Ciudad Juarez police baffled by shooting of teens

The attack on a party attended by mostly high school and college students has 'no apparent motive,' the mayor says. The death toll rises to 16.

By Ken Ellingwood

February 1, 2010

Reporting from Mexico City

Authorities in Ciudad Juarez said Monday that they have no idea what motivated a weekend shooting attack against a group of young partygoers that killed at least 16 people in the border city.

The death toll rose from 14 after two more victims died Monday from wounds suffered during the assault, in which gunmen in seven vehicles sealed off the street and opened fire on a party packed with teenagers. More than a dozen people were wounded during the attack around midnight Saturday.

The majority of the dead were under 20, and most were high school or college students.

Ciudad Juarez has witnessed spectacular violence for the last two years because of a ferocious war between a pair of drug trafficking groups that has killed more than 3,700 people. Many of the killings have been gangland-style, with bodies lined up in rows or left headless in public places, and few of the cases have been solved.

Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said Monday that authorities had found no evidence to suggest that any of the young victims were connected in some way to criminal activity. Authorities have offered a reward of 1 million pesos, about $78,000, for information leading to the capture of the killers.

"The violence has always been between the criminal groups, [but] in this case in particular -- good kids, students, athletes -- there is no apparent motive for these deeds, and that is what concerns Juarez residents most today," Reyes said during a radio interview. "This case is very difficult for us."

The father of one victim wept during a radio interview as he called upon his government to stop the killing that has shown no signs of abating in Juarez.

"It's not fair, President Calderon. Hear these cries. They're not from families that have problems with drugs, it's from a father whose heart has been torn out, whose son has been taken away this way," said Adrian Cadena, whose son Rodrigo was killed.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-mexico-shootings2-2010feb02,0,4575039,print.story

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A harassment-free school opens in L.A.

A new academic program for grades seven through 12 serves lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth.

By Nicole Santa Cruz

February 1, 2010

Aiden Aizumi almost didn't graduate from high school.

Aizumi, now 21, is one of many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender young people who say they have suffered through school, enduring homophobic taunts and name-calling.

He completed his final semester of high school from home.

His mother, Marsha Aizumi, didn't want others to endure the same treatment, so she approached educators about a new school geared for such students.

The school, which serves grades seven through 12, is a collaboration between Opportunities for Learning , a charter school with 34 locations across Los Angeles and Orange counties, and Lifeworks , a mentoring program for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth sponsored by the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center.

The school opened for enrollment at the center in January, but it will host an open house from 3 to 7 p.m. Tuesday at 1125 N. McCadden Place.

Currently the satellite campus employs one teacher. Three students will begin instruction in the upcoming weeks.

The school's independent study program is tailored to individual student needs.

Students meet with an instructor twice a week and are expected to complete between four and six hours of work at home each weekday.

School officials will expand the program, which is open to about 40 students, if the need arises. Those officials say they aren't aware of any similar schools in the county.

Michael Ferrera, the director of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, said there's a demand for more safe programs that award high school diplomas rather than high school equivalency certificates.

About 86% of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender students reported experiencing harassment at school, according to a 2007 survey conducted by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

About three-fifths of students felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation and one-third had skipped school because of feeling unsafe, the survey found.

Eliza Byard, the executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, said schools that embrace every aspect of diversity are greatly needed.

"One could really not create enough seats for the kinds of needs that are out there," she said.

Ferrera said the educational addition to the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center makes it a "one-stop" shop for services ranging from job placement to housing.

Students can also participate in various community programs offered by the center. Aizumi said he'd love to see students succeed in the charter school but wishes it weren't necessary for some.

High school, he said, is hard enough.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-newschool2-2010feb02,0,1469618,print.story

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Abstinence-only classes may be effective for young teens

Other forms of sex education may work too, though experts call for more studies.

By Thomas H. Maugh II and Shari Roan

February 2, 2010

A new study shows for the first time that a sex education class emphasizing abstinence only -- ignoring moral implications of sexual activity -- can reduce sexual activity by nearly a third in 12- and 13-year-olds compared with students who received no sex education.

Other forms of sex education also worked, however, reducing sexual activity by about 20% and reducing multiple sexual partners by about 40%, according to the study reported Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

None of the classes appeared to influence the use of condoms or other birth control when the students did have sex. The children thus remained at risk of pregnancy and disease.

"This study, in our view, is game-changing science," said Bill Albert, chief program officer at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group based in Washington. "It provides, for the first time, evidence that abstinence-only intervention helped young teens delay sexual activity."

The George W. Bush administration poured tens of millions of dollars into federal funding for abstinence-only programs, most of them religious-oriented, with little or no evidence that they worked. And new data released last week showed that sexual activity, pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases are increasing among teens.

The Obama administration has sharply reduced funding for abstinence-only programs and has announced its intention to fund only interventions that have been found to work. The new study is expected to provide support for such interventions.

But Albert noted that this is only one study in one region. It "should not be interpreted as a signal that abstinence-only education works at all times and under all circumstances. That doesn't even pass the common-sense test."

In an editorial accompanying the report , journal editor Dr. Frederick P. Rivara of the University of Washington and Dr. Alain Joffe of Johns Hopkins University argued that "no public policy should be based on the results of one study, nor should policymakers selectively use scientific literature to formulate a policy that meets preconceived ideologies."

The study's lead author, psychologist John B. Jemmott III of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, agreed in a statement, saying that other types of students must be studied as well: "Policy should not be based on just one study, but an accumulation of empirical findings from several well-designed, well-executed studies."

The study was conducted among 662 African American sixth- and seventh-graders in four low-income schools in the northeastern United States. The students were randomized into four groups.

One received an eight-hour abstinence-only class focusing on the risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. It was based on principles shown to be effective in reducing transmission of sexually transmitted diseases and did not use a moralistic tone or portray sex in a negative light.

A second group received an eight-hour safe-sex class. The third group received a comprehensive eight- or 12-hour class emphasizing both aspects. The control group received education only about healthy living.

Over the two years after taking the classes, 48.5% of those in the control group reported sexual activity, compared with 33.5% of those in the abstinence-only group. About 52% of those taught only safe sex reported sexual activity, and about 42% of those in the comprehensive class made a similar report.

About 8.8% of participants in the comprehensive class reported activity with multiple partners, compared with 14.1% in the control group, indicating that the comprehensive class reduced the risk of sexually transmitted disease. Diseases and pregnancies were not monitored, however.

Catherine Camacho, deputy director for the California Department of Public Health's Center for Family Health, said previous research had shown that it made sense to include abstinence education as part of a comprehensive program.

"A comprehensive approach that does include abstinence is the most effective program," she said. "We have never disagreed with that. But we would prefer to call it abstinence-plus."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-sci-sex-ed2-2010feb02,0,2150232,print.story

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If not NYC, where else could Obama's administration possibly try the Guantanamo Bay prisoners?

Now that the Obama administration's Justice Department appears ready to deny the publicity-seeking self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind, his alleged cohorts and their defense attorneys the brightly-lit global stage of Broadway and the Big Apple for the trials, the debate begins over where best to hold them.

Chicago's South Side Hyde Park doesn't seem to be on the list of possibles. Nor Eric Holder 's neighborhood.

Gee, if only the United States had a secure military-type prison 90 miles offshore where it could not only safely house these accused possessed evildoers but try them as well.

Now comes a new Rasmussen Reports poll that could make President Obama hit his forehead with the palm of his hand: Why didn't we think of this?

Rasmussen found 44% of U.S. voters suggesting the trials of Guantanamo Bay prisoners be held in a place called Guantanamo Bay, which is 90 miles offshore on the island called Cuba.

Thirty-three percent don't like that idea, but weren't volunteering their town. And 23% couldn't decide.

Nineteen months ago, 54% of Americans thought these foreign guys should be tried by military tribunals on account of their allegedly being involved in a military conflict against the United States and its people.

As a result, the Obama administration decided to try them instead in civil courts as if the accused were American citizens full of rights. This decision can't be changed because Holder's Justice Department already dropped the military charges before placing the civil ones.

So now today, more than two-thirds of Americans (67%) think military tribunals are or would have been the route to go.

There's another homemade Obama catch. During the 2008 presidential campaign, as part of his change platform, the ex-community organizer promised to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility because it had a bad reputation. As opposed to, say, any other prison on the planet, which typically are so well-thought-of that the facilities must have barbed wire all around to keep people from breaking in.

Guantanamo was especially ill-thought of among millions of people overseas who can't vote in the U.S.

In fact, despite warnings that it was more difficult than it seemed from Springfield, on his second day in office before he'd even found all the White House bathrooms, Obama signed a real Executive Order ordering the Guantanamo prison closed by the end of 2009.

He couldn't follow his own Executive Order. Missed the deadline. Completely blew it.

In fact, it was more difficult than it seemed from Springfield, or anywhere else for that matter. Turns out, few of the other countries that were so eager to have Guantanamo closed were so eager to imprison its inhabitants on their soil. And it also turns out that, if released, about 1 in 5 of these guys went right back into combat against American and allied troops, which is a dangerous thing.

