Barack Obama's invitations to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley to visit with him at the White House vindicate his election by reminding us, as perhaps only Obama could in this case, that ultimately this is a country, not a courtroom.

The case shows well that, although law is indispensable and decisive in framing, prodding, and enforcing our reckonings on race, the law and those who execute and enforce it aren't the only or even the best framers or deciders.

It's sometimes painfully necessary to remind lawyers of this, especially in matters touching race -- and precisely because, in those matters, law sometimes does offer the only hope for justice. With his phone calls, especially to Sgt. Crowley, President Obama -- a black man who is a former professor of constitutional law, activist, and legislator -- is reminding all of us that law is a vitally necessary but not a sufficient condition of justice.

So, what would be "sufficient"?

Read more »

I've stayed out of the Gates-Crowley-Obama contretemps if for no other reason than that I'm out of the country and unable to keep up with all the breaking news-blips, but the following statement in today's NYT strikes me as significant even beyond the problem of racial profiling, police malpractice, and the wise and legal responses to both:

Advisers said both his sharp statement, which was made at Wednesday night's news conference, and his toned-down remarks on Friday reflected strains of his experiences. He was personally outraged by the arrest and wanted to speak bluntly about it, aides said. And they said he was distressed that his words proved polarizing and contrary to his instincts for conciliation.

The lion's share of Obama's political legacy rests, it seems to me, on whether he gets (and therefore we get) (a) a serious economic revival with unemployment declining for several months in a row within a year, in time for the midterm elections; (b) a decent near-universal health care bill, preferably sooner, to keep up his momentum as a winner; and (c), before 2012, a reasonably rapid exit from Afghanistan.

Read more »

The generally sane and realistic military analyst Tony Cordesman published a 28-page paper (PDF) yesterday on the US war in Afghanistan, which to me merely underlined how deeply un-winnable this US war has become.

Here's his lead sentence:

There are no certainties in war, and the tasks that NATO/ISAF and the US must perform in Afghanistan go far beyond the normal limits of counterinsurgency. They are the equivalent of armed nation building at a time when Afghanistan faces major challenges from both its own insurgents and international movements like Al Qa'ida, and must restructure its government and economy after 30 years of nearly continuous conflict.

Armed nation building?

Read more »

It looks like the realists are growing weary. The venerable Landrum Bolling has produced a new video, New Hope for Peace: What America Must Do To End The Israel-Palestine Conflict, that looks aimed directly at the Obama White House. In it Bolling interviews Jimmy Carter, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, all of whom offer their advice for the current Obama efforts. There seems to be tinge of concern that the administration isn't willing to do what needs to be done. Scrowcroft says we have to change the way we have been doing things, while Brzezinski says frustration is widespread. Jimmy Carter takes the cake with the quote that became the title of this post. The message is clear - the US needs to speak clearly about Israel and apply pressure to change conditions on the ground.

Read more »

Watching the President holding firm on the occupation convinces me that his health care bill will prevail too. True, the forces arrayed against him on the Middle East are school children compared to the "health industry" but, nonetheless, Team Obama knows how to play hardball.

The latest is this. The Israeli government is determined to build a block of settlements, shops, schools and industrial areas that would link East Jerusalem to the huge Maale Adumim settlement in the West Bank. This settlement corridor called E-1 would not only solidify Israel's control over East Jerusalem but divide the northern from the southern West Bank, making both free Palestinian movement and a Palestinian state impossible.

But Obama is saying "no."

Read more »

There is something about the Netanyahu-Obama stand-off on settlements that seems beside the point. Had Ronald Reagan, following Jimmy Carter's lead, demanded a total freeze in 1980, the idea might have worked. Today the demand for a freeze reminds me of the joke about the implacable customer at a restaurant who, having waited too long for his dinner, says he can be appeased only by being served "15 minutes ago."

President Obama clearly wants to make a clean break with the past, and even make a show of force to Israeli extremists. But a total freeze is now out of the question. About 400,000 settlers live in crowded communities more or less contiguous with Israel (like Gush Etzion), or in Jerusalem suburbs (like Gilo and Ma'aleh Adumim). These urbanized areas are clearly not going to be moved or dismantled. And they cannot stop growing. Rather, a new border must be drawn around them and Palestine will have to be compensated in some way. Even the Geneva Initiative negotiators agreed on this.

