Prohibition was a failure. The War on Drugs is a failure. Maybe it's time to try a new approach.

Former UK Defense Minister Bob Ainsworth says it's time to legalize drugs. The methods of the past, including prohibition, don't work. They fail to keep the public safe.

The war on drugs has been "nothing short of a disaster" and it is time to study other options, including decriminalising possession of drugs and legally regulating their production and supply. "We must take the trade away from organised criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists."

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More bad news for former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. The grand jury has returned an 89 page racketeering Indictment charging Kwame, his father, Bernard Kilpatrick and others with "13 alleged fraudulent schemes in the awarding of contracts in the city's Department of Water and Sewerage." The Indictment is the result of a six year investigation into Kwame's actions while serving as a Michigan legislator and later as Mayor of Detroit.

He resigned as mayor in 2008 after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in state court. He's now in prison for violating probation in that case and is awaiting trial in federal court on tax and fraud charges related to how he spent money from a nonprofit fund.

Lawyers for both Kwame and his father promise a vigorous defense. And the FBI says the investigation is ongoing. ""It's not going to be done until we say it's done."

The Guardian reports it was Great Britain, not Sweden, that decided to appeal the release of Wilileak's founder Julian Assange on bond.

The Crown Prosecution Service will go to the high court tomorrow to seek the reversal of a decision to free the WikiLeaks founder on bail, made yesterday by a judge at City of Westminster magistrates court.

It had been widely thought Sweden had made the decision to oppose bail, with the CPS acting merely as its representative. But today the Swedish prosecutor's office told the Guardian it had "not got a view at all on bail" and that Britain had made the decision to oppose bail.

The spokesperson for the Swedish Prosecutor's office says they don't have a view on bail and will not be submitting any evidence at tomorrow's hearing. The CPS has confirmed this. [More...]

Is Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg a good choice for "Person of the Year"? Time Magazine thinks so. I don't. Zuckerman and FB to me are "so last year." I also think that as people are learning how privacy intrusive and commercial FB is, more will reduce their use of it.

Runners-up included Julian Assange, the Tea Party, Hamid Karzai and the Chilean Miners. Assange won the magazine's online poll, and Time unconvincingly explains why it chose Zuckerman instead. [More...]

By a vote of 250 to 175, the House of Representatives today passed a stand-alone bill to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT). The bill now goes to the Senate.

While the initial repeal measure failed in the Senate, Democrats are now confident they can find 60 votes there to pass this standalone bill. The party is working against time, however. Before they take up the "don't ask" repeal, Senate Democrats are committed to taking up other significant issues, like the ratification of a nuclear treaty with Russia and a government-funding bill. The Senate is attempting to take up all of these matters before breaking for Christmas recess.

Not that there is a snowball's chance of it happening, but now is most definitely NOT the time for filibuster reform in the Senate.

In the upcoming Congress, a Republican House will be passing all kinds of bad bills. President Obama seems unwilling to be a veto (pun intended) point in the process. Our last best hope for limiting the damage is in fact the filibuster in the Senate.

Apparently, many folks are hopeful of some good things coming out of the next Congress. I'm not one of those people. Bill Clinton vetoed 17 bills in the 2 years after the 1994 elections delivered the Congress to the Republicans, including vetoes that precipitated government shutdowns. I don't expect President Obama to veto any. The filibuster in the Senate will need to be the veto point.

Speaking for me only

Open Thread.

HuffPo:

The 2008 bank bailout bill gave the Treasury secretary broad discretion to spend money to fend off foreclosures. But while Treasury has approved $7.6 billion in expenditures to help states prevent and clean up foreclosures[. . . ] States initially applied for funds from the program in the spring of this year, but the Treasury refused to extend money for tackling legal bills. [. . . Sen. Sherrod] Brown and 30 Democratic members of the House sent a letter to Geithner asking him to reconsider his decision. Geithner refused[. . . MORE]

Matt Yglesias writes:

The deficit is a problem only in the sense that the short-term deficit is currently too small. But this is one reason I’m surprised so many liberals are being so stinty in their praise of the recent tax deal. We’d just all been spending 12 months arguing that contrary to the conventional wisdom, short-term deficits should be smaller. We also spent a lot of time observing that conservative deficit-talk is fraudulent and all they care about is tax cuts for the rich. Then the Obama administration, after a year of fruitless austerity gambits, finally called their bluff. “Fine, you can have your deficit-increasing tax cut extension, but give me some other deficit-increasing stuff that my economists say has a higher multiplier than your tax cuts for the rich.” Now the deal is done, and for all the panels and commissions and all the money Pete Peterson’s spent the parties are coming together to make the deficit bigger.

This is all kinds of wrong. I'll explain on the flip.

President Obama is expected to release a review of the Administration's Afghanistan policy tomorrow. Today, there are two new reports that paint a bleak picture of Afghanistan.

In a rare public assessment of the humanitarian conditions in Afghanistan, the International Committee for the Red Cross said growing civilian casualties, internal displacement and poor medical care have created a dire humanitarian situation and are likely to persist into next year.

...Separately, in assessments reported by the New York Times, US intelligence officials said Pakistan's unwillingness to crack down on militant groups operating in the lawless borderlands had created a major obstacle to progress in Afghanistan.

The LA Times reports that NATO claims the Taliban is forcing farmers to grow poppy instead of saffron. The Taliban denies the charge.

Sen. Al Franken on The Deal:

A lot of people are unhappy that the president punted on first down, and I'm one of them. Extending the excessive Bush tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires will explode our deficit over the next two years without doing anything to help our economy. I think it's simply bad policy. [. . .] If this is the prelude of a permanent extension of the Bush tax breaks for the super-wealthy, we're in big trouble. We'll lose our ability to make the investments we need to grow our way out of long-term budget deficits: education, infrastructure, and research and development.

(Emphasis supplied.) Al Franken voted for The Deal.

A year ago I wrote about the DEA's expensive "African vacation" during which it sent informants and agents to Ghana as part of an elaborate sting operation to intercept cocaine on its way to Europe. It ended up with no cocaine or money, but flew three African men back to the U.S. to face criminal charges. (A year later, the court's docket in U.S. v. Oumar Issa, et. al., SDNY, shows the three are still in custody and the case hasn't even gotten past the discovery phase to the filing of pre-trial motions.)

I'm sure the men's lawyers (some of whom are court-appointed since some of those charged are indigent) will be very interested in Wikileaks' release of embarrassing cables today pertaining to cocaine enforcement operations in Ghana, Mali and elsewhere in West Africa. One set of cables pertains to a longstanding and expensive UK operation called Westbridge, in which the UK teamed up with the Ghana Government. Cables by American diplomats claim corruption in Ghana has ruined the operation. [More...]