Wednesday, February 16, 2011

let's get serious obama Legalize Marijuana, End The Budget Crisis

The government has several reasons to legalize marijuana now. The costs associated with marijuana for the government are huge. A study by Jeffery Miron, a professor at Harvard, said that legalizing marijuana would save the government $7.7 billion a year. Second, legalized marijuana would bring in a large amount of tax revenue. Miron estimated that it would bring in $6.2 billion if it were taxed at the rates of alcohol and tobacco. Next, many studies agree that marijuana is actually safer than alcohol and tobacco. It doesn’t really make sense for marijuana to be illegal while alcohol and tobacco are sitting on shelves in the store. Finally, the prohibition of alcohol should have taught us something. Making it illegal made it much less safe and only served to make organized crime rich. Illegal marijuana is making our government broke and drug dealers rich.

Budget Shortfalls

Right now many states including the one I live in, Tennessee, are having huge budget shortfalls due to the recession. These states have been forced to cut jobs and hours. Some states, like California, are in huge trouble. They are actually shutting down the government for 2 days a month right now to save money. That means less hours for the workers, and inconvenience for everyone in the state. Miron estimates that legalizing marijuana would save $7.7 billion dollars a year by reducing the enforcement and incarceration costs. Legalizing marijuana would allow us to use our police force in ways that are much more helpful to the general population than trying to put Michael Phelps in jail. This budget savings would allow many jobs to be saved around the country.

Increased Tax Revenues

If we were to legalize marijuana, we would add significant taxes to any purchase. The cost would be similar to the current cost, however, the profit would be going to the government in the form of tax revenue instead of to drug dealers. Miron put the estimate at around $6.2 billion dollars. Remember those budget problems I was talking about, this would be a nice windfall that could help save / create more even more jobs. Making marijuana legal would also reduce drug related crime and keep our youth doing legal work instead of being enticed by the huge amounts of money that is made selling drugs.

Marijuana is Safer than Alcohol and Tobacco

Medical experts say that marijuana use is generally safer and less addictive than other legal drugs.

“Is marijuana safer [than alcohol]? The short answer is ‘yes,’” said Dr. Mitch Earleywine, a University of Southern California psychologist who is the author of “Understanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence” and the just published “Mind-Altering Drugs: The Science of Subjective Experience.” The evidence is clear, he told DRCNet. “Cannabis has no lethal dose, so you can’t die from it. The impact on the brain structure for cannabis is nil, but there can be very serious brain function changes with alcohol abuse. Also, more dramatic liver functions are impaired with alcohol. Malnutrition, B-vitamin deficiency, and Korsakoff’s Disorder are all linked to alcohol, but not cannabis.”

I am certainly not advocating the use of marijuana. I don’t and have never used it. I also don’t drink or smoke. That isn’t the point. The point is that the health effects are similar or less than other legal drugs. It just doesn’t make sense for marijuana to be illegal while alcohol and tobacco are not.

Learn from History, Prohibition Failed

Prohibition was a very interesting social experiment in the United States. It made alcohol illegal. It did not however remove alcohol from America. What it did was make people drink things that were much worse for them. It also made organized crime a lot of money. Does this sound familiar? Marijuana is pretty easily found in the United States right now even though it is illegal, but who knows what else it contains. Drug dealers are getting rich and not paying taxes just like the organized crime did during Prohibition. We could help fix that with the fair tax, but it makes more sense to just take away their illegal income. We have to start learning from history. Prohibition of alcohol was a failure, prohibition of marijuana isn’t working very well either.

Legalize Marijuana, Solve the Budget Problem

Right now we are in a recession. Unemployment is higher than anyone would like it to be. President Obama just signed an almost $800 billion stimulus package into law trying save jobs. We should legalize marijuana and help out some of the many states that are currently having serious budget problems. It would certainly help a lot to have more money coming in and less going out.

Related: Want to Decrease Illegal Drug Use? Decriminalize it!

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Monday, February 14, 2011

A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History

CAIRO — As protesters in Tahrir Square faced off against pro-government forces, they drew a lesson from their counterparts in Tunisia: “Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.”

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Ed Ou for The New York Times

Cairo, Feb. 3 After more than a week of unrest, anti-Mubarak protesters clashed with supporters of the president for control of Tahrir Square. When confronting the police, the protesters wore armor made of cardboard and Pepsi bottles.

The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades.

They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade — but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley.