The people who will be moved as part of any conceivable peace, who have turned Palestine into strangulated enclaves, are the 75,000-100,000 residents of settlements scattered around Hebron and between Ramallah and Nablus - vexingly, the very people who are most mobilized against any kind of deal and must be confronted by the international community and mainstream Israelis. (Salam Fayyad's offer of Palestinian citizenship to Jews who are more attached to the ancient land than the modern state will be scoffed at by most of these settlers.)

Read more »

After living through and writing about many constabular and reportorial mishandlings of racially charged cases, I know a seasoned assessment when I see one. Here's the best I've seen in the matter of Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cambridge, MA police Sergeant James Crowley -- a post on Crooked Timber by a New York City police captain and PhD student who's been following the case. (For the link I thank the writer George Scialabba, a Cambridge resident and a true sage in that village of pedants.)

I've known more than a few very good cops, as well as some bad ones, and, based on what I've learned about Crowley, my own not-so-Solomonic assessment is that both he and Gates are decent men who behaved wrongly in a highly charged situation. Gates made it worse, but the larger wrong was Crowley's: He shouldn't have arrested Gates. We won't get anywhere, though, if we don't try to imagine why he did.

Read more »

Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up To Me, the precocious 1966 novel by the late Richard Farina, defined the late 1960s counterculture. The stock market rally that's pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average back above 9000 for the first time since early January could be given the same title, and it might well come to define the much-wished-for financial recovery.

What's pushing the stock market upward? Mainly, unexpectedly positive second-quarter corporate profits. But those profits aren't being powered by consumers who have suddenly found themselves with a lot more money in their pockets. The profits are coming from dramatic cost-cutting -- including, most notably, payroll cuts. If a firm cuts its costs enough, it can show a profit even if its sales are still in the basement.

The problem here is twofold. First, such profits can't be maintained. There's a limit to how much can be cut without a business eventually disappearing -- becoming, in effect, a balance sheet in space. Secondly, when businesses slash payrolls to show profits, consumers end up with even less money in their pockets to buy the things businesses produce. Even if they hold on to their jobs, they're likely to fear that they won't have the jobs for long, which causes them to retreat even further from the malls.

Read more »

Today's New York Times reports on the political imperviousness of what Ryan calls Big Pharma: "The pharmaceutical industry has remained relatively unscathed so far in Washington's effort to overhaul the nation's health care system." This is the same clout that TIYCOD describes as critical to the history of drug legalization. For example, Ryan says that opiates and cocaine became illegal in part because Big Pharma made a conscious decision not to fight their prohibition, while speed stayed legal in part because Big Pharma fought to keep it so.

Read more »

Even as the media highlighted a few governors concerns about health reform, hundreds of state legislators from across the nation were gathered in Philadelphia this week and today collectively endorsed federal health reform including a public health insurance option and other key reforms to expand coverage, rein in costs and expand choice for consumers.

By a vote of thirty-eight states to eleven (with a few abstaining), the National Conference of State Legislatures endorsed the proposed resolution (see http://progressivestates.org/ncsl09/healthpolicyrecommendations.pdf for details). It was a hotly debated issue throughout the week as committees met multiple times with a long debate, but in the end the vote was overwhelming in support for moving forward on real health care reform.

Read more »

U.S. Army Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl of Hailey, Idaho, is no longer a combatant in the Afghanistan war. Instead, he is now playing a part in an increasingly desperate information war being waged by the Taliban. Pfc. Bergdahl was recently identified in a video distributed by his captors, the Afghan Taliban, a religious-based insurgent group now fighting American, NATO and Afghan government forces under the command of Mullah Omar.

Despite the nature of the conflict, Bergdahl is not a prisoner of war - he is a terrorist hostage. The difference is important. The United States government classifies persons held against their will in several different categories, depending on the captor and the circumstances of conflict. In a war where one state is a signatory of the Geneva Convention, the soldiers taken off the battlefield are prisoners of war. In an insurgency war against irregular and unlawful battlefield combatants - bandits, terrorists or even armed civilians or vigilantes - soldiers captured are considered hostages.

Read more »

Writing in Foreign Policy's brilliant new blog, Professor Noah Efron of Bar Ilan University, a member of the Tel Aviv City Council, writes that he is sick and tired of ultra-Orthodox Jews making life in Israel unbearable.

In the last few weeks alone a violent battle (replete with death threats) has been raging over a new (and much needed) parking lot that is open for business on the Sabbath. Another battle is being waged in Jerusalem over whether special bus lines should be established for women so that male ultras can be spared close proximity to female passengers.

