofficial  position has been challenging presidential spouses for more than two  centuries now. I've spent years researching and interviewing first  ladies, but it was Hillary Clinton who best crystallized for me the  essential reality of what it means to be first lady: &quot;Who I really am as  a person is ultimately less important to the public than what they want  me to represent as a persona.&quot;

This was as true for mental  health care reform advocate Rosalynn Carter in the 1970s as it was for  the happy hostess Julia Grant a century earlier.

Michelle Obama  articulated her own frustration with this the other day, for seeming,  she said, to have been cast as &quot;some kind of angry black woman.&quot;

There  is truth in Mrs. Obama's observation; her historic status as the first  African-American first lady has made her at times a target for unfair  stereotype and very ugly treatment.

But casting the first lady as  &quot;the other&quot; &mdash; that is, outside the concept of the Anglo-Saxon as  acceptably &quot;American&quot; &mdash; has a long history. Almost a century ago, when  the press widely reported that Edith Wilson was from the &quot;Red Bolling  family,&quot; as the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter  of Princess Pocahontas, even serious journalists ignored the fact that  it meant only one of her 512 ninth-generation ancestors was a Native  American. Instead, it prompted members of the public to send her Native  American items like a beaded belt and write to government officials  warning that it was illegal for the first lady to be served alcohol.

As  late as the 1960 election, when the Catholicism of Democratic  presidential candidate John F. Kennedy finally broke through the  nation's historic anti-papist sentiment, the campaign of his opponent,  Richard Nixon, soft-pedaled his wife's ethnic and religious background.  Not only was Pat Nixon the daughter of a German immigrant mother, but  also of an Irish Catholic father.

Kennedy's campaign may not have  been able to conceal that Jacqueline Kennedy was Catholic too, but at  least her &quot;Bouvier&quot; maiden name offered legitimate exotic cover for the  larger reality of her background: She had only one French paternal  great-grandparent, and her &quot;Lee of Virginia&quot; mother was not of the  famous blue-blood clan, but rather had briefly lived in the Old Dominion  for a college term and was as Irish as the Kennedys.

Mamie  Eisenhower? Despite her widely distributed Swedish Christmas cookie  recipe, even she never acknowledged her grandparents as immigrants from  Sweden.

At other points, societal judgments of the first ladies  served well as veiled partisan attacks on their husbands. In an earlier  time, the worldly, abolitionist Mary Lincoln of the wealthy Kentucky  Todd clan would have been idealized as a Southern belle hostess. But  married to the Union's president during the Civil War, she was  maliciously caricatured as a racist secretly loyal to the Confederacy.

And  William McKinley, realizing that disclosure of his wife Ida's epilepsy  would fix her with a label of &quot;insanity,&quot; avoided the ignorant  presumption by asserting that she was an &quot;invalid,&quot; as evidenced by her  use of a wheelchair or cane.

The 1828 campaign editorials shaming  Rachel Jackson as morally unfit because her first marriage had ended in  divorce were central to the character attacks on her husband, Andrew  Jackson.

Nearly 100 years later, such judgment was still so  strongly feared for its political liability that Florence Harding  outright lied to the press with her claim of having been widowed by her  first husband, not divorced. By 1976, however, Betty Ford's first  marriage ending in divorce was not an issue, and neither was the earlier  divorce of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.

As time moves on  and American life and demographics evolve, so too will the perceptions  of wives in the White House. However, hurtful remarks or hateful racism  aimed at the current first lady may feel to Americans of many different  backgrounds so shaming as to force a tipping point in history. One can  hope it will finally help reduce the rhetoric of future generations  about presidential spouses based on their origins, appearance -- even  gender.

Join CNN Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on Twitter.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Carl Sferrazza Anthony.
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			<title><![CDATA[Why is Arizona threatened by Mexican-American studies?]]></title>
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			<pubDate>Thu, 5 Jan 2012 11:13:50 PST</pubDate>
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Editor's note: Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a CNN.com contributor and a nationally syndicated columnist.
SAN DIEGO (CNN) &mdash; Who's afraid of a harmless course in Mexican-American studies?
 
Arizonans. That's who. It figures. In the immigration debate, the state that has demonstrated that it is terrified of changing demographics and determined to run off Latinos seems afraid of its own cultural footprint.
 
We're talking about courses in Mexican-American history being taught to high school students of all colors and backgrounds in the Tucson Unified School District.
 
Concerned that teachers are presenting material in a biased and inflammatory manner, a posse of elected officials, education bureaucrats and school board trustees &mdash; made up of Democrats and Republicans &mdash; are trying to shut down the district's Mexican-American studies program.
 
Those wrongheaded efforts got a boost last week when, at an administrative hearing, state Administrative Law Judge Lewis Kowal &mdash; relying on auditors that had surveyed only a few classes &mdash; found that the program was being taught in an inappropriate manner.
 
It's rare that you find ethnic studies at the K-12 level. Maybe that's because parents and communities are sometimes uncomfortable with the subject matter.
 
I bet you could go into most high schools in the United States, and you'd find U.S. history textbooks that make no mention of the Chicano Movement, the birth of the United Farm Workers union, the Zoot Riots and a long list of other seminal events experienced by Mexican-Americans in this country.
 
And given that Latinos account for 16% of the U.S. population and are projected to make up twice that percentage in a few decades &mdash; and that Mexican and Mexican-Americans account for about two-thirds of the Latino population &mdash; that sort of blind spot doesn't serve anyone's interests.
 
Latinos have to learn about the culture and institutions of the mainstream. Why shouldn't those in the mainstream have to reciprocate and learn a little something about Latinos? That's not only fair, but also wise.
 
These days, it's hard to be wise in Arizona. An ominous state law passed by the legislature in 2010 bans courses that teach &quot;racial resentment&quot; or are &quot;designed for a specific ethnic group&quot; or advocate &quot;ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.&quot; Under the law, the state can withhold 10% of the funding for a school district &mdash; in the case of Tucson, about $15 million a year &mdash; until the district changes the courses or eliminates them.
 
In writing his opinion, Kowal charged right into the debate with the grace of, well, a right-wing radio talk show host.
 
&quot;Teaching oppression objectively is quite different than actively presenting material in a biased, political, and emotionally charged manner,&quot; Kowal wrote. &quot;Teaching in such a manner promotes social or political activism against the white people, promotes racial resentment, and advocates ethnic solidarity, instead of treating pupils as individuals.&quot;
 
As an example of the harm supposedly done by such courses, he brought up one lesson that taught students that the historic treatment of Mexican-Americans was &quot;marked by the use of force, fraud and exploitation.&quot;
 
And so? Isn't that true? And isn't the same thing true of Asian-Americans, Native Americans and African-Americans? Are these the next groups to be bullied? So we won't teach the ugly chapters of American history. Why not just have the textbooks written by Hallmark?
 
Here's what this is really about. A group of people is afraid that the tables are being turned, and that they will eventually lose power and suffer retaliation. So they're portraying themselves as victims of a new oppression.
 
This view is shared by Republicans and Democrats alike. It makes no difference. This isn't about partisanship. It's about pettiness. And losing your place in line. Arizona, the problem child of the Southwest, has it backward again. In recent years, state officials have made it awfully clear where they believe Latinos belong in the social pecking order. The bottom.
 
That was the message when artists hired to paint a mural at a school in Prescott were told to &quot;lighten&quot; the face of the child at the center of the drawing because people objected that the figure was obviously Latino &mdash; before the school came to its senses and retracted the order.
 
That was the message when state lawmakers passed a tough immigration bill that encouraged ethnic profiling by deputizing local and state police to enforce federal immigration law based on who they suspect is in the country illegally. And that was the message when state education officials went so far as to bar instructors who are determined to have heavy accents from teaching English language classes.
 
Opponents of ethnic studies think knowledge is dangerous. But what's the alternative? Take a good look at what's become of Arizona and consider the perils of ignorance.
 
The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Rube Navarrette Jr.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Should Cee Lo have tweaked 'Imagine'?]]></title>
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Editor's Note:  Stephen Prothero, a Boston University religion scholar and author of  &quot;God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World,&quot; is a  regular CNN Belief Blog contributor.

By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN

New Year&rsquo;s Eve is usually truce time in the culture wars &mdash; a moment  to reflect and hope and forget your troubles (and the world&rsquo;s). Not so  on Saturday night, when Cee Lo Green changed the lyrics to John Lennon&rsquo;s  &ldquo;Imagine&rdquo; while performing the song on live television in New York&rsquo;s  Time Square.

Instead of &ldquo;Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too,&rdquo; Green sang, &ldquo;Nothing to kill or die for, and all religion&rsquo;s true.&rdquo;

This change has performed something of a minor miracle: bringing  atheists and evangelicals together in common cause. Atheists are  outraged that Green is messing with what they see as an anthem for their  cause, while evangelicals object to his view that all religions are  true.

Green has also infuriated Beatles  believers, who see tampering with any Lennon lyrics as tantamount to  rewriting the Bible. On Twitter, more than one Beatles fan has quoted  Cee Lo Green back to himself: &ldquo;Forget you&rdquo; (or worse).

Pop stars routinely tweak lyrics here and there (sometimes because  they forget the words), but &ldquo;Imagine&rdquo; is nearly as iconic as Lennon and  the Beatles themselves &mdash; number three on Rolling Stone&rsquo;s 2004 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

One of the great debates about the world&rsquo;s religions concerns whether  they are toxic or tonic. In recent years, Christopher Hitchens and  other New Atheists have argued forcefully that all religion is &ldquo;poison.&rdquo;

Lennon never said that. In fact, he was powerfully drawn to various  forms and offshoots of Hindu practice, including Transcendental  Meditation. In 1968, he went to India and the following year in England  he engaged in a wide-ranging conversation with the Hare Krishna leader Swami Prabhupada.

But he was clearly a critic of organized religion in general, and of  Christianity in particular.  (Remember when he bragged that the Beatles  were more famous than Jesus?) And as &ldquo;Imagine&rdquo; attests, he stood  alongside those who saw religion as a source of lethal conflict in the  world.

The message of &ldquo;Imagine&rdquo; is simple. Here Lennon allows himself to  imagine what Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of as a &ldquo;beloved community&rdquo;  wrapping its arms around the entire planet. Three things need to go away  for that to be possible: countries, religions, and possessions.

So this was not some minor cut Cee Lo Green did to the song on New  Year&rsquo;s Eve. It was major surgery on Lennon&rsquo;s &ldquo;one world&rdquo; vision.

One final quibble, this time about &ldquo;all religion&rsquo;s true.&rdquo; Huh? What does that even mean?

If one religion says there is one god, another says there are  millions of gods, and another says there are no gods, can they all be  true? Perhaps in some mystical sense. But on some theological questions,  at least, the logical laws of contradiction still obtain.

I say let&rsquo;s leave the Christ in Christmas, and for the rest of 2012, at least, let&rsquo;s leave the Lennon in Lennon, too.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Stephen Prothero.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Bill Clinton's lessons for Obama ]]></title>
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			<pubDate>Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:17:44 PST</pubDate>
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Editor's note: Julian Zelizer  is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He  is the author of &quot;Jimmy Carter&quot; (Times Books) and author of the  forthcoming book &quot;Governing America&quot; (Princeton University Press).

(CNN) &mdash; Sometimes it feels like  President Clinton never left the public spotlight. Although there were  moments during the 2008 campaign when it seemed he was as much of a  target within his own party as were the Republicans, these days Clinton  is everywhere and Democrats want him by their side. Members of President  Obama's campaign team say Clinton will offer them his services next  year.

The re-emergence of President Clinton in Obama's circles has  been gradual. It has taken time to recover from the tensions that  flared during the 2008 Democratic primaries, when some Democrats accused  Clinton of making racist remarks following Obama's victory over Sen.  Hillary Clinton in South Carolina. But over the past year, the White  House has brought him back on more and more occasions to strengthen  Obama's standing.

What explains the former president's appeal &mdash;  beyond his knowing how to work the necessary magic that got him  re-elected in 1996 and left booming approval ratings at the end of his  presidency? His strengths offer some guidance for President Obama to  improve his standing, even beyond his campaign.

The first is that  President Clinton was very successful at counteracting Republicans when  they attacked. One of President Obama's great frustrations has been the  &quot;messaging wars.&quot; He has frequently been frustrated by how the GOP  portrays him to the public and defines his policies in unfavorable ways.

Clinton  didn't let the GOP do that easily. When Republicans painted the  president as left of center early in his term, he responded by  aggressively highlighting his centrist credentials, lowering the deficit  in 1993 and reforming welfare in 1996. Although he accepted their terms  of debate, unlike when President Obama has done the same, he was able  to follow through on that co-optation by strengthening his party's  standing.

When House Republicans shut down the government over  spending, Clinton helped convince the public that they were extremists,  forcing Republicans to backtrack.

When the GOP started the process  to impeach President Clinton in 1998 and 1999, he focused public  attention on that process, which he said was driven purely by partisan  concerns. Republicans said that the president was corrupt. The president  responded that Republicans were simply using impeachment for partisan  purposes. His approval ratings skyrocketed. The GOP struggled.

The  second reason is that President Clinton was relentless in his focus on  the economy. Clinton, who famously campaigned with &quot;It's the economy,  stupid&quot; in 1992, never took his eye off the ball. He continued to hammer  away at the recession that he inherited and didn't stop talking about  the problems Americans faced. Although Clinton did turn his attention  toward health care in 1993 and 1994, he continued to work on the  economy, such as the Family and Medical Leave Act. He proposed  enterprise zones to try and revitalize urban areas and fought against  Republican proposed cuts to key domestic programs. During the rebound of  the mid-1990s, Clinton was in a good position to claim credit for the  improved circumstances.

President Obama has certainly worked hard  to improve the economy. In more dramatic fashion than Clinton, he  persuaded Congress to pass an economic stimulus bill as well as  financial regulation. But too often, President Obama has seemed focused  on other concerns, whether it was health care reform in his first two  years as president or deficit reduction after the midterm elections. The  situation has left many Democrats yearning for a president who  understood that economic recovery was the top priority for many in the  party.

The final reason is that President Clinton displayed a  phenomenal ability to show empathy with Americans who were suffering,  whether they were struggling with hard economic times or were the  victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. Although empathy is much different  from policy, it was clear that Clinton's ability to forge connections  with voters in small groups, or even through speeches, was one of the  reasons his polls remained so strong.

This has been one of the  hardest challenges for the president, who often seems distant and  disconnected from the problems facing the country. Obama, a skilled  orator, has had trouble connecting to voters at this level.

None  of this is to ignore the many Democrats who still look back to the  Clinton years with a skeptical eye. After all, some Democrats argue that  he helped to promote the deregulatory policies that fueled the  financial meltdown and that he did little to reverse the growing  economic inequality in America.

Nonetheless, many aspects of his  presidency are attractive in retrospect. For all these reasons,  President Clinton is back. The man who often positioned himself against  the Clinton legacy is running side by side with him. Besides the  campaign for reelection, President Obama should spend some time thinking  about what lessons Clinton has to offer this presidency in the final  months of his first term &mdash; and in his second term, should that come to  pass.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Julian Zelizer.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Yes, Mr. President, Americans can be 'lazy']]></title>
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COMMENTARY

(CNN) &mdash; For all of our talk of  Americans being straight shooters who don't like to mince words and have  the freedom of speech to say exactly what's on our minds, we sure punk  out when it comes to elected officials speaking the truth.

Case in point: President Barack Obama describing American corporations as being &quot;lazy&quot; in competing globally.

Now,  if you hear that word by itself, you would think, &quot;Man, that's horrible  our president said such a thing.&quot; But here is EXACTLY what he said  during a conversation with Boeing's CEO as they discussed American  businesses selling more products overseas, and attracting foreign  investment to the U.S.:

&quot;You know, we've been a little bit lazy, I  think, over the last couple of decades. We've kind of taken for  granted, well, people will want to come here, and we aren't out there  hungry selling America, and trying to attract new businesses into  America.&quot;

That's it. Was he talking about workers turning out cars  in Detroit? Nope. Was President Obama dissing manufacturing workers in  North Carolina? Not at all. He was talking about Americans being far  more aggressive in trying to sell our wares abroad.

That's it. Simple. Easy. And on point.

Then  all of a sudden, Texas Gov. Rick Perry used the word in an ad, not even  bothering with the context. Fox anchor Martha MacCallum said Obama was  &quot;scolding&quot; Americans. Sean Hannity, never one to let facts get in the  way of a good lie, said Obama &quot;attacked&quot; Americans. And the king of  taking anything out of context, Rush Limbaugh, said the president  &quot;insults the people who make this country work.&quot;

Seriously, please pass the cup so these folks can take a drug test because they are hallucinating.

This  is the problem with the stubborn belief in American exceptionalism: It  assumes that no matter what the issue, Americans are the best in the  world and can't be topped or beaten.

There is another word for this: arrogance.

Yes, it's true. Americans can be absolutely arrogant when it comes to competing with the rest of the world.

A  few months ago I read a story where American college students were  dismayed that they had to apply for jobs overseas. Well, if that's where  multinational corporations are hiring, then we might have to learn to  get a passport, hop on the plane, and learn how to Skype in order to  talk to family members. Are we so arrogant to think the rest of the  world is desperate to come here and we may not have to go to other  countries?