So despite the promises and the Executive Order, in fact, there's still no new or maybe firm date for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Although, by golly, it will be closed. Believe in it.

In the meantime, however, the secure facility is still there. Still secure. So are the prisoners. And the best part is, Guantanamo has no member of Congress to get his/her behind shot off by angry voters in this fall's midterm elections. As The Ticket pointed out here could happen in Illinois Tuesday .

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/02/obama-guantanamo-gitmo-terror.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+topoftheticket+%28Top+of+the+Ticket%29

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What Obama's budget plan may mean for California

More than $1 billion would go to the state for Medicaid and to help jail illegal immigrants.

By Richard Simon

February 1, 2010

Reporting from Washington

California stands to receive more than $1 billion from President Obama's budget plan to help cover healthcare for the poor and the cost of jailing illegal immigrants.

The budget proposal includes $25 billion in additional Medicaid funds for states, of which California is projected to receive $1.5 billion. States received a funding boost in the economic stimulus bill that Congress passed one year ago. Obama's budget plan would extend the funding through mid-2011.

The proposal also includes $330 million to help states pay for jailing illegal immigrants. The money has long been a priority for California officials, who argue that local and state taxpayers should not have to bear the burden of Washington's failure to control America's borders. California's expected $90-million share would represent a fraction of the nearly $1 billion the state probably will spend this year on incarcerating illegal immigrants.

A spokesman for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said a bipartisan group of senators would be working to increase that funding.

Still, the White House's inclusion of the money is an acknowledgment of the bipartisan support in Congress for the prison funding; last year, lawmakers rejected Obama's effort to eliminate the payments.

The budget proposal drew a predictably mixed reaction from California's fractured congressional delegation.

Cheering the proposed funding for the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, Rep. Linda T. Sanchez (D-Lakewood) said: "After years of working to maximize funding that both Presidents [George W.] Bush and Obama zeroed out in the past, I am pleased to see President Obama responding to congressional priorities."

On another funding matter, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) expressed concerns that a proposed cut to the Army Corps of Engineers' budget could reduce the amount available for an important flood-control project in Orange County.

And Boxer, while expressing support for most of Obama's budget plan, disagreed with his effort to end funding for Boeing C-17 military cargo planes that are assembled in Long Beach.

As for the state's GOP delegation, Rep. Jerry Lewis of Redlands, top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, criticized the budget proposal for its tax increases and what he says is excessive spending. "In my view, this bloated, unbalanced budget request should be dead on arrival," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-budget-california2-2010feb02,0,2401964,print.story

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D.A.R.E. generation wants marijuana legalized

Taxing and regulating has worked with cigarettes and alcohol. Why not try it with marijuana?

By Jonathan Perri

February 1, 2010

D.A.R.E. America Chairman Skip Miller writes in his Jan. 28 Times Op-Ed article, " Don't legalize marijuana ," that his organization has been successful in its efforts to reduce illegal drug use in the U.S. by educating schoolchildren. Indeed, protecting young people has long been used to justify marijuana prohibition. But in reality, our drug laws have failed to stop marijuana use among American youth but have succeeded in punishing them with damning criminal records, loss of financial aid for college and removal from after-school activities. As a graduate of D.A.R.E., I know all too well about the shortcomings of this program and of America's war on marijuana.

The simple truth is that prohibition doesn't work, and regulation and education do. Most young people will tell you that marijuana is easy to buy despite nearly a century of prohibition that has cost billions of tax dollars and put thousands of people behind bars.

Anti-drug groups such as D.A.R.E. refuse to acknowledge that today's marijuana prohibition causes the same problems as alcohol prohibition did in the 1920s. It's no wonder, then, that D.A.R.E. has been called ineffective by the National Academy of Sciences and, in 2001, was placed under the category of "ineffective programs" by the U.S. surgeon general. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2003 that there are "no significant differences in illicit drug use between students who received D.A.R.E. . . . and students who did not."

The fact is that legalizing, taxing and regulating substances reduces the harm caused by those drugs. A University of Florida study provided statistically overwhelming evidence that raising taxes on alcohol reduces consumption.

The Tax and Regulate initiative on California's November ballot would levy a tax of $50 per ounce on marijuana; the money raised would help fund drug-abuse and prevention programs.

Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs on the planet, yet thanks to aggressive taxation in many areas and education efforts, cigarette use in the U.S. has declined sharply over the last few decades. We didn't have to arrest, incarcerate or impose prohibition to achieve those results; we merely had to tell the truth to young people about the very real harms caused by cigarette addiction while imposing taxes and age restrictions. The most recent Monitoring the Future Survey, which asks students about their drug use, shows that more 10th graders now use marijuana than cigarettes.

Legalizing and taxing marijuana won't cure California's chronic budget woes. But should we really be cutting from education while spending all the money it takes to enforce our failed prohibition policies? Furthermore, the Tax and Regulate initiative would not allow the use of marijuana by people under 21. I certainly don't want more young people smoking marijuana. But some of the teens I helped as a substance-abuse counselor told me that it was easier to purchase marijuana inside their own schools than it was to buy beer or cigarettes from a convenience store. This is not what a successful policy looks like.

Many Americans are coming around to this view. Depending on the poll, either a majority or near-majority of Americans say that marijuana should be taxed and legalized. Even the American Medical Assn. has called for the federal government to review its absurd classification of marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, which puts cannabis right alongside heroin and PCP.

D.A.R.E. can warn people all day about the harm associated with marijuana use. What it refuses to acknowledge is that these arguments only support ending prohibition. If marijuana is so dangerous, D.A.R.E. and its allies ought to support efforts to remove control over distribution from black-market drug dealers.

It's time for D.A.R.E. to take a back seat to evidence-based drug prevention programs that don't use scare tactics. It's time to legalize marijuana.

Jonathan Perri is the Western regional director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-oew-perri2-2010feb02,0,5125881,print.story

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OPINION

A disappointing defense review

The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review is short on specific goals and ways to measure success.

By P. W. Singer

February 2, 2010

Every four years, the Department of Defense issues its Quadrennial Defense Review, a comprehensive vision statement outlining the nation's defense priorities and strategies for meeting them.

The document is always revealing. It provides a look at how the Pentagon sees the world and how it intends to move forward. The 1996 review, for instance, is remembered for its shift in strategy from preparing for one big war (an artifact of the Cold War) to two medium-sized conflicts. The 2006 review is widely viewed as the last gasp of the Donald H. Rumsfeld Pentagon to lock in its technology-focused agenda.

Now comes the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, released Monday. How will history remember this version? What will be the memorable take-away, the driving vision laid out for the military, for Americans and for the world?

I have read it multiple times, and I still don't know. The closest to a summary I can come to is this: We plan to do what we do now, but we'll try to do it a little bit better. That's probably not what was intended.

Producing such a document is a huge logistical challenge. It is written over the course of a year by more than 700 contributors, coming from offices and agencies across the Defense Department. They don't just contribute but also compete, with interest groups fighting to ensure that their visions (and slice of the budget) are highlighted in the final document.

The 2010 review is notable for its comprehensiveness. It captures the magnitude of the challenges that the U.S. military must plan and prepare for today, from fighting a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan to earthquake aid efforts in Haiti, all while keeping an eye on rising powers of uncertain intent. The document also does a good job of highlighting areas that typically get short shrift in defense policy discussions. It notes, for example, the need to better support service members and their families, with a special focus on wounded warriors -- fulfilling commitments that the commander in chief made when running for office.

Yet, for such an important effort, the report disappoints in two key areas. The first is that of vision. Washington insiders may care about which widget got mentioned or that the concept of preparing to fight two medium-sized wars was smartly dropped in favor of more flexible options. But the quadrennial review offered a far more important opportunity that was missed. President Obama has made a forward-looking, positive vision of America's role in the world a centerpiece of his policy goals, and the Pentagon could have used the review to expand on that vision as it pertains to national security.

Instead, the 2010 review offers more a series of agenda items than a comprehensive vision. Even more, most of these items are belated ones that should have been worked out since the 2006 version. There is no thread that links it all together, no broader framework that lays out the journey we are on, the challenges we face and, most important, what we must do to end up at our target destination.

Part of the problem is a lack of specificity. Only in some areas of the review (such as acquisitions reform or aid for wounded warriors) are clear goals set, with definable targets. Yet, having specific metrics is crucial for the document to have any sort of staying power. If a problem area is important enough to mention in America's primary defense policy document, then we should identify and commit to actual targeted goals to face it.

Consider the energy issue. The report takes the bold step of identifying the security risks of energy dependence, as well as arguing that reducing nonrenewable energy use by the Department of Defense is essential to bolstering national security. But the document doesn't set any goals or establish new policies to meet this need. Should military fossil-fuel use be reduced by 5%? By 10%? By when and how?

This happens in far too many sections of the review. The report identifies numerous key priorities for action, including long-range strike aircraft, personnel policy changes, cyber-warfare and the defense industrial base, but on far too many of them, it steps back from identifying how, when and where we are going to act on them.