Then there is the case of the yeshiva student who ran over a young female parking attendant for demanding he pay his parking fee. She suffered brain damage but he was spared prison on the grounds that he is a brilliant Torah scholar whose scholarly undertakings would be damaged if he were jailed.

Read more »

We here in Washington DC currently have a front-seat view of how a country undertakes the ending of the military occupation by its ground forces of another country's territory.

Yesterday, Iraq's elected PM Nuri al-Maliki met with Pres. Obama in the White House. Top on the agenda of their talks was the continuing disagreements over the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement (SOFA) that the two governments concluded last November, which mandates a complete withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Read more »

Antony Loewenstein and Joseph Dana write:

With all the current rhetoric out of Washington regarding an Israeli settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, we wanted to gauge public opinion on the streets of Jerusalem on a sunny, Sunday afternoon last weekend. What we found was shocking but unsurprising. The ease with which most Americans and Israelis, young and old, spouted racist and uncompromising comments about Arabs, settlements and Israeli conduct was a raw manifestation of the barriers to the peace process.

Read more »

Now Obama's done it.

He actually expressed empathy for a fellow black guy who had a run-in with a racist cop.

Here we go. This summer's shark story will be the shark that always lurks in American waters: racism.

Of course, other than virulent racists of the Pat Buchanan stripe, every media commmentator knows that there was nothing controversial about what Obama said. I'm sure the cop's own mother told him he acted stupidly.

But no matter. The MSM hates the boring health care issue. They think it's way too complicated for us dummies out here. It's time to switch the subject and what better subject is there than that our President is black and stupidly admitted it during prime time.

What a boon for the MSM.

It's hard for the respectable media when Buchanan, Limbaugh, and Dobbs own the race issue. Now everyone can play.

Note: Fox is far from the worst offender. MSNBC employs Pat Buchanan who is not only a racist but a virulent anti-semite and Holocaust denier(he recently likened Nazi mass murderer John Demjanjuk to Jesus Christ).

I don't know if anyone will respond to this post but, if past is prologue, the usual suspects will be out in force. Liberal racism is not just a construct invented by the right. We've got them too although the racists here tend to be rightwingers who are keeping an eye on us!

The Washington Post has a front page story telling readers that the good old days are back on Wall Street, with bonuses projected to be larger than ever. Why would the Wall Street boys pay themselves huge bonuses so soon after getting bailed out by the taxpayers, at a time when tens of millions of people are unemployed or underemployed?

The answer is the same as the reason that dogs are known to lick a certain part of their anatomy: because they can. With one hand in the taxpayers' pockets and one foot firmly braking any congressional action to rein them in, we can expect to see many more big paydays on Wall Street.

I cannot imagine what it's like to be a black man confronted by a white cop.

But I will say this. Assuming that the experience is considerably worse than most experiences I have had with cops -- white and black -- I assume it must be frightening, intimidating and ugly.

Cops are the most imperious human beings I have ever encountered. They detain you. You can ask no questions and, if you do, they threaten you.

Have you ever asked a cop why you were pulled over for driving at the same speed as the rest of the traffic? Have you ever asked a cop why he cannot talk to you like a fellow human?

Cops tend to be scary people, best avoided except in those situations where there are even more scary people around.

I hope the Gates situation leads to white cops becoming somewhat more sensitive about how they treat minorites. I also hope it leads cops of all races to stop abusing their authority. This isn't a police state and we shroud not have to kiss their badges.

I am off to Athens, Greece this evening to meet with some folks and to ponder what Socrates, Plato and Thucydides would say about Barack Obama's coming showdown with Bibi Netanyahu over East Jerusalem.

Netanyahu is very clearly Obama's Khruschev.

Netanyahu is poking the Obama White House, ridiculing his foreign policy team, and launching preemptive strikes at the very necessary deal-making that Obama must move forward in the region to shore up America's power position and global relevance.

Read more »

In the end to vote to finish the sorry life of the F-22 wasn't even close--58-40. President Obama's threat of a veto was taken seriously and the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) lost their first battle in what will be a long war.

At $361 Million per plane, the existing 187 F-22's have cost the country $67 Billion to build plus the fact that the Office of the Secretary of Defense says the plane requires 34 hours of maintenance per single hour of flight. Here's the kicker. The F-22 has never been used in actual combat!