We can't continue to act like our stuff doesn't stink.  There are many areas where Americans are lazy, and in the words of  President George W. Bush, we must end &quot;the soft bigotry of low  expectations.&quot;

Maybe this comes from our view of sports. It used  to be on the national sporting stage, the attitude of America in  gymnastics, boxing, track and field, basketball and numerous other  sports was that we could just wake up, walk into a stadium with the  American flag on our chest, and everyone else would faint, allowing us  to win.

Well, that ain't gonna cut it. And when we lose, Americans totally freak out, wondering how we got beat. Easy. H-A-R-D W-O-R-K.

We need a dose of reality at times to remind us that to to be the best, we must have the right work ethic.

According to the Broad Education Foundation:

&mdash; 68% of American eighth graders can't read at grade level and won't catch up

&mdash; American students rank 21st in science compared to students in 30 industrialized countries &mdash; America's top math students rank 25th out of 30 countries

In 2000, the last time The World Health Organization ranked the  top health systems in the world, the U.S. was 37th, behind France  (first); Oman (eighth); and Chile (33rd).

Maybe part of the  problem is the American culture rewards weakness. If America wants to be  the absolute best, we must stop telling our children that they are so  exceptional when they are not. If your kid can't shoot, pass, dribble or  rebound, guess what? They are terrible at basketball and should find a  new sport. If it's just about the enjoyment, fine. But if it's about  winning, they can't cut it.

I was talking to a CNN colleague whose  mother is a teacher and she said that her mom can't grade papers in red  ink anymore because that is considered too aggressive. Really? Has  America become so weak that we can't even handle a school paper graded  in red?

I'm sick of us giving awards at schools just because we  don't want a kid to feel bad. Guess what? Suck it up. First, second and  third is fine with me. You finished eighth? Tough. No ribbon for you. No  apologies.

Notre Dame's Brian Kelly and Nebraska's Bo Pelini had  to apologize because folks complained about them yelling and shouting at  their players on the sidelines. Thank God Vince Lombardi and Knute  Rockne are dead. We would run them out of town!

In Walter  Isaacson's excellent book, &quot;Steve Jobs,&quot; the co-founder of Apple is  blasted by some for his treatment of workers and competitors. Was some  of Jobs' stuff over the top? Sure. But what was he trying to do? He was  trying to create a world-class company that could withstand the test of  time and wasn't filled with a bunch of B players. He wanted excellence  in every spot, and would rather fire a B or C player on the spot than  accept shoddy work.

Hey, I'm down with the philosophy of Jobs.  Those are the kind of companies I've worked for in the past, and I was  taught that if you want to win at something, you better be the best.  Heck, even Jobs wasn't above criticizing President Obama, saying that  one of the reasons he was on his way to a one-term presidency was  because, &quot;He's having trouble leading because he's reluctant to offend  people or piss them off.&quot;

&quot;Yes, that's not a problem I ever had,&quot; Isaacson quotes Jobs as saying.

Now that's some real talk.

I'll  guarantee you this: Weak and lazy corporate bosses allow weak and lazy  employees to stick around. And weak and lazy employees tend to turn out a  weak and sorry product that nobody wants. And weak and lazy people  accept mediocrity with ease.

America, it's time to suck it up. If  we love the harsh and in-your-face American Idol/X Factor judging of  Simon Cowell, then we should accept it in the real world. This nation  needs a swift kick in the butt, and there is nothing wrong when  President Obama says it. If House Speaker John Boehner said the same, I  would be hollering, &quot;Amen!&quot;

If America wants to maintain it's  position as a great nation, then we are going to have to roll up our  sleeves and out-think, out-learn, out-hustle and out-work everyone.

So  Gov. Perry, instead of spending time taking President Obama out of  context in an ad, you need to work harder in debates. Herman Cain, you  don't like the president using the word lazy? Then bone up on foreign  affairs. Republicans and Democrats unhappy with President Obama  challenging our corporate leaders, stop kicking the can down the road on  the tough budget stuff and make a principled, not partisan, call.

We have been better and can be better. So let's do better. Today.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Barack Obama slept here]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/Barack-Obama-slept-here-130957338.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">130957338</guid>		
			<pubDate>Sun, 2 Oct 2011 22:22:44 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	



	


		

																		



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(CNN) &mdash; &quot;George Washington slept here.&quot;

It was once an American catchphrase &mdash; cheery shorthand for a  blithesome fact of American democracy: Our presidents come from among  us, and have traditionally striven to continue moving among us.

Any  number of country inns and lodges, in the early years of the United  States, proudly proclaimed that the first president once spent the night  within their walls. The phrase had staying power; as late as the 1940s a  hit Broadway comedy by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman was titled  &quot;George Washington Slept Here,&quot; and was followed by a major motion  picture starring Jack Benny.

It is doubtful, in our contemporary  era of Code Red security levels and constant threats against public  officials, that there will be a sequel to the jolly play or movie coming  out any time soon. Our presidents still, from time to time, sleep among  us, but whatever feeling of lighthearted happenstance was implicit in  the &quot;George Washington slept here&quot; slogan is long gone. By necessity, a  president spending a night away from the White House is grimly serious  business.

Without having planned it that way, I ended up staying  at the same hotel as President Barack Obama during his recent visit to  New York to address a session of the United Nations General Assembly. I  had scheduled a trip to New York months before, and had no idea the  president would be in town at the same time. The roadway congestion and  police-mandated detours on the way into midtown Manhattan from LaGuardia  created a backed-up mess, and the cabdriver summed it up in a weary  phrase I could tell he had used many times that week: &quot;Obama traffic.&quot;

It's  not a phrase any politician would welcome &mdash; no one seeking the voting  public's goodwill wants to be associated with traffic headaches &mdash; but  that's how it is these days, whether the person in office is a Democrat  or a Republican. When a president comes to town, all streets along the  paths of his motorcades are blocked off, all people seeking access to  where he is are frisked, either electronically or by hand or both.  Because of the history of violence against political leaders, the  melancholy assumption on the part of law enforcement is that everyone  must be presumed guilty of having bad intentions until being deemed  innocent.

No one has to ask why there must be Secret Service war  wagons standing sentry on otherwise cleared-of-traffic streets adjacent  to where a president sleeps, or why guests checking into a hotel where a  president stays have their baggage taken from them and carted to an  outdoor location behind steel-and-cement barriers, where sophisticated  screening devices give them the once or twice over. And no one has to  inquire about the reason for the searches every hotel employee and every  hotel guest must submit to each time he or she wants to enter the  building anew.

Not to have these measures in place would be to  invite disaster of shattering proportions, especially when, in the case  of the recent United Nations sessions, not only the president of the  United States, but numerous top-level foreign officials are there, too.

Still,  it makes the very idea of a president mixing with the people he is  elected to serve seem like a well-intentioned but ultimately bittersweet  illusion. And the limitations on a president's movement, and on the  free movement of citizens who would like to catch a glimpse of him, are  destined to grow ever more restrictive. Presidents routinely rode  through cities in open convertibles &mdash; until the murder of John F.  Kennedy made that seem like a foolhardy concept.

Presidents and  presidential candidates took it for granted that the people who worked  in the buildings where they spoke or slept were not a major danger &mdash;  until Robert F. Kennedy took that shortcut through the hotel kitchen.  Presidents felt relatively safe strolling onto a sidewalk with  unscreened people in close proximity &mdash; until Ronald Reagan walked onto  the wrong sidewalk on the wrong day. Today, when presidents decide to  take a jog or go out for a bite to eat, it is done from within thick  concentric rings of armed Secret Service agents and local police.

Presidents  have been known to say that they feel stifled governing from the  environs of the Rose Garden, meaning that they believe they have to get  out from the bubble that is life in the White House if they want to  maintain a feel for America and Americans. Yet the reality,  increasingly, is that they can't and don't leave the bubble &mdash; the  bubble moves right along with them, except that it is no longer merely a  bubble, it is a heavily fortified multiple-city-block mobile bunker.  And every time that bunker is deployed into the nation beyond Washington  is a new reminder of the seemingly unsolvable quandary we face:

We  wish we didn't live in a world where such measures are necessary. Our  presidents wish they didn't live in a world where such measures are  necessary. It's not our fault, or theirs. But it's not going to get any  easier.

Wherever George Washington may have slept, if he were  alive today the place would be surrounded by iron barricades, shut-down  roadways and government sharpshooters bearing automatic weapons. It's  the kind of thing that might keep a president awake at night.

CNN Contributor  Bob Greene is a bestselling author whose books include &quot;Late Edition: A  Love Story&quot; and &quot;Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte  Canteen.&quot; Watch him on CNN Newsroom Mondays during the 9 a.m. (ET) hour. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bob Greene.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Why Americans should care about famine in Africa]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/frist-africa-somalia-famine-column-opinion-biden-127485618.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">127485618</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:57:33 PST</pubDate>
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																																											                                                                        <description><![CDATA[

Editor's Note: William Frist, the former Republican majority leader of the U.S. Senate, is a physician.

(CNN) &mdash; Why should Americans care about the unfolding crisis in Somalia when our own economy is in chaos?

To shed some light on that question, I joined Dr. Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, on a fact-finding mission over the past several days to a Somali refugee camp close to the Kenya-Somalia border.

We saw the answer as we listened to a grief-stricken mother of five, who had marched for 15 days across the parched Somali land to find food and security in a border camp. They arrived malnourished, sick and thirsty to a camp of 430,000 other refugees. They competed with 1,500 others who had made it to the camp that day, only to find it filled to capacity. Inside they would find adequate food and water.

They would find the vaccinations that are saving the lives of thousands. They would survive because of the generosity of Americans (the U.S. is responsible for 47% of the food being provided) and increasingly because of members of the world community who are standing up, in spite of challenging times in their own communities.

More than 29,000 children have died over the past three months in what is the most acute food security emergency on Earth. It's worsening by the minute and outstripping available supplies. Thousands never make it to the camps, and those that do might have to wait outside the confines where 50,000 others are waiting.

Drawing from my experiences as a doctor in refugee camps in southern Sudan and Darfur, the conditions Biden and I saw this week constitute among the worst, the result of a cruel nexus of war, drought and poverty. The issue is complex, but we know with certainty that a primary focus on health greatly improves the chances of preventing death and of establishing security throughout the Horn of Africa. It's a worthy investment.

Drought occurs regularly throughout the region, but a dysfunctional government in Somalia is incapable of responding. Direct access by the international aid community is difficult and dangerous. This is why our focus on assistance in Ethiopia and Kenya is essential.

The five regions of famine in Somalia lead to death locally and to an exodus of children and families to Kenya and Ethiopia for food. The arrival each day of 1,400 to 2,000 new Somali refugees to the Dadaab Camp alone places a huge food, economic and environmental stress on eastern Kenya.

The good news for the American taxpayer is that investments by our humanitarian and development organizations have worked. Through past advances in agriculture and food security led by the United States, we learned that from the more plentiful regions of Kenya, food is flowing to the areas of greatest need. Even though tens of thousands have died in recent weeks because of the famine, I am certain that the number would have been much higher if the American people had not so smartly invested over the past decade.

Drought and famine are not new to the Horn of Africa. By examining past famines, we have learned that among the most important acute interventions is taking steps to improve health. This primacy of health is not generally recognized by the public, but it is by USAID administrator Rajiv Shah, who accompanied us.

Drought leads to famine, and famine leads to deteriorating health. Therapeutic health intervention with vaccines and oral rehydration is easy and cheap. But we have to get material to the region. And that is why the increased aid of $105 million announced Monday by our government is so important. This also shows that we can make such a difference as individuals through our own contributions (see http://www.usaid.gov/ for organizations).

The region is witnessing the worst drought in 60 years with more than 12 million people in need of outside assistance. Even though contributions by government, NGOs and the international community are growing, the needs are growing faster than the world is responding.

Will the American people respond in these difficult times? I know based on my experiences in southern Sudan, Darfur, Chad, Haiti and Bangladesh that the American people will give generously and support our nation's ongoing response.

Americans are at their best when they respond unselfishly to others in need &mdash; and they do so generously when they know that their investments, both personal gifts and government contributions, have value in saving lives in the short-term and supporting prevention in the long-term.

They know that their help will make a difference. Americans will act as they always do to help those in need.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of William Frist.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Gergen: Why didn't Obama listen to Petraeus?]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/obama-afghanistan-petraeus-gergen-troops-withdrawal-124449404.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:15:40 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	



				
	
	


									

																		



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Editor's note: David Gergen is a senior political analyst for CNN and has been an adviser to four presidents. He is professor of public service and director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Follow him on Twitter: @david_gergen

(CNN) &mdash; There was something deeply unsettling about President Obama's speech on Afghanistan and much of the commentary that surrounded it &mdash; or at least there was to me, as someone who clings to some old-fashioned traditions about U.S. foreign policy.

It should be said up front that the speech itself was well crafted. More importantly, President Obama deserves credit on two fronts.

First, he has kept his promises as a candidate and then in the Oval Office that he would wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in ways that he considered responsible. When he came into office, the U.S. had approximately 190,000 troops deployed in the two war zones; the wind-downs that are under way will mean that by the end of this year, we will have less than 100,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Promise kept.

Second, the president deserves credit for having the guts to order up a surge in Afghanistan in 2009 &mdash; against the wishes of many in his party &mdash; and for overseeing many successes from the surge, including devastating blows against al Qaeda. Promise kept.

But the issue before him in his East Room speech was where to go from here in Afghanistan. Everyone in his administration agrees that it is time to begin winding down the Afghanistan surge, as he promised in his West Point speech in 2009. The central question was how to do that.

Going forward, Gen. David Petraeus &mdash; who runs the military operations in Afghanistan &mdash; was widely reported to favor a slow, moderate reduction in U.S. forces, ensuring that the U.S. would continue to keep strong troop strength not only in 2011 but through the fighting season in Afghanistan in 2012. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shared that view, according to reports. (In a wonderful bit of commentary, Joe Klein of Time has posited that the fighting season in Afghanistan starts in the spring when the opium crop has been harvested and ends in November or so when the harvest season opens for marijuana.)

Set against the recommendations of his top military commander and his defense and diplomatic secretaries were those coming from Vice President Joe Biden and others to speed up the withdrawal and shift quickly from a counterinsurgency strategy (which requires more troops) to a counterterrorism strategy (which requires fewer troops, depending more on pinpoint attacks by drones, special forces and the like).

As someone who has seen a lot of military decisions made in the White House, I am accustomed to presidents paying great heed to the views of their commanders on the ground.

In this case, Petraeus was not just the commander on the ground &mdash; he is one of the very best American generals in modern history, a man who has turned around the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. One might think that given his extraordinary success and the great respect in which he is held on Capitol Hill and around the country, Obama would give Petraeus the benefit of the doubt and go with his preferred option.

But that is exactly what the president decided not to do. Instead of a 3,000-5,000 troop withdrawal this year, as Petraeus is understood to have recommended, Obama went for 10,000. And instead of protecting two full seasons of strong American troop presence in Afghanistan, Obama set forth a plan that almost certainly will compromise next season's fighting.

As a top general at the Pentagon told me, there is great fear that once troops know they are definitely coming home next summer, they will be focused on getting out of there safely &mdash; not on serious engagement with the Taliban.

Petraeus will loyally support the president in public, as he should. So will Gates and Clinton, even though both accepted the president's decision reluctantly, according to The New York Times.

But the impression grows that the president and his team were heavily influenced by the growing weariness with war in the public &mdash; 56% now say we should get out of Afghanistan &mdash; and by fears of the cost of war. All that is understandable &mdash; the president clearly has one eye (or both?) on his re-election campaign next year.

Politics ever intrudes in policy-making. But in foreign policy, the tradition has usually been that a president's role is to figure out what is in the nation's security interest and do that. A strong president tries to rally public opinion behind him, not bend to the latest shift in the winds.

What we are starting to see now in politics is a stampede toward the exits in Afghanistan. The wars are bleeding us dry, it is said &mdash; over $1 trillion over the past 10 years. Never mind that during those same years, a bloated government spent about $40 trillion in total. The public doesn't like Afghanistan anymore, it is said. Never mind that the public soured on Iraq, too, but President George W. Bush (despite his other faults) had the gumption to stick to his guns and order up a surge, and Iraq today is in much better shape than if we had retreated back when.

Given what Petraeus and others were arguing, I had hoped to hear more of that from Obama. He is certainly capable of making tough calls. But instead he delivered an address that had echoes of &quot;Come Home, America,&quot; a famous convention speech by George McGovern during the Vietnam period that served as a powerful encomium to American ideals &mdash; but also advocated a much more precipitous withdrawal than the wisdom of the American people could earnestly endorse.

No doubt, Obama's speech will appeal to many, many Americans. He is right that we do have to engage in more nation-building here at home. But we dare not head for the exits too quickly.

