Changing Channels

Drug war: Let's say we won and get out

It's not exactly television, but...

The veteran sitting across the table from me looked weary after delivering yet another speech against a war that has neither a point nor, apparently, an end. It was started years ago by a Republican president, long since discredited, the veteran noted. Yet the Democrats who until a few weeks ago controlled both the White House and Congress didn't raise a finger to stop it. "I don't understand how much more money has to be wasted or how many more lives have to be ruined before we admit it's been a huge mistake,'' Kyle Vogt told me. "We can end this thing with the stroke of a pen.''

He wasn't referring to Iraq or Afghanistan, but America's truly endless war, the war on drugs. Declared 40 years ago by President Nixon, it chews up $41 billion in government spending each year while sending two million Americans to jail. Yet Nixon's goal of a drug-free America ("the final issue is not whether we will conquer drug abuse, but how soon'') seems no closer to anyone but the drug warriors themselves.

"All these years later, the people running the drug war keep promising us the same thing they have from the beginning, that they can decrease drug use,'' Vogt said. ``They just need a little more time and a little more money. Why do we listen? We wouldn't tolerate that from a physician who was treating us and not making us any better.

"And if everything your physician told you to do made your illness worse, you'd quit doing it and find another doctor.''

Vogt, who served four years as a military policeman on a Maryland army base, speaks as a veteran of the front lines of the drug war. He's one of an increasing number of former drug warriors turned doves. Their organization, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), includes some 4,000 people -- from beat cops through Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico -- who once played roles in enforcing drug laws. Read my full op-ed column in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

Why your TV won't show 'The Kennedys'

With heroic disdain for cheap reality shows and tawdry sexcoms, a big television network schedules a dramatic miniseries that takes a critical look at a popular presidency. Rapacious corporate interests intervene, pressuring the network to cancel it. What happens next?

Well, if the popular president is named Reagan, then America's political progressives revolt against censorship, insisting that the marketplace of ideas can't be ravaged by megacorporate leviathans. Another network steps up -- the series airs! The First Amendment triumphs!

But if the popular president is named Kennedy, the story ends differently. Very differently. Suppression of political criticism becomes corporate good citizenship. Other networks sniff that the show just isn't right for them. And progressives triumphantly take to the Internet to brag about their role in ideological repression: ``We Won! Thanks to you The History Channel has canceled The Kennedys miniseries!''

The Kennedys reportedly is harshly critical of the political dynasty, taking a tough look at the way patriarch Joe Kennedy used his bootlegging wealth to buy influence as well as the compulsive womanizing of his presidential son, John. I say ``reportedly'' because we haven't seen it and perhaps never will.

The show -- developed by Joel Surnow, who produced the hit series 24 -- with a heavy-hitter cast led by Katie Holmes and Greg Kinnear was canceled by The History Channel this month before a single one of its eight episodes aired. Not because it was crummy: The History Channel admitted in a statement on the cancellation that "the film is produced and acted with the highest quality.'' The problem, the network said, was that "this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand.

If you're wondering why a TV network would sink $25 million into a show, reviewing scripts and daily shooting for 13 months before deciding that it's "not a fit,'' let me suggest a couple of reasons.... Read my full op-ed column in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

Merry political moments of 2010

History will likely record 2010 as the year Americans finally comprehended Obama math: 7.6 percent unemployment plus $787 billion stimulus equals 9.8 percent unemployment. Or, to express it in different mathematical terms, minus-63 seats in the House and minus-6 in the Senate.

But, being a glass-half-full kind of guy, I'll prefer to remember 2010 as the year governments around the world struck out in creative new directions in use of taxpayer dollars. Nothing symbolized the innovative capacity of the state like the way local governments in Great Britain used money from an $805 million program to help the elderly and the disabled, buying them lap dances from strippers and flying them to Amsterdam for visits with hookers.

Other great moments in governance and politics during 2010:

THE NEWEST FRONT IN THE WAR ON DRUGS: The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse gave $1.44 million in federal funds to a project estimating the number of gay hookers in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Not that the study is just about dry statistics: "Formative ethnography will be used to describe the settings, venues and overall social milieu in which male sex work is being situated,'' says the abstract for the project grant.

THAT'S GROUCHO MARX, NOT KARL: The German Communist Party gave away pens to school children -- that, when clicked, lit up with porn pictures. We were tricked by a crafty capitalist merchant, the party explained when newspapers got wind of the story. Read my full op-ed salute to American politics in 2010 in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

Meet the new boss, same as the old...

It's not exactly about television, but...