When are the American people going to wake up to the fact that they are being stolen blind by the MIC and that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist", just as President Eisenhower warned? What Ike said in 1953 is even more important today as California and other states close schools and clinics and layoff teachers and nurses.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

56 years later, have we learned anything?

Mark, I don't argue that drug policy is futile, at least in the sense that you mean, or that it doesn't have an effect on drug use. It does. The price of a drug certainly has an influence over the rate of the use of that drug.

The three most important factors that influence use are price, availability and perception of a drug's harmfulness or attractiveness, but many other factors unique to time, place and culture also come into play.

But let's stick to your coke example and run through the three biggest factors that influence its use. 1). The drug war has largely failed to make it unavailable. (Certainly, if cocaine were legal, it would be comparatively more available than it is now, so that's worth considering.) 2). The drug war has also failed in its goal of keeping cocaine and other drug prices high. Cocaine is much, much cheaper than it was in the early '80s, despite a 25-year war against it. 3). And coke is still considered to be a very attractive drug, but also one that has a considerable down side.

Read more »

Congratulations to Ryan for this encyclopedic accomplishment. I came away with a rich sense of the historic sweep of drug use and policy in this country, its intricacies as well as its insanities.

Ryan titled his post "There is no such thing as drug policy." I think I know what he means by this--there is no moral, scientific, or even logical grounding for drug policy as currently practiced. But I also thought that this pithy line understates the potential contributions of the book. TIYCOD actually presents a pretty compelling picture of U.S. drug policy--de facto as well as intentional--as a key facet of social regulation more generally. In fact, as Ryan points out, we have lots of drug policy: "foreign policy is drug policy," and so is health policy, employment policy, education policy, policing strategies, and so forth.

Read more »

"The Pope and the cardinals of the Vatican help organize tours of Auschwitz for Hezbollah members to teach them how to wipe out Jews..."

"When I see a human rights organization try to raise money in Saudi Arabia, it speaks to the collapse of the human rights community..."

These are just two of the nuttier arguments currently being made by Israeli and extremist pro-Israeli propagandists. The first is a claim from a pamphlet that was distributed to IDF troops for some months, until recently. The second, which simply assumes that all his listeners will share his own inherent racism against citizens of Saudi Arabia, is an argument made by Ron Dermer, director of policy planning for Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu.

Read more »

The theory that the Republican Party of 2009 has any interest in public policy was destroyed over the past 24 hours. Sensing that the momentum for health care reform has slowed, one GOP talking head spoke about the biggest domestic reform in decades using the most brazen partisan and cynical terms. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) joyfully told a conservative group, "[i]f we are able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

William Kristol reached back to the GOP's tactics of 1993 to 1994 -- urging in The Weekly Standard that we should now "go for the kill" and then disingenuously arguing that we can get to bi-partisan reform next year. I am certain Kristol genuinely forgot that next year is a congressional election year when the chances of "bi-partisan" reform are slim to none...and slim just left town.

GOP Chairman Michael Steele was the most entertaining. Today, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post documented how Steele was cribbing, nearly word for word, from Republican pollster Alex Castellanos' poll-tested memo which stated, "[i]f we can slow this sausage-making process down, we can defeat it." Steele used every hackneyed cliché in Castellanos's memo to attack health care reform. However, when he was asked, G-d forbid, a policy question--does he favor requiring everyone to have health coverage Steele could only respond that "I don't do policy."

Those Democrats in Congress who are dragging their feet on health care reform need to understand one thing. If they do not stand with the President and get a solid bill passed, they will lose the voters who put them over the top in 2006 and 2008.

It's all here. It was the increase in registration and voting by young people and minorities that gave us a Democratic Congress and President Obama. If these same voters disappear from the rolls, the Republicans will be back and even the GOP-loving Blue Dogs will find themselves in the minority.

I suppose the House Blue Dogs and the Senate DINOs think that if health care fails we will blame Obama. We won't. We will blame them. Do they recall 1994? It was the Congressional majorities that disappeared but President Clinton was easily re-elected two years later.

Hopefully, the conservative Democrats in Congress understand that if Obama's health reform fails, it will be their failure and not his. And they will pay the price.

Just a word to the not so wise.

"The war is with the Arabs."