I wish he had listened to Gen. Petraeus.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Gergen.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[In ‘payback’ move, mayor’s allies  demoralize a proud inner-city school]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/In-payback-move-mayors-allies-demoralize-a-proud-inner-city-school.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">124868554</guid>		
			<pubDate>Fri, 1 Jul 2011 09:54:54 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	



	


		

																		



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In a staggering blow to traditional schools, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education voted to award the administration of Henry Clay Middle School to Green Dot, a charter school operator: In doing so, the district demoralized a campus, its faculty, staff, students and parents, and left community members and outside observers confused about the direction of Clay and other traditional schools.

The March 15 vote to convert Clay from a traditional school to a charter, effective July 1, was done over the objection of both myself, the elected representative for the area, and that of Ramon Cortines, the superintendent at that time. This decision was approved by board members who have never visited Clay&rsquo;s campus, and have no understanding of its history or lack of resources and district support. 

In short, the school board placed Clay on a silver platter and handed it to Green Dot, without solicitation or proposal. Astute observers know that this was an act of political payback because I do not support Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa&rsquo;s widely touted, highly publicized and heavily financed education &ldquo;reform&rdquo; agenda. The decision was allegedly made because of Green Dot&rsquo;s &ldquo;track record.&rdquo; 

Nevertheless, along with parents, educators and community members, I have raised questions as to what makes this track record inherently better than that of the school. To date, I have received no answers. While Clay&rsquo;s Academic Performance Index (API) score of 537 reflects a clear need for improvement, their principal of less than two years, led the school to tremendous gains and implemented new academic programs. Green Dot, on the other hand, has no history of working with middle school-aged children. 

And, to make matters worse, Green Dot&rsquo;s scores are no better than Clay&rsquo;s. Of their 13 schools operated within LAUSD, eight have scores of less than 650, which means that only five have API scores above the district&rsquo;s focus for re-vamping. Their schools with low API scores include the five Locke High Schools. These schools have been in Green Dot&rsquo;s hands long enough for us to have seen educational growth, especially since they have significantly smaller student bodies than Clay. Locke&rsquo;s 2010 scores of 563, 605, 495, 537 and 606, do not warrant the reward of another school in which to implement educational strategies that have not resulted in overwhelming success. This is not a track record to which we should aspire. We must continue to ask the board why it does not demand that charters illustrate an ability to get better results than current school administrations.

In awarding Clay to an organization whose API scores are essentially no better the Clay&rsquo;s, the board&rsquo;s action caused dedicated teachers and staff to ask why they were not given the chance and resources to continue the improvements they had started. Furthermore, as a result of the board&rsquo;s decision about Clay, other schools are in fear of being taken over, despite improved test scores and educational strategies which are appropriate for their populations. 

While at Clay last Saturday, I found teachers and staff hurriedly packing and removing belongings from offices and classrooms because they were ordered to be out by June 27. While rushing to clear their spaces, repairs and beautification projects were being carried out with unprecedented speed, in preparation for Green Dot&rsquo;s arrival. Teachers with many years of dedicated service are being displaced with little notice, no knowledge of their next assignment or even when they would be notified. 

Parents, also on campus for a community meeting, were bewildered, because they have been misinformed, misled or in some instances, kept completely in the dark about key components of the transition. The input of parents was discouraged in favor of orchestrated groups from outside of the school&rsquo;s boundaries. Parents with special needs or gifted children know that Green Dot does not have a history with those populations as does Clay. They are now faced with sending children out of their neighborhoods in order to maintain services and/or programs to which they have become accustomed. 

In their frustration, parents shared their concerns with Congresswoman Maxine Waters, in a community meeting she hosted. As a result, parents decided to go door-to-door to inform area residents about what was happening with Clay. The congresswoman joined them on several outings and listened to the concerns of nearby residents. Community stakeholders are now raising questions, not only concerning Clay, but about other traditional schools within the inner city, that have been targeted for change under the LAUSD process called Public School Choice. 

If the reform process is meant to be inclusive, then school officials and outside interests must solicit the input of legitimate stakeholders: parents, educators, elected officials, churches, business owners and community members. We are equally responsible for improving the academic performance of students within our reach. District officials must respect the knowledge, skills and abilities of professional educators who know how to implement educational strategies that will make steady, incremental gains in our schools. There must be open, honest, two-way communication as well as fair decisions taking into account a school&rsquo;s history, background and lack of district resources and support. 

As community members, we must investigate decisions made about our community without our input and strategically respond to plans that undermine our voice. We must insist that the school board maintain our history and legacy. By renaming the school, as they plan to do with Clay, the school board will remove more than 50 years of history, experiences and memories. And, we must tell the school board that this brand of education &ldquo;reform&rdquo; is unacceptable. If true &ldquo;reform is desired, LAUSD must discontinue decisions which demoralize campuses and cause widespread disenchantment throughout the community.

Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte represents District 1 on the LAUSD Board of Education.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[New Mexican president, same cartel war?]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/New-Mexican-President-Same-Cartel-War-124020099.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Thu, 23 Jun 2011 03:37:00 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	







																														                                                                        <description><![CDATA[

We talk to a lot of people in our effort to track Mexico&rsquo;s criminal cartels and to help our readers understand the dynamics that shape the violence in Mexico. Our contacts include a wide range of people, from Mexican and U.S. government officials, journalists and business owners to taxi drivers and street vendors. Lately, as we&rsquo;ve been talking with people, we&rsquo;ve been hearing chatter about the 2012 presidential election in Mexico and how the cartel war will impact that election.

In any democratic election, opposition parties always criticize the policies of the incumbent. This tactic is especially true when the country is involved in a long and costly war. Recall, for example, the 2008 U.S. elections and then-candidate Barack Obama&rsquo;s criticism of the Bush administration&rsquo;s policies regarding Iraq and Afghanistan. This strategy is what we are seeing now in Mexico with the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) criticizing the way the administration of Felipe Calderon, who belongs to the National Action Party (PAN), has prosecuted its war against the Mexican cartels.

One of the trial balloons that the opposition parties &mdash; especially the PRI &mdash; seem to be floating at present is the idea that if they are elected they will reverse Calderon&rsquo;s policy of going after the cartels with a heavy hand and will instead try to reach some sort of accommodation with them. This policy would involve lifting government pressure against the cartels and thereby (ostensibly) reducing the level of violence that is wracking the country. In effect, this stratagem would be a return of the status quo ante during the PRI administrations that ruled Mexico for decades prior to 2000. One other important thing to remember, however, is that while Mexico&rsquo;s tough stance against the cartels is most often associated with President Calderon, the policy of using the military against the cartels was established during the administration of President Vicente Fox (also of PAN), who declared the &ldquo;mother of all battles&rdquo; against cartel kingpins in January 2005.

While this political rhetoric may be effective in tapping public discontent with the current situation in Mexico &mdash; and perhaps obtaining votes for opposition parties &mdash; the current environment in Mexico is far different from what it was in the 1990s. This environment will dictate that no matter who wins the 2012 election, the new president will have little choice but to maintain the campaign against the Mexican cartels.

Changes in the Drug Flow

First, it is important to understand that over the past decade there have been changes in the flow of narcotics into the United States. The first of these changes was in the way that cocaine is trafficked from South America to the United Sates and in the specific organizations that are doing that trafficking. While there has always been some cocaine smuggled into the United States through Mexico, like during the &ldquo;Miami Vice&rdquo; era from the 1970s to the early 1990s, much of the U.S. supply came into Florida via Caribbean routes. The cocaine was trafficked mainly by the powerful Colombian cartels, and while they worked with Mexican partners such as the Guadalajara cartel to move product through Mexico and into the United States, the Colombians were the dominant partners in the relationship and pocketed the lion&rsquo;s share of the profits.

As U.S. interdiction efforts curtailed much of the Caribbean drug flow due to improvements in aerial and maritime surveillance, and as the Colombian cartels were dismantled by the Colombian and U.S. governments, Mexico became more important to the flow of cocaine and the Mexican cartels gained more prominence and power. Over the past decade, the tables turned. Now, the Mexican cartels control most of the cocaine flow and the Colombian gangs are the junior partners in the relationship.

The Mexican cartels have expanded their control over cocaine smuggling to the point where they are also involved in the smuggling of South American cocaine to Europe and Australia. This expanded cocaine supply chain means that the Mexican cartels have assumed a greater risk of loss along the extended supply routes, but it also means that they earn a far greater percentage of the profit derived from South American cocaine than they did when the Colombian cartels called the shots.

While Mexican cartels have always been involved in the smuggling of marijuana to the U.S. market, and marijuana sales serve as an important profit pool for them, the increasing popularity of other drugs in the United States in recent years, such as black-tar heroin and methamphetamine, has also helped bring big money (and power) to the Mexican cartels. These drugs have proved to be quite lucrative for the Mexican cartels because the cartels own the entire production process. This is not the case with cocaine, which the cartels have to purchase from South American suppliers.

These changes in the flow of narcotics into the United States mean that the Mexican narcotics-smuggling corridors into the United States are now more lucrative than ever for the Mexican cartels, and the increasing value of these corridors has heightened the competition &mdash; and the violence &mdash; to control them. The fighting has become quite bloody and, in many cases, quite personal, involving blood vendettas that will not be easily buried.

The violence occurring in Mexico today also has quite a different dynamic from the violence that occurred in Colombia in the late 1980s. In Colombia at that time, Pablo Escobar declared war on the government, and his team of sicarios conducted terrorist attacks like destroying the Department of Administrative Security headquarters with a huge truck bomb and bombing a civilian airliner in an attempt to kill a presidential candidate, among other operations. Escobar thought his attacks could intimidate the Colombian government into the kind of accommodation being in discussed in Mexico today, but his calculation was wrong and the attacks served only to steel public opinion and government resolve against him.

Most of the violence in Mexico today is cartel-on-cartel, and the cartels have not chosen to explicitly target civilians or the government. Even the violence we do see directed against Mexican police officers or government figures is usually not due to their positions but to the perception that they are on the payroll of a competing cartel. There are certainly exceptions to this, but cartel attacks against government figures are usually attempts to undercut the support network of a competing cartel and not acts of retribution against the government. Cartel groups like Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) have even produced and distributed video statements in which they say they don&rsquo;t want to fight the federal government and the military, just corrupt officers aligned with their enemies.

This dynamic means that, even if the Mexican military and federal police were to ease up on their operations against drug-smuggling activities, the war among the cartels (and factions of cartels) would still continue.

 The Hydra

In addition to the raging cartel-on-cartel violence, any future effort to reach an accommodation with the cartels will also be hampered by the way the cartel landscape has changed over the past few years. Consider this: Three and a half years ago, the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO) was a part of the Sinaloa Federation. Following the arrest of Alfredo Beltran Leyva in January 2008, Alfredo&rsquo;s brothers blamed Sinaloa chief Joaquin &ldquo;El Chapo&rdquo; Guzman Loera, declared war on El Chapo and split from the Sinaloa Federation to form their own organization. Following the December 2009 death of Alfredo&rsquo;s brother, Arturo Beltran Leyva, the organization further split into two factions: One was called the Cartel Pacifico del Sur, which was led by the remaining Beltran Leyva brother, Hector, and the other, which retained the BLO name, remained loyal to Alfredo&rsquo;s chief of security, Edgar &ldquo;La Barbie&rdquo; Valdez Villarreal. Following the August 2010 arrest of La Barbie, his faction of the BLO split into two pieces, one joining with some local criminals in Acapulco to form the Independent Cartel of Acapulco (CIDA). So not only did the BLO leave the Sinaloa Federation, it also split twice to form three new cartels.

There are two main cartel groups, one centered on the Sinaloa Federation and the other on Los Zetas, but these groups are loose alliances rather than hierarchical organizations, and there are still many smaller independent players, such as CIDA, La Resistencia and the CJNG. This means that a government attempt to broker some sort of universal understanding with the cartels in order to decrease the violence would be far more challenging than it would have been a decade ago.

Even if the government could gather all these parties together and convince them to agree to cease hostilities, the question for all parties would be: How reliable are all the promises being made? The various cartels frequently make alliances and agreements, only to break them, and close allies can quickly become the bitterest enemies &mdash; like the Gulf cartel and its former enforcer wing, Los Zetas.

We have heard assertions over the last several years that the Calderon administration favors the Sinaloa Federation and that the president&rsquo;s real plan to quell the violence in Mexico is to allow or even assist the Sinaloa Federation to become the dominant cartel in Mexico. According to this narrative, the Sinaloa Federation could impose peace through superior firepower and provide the Mexican government a single point of contact instead of the various heads of the cartel hydra. One problem with implementing such a concept is that some of the most vicious violence Mexico has seen in recent years has followed an internal split involving the Sinaloa Federation, such as the BLO/Sinaloa war.

From DTO to TCO

Another problem is the change that has occurred in the nature of the crimes the cartels commit. The Mexican cartels are no longer just drug cartels, and they no longer just sell narcotics to the U.S. market. This reality is even reflected in the bureaucratic acronyms that the U.S. government uses to refer to the cartels. Up until a few months ago, it was common to hear U.S. government officials refer to the Mexican cartels using the acronym &ldquo;DTOs,&rdquo; or drug trafficking organizations. Today, that acronym is rarely, if ever, heard. It has been replaced by &ldquo;TCO,&rdquo; which stands for transnational criminal organization. This acronym recognizes that the Mexican cartels engage in many criminal enterprises, not just narcotics smuggling.

As the cartels have experienced difficulty moving large loads of narcotics into the United States due to law enforcement pressure, and the loss of smuggling corridors to rival gangs, they have sought to generate revenue by diversifying their lines of business. Mexican cartels have become involved in kidnapping, extortion, cargo theft, oil theft and diversion, arms smuggling, human smuggling, carjacking, prostitution and music and video piracy. These additional lines of business are lucrative, and there is little likelihood that the cartels would abandon them even if smuggling narcotics became easier.

As an aside, this diversification is also a factor that must be considered in discussing the legalization of narcotics and the impact that would have on the Mexican cartels. Narcotics smuggling is the most substantial revenue stream for the cartels, but is not their only line of business. If the cartels were to lose the stream of revenue from narcotics sales, they would still be heavily armed groups of killers who would be forced to rely more on their other lines of business. Many of these other crimes, like extortion and kidnapping, by their very nature focus more direct violence against innocent victims than drug trafficking does.

Another way the cartels have sought to generate revenue through alternative means is to increase drug sales inside Mexico. While drugs sell for less on the street in Mexico than they do in the United States, they require less overhead, since they don&rsquo;t have to cross the U.S. border. At the same time, the street gangs that are distributing these drugs into the local Mexican market have also become closely allied with the cartels and have served to swell the ranks of the cartel enforcer groups. For example, Mara Salvatrucha has come to work closely with Los Zetas, and Los Aztecas have essentially become a wing of the Juarez cartel.

There has been a view among some in Mexico that the flow of narcotics through Mexico is something that might be harmful for the United States but doesn&rsquo;t really harm Mexico. Indeed, as the argument goes, the money the drug trade generates for the Mexican economy is quite beneficial. The increase in narcotics sales in Mexico belies this, and in many places, such as the greater Mexico City region, much of the violence we&rsquo;ve seen involves fighting over turf for local drug sales and not necessarily fighting among the larger cartel groups (although, in some areas, there are instances of the larger cartel groups asserting their dominance over these smaller local-level groups).

As the Mexican election approaches, the idea of accommodating the cartels may continue to be presented as a logical alternative to the present policies, and it might be used to gain political capital, but anyone who carefully examines the situation on the ground will see that the concept is totally untenable. In fact, the conditions on the ground leave the Mexican president with very little choice. This means that in the same way President Obama was forced by ground realities to follow many of the Bush administration policies he criticized as a candidate, the next Mexican president will have little choice but to follow the policies of the Calderon administration in continuing the fight against the cartels.

&quot;New Mexican President, Same Cartel War?&quot; is republished with permission of STRATFOR.


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			<title><![CDATA[Ohio governor's crass attack on LeBron James]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/Ohio-governors-crass-attack-on-LeBron-James-123896764.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Tue, 14 Jun 2011 22:58:08 PST</pubDate>
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Editor's note: Roland S. Martin is a syndicated columnist and author of &quot;The First: President Barack Obama's Road to the White House.&quot; He is a commentator for TV One Cable network and host/managing editor of its Sunday morning news show, &quot;Washington Watch with Roland Martin.&quot;

(CNN) &mdash; Sports and politics have always mixed. We've had former athletes hold elective office; mayors, members of Congress and governors are always making bets with one another when their teams play each other in big games; and it's great to see the respective national champions or winners in pro sports visit the White House for a congratulatory pat on the back from the president of the United States.

But there are some moments that deserve to be called out, such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich issuing a resolution declaring the Dallas Mavericks honorary residents of the state of Ohio.

Is he stuck on stupid?

The only reason he issued the declaration is to take a swipe at LeBron James, an Ohio native who gave Cleveland seven solid years of play, but left on his own free will when his contract ended to go to Miami.

With the Dallas Mavericks beating LeBron and the Miami Heat, Kasich showed how petty Clevelanders and Ohio residents are who are still upset with LeBron.

He didn't demand a trade. LeBron simply chose to leave Cleveland to go to Miami. This is a guy who never got into trouble, never got arrested, and did a ton of charitable work in the state. So you're upset that he left?

Ohio, you're still mad because of &quot;The Decision&quot;? It's time to grow up and move on. Seriously. If not, y'all need to join Rep. Anthony Weiner and seek treatment.