Without an overall vision, and without hard targets to drive change internally, I fear that many critical issues laid out in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review will remain in need of action when we revisit them four years from now.

P.W. Singer is director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-singer2-2010feb02,0,837301,print.story

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From the Daily News

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President unlikely to reach his goals on jobs, deficit

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama's new budget sets two major goals: creating jobs and cutting the deficit. But his own budget documents cast serious doubt on whether he'll make much headway on either.

Unemployment will still be near 10 percent by year's end, the administration forecasts.

And any deficit-cutting strides will be modest in light of the administration's intention to spend heavily on jobs, education and other high-priority recession relief programs while shielding the Pentagon, homeland security, veterans, Social Security and Medicare from a proposed spending freeze.

"It's time to save what we can, spend what we must and live within our means once again," Obama said Monday as he unveiled his $3.8 trillion blueprint for the budget year that begins Oct. 1.

In hard economic times, it's hard for the government to simultaneously create jobs and reduce deficits. In this politically charged midterm election atmosphere, it may be next to impossible.

Obama vows repeatedly to get Americans back to work. But deep in the administration's thousands of pages of budget documents is its forecast for 9.8 percent unemployment by the end of this year - down only slightly from the current 10 percent.

The administration is predicting 8.9 percent unemployment at the end of 2011 and 7.9 percent by the end of 2012 - rates still deemed to be at recessionary levels. And that's assuming all the jobs proposals included in Obama's budget are adopted by Congress - a big assumption.

Even as the president submitted his budget to Congress, arrows were flying - from both sides of the partisan aisle and from special interest groups.

"None of this is easy," White House Budget Director Peter Orszag acknowledged.

Obama's proposal for a three-year freeze on some government domestic spending drew criticism from some on the left who saw favored programs coming under assault.

Republicans, newly emboldened by a Senate victory in Massachusetts last month, were criticizing other parts of the plan, with some complaining of tax increases on wealthy individuals, banks and some corporations while others suggested Obama's deficit-trimming features did not go far enough.

"We can do much better than that," asserted House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio.

Obama used his fiscal 2011 budget presentation to underscore his shift in priorities away from health care to job creation, a nod to the economic restlessness among the populace and the changed political dynamics that could signal trouble ahead for Democrats.

Capitol Hill deliberations "will be difficult, will be painful, will be partisan," said Stanley Collender, a longtime staff analyst for congressional budget committees and now a budget expert at Qorvis Communications. "The tension is clearly between jobs and deficit reduction."

But Collender said Obama politically had little choice but to emphasize both jobs and deficit-reduction given the nation's sour mood - so long as he puts more emphasis for now on jobs.

Asked whether creating jobs has a higher priority than reducing the deficit, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, "In the short term, absolutely."

In fact, many of the administration's deficit-reduction proposals would not come into play right away.

Most economists say the deepest recession since the 1930s probably ended last summer, but they also note that high unemployment rates often linger long after.

Lawrence Summers, Obama's chief economic adviser, said that means the country is in "a statistical recovery and a human recession."

Lackluster housing demand, tight credit, high consumer debt burdens and lower tax revenues for state and local governments are combining with high joblessness in weighing down the recovery.

Doesn't the administration's prediction that unemployment will continue at near 10 percent through the end of the year run counter to the president's promise of putting Americans back to work?

"Our projections of the unemployment rate reflect the particularly severe toll that this recession has taken on the labor market and on American workers," said Christina Romer, who heads Obama's Council of Economic Advisers.

She also noted it was in line with private forecasts.

The administration last year was overly optimistic, predicting last February that the jobless rate - then 7.6 percent - would be held at below 8 percent if Congress approved Obama's $787 billion stimulus package. Congress did, and unemployment still soared.

Presidential budgets tend to be like Kabuki dances, the highly stylized Japanese stage plays where the outcome is known well beforehand.

The president proposes and the Congress disposes, a maxim that is seldom truer than in this midterm year. Democrats are under severe pressure and Republicans, eyeing congressional gains in November, are defiant with little incentive to cooperate with the majority.

It is Congress, and not the president, that sets spending and taxing levels. All the president can do is send up a budget blueprint and make it sound like his proposals are the final word. They aren't, not by a long shot. Presidents can always veto what they don't like, but that's at the very end of the legislative budget road.

Also, the worst recession since the 1930s has depressed tax revenues. That, combined with spending on two wars and stimulus programs, has swollen the national debt to a whopping $12.1 trillion. This leaves little room to maneuver, either for Obama or Congress. They can only nibble around the edges.

"In politics, whatever the president can get voters to believe becomes the truth, but in economics the numbers establish the facts. Unfortunately for President Obama, Americans can add," said Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland who has criticized the economic policies of both Obama and former President George W. Bush.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_14313629

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Authorities find immigrants held captive in Reseda house

RESEDA - Authorities searched today for the smugglers who brought into the United States more than a dozen illegal immigrants found in a house in Reseda, where they were apparently being kept against their will.

Police went to 7942 Newcastle Ave. Sunday night in response to a 911 call from one of the 14 immigrants found in the house, said Virginia Kice of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Ten illegal immigrants were from Guatemala, three from El Salvador and one from the Dominican Republic, Kice said, adding that no weapons were found.

Kice declined to discuss details of the case. Typically, illegal immigrants are held against their will in a residence, such as the one in which they were found -- known as a "drop house" -- until the smugglers receive payment.

Officers went to the neighborhood after tracing the 911 call to the general area, then went door-to-door until they found the house with the immigrants inside, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_14310346

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Driving under the influence can be prevented by us all

WHEN I was arrested for drunk driving before checkpoints were invented, my slurred response to the officer's question, "Have you been drinking?" was, "Of courze, hazzn't effrybody?"

"What have you been drinking?" he asked. "Beer, wine, tequila, vodka, scotch, bourbon?"

"Yess" I answered proudly, trying to touch my nose while balancing on one foot.

This year sobriety checkpoints will be more evident and abundant. State traffic safety officials have declared 2010 as "The Year of the Checkpoint." Federal and state funding is now making it possible for local police to set up more sobriety checkpoints than in previous years.

The theory is that the checkpoints will create more public awareness of the serious consequences of driving under the influence, or DUI, and help get drunk drivers off the roads.

But how necessary are these checkpoints? Are there that many people drinking and driving? We constantly see with sadness the numbers of precious young lives lost in the war on terror. But the media seem impervious to the precious lives of innocent people killed every year by drunk drivers.

For example, last year 461 of our military personnel were tragically killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008, here at home, drunk drivers accidentally killed 11,773 people. Since 9-11 we have lost more than 5,000 men and women in the war on terror, but almost 100,000 men, women and children in drunk driving deaths.

Years ago, a cartoon showed the inquisitive, cute little possum, Pogo, dressed like a detective, walking in circles around a tree. He studied the footsteps as he circled the tree not realizing they were his own footprints. "I have found the enemy," he announced, "and the enemy is us."

Who are these drunk drivers who kill thousands of men, women, and children every year and hospitalize four out of 10 Americans sometime during their lives? They are in fact "us." They are good people - our neighbors, family members, co-workers and anyone else in the 60 percent of the American population that drinks alcoholic beverages.

Most of the people who come through my DUI schools are not alcoholics. They could be considered social drinkers. They go to cocktail parties, sports bars, or special events and consume alcoholic drinks as a social ritual. What we don't realize is that most drunk driving deaths are not caused by alcoholics, but by social drinkers like those stopped at checkpoints whose judgment has been impaired.

They know all the slogans like, "Think before you drink," "Friends don't let friends drive drunk," "Be a designated driver" and "Drink responsibly." But when the anesthetic properties of the alcohol start putting the left side of your brain to sleep, reason, judgment, logic and warnings go under the influence. Inhibitions dissolve and your right brain can come out to play. You can feel free, social, sexy, rich and famous. It's fun! It's also dangerous!

Without judgment you can feel like you are invincible and make half-brain choices that are irreversible.

We all need to remember that the feelings we are after are not in a bottle or a baggie. They are already in us waiting to be released.

So start having fun naturally and you won't have to worry about "The Year of the Checkpoint" or becoming a statistic in 2010. Should you be stopped and the officer asks, "Have you been drinking?" You can proudly and smugly say, "No, but thanks for asking."

http://www.dailynews.com/opinions/ci_14313737

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From the Wall Street Journal

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U.S. Steps Up Missions Targeting Taliban Leaders

BARGHANTU, Afghanistan—The tunnel entrance was no more than 18 inches high. Matt, a U.S. Special Forces soldier, stripped off his body armor, dropped his rifle and wriggled through the gap, pistol and flashlight leading the way. Some 150 feet in, his beam caught a shape: a bearded man hiding behind a pile of rocks.

Cornered, the man stood and greeted Matt with a smile, as if their underground rendezvous were a scheduled appointment between friends. Instead, he was frisked, handcuffed, bundled into a helicopter and taken away for questioning.