As their swelling protests shook the Egyptian state, they were locked in a virtual tug of war with a leader with a very different vision — Gamal Mubarak, the son of President Hosni Mubarak, a wealthy investment banker and ruling-party power broker. Considered the heir apparent to his father until the youth revolt eliminated any thought of dynastic succession, the younger Mubarak pushed his father to hold on to power even after his top generals and the prime minister were urging an exit, according to American officials who tracked Hosni Mubarak’s final days.

The defiant tone of the president’s speech on Thursday, the officials said, was largely his son’s work.

“He was probably more strident than his father was,” said one American official, who characterized Gamal’s role as “sugarcoating what was for Mubarak a disastrous situation.” But the speech backfired, prompting Egypt’s military to force the president out and assert control of what they promise will be a transition to civilian government.

Now the young leaders are looking beyond Egypt. “Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world,” said Walid Rachid, one of the members of the April 6 Youth Movement, which helped organize the Jan. 25 protests that set off the uprising. He spoke at a meeting on Sunday night where the members discussed sharing their experiences with similar youth movements in Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Iran.

“If a small group of people in every Arab country went out and persevered as we did, then that would be the end of all the regimes,” he said, joking that the next Arab summit might be “a coming-out party” for all the ascendant youth leaders.

Bloggers Lead the Way

The Egyptian revolt was years in the making. Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer and a leading organizer of the April 6 Youth Movement, first became engaged in a political movement known as Kefaya, or Enough, in about 2005. Mr. Maher and others organized their own brigade, Youth for Change. But they could not muster enough followers; arrests decimated their leadership ranks, and many of those left became mired in the timid, legally recognized opposition parties. “What destroyed the movement was the old parties,” said Mr. Maher, who has since been arrested four times.

By 2008, many of the young organizers had retreated to their computer keyboards and turned into bloggers, attempting to raise support for a wave of isolated labor strikes set off by government privatizations and runaway inflation.

After a strike that March in the city of Malhalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his friends called for a nationwide general strike for April 6. To promote it, they set up a Facebook group that became the nexus of their movement, which they were determined to keep independent from any of the established political groups. Bad weather turned the strike into a nonevent in most places, but in Malhalla a demonstration by the workers’ families led to a violent police crackdown — the first major labor confrontation in years.

Just a few months later, after a strike in the Tunisian city of Hawd el-Mongamy, a group of young online organizers followed the same model, setting up what became the Progressive Youth of Tunisia. The organizers in both countries began exchanging their experiences over Facebook. The Tunisians faced a more pervasive police state than the Egyptians, with less latitude for blogging or press freedom, but their trade unions were stronger and more independent. “We shared our experience with strikes and blogging,” Mr. Maher recalled.

For their part, Mr. Maher and his colleagues began reading about nonviolent struggles. They were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor, which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharp’s work is well-tailored to Mr. Mubark’s Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent resistance to justify repression in the name of stability.

The April 6 Youth Movement modeled its logo — a vaguely Soviet looking red and white clenched fist—after Otpor’s, and some of its members traveled to Serbia to meet with Otpor activists.

Another influence, several said, was a group of Egyptian expatriates in their 30s who set up an organization in Qatar called the Academy of Change, which promotes ideas drawn in part on Mr. Sharp’s work. One of the group’s organizers, Hisham Morsy, was arrested during the Cairo protests and remained in detention.

“The Academy of Change is sort of like Karl Marx, and we are like Lenin,” said Basem Fathy, another organizer who sometimes works with the April 6 Youth Movement and is also the project director at the Egyptian Democratic Academy, which receives grants from the United States and focuses on human rights and election-monitoring. During the protesters’ occupation of Tahrir Square, he said, he used his connections to raise about $5,100 from Egyptian businessmen to buy blankets and tents.

Moises Saman for The New York Times

Cairo, Feb. 11 Egyptians celebrated the announcement that President Mubarak was stepping down. “Eighty-five million people live in Egypt, and less than a 1,000 people died in this revolution — most of them killed by the police,” an organizer said.

‘This Is Your Country’

Then, about a year ago, the growing Egyptian youth movement acquired a strategic ally, Wael Ghonim, a 31-year-old Google marketing executive. Like many others, he was introduced into the informal network of young organizers by the movement that came together around Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning diplomat who returned to Egypt a year ago to try to jump-start its moribund political opposition.