If you doubt that the alien moonscape inside the Washington Beltway spins on its own peculiar axis, just listen to the way the chattering-class punditry shrieked, whether in elation or despair, over last week's congressional thumb-wrestling on taxes and spending.

``On a historic night this past Thursday, a new Tea Party Republican Congress completely transformed U.S. economic policy,'' exulted former Reagan economic apparatchik Larry Kudlow in the National Review. ``An absolute disaster and an insult to the vast majority of the American people,'' raged Vermont's socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Out here in the real world, though, it just looked like Washington business as usual, elephantine struggles to produce minor changes that will all have to be revisited next year, packaged with the mandatory collection of goofball subsidies.

Most of the sound and fury was generated by the tax deal between the Obama White House and congressional Republicans. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party portrayed it as a plutocratic sacking of the U.S. Treasury. Sanders filibustered it; Michigan's Rep. John Conyers said resisting a White House compromise with Republicans was nothing less than ``a fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party and the nation.''

But what did it really amount to? Mostly, a promise that taxes won't go up for a couple of years: rates on income- and capital-gains taxes that have been in place for the better part of a decade will stay the same. The only actual cut is a miniscule 2-percentage point decrease in Social Security taxes, which lasts just a year. Read my full op-ed column in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

Pardon Jim Morrison? Are you nuts, Charlie?

It's not exactly about television, but...

I never thought I'd say this, but it's time to salute Charlie Crist's resolve. Determined not to go gently into political asteriskdom as an irrelevant one-term governor known mostly for the number of flip-flops he could perform in one day, Charlie is about to strike the most courageous position of his career: He's going to bravely stand up for the right of drug-addled (and conveniently deceased) rock stars to waggle their willies in front of teenagers.

Crist is preparing to pardon Jim Morrison, lead singer of the darkly dissolute 1960s rock band the Doors, who 40 years ago was convicted of indecent exposure for exposing himself during a drunken, riotous concert in Coconut Grove.

A churlish observer might think that Crist, if he wanted to spend his final month in office righting wrongs in Florida's criminal justice system, would look into some current cases -- say, that of Katie Vickers, a 70-year-old Jacksonville woman convicted of practicing law without a license after she typed up documents for a friend involved in a workman's comp case.

Vickers has exhausted her appeals, so without a pardon, she faces 30 days in jail and a $7,800 fine. Morrison, without a pardon, will still be dead for 39 years of a probable heroin overdose, and his conviction will still be the rock 'n' roll equivalent of a badge of honor for a singer who fashioned himself the Lizard King and made a talisman out of perverse and often sinister sexuality. Read my full op-ed column in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

The mortgage scandal that isn't

It's not exactly about television, but...

The prospect of being hanged, they say, concentrates the mind wonderfully. So perhaps the impending midterm electoral massacre of Democrats has sharpened the Obama administration's thinking. I cannot otherwise figure out how a White House that never met a bailout it didn't like could have so sensibly denounced the idea of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures.

``A national moratorium would be very damaging to exactly the kind of people we're trying to protect,'' said Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in pooh-poohing a moratorium, ``because the consequence of that would be in neighborhoods that have been most affected by the foreclosure crisis, where you see lots of houses on the block empty, unoccupied. . . . Those communities will be living longer with houses unoccupied, with more pressure on their house price with the people still in their houses.''

Hearing somebody from the White House speaking intelligently about economics naturally raises suspicions that space aliens slipped a pod under the president's bed while he slept. And especially so in this case, since the call for a moratorium doubtless appealed to Obama's primal instinct for giving away other people's money. Read my full op-ed column on the latest mortgage "scandal" in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

Lies, damn lies, and congressmen

It's not exactly television, but...

I guess I have to take back all my wisecracks about President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. No, not because he's finally pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq, except for the 50,000 that he didn't. (Come on, that's close enough for government math.) It's because he's ended crime in America.

The White House's proclamation of victory last week came in the form of six felony indictments against former major league pitcher Roger Clemens for lying to Congress when he said he'd never taken steroids.

The Justice Department didn't actually say the war on crime is over. But if federal prosecutors and the FBI have nothing better to do than trying to put Clemens in jail for 30 years for denying use of a drug that isn't even illegal, then we've obviously reached what the philosophers will soon proclaim is The End of Outlaw History.

People are often surprised and sometimes even offended to learn that you can be charged with a crime for lying to the collection of hacks, loafers, parasites, thieves, pork addicts, page-molesters and general swine who Mark Twain once called America's only native criminal class. Not me. Read my full op-ed column about lies, damn lies and congressmen in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

The gay-marriage conundrum

It's not exactly television, but..