I saw this sign as I was entering Nablus last week, again on my way to Ramallah, and again near Bethlehem. The phrase is printed in Hebrew, presumably by Israeli settlers, on huge signs throughout the West Bank. Israeli racism rarely shocks me anymore, but its blatant display still makes me stop and catch my breath as I translate it into other contexts. Imagine driving through the middle of a predominantly black neighborhood in a US city or town and seeing a humongous sign that says, "The war is with the Blacks."

Read more »

Oh, pity the retreating hegemon-- just for a fleeting second-- as it starts to realize the implications of the drawdown of ts forces from Iraq, in compliance with the Withdrawal Agreement (PDF) concluded last November.

The WaPo's Ernesto Londono and Karen De Young reported from Baghdad today that on July 2, two days after the deadline for the withdrawal of US forces from all the cities of Iraq,

Iraq's top commanders told their U.S. counterparts to "stop all joint patrols" in Baghdad. It said U.S. resupply convoys could travel only at night and ordered the Americans to "notify us immediately of any violations of the agreement."

Read more »

The Chinese only allow about 10 American movies a year to be shown in their theaters. They avoid anything that might be slightly controversial, so it is easy to see why they embraced the new Transformers movie.

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" has broken China's box office record with receipts of 400 million yuan ($58.5 million), sinking the $52.7 million record held by "Titanic" since 1998.

I watched about 15 minutes of Transformers before seeing Public Enemies the other day. In my 55 years of going to movie theaters, I can say without qualification that Transformers is the single stupidest piece of entertainment I have ever witnessed. When Marshall McLuhan wrote about the "Global Village" years ago, I'm not sure he could have imagined that the spread of globalization would simply mean a sort of universal dumbing down of the world's people. The New Yorker's film critic, David Denby, reviewing Transformers called the director, "the stunningly, almost viciously untalented Michael Bay." That about sums it up for me.

I'm well aware that the American studio movie business is now almost exclusively aimed at 14 year old boys. Anything made for an adult will have to be made on a very small budget, so the days of The Godfather or Lawrence of Arabia--a movie with scale that was both artistic and successful--are long gone. That quite frankly is disheartening, but at least I figured that other countries (including China) might take up the mantle of artistic cinema leadership.

Now I'm not so sure.

Those of us who laughed and nodded our way through Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, yet put the book down thinking the author had somehow (well, entirely) missed the point, have a counter-text in Angels and Ages: Adam Gopnik's beautiful little book, ostensibly about Lincoln and Darwin, but really about how liberal minds make sense of the divine, that is, the immense thing left over once they make sense of the facts--a book as valuable for its tone as its arguments, indeed, a book whose main argument is about the tone Lincoln and Darwin needed to be trenchant and, therefore, loved.

I won't try to recapitulate Gopnik's way of getting into his subject. I'll only say that he leaves you understanding something those of us who grew up in Montreal, and came of age day-dreaming our way through McGill's Stephen Leacock Building, knew from the air--especially given the contrast between the Victorian atmospherics on the campus and the clannish residues of rural, ultra-montaine Quebec (and, for that matter, immigrant, Jewish, St. Urbain Street). It is that liberal civilization is an achievement. Liberty derives from the way we collect and adjust to evidence. It derives from the way we prepare for and argue a case in court. We are otherwise lost in our families, instincts and appetites.

"You've got to be taught to hate," we hear from "South Pacific." Nonsense. Every child knows how to hate. You have to be taught toleration, which is not a simple thing, and takes years of learning moral tact. And yet what an enlightenment education cannot teach you, or even explain, is the need to assume ordinary human dignity: the personal poetic that distills from one's culture, the desire for fugitive truth. For this you need a leap of (here, I'll say it) faith. "There is more to man than the breath in his body, if only the hat on his head, and the hope in his heart," Gopnik ends his book. Every sentence that gets you to that succinct conclusion is worth your time.

Thank God I have my memories of the Israel that once was. Read this by Noah Efron, chair of the science, technology & society program at Bar-Ilan University and a member of Tel Aviv's city council. He describes a country out of touch with its roots and certainly out of touch with the direction the rest of the world is moving in.

'No one holds a heroic view of Israel anymore, not abroad and not here. Today's kibbutzim are not a source of national pride. In the past decade, dozens of them have 'privatized,' dividing up what was common property (it took a Supreme Court ruling to stop kibbutzim from selling to developers valuable government-owned lands that had been lent to them for agriculture).