Mr. Ghonim had little experience in politics but an intense dislike for the abusive Egyptian police, the mainstay of the government’s power. He offered his business savvy to the cause. “I worked in marketing, and I knew that if you build a brand you can get people to trust the brand,” he said.

The result was a Facebook group Mr. Ghonim set up: We Are All Khalid Said, after a young Egyptian who was beaten to death by police. Mr. Ghonim — unknown to the public, but working closely with Mr. Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement and a contact from Mr. ElBaradei’s group — said that he used Mr. Said’s killing to educate Egyptians about democracy movements.

He filled the site with video clips and newspaper articles about police violence. He repeatedly hammered home a simple message: “This is your country; a government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money, and you have your rights.” He took special aim at the distortions of the official media, because when the people “distrust the media then you know you are not going to lose them,” he said.

He eventually attracted hundreds of thousands of users, building their allegiance through exercises in online democratic participation. When organizers planned a “day of silence” in the Cairo streets, for example, he polled users on what color shirts they should all wear — black or white. (When the revolt exploded, the Mubarak government detained him for 12 days in blindfolded isolation in a belated attempt to stop his work.)

After the Tunisian revolution on Jan. 14, the April 6 Youth Movement saw an opportunity to turn its little-noticed annual protest on Police Day — the Jan. 25 holiday that celebrates a police revolt that was suppressed by the British — into a much bigger event. Mr. Ghonim used the Facebook site to mobilize support. If at least 50,000 people committed to turn out that day, the site suggested, the protest could be held. More than 100,000 signed up.

“I have never seen a revolution that was preannounced before,” Mr. Ghonim said.

By then, the April 6 movement had teamed up with Mr. ElBaradei’s supporters, some liberal and leftist parties, and the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood to plaster Cairo with eye-catching modernist posters advertising their Tunisia-inspired Police Day protest. But their elders — even members of the Brotherhood who had long been portrayed as extremists by Mr. Mubarak and the West — shied away from taking to the streets.

Explaining that Police Day was supposed to honor the fight against British colonialism, Essem Erian, a Brotherhood leader, said, “On that day we should all be celebrating together.

“All these people are on Facebook, but do we know who they are?” he asked. “We cannot tie our parties and entities to a virtual world.”

‘This Was It’

When the 25th came, the coalition of young activists, almost all of them affluent, wanted to tap into the widespread frustration with the country’s autocracy, and also with the grinding poverty of Egyptian life. They started their day trying to rally poor people with complaints about pocketbook issues: “They are eating pigeon and chicken, but we eat beans every day.”

By the end of the day, when tens of thousands had marched to Tahrir Square, their chants had become more sweeping. “The people want to bring down the regime,” they shouted, a slogan that the organizers said they had read in signs and on Facebook pages from Tunisia. Mr. Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement said the organizers even debated storming Parliament and the state television building — classic revolutionary moves.

“When I looked around me and I saw all these unfamiliar faces in the protests, and they were more brave than us — I knew that this was it for the regime,” Mr. Maher said.

It was then that they began to rely on advice from Tunisia, Serbia and the Academy of Change, which had sent staff members to Cairo a week before to train the protest organizers. After the police used tear gas to break up the protest that Tuesday, the organizers came back better prepared for their next march on Friday, the 28th, the “Day of Rage.”

This time, they brought lemons, onions and vinegar to sniff for relief from the tear gas, and soda or milk to pour into their eyes. Some had fashioned cardboard or plastic bottles into makeshift armor worn under their clothes to protect against riot police bullets. They brought spray paint to cover the windshields of police cars, and they were ready to stuff the exhaust pipes and jam the wheels to render them useless. By the early afternoon, a few thousand protesters faced off against well over a thousand heavily armed riot police officers on the four-lane Kasr al-Nile Bridge in perhaps the most pivotal battle of the revolution.

“We pulled out all the tricks of the game — the Pepsi, the onion, the vinegar,” said Mr. Maher, who wore cardboard and plastic bottles under his sweater, a bike helmet on his head and a barrel-top shield on his arm. “The strategy was the people who were injured would go to the back and other people would replace them,” he said. “We just kept rotating.” After more than five hours of battle, they had finally won — and burned down the empty headquarters of the ruling party on their way to occupy Tahrir Square.

Pressuring Mubarak

In Washington that day, President Obama turned up, unexpectedly, at a 3:30 p.m. Situation Room meeting of his “principals,” the key members of the national security team, where he displaced Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, from his seat at the head of the table.