A few months ago I was in Ohio and spoke at an event in the state capitol and Kasich was there. We got a chance to talk education and voter suppression. He's a nice guy and I enjoyed our chat.

But on this one, he looks like an idiot. A governor is supposed to be above silly and petty stuff like this. Leave this kind of crap to the sports radio hosts, columnists and bloggers.

Lastly, I don't believe a single Dallas Maverick is a taxpayer in Ohio. LeBron is. He still owns homes there, has family there, and continues to do charity work there, namely in his hometown of Akron.

So Gov. Kasich, good job. You managed to diss an Ohio athletic icon, but also a taxpayer and constituent. I bet you don't mind LeBron cutting a check to pay his property tax bill, especially with your state facing a multi-billion dollar deficit.

It's safe to say you just lost all votes in the James household.

Lastly, governor, as a native Texan, we have no desire to be honorary residents of Ohio.

We already live in God's country.

Whoop!

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Roland S. Martin. Photo: Keith Allison/via Wikimedia Commons.
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			<title><![CDATA[The Palestinian move]]></title>
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			<pubDate>Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:39:27 PST</pubDate>
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A former head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, has publicly criticized the current Israeli government for a lack of flexibility, judgment and foresight, calling it &ldquo;reckless and irresponsible&rdquo; in the handling of Israel&rsquo;s foreign and security policies. In various recent interviews and speeches, he has made it clear that he regards the decision to ignore the 2002 Saudi proposal for a peace settlement on the pre-1967 lines as a mistake and the focus on Iran as a diversion from the real issue &mdash; the likely recognition of an independent Palestinian state by a large segment of the international community, something Dagan considers a greater threat.

What is important in Dagan&rsquo;s statements is that, having been head of Mossad from 2002 to 2010, he is not considered in any way to be ideologically inclined toward accommodation. When Dagan was selected by Ariel Sharon to be head of Mossad, Sharon told him that he wanted a Mossad with &ldquo;a knife between its teeth.&rdquo; There were charges that he was too aggressive, but rarely were there charges that he was too soft. Dagan was as much a member of the Israeli governing establishment as anyone. Therefore, his statements, and the statements of some other senior figures, represent a split not so much within Israel but within the Israeli national security establishment, which has been seen as being as hard-line as the Likud.

In addition, over the weekend, when pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the Golan Heights tried to force their way into Israeli-held territory, Israeli troops opened fire. Eleven protesters were killed in the Golan, and six were killed in a separate but similar protest in the West Bank. The demonstrations, like the Nakba-day protests, were clearly intended by the Syrians to redirect anti-government protests to some other issue. They were also meant to be a provocation, and the government in Damascus undoubtedly hoped that the Israelis would open fire. Dagan&rsquo;s statements seem to point at this paradox. There are two factions that want an extremely aggressive Israeli security policy: the Israeli right and countries and militant proxies like Hamas that are actively hostile to Israel. The issue is which benefits more.

3 Strategic Phases

Last week we discussed Israeli strategy. This week I want us to consider Palestinian strategy and to try to understand how the Palestinians will respond to the current situation. There have been three strategies on Palestine. The first was from before the founding of Israel until 1967. In this period, the primary focus was not on the creation of a Palestinian state but on the destruction of Israel by existing Arab nation-states and the absorption of the territory into those states.

Just a few years before 1967, the Palestine Liberation Army (PLO) came into existence, and after Israel&rsquo;s victory in the June 1967 war, the Arab nations began to change their stance from simply the destruction of Israel and absorption of the territories into existing nation-states to the creation of an independent Palestinian state. The PLO strategy at this time was a dual track divided between political and paramilitary operations and included terrorist attacks in both Israel and Europe. The political track tried to position the PLO as being open to a negotiated state, while the terrorist track tried to make the PLO seem extremely dangerous in order to motivate other nations, particularly European nations, to pressure Israel on the political track.

The weakness of this strategy was that the political track lost credibility as the terrorist track became bound up with late Cold-War intrigues involving European terrorist groups like Italy&rsquo;s Red Brigade or Germany&rsquo;s Red Army Faction. Their networks ranged from the Irish Republican Army to the Basque terrorist group ETA to Soviet bloc intelligence services. The PLO was seen as a threat to Europe on many levels as well as a threat to the Arab royal houses that they tried to undermine.

For the Palestinians, the most significant loss was the decision by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to shift from the Soviet alliance and make peace with Israel. This isolated the Palestinian movement from any significant regional support and made it dependent on the Soviets. With the Cold War winding down, the PLO became an orphan, losing its sponsorship from the Soviets as it had lost Jordanian and Egyptian support in the 1970s. Two main tendencies developed during this second phase. The first was the emergence of Hamas, a radically new sort of Palestinian movement since it was neither secular nor socialist but religious. The second was the rise of the internal insurrection, or intifada, which, coupled with suicide bombings and rocket fire from Gaza as well as from Hezbollah in Lebanon, was designed to increase the cost of insurrection to the Israelis while generating support for the Palestinians.

Ultimately, the split between Hamas and Fatah, the dominant faction of the PLO that had morphed into the Palestinian National Authority, was the most significant aspect of the third strategic phase. Essentially, the Palestinians were simultaneously waging a civil war with each other while trying to organize resistance to Israel. This is not as odd as it appears. The Palestinians had always fought one another while they fought common enemies, and revolutionary organizations are frequently split. But the Hamas-Fatah split undermined the credibility of the resistance in two ways. First, there were times in which one or the other faction was prepared to share intelligence with the Israelis to gain an advantage over the other. Second, and more important, the Palestinians had no coherent goal, nor did anyone have the ability to negotiate on their behalf. Should Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas engage in negotiations with Israel he could not deliver Hamas, so the whole point of negotiations was limited. Indeed, negotiations were likely to weaken the Palestinians by exacerbating intra-communal tensions.

Post Cold-War Weakness

One of the significant problems the Palestinians had always had was the hostility of the Arab world to their cause, a matter insufficiently discussed. The Egyptians spent this period opposed to Hamas as a threat to their regime. They participated in blockading Gaza. The Jordanians hated Fatah, having long memories about the Black September rising in 1970 that almost destroyed the Hashemite regime. Having a population that is still predominantly Palestinian, the Hashemites fear the consequences of a Palestinian state. The Syrians have never been happy with the concept of an independent Palestinian state because they retain residual claims to all former Syrian provinces, including Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. When they invaded Lebanon in 1976, they were supporting Maronite Christians and trying to destroy the PLO. Finally, the constant attempts by Fatah and the PLO to overthrow the royal houses of Arabia &mdash; all of which failed &mdash; created massive mistrust between a number of Arab regimes and the fledgling Palestinian movement.

Therefore, the strategic position of the Palestinians has been extremely weak since the end of the Cold War. They have been able to put stress on Israel but not come anywhere close to endangering its survival or even forcing policies to change. Indeed, their actions tended to make Israel even more rigid. This did not displease the Palestinians as an outcome. The more rigid the Israelis were, the more intrusive they would be in the Palestinian community and the more both Fatah and Hamas could rely on Palestinian support for their policies. In a sense, the greatest threat to the Palestinian movement has always been the Palestinians losing interest in a Palestinian state in favor of increased economic wellbeing. The ability to force Israel to take aggressive measures increased public loyalty to each of the two groups. During a time of inherent civil conflict between the two, provoking Israel became a means of assuring support in the civil war.

From Israel&rsquo;s point of view, so long as the suicide bombings were disrupted and Gaza was contained, they were in an extraordinarily secure position. The Arab states were indifferent or hostile (beyond public proclamations and donations that frequently wound up in European bank accounts); the United States was not prepared to press Israel more than formally; and the Europeans were not prepared to take any meaningful action because of the United States and the Arab countries. The Israelis had a problem but not one that ultimately threatened them. Even Iran&rsquo;s attempt to meddle was of little consequence. Hezbollah was as much concerned with Lebanese politics as it was with fighting Israel, and Hamas would take money from anyone. In the end, Hamas did not want to become an Iranian pawn, and Fatah knew that Iran could be the end of it.

In a sense, the Palestinians have been in checkmate since the fall of the Soviet Union. They were divided, holding on to their public, dealing with a hostile Arab world and, except for the suicide bombings that frightened but did not weaken Israel, they had no levers to change the game. The Israeli view was that the status quo, which required no fundamental shifts of concessions, was satisfactory.

A New 4th Phase?

As we have said many times, the Arab Spring is a myth. Where there have been revolutions they have not been democratic, and where they have appeared democratic they have not been in any way mass movements capable of changing regimes. But what they have been in the past is not necessarily what they will be in the future. Certainly, this round has bought little democratic change, and I don&rsquo;t think there will be much. But I can make assumptions that the Israeli government can&rsquo;t afford to make.

One does not have to believe in the Arab Spring to see evolutions in which countries like Egypt change their positions on the Palestinians, as evidenced by Egypt&rsquo;s decision to open the Rafah border crossing. In Egypt, as in other Arab countries, the Palestinian cause is popular. A government that would make no real concessions to its public could afford to make this concession, which costs the regime little and is an easy way to appease the crowds. With the exception of Jordan, which really does have to fear a Palestinian state, countries that were hostile to the Palestinians could be more supportive and states that had been minimally supportive could increase their support.

This is precisely what the Palestinians want, and the reason that Hamas and Fatah have signed a grudging agreement for unity. They see the risings in the Arab world as a historic opportunity to break out of the third phase into a new fourth phase. The ability to connect the Palestinian cause with regime preservation in the Arab world represents a remarkable opportunity. So Egypt could, at the same time, be repressive domestically &mdash; and even maintain the treaty with Israel &mdash; while dramatically increasing support for the Palestinians.

In doing that, two things happen: First, Europeans, who are important trading partners for Israel, might be prepared to support a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders in order to maintain relations in the Arab and Islamic world on an issue that is really of low cost to them. Second, the United States, fighting wars in the Islamic world and needing the support of intelligence services of Muslim states and stability in these countries, could support a peace treaty based on 1967 borders.

The key strategy that the Palestinians have adopted is that of provocation. The 2010 flotilla from Turkey presented a model: select an action that from the outside seems benign but will be perceived by the Israelis as threatening; orchestrate the event in a way that will maximize the chances for an Israeli action that will be seen as brutal; shape a narrative that makes the provocation seem benign; and use this narrative to undermine international support for the Israelis.

Given the rigid structure of Israeli policy, this strategy essentially puts the Palestinians or other groups in control of the Israeli response. The Palestinians understand Israeli limits, which are not dynamic and are predictable, and can trigger them at will. The more skillful they are, the more it will appear that they are the victims. And the conversation can shift from this particular action by Israel to the broader question of the Israeli occupation. With unrest in the Arab world, shifting evaluations of the situation in the West and a strategy that manages international perceptions and controls the tempo and type of events, the Palestinians have the opportunity to break out of the third phase.

Their deepest problem, of course, is the split between Hamas and Fatah, which merely has been papered over by their agreement. Essentially, Fatah supports a two-state solution and Hamas opposes it. And so long as Hamas opposes it, there can be no settlement. But Hamas, as part of this strategy, will do everything it can &mdash; aside from abandoning its position &mdash; to make it appear flexible on it. This will further build pressure on Israel.

How much pressure Israel can stand is something that will be found out and something Dagan warned about. But Israel has a superb countermove: accept some variation of the 1967 borders and force Hamas either to break with its principles and lose its support to an emergent group or openly blow apart the process. In other words, the Israelis can also pursue a strategy of provocation, in this case by giving the Palestinians what they want and betting that they will reject it. Of course, the problem with this strategy is that the Palestinians might accept the deal, with Hamas secretly intending to resume the war from a better position.

Israel&rsquo;s bet has three possible outcomes. One is to hold the current position and be constantly manipulated into actions that isolate Israel. The second is to accept the concept of the 1967 borders and bet on the Palestinians rejecting it as they did with Bill Clinton. The third outcome, a dangerous one, is for the Palestinians to accept the deal and then double-cross the Israelis. But then if that happens, Israel has the alternative to return to the old borders.

In the end, this is not about the Israelis or the Palestinians. It is about the Palestinian relationship with the Arabs and Israel&rsquo;s relationship with Europe and the United States. The Israelis want to isolate the Palestinians, and the Palestinians are trying to isolate the Israelis. At the moment, the Palestinians are doing better at this than the Israelis. The argument going on in Israel (and not with the peace movement) is how to respond. Benjamin Netanyahu wants to wait it out. Dagan is saying the risks are too high.

But on the Palestinian side, the real crisis will occur should Dagan win the debate. The center of gravity of Palestinian weakness is the inability to form a united front around the position that Israel has a right to exist. Some say it, some hint it and others reject it. An interesting gamble is to give the Palestinians what the Americans and Europeans are suggesting &mdash; modified 1967 borders. For Israel, the question is whether the risk of holding the present position is greater than the risk of a dramatic shift. For the Palestinians, the question is what they will do if there is a dramatic shift. The Palestinian dilemma is the more intense and interesting one &mdash; and an interesting opportunity for Israel.
 &quot;The Palestinian Move&quot; is republished with permission of STRATFOR.
 


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			<title><![CDATA[Israel's borders and national security]]></title>
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			<pubDate>Wed, 1 Jun 2011 16:10:38 PST</pubDate>
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said May 30 that Israel could not prevent the United Nations from recognizing a Palestinian state, in the sense of adopting a resolution on the subject. Two weeks ago, U.S. President Barack Obama, in a speech, called on Israel to return to some variation of its pre-1967 borders. The practical significance of these and other diplomatic evolutions in relation to Israel is questionable. Historically, U.N. declarations have had variable meanings, depending on the willingness of great powers to enforce them. Obama&rsquo;s speech on Israel, and his subsequent statements, created enough ambiguity to make exactly what he was saying unclear. Nevertheless, it is clear that the diplomatic atmosphere on Israel is shifting.

There are many questions concerning this shift, ranging from the competing moral and historical claims of the Israelis and Palestinians to the internal politics of each side to whether the Palestinians would be satisfied with a return to the pre-1967 borders. All of these must be addressed, but this analysis is confined to a single issue: whether a return to the 1967 borders would increase the danger to Israel&rsquo;s national security. Later analyses will focus on Palestinian national security issues and those of others.

Early Borders

It is important to begin by understanding that the pre-1967 borders are actually the borders established by the armistice agreements of 1949. The 1948 U.N. resolution creating the state of Israel created a much smaller Israel. The Arab rejection of what was called &ldquo;partition&rdquo; resulted in a war that created the borders that placed the West Bank (named after the west bank of the Jordan River) in Jordanian hands, along with substantial parts of Jerusalem, and placed Gaza in the hands of the Egyptians.

The 1949 borders substantially improved Israel&rsquo;s position by widening the corridors between the areas granted to Israel under the partition, giving it control of part of Jerusalem and, perhaps most important, control over the Negev. The latter provided Israel with room for maneuver in the event of an Egyptian attack &mdash; and Egypt was always Israel&rsquo;s main adversary. At the same time, the 1949 borders did not eliminate a major strategic threat. The Israel-Jordan border placed Jordanian forces on three sides of Israeli Jerusalem, and threatened the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor. Much of the Israeli heartland, the Tel Aviv-Haifa-Jerusalem triangle, was within Jordanian artillery range, and a Jordanian attack toward the Mediterranean would have to be stopped cold at the border, since there was no room to retreat, regroup and counterattack.

For Israel, the main danger did not come from Jordan attacking by itself. Jordanian forces were limited, and tensions with Egypt and Syria created a de facto alliance between Israel and Jordan. In addition, the Jordanian Hashemite regime lived in deep tension with the Palestinians, since the former were British transplants from the Arabian Peninsula, and the Palestinians saw them as well as the Israelis as interlopers. Thus the danger on the map was mitigated both by politics and by the limited force the Jordanians could bring to bear.

Nevertheless, politics shift, and the 1949 borders posed a strategic problem for Israel. If Egypt, Jordan and Syria were to launch a simultaneous attack (possibly joined by other forces along the Jordan River line) all along Israel&rsquo;s frontiers, the ability of Israel to defeat the attackers was questionable. The attacks would have to be coordinated &mdash; as the 1948 attacks were not &mdash; but simultaneous pressure along all frontiers would leave the Israelis with insufficient forces to hold and therefore no framework for a counterattack. From 1948 to 1967, this was Israel&rsquo;s existential challenge, mitigated by the disharmony among the Arabs and the fact that any attack would be detected in the deployment phase.

Israel&rsquo;s strategy in this situation had to be the pre-emptive strike. Unable to absorb a coordinated blow, the Israelis had to strike first to disorganize their enemies and to engage them sequentially and in detail. The 1967 war represented Israeli strategy in its first generation. First, it could not allow the enemy to commence hostilities. Whatever the political cost of being labeled the aggressor, Israel had to strike first. Second, it could not be assumed that the political intentions of each neighbor at any one time would determine their behavior. In the event Israel was collapsing, for example, Jordan&rsquo;s calculations of its own interests would shift, and it would move from being a covert ally to Israel to a nation both repositioning itself in the Arab world and taking advantage of geographical opportunities. Third, the center of gravity of the Arab threat was always Egypt, the neighbor able to field the largest army. Any pre-emptive war would have to begin with Egypt and then move to other neighbors. Fourth, in order to control the sequence and outcome of the war, Israel would have to maintain superior organization and technology at all levels. Finally, and most important, the Israelis would have to move for rapid war termination. They could not afford a war of attrition against forces of superior size. An extended war could drain Israeli combat capability at an astonishing rate. Therefore the pre-emptive strike had to be decisive.