"Israel's social gap is now considered among the greatest in the developed world....Israelis are unwelcome in African capitals. They are mostly unwelcome anywhere. And most important of all, Israel's military excellence has been tested in a 20-year misadventure occupying southern Lebanon, and in laboriously maintaining the peace in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The disastrous last war in Lebanon, and the wrenching recent war in Gaza, won support by most Israelis, and censure by some, but together they have left little doubt that the country's army is not heroic in the sense that it once was.

"For all these reasons, to be a secular Israeli in 2009 is a demoralizing and demoralized affair. We are tired: tired of the Palestinians, tired of the bombs, tired of U.N. and EU condemnations, tired of having so much of our daily wages taxed to buy guns and missiles, tired of the army reserves, tired of being hated, tired of going to bed and waking up to reports of kids -- Jewish kids, Palestinian kids -- watching their parents die or dying in their parents' arms. We are tired of our lives and tired of ourselves."

I hope this transformation is not permanent because, if it is, Israel isn't. That is why Barack Obama is Israel's best friend in the world. Only he can lead the good Israelis to end the occupation and domination by 13th century fanatics. Otherwise, the religious and nationalist right will utterly destroy everything that was accomplished by the secular and humane Jews who built Israel --and by their enablers here.

h/t GDRiver

I'm glad that Ryan wrote in his first post that drug policy cannot be separated other areas of public policy. "Drug policy," Ryan wrote, "attempts to isolate a phenomenon that can't be taken in isolation. Economic policy is drug policy. Healthcare policy is drug policy. Foreign policy, too, is drug policy. When approached in isolation, drug policy almost always backfires, because it doesn't take into account the powerful economic, social, and cultural forces that also determine how and why Americans get high." But I wonder if there is a lot to learn by separating (and comparing) drug policy with other areas of public policy, particularly as we're in the midst of a national discussion on healthcare. As Bob Somerby wrote on Monday "Our entire discussion about health care costs is built around defense of the baseline."

The baseline on healthcare that Somerby refers to--an exorbitantly inexpensive yet profoundly inefficient healthcare system--is quite similar to the drug policy baseline and to debates on drug policy which almost always defend the baseline.

Read more »

The Israeli media over the weekend was celebrating Prime Minister Netanyahu's cleverness. The conventional wisdom there was that it was a mistake for President Obama to call in the Israeli ambassador and tell him that we oppose building a new settlement in East Jerusalem. The Israelis felt that Obama had fallen into a trap and that -- because no one in Israel considers East Jerusalem occupied territory -- Obama would have to back down.

The Israeli media overlooks one thing. The President doesn't have to worry about the consensus of opinion in Israel. He has to worry about public opinion here and in this country, few think about East Jerusalem one way or another. Congress is hardly likely to rush to the barricades to defend the right of a Republican fundraiser from California, Irving Moskowitz, to build in a part of Jerusalem that is close to 100% Palestinian and for rthe sole purpose of provocation.

So today, rather than back down, the State Department re-stated even more clearly that East Jerusalem is the West Bank. And that Israel should freeze building there until its disposition is resolved in final status talks. Thanks, Bibi. None of us knew where the administration stood on East Jerusalem. Now we know. They consider it to be what it is: occupied. And therefore likely to be shared following negotiations.

I only wish Obama's opponents on health care were as inept as his opponents in Israel and among the status quo crowd here. If they were, we'd have the Canadian system by now.

There is a long history of mediums who claim to communicate with the dead. They sell their services to people anxious to talk to relatives or great figures of the past. Such exercises can be dismissed as harmless entertainment - people spend a few dollars to be treated to tall tales.

There is a Wall Street equivalent to these seances. People who claim to be knowledgeable about financial markets tell policy makers and reporters what the financial markets are thinking about current policy. These Wall Street seers claim to interpret events in financial markets for those of us who are less familiar with the mysteries of market movements.

In recent weeks, the Wall Street seers have been spinning stories about how the financial markets are very worried over the US budget deficit.

Read more »

Ryan, your book seems destined for instant best-sellerdom, as it is certain to please both the drug hobbyists and the libertarians. It's also astonishingly clear-headed and well-written, as if someone had taken David Courtwright and added just a splash of Hunter Thompson. And of course I'm delighted to see a little bit of economic analysis applied to the problem.