The White House had been debating the likelihood of a domino effect since youth-driven revolts had toppled President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, even though the American intelligence community and Israel’s intelligence services had estimated that the risk to President Mubarak was low — less than 20 percent, some officials said.

According to senior officials who participated in Mr. Obama’s policy debates, the president took a different view. He made the point early on, a senior official said, that “this was a trend” that could spread to other authoritarian governments in the region, including in Iran. By the end of the 18-day uprising, by a White House count, there were 38 meetings with the president about Egypt. Mr. Obama said that this was a chance to create an alternative to “the Al Qaeda narrative” of Western interference.

American officials had seen no evidence of overtly anti-American or anti-Western sentiment. “When we saw people bringing their children to Tahrir Square, wanting to see history being made, we knew this was something different,” one official said.

On Jan. 28, the debate quickly turned to how to pressure Mr. Mubarak in private and in public — and whether Mr. Obama should appear on television urging change. Mr. Obama decided to call Mr. Mubarak, and several aides listened in on the line. Mr. Obama did not suggest that the 82-year-old leader step aside or transfer power. At this point, “the argument was that he really needed to do the reforms, and do them fast,” a senior official said. Mr. Mubarak resisted, saying the protests were about outside interference.

According to the official, Mr. Obama told him, “You have a large portion of your people who are not satisfied, and they won’t be until you make concrete political, social and economic reforms.”

The next day, the decision was made to send former Ambassador Frank G. Wisner to Cairo as an envoy. Mr. Obama began placing calls to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and other regional leaders.

The most difficult calls, officials said, were with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Mr. Netanyahu, who feared regional instability and urged the United States to stick with Mr. Mubarak. According to American officials, senior members of the government in Saudi Arabia argued that the United States should back Mr. Mubarak even if he used force against the demonstrators. By Feb. 1, when Mr. Mubarak broadcast a speech pledging that he would not run again and that elections would be held in September, Mr. Obama concluded that the Egyptian president still had not gotten the message.

Within an hour, Mr. Obama called Mr. Mubarak again in the toughest, and last, of their conversations. “He said if this transition process drags out for months, the protests will, too,” one of Mr. Obama’s aides said.

Mr. Mubarak told Mr. Obama that the protests would be over in a few days.

Mr. Obama ended the call, the official said, with these words: “I respect my elders. And you have been in politics for a very long time, Mr. President. But there are moments in history when just because things were the same way in the past doesn’t mean they will be that way in the future.”

The next day, heedless of Mr. Obama’s admonitions, Mr. Mubarak launched another attack against the protesters, many of whom had by then spent five nights camped out in Tahrir Square. By about 2:30 p.m., thousands of burly men loyal to Mr. Mubarak and armed with rocks, clubs and, eventually, improvised explosives had come crashing into the square.

The protesters — trying to stay true to the lessons they had learned from Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gene Sharp — tried for a time to avoid retaliating. A row of men stood silent as rocks rained down on them. An older man told a younger one to put down his stick.

But by 3:30 p.m., the battle was joined. A rhythmic din of stones on metal rang out as the protesters beat street lamps and fences to rally their troops.

The Muslim Brotherhood, after sitting out the first day, had reversed itself, issuing an order for all able-bodied men to join the occupation of Tahrir Square. They now took the lead. As a secret, illegal organization, the Brotherhood was accustomed to operating in a disciplined hierarchy. The group’s members helped the protesters divide into teams to organize their defense, several organizers said. One team broke the pavement into rocks, while another ferried the rocks to makeshift barricades along their perimeter and the third defended the front.

“The youth of the Muslim Brotherhood played a really big role,” Mr. Maher said. “But actually so did the soccer fans” of Egypt’s two leading teams. “These are always used to having confrontations with police at the stadiums,” he said.

Soldiers of the Egyptian military, evidently under orders to stay neutral, stood watching from behind the iron gates of the Egyptian Museum as the war of stone missiles and improvised bombs continued for 14 hours until about four in the morning.

Then, unable to break the protesters’ discipline or determination, the Mubarak forces resorted to guns, shooting 45 and killing 2, according to witnesses and doctors interviewed early that morning. The soldiers — perhaps following orders to prevent excessive bloodshed, perhaps acting on their own — finally intervened. They fired their machine guns into the ground and into the air, several witnesses said, scattering the Mubarak forces and leaving the protesters in unmolested control of the square, and by extension, the streets.