The U.S. military is deploying tens of thousands of fresh troops in a much-publicized strategy to woo the Afghan people through good government, economic growth and security. Yet behind the battle lines, the U.S. is quietly escalating a more forcible campaign.

In recent months, small teams of Army commandos, Navy Seals and Central Intelligence Agency operatives have intensified the pace of what the military often calls "kill-capture missions"—hunting down just one or two insurgents at a time who are deemed too recalcitrant to be won over by any goodwill campaign.

The Pentagon's fiscal 2011 budget, released Monday, called for increasing the number of elite Special Operations troops, buying larger numbers of aerial drones and expanding the amount of military and financial assistance to Yemen, the home base of the al Qaeda offshoot that claimed responsibility for the failed Christmas Day bombing of a crowded U.S. airliner. Meanwhile, the U.S. is trying to determine whether a U.S. drone strike in mid-January killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, though that group said Monday he is still alive.

"You've got to kill or capture those bad guys that are not reconcilable," Gen. David Petraeus, chief of U.S. forces in the region, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in December. He said coalition commanders plan to escalate counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan even more in the coming months. The CIA plans to increase its presence by 25%, though it won't provide exact numbers.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied commander in Kabul, made his name commanding similar special-operations forces in Iraq and sending them after hundreds of key insurgent and al Qaeda figures. His success was considered crucial to salvaging the Iraq war.

He recently told his staff in Kabul, "It's not the number of people you kill—it's the number of people you convince." But the stick remains as integral to his strategy as the carrot.

Typical of this approach is the December Special Forces raid on Barghantu in Zabul Province, a popular transit route for insurgents. During a six-month combat tour, which just ended, the soldiers stationed there conducted more than 100 operations to target Taliban commanders and facilitators, seize their weapons, disrupt their bases and destroy their sense of security.

Barghantu is a village of perhaps 300 people living in a few dozen mud-walled compounds spread out along 1,000 yards of orchards and dry river bed. Intelligence reports suggest the village serves as a bedroom community for passing insurgents.

The raid has two targets: "Objective Albany," a compound thought to be used to manufacture roadside bombs; and "Objective Syracuse," a man thought to be the local coordinator for bomb makers.

Two Blackhawk helicopters insert teams in and around the village. The first teams hit the eastern and western sections of the village at about 8 a.m., beginning the search for fighters and weapons. Another team is dropped off along the parched riverbed, or wadi, to block anyone trying to escape in that direction, while another team, headed by company commander Maj. Mike, sets up a command post on a rocky spur a few hundred yards above the village. The ridge is so narrow that the pilots have to balance the helicopter on its front wheels while the soldiers leap out. The Special Forces allowed a reporter to go along on the operation on condition that the soldiers' last names not be published and that certain tactical details be omitted.

The command team sets up machine-gun positions at opposite ends of the spur. They spot two boys on the barren mountainside collecting dry plants for kitchen fires. The soldiers escort the boys down to the command post so they won't tip off the Taliban. Soon, two more boys join them, huddling in thin shawls against the morning cold. The major gives them a Snickers bar and some trail mix. One boy accepts with a smile; another does so sullenly.

A half-hour into the operation, the soldiers scouring the village have already rounded up nine fighting-age males for questioning in the village's eastern section. But villagers tell them the bomb facilitator they're seeking left two days earlier.

The troops, with help from Afghan army soldiers, search a small compound at the base of the spur. They lead two men in turbans out of the house, bind their hands with plastic cuffs and walk them away through the bare orchards. A woman in blue and green robes stands outside the door, a baby in her arms, and wails in a voice that pierces the valley.

Soldiers in the western part of the village meet a man who offers to identify the local Taliban fighters. They show him photos of the men they've rounded up and he points to two of them; the names match those on a list of suspects the soldiers brought with them. Before loading the suspects onto a helicopter, the soldiers give them a final pat-down and discover a hand-grenade fuse on one. It's a small explosive, not the whole grenade. But it has enough force to blow off fingers, and could create chaos inside the Blackhawk.

Elsewhere, soldiers are still looking for the bomb facilitator, in hopes that he hasn't actually left town. The man found hiding in the tunnel turns out to be his father. He says he hid because he's scared of helicopters, but the soldiers find a mortar round hidden inside a wall in his compound. The explosive material has been removed, and the soldiers suspect it has been used for a roadside booby trap. "That guy is coming with us," says the company sergeant major.

At 11 a.m., soldiers are still searching for the bomb-making compound. A villager tells them it's the one kitty-corner from a small mud mosque. Sgt. First Class Clayton, a 26-year-old Texan, takes four Afghan soldiers to have a look.

They don't find any bomb-making materials, but they do discover something else, hidden under a pile of hay: a pair of U.S. Army fatigue pants. It's an alarming find—there have been intelligence reports that foreign insurgents plan to dress in American uniforms during attacks on coalition troops.

Meantime, two armed men are spotted running on a ridge a couple of thousand feet above the village. The deep tattoo of cannon fire echoes through the hills as two Apache attack helicopters strafe the men, apparently killing them, then return to the base to refuel. After they're gone, an unmanned surveillance plane sees a dozen more men emerge from the rocks and make their escape.

Just after noon the Blackhawks begin returning in waves, collecting the troops and the suspects they're taking for further questioning. When his Blackhawk sets down, Capt. Josh, an assault-team leader, climbs in and connects to the helicopter's intercom. The pilots tell him that on the way in they saw two more armed men trying to hide in the hills.

"Can y'all put me down on that target?" asks Josh, a 36-year-old from Mississippi.

The helicopter circles the trackless hills and flies over a herd of grazing sheep. In a sloping valley below, the pilots point out an oblong ring of crumbling rock wall, perhaps 30-feet across at its widest.

A red motorcycle leans against the enclosure wall. Nearby, a man holds his hands up in surrender. While one Blackhawk circles above, Josh's helicopter touches down. Afghan and American soldiers pour out and shout at the man to stop.

Moments later, a second man appears about 100 yards uphill. He wears a light gray turban and a threadbare pinstriped vest over a mustard-colored tunic.

The Afghan soldiers yell at him to halt. Instead, he bolts up the gradual incline, the barrel of an AK-47 poking out of his loose-fitting clothes. From his pocket emerges the antenna of a two-way radio commonly used by insurgents. Josh tells Lance, a 32-year-old, red-bearded fellow Mississippian, to fire a warning shot. Lance fires two.

In the helicopter above, Marc, a 32-year-old Coloradan, sees small fountains of earth erupt as the warning shots hit dirt. He leans and fires four more shots into the ground behind the man.

Instead of stopping, however, the man runs faster, dropping his rifle and radio in the rocky crevasses. He's 200 or 300 yards away when Josh gives the order: "Burn him down."

Josh, Lance and an Afghan soldier with a sniper rifle open fire. One shot hits the man in the right shoulder, but he keeps running. A second slams through the bone in his upper right arm. His arm flinches, and he spins around before regaining his balance and taking off again. "I can't believe that son of a bitch ain't going down," Lance tells Josh. Josh's next shot hits the man's thigh, knocking him to the ground.

When Josh reaches him, the man is lying on his side. "Come here," Josh yells in Pashtu, the local language. Josh knows the man can't stand, but doesn't know how to say, "Hands up."

The team medic quickly bandages the man's arm and leg to stanch the bleeding. Four soldiers use the man's blanket as a makeshift stretcher to carry him to the landing zone.

An hour after he was shot, the suspected insurgent is in the trauma ward of the 758th Forward Surgical Team at a coalition base in Qalat, capital of Zabul Province and about 25 miles from Barghantu.

Maj. Lisa Coviello, a general surgeon in a black "Operation Enduring Freedom 2009-10" T-shirt, cuts away his clothes, searching for additional injuries.

The 40-year-old Chicagoan is on call 24 hours a day. She says most nights she gets into bed around 2 a.m. and lies awake until dawn, her mind zigzagging with thoughts of broken bodies. "Please, God, let me sleep," she says to herself.

Dr. Coviello discovers a bullet hole on the right side of the man's abdomen. As she works on him, the man lifts his head and looks down his bloody torso to see a bulbous pink section of his own small intestine, about the size of a tennis ball, protruding from the wound. He moans and drops his head back to the stretcher.

His blood pressure falls dangerously low and his eyes assume a glaze of indifference. He's circling the drain, thinks Dr. Coviello. The trauma team struggles to locate a vein plump enough for an IV. Nurses and medics hold him down while the doctor inserts one into the femoral vein near his groin. They pump in six units of blood, from a supply collected beforehand from U.S. troops. His blood pressure recovers.

In the operating room, Dr. Coviello opens his abdomen and discovers that the bullet has torn 15 holes in his intestinal tract. She removes a damaged section of bowel, reconnects the ends and stitches up the remaining holes.

The man regains consciousness in the recovery room. Soldiers scan his irises and take finger prints. They ask him questions. He is, he says, a Taliban fighter

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703535104574646821214490310.html?mod=WSJ_World_LeadStory#printMode

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Indictment Unsealed Against Terror Suspect's Father

NEW YORK—The father of a man accused of buying chemicals that could be used to make bombs in a plot to attack New York City has been charged in Brooklyn with conspiring to obstruct justice.