After nearly 50 years of civil-rights legislation, where do we stand? Ask my friend Eric Deggans, the television critic at the St. Petersburg Times. When Eric, who is black, returned home from a trip last week, he found a message on his phone from an irate reader suggesting he get a TV show titled A Coon With A View. ``Post-racial America my foot,'' Eric wearily noted on his Facebook page.

I have a feeling that the two couples whose lawsuit resulted in a ruling last weekend striking down California's ban on gay marriages will soon know exactly how Eric feels.For that matter, so will federal Judge Vaughn Walker, who issued the ruling.

Despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, this case had little to do with governmental discrimination against gays. The ban on gay marriage approved by California voters in 2008 had no effect on the state's domestic-partners law -- and Walker's own decision acknowledged that ``domestic partnerships offer same-sex couples almost all of the rights and responsibilities associated with marriage.''

What the lawsuit was really about, as the couples testified over and over during the trial, was social acceptance and emotional affirmation -- matters beyond the scope of any judicial ruling, no matter how legally sweeping and humanitarianly intended.

Sandy Stier, who runs a child-welfare agency, and Kristin Perry, a county health-services worker, already have a domestic partnership, not to mention four children. But Stier believes that marriage would not only include them ``in the social fabric'' but also be a way to tell ``our friends, our family, our society, our community, our parents . . . and each other, that this is a lifetime commitment.''

I'm fine with Stier and Perry having a wedding. I don't see how it undermines the institution of marriage or adversely affects the rest of us in any way. But if having four kids didn't convince their friends and family that they're serious about one another, I can't imagine that a fill-in-the-blanks form from the state of California is going to do it, either. Nor will it guarantee a lifetime commitment, as heterosexual marriages -- currently failing at rate of something over 40 percent -- certainly attest. Read my full op-ed column in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

Busting the welfare queens at the Pentagon

A most peculiar thing happened last week: The Washington Post ripped a federal welfare boondoggle to shreds, exposing tens of billions of dollars of waste, duplication and bureaucratic excess . . . and conservatives didn't erupt in astonishment and praise. In fact, they didn't raise a peep.

That's because the welfare queens ripping off taxpayer dollars in this case aren't poverty pimps waving the bloody flag of race and class, but military-industrial hustlers exploiting the war on terrorism to build themselves opulent and powerful fiefdoms.

At a time when newspapers are shrinking, not many ran The Post's 16,000-word Top Secret America series, a rough map of the murky yet vast labyrinth of intelligence and defense agencies that securitycrats have burrowed into the federal budget since Sept. 11.

But if you care at all about either the wholesale waste of federal dollars or the real capabilities of the U.S. government to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, The Post series is worth tracking down on the Internet.

If anything, its conclusion -- that we've created a surveillance-industrial complex ``so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within or exactly how many agencies do the same work'' -- is modestly understated. Read my full op-ed piece on national-security welfare in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

Mailbag: Soccer hooligans

The readers write:

I enjoyed your column on soccer "evangelism'' as I call it.  Why in the name of Johnny Unitas, Bart Starr, etc. must some people feel that religious urge to foist soccer on a largely indifferent public? Is it better that football? Do more classy people watch it, like the yobs who riot routinely at soccer matches? Are we inferior to the Euro trash that look down their noses at American football?  I think it's snob appeal and part of the trend of our "betters'' to denigrate anything American and worship anything from abroad. They are wasting their time. At age 64 I ain't about to start watching a sport where nothing happens except guys in shorts running around chasing a ball.

Gary Beauchamp

Laplace, La.

   

Screw those guy who wrote letters on soccer that the paper printed today. I'm with your sports colleague, (Greg Cote?) who said watching soccer is like watching paint dry. I've got to look at soccer because my grandson is a strong player and I need to be able to talk with him.

It seems to me that after millions of years of evolution we have developed hands with opposing thumbs and it's stupid not to use them. It's like having opera with music and only pantomime, no voices.

Arnold Mercado

Miami

Then an aired on WLRN, the Herald's public-radio broadcast partner. Tough audience over there:

Whenever I hear an egregious grammar mistake on NPR, I send a message as I believe NPR should be the standard of grammar excellency in broadcasting. You’re the latest offender. It’s “fewer viewers,” not “less viewers,” as you said in your piece today on the World Cup.

John Virtue

Director, International Media Center

Florida International University

Miami

That's hardly the worst of it, John. I'm afraid poor Dana Davis Rehm might have inadvertently heard the piece and put her ear drums out with sharpened chopsticks in despair.

Poor Diane.