But a little learning can, indeed, be a dangerous thing. Let me ask you about two of the economic ideas in the book:

You talk about "inelastic demand," but most of the current evidence suggests that the quantity of drugs purchased rises and falls more than proportionally with the price. That makes sense, once you consider that most of the volume goes to heavy users, for whom the price of their favorite drug is likely to be a major budget item. Indeed it's the light users whose demand tends to be inelastic; since I rarely drink, the price of alcohol is such a trivial part of my monthly expenditure that a price increase or decrease doesn't matter much to me. The failure of increased drug enforcement to reduce drug consumption results not from inelastic demand but from the failure of increased enforcement to raise prices.

Read more »

Cultural commentators who look for trends in unemployment numbers, presidential-approval ratings, or car and housing purchases are missing something fundamental if they don't also consider statistics on drug use. Little tells us more about the state of America than what Americans are doing to get high.

Life in the United States, of course, is similar in many ways to life anywhere in the developed world. But our nation diverges sharply from the rest of the world in a few crucial ways. Americans work hard: 135 hours a year more than the average Briton, 240 hours more than the typical French worker, and 370 hours--that's nine weeks--more than the average German. We also play hard. A global survey released in 2008 found that Americans are more than twice as likely to smoke pot as Europeans. Forty-two percent of Americans had puffed at one point; percentages for citizens of various European nations were all under 20. We're also four times as likely to have done coke as Spaniards and roughly ten times more likely than the rest of Europe.

Read more »

This week at Cafe, Ryan Grim joins us for discussion of his new book, This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History Of Getting High In America.

Grim, the senior congressional correspondent for the Huffington Post, has written a provocative and illuminating history of drug policy in the U.S. at just the right time. The President has been peppered with questions about the legalization of marijuana at town halls, serious policy evaluations are underway about the potentially positive economic effects of such a move, and magazines like The American Prospect and Mother Jones have put the issue of drug policy front and center on their latest covers.

Joining him for the discussion are Ethan Brown, journalist and author of Snitch: Informers, Cooperators and the Corruption of Justice; Mark Kleiman, Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA School of Public Affairs; Alexandra Natapoff, Professor of Law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles; and Laura Thomas, Deputy State Director of the Drug Policy Alliance in San Francisco.

If you blinked, you could've missed it. With the media's obsession over Michael Jackson's death and Sotomayor's confirmation hearings plastered across cable news shows, an important story might have skipped your radar.

Last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, released a stunning new report detailing significant barriers that many female veterans face in accessing healthcare at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Not just for policy wonks, this report should be required reading for every American. Some of the critical findings include:

• Privacy standards for women veterans at VA facilities aren't being met. The GAO found women's exam room tables that faced doors instead of walls, and instances where women patients had to walk through waiting rooms to use the restrooms, as opposed to next to the exam room as required by VA policy. Some hospitals under review also did not guarantee access to private and secure bathing areas or visual and auditory privacy at check-in.

Read more »

Right now, Obamacare is at war with itself. Political efforts to buy off Big Pharma, private insurers, and the AMA are all pushing up long-term costs -- one reason why Douglas Elmendorf, head of the Congressional Budget Office, told Congress late last week that "the cost curve is being raised." But this is setting off alarms among Blue Dog Democrats worried about future deficits -- and their votes are critical.

Big Pharma, for example, is in line to get just what it wants. The Senate health panel’s bill protects biotech companies from generic competition for 12 years after their drugs go to market, which is guaranteed to keep prices sky high. Meanwhile, legislation expected from the Senate Finance committee won't allow cheaper drugs to be imported from Canada and won't give the federal government the right to negotiate Medicare drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies. Last month Big Pharma agreed to what the White House touted as $80 billion in givebacks to help pay for expanded health insurance, but so far there's been no mechanism to force the industry to keep its promise. No wonder Big Pharma is now running "Harry and Louise" ads -- the same couple who fifteen years ago scared Americans into thinking the Clinton plan would take away their choice of doctor -- now supportive of Obamacare.

Read more »

The pressure builds.

The New York Times reports that the administration is telling the Israeli government to stop constructing a settlement in East Jerusalem, funded by right-wing American Irving Moskowitz.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has already said "no."

Here is Ha'aretz on this impressive move by the administration.

And the story of Moskowitz and how he pays for his projects in Israel.

Plus: a call from COMMENTARY (the voice of the neocons) for American Jews to abandon President Obama in solidarity with those illegal settlements Secret from MJ to Commentary: It ain't gonna happen because, get ready, American Jews are...Americans.