The indictment, unsealed Monday, accused Mohammed Wali Zazi of conspiring with others to alter, destroy, manipulate or conceal "glasses, masks, liquid chemicals and containers, with the intent to impair the objects' integrity and availability for use in an official proceeding"--namely a grand jury probe into terrorism.

The charges were sought by the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn.

A lawyer for Mohammed Zazi didn't immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

Mohammed Zazi had previously been indicted in Colorado on the charge of making a false statement to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents. He is expected to make an appearance in U.S. District Court in Denver later Monday.

His son, Najibullah Zazi, has been charged with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. Najibullah Zazi has pleaded not guilty to the charge, which was filed in federal court in Brooklyn.

Prosecutors from the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn have alleged that Najibullah Zazi bought hair products in Colorado that contained chemicals that could be used to make bombs in connection with a plot to commit an attack in New York City. They also have alleged that bomb-building instructions were found on Mr. Zazi's computer.

FBI affidavits filed in Mr. Zazi's case said that he told FBI agents in interviews that he also attended courses and received instruction on weapons and explosives at an al Qaeda training facility in Pakistan.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204575039380619377438.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_5#printMode

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OPINION

A Tale of Two Terrorists

The Justice Department defended the lengthy interrogation of one terror suspect days before the Christmas bomber was hastily Mirandized.

The Obama administration's decision to read the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights has rightly come under withering criticism. Instead of a lengthy interrogation by officials with al Qaeda expertise, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was questioned for 50 minutes by local FBI agents and then later advised of his "right to remain silent."

It's well understood that the focus on gaining evidence for a criminal trial was an intelligence failure of massive proportions. Not well understood is that the most powerful recent argument for aggressively interrogating terrorists, keeping them in military detention, and prosecuting them in military commissions comes to us from the Obama Justice Department itself.

On Dec. 18, 2009, days before the Christmas attack, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, made a secret filing in federal district court that was aimed at saving the prosecution of Ahmed Ghailani, another al Qaeda terrorist. Ghailani is facing charges for helping al Qaeda bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Ghailani argues that those charges should be dropped because lengthy CIA interrogations have denied him his constitutional right to a speedy trial.

"The United States was, and still is, at war with al Qaeda," Mr. Bharara argued. "And because the group does not control territory as a sovereign nation does, the war effort relies less on deterrence than on disruption—on preventing attacks before they can occur. At the core of such disruption efforts is obtaining accurate intelligence about al Qaeda's plans, leaders and capabilities."

Mr. Bharara is right. The interrogation of a high-value terrorist is a critical opportunity to obtain intelligence. As Mr. Bharara pointed out in regards to Ghailani, "the defendant was . . . a rare find, and his then-recent interactions with top-level al Qaeda terrorists made him a potentially rich source of information that was both urgent and crucial to our nation's war efforts." Abdulmutallab's recent interactions with leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula made it likely he could give up actionable intelligence. He possessed unique information about those who deployed him, bomb makers who prepared him, and operatives who trained with him.

As Mr. Bharara's memorandum notes, "The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 . . . naturally resulted in a heightened focus on intelligence gathering to preempt another attack." He went on to say that "when the United States took custody of the defendant . . . and it justifiably believed that he had actionable intelligence that could be used to save lives, it reasonably opted to treat him initially as an intelligence asset."

The Justice Department did not bring Ghailani to a civilian court immediately after he was captured in 2004, preferring, after his lengthy interrogation was completed, to prosecute him in a military commission. It wasn't until June that his case was shifted to the criminal justice system.

Moreover, the government "did not Mirandize the defendant at any point to preserve the possibility of later using his inculpatory statements. It did not maintain a strict chain of custody with respect to physical evidence in the manner of a law enforcement agency. . . . Indeed, the goal of the [CIA interrogation program] was remote from law enforcement; the program's purpose was to gain intelligence, not to get admissible confessions or to gather admissible evidence."

This, according to Mr. Bharara's filing, was the right approach: "the defendant . . . did in fact have actionable intelligence about al Qaeda," and thus "the interest in national security plainly justified holding the defendant in this case as an enemy combatant, interrogating him, and prosecuting him for violations of the laws of war, even if that meant delaying his criminal trial."

Days after Mr. Bharara's filing, as the Abdulmutallab fiasco unfolded, Attorney General Eric Holder and other senior administration officials made it clear in congressional testimony and numerous media appearances that their focus was no longer on gathering intelligence to pre-empt an attack, but on prosecuting terrorists in the criminal justice system. That change in focus likely grew out of President Barack Obama's early decision to close the prison complex at Guantanamo, and to transfer high-value detainees like Ghailani who have been held there to the criminal justice system.

One immediate consequence of the president's approach is the effort by Ghailani's lawyers to take full advantage of a bevy of constitutional rights that are available to him in the civilian justice system, but which he would have never received in a military commission. Ghailani's demand that charges against him be dropped because of the long delay in getting a trial is likely only the first of a torrent of filings to come from al Qaeda members if the administration persists on trying them in civilian courts.

Administration officials have rejected robust interrogation methods and announced that those remaining Guantanamo detainees who would be neither tried nor released are slated to be transferred to a prison in Thompson, Ill.

These decisions have been accompanied by intensified investigations of, and threats to prosecute, career and political officials from the previous administration. So it is ironic that the assessments laid out in the Ghailani memorandum were not proffered by the administration's conservative critics, but by Mr. Bharara, who was appointed by Mr. Obama, and the career Justice officials who helped draft his filing. In other words, it was written by those who have been forced to deal with the consequences of trying terrorists in civilian courts.

This administration's approach greatly impairs our ability to obtain vital intelligence and puts us all at greater risk of suffering another terrorist attack. Hopefully, the administration will consider the arguments of its own prosecutors and change course before it's too late.

Mr. Rivkin, served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, is a Washington, D.C., attorney and cochairman of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Mr. Thiessen, a former speech writer for President George W. Bush, is the author of " Courting Disaster ," just published by Regnery.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204575039201390613906.html#printMode

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From the White House

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The White House's Commitment to Combating Violence Against Women

For six months now, I have held the first-ever White House position dedicated to combating violence and sexual assault against women and continuing the important work of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Every morning when I've walked into the White House, I've brought with me the stories of the many survivors I have worked with over the years.  I've focused on raising the profile of violence against women issues across Federal Agencies, states, tribal communities, and localities; coordinating interagency collaboration on these issues; implementing victim assistance programs; and integrating these issues into Administration-wide programs such as the White House Fatherhood Initiative , the White House Council on Women and Girls , HUD's fight against homelessness , and the Justice Department's recent effort to better combat disproportionate violence in tribal communities .  

Yesterday, I met with a group of 16 leaders of organizations that combat violence against women, provide resources for women who face domestic violence and sexual assault, and advocate for victims. During this meeting, I shared with these leaders the same information I am sharing with you -- information on how the White House, through the President's FY 2011 budget, is making combating violence against women a real priority.

Violence Against Women Act as a Budget Priority

The FY 2011 budget will provide a record total of $730 million to combat violence against women -- a $130.5 million increase in funding from the previous fiscal year.  The VAWA, passed in 1994, already provides thousands of victims with life-saving services, improvements in the criminal justice system and increased public awareness. The President's FY 2011 budget not only continues this strong response, but bolsters current funding and responds to the emerging needs of communities.

Crime Victims Fund

The budget provides a $100 million increase from the Crime Victims Fund, specifically for emergency shelter, transitional housing, and other local services for domestic violence and sexual assault victims. By focusing on both immediate safety and long-term housing assistance, we can help ensure that victims don't have to choose between living with abuse or becoming homeless. Furthermore, the Crime Victims Fund does not consist of a single taxpayer dollar; it is self-sustaining and supported by criminal fines, forfeited bail bonds, and penalties for Federal offenders. In addition to a fund increase from the Crime Victims Fund, the FY 2011 budget provides $140 million for battered women's shelters and services, an increase of $10 million from the previous fiscal year.

Victim Resources and Legal Support

The $730 million also provides vital funding for victim resources. The National Domestic Violence Hotline and Teen Dating Violence Helpline are receiving increased funding of $4.5 million to ensure every call is answered. The budget also provides $30 million in VAWA funding for victims of sexual assault -- a $15 million increase from the previous year -- which will be utilized by the Sexual Assault Services Program to provide crisis intervention, advocacy within the criminal justice system, support during forensic exams, and other related assistance.

The FY 2011 budget bolsters legal support for domestic violence and sexual assault victims by providing $50 million in VAWA funding for legal assistance for victims, a $9 million increase from the previous year. The Civil Legal Assistance Program will use this funding to help victims more easily obtain protective orders and other assistance available through the court system.

To build upon the above improvements in the criminal justice system, the budget also provides $188 million in STOP grants that provide better training, improved data collection, specialized law enforcement and prosecution units, and courts specialized for domestic violence and sexual assault cases.