The 1949 borders actually gave Israel a strategic advantage. The Arabs were fighting on external lines. This means their forces could not easily shift between Egypt and Syria, for example, making it difficult to exploit emergent weaknesses along the fronts. The Israelis, on the other hand, fought from interior lines, and in relatively compact terrain. They could carry out a centrifugal offense, beginning with Egypt, shifting to Jordan and finishing with Syria, moving forces from one front to another in a matter of days. Put differently, the Arabs were inherently uncoordinated, unable to support each other. The pre-1967 borders allowed the Israelis to be superbly coordinated, choosing the timing and intensity of combat to suit their capabilities. Israel lacked strategic depth, but it made up for it with compact space and interior lines. If it could choose the time, place and tempo of engagements, it could defeat numerically superior forces. The Arabs could not do this.

Israel needed two things in order to exploit this advantage. The first was outstanding intelligence to detect signs of coordination and the massing of forces. Detecting the former sign was a matter of political intelligence, the latter a matter of tactical military intelligence. But the political intelligence would have to manifest itself in military deployments, and given the geography of the 1949 borders, massing forces secretly was impossible. If enemy forces could mass undetected it would be a disaster for Israel. Thus the center of gravity of Israeli war-making was its intelligence capabilities.

The second essential requirement was an alliance with a great power. Israel&rsquo;s strategy was based on superior technology and organization &mdash; air power, armor and so on. The true weakness of Israel&rsquo;s strategic power since the country&rsquo;s creation had been that its national security requirements outstripped its industrial and financial base. It could not domestically develop and produce all of the weapons it needed to fight a war. Israel depended first on the Soviets, then until 1967 on France. It was not until after the 1967 war that the United States provided any significant aid to Israel. However, under the strategy of the pre-1967 borders, continual access to weapons &mdash; and in a crisis, rapid access to more weapons &mdash; was essential, so Israel had to have a powerful ally. Not having one, coupled with an intelligence failure, would be disastrous.

After 1967

The 1967 war allowed Israel to occupy the Sinai, all of Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. It placed Egyptian forces on the west bank of the Suez, far from Israel, and pushed the Jordanians out of artillery range of the Israeli heartland. It pushed Syria out of artillery range as well. This created the strategic depth Israel required, yet it set the stage for the most serious military crisis in Israeli history, beginning with a failure in its central capability &mdash; intelligence.

The intelligence failure occurred in 1973, when Syria and Egypt managed to partially coordinate an assault on Israel without Israeli intelligence being able to interpret the intelligence it was receiving. Israel was saved above all by rapid rearmament by the United States, particularly in such staples of war as artillery shells. It was also aided by greater strategic depth. The Egyptian attack was stopped far from Israel proper in the western Sinai. The Syrians fought in the Golan Heights rather than in the Galilee.

Here is the heart of the pre-1967 border issue. Strategic depth meant that the Syrians and Egyptians spent their main offensive force outside of Israel proper. This bought Israel space and time. It allowed Israel to move back to its main sequential strategy. After halting the two attacks, the Israelis proceeded to defeat the Syrians in the Golan then the Egyptians in the Sinai. However, the ability to mount the two attacks &mdash; and particularly the Sinai attack &mdash; required massive American resupply of everything from aircraft to munitions. It is not clear that without this resupply the Israelis could have mounted the offensive in the Sinai, or avoided an extended war of attrition on unfavorable terms. Of course, the intelligence failure opened the door to Israel&rsquo;s other vulnerability &mdash; its dependency on foreign powers for resupply. Indeed, perhaps Israel&rsquo;s greatest miscalculation was the amount of artillery shells it would need to fight the war; the amount required vastly outstripped expectations. Such a seemingly minor thing created a massive dependency on the United States, allowing the United States to shape the conclusion of the war to its own ends so that Israel&rsquo;s military victory ultimately evolved into a political retreat in the Sinai.

It is impossible to argue that Israel, fighting on its 1949 borders, was less successful than when it fought on its post-1967 borders. What happened was that in expanding the scope of the battlefield, opportunities for intelligence failures multiplied, the rate of consumption of supplies increased and dependence grew on foreign powers with different political interests. The war Israel fought from the 1949 borders was more efficiently waged than the one it fought from the post-1967 borders. The 1973 war allowed for a larger battlefield and greater room for error (errors always occur on the battlefield), but because of intelligence surprises and supply miscalculations it also linked Israel&rsquo;s national survival to the willingness of a foreign government to quickly resupply its military.

The example of 1973 casts some doubt around the argument that the 1948 borders were excessively vulnerable. There are arguments on both sides of the issue, but it is not a clear-cut position. However, we need to consider Israel&rsquo;s borders not only in terms of conventional war but also in terms of unconventional war &mdash; both uprisings and the use of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapons.

There are those who argue that there will be no more peer-to-peer conflicts. We doubt that intensely. However, there is certainly a great deal of asymmetric warfare in the world, and for Israel it comes in the form of intifadas, rocket attacks and guerrilla combat against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The post-1967 borders do not do much about these forms of warfare. Indeed, it can be argued that some of this conflict happens because of the post-1967 borders.

A shift to the 1949 borders would not increase the risk of an intifada but would make it moot. It would not eliminate conflict with Hezbollah. A shift to the 1949 line would eliminate some threats but not others. From the standpoint of asymmetric warfare, a shift in borders could increase the threat from Palestinian rockets to the Israeli heartland. If a Palestinian state were created, there would be the very real possibility of Palestinian rocket fire unless there was a significant shift in Hamas&rsquo; view of Israel or Fatah increased its power in the West Bank and was in a position to defeat Hamas and other rejectionist movements. This would be the heart of the Palestinian threat if there were a return to the borders established after the initial war.

The shape of Israel&rsquo;s borders doesn&rsquo;t really have an effect on the threat posed by CBRN weapons. While some chemical artillery rockets could be fired from closer borders, the geography leaves Israel inherently vulnerable to this threat, regardless of where the precise boundary is drawn, and they can already be fired from Lebanon or Gaza. The main threat discussed, a CBRN warhead fitted to an Iranian medium-range ballistic missile launched from a thousand miles away, has little to do with precisely where a line in the Levant is drawn.

When we look at conventional warfare, I would argue that the main issue Israel has is not its borders but its dependence on outside powers for its national security. Any country that creates a national security policy based on the willingness of another country to come to its assistance has a fundamental flaw that will, at some point, be mortal. The precise borders should be those that a) can be defended and b) do not create barriers to aid when that aid is most needed. In 1973, U.S. President Richard Nixon withheld resupply for some days, pressing Israel to the edge. U.S. interests were not those of Israel&rsquo;s. This is the mortal danger to Israel &mdash; a national security requirement that outstrips its ability to underwrite it.

Israel&rsquo;s borders will not protect it against Iranian missiles, and rockets from Gaza are painful but do not threaten Israel&rsquo;s existence. In case the artillery rocket threat expands beyond this point, Israel must retain the ability to reoccupy and re-engage, but given the threat of asymmetric war, perpetual occupation would seem to place Israel at a perpetual disadvantage. Clearly, the rocket threat from Hamas represents the best argument for strategic depth.

The best argument for returning to the pre-1967 borders is that Israel was more capable of fighting well on these borders. The war of independence, the 1956 war and the 1967 war all went far better than any of the wars that came after. Most important, if Israel is incapable of generating a national defense industry that can provide all the necessary munitions and equipment without having to depend on its allies, then it has no choice but to consider what its allies want. With the pre-1967 borders there is a greater chance of maintaining critical alliances. More to the point, the pre-1967 borders require a smaller industrial base because they do not require troops for occupation and they improve Israel&rsquo;s ability to conduct conventional operations in a time of crisis.

There is a strong case to be made for not returning to the 1949 lines, but it is difficult to make that case from a military point of view. Strategic depth is merely one element of a rational strategy. Given that Israel&rsquo;s military security depends on its relations with third parties, the shape of its borders and diplomatic reality are, as always, at the heart of Israeli military strategy.

In warfare, the greatest enemy of victory is wishful thinking. The assumption that Israel will always have an outside power prepared to rush munitions to the battlefield or help create costly defense systems like Iron Dome is simply wishful thinking. There is no reason to believe this will always be the case. Therefore, since this is the heart of Israeli strategy, the strategy rests on wishful thinking. The question of borders must be viewed in the context of synchronizing Israeli national security policy with Israeli national means.

There is an argument prevalent among Israelis and their supporters that the Arabs will never make a lasting peace with Israel. From this flows the assumption that the safest course is to continue to hold all territory. My argument assumes the worst case, which is not only that the Palestinians will not agree to a genuine peace but also that the United States cannot be counted on indefinitely. All military planning must begin with the worst case.

However, I draw a different conclusion from these facts than the Israelis do. If the worst-case scenario is the basis for planning, then Israel must reduce its risk and restructure its geography along the more favorable lines that existed between 1949 and 1967, when Israel was unambiguously victorious in its wars, rather than the borders and policies after 1967, when Israel has been less successful. The idea that the largest possible territory provides the greatest possible security is not supportable in military history. As Frederick the Great once said, he who defends everything defends nothing.

 
&quot;Israel's Borders and National Security&quot; is republished with permission of STRATFOR.





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			<title><![CDATA[Obama and the Arab Spring]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/Obama-and-the-Arab-Spring.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">122515814</guid>		
			<pubDate>Tue, 24 May 2011 13:19:59 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	



	


		

																		



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U.S. President Barack Obama gave a speech last week on the Middle East. Presidents make many speeches. Some are meant to be taken casually, others are made to address an immediate crisis, and still others are intended to be a statement of broad American policy. As in any country, U.S. presidents follow rituals indicating which category their speeches fall into. Obama clearly intended his recent Middle East speech to fall into the last category, as reflecting a shift in strategy if not the declaration of a new doctrine.

While events in the region drove Obama&rsquo;s speech, politics also played a strong part, as with any presidential speech. Devising and implementing policy are the president&rsquo;s job. To do so, presidents must be able to lead &mdash; and leading requires having public support. After the 2010 election, I said that presidents who lose control of one house of Congress in midterm elections turn to foreign policy because it is a place in which they retain the power to act. The U.S. presidential campaign season has begun, and the United States is engaged in wars that are not going well. Within this framework, Obama thus sought to make both a strategic and a political speech.
Obama&rsquo;s War Dilemma

The United States is engaged in a broad struggle against jihadists. Specifically, it is engaged in a war in Afghanistan and is in the terminal phase of the Iraq war.

The Afghan war is stalemated. Following the death of Osama bin Laden, Obama said that the Taliban&rsquo;s forward momentum has been stopped. He did not, however, say that the Taliban is being defeated. Given the state of affairs between the United States and Pakistan following bin Laden&rsquo;s death, whether the United States can defeat the Taliban remains unclear. It might be able to, but the president must remain open to the possibility that the war will become an extended stalemate.

Meanwhile, U.S. troops are being withdrawn from Iraq, but that does not mean the conflict is over. Instead, the withdrawal has opened the door to Iranian power in Iraq. The Iraqis lack a capable military and security force. Their government is divided and feeble. Meanwhile, the Iranians have had years to infiltrate Iraq. Iranian domination of Iraq would open the door to  Iranian power projection throughout the region. Therefore, the United States has proposed keeping U.S. forces in Iraq but has yet to receive Iraq&rsquo;s approval. If that approval is given (which looks unlikely), Iraqi factions with clout in parliament have threatened to renew the anti-U.S. insurgency.

The United States must therefore consider its actions should the situation in Afghanistan remain indecisive or deteriorate and should Iraq evolve into an Iranian strategic victory. The simple answer &mdash; extending the mission in Iraq and increasing forces in Afghanistan &mdash; is not viable. The United States could not pacify Iraq with 170,000 troops facing determined opposition, while the 300,000 troops that Chief of Staff of the Army Eric Shinseki argued for in 2003 are not available. Meanwhile, it is difficult to imagine how many troops would be needed to guarantee a military victory in Afghanistan. Such surges are not politically viable, either. After nearly 10 years of indecisive war, the American public has little appetite for increasing troop commitments to either war and has no appetite for conscription.

Obama thus has limited military options on the ground in a situation where conditions in both war zones could deteriorate badly. And his political option &mdash; blaming former U.S. President George W. Bush &mdash; in due course would wear thin, as Nixon found in blaming Johnson.
The Coalition of the Willing Meets the Arab Spring

For his part, Bush followed a strategy of a coalition of the willing. He understood that the United States could not conduct a war in the region without regional allies, and he therefore recruited a coalition of countries that calculated that radical Islamism represented a profound threat to regime survival. This included Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jordan, and Pakistan. These countries shared a desire to see al Qaeda defeated and a willingness to pool resources and intelligence with the United States to enable Washington to carry the main burden of the war.

This coalition appears to be fraying. Apart from the tensions between the United States and Pakistan, the unrest in the Middle East of the last few months apparently has undermined the legitimacy and survivability of many Arab regimes, including key partners in the so-called coalition of the willing. If these pro-American regimes collapse and are replaced by anti-American regimes, the American position in the region might also collapse.

Obama appears to have reached three conclusions about the Arab Spring:

     - It represented a genuine and liberal democratic rising that might replace regimes.
     - American opposition to these risings might result in the emergence of anti-American regimes in these countries.
     - The United States must embrace the general idea of the Arab risings but be selective in specific cases; thus, it should support the rising in Egypt, but not necessarily in Bahrain.


Though these distinctions may be difficult to justify in intellectual terms, geopolitics is not an abstract exercise. In the real world, supporting regime change in Libya costs the United States relatively little. Supporting an uprising in Egypt could have carried some cost, but not if the military was the midwife to change and is able to maintain control. (Egypt was more an exercise of regime preservation than true regime change.) Supporting regime change in Bahrain, however, would have proved quite costly. Doing so could have seen the United States lose a major naval base in the Persian Gulf and incited spillover Shiite protests in Saudi Arabia&rsquo;s oil-rich Eastern Province.

Moral consistency and geopolitics rarely work neatly together. Moral absolutism is not an option in the Middle East, something Obama recognized. Instead, Obama sought a new basis for tying together the fraying coalition of the willing.
Obama&rsquo;s Challenge and the Illusory Arab Spring

Obama&rsquo;s conundrum is that there is still much uncertainty as to whether that coalition would be stronger with current, albeit embattled, regimes or with new regimes that could arise from the so-called Arab Spring. He began to address the problem with an empirical assumption critical to his strategy that in my view is questionable, namely, that there is such a thing as an Arab Spring.

Let me repeat something I have said before: All demonstrations are not revolutions. All revolutions are not democratic revolutions. All democratic revolutions do not lead to constitutional democracy.

The Middle East has seen many demonstrations of late, but that does not make them revolutions. The 300,000 or so demonstrators concentrated mainly in Tahrir Square in Cairo represented a tiny fraction of Egyptian society. However committed and democratic those 300,000 were, the masses of Egyptians did not join them along the lines of what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in Iran in 1979. For all the media attention paid to Egypt&rsquo;s demonstrators, the most interesting thing in Egypt is not who demonstrated, but the vast majority who did not. Instead, a series of demonstrations gave the Egyptian army cover to carry out what was tantamount to a military coup. The president was removed, but his removal would be difficult to call a revolution.

And where revolutions could be said to have occurred, as in Libya, it is not clear they were democratic revolutions. The forces in eastern Libya remain opaque, and it cannot be assumed their desires represent the will of the majority of Libyans &mdash; or that the eastern rebels intend to create, or are capable of creating, a democratic society. They want to get rid of a tyrant, but that doesn&rsquo;t mean they won&rsquo;t just create another tyranny.

Then, there are revolutions that genuinely represent the will of the majority, as in Bahrain. Bahrain&rsquo;s Shiite majority rose up against the Sunni royal family, clearly seeking a regime that truly represents the majority. But it is not at all clear that they want to create a constitutional democracy, or at least not one the United States would recognize as such. Obama said each country can take its own path, but he also made clear that the path could not diverge from basic principles of human rights &mdash; in other words, their paths can be different, but they cannot be too different. Assume for the moment that the Bahraini revolution resulted in a democratic Bahrain tightly aligned with Iran and hostile to the United States. Would the United States recognize Bahrain as a satisfactory democratic model?

The central problem from my point of view is that the Arab Spring has consisted of demonstrations of limited influence, in non-democratic revolutions and in revolutions whose supporters would create regimes quite alien from what Washington would see as democratic. There is no single vision to the Arab Spring, and the places where the risings have the most support are the places that will be least democratic, while the places where there is the most democratic focus have the weakest risings.

