Clinton: U.S. wants to increase help for Mexico's fight against drug cartels

Can the United States really help Mexico succeed in its battle against drug cartels that have expanded their influence farther and farther south from the border between the two countries? From the safety of Northern California, hundreds of miles from Tijuana, it used to look as if the Mexican government was forced to fight corruption it its own police forces before it could engage the drug traffickers that had turned even peaceful cities into dangerous places. But years of unabated violence have made the lines of power a lot easier to understand. That's why U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the other day that the powerful Mexican drug cartels were behaving a lot like political insurgent groups than mere gangs. "This is one of the most difficult fights that any country faces today," Clinton told San Francisco's nonpartisan Commonwealth Club in a speech Friday, according to Cable News Network (CNN). "We are watching drug traffickers undermine and corrupt governments in Central America, and we are watching the brutality and barbarity of their assaults on governors and mayors, the press, as well as each other, in Mexico." Clinton said the United States could help Mexico rebuild its criminal justice system and retrain its police forces to fight the cartels, which she said were acting like terrorists. "For the first time, they are using car bombings," she said. "You see them being much more organized in a kind of paramilitary way." Clinton's comments were no doubt a reference to U.S. efforts to find the body of David Hartley, a U.S. resident believed to have been shot by drug traffickers on Mexico's border with Texas, CNN said.

City of Oakland OKs large medical marijuana farms

News that the San Francisco Bay Area city of Oakland had approved large-scale medical marijuana farming for medical use was met by silence by opponents of such cultivation and by U.S. authorities who have eased up on enforcement of a federal ban since the 2008 presidential election. The city council of Oakland, a city of 350,000 across the bay from San Francisco, passed a provision Tuesday legalizing "industrial" marijuana cultivation and agreed to issue as many as four permits for large operations next year, according to the Reuters international news service. Medical marijuana has been legal in California under a state law approved by voters in 1996, but it is still illegal under federal law and cultivation has only been allowed by individuals in small garden operations. But Oakland officials said the city would profit by allowing and taxing large-scale cultivation. "This is going to grow as an industry," City Councilwoman Jean Quan said during the debate. "And someone is going to have a high-tech producer." The city plans to impose an array of new taxes on growers and sellers next year, Reuters said. The council approval has no relation to a ballot initiative on the November ballot that would, if passed, make California the first state to legalize marijuana use. But law enforcement officials complain that underground marijuana cultivation in California have been dominated by criminals.

Lawyers, guns and Starbucks

It was a shock, really, to see a pistol-toting customer waiting on line for a latte at the local Starbucks last week. OK, customer service is not what it was -- everybody can see that -- but aren't we just a tad more civilized than this? The answer to that somewhat-rhetorical question is, apparently, a resounding "not exactly." What else is there to think about the latest gun-enthusiast trend sweeping the country -- or, at least, growing in the 43 states that have laws allowing people to carry guns openly? Of course, groups behind the open-carry movement, which broke through to public consciousness last summer when opponents of the health care system overhaul proposed by President Barack Obama began showing up wearing sidearms at town hall-type meetings across the country, say they're just exercising their Second Amendment rights. “Our point is to do the same thing that concealed carriers do,” OpenCarry.org co-founder Mike Stollenwerk told the New York Times. “We’re just taking off our jackets.” It's a movement, apparently, designed to pressure government to relax restrictions on carrying concealed weapons. Armed gatherings -- known as meetups -- became popular almost immediately because California issues very few permits for concealed weapons while, like most states, has almost no restrictions on open-carried weapons. “It is a discriminatory issue in California,” said Paul Higgins, 43, moderator of a Web forum called CaliforniaOpenCarry.org. “If you are politically connected, if you’re rich, if you’re a politician, if you’re a celebrity, you get a permit. Otherwise, you don’t.” The meetups were quickly barred from some restaurants, concerned that the open display of weapons would or did upset patrons, but other establishments have embraced the movement. There have been more than 140 meetups in California this year in restaurants and coffeehouses, including Starbucks, which has rejected calls for a ban. “The political, policy and legal debates around these issues belong in the legislatures and courts, not in our stores,” Starbucks officials said in a public statement this month. That's true, of course, but it's also not the whole truth. Corporate citizenship certainly means more than occasionally taking a stand on a subject of personal interest -- citizens have to decide questions and advise their government on a variety of issues. That is the role of a citizen in a democracy -- things are most often about other people but everyone has to help the government figure out what to do. And that figuring had better be underway, because some painful decisions are going to have to be made and it's better to make them before people start getting shot.