Once the military demonstrated it was unwilling to fire on its own citizens, the balance of power shifted. American officials urged the army to preserve its bond with the Egyptian people by sending top officers into the square to reassure the protesters, a step that further isolated Mr. Mubarak. But the Obama administration faltered in delivering its own message: Two days after the worst of the violence, Mr. Wisner publicly suggested that Mr. Mubarak had to be at the center of any change, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned that any transition would take time. Other American officials suggested Mr. Mubarak might formally stay in office until his term ended next September. Then a four-day-long stalemate ensued, in which Mr. Mubarak refused to budge, and the protesters regained momentum.

On Thursday, Mr. Mubarak’s vice president, Omar Suleiman, was on the phone with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at 2 p.m. in Washington, the third time they had spoken in a week. The airwaves were filled with rumors that Mr. Mubarak was stepping down, and Mr. Suleiman told Mr. Biden that he was preparing to assume Mr. Mubarak’s powers. But as he spoke to Mr. Biden and other officials, Mr. Suleiman said that “certain powers” would remain with Mr. Mubarak, including the power to dissolve the Parliament and fire the cabinet. “The message from Suleiman was that he would be the de facto president,” one person involved in the call said.

But while Mr. Mubarak huddled with his son Gamal, the Obama administration was in the dark about how events would unfold, reduced to watching cable television to see what Mr. Mubarak would decide. What they heard on Thursday night was a drastically rewritten speech, delivered in the unbowed tone of the father of the country, with scarcely any mention of a presumably temporary “delegation” of his power.

It was that rambling, convoluted address that proved the final straw for the Egyptian military, now fairly certain that it would have Washington’s backing if it moved against Mr. Mubarak, American officials said. Mr. Mubarak’s generals ramped up the pressure that led him at last, without further comment, to relinquish his power.

“Eighty-five million people live in Egypt, and less than 1,000 people died in this revolution — most of them killed by the police,” said Mr. Ghonim, the Google executive. “It shows how civilized the Egyptian people are.” He added, “Now our nightmare is over. Now it is time to dream.”

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Egypt

Hosni Mubarak's 30 year regime has ended and power has been handed over to the military. The new rulers say that their rule is temporary and will only last until democratic elections are held - but civil rights groups have say that protesters have been detained and tortured by the army.

Transcript

HEATHER EWART, PRESENTER: Now to Egypt's tentative new dawn. After 18 days of pro-democracy demonstrations, President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year regime is over, leaving the military in charge. The generals say their rule is temporary and will only last until democratic elections are held, which could be as soon as six months away.

But with civil rights groups claiming scores of protesters have been detained by the Army and some are being tortured, the question now is whether the military will keep their word. The ABC's Middle East correspondent Ben Knight reports from Cairo.

BEN KNIGHT, REPORTER: The most important thing to know about the Egyptian Army is that apart from being the biggest military force in the Middle East, it's also Egypt's biggest and richest business conglomerate.

Behind the tanks and the guns, it has massive interests in manufacturing, agriculture and real estate. It owns resort hotels and factories that make everything from cars to dishwashers to olive oil.

Some estimates say it makes up more than 10 per cent of the country's economy.

And if these soldiers rise high enough in the ranks, they know they'll be rewarded for their loyalty with a healthy slice of the action.

The military has been the power behind the throne for 60 years.

TARIQ OSMAN, AUTHOR, 'EGYPT ON THE BRINK': People say the regime has fallen. I argue the President has fell; the regime has not. Because the regime that has ruled Egypt for the past 60 years is still, or has been, the military establishment, which continues to control the situation today in Egypt. So effectively the structure's the same.

BEN KNIGHT: And it has the most to lose if Egypt moves to a democratic system of government. So why is it that the Egyptian people are so prepared to let the Army take over their revolution, and why do they trust them to keep their promises? Well, not everyone does.

MOHAMMED SIRAGH: The people lost some confidence in the Army, especially since Wednesday and Thursday when the lynch mob - basically the doors were open for the lynch mob to come and attack the people here in Tahrir (inaudible) and they continued supporting the President until now.

BEN KNIGHT: Mohammed Siragh was helping his fellow protesters clean up Tahrir Square on the weekend, but unlike most of them, he's not planning on leaving just yet.

MOHAMMED SIRAGH: So we wanna see the process beginning so that we have tranquillity in our hearts, that we can leave (inaudible). Everyone knows that if anything goes wrong or if they try to do any snake work, we're gonna come right back.