As important, even if we assume that democratic regimes would emerge, there is no reason to believe they would form a coalition with the United States. In this, Obama seems to side with the neoconservatives, his ideological enemies. Neoconservatives argued that democratic republics have common interests, so not only would they not fight each other, they would band together &mdash; hence their rhetoric about creating democracies in the Middle East. Obama seems to have bought into this idea that a truly democratic Egypt would be friendly to the United States and its interests. That may be so, but it is hardly self-evident &mdash; and this assumes democracy is a real option in Egypt, which is questionable.

Obama addressed this by saying we must take risks in the short run to be on the right side of history in the long run. The problem embedded in this strategy is that if the United States miscalculates about the long run of history, it might wind up with short-term risks and no long-term payoff. Even if by some extraordinary evolution the Middle East became a genuine democracy, it is the ultimate arrogance to assume that a Muslim country would choose to be allied with the United States. Maybe it would, but Obama and the neoconservatives can&rsquo;t know that.

But to me, this is an intellectual abstraction. There is no Arab Spring, just some demonstrations accompanied by slaughter and extraordinarily vacuous observers. While the pressures are rising, the demonstrations and risings have so far largely failed, from Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak was replaced by a junta, to Bahrain, where Saudi Arabia by invitation led a contingent of forces to occupy the country, to Syria, where Bashar al Assad continues to slaughter his enemies just like his father did.
A Risky Strategy

Obviously, if Obama is going to call for sweeping change, he must address the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. Obama knows this is the graveyard of foreign policy: Presidents who go into this rarely come out well. But any influence he would have with the Arabs would be diminished if he didn&rsquo;t try. Undoubtedly understanding the futility of the attempt, he went in, trying to reconcile an Israel that has no intention of returning to the geopolitically vulnerable borders of 1967 with a Hamas with no intention of publicly acknowledging Israel&rsquo;s right to exist &mdash; with Fatah hanging in the middle. By the weekend, the president was doing what he knew he would do and was switching positions.

At no point did Obama address the question of Pakistan and Afghanistan or the key issue: Iran. There can be fantasies about uprisings in Iran, but 2009 was crushed, and no matter what political dissent there is among the elite, a broad-based uprising is unlikely. The question thus becomes how the United States plans to deal with Iran&rsquo;s emerging power in the region as the United States withdraws from Iraq.

But Obama&rsquo;s foray into Israeli-Palestinian affairs was not intended to be serious; rather, it was merely a cover for his broader policy to reconstitute a coalition of the willing. While we understand why he wants this broader policy to revive the coalition of the willing, it seems to involve huge risks that could see a diminished or disappeared coalition. He could help bring down pro-American regimes that are repressive and replace them with anti-American regimes that are equally or even more repressive.

If Obama is right that there is a democratic movement in the Muslim world large enough to seize power and create U.S.-friendly regimes, then he has made a wise choice. If he is wrong and the Arab Spring was simply unrest leading nowhere, then he risks the coalition he has by alienating regimes in places like Bahrain or Saudi Arabia without gaining either democracy or friends.
&quot;Obama and the Arab Spring&quot; is republished with permission of STRATFOR.



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			<title><![CDATA[Corruption: Why Texas is not Mexico]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/Corruption-Why-Texas-is-not-Mexico.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">122240679</guid>		
			<pubDate>Tue, 24 May 2011 00:31:54 PST</pubDate>
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As one studies Mexico&rsquo;s cartel war, it is not uncommon to hear Mexican politicians &mdash; and some people in the United States &mdash; claim that Mexico&rsquo;s problems of violence and corruption stem largely from the country&rsquo;s proximity to the United States. According to this narrative, the United States is the world&rsquo;s largest illicit narcotics market, and the inexorable force of economic demand means that the countries supplying the demand, and those that are positioned between the source countries and the huge U.S. market, are trapped in a very bad position. Because of this market and the illicit trade it creates, billions of dollars worth of drugs flow northward through Mexico (or are produced there) and billions of dollars in cash flow back southward into Mexico. The guns that flow southward along with the cash, according to the narrative, are largely responsible for Mexico&rsquo;s violence. As one looks at other countries lying to the south of Mexico along the smuggling routes from South America to the United States, they too seem to suffer from the same maladies.

However, when we look at the dynamics of the narcotics trade, there are other political entities, ones located to Mexico&rsquo;s north, that find themselves caught in the same geographic and economic position as Mexico and points south. As borderlands, these entities &mdash; referred to as states in the U.S. political system &mdash; find themselves caught between the supply of drugs flowing from the south and the large narcotics markets to their north. The geographic location of these states results in large quantities of narcotics flowing northward through their territory and large amounts of cash likewise flowing southward. Indeed, this illicit flow has brought with it corruption and violence, but when we look at these U.S. states, their security environments are starkly different from those of Mexican states on the other side of the border.

One implicit reality that flows from the geopolitical concept of borderlands is that while political borders are clearly delineated, the cultural and economic borders surrounding them are frequently less clear and more dynamic. The borderlands on each side of the thin, artificially imposed line we call a border are remarkably similar in geographic and demographic terms (indeed, inhabitants of such areas are often related). In the larger picture, both sides of the border often face the same set of geopolitical realities and challenges. Certainly the border between the United States and Mexico was artificially imposed by the annexation of Texas following its anti-Mexico revolution as well as the U.S. annexation of what is now much of the U.S. West, including the border states of Arizona, California and New Mexico, following the Mexican-American War. While the desert regions along the border do provide a bit of a buffer between the two countries &mdash; and between the Mexican core and its northern territories &mdash; there is no geological obstacle separating the two countries. Even the Rio Grande is not so grand, as the constant flow of illicit goods over it testifies. In many places, like Juarez and El Paso, the U.S.-Mexico border serves to cut cities in half, much like the Berlin Wall used to do.

Yet as one crosses over that artificial line one senses huge differences between the cultural, economic and security environments north and south. In spite of the geopolitical and economic realities confronting both sides of this borderland, Texas is not Mexico. The differences run deep, and we thought it worthwhile this week to examine how and why. 
Same Problems, Different Scope

First, it must be understood that this examination does not mean to assert that the illicit narcotics market in the United States has no effect on Mexico (or Central America, for that matter). The flow of narcotics, money and guns, and the organizations that participate in this illicit trade, does have a clear and demonstrable impact on Mexico. But &mdash; and this very significant &mdash; that impact does not stop at the border. This illicit commerce also impacts the U.S. states north of the border.

Certainly the U.S. side of the border has seen corruption of public officials, cartel-related violence and, of course, drug trafficking. But these phenomena have manifested themselves differently on the U.S. side of the border.

In the United States there have been local cops, sheriffs, customs inspectors and even FBI agents arrested and convicted for corruption. However, the problem is far worse on the Mexican side, where entire police forces have been relieved of their duties due to their cooperation with the drug cartels and where systematic corruption has been traced all the way from the municipal mayoral level to the Presidential Guard, and even to the country&rsquo;s drug czar. There have even been groups of police officers and military units arrested while actively protecting shipments of drugs in Mexico &mdash; something that simply does not occur in the United States. And while Mexican officials are frequently forced to choose between &ldquo;plata o plomo&rdquo; (Spanish for &ldquo;silver or lead,&rdquo; a direct threat of violence meaning &ldquo;take the bribe or we will kill you&rdquo;), that type of threat is extremely rare in the United States. It is also very rare to see politicians, police chiefs and judges killed in the United States &mdash; a common occurrence in Mexico.

That said, there certainly has been cartel-related violence on the U.S. side of the border with organizations such as Los Zetas conducting assassinations in places like Houston and Dallas. The claim by some U.S. politicians that there is no spillover violence is patently false. However, the use of violence on the U.S. side has tended to be far more discreet on the part of the cartels (and the U.S. street gangs they are allied with) than in Mexico, where the cartels are frequently quite flagrant. The cartels kill people in the United States but they tend to avoid the gruesome theatrics associated with many drug-related murders in Mexico, where it has become commonplace to see victims beheaded, dismembered or hung from pedestrian walkways over major thoroughfares.

Likewise, the large firefights frequently observed in Mexico involving dozens of armed men on each side using military weapons, grenades and rocket-propelled grenades have come within feet of the border (sometimes with stray rounds crossing over onto the U.S. side), but these types of events have remained on the south side of that invisible line. Mexican cartel gunmen have used dozens of trucks and other large vehicles to set up roadblocks in Matamoros, but they have not followed suit in Brownsville. Cities on the U.S. side of the border are seen as markets, logistics hubs and places of refuge for cartel figures, not battlefields.

Even when we consider drug production, it is important to recognize that the first &ldquo;super labs&rdquo; for methamphetamine production were developed in California&rsquo;s Central Valley, not in Mexico. It was only pressure from U.S. law enforcement agencies that forced the relocation of these laboratories south of the border. Certainly, meth production is still going on in many parts of the United States, but the production is being conducted in mom-and-pop operations that can produce only relatively small amounts of the drug, usually of varying quality. By contrast, Mexican super labs can produce tons of meth that is of very high (almost pharmacological) quality. Additionally, while Mexican cartels (and other producers) have long grown marijuana inside the United States in clandestine plots of land, the quantity of marijuana the cartels grow inside the United States is far eclipsed by the industrial marijuana production operations conducted in Mexico.

Even the size of narcotics shipments changes at the border. The huge shipments of drugs that are shipped within Mexico are broken down into smaller lots at stash houses on the Mexican side of the border to be smuggled into the United States. Then they are frequently broken down again in stash houses on the U.S. side of the border. The trafficking of drugs in the United States tends to be far more decentralized and diffuse than it is on the Mexican side, again in response to U.S. law enforcement pressure. Smaller shipments allow drug traffickers to limit their losses if a shipment is seized, and using a decentralized distribution network allows them to be less dependent on any one link in the chain. If one distribution channel is rolled up by the authorities, traffickers can shift their product into another sales channel.
Not Just an Institutional Problem

Above we noted that the same dynamics exist on both sides of the border, and the same cartel groups also operate on both sides. However, we also noted the consistent theme of the Mexican cartels being forced to behave differently on the U.S. side. The organizations are no different, but the environment in which they operate is very different. The corruption, poverty, diminished rule of law and lack of territorial control (particularly in the border-adjacent hinterlands) that is endemic to the Mexican system greatly empowers and emboldens the cartels in Mexico. The operating environment inside the United States is quite different, forcing the cartels to behave differently. Mexican cartels and drug trafficking are problems in the United States, but they are problems that can be controlled by U.S. law enforcement. The environment does not permit the cartels to threaten the U.S. government&rsquo;s ability to govern.

A geopolitical monograph explaining the forces that have shaped Mexico can be found here. Understanding the geopolitics of Mexico is very helpful to understanding the challenges Mexico faces and why it has become what it is today. This broader understanding is also the key to understanding why the Mexican police simply can&rsquo;t be reformed to solve the problems of violence and corruption. Certainly, the Mexican government has aggressively pursued police reform for many years now, with very little success. Indeed, it was the lack of a trustworthy law enforcement apparatus that led the Calderon government to turn to the military to counter the power of the Mexican cartels. This lack of reliable law enforcement has also led Calderon to aggressively pursue police reform. This reform effort has included unifying the federal police agencies and consolidating municipal police departments (which have arguably been the most corrupt institutions in Mexico) into unified state police commands, under which officers are subjected to better screening, oversight and accountability. Already, however, there have been numerous instances of these &ldquo;new and improved&rdquo; federal- and state-level police officers being arrested for corruption.

This illustrates the fact that Mexico&rsquo;s ills go far deeper than just corrupt institutions. Because of this, revamping the institutions will not result in any meaningful change, and the revamped institutions will soon be corrupted like the ones they replaced. This fact should have been readily apparent; the institutional approach has been tried in the region before and has failed.

Perhaps the best example of this failure was the &ldquo;untouchable and incorruptible&rdquo; Department of Anti-Narcotics Operations, known by its Spanish acronym DOAN, which was created in Guatemala in the mid-1990s. The DOAN was almost purely a creation of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Department of State&rsquo;s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. The concept behind the creation of the DOAN was that corruption existed within the Guatemalan police institutions because the police were undertrained, underpaid and underequipped. It was believed that if police recruits were carefully screened, properly trained, well paid and adequately equipped, they would not be susceptible to the corruption that plagued the other police institutions in the country. So the U.S. government hand-picked the recruits, thoroughly trained them, paid them generously and provided them with brand-new uniforms and equipment. However, the result was not what the U.S. government expected. By 2002, the &ldquo;untouchable&rdquo; DOAN had to be disbanded because it had essentially become a drug trafficking organization itself and was involved in torturing and killing competitors and stealing their shipments of narcotics.

The example of the Guatemalan DOAN (and of more recent Mexican police reform efforts) demonstrates that even a competent, well-paid and well-equipped police institution cannot stand alone within a culture that is not prepared to support it and keep it clean. In other words, over time, an institution will take on the characteristics of, and essentially reflect, the environment surrounding it. Therefore, significant reform in Mexico requires a holistic approach that reaches far beyond the institutions to address the profound economic, sociological and cultural problems that are affecting the country today. Indeed, given how deeply rooted and pervasive these problems are and the geopolitical hand the country was dealt, Mexico has done quite well. But holistic change will not be easy to accomplish. It will require a great deal of time, treasure, leadership and effort. In view of this reality, we can see why it would be more politically expedient simply to blame the Americans.
Corruption: Why Texas is Not Mexico is republished with permission of STRATFOR.



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			<title><![CDATA[Republicans, meet your new front-runner]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/james-carville-op-ed-trump-commentary-120806674.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:09:18 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	







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(CNN) &mdash; Today's big winner is Donald Trump. His news conference this morning was an utterly brilliant performance in which he claimed, with considerable justification, that he alone was able to get the president of the United States to accomplish what no one else could, not the Clintons, not the press, not anybody: the release of President Obama's &quot;long form&quot; birth certificate.

Trump then parlayed this remarkable feat into something even bigger, taking the Saudis and the Chinese to task to increase oil production and to fairly value their currency, respectively.

There is no question that today's events gave Trump a huge political opening. It is also agreed by all, including myself, that despite his exceptional brilliance on this morning of April 27, he would be a completely disastrous nominee for the GOP.

My mother, Ms. Nippy Carville, was an accomplished bridge teacher and always cautioned her students to &quot;review the bidding&quot; before the play. In keeping with her advice I would like to review these facts:

We have seen various forms of proof, from contemporaneous newspaper articles announcing his birth to verified statements from Hawaiian officials and certified legal documents that have allowed all of the major news organizations to determine and report beyond any reasonable doubt that President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961.

Yet the political world came to a standstill as the president of the United States appeared personally to deal with what has to be the most idiotic issue in the history of politics. Was it, as they claim, that the administration was so driven to the point of distraction that members were no longer able to focus on the multitude of serious issues facing the country? Or is there another explanation that makes more sense and would lead one to hope that the White House is smarter than it looks?

With these bids duly reviewed and the bluffs factored in, even Ms. Nippy would surely conclude that these facts &quot;trump the trick.&quot;

So, in the words of Jack Cafferty, &quot;Here's my question to you:&quot; What motivated the White House to become a part of the spectacle at this stage in the game? Was the posting of the birth certificate an intentional move to bolster the political standing of Donald Trump? This is one Democrat that hopes it was, as it would demonstrate a political move of great sophistication and overall strategic brilliance.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of James Carville.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Will birther nonsense stop now?]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/birth-certificate-obama-birther-120804329.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">120804329</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:50:45 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	







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New York (CNN) &mdash; In response to the increased heat of conspiracy entrepreneurs selling books and seeding presidential campaigns with &quot;birther&quot; theories, President Obama released his long-form birth certificate Wednesday.

In the White House briefing room, he spoke frankly about how he'd been puzzled and initially &quot;bemused&quot; about the persistence of the rumors that he was not born in the United States even after his 2008 campaign released his certificate of live birth.

The birther theories have been thoroughly debunked before, but Donald Trump recently reignited the debate by basing his presidential flirtation largely on the birther claims and received a significant short-term bump in the polls as a result. This was a sign of the fringe blurring with the base, evidence of the political potential for playing to the lowest common denominator at a time when 51% of Republican primary voters doubt whether the president was born in the United States.

So, will this finally stop the conspiracy theorists?

Sadly, no. As Jonathan Swift once said, you cannot reason someone out of something they were not reasoned into.

But this long-form birth-certificate release will increase the ranks and volume of responsible Republicans who have realized that they have created a monster by encouraging &quot;Obama Derangement Syndrome&quot; for political gain. There are, after all, plenty of compelling rational reasons to oppose the president's re-election.

Already, there are those whose only response to this release is to suspiciously ask why the long-form birth certificate was not released sooner. Others are questioning whether the document is real, with Drudge Report linking to a story pointing out that the doctor who presided over the birth died in 2003, presumably making 100% verification permanently in doubt. And there were folks who resisted previous evidence, like the two concurrent birth announcements for Barack Obama in Honolulu papers.

Like the Bush Derangement Syndrome that proliferated on the far-left during the last administration -- the 9/11 truthers were the birthers of the Bush era -- Obama Derangement Syndrome is a hydra-headed monster of conspiracy theories. Some will now switch to related variations, questioning the president's religion or, as Trump has started to do, his school records. Conspiracy theories always parade as scientific theory, pushed by people claiming to have special knowledge of some monstrous fraud. But in the end, it is fright-wing politics peddled to the gullible, troubled and hyper-partisan.