U.S. environmental regulators decide to protect jaguar

U.S. residents got another example of the kind of change they voted for in 2008 when the Obama administration announced Tuesday that it would protect the habitat of the jaguar, even though the last of the big cats in the United States is believed to have died last year. Tuesday's announcement by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service settles, at least for now, a long-running dispute over the jaguar's status as an endangered species, according to the New York Times. The jaguar has been listed as endangered since 1997, but regulators never designated any critical habitat for the wide-ranging animals, which were formerly believed to have ranged from Louisiana to California, the Times said. Wildlife activists sued to force the government to come up with a species-recovery plan, as required by the Endangered Species Act and a federal judge in Tucson ordered regulators to draft such plans or explain why not. This time, the Fish and Wildlife Service dropped longstanding opposition to such planning and agreed to comply despite fierce opposition from ranchers, who long opposed protecting the habitat of such wide-ranging predators, the Times said. The designation will protect the jaguar if it returns to the western United States. There are 5,000 jaguars in Mexico and thousands more in Central and South America. Conservationists applauded the decision as historic. "It will reorient land conservation in the Southwest," said Michael Robinson of the Center on Biological Diversity of Tuscon, the nonprofit group that sued. "We will see planning to ensure jaguars can reach each other." Robinson said the new designation could affect decisions to allow tree harvesting or mining on public lands within the jaguar habitat, the Times said.

Plans for Mars exploration offer hope for international cooperation in space travel

If there's ever going to be a United Federation of Planets or anything like it with human beings involved, the next step -- fairly obviously -- has to be cooperation on space exploration between beings on this planet. Toward that end, apparently, comes word from NASA's Mars Exploration Program in Sunnyvale, Calif., that a merger between the U.S. and European Union space programs is being planned, according to Cable News Network (CNN). Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars program at the Ames Research Center, told CNN that an agreement could take a year to complete and joint missions could begin by 2016. "The European Space Agency's council and their program board have agreed to the terms that we're working with and have endorsed this partnership to go forward," McCuistion said. "So we are starting the new year with a renewed excitement for missions beginning in 2016 to be done in a joint partnership between Europe and NASA." Such an agreement would have the twin advantages of sharing the cost of the multibillion-dollar missions and assuring that any knowledge gained does not benefit one nation over another but contributes to overall human understanding of the universe. "That's a very challenging mission of launching something from here, putting it into orbit at Mars, getting it to the surface and collecting samples, getting those samples back into orbit, then return them to Earth," McCuistion said. "This is a mission that will change our understanding of Mars and change our understanding of planetary science significantly. It really needs to be a global effort." But understanding that means the integration of the space programs of the Soviet Union and China, something that could be decades away given the current state of international relations on the third planet.

Pretrial publicity forces relocation of trial of transit cop who shot passenger in Oakland

