Author: hankkalet

President Barack Obama, former constitutional law professor, has compiled quite the track record on issues of national security. He would point to the killing of Osama bin Laden and several other high-ranking members of al-Qaeda as proof that he has been a successful commander in chief. And he does deserve credit for getting us out of Iraq.

But the rest of his record makes it clear that his approach to national security has been to steer the course originally set out by President George W. Bush. The changes have mostly been rhetorical — he no longer uses the phrase “War on Terror” — but much of the content has remained in place.

Here is the Obama record on national security and civil liberties issues:

• He has approved targeted killings using unmanned drones, including the killing of American citizens. And he attempted to keep the program secret, not just from Americans but Congress, as well.
• He has begun more prosecutions of alleged leakers than all previous presidents combined.
• He subpoenaed the phone records of reporters at the Associated Press to chase a whistleblower.
• His Justice Department designated a reporter as a potential co-conspirator in a leak investigation.
• He has approved domestic surveillance and signed an extension of some of the more far-reaching and civil-rights-encroaching provisions of the USA Patriot Act.
• He has claimed a right of extra-judicial executions.

This is the context in which we need to judge the revelations, published by the Guardian (UK) yesterday, that

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

Does this make Obama worse than Bush, as some are claiming? Probably not. His administration has gotten court approval for its assault on civil liberties, something that the Bush administration saw as unnecessary. The upshot, however, is the same — an erosion of civil liberties that has the imprimatur of both parties and a presidency carrying far more power than is healthy for the kind of democratic republic under which we claim to live.

Obama, to paraphrase Billy Joel, didn’t start the fire. He didn’t, however, try to fight it — and we are going to pay for it in spades in the not-too-distant future.

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With the war on drugs, everyone loses.

Civil liberties go out the window, communities get turned into war zones and public money that could be used for more productive purposes get flushed down the toilet like a brick of dope at the first sign of a police raid.

The latest evidence that it is time to change the paradigm is an ACLU report issued yesterday that shows that

The aggressive enforcement of marijuana possession laws needlessly ensnares hundreds of thousands of people into the criminal justice system and wastes billions of taxpayers’ dollars. What’s more, it is carried out with staggering racial bias. Despite being a priority for police departments nationwide, the War on Marijuana has failed to reduce marijuana use and availability and diverted resources that could be better invested in our communities.

According to the ACLU, 8 million were arrested on pot charges between 2001 and 2010, or “one bust every 37 seconds and hundreds of thousands ensnared in the criminal justice system” at a cost of “about $3.6 billion a year.” Despite this, “Marijuana use has increased since 2007.“

In 2011, there were 18.1 million current (past-month) users—about 7.0 percent of people aged 12 or older—up from 14.4 million (5.8 percent) in 2007.

While pot use “is roughly equal among Blacks and whites,” the ACLU says, “Blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.”

The ACLU report calls for legalization of pot for “persons 21 or older through a system of taxation, licensing, and regulation.”

Legalization is the smartest and surest way to end targeted enforcement of marijuana laws in communities of color, and, moreover, would eliminate the costs of such enforcement while generating revenue for cash-strapped states. States could then reinvest the money saved and generated into public schools and public health programs, including substance abuse treatment. If legalization is not possible, the ACLU recommends depenalizing marijuana use and possession for persons 21 or older by removing all attendant civil and criminal penalties, or, if depenalization is unobtainable, decriminalizing marijuana use and possession for adults and youth by classifying such activities as civil, not criminal, offenses.

In the meantime, the ACLU says, police departments should back off their aggressive enforcement of marijuana laws, “end racial profiling and unconstitutional stop, frisk, and search practices, and no longer measure success and productivity by the number of arrests they make.”

The Star-Ledger is pushing this new paradigm, but stops short of calling for legalization, instead preferring the “reanimation of a legislative move to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use.”

That doesn’t mean legalization; possession would still be subject to a fine but, like a traffic ticket, it would not be a criminal offense that now carries a punishment of up to a $1,000 fine and six months in jail.

Gov. Chris Christie has taken the wise and compassionate step of directing those convicted of nonviolent drug offenses to treatment instead of a jail cell. Why not extend that sensible approach to the front end of the system, ending costly arrests for possessing small amounts of pot?

It’s a good question. The answer is that the politicians have yet to buy into the shift away from a law-enforcement model, one that brings with it impressive visuals (in this, the press is complicit, running photos of smiling law enforcement and their impressive looking catches), to the less visually alluring efforts to treat drug use as the health problem that it is.

My preference is legalization — and in states like Colorado and Washington, which have an initiative-and-referendum process, that remains a short-term possibility. In other states — like New Jersey — the process is going to have to be more incremental, proving at each step that the loosening of pot laws has not caused the sky to fall, so that fence-sitting politicians may eventually do the right thing.

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ESPN’s Outside the Lines is reporting that 20 ballplayers are about to face punishment from Major League Baseball because of their alleged connection to a “Miami-area clinic at the heart of an ongoing performance-enhancing drug scandal.” The players include former MVPs Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun and would be part of what ESPN said could be “the largest in American sports history.”