The birther theories have always been demonstrably false. In my research for the book &quot;Wingnuts,&quot; I found the birther patient zero: She was an amateur opposition researcher and Hillary Clinton delegate from Texas known as Linda Starr.

She first notoriety in the late 1990s, digging up stories about the hypocrisy of Republicans like Dan Burton and Bob Livingston during the Clinton impeachment hearings. She later surfaced as a source in the reporting on the discredited Bush Air National Guard story that brought down Dan Rather's long and otherwise distinguished career at CBS.

In 2008, she was offended by what she later told me was &quot;the daily misogynistic hate speech against Hillary&quot; during the primaries. She volunteered for the Clinton campaign during the hotly contested Lone Star State primary and served as a Clinton delegate at the state convention. After Clinton's concession, Starr turned her attention to Obama.

&quot;I determined that I was going to start digging up every bit of dirt that I could find on him,&quot; she told me after I hunted her down in late '09, &quot;and that hopefully that I would find something against him that would convince the Democratic Party to dump him and make Hillary the nominee.&quot;

She worked to provide unspecified &quot;research&quot; allegedly about Obama's birth to a Philadelphia lawyer who had filed at a 9/11 truther law suit against President Bush, alleging that the government allowed the terrorist attacks to happen and that the World Trade Center was destroyed from within.

This new conspiracy theory was picked up by unhinged partisans on the right and proliferated courtesy of the Internet. It was pumped up by conspiracy entrepreneurs selling bumper stickers and books and promoted via talk radio, riffing off the offensive idea that the president of the United States is somehow &quot;un-American.&quot;

And so began a pathetic waste of time that distorted our political debates and sowed the seeds of distrust between fellow citizens. It was never anything more than a dark fantasy about reversing election results pushed by people invested in polarization for political and personal profit.

Obama was correct to call out the outsized influence that conspiracy theorists and carnival barker-style have achieved in our politics.

&quot;I know that there's going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest,&quot; he said. &quot;But I'm speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We've got better stuff to do. I've got better stuff to do. We've got big problems to solve. And I'm confident we can solve them, but we're going to have to focus on them -- not on this.&quot;

He's right.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of John P. Avlon.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Health care law: How it impacts children]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/Health-care-law-How-it-impacts-children-106726708.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">106726708</guid>		
			<pubDate>Thu, 4 Nov 2010 14:37:26 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	







																														                                                                        <description><![CDATA[

Kelly Hardy and Robert Phillips respond to some frequently asked questions on the impact of the health care law on children. Hardy is director of health policy at Children Now, a national organization that helps children achieve their full potential. And Phillips is the Director of Health &amp; Human Services at the California Endowment, a private, statewide health foundation whose mission is to expand access to affordable, quality health care for underserved individuals and communities, and to promote fundamental improvements in the health status of all Californians .

Q: I am a 23-year-old college graduate working for a company that doesn&rsquo;t provide health insurance. I got aged out of my dad&rsquo;s insurance before I started college and can&rsquo;t afford to buy private health insurance. Can the new health care reform law help me?

A: Yes! As of this September, young adults can stay on their parents&rsquo; family health insurance plans until they turn 26, even if they are not students or financially dependent on their parents. However, you can only re-join your parents&rsquo; plan if your employer doesn&rsquo;t provide health coverage.

Each insurance company has a different time of year when it enrolls new people on an existing insurance plan. So if your parents have an insurance plan that kicked you off or excluded you before September 23rd, your parents&rsquo; insurance company does not have to put you back on the plan before the start of the next plan year.

For example, if your parent&rsquo;s &ldquo;plan year&rdquo; does not start until January 2011, you may not get insurance coverage until then. You&rsquo;ll have to check with your parent&rsquo;s employer to know for sure if you are eligible for coverage now.

My son, now 20, was diagnosed with autism when he was three. It has been impossible for me to get him health insurance because most health plans do not cover mental health. Does the new health law address situations such as mine?

Starting in 2014, the federal health reform law requires mental health services to be included as a benefit in health insurance plans provided through the health care Exchange networks being set up in each state. Also in 2014, mental illness can no longer be used by insurers to deny coverage as a &ldquo;pre-existing condition,&rdquo; and insurers will not able to use mental health conditions to raise your premiums.

I have a 21-year-old daughter who has been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. My part-time job doesn&rsquo;t provide health insurance, and I make a little too much to qualify for Medi-Cal. No insurance company will cover my daughter because of her pre-existing condition. Can I get relief from the new health care law?

In September 2010, the health care law provision preventing insurance companies from denying coverage to children (18-years and younger) based on pre-existing conditions went into effect. In 2014, this provision will cover Americans of all ages.

The new law also provides funding for insurance for those with pre-existing conditions. This program is available for individuals who have not had health coverage in the six months prior to applying.

A health insurance company recently refused to sell me a child-only policy for my 7-year-old child, who is healthy right now. But I want her to have insurance, just in case. I was told that insurance companies are doing this because of the new health care reform law. Can they do this?

Unfortunately, some insurers have decided to stop offering child-only policies to new customers. Existing customers are not impacted. This affects a small number of children, but often these are the children most in need. The situation will be improved in 2014, when all insurers who wish to participate in state Exchanges will be required to offer child-only policies. In the meantime, a new California law that goes into effect next January prohibits insurers from participating in California&rsquo;s Exchange for five years if they stop offering child-only policies.

If you have any questions about the health care law, call: (800) 871-9012 x712389#, or e-mail your question to asktheexpert@newamericamedia.org or send by regular mail to P.O. Box 410447, San Francisco, CA 94141-0447. You can find more resources at www.calendow.org/healthlaw.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Health care law: How does it help people without insurance, jobs, papers?]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/Health-care-law-How-does-it-help-people-without-insurance-jobs-papers-106726053.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">106726053</guid>		
			<pubDate>Thu, 4 Nov 2010 14:27:23 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	







																														                                                                        <description><![CDATA[

Below are some of the frequently asked questions NAM has heard since President Obama signed the health care reform law in March.

Q: I am a 32-year-old male who has just been released from prison. I have chronic hypertension and diabetes. It has been difficult to find a job and even more difficult to access health insurance. What can I do now and how will that change in 2014 when the health care law is fully implemented?

A: Currently, in California individual counties are responsible to provide basic health care services to persons who can&rsquo;t afford them and are not eligible for other public programs.  There may also be a non-profit clinic available where you live that takes patients on a sliding fee scale depending on your income.  However, after January 1, 2014, when the affordable care act is fully implemented, you will be eligible for Medi-Cal.

My husband and I are both working but do not get health insurance from our jobs and cannot afford to buy private insurance.  Although we are currently without legal status, our two children are U.S. citizens and are enrolled in California's child health insurance program, Healthy Families.  Is there anything in the new health care law that could help our family get affordable health care? 

Your children and other family members who have legal status will remain eligible for Healthy Families, Medi-Cal, Medicare, and will also be able to buy affordable health insurance in the new insurance marketplace.  Californians without legal status will still be able to enroll in Emergency Medi-Cal to cover emergency treatment (if they meet other eligibility rules) and can continue to obtain affordable health services at their local community health centers and pay based on their income.  In addition, due to the existing Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) requirements, hospitals will continue to be required to treat and stabilize uninsured individuals who need emergency treatment under the new health care reform law.

I am a 45-year-old female who just got laid off. I don&rsquo;t qualify for COBRA &ndash; the temporary continuation of health coverage former employees or their spouses get at group rates &ndash; and I can&rsquo;t afford private insurance. Can I get help from the new law?

Today under the existing system, if you have children at home, you may be eligible for Medi-Cal coverage or if you do not have children at home, you may be eligible for county health care.  You are also eligible to receive health care through community clinics. Several of California clinics have already begun to receive new funding that is provided by the Affordable Care Act. In total, the Act will provide $11 billion in new funding to Federally-Qualified Health Centers over the next five years.

If you have any questions about the health care law, call: (800) 871-9012 712389#, or e-mail your question to asktheexpert@newamericamedia.org or send by regular mail to P.O. Box 410447, San Francisco, CA 94141-0447. You can find more resources at www.calendow.org/healthlaw.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Ask the Expert]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/Ask-the-Expert-Miles-105071609.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">105071609</guid>		
			<pubDate>Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:33:57 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	







																														                                                                        <description><![CDATA[

Dr. Toni P. Miles, a professor at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, and Robert Phillips, a policy expert at The California Endowment, address three frequently asked questions about elder care benefits under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into law in March 2010.

A lot of seniors are worried that the new law will cut Medicare benefits and make it harder for those in the program to have good health care. Is this true?

The law guarantees there will be no reductions in basic Medicare benefits. As you know, Medicare is a health insurance program for those who are 65 or older, some disabled people under 65, and anyone with end-stage kidney disease.

Many people worry about what they will do if they get a debilitating illness that requires long-term care. Will they be able to stay at home and be cared for instead of ending up in a nursing home?

The new health care law creates a new insurance program called the Community Living Assistance Services and Support (CLASS) program. CLASS increases your long-term options to live independently if you have or develop a qualifying disability.  For example, this insurance can be used to help pay for assisted living care and home modifications.

Starting in 2012 or 2013, you will first need to enroll in the CLASS program. After paying premiums for at least five years and meeting several eligibility requirements, you will be eligible for benefits.

Many who are on Medicare Part D end up spending hundreds of dollars each month to pay for their prescription drugs.  How will the new law affect them?

The new law will close the doughnut hole.

Starting in January 2011, pharmaceutical companies will provide a discount of 50 percent on brand-name drugs to low- and middle-income beneficiaries who find themselves in the doughnut hole. Over time, the doughnut hole will start shrinking and ultimately disappear entirely in 2020.

This year, Medicare beneficiaries who hit the doughnut hole received a $250 rebate check as part of the new law.

If you have any questions about the health care reform law for the expert, call: (800)-871-9012 Ext. 712389 #, or Email your question to asktheexpert@newamericamedia.org or send by regular mail to P.O. Box 410447, San Francisco, CA 94141-0447.  For more information visit www.calendow.org/healthlaw.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Health care law: What’s in it for small businesses?]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/Health-Care-Law--Whats-in-it-for-Small-Businesses-105071329.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">105071329</guid>		
			<pubDate>Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:30:38 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	







																														                                                                        <description><![CDATA[

In California, small businesses, or businesses that employ less than 100 people, make up over 90% over all private sector employers, employ over 5 million Californians, and paid over a third of the state&rsquo;s private sector payrolls. Nationally, small businesses employ over 50 percent of all private sector workers in the US and have generated two thirds of the new jobs in our economy during the recession. What is the new health care reform law doing to help this critical sector of our economy?

Robert Phillips of The California Endowment and Sara Collins of the Commonwealth Fund, both private foundation headquartered in California and New York respectively who focus on health policy answers concerns raised by small business owners in California.

I own a sandwich shop in San Francisco with five full-time employees. Will the new health care law require me to provide them insurance?  If it does, I may be forced to shut down - Son ka Wu, Vietnamese entrepreneur

The new law doesn&rsquo;t make it mandatory for small businesses with 50 employees or fewer to provide coverage.

I run BBQ business in Orange County with 13 full-time employees.  My insurance cost has risen from 5 to 6 percent of my overall expenses to more than 12 percent, in the past four years. Soon I&rsquo;ll have to opt out of providing health insurance. Can&rsquo;t the new law help me lower my health insurance costs? &ndash; Liz Parker.

Answer: Two provisions help reduce premiums. First, if you have fewer than 25 employees who earn an average wage below $50,000 per annum you are eligible for a tax credit of up to 35 per cent of the amount you contribute for employees&rsquo; premiums, for taxes filed for 2010 to 2013. From 2014 to 2016, the tax credits will increase to cover up to 50 percent of the employer's premium contribution for eligible small businesses.

Second, the health law requires states to create insurance exchanges which will give small businesses more options and clout in purchasing insurance. The state exchange in California will allow small businesses to band together to purchase insurance, giving them the type of clout that large businesses enjoy when negotiating for coverage. In California, 3.76 million small-business employees and their dependents, and 840,000 self-employed people, will be eligible to purchase insurance through the exchange.

I am a Korean-American entrepreneur operating a small travel agency in San Jose. I have seven employees. One was diagnosed with liver cancer but our insurance provider has stipulated a limit on the cost that it will bear. What are the alternative options that I have? Can the new health care law help me? -- Lianna Kim

The health care law outlaws denial of insurance to those with pre-existing conditions. But this change won&rsquo;t take full effect until 2014. But U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who have preexisting conditions and have been uninsured for at least six months will be eligible to enroll in the new Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) being offered through California&rsquo;s Medical Risk Medical Insurance Board (MRMIB).  Maximum out-of-pocket cost sharing for enrollees will be $5,950 for individuals and $11,900 for families, per year.

As of September 23rd, the law prohibits all health plans from imposing lifetime dollar limits on benefit payments. This provision applies to both old and new insurance plans. For people who have exceeded their lifetime limits before September 23, the plans must provide notice that the lifetime limit no longer applies, and provide an enrollment period for those who have disenrolled from the health plan.

I am a Latino entrepreneur running a Mexican restaurant in San Jose with 10 employees. I don&rsquo;t have the time and expertise to figure out the most affordable and appropriate insurance cover for my employees. Does the new law simplify the insurance purchasing process? - Jose Rios

California is required to create new health insurance exchanges for small businesses like yours and for individuals starting in 2014. This aims to make it simpler for individuals and small businesses to compare different policies by making it mandatory for participating insurers to meet a set of federal essential benefit standards.  All plans will have no lifetime or annual limits on what insurers will pay, and must limit out-of-pocket costs to $5,950 for a single person and $11,900 for a family. Deductibles for small businesses can be no greater than $2,000 for a single policy or $4,000 for a family policy.

If you have any questions about the health care reforms to ask the expert Call: (800) 871-9012 ext. 712389#  Email: asktheexpert@newamericamedia.org or Regular mail: P.O. Box 410447, San Francisco CA 94141-0447 calendow.org/healthlaw or GetCoveredCA.org.

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			<title><![CDATA[Carville: Louisiana demands justice, not charity]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/96267603.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">96267603</guid>		
			<pubDate>Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:42:06 PST</pubDate>
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																		                                                                        <description><![CDATA[New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) -- Henry Ford once described history as "one damned thing after another." And he didn't even live in Louisiana.

         Much has been made of my "outburst" toward the Obama administration on May 26, with George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning America," when I exclaimed, "Man, you got to get down here and take control of this! Put somebody in charge of this thing and get this moving. We're about to die down here!"

         But those emotions had been percolating below the surface like the crude that threatens our way of life today.

         While it is important to note that both BP's and the administration's tepid responses to this catastrophe are unacceptable, it is also essential that the rest of the country understand that this feeling of neglect has festered amongst South Louisianians for generations. It's just one damned thing after another, so the anger rising out of the Gulf is not new.

         For too long, the federal government and industry alike have simultaneously abused and neglected, patronized and plundered, and now polluted the people of Louisiana. And our plight now is a national emergency.

         We felt the effects of this neglect for the past five years, after rebuilding a city which was 80 percent flooded due to shoddy construction of flood control systems and levees by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And we feel ourselves ever more vulnerable due to the nonstop degradation of our wetlands, which serve as our first line of defense against hurricanes and powerful storm surge.

         For decades, massive engineering projects across the country have made us more vulnerable. We lose a chunk of land the size of a football field every 38 minutes. Since World War II, we've lost wetlands the size of the state of Delaware. I bet Joe Biden would be screaming on national television too if it was happening on his turf. Or if the Hamptons lost 16,000 acres a year, you bet there'd be a Million Hedge-Fund Managers March on Washington to demand action.

         And the loss of coastal wetlands has everything to do with activities across the rest of the country, starting with the deprivation of natural sediment that the Mississippi River should carry to its mouth and dump at the Gulf of Mexico to nourish our barrier islands.

         The Mississippi River system drains more than 30 states. Part of the sediment is lost by the damming of rivers in the system in the 1950s to provide electricity as well as flood protection for states like North Dakota and Missouri. According to historian John Barry, our sediment level is only 30 to 40 percent of the natural amount, which is why we are losing such valuable land so quickly.

         Then the oil companies dredged canals in the marshlands in an attempt to grow an industry which now provides the country with more than 30 percent of its domestic oil and natural gas. Salt-water intrusion killed the marsh. These marshlands provide jobs for tens of thousands of fisherman in an industry that provides over 30 percent of this country's domestic seafood supply.

         Canals were also dredged for shipping. Five of the nation's top 15 ports are located in South Louisiana. So in essence, we are the gateway of commerce to much of the lower 48 states.

         Add that to the fact that we have not seen a single penny of royalties for oil produced more than six miles off our coast. We assume all of the risk, produce seafood and oil and gas, with none of the reward. Royalties totaling $165 billion have gone to the federal treasury when they could go to help repair this pressing issue.

         But there's more.

         In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, federal judge Stanwood Duval Jr. found that the Army Corps of Engineers had displayed "gross negligence ... insouciance, myopia, and shortsightedness." He continued, "The Corps not only knew, but admitted by 1988, that the [Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Project] threatened human life." And yet, nothing was done about it until recently.