BEN KNIGHT: It's hard to overstate just how popular the Army is in Egypt. Most importantly, it's never turned its guns on the people, and in the Middle East, that's a proud claim to make. Egyptians have long felt that if their government ever turned on them, it would be the Army that saves them. So when the police disappeared from the streets in January and the Army arrived, they were welcomed as heroes.

These are the real men, the biggest sacrifices. The heroes.

BEN KNIGHT: Some individual soldiers even joined the protests. But the beginning of the end for Hosni Mubarak was when the Army commanders publicly supported the people's demands and promised not to fire on them. Now, it's over, and long-time democracy activists like Hisham Kassem still can't quite believe it's happened.

HISHAM KASSEM: I'm still absorbing it. I still am. I choke sometimes when I think about it. Amazing. I've always worked hard for this, but today, for the first time in my life, I'm proud to be Egyptian. I really am. I love the way we did it. Peaceful.

BEN KNIGHT: Hisham Kassem was the publisher of Egypt's largest daily newspaper until 2006, but for 20 the years he's been one of the few vocal opponents of the Mubarak regime. So, does he trust the Army to keep its word?

HISHAM KASSEM: I do, yes. The only other option is bloodshed. If the military try and stay in power, you know, as a de facto governing council, my forecast or my analysis, definitely not. It's too much, it's not something anybody can handle, you see? It just won't pass by. Egypt has changed after January 25.

BEN KNIGHT: But the Army's leadership has not. Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi is 80 years old, and as head of the Army, he also chairs the military council that will now rule Egypt until it holds democratic elections. Again, he seems an unlikely choice. Leaked cables have described him as Mubarak's poodle, resistant to change and without the energy or world view to do anything other than maintain the status quo.

Yet four times in the past week, he's promised the Egyptian people that all of their demands will be met and on time.

Tariq Osman believes the Army will simply be unable to go against the momentum for change.

TARIQ OSMAN: It is supported by tens of millions in the massive block, demographic block of the Egyptian middle class; a clash, even if it's only psychological clash between the military and these aspirations of the millions of the middle class, in my view is unlikely.

BEN KNIGHT: Egyptians might seem comfortable with the huge change they're about to undertake, but some of their neighbours are not. In Israel, the talk has all been about what happens when the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood becomes the next ruling party of Egypt.

HISHAM KASSEM: I can't tell you how much time I spent explaining, OK?, to different American administrations, diplomats, etc. that that is not the case, that the Brotherhood have been trying to get to power for 82 years and they have failed. That they are there because Mubarak is preventing people like me from going out on the streets, OK? That they're working through mosques. Mubarak was not able to close mosques so that became the clear, visible opposition of Mubarak.

BEN KNIGHT: But he says Israel can stop worrying that its peace treaty with Egypt is about to be torn up.

HISHAM KASSEM: We will prove to the world, OK?, that this is not a radically Islamic country, that we refuse to be identified politically as Muslims, OK? This is our religion, not our political affiliation. And, um, ah, I guess that's the only way we're going to defuse that fear.

BEN KNIGHT: But for Egyptians like Mohammed Siragh, the focus will be much closer to home.

MOHAMMED SIRAGH: And so we wanna make sure that the corruption is not going to seep back in and destroy what we've done so far. So we wanna maintain our strength and momentum to make sure that nothing will seep through the cracks.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

The Protests

Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, erupted in mass protests on Jan. 25, 2011, as the revolution in Tunisia earlier in the month seemed to inflame decades worth of smoldering grievances against decades of heavy-handed rule by President Hosni Mubarak. After a week of mass protests, Mr. Mubarak said he would not seek reelection but refused to step down. His government has appeared to be trying to wait the protesters out, offering a reform plan that consists of minor concessions. But the protesters, having beaten back an attempt by armed pro-government supporters to drive them from Cairo's Tahrir Square, managed to keep the movement's momentum going. On Feb. 10, the armed forces signaled they would intervene "to protect the nation,'' but in an address that night Mr. Mubarak appeared to cling to office, saying he would remain while reforms were undertaken during the remainder of his term. More than 300 people are estimated to have died in Egypt since the turmoil began, according to human rights groups.

