Day: May 2, 2006

This is truly outrageous.

Mexican President Vicente Fox will sign into law a measure that decriminalizes the possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs for personal use, his spokesman said Tuesday.

Spokesman Ruben Aguilar defended the law, which was approved Friday by Mexico’s Senate, despite criticism in the United States that it could increase casual drug use.

“The president is going to sign this law,” said Aguilar, who called the legislation “a better tool … that allows better action and better coordination in the fight against drug dealing.”

“The government believes that this law represents progress, because it established the minimum quantities that a citizen can carry for personal use,” Aguilar said.

Under current Mexican law, judges can drop charges against people caught with drugs if they can prove they are addicts and if an expert certifies they were caught with “the quantity necessary for personal use.”

The new bill makes the decriminalization automatic and drops the addict requirement — automatically letting any “consumers” have drugs.

Meanwhile, the Mayor of San Diego, California, is freaking out. And rightly so.

On Friday, Mayor Jerry Sanders of San Diego, said he was “appalled” by the bill. The city of 1.3 million people is a short drive from the Mexican border town of Tijuana.

“I certainly think we are going to see more drugs available in the United States,” Sanders said. “We need to register every protest the American government can muster.”

But, at least so far, the silence is deafening.

Way back when I was much, much younger and not nearly as responsible as I am today as an adult, I used to visit friends in Southern California. During each visit, we would make our annual trip down to Chula Vista, park the car on the U.S. side, and walk over the border to Tijuana. Oh, and we would be walking with thousands of other college age kids who all had the same thing on their mind – partying in the bars of TJ. We’d get down there around 8:30 PM and we’d stumble walk back into the U.S. around 3 or 4 AM. While our interests were primarily centered around dancing and drinking, there were plenty of locals available who were more than willing to sell you a drug or two on the cheap. I can only imagine what that place is like today. And, now that it will be legal for “consumers” to have drugs in TJ, or any place in Mexico, we’ll have thousands of American youngsters coming back into the country DRUNK AND DOPED UP. And don’t think they walk home…no way. They’re getting into their cars and driving back to San Diego, or even Los Angeles. Get the picture?

The U.S. should immediately beef up the borders with more agents, and the penalties for public drunkenness and drug intoxication should be much tougher now that Mexico has decided that they’ll willingly allow our kids to toke out and snort up whenever and wherever. If U.S. citizens get loaded in Mexico and face a higher risk of gettin’ busted when they try to come back into the country, we might be able to minimize further injury or better yet, prevent an untimely death.

In the meantime, we need to publicly denounce this decision by Vicente Fox. The safety of our citizens and our national security is at risk. President Bush should immediately make a statement informing the Mexican government that the United States does not support the legalization of drugs and that future relations with Mexico will be adversely affected because of their decision.

MORE: Sam Enriquez

UPDATE: Fox now refuses to sign the drug bill, sending the legislation back to Congress.

Too bad this is coming in May of ‘06. It should have been the plan in May of ‘05 so this could have been avoided.

 

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin today outlined a newly revised evacuation plan as the city gears up for the hurricane season which runs from June 1 through to November.

This time, Nagin says there will no shelter of last resort, meaning, the Superdome and Convention center will not be used as shelters, but as staging areas.

“Amtrak trains will also be used for evacuation purposes, which we’re really excited about,” Nagin said. He said federal Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had cleared the way for the use of passenger trains.

Nagin added that the city’s communications infrastructure is being beefed up and that contingency for communication failures had been developed.

The new plan also touches on a heart-wrenching decision evacuees faced ahead of Katrina: To board the buses, they had to leave their pets, and some refused to go without them. In the future, evacuees will be allowed to bring pets with them as long as they have some type of cage to safely put them in.

New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert said the plan also includes arrangements for swiftly getting tourists out of town.

While this announcement should be welcome news for the people of New Orleans, I can’t help but note the timing. Nagin faces an election runoff against Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu. It’s likely that this revised plan was formulated at least a month ago, if not more. Did Nagin sit on the information so he could stage a P.R. event just when he hopes to be reelected mayor? I wonder.

Shelby Steele.

There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.

For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along–if admirably–in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one–including, very likely, the insurgents themselves–believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

Go.Read.Now.

Michelle Malkin has pictures (more here) from yesterday’s ‘amnesty now’ demonstrations that you won’t find on ABCNBCCBSFOXCNNMSNBC.

Via AP: Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the longest-serving leader in postwar Italy, resigned Tuesday to make way for a center-left government led by Romano Prodi that must re-energize a moribund economy.

UN Ambassadors from the US, Britain and France (yes, France) are expected to introduce a binding resolution this week to compel Iran to abandon it’s nuclear program. Negotiating the resolution could take months and it’s likely that none of it will matter anyway. Russia and China have already told Iran that they will not seek sanctions or endorse any military action against Tehran. In other words, the diplomatic dance through the UN is already proving to be a colossal waste of time.

When asked how far Russia and China, veto-wielding permanent members of the council, would support Washington, Manouchehr Mottaki told the Kayhan newspaper:

“The thing these two countries have officially told us and expressed in diplomatic negotiations is their opposition to sanctions and military attacks.”

“At the current juncture, I personally believe no sanctions or anything like that will be on the agenda of the Security Council,” he said in the interview.

Western diplomats say China and Russia will probably back a U.N. resolution demanding a halt to Iran’s fuel work, but are not yet ready to back moves toward sanctions.

Iran has said repeatedly that they don’t care what the UN says or does. Ahmadinejad is as defiant as ever; his words becoming more and more reckless.

Iran will target Israel first if the United States does anything “evil”, a senior commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards said on Tuesday.

The United States says it wants Iran’s nuclear standoff with the West solved diplomatically but has refused to rule out military action.

“We have announced that wherever America does something evil, the first place that we target will be Israel,” Revolutionary Guards Rear Admiral Mohammad-Ebrahim Dehqani was quoted as saying by Iran’s student news agency ISNA.

The Islamic Republic has never recognized Israel and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for the Jewish state to be “wiped off the map.”

Dehqani said naval wargames held in the Gulf last month “carried the warning to those countries that threaten Iran, including America and the Zionist regime”.

Experts said the wargames, in which Iran said it had tested new missiles and torpedoes, were a thinly veiled threat that it could disrupt vital Gulf oil shipping lanes if it was attacked.

That sounds like a national security threat against the United States if you ask me. The fact is though, we face an uphill struggle this time. Leaders in Congress won’t be quick to support military action against Iran unless it’s clear that Israel is in danger. But, how do you define danger?

We should sidestep the UN as soon as possible. Economic sanctions imposed by a coalition of the willing would be the best first step, if that coalition can be identified. Let’s face it, Britain doesn’t want to face another “Iraq” situation, and they’ll be hesitant to move quickly against Tehran. Germany looks friendlier now than a few years ago, but it’s hard to know if Merkel has the will to oppose public opinion. And then there’s France. Chirac’s backroom deals with Iraq and Iran make him completely unreliable. It’s best to leave France off the table regarding their participation in any coalition. So, that leaves…

I’m doubtful that anything will be done before Bush leaves office, and that’s troubling. Even if a Republican is elected to the presidency in 2008, there’s no guarantee that the war time doctrine of this administration will be adopted and continued as policy. And by then, it might be too late.