Support Across the Board

Ending domestic violence and sexual assault is a priority for President Obama and Vice President Biden. I've written about numerous fund increases and initiatives that are testaments to this fact. In my meeting yesterday, the White House's commitment to violence against women issues was clear -- we are increasing support for women across the board. 

Read more about our efforts in the President's FY 2011 budget.

Lynn Rosenthal is the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/02/02/white-house-s-commitment-combating-violence-against-women

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Interview of the President by YouTube

Library

WITH STATE OF THE UNION Q&A

MR. GROVE:  Hello, everyone.  We're here at the White House today for a very unique event -- an exclusive interview with President Obama in which the questions come from American people who have submitted them and chosen them online.  My name is Steve Grove and I'm the news and politics at YouTube.

Mr. President, thank you for taking the time to answer these questions today.

THE PRESIDENT:  It's my pleasure.  Thank you, Steve.  Thanks for having me and thanks to YouTube for doing this.  We had a chance to do this before I was elected and had a great time, so I'm glad we can do it again.

MR. GROVE:  Great.  Well, let's tell people a little bit about how this works.  Five days ago as you were delivering your State of the Union address, we opened up our moderator platform on YouTube, where thousands of people have been submitting and voting on both video and text questions.  Some of them, as you'll see, were hard-hitting; others were emotional; some were even funny -- but all of the questions you'll see here today were voted into the top tier of the thousands of questions we received.  And none of them have been chosen by the White House or seen by the President.  So this should be a lot of fun.

Mr. President, let's let laymanmarcus from Silver Spring, Maryland, kick us off.  He submitted this video to remind us of where things were a year ago.

(A video is shown.)

Mr. Marcus writes:  "Mr. President, I know there have been political setbacks to getting health care reform done.  The 40 million people who have no insurance can't wait.  Will they be able to get insurance this year?"

THE PRESIDENT:  It is my greatest hope that we can get this done not just a year from now, but soon.  We came extremely close.  We now have a bill that's come out from the House, come out from the Senate.  That's unprecedented.  And if you look at the core components of that legislation, what you have is 30 million people who get coverage, insurance reform so that people who have health insurance are going to be able to be protected from not being able to get it because of preexisting conditions or suddenly losing their health care because the insurance company has some fine print that they didn't read.  It makes sure that we actually start bending the cost curve, controlling the rise in premiums, by instituting better practices in terms of how we reimburse doctors and how we ask hospitals to work together.  We've already invested in electronic IT, electronic medical records, things that can help make the system more efficient.

So we had this enormous opportunity, but the way the rules work in the United States Senate, you've got to have 60 votes for everything.  After the special election in Massachusetts, we now only have 59.  We are calling on our Republican colleagues to get behind a serious health reform bill, one that actually provides not only the insurance reforms for people who do have health insurance but also the coverage for folks who don't.

My hope is, is that they accept that invitation and that they work with us together over the next several weeks to get it done.

MR. GROVE:  A lot of people that submitted questions were sort of frustrated with the process of all of health care, and the number one question we got in health care came from Mr. Anderson in Texas who asked:  "Why are the health care meetings and procedures not on C-SPAN as promised?"  And then one of the top questions in the government reform category was Warren Hunter in Brooklyn, who said:  "How do you expect people in this country to trust you when you've repeatedly broken promises that were made on the campaign trail, most recently the promise to have a transparent health care debate?"

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I guess, first of all, I would say that we have been certified by independent groups as the most transparent White House in history.  It's important to understand.  We are the first White House since the founding of the republic to list every visitor that comes into the White House online so that you can look it up.  People know more about the inner workings of this White House, the meetings we have.  We've excluded lobbyists from boards and commissions, but we also report on any lobbyist who meets with anybody who's part of our  -- part of our administration.

So we've actually followed through on a lot of the commitments that we'd made.  And so Warren is mistaken in terms of how he characterized it.

What is fair to say is that as the health care process went forward, not every single aspect of it was on C-SPAN.  Now, keep in mind, most of the action was in Congress, so every committee hearing that was taking place, both in the House and the Senate, those were all widely televised.  The only ones that were not were meetings that I had with some of the legislative leadership trying to get a sense from them in terms of what it was that they were trying to do.

I think it is a fair criticism.  I've acknowledged that.  And that's why as we move forward making sure that in this last leg, these five yards before we get to the goal line, that everybody understands exactly what's going on in the health care bill, that there are no surprised, no secrets.  That's going to be an imperative.  It's going to be one of my highest priorities.

MR. GROVE:  Well, the central focus of your State of the Union was obviously jobs.  And a lot of people wrote in asking for some clarity around some of your plans for small businesses. I'm going to play you two video questions in a row.

Q    "Good evening, President Obama.  One year ago today my wife and I were both let go from our jobs in corporate America within 48 hours of each other.  We've since started a small business and we employ a couple people around us.  What is being done to free up funding and encourage the growth of other small businesses that have such a tremendous impact on our economy?  Thank you."

Q    "Colin Callahan, Costa Mesa, California.  Mr. President, how exactly are you planning on helping small businesses grow and prosper, besides simply providing tax breaks?"

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, let me start with some specific issues that confront every small business all across the country, and it's absolutely true that if we can get small businesses back on their feet then that's going to go a long way towards bringing the unemployment rate down because that's the fastest generator of jobs across the country.

Number one, small businesses really are still struggling with financing.  You hear stories everywhere you go that even profitable, successful businesses are having trouble getting financing because banks, frankly, just don't want to take the risk.  After having taken way too many risks before, now they're taking no risk.  And small businesses are punished for that.

So we've expanded the SBA loan -- the Small Business Administration loan portfolio by about 70 percent.  We've been waiving guarantees and fees, trying to streamline the process, just to get more capital into the hands of small businesses.  That's point number one.

Point number two then are the tax breaks that were alluded to.  It is important to see if we can give more incentives to small business.  So, for example, we're just eliminating capital gains for small business -- which is particularly important if you've got a start-up; 10 years from now you may end up being successful with your small business but suddenly you've got to pay taxes on it.  If you can take that money and, instead of paying Uncle Sam, reinvest it in your business, you can grow it further.  So we think that that's the kind of strategy that makes a lot of sense.

We want to also make sure that we're providing tax credits for hiring of small business -- small businesses that are hiring new employees.  And so we've got a whole range of proposals there.

Now, in addition to the tax credits, in addition to the financing, one of the other things that, frankly, small businesses need is just a economic environment that is growing.  And one of the things we're very proud of is the fact that we had a 6 percent contraction of the economy at the beginning of last year -- this past quarter we had a 6 percent increase in the growth of the economy.  That 12 percent swing offers greater opportunities for small businesses to prosper and thrive.

The last point I'd make:  One of the biggest burdens on small businesses is health care costs.  And probably nobody benefits more from our health care proposals than small businesses, because what we're doing is we're saying that not only will you get tax credits to buy health insurance, but we're also going to let you pool -- buy into a big exchange so that you have the same purchasing power as a big company like Ford or Google is able to negotiate with insurance companies and get a good deal, well, now small businesses, by pooling together in this exchange, are going to have that same leverage.  That will help lower their costs.

And for a lot of small businesses, it's not just a matter of giving health insurance to your employees; it's also just being able to buy health insurance for yourself.  That will cut down on small businesses' costs and they'll be able to, again, invest more in their business.

MR. GROVE:  A lot of Americans saw what happened on Wall Street this past year, and they wrote in saying, when are we going to get our bailout?  Here is Frederick from Florida, who submitted the number one video question in the financial reform category.

Q    "Mr. President, my name is Frederick from South Florida. I have a question about your HAMP program and why the banks are reluctant to modify loans for homeowners who can afford to stay in their homes.  Now, the taxpayers bailed them out.  They refuse to help us out.  And I would like to know what say you, Mr. President?"

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, look, this is something that we've been dealing with since the beginning of this financial crisis.  We set up a program for loan modification that so far about
4 million people have taken advantage of across the country.  You've got about 800,000 people who've gotten loan modifications that are saving them an average of $550.  And so these are not insignificant savings.  We've been able to get that done.

The problem is, is the number of people whose mortgages are underwater where they actually have a home value that's now less than their mortgage is a lot bigger than that.  And you saw declining values all across the country.

So the amount of money that we've been able to get into this program has not met the entire need.  We're now pushing the banks as hard as we can to make sure that not only do they do the most with the resources that we've been giving them, but that they also do a much better job of customer service with people who are coming to them.  I get letters all the time of people who've gone through all kinds of hoops, filled out forms; the bank doesn't call them back, or after they've gone through a trial period, the bank says, well, we now think we shouldn't give you a home modification.

What we're trying to do is to increase transparency and force all the banks to tell us exactly what are you doing with your customers who want to stay in their homes, can't afford to pay a mortgage, but need something a little bit more limited.