Feb. 10

  • Egypt's armed forces said they had begun to take measures to "protect the nation,'' creating a supreme military council. But in a late-night address to the nation, Mr. Mubarak unexpectedly refused to budge, saying he would stay on through the end of his term.
  • Labor strikes and worker protests flared across Egypt, affecting post offices, textile factories and even the government’s flagship newspaper, providing a burst of momentum to protesters, even as the government pushed back with greater force against their demands.
  • Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit dismissed calls by Egyptian protesters and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scrap the country’s emergency laws, which allow the authorities to detain people without charges.

Feb. 9

Feb. 8

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comments are welcome from your friendly neighborhood punker!!!

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Mubarak must leave !!!

Friday, February 4, 2011

After supporting him with money and weapons for 30 years, the United States and all democracies must insist that Hosni Mubarak heed the voices of his young citizens who call for him to step down immediately and spare Egypt further bloodshed and economic loss.

This Story

From the Archives: Saad Eddin Ibrahim: Egypt's repression

The young Egyptians who have dug their heels deep into Cairo's Tahrir Square were born during Mubarak's three decades in power. They have known no other president and face a bleak future under his corrupt rule. Inspired by recent events in Tunisia, they finally took to the streets to seek change. Though Mubarak vowed this week to finally step down in September, few believe him, and with good reason: He has reneged on every election promise for political reform made since coming to power in 1981. Only hours after offering this "concession," Mubarak unleashed thugs and provocateurs on unarmed protesters amassed in Tahrir Square. At least five demonstrators were killed and hundreds injured. This followed reports that convicts have been released or escaped from prison, adding to the insecurity and violence on the streets of Cairo.

A president who would condone these crimes against his people and deny all cellphone and Internet access across the country has lost any semblance of credibility. For the vast majority of Egyptians, this is simply the last straw. When Mubarak became president after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, he vowed to serve only one six-year term. But he has ruled under a "state of emergency" since those chaotic days. Emergency laws enabled him to suspend the rule of law and bypass Egypt's esteemed judiciary. He has systematically eliminated, harassed or defamed any potential alternative to his leadership. He has rigged elections, silenced dissidents and prohibited even small political rallies. He has beaten and jailed democracy activists and sent civilians to military courts. He tightly controls the media and has cracked down hard on young bloggers. (I was tried and convicted in absentia on charges of "defaming Egypt's reputation" for writing on this page in 2007 in support of democratic change.)

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Mubarak has continued Sadat's economic liberalization to an open-market economy, but much of the benefits of growth have been skewed toward a narrow group of elites. Corruption around the president's family is legendary and on par with that which toppled Tunisia's Ben Ali ruling family. Meanwhile, roughly a fifth of the Egyptian people live in poverty, and the once-vibrant middle class cannot afford a decent education or the skyrocketing costs of housing, or find jobs.

Mubarak claims he is proud of his record of service and vows to "die on the soil of Egypt." He will allow the country to descend into chaos rather than leave and allow us to rebuild our land. As I write, my wife is reporting sounds of gunfire from several districts in Cairo. We propose a solution to this impasse: In return for Mubarak resigning from the presidency immediately, the United Nations and Western powers could ensure him and his family safe passage to the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, where he spends most of his time anyway. He could avoid prosecution by agreeing to return the wealth his family has amassed during its years in power.

According to the Egyptian constitution, the recently appointed vice president would become the interim president until scheduled elections in September. The prime minister has vowed to find and prosecute those responsible for violent attacks of the past 48 hours. He should be supported in restoring law and order and getting the economy back on its feet. He must rapidly bring the brave young protesters into a broad-based national dialogue, along with members of opposition groups, the media, clean elements within the business community and civil society leaders.

With concerted efforts among the reform elements in Egypt and leaders of Western democracies, this scenario could be the way out from today's perilous situation. Egypt's instability threatens peace and stability across the region. Barack Obama and his European counterparts face a moment of truth: They can move rapidly to support the democracy activists who are putting their lives on the line in Tahrir Square, or history may never pardon them.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

What The "Do Nothing" Obama Has Accomplished That We Choose To Ignore Or Fail To Acknowledge

There is a rising chorus of impatient progressive bloggers, some on these pages, calling Obama a failure and a do-nothing president only nine months into his first of four years as president. SNL's "do-nothing skit" on Obama may well have empowered some on our side to start playing on the fringes of the Limbaugh sandbox. While the charges and name-calling are not as vicious as the Limbaugh Lemmings, it has started nonetheless.

So what has our newly-minted asshole president been doing for nine months?