         And then BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster hits, which is the deadliest combination imaginable of corporate greed and governmental malfeasance. We've been lied to by BP at every turn, from oil-flow estimates to the existence of plumes to health effects.

         There's also the blatant malpractice and corruption in the Minerals Management Service. Free meals, cushy seats at sporting events, and other gifts from the folks they were trying to regulate seemed to cloud the judgment of too many MMS officials to be bothered with protecting the interests of our residents and our way of life.

         In case anyone misses the point here, let me state it bluntly: There is nothing natural about the great engineering failure of 2005 in Orleans and Saint Bernard Parishes. There is nothing natural about the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico today. Both were the result of shoddy engineering on the part of private industry, which was in both cases supposed to be regulated and overseen by the federal government.

         Every penny that has been allocated to the hurricane recovery in Orleans and Saint Bernard is owed to us, and every penny in the future that will be allocated as a result of this current catastrophe is owed to us. We do not seek charity, but we do demand justice.

         So we've had two monumental, mostly preventable man-made disasters in five years, which brings us to the moment where I said on television the thing that every person who lives south of the Interstate 10/Interstate 12 corridor agrees with.

         We've been abused, neglected and exploited for too long.

         And to be brutally honest, part of my frustration is a sense of personal shame that I have known this was going on for a long time, and I was ineffective in making Louisiana's case in my years in Washington.

         But let me say that it's now time to draw a line in the alluvial mud. We want our fair share of oil revenues now so that we can protect ourselves. And we want to be treated like we matter.

         And we're not whiners. We produce oil and gas and produce seafood and allow goods to flow freely to the heartland. We assume the risks with little reward. Jobs and livelihoods are at stake.

         In the end, whatever past transgressions by the country toward us or whatever our failures to articulate our plight have been, we should be reminded of the words of Admiral Lord Nelson just before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805: "England expects that every man will do his duty."

         And in this, the most critical hour in our region's long, tortured, and yet glorious history, let's remind ourselves that Louisiana expects every person to do his or her duty.

         This is a struggle for the preservation of our culture, way of life, and the land we love.

         The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of James Carville.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Zakaria: Obama caves in to media frenzy over BP]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/96128594.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">96128594</guid>		
			<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jun 2010 02:17:15 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	



	


		

																		



															<enclosure url="http://media.wavenewspapers.com/images/obama+bp+oil+louisiana+320px.jpg" length="80150" type="image/jpeg" />
																																											                                                                        <description><![CDATA[COMMENTARY

New York (CNN) -- President Obama's stepped-up focus on the Gulf oil disaster and his hardline rhetoric against BP are accomplishing little and risk distracting the White House from other urgent responsibilities, says analyst Fareed Zakaria.

         Obama, responding to critics of the government's handling of the spill, has made a point of emphasizing the time he's devoted to the crisis and has used blunt language to express outrage about it. In an interview with NBC, he said he met with experts "because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick."

         Zakaria told CNN, "I think that what he's been doing in recent days has been caving in to this media outcry that he show more emotion and anger and energy in dealing with the problem. And I think the result of it is that you're getting government as theater rather than government that is actually doing something effective.

         "The reality is that this is a terrible tragedy, a very complex, technical problem. The federal government has limited power and limited expertise. But the media -- and I hold us all responsible here -- has been baying like wolves asking for him to emote. ... It has had an effect."

         The author and host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" spoke to CNN on Wednesday. Here is an edited transcript:

         CNN: What do you think of the way President Obama has been handling the oil disaster?

         Fareed Zakaria: In my view the president has been demeaning himself by trash-talking the CEO of BP. He's engaging in, as far as I can tell, pointless committees, make-work briefings, ... all of which is really just designed to appease this hungry media, and as far as I can tell is not going to speed up by one second the point at which the leak is plugged.

         And the real effect it will have is to totally distract the government from dealing with the important issues the federal government has competence and jurisdiction over, such as the state of the economy, the dangers of a European debt crisis, the issues involving the way in which the Chinese military has been flexing its muscles, North Korea, Iran -- these are the things the president should be holding lots of meetings on, these are areas which are uniquely within the purview of the federal government. We have descended to government as theater.

         CNN: If you look at the Gulf situation, you have a giant corporation that wasn't capable of ensuring the safety of a well that it dug. So who's supposed to hold them responsible and make sure they do the right thing?

         Zakaria: Look, on all available evidence it does appear that BP cut a lot of corners on safety. This is not an act of God, this is something that they are absolutely responsible for. And of course the federal government has responsibility to make sure that they clean up the mess, that they plug the leak as quickly as they can -- though they themselves have a pretty powerful incentive to do it, and let's be real, BP could literally go bankrupt because of this. Whatever their past misdeeds, their economic self-interest would make them very, very powerfully motivated to plug this leak.

         But the federal government has lots of responsibilities here. My point is that we are trying to turn the president and the presidency into some kind of national psychiatrist's couch by constantly urging him to show that he's angry, to do more.

         I can't tell you how many reporters and commentators have said the president isn't showing enough emotion. I'm not sure what this means. Is he supposed to stand up there and start crying? Is he supposed to jump up and down?

         In what other profession is it supposed to be a good idea that you suspend your rational faculties and let yourself be overtaken by raw emotions? Unless you're an offensive linebacker, this is not supposed to be a good thing. And in this case, we're saying the president is being too rational, too calculating. In this kind of crisis, I'm rather reassured that the president is not losing his head.

         CNN: It's his choice whether to respond to the media commentary. Why do you think he's choosing to do it?

         Zakaria: We've gotten to a point where there's an accumulation of media commentary of this kind. It becomes so overwhelming that you have to get the story off the page, you have to respond. In particular what's happened, a lot of this commentary was coming from usually mainstream media that's not instinctively biased against him. This is not Fox News, this was CNN, New York Times and lots of other mainstream organizations, But it has a real cost.

         CNN: What is the cost?

         Zakaria: Well, look at what's happened with his Asia trip. He's now canceled his Asia trip for the second time. This is an area of the world that is absolutely crucial to America's future prosperity. It is where the future balance of power in the world is going to be set.

         To show that the United States is actively engaged is of huge importance. Indonesia in particular is critical here, because there is a complex geopolitical game going on between China and the United States, and Indonesia sits right in the middle of that. And yet he has had to put that aside and to do so in a way that cannot but humiliate the Indonesians.

         There is also the reality of how much time he is spending on [the oil spill]. He says there have been more White House meetings on this subject than any other since the Afghan [war] review. This is insane. The Afghan review -- you're talking about committing tens of thousands of American troops in a very complex multinational war effort in a country 8,000 miles away. That was something that is entirely within the federal government's purview. That's what presidents should be sitting there doing.

         CNN: What about the argument that the example of Hurricane Katrina is behind what the government is doing?

         Zakaria: It may be that people feel that way, but it's a very weird analogy. Katrina was largely a failure of the government. The levees were built largely by the Army Corps of Engineers. What then happened regarding the flooding and the fleeing of the population, that all required primarily a government response. ...

         Fundamentally, the oil spill is a problem that only engineers at BP and other oil industry experts can solve. The government has lots of associated tasks that go along with it; as far as I can tell they are doing those.

         Think back to the Exxon Valdez. I don't believe George H.W. Bush, who was president at the time, ever even went to the area in the first few months. ... There was no requirement that the president seem to be somehow actively engaged on a minute-to-minute basis in a situation that was clearly a spill by an oil tanker.

         What worries me is that we have gotten to the point where we expect the president to somehow magically solve every problem in the world, appear to be doing it, and to reflect our anger and emotion. This is a kind of bizarre trivializing of the presidency into some kind of national psychiatrist-in-chief.

         CNN: Do you think the mistaken response includes the moratorium on deepwater drilling?

         Zakaria: I do, I think that actually offshore drilling has proved to be extremely safe. ... In this case, BP seems to have done a number of things for cost-cutting reasons that should not have been done, or were not industry practice, and it is paying the price for it and we are all paying the price for it.

         Can you guard against a single outlier? Maybe there should have been better regulation, there should certainly have been more vigorous inspections. It seems as though as long as you can get offshore drilling properly supervised, and follow standard procedure, it seems it's entirely possible for it to work.

         Now there is an issue of whether deepwater drilling should be covered by same regulations as shallow-water drilling, and that's something that can be explored in terms of making it even safer. But it would be a mistake to react to this by banning offshore drilling or by having a moratorium.

         In the long run, of course, offshore drilling or any kind of drilling in the United States is not much of a solution for our energy problems. What we really need is an energy policy with dramatic investments in alternative energy technology, that's the kind of broader direction we should be going in. But meanwhile we still do need oil, and this has, by and large, proven a safe way to do it.

         This is a very politically incorrect thing to say in the midst of a tragedy like this that captures the danger vividly on camera. But the reality is that there are millions and millions of barrels of oil that have been extracted with relatively small spillage. ... [In the Gulf] you're extracting about 1.6 million barrels a day. And typically, in an average year, you would have oil spills of a few hundred barrels a year. In relative terms this has been a reasonably safe activity with the exception of this terrible, terrible tragedy.]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Who are the credit ratings agencies?]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/92610444.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">92610444</guid>		
			<pubDate>Sat, 1 May 2010 22:12:32 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	







																														                                                                        <description><![CDATA[

(CNN) --  The financial world was thrown into a tailspin last weekend as credit  ratings agency Standard &amp; Poor's first downgraded Greece's debt  rating to junk status, and also lowered the ratings of Portugal and  Spain.

Behind the headlines stand the firms that make  the calls on the market, which begs a closer look at these powerful  players in the global economy.

Who are the credit  ratings agencies?

The &quot;big three&quot; are Standard's  &amp; Poor's, Moody's Investor Services and Fitch Ratings. All  originated in the United States, although Fitch has dual headquarters in  New York and London.

What do they do?

They are designed to provide independent analysis of the credit  worthiness -- the ability to pay off loans or investments -- of  companies, countries and financial products. They rate them on a sliding  scale ranging from AAA to D. In the case of government bonds, anything  that slips to BB+, as was the case with Greece this week, is considered a  &quot;highly speculative&quot; investment: Or &quot;junk bonds&quot; in the parlance of the  markets.

Why do they wield such power?

Investors across the world look to credit ratings agencies to  judge where to place their bets in the market. For governments, the  ratings agencies have a lot of power over the popularity of bonds: cash  given to governments like Greece by investors that, over time, will pay a  return on the original investment -- unless the government defaults.  The downgrade of Greece signaled Standard &amp; Poor's belief that  Greece has a higher likelihood to default on investments. It caused  investors to lose their appetite to invest in bonds from Greece, which  imperils its ability to pay down its deficit -- which now stands 13  percent higher than the total economic output of the country.

The decisions of credit rating agencies also have a ripple effect  through the market: In the wake of the Greece downgrade, investors  across the globe started rethinking investment in other governments'  bonds and began selling off more risky investments.

How  are they paid?

Historically, they were created to  give investors an unbiased assessment of investments and investors paid  for access to the ratings. In the 1970s, however, credit rating agencies  started charging the issuers of new investments fees for ratings. In  1975, U.S. legislators -- fearing a proliferation of unscrupulous  ratings agencies, designated Standard &amp; Poor's, Moody's and Fitch as  the only ratings organizations banks and brokers could use to evaluate  the credit worthiness of their products.

What are the  complaints against the firms?

Critics complain the  agencies have lost their ability to independently judge the risk on  certain investments -- especially in light of AAA ratings given to  mortgage-backed securities that imploded when defaults on U.S. home  loans shot up, triggering the financial crisis. Lawmakers in the United  States, the European Union and other countries around the world are now  reviewing regulations on the credit ratings agencies. Credit ratings  agencies, too, have revamped their procedures and have argued their  ratings are merely opinions -- it's up to the markets to decide.
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			<title><![CDATA[Protect voter gains of 'Bloody Sunday']]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/op-ed/86997267.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">86997267</guid>		
			<pubDate>Mon, 8 Mar 2010 15:53:51 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	



	


		

																		



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																																											                                                                        <description><![CDATA[Washington (CNN) -- On Sunday we commemorate the courage and sacrifice of 600 men and women who dared 45 years ago to take the first steps in a 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital, Montgomery, for the right to vote. That day, Sunday, March 7, 1965, would come to be known as "Bloody Sunday."

         As these unarmed civil rights patriots attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where fewer than one percent of eligible black voters were allowed to register, they were gassed and beaten with billy clubs by state and local police, some on horseback, ordered to break up the demonstration.

         Captured by television cameras and broadcast nationwide, the suffering of these nonviolent activists, 50 of whom required hospitalization, awoke the nation's consciousness to the importance of voting rights and the entire civil rights movement.

         Within 10 days, President Johnson would send a bill to Congress, the National Voting Rights Act of 1965, that would outlaw the discriminatory Jim Crow-era practices that had long worked to disenfranchise African-Americans and other minorities across the United States.

         Forty-five years later, the right for which marchers in Alabama bled remains out of reach for many Americans. In many states, minority voters encounter obstacles at every step of the voting process, from registration to casting a ballot.

         Last month, voting rights advocates filed suit against Virginia state election officials, following the advocates' investigation of rejected voter registration applications in 2008 from students at historically African-American Norfolk State University and the state officials' subsequent refusal to make certain voter registration records publicly available.

         While Virginia was rejecting minority voter registrations in 2008, Colorado was purging voters from its registration rolls. Earlier this year, Colorado settled a lawsuit brought by Mi Familia Vota and other voting rights advocates. As a result of the Colorado suit, usage of lists of purged voters was stayed and the approximately 31,000 voters illegally removed from the registration lists were permitted to cast provisional ballots in the 2008 presidential election.

         Forty-five years after Bloody Sunday, another march is under way, but it aims to turn back the clock on voting rights. Last month, the South Carolina state Senate passed legislation to require voters to show a photo ID before casting a ballot -- a measure that disproportionately excludes low-income, minority, elderly, and student voters, all of whom are less likely than majority voters to have ready access to a government-issued photo ID.

         Meanwhile, Georgia's secretary of state has vowed to bring a federal court challenge after the U.S. Department of Justice rejected the state's proposed voter "verification" program to identify registrants who may not be citizens.

         The DOJ analysis of the program condemned it as highly inaccurate in identifying noncitizens and concluded that it would have a discriminatory effect on minority voters. Moreover, on Thursday officials in Indiana continued their fight to salvage that state's photo ID law in arguments to the state's Supreme Court, after an appellate court held that the law violates equal protection under the state Constitution.

         Proponents of photo ID and citizenship verification laws claim these measures are needed to protect against voter fraud. The problem with that argument is that they cannot point to any reliable evidence that fraud is a problem.

         All credible research and expert analysis demonstrates that voter fraud is, at best, extremely rare. And in-person voter fraud -- someone registering to vote as Mickey Mouse and then showing up at the polls claiming to be Mr. Mouse -- simply does not exist. These laws are solutions searching for a problem, with what some may describe as the unintended consequence of disenfranchising the most vulnerable voters.

         In some cases, however, disenfranchising voters is precisely the intended consequence. For example, the Republican National Committee just appealed a federal court's order to keep in place a 28-year-old consent agreement that prohibited the RNC from engaging in "security programs" that have had a disproportionate impact on minorities at the ballot box.

         The RNC consented to the agreement in 1982 to settle a lawsuit alleging that its so-called security measures -- such as stationing armed off-duty law enforcement officers at minority voting locations and aggressively challenging the rights of eligible minority voters to cast a ballot -- were actually voter intimidation tactics.

         Unable to identify a single instance of in-person voter fraud, the RNC instead argued, in part, that because the president of the United States and the U.S. attorney general are African-American, it is more likely that the government will enforce laws that safeguard against disenfranchising minority voters. In an effort to show their intentions are good, RNC lawyers note that the committee's chairman, Michael Steele, is African-American.

         The fact is, voting patterns continue to split along racial and party lines. Exit polls from the 2008 presidential election show that while 95 percent of African-Americans, 67 percent of Latinos, and 62 percent of Asian-Americans voted for Barack Obama nationally, only 43 percent of whites did. As the federal judge noted in this case, the RNC "has been largely unsuccessful in its efforts to attract minority voters." So long as these patterns endure, the RNC will continue to have what the judge termed an "incentive" to engage in racially motivated voter suppression.

         There is no doubt that we have come a long way since Bloody Sunday. Sadly, however, there is also no doubt that the need to fight for voting rights continues. Instead of going back to a dark era of our history by putting needless obstacles in front of minority voters, Congress and the states should press ahead to break down the remaining barriers that block eligible voters from exercising their constitutional rights.

         We should start by modernizing the voter registration system by making it more automated and keeping eligible voters on the rolls permanently. We should take voting out of the artificial confines created by a limited and literal "Election Day" by providing for universal early voting.

         To live up to our constitutional mandate to continue to form a more perfect union -- and to truly honor the brave men and women who marched and were beaten and bloodied, and especially those who were murdered defending their right to vote -- we have the duty to ensure that every eligible voter has an equal and meaningful opportunity to cast a ballot and have it counted.

         The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Donna Brazile.]]></description>
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