And I'm hopeful that we're going to continue to see more and more people take advantage of it.  But I want to be honest, given the magnitude of the housing problem out there, that there are still going to be pockets of areas where the housing values have dropped so much that it is still going to be tough for a lot of people, and we're just going to have to work our way through this as the economy improves.

MR. GROVE:  Mr. President, let's lighten things up for a minute.  We got a lot of people just submitting their ideas to you -- ideas for how to make the country better.  They wanted to hear what you thought about them.

Let's play sort of a faster round of a thing we'll call "Good idea, bad idea."  I'll show you an idea.  You say whether you think it's good or bad, and maybe just a few sentences about what you think about it.

First one comes from Aloha Tony, your home state of Hawaii. He says, "Mr. President, our deficit is higher than ever at $12 trillion.  Will you consider allowing the private sector to buy and take over the most troubled government-run agencies such as the U.S. Postal Service?"

THE PRESIDENT:  Bad idea most of the time.  There are examples where privatization makes sense, where people can do things much more efficiently.  But oftentimes what you see is companies want to buy those parts of a government-run op that are profitable, and they don't want to do anything else.

So, for example, the U.S. Postal Service, everybody would love to have that high-end part of the business that FedEx and UPS are already in, business to business you make a lot of money.  But do they want to deliver that postcard to a remote area somewhere in rural America that is a money loser?  Well, the U.S. Post Office provides universal service.  Those companies would not want to provide universal service.  So you've got to make sure that you look carefully at what privatization proposals are out there.

MR. GROVE:  So bad idea most of the time?

THE PRESIDENT:  Most of the time.

MR. GROVE:  Most of the time.  Next idea is a video.

Q    "My car insurance company will allow me to take driver's ed classes to reduce my monthly premiums.  Could we do the same thing for health insurance -- take class in cooking, nutrition, stress management, communication, parenting, stopping smoking, maybe even exercise classes -- and get a reduction on our monthly premiums?"

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I think the idea is a good one, and that is that if people are being healthy, that they should be able to get some incentives for that.  And a lot of companies are starting to do that.  We probably don't want the insurance companies, though, making those decisions because insurance companies have every incentive to take the youngest, healthiest people and insure them, since they're less likely to pay out, and then leave older, sicker individuals out of their insurance pools.  So it's important in any health care program to make sure that the young and the healthy and the older and the sicker are in a single pool.

But what we should encourage are individual companies who provide incentives for wellness programs, smoking cessation programs, they're going to get a workout once in a while -- those things are something we should encourage.  And the First Lady, Michelle Obama, she's really focusing right now on childhood wellness, healthy eating, getting exercise.  That's a campaign that she is going to be pushing all year long.

MR. GROVE:  Let's get one more idea in here.  This next one comes from JLevers in Dover, Delaware, who writes:  "Do you think it would be worth looking at placing solar panels in all federal, state, and school buildings as a way to cut energy costs and put that budget money to better use?"

THE PRESIDENT:  Good idea.  And we want to do everything we can to encourage clean energy.  And I have instructed the Department of Energy to make sure that our federal operations are employing the best possible clean energy technology, alternative energy technology.  And what we're seeing is more and more companies realize this is a win-win for them.  Not only is what they're doing environmentally sound, but it also over the long term saves money for them.

MR. GROVE:  Great.  Well, let's move back to the questions. And I got to tell you, the number one question that came in, in the jobs and economy category had to do with the Internet.  And it came from James Earlywine in Indianapolis.  He said: "An open Internet is a powerful engine for economic growth and new jobs.  Letting large companies block and fill their online content services would stifle needed growth.  What is your commitment to keeping Internet open and neutral in America?"

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I'm a big believer in net neutrality. I campaigned on this.  I continue to be a strong supporter of it. My FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski, has indicated that he shares the view that we've got to keep the Internet open; that we don't want to create a bunch of gateways that prevent somebody who doesn't have a lot of money but has a good idea from being able to start their next YouTube or their next Google on the Internet. So this is something we're committed to.

We're getting pushback, obviously, from some of the bigger carriers who would like to be able to charge more fees and extract more money from wealthier customers.  But we think that runs counter to the whole spirit of openness that has made the Internet such a powerful engine for not only economic growth, but also for the generation of ideas and creativity.

MR. GROVE:  Well, to get good jobs I think many Americans realize they need a higher education, but college tuition costs are so high.  Here is a video question from Saginaw, Michigan:

Q    "Dear President Obama, as a college student who has 14 credits and three part-time jobs, I'm just wondering what are your plans for -- plans to lower college tuition costs?  I know we're in a struggling economy right now, but any little bit that you can help would be appreciated.  Thank you.  God bless.  Bye."

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, John is right that college tuition costs are just crushing on a lot of folks.  And this is something that I remember from my own experience, because Michelle and I, we had college loans we kept on paying off for a decade after we had graduated from law school.

We've already done a huge amount to increase Pell Grants, to help increase the accessibility of college loans and grants at the college level.  But we want to do more.  And so we've put forward an initiative that is being debated in Congress -- and we hope to get passed this year -- where if you have student loans, that you will not have to pay more than 10 percent of your income on those loans; that after 20 years they'll be forgiven; and if you've gone into public service, they'll be forgiven after 10 years.  That would provide a huge amount of relief for people.

We still need to expand more the Pell Grant program and make it both accessible to more people and raise the amount of tuition.

In order to pay for this -- the best part of this is we can actually figure out how to pay for it, because right now you've got a lot of banks and financial service companies who are still middlemen in the federally guaranteed loan programs.  And if we can cut those middlemen out, then you've got several billion dollars that you can invest in the programs that I just described.

This is something that I've made a top priority.  I want us to once again have the highest college graduation rates of any country in the world by 2020.  We can get that done.  But this is legislation that needs to pass.

And the last point I would make, colleges and universities also, though, have to figure out how can they cut their costs, because even if we're putting more and more loans in, more and more money for loans, if the inflation in higher education keeps on skyrocketing, over time it's still going to gobble up all that extra money and we'll be right back where we started.  So we've got to show more restraint at the college and university level in terms of ever-escalating costs.

MR. GROVE:  Well, let's back up a bit just from the specifics of education policy and ask a more fundamental question, which comes from Sean in Ohio.

Q    "Mr. President, what do you want public education to help students become?  Should they be good workers?  Innovative thinkers?  Something else?  As a math teacher, I want to know what you think it means to be an educated person."

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I think obviously there's a huge economic component to being well educated.  We know that if you've got a college education, you are going to make multiples of what you would make as a high school graduate, much less a high school dropout over the course of a lifetime.  But it's absolutely true that a high-quality education is not just a matter of being a good worker; it's also a matter of being a good citizen, it's also a matter of being able to think critically, evaluate the world around you, make sure that you can process all the information that's coming at us in a way that helps you make decisions about your own life but also helps you participate in the life of the country.

And I'm a big believer that the most important thing that a kid can learn in school is how to learn and how to think.  If Malia and Sasha, my two daughters, are asking questions, know how to poke holes in an argument, know how to make an argument themselves, know how to evaluate a complicated bunch of data, then I figure that they're going to be okay regardless of the career path that they're in.  And I think that that requires more than just rote learning -- although it certainly requires good habits and discipline in school -- it also requires that in the classroom they're getting the kind of creative teaching that's so important.

And that's why our administration has initiated something called Race to the Top, where my Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has helped to design a competition among states so that they can foster the kinds of excellence in learning everywhere.  Not just in some schools, not just in some states, but in every school in every state.  If states want money, we're going to reward excellence, and we will show them what has been proven to work in terms of encouraging the kind of critical thinking that all of our children need.

MR. GROVE:  Mr. President, the number two category after jobs and economy that people submitted to was national security and foreign policy.  And the number one question came from  concernedconservative in Georgia, who asked about your plans for the war on terror.  And then Sean from Pennsylvania followed it up with:  "Dear President Obama, if we remove our troops from the war on terror, how will you continue to combat the threat of terrorism?"

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, first of all, I think it's important to understand that we are at war against a very specific group -- al Qaeda and its extremist allies that have metastasized around the globe, that would attack us, attack our allies, attack bases and embassies around the world, and most sadly, attack innocent people regardless of their backgrounds, regardless of their religions.  Al Qaeda is probably the biggest killer of innocent Muslims of any entity out there.

And so that is our target and that is our focus.  Now, they employ terrorist tactics, but we need to be clear about who our target is.

And we have to fight them on all fronts.  We have to fight them in very concrete ways in Afghanistan and along the border regions of Pakistan where they are still holed up.  They have spread to places like Yemen and Somalia, and we are working internationally with partners to try to limit their scope of operations and dismantle them in those regions.

But we also have to battle them with ideas.  We have to help work with the overwhelming majority of Muslims who reject senseless violence of this sort, and to work to provide different pathways and different alternatives for people expressing whatever policy differences that they may have.  And I think we haven't done as good of a job on that front.

We have to project economically, working in country like a Yemen, that is extraordinarily poor, to make sure that young people there have opportunity.  The same is true in a place like Pakistan.