Tony Bosch, founder of the now-shuttered Biogenesis of America, reached an agreement this week to cooperate with MLB’s investigation, two sources told “Outside the Lines,” giving MLB the ammunition officials believe they need to suspend the players.

One source familiar with the case said the commissioner’s office might seek 100-game suspensions for Rodriguez, Braun and other players, the penalty for a second doping offense. The argument, the source said, is the players’ connection to Bosch constitutes one offense, and previous statements to MLB officials denying any such connection or the use of PEDs constitute another.

The news is a sad day for baseball, and not just because it gives the game another “steroid” scandal at a time when it appeared to be recovering from earlier ones. It also continues the selective approach the league has taken to justice as it makes its stars the bad guys when ownership has been as complicit, turning a blind eye during the height of the steroid era.

The history provides the context. Baseball’s owner-triggered 1994 shutdown was followed by a couple of leans attendance years even as fans were being given a chance to watch some outstanding baseball. Everyone talks about the Yankee teams of the late-90s, but the Braves and Indians fielded some outstanding ballclubs as well.

Then, in 1998, four years after the lock-out, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa traded homeruns, chasing and then erasing a 37-yearold homerun record that was supposed to be unbreakable. The homerun was king — as the Tom Glavine-Gregg Maddux TV commercial claimed, “Chicks dig the long ball.”

Homeruns made the owners money in attendance and through TV ratings and they made hitters rich, as well. And owners worked to ensure the trend would continue, with smaller parks, tighter strike zones and the tacit approval of whatever it was that these homerun hitters were doing.

Throughout, there was whispering and even loud shouting, but the league and the players did little more than nod and make empty promises — even as the whispers grew louder (a Sports Illustrated cover story on former MVP Ken Caminiti in 2002 detailed his steroid use and accusations that the use was widespread and Jose Canseco’s accusations in 2005). In 2006, the league acted undertaking an internal investigation into performance-enhancing drug use among players that stopped short of examining a larger league culture that, as I said, tacitly encouraged the drug-fueled power spree.

In the wake of the investigation, the league instituted a new testing regime and got religion on the drug issue. But in declaring its own war on performance-enhancing drugs, the league is making the same mistakes that local, state and federal authorities have made in attempting to curtail illegal drug use. It has made it about crime and punishment, which ensures failure.

This is why Dave Zirin’s suggestion is worth considering:

Steroids and all PEDs need to be seen as an issue of public health not crime and punishment. If seen as an issue of public health, the scandal here would not be that a group of players may have used PEDs. The scandal would be that they had to visit a skuzzy, unregulated “clinic” not run by medical professionals to get their drugs. Instead of criminalization, educate all players about the harmful effects of long-term PED use when not under a doctor’s supervision. Have medical officials make the policy and determine what PEDs help a person heal faster – an admirable quality in a medicine, no? – and what shouldn’t be a part of any training regimen. Centralize distribution under the umbrella of MLB so it doesn’t become an arms race of which teams get the best doctors and the best drugs. Then, players could take advantage of the most effective new medicines and MLB would be removing the process out of the shadows where the Tony Bosch-types of the world hold sway. They also then have an ethical basis for testing and rehabilitation when use crosses the line into abuse.

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Dear readers:

If you have come here expecting my rambling thoughts on Mike Post or the theme from”The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” you’ll have to forgive me. Today’s theme-song list contains the music I’d use were I to have my own radio program.

I got the idea while listening to The Majority Report. Sam Seder’s web-based political radio show is unabashedly progressive — and it flat out rocks, with theme music from The Clash, The Pixies, The Stokes, Gang of Four and others.

The other bit of inspiration are two songs on my theme list that were released this year. The first is Billy Bragg’s “Handyman Blues,” which my wife will attest to as the perfect description of my approach to home projects.

Don’t be expecting me to put up shelves or build a garden shed
But I can write a song that tells the world how much I love you instead
I’m not any good at pottery so let’s lose the ‘t’ and just shift back the ‘e’
And I’ll find a way to make my poetry build a roof over our heads

I know it looks like I’m just reading the paper
But these ideas I’ll turn to gold dust later
Cause I’m a writer not a decorator

I’m not your handyman

The other, from Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell needs no explanation other than to say that I’m a bit of a coffee-holic:”Black Caffeine.”

The list:

• The Tuff Darts, “All for the Love of Rock ‘n’ Roll” from the CD Live from CBGB’s, including the stage announcement, which was the theme from my college radio show.
• The Clash, “Revolution Rock,” which seems like a good name for a lefty talk and music show.
• Steve Earle, “The Revolution Starts Now.”
• Elvis Costello, “Lip Service,” which goes out to the Democratic Party (“Lip service is all I ever get from you”).
• Bob Dylan, “Political World.”
• Manu Chao, “Politik Kills.”
• Billy Bragg, “Handyman Blues” and “There is Power in a Union.”
• Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, “Black Caffeine.”
• Gang of Four, “Guns Before Butter.”
• Leonard Cohen, “Democracy”
• American Graveyard, “Common Ones,” a populist anthem that deserved wide play.

So, dear readers, what are your theme songs?