Relatives of Oscar Grant, the young Hayward man whose slaying by a transit cop on a train platform in Oakland sparked riots and protests in the California city's downtown, applauded the news Thursday that the trial of now former BART police officer, who is accused of murder, will be moved to Los Angeles. Family members did not want the case moved to more-conservative San Diego, one of several counties considered as a venue for the trial by the Oakland judge who decided to move the case last month, according to the http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/20/BAP71ANCJB.DTL. But Grant's family also opposed moving the trial out of racially diverse Alameda County, across the bay from San Francisco. Grant, 22, was shot and killed while being restrained along with a dozen others at the transit agency's Fruitvale Station following a disturbance on a train. BART is an acronym for Bay Area Rapid Transit, a regional rail system that carries 350,000 passengers daily. The shooting was captured on dozens of cell phone cameras and has been seen by millions on the Internet and on television, the Chronicle said. A BART-commissioned found transit police did not respond adequately to either the disturbance or in the aftermath of the shooting, leading to calls for the disbandment of the BART force. Jacobson ruled last month that the former officer, Johannes Mehserle, could not get a fair trial in Alameda County because of pretrial publicity and the possibility of civil unrest during and after the proceeding. Mehserle resigned from the BART police force immediately after the shooting, presumably to avoid being compelled to give testimony under oath. Mehserle's attorneys, who say the officer pulled his gun by mistake, sought to have the case moved to San Diego County. "I think I can get justice for Oscar in Los Angeles," said Cephus Johnson, Grant's uncle. An attorney for the Grant family, widely known Oakland lawyer John Burris, said Jacobson's ruling was "the most important ruling that will be made in this case other than the verdict." Burris said "Mehserle would have walked" if the case had been moved to San Diego County. Jacobson's decision Thursday to move the case to Los Angeles, to the same courthouse where ex-football star O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and a friend in 1995, came after more than an hour and a half of argument, the Chronicle said. Jacobson said he would ask for a different judge to be appointed to preside over the trial.

Toyota takes clunker money and runs

News that Toyota will bail from a 25-year partnership with General Motors to produce vehicles at the only automobile manufacturing plant still operating in California should come as no surprise to anyone -- GM already announced in a bankruptcy court filing in June that it was abandoning its share of the joint venture. California officials tried to save the NUMMI plant in Fremont by offering tax breaks and other incentives, according to the Reuters international news service, but Toyota decided to close the plant as part of its global cost-saving strategy. The plant, and the combination of GM and Toyota, was an innovation when it reopened in 1984 to produce a redesigned Chevrolet Nova using Japanese manufacturing techniques. It had previously been a GM manufacturing facility. It now employs more than 4,000 autoworkers and supports as many as 35,000 supplier jobs, and will continue to build Toyota Corolla cars and Tacoma trucks until March 31. GM, which is reorganizing under court protection, ceased production of the Pontiac Vibe at the plant last month, and is discontinuing the Pontiac brand. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said Toyota's announcement was a "sad day" and said plans were underway to convert the plant to other uses, Reuters said. The plant was the only Toyota facility in the United States with a contract with the United Auto Workers union. A union official said the decision to close the plant was devastating. "This is no time to close a highly successful manufacturing facility," said Jimmy Settles, a United Auto Workers vice president. "California is one of the most important markets for Toyota." Perhaps ironically, Toyota was the largest recipient of stimulus dollars from the U.S. government's so-called "Cash for Clunkers" program that pumped $3 billion into the auto industry in an effort to boost sales. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Toyota officials told her office that GM's pullout from NUMMI left the plant with excess capacity and no outlook for increased demand in the current economic environment, according to Reuters. Toyota also complained that the plant was old and that production costs were too high in California, Reuters said.

2009 California budget held hostage -- Day 16

The failure of state leaders to resolve California's latest budget crisis really should be blamed on its action-hero governor, whose inexperience has gone beyond being a source of amusement to an outright disgrace. No doubt, California voters thought they were voting for compromise when they ousted former Democratic governor Grey Davis and elected Schwarzenegger back in 2003, and then re-elected him in 2006. Instead, what they got was even worse legislative gridlock. The issue made news again today because an expected budget compromise collapsed yesterday, according to the Reuters international news service, and the state has been forced to pay its bills with IOUs. Democrats hold a two-thirds majority in the state Assembly but are six votes short of two-thirds in the Senate, and California is one of the few states that require a supermajority to pass a budget. And that is the problem, at least on the surface. Schwarzenegger has so little influence on his party colleagues in the state Senate that he cannot even convince three to change their minds and support the budget. Actually, this is colossal arrogance by Republicans and utter incompetence by Schwarzenegger. Millions of California residents and businesses depend on the state to conduct itself professionally; today, they are hostages to political bickering. The state legislature really only has one job, to pass the budget. The governor has the power to do pretty much everything else. So why do Californians spend millions of dollars every year to keep its legislature meeting in luxury and pay its legislators lavish salaries, if they can't even accomplish this?