Let's start with what he has not done. He has not found a cure for cancer, reversed climate change, ended poverty, brought peace to the Middle East, ended all wars, created enough new jobs, or created a single-payer healthcare system. These are big ticket items that no president will ever accomplish, so it is a little disingenuous to suggest a standard for Obama that does not apply to all past presidents or to future presidents. As Princeton economics professor Alan Blinder says in assessing what Obama has accomplished so far, "If he seems to have achieved little, it's partly because he set out to do too much." To which I would add, and we created an unrealistic agenda for what we wanted him to accomplish.

Let's continue with what he has done. First and foremost, none other than the Wall Street Journal, in an assessment titled, "Democrats Quiet Changes Pile Up", says he has accomplished more in nine months than George Bush did in his first nine months.

Let's be specific:

1. Significantly, he buried the Imperial Presidency of George Bush and restored the Constitutional balance of government by respecting the equal standing of the legislative branch of government. As a former constitutional law professor, this is a major matter of change of tone and style that he promised during the campaign, and he has delivered. (Not pretty or necessarily effective given the Reid-less leadership in the Senate, but we are a constitutional democracy.)

2. Passed and signed the stimulus package, the biggest piece of legislation--ever--in blinding speed, thus being able to start to stabilize the economy, with GDP now projected to grow at the rate of 3 percent by the end of the year. Check the comeback of your 401K since Obama has taken over.

3. Stabilized the top 20 banks without federalizing them.

4. Reduced the rate of foreclosures inherited from the Bush administration.

5. Signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that makes it easier to sue for wage discrimination, a dramatic reversal of the bill's fortunes under Bush.

6. Granted regulatory power to the FDA to control tobacco products, another dramatic reversal of the Bush years that industry has lobbied hard to prevent.

7. Signed the Matthew Shepard Hate Act that expanded federal hate crime protection to categories of sexual orientation and gender, to the major consternation of the Religious Right.

8. Killed the F-22 fighter jet program, a popular program with Congress, saving billions of dollars.

9. With a stroke of a pen, enacted, by executive order, (see correction below in comments, it was a bill signing) the largest conservation measure in 15 years, spanning the Bush and Clinton records.

10. Implement an electronic medical record system before any healthcare legislation was introduced. This new technology will be singularly responsible for saving lives and reducing the high administrative costs of healthcare, a key element of reform.

11. Extended a $2500 tax credit to 5 million families to help with college tuition.

12. Cooperated with Japan in bringing a $5 billion stabilization package for Pakistan.

13. Engaged the Muslim world in a dialogue, beginning with his unprecedented speech in Cairo, followed by an interview with Al Arabiya, and face-to-face discussions with Iran, a total reversal of the Bush years of Muslim baiting and hate.

14. Dramatically reversed the reputation of the United States around the world, with now most nations looking favorably on the US, and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize as one consequence.

15. Agreed to plan for bringing the troops home from Iraq, at a slower pace than what he promised, but based on knowledge that commanders-in-chief, not candidates, have.

16. Brought the White House online, doing for the White House what he had done for political campaigning. There are now online Q&A's with the administration, and a White House blog.

17. Released the names of all visitors to the White House, a total reversal of the secret Bush years.

18. Told Mexico that the US is responsible for some of their drug problems, a no small, but truthful admission.

19. Restored the rights of states to regulate the medical use of marijuana without fear of federal law enforcement intrusion.

20. Banned the use of torture, and he has begun a complete review of the torture policies under Bush.

21. Appointed the first Latina to the Supremes: Imagine what would have happened to the Supreme Court under four more years of radical Republicans. Obama has thus averted a long-term dramatic swing to the extreme right on the court, and appointed a progressive to keep matters in check.

In summary, and to those on these pages and elsewhere who see things differently, I say this feels a little like Waiting for Godot. Let's recall one thing that Samuel Beckett said in the mischievous play:

"The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased."


Read the update post here.

Read the second update post here.

OK For Republicans - But Not Democrats

Political Cartoon is by Jim Morin in the Miami Herald.
Link to original post

Why We Should Care

The Covert Kingdom -- Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Texas
But until progressives come to understand what [fundamentalists] read, hear, are told and deeply believe, we cannot understand American politics, much less be effective. Given fundamentalist Christianity's inherent cultural isolation, it is nearly impossible for most enlightened Americans to imagine, in honest human terms, what fundamentalist Americans believe, let alone understand why we should all care.