So we want to use all of our national power to deal with the problem of these extremist organizations.  But part of that does involve applications of military power.  And that's why, although it is the hardest decision that a Commander-in-Chief can make to send our troops into battle, I thought it was very important to make sure that we had an additional 30,000 troops in Afghanistan to help train Afghan forces so that they can start providing more effective security for their own country in dealing with the Taliban, and ultimately allow us to remove our troops but still have a secure partner there that's not going to be able to use that region as a platform to attack the United States.

MR. GROVE:  Well, another central issue in the war on terror now is Guantanamo, and a lot of users wrote in about this.  Oh, actually, you know what, I think we're going to -- well, how about I come later -- I think that question is actually about Sudan, which you didn't actually address in your State of the Union, but it was actually the number one voted question, and it's a video from the EnoughProject here in D.C.

Q    "President Obama, more than 3 million Darfuris fear returning home because of instability.  Many fear that Sudan may be on the brink of war.  What will you do to galvanize the international community to ensure that widespread violence does not occur in Sudan this year?"

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, the situation in Sudan has been heartbreaking but also extremely difficult, and something that we started working on the day that I came into office.  Our first task was, at that time, making sure that people who were in refugee camps in Darfur had access to basic water, food, other necessities of life.  And this was after the Sudanese government in Khartoum had kicked out a whole bunch of nongovernmental organizations that were providing assistance there.  We were able to get that assistance back in to help at least initially stabilize the situation.

The next step in the challenge is to broker a lasting peace agreement between rebels who are still in the Darfur region and this government.  And I've got a special envoy who has been very active in trying to bring together the international community to get that deal brokered.

Part of what makes it complicated is you also have a conflict historically between northern Sudan and southern Sudan. They finally reached a agreement after a lot of work.  But the Sudanese now -- the southern Sudanese now have an option where they may be seeking to secede from all of Sudan.  That's another potential conflict that could create additional millions of refugees.

And so what we are doing is try to work with not only the regional powers but the United Nations and other countries that have shown a great interest in this to see if we can broker a series of agreements that would stabilize the country, and then allow the refugees who are in Darfur to start moving back to their historic lands.

Sadly, because of the genocide that took place earlier, a lot of those villages are now destroyed.  And so thinking about how to resettle these populations in places that are viable economically, that have the resources to support populations, is a long-term development challenge that the international community is going to have to support.

We continue to put pressure on the Sudanese government.  If they are not cooperative in these efforts, then it is going to be appropriate for us to conclude that engagement doesn't work, and we're going to have to apply additional pressure on Sudan in order to achieve our objectives.  But my hope is, is that we can broker agreements with all the parties involved to deal with what has been enormous human tragedy in that region.

MR. GROVE:  The question we missed from the deck, but it was about Guantanamo, and essentially he was just saying why is it taking so long to close down Guantanamo?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, it's pretty straightforward.  Number one, you've got a whole bunch of individuals in Guantanamo, some of whom are very dangerous, some of whom were low-level fighters, some of whom the courts have determined should never have been put there in the first place.  We've had to evaluate each of those cases, hundreds of cases, one by one, to determine what these various categories are, and do it in a way that stands up to our standards of due process and legal scrutiny.

Then we've got to figure out, if we're closing Guantanamo, where are we going to put them?  And we have proposed that there are a number of options on the continental United States where you could hold these people as trials either in military commissions or in Article 3 courts are pending.  But unfortunately, there has been a lot of political resistance, and, frankly, some of it just politically motivated -- some of it people being legitimately scared about, well, if we've got somebody who we've been told is a terrorist in our backyard, will that make us a target?

One of the things that we've had to try to communicate to the country at large is that, historically, we've tried a lot of terrorists in our courts; we have them in our federal prisons; they've never escaped.  And these folks are no different.  But it's been one of those things that's been subject to a lot of, in some cases, pretty rank politics.

And we've got to work through that process because Congress ultimately controls the purse strings in creating new facilities. If Congress makes a decision that they are going to try to block the opening of a new facility, it potentially constrains what our administration can do.  And so this is something that we've got to work through both in Congress but also with public opinion so that people understand that ultimately this is the right thing to do.  By closing Guantanamo, we can regain the moral high ground in the battle against these terrorist organizations.

There's been no bigger propaganda weapon for many of these extremists than pointing to Guantanamo and saying that we don't live up to our own ideals.  And that's something that I strongly believe we have to resist, even if it has some costs to it, and even if it's not always the most politically popular thing to do.

MR. GROVE:  Mr. President, we don't have much time left, but I want to make sure we get to the issue of energy, the environment.  One of the rare moments where you were able to get applause from your friends on the Republican side of the aisle in Congress the other night was when you mentioned nuclear energy.  And just today your budget announced tripling the loan guarantees for nuclear reactors.  A lot of people had questions about just how this would work and why you did that.

Q    "President Obama, record numbers of young people elected you in support of a clean energy future.  If money is tight, why do you propose wasting billions in expensive nuclear, dirty coal, and offshore drilling?  We need to ramp up efficiency, wind and solar, that are all economically sustainable and create clean and safe jobs for our generation."

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, you're not going to get any argument from me about the need to create clean energy jobs.  I think this is going to be the driver of our economy over the long term.  And that's why we put in record amounts of money for solar and wind and biodiesel and all the other alternative clean energy sources that are out there.

In the meantime, though, unfortunately, no matter how fast we ramp up those energy sources, we're still going to have enormous energy needs that will be unmet by alternative energy. 
And the question then is, where will that come from?

Nuclear energy has the advantage of not emitting greenhouse gases.  For those who are concerned about climate change, we have to recognize that countries like Japan and France and others have been much more aggressive in their nuclear industry and much more successful in having that a larger part of their portfolio, without incident, without accidents.  We're mindful of the concerns about storage, of spent fuel, and concerns about security, but we still think it's the right thing to do if we're serious about dealing with climate change.

With respect to clean coal technology, it is not possible at this point to completely eliminate coal from the menu of our energy options.  And if we are ever going to deal with climate change in a serious way, where we know China and India are going to be greatly reliant on coal, we've got to start developing clean coal technologies that can sequester the harmful emissions, because otherwise -- countries like China and India are not going to stop using coal -- we'll still have those same problems but we won't have the technology to make sure that it doesn't harm the environment over the long term.

So I know that there's some skepticism about whether there is such a thing as clean coal technology.  What is true is right now that we don't have all the technology to prevent greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, but the technology is close and it makes sense for us to make that investment now, not only because it will be good for America but it will also ultimately be good internationally.  We can license and export that technology in ways that help other countries use a better form of energy that's going to be helpful to the climate change issue.

MR. GROVE:  Mr. President, I think we're out of time, but I know a lot of people really enjoyed the opportunity to ask questions of you in this way, and we'd love to do this again with you some time.

THE PRESIDENT:  You know, this was terrific.  And I just want to thank everybody who submitted questions, whether via e-mail or over the Internet.  And I hope we get a chance to do this on a more regular basis, because it gives me great access to all the people out there with wonderful ideas.  And even if you didn't make your question, even if it wasn't on this show, we appreciate your submission, and hopefully we'll catch you next time.

MR. GROVE:  Great.  Thanks, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT:  All right, thank you, appreciate it

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/interview-president-youtube

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Introducing the 2011 Budget

Cross-posted from the OMB Blog, read more details on the OMB Budget page.

Today, the President transmitted the FY 2011 Budget to the Congress.  In about an hour, he will deliver remarks about the Budget, and after that I will be taking questions from the press with CEA Chair Romer.  This post gives readers of OMBlog a brief overview of the document.

After a year in which we took immediate and unprecedented action to rescue the economy from the brink of a second Great Depression, the FY 2011 Budget takes steps to jumpstart job creation, strengthen the economic security of middle-class families, and make the tough choices to put our Nation back on the path to fiscal sustainability.

When the President took office, the economy was on the brink of a depression. The economic crisis required that we take immediate and extraordinary steps to prevent a complete economic collapse that would have caused millions more to lose their jobs. Not all of the efforts we undertook to avoid a deeper recession were popular.   Nonetheless the President did what was right for our country's future: signing into law the Recovery Act to jumpstart economic growth and taking steps to prevent the collapse of the financial system.

A year later, the economy is back from the brink – and is growing again.  This "statistical recovery," however, is cold comfort for the millions of Americans who have lost their job. The President has therefore called for a package to spur job creation now – including small business tax cuts and investments in clean energy and infrastructure.

To sustain job creation and economic growth into the years ahead and provide room for the private sector to expand, we are also making tough choices in the Budget: cutting what doesn't work or isn't necessary and investing in what will help to expand the economy and employment in the coming years.

The Budget thus institutes a three-year non-security discretionary freeze that will save $250 billion over the next decade.  We're not putting forward an across-the-board freeze, but rather an overall cap on non-security discretionary funding in which key investments are expanded but we cut back on programs that are ineffective, duplicative, or just wasteful.  As part of that overall effort, we identified more than 120 programs across the government that should be terminated or reduced – generating $20 billion in savings.

At the same time, we are making critical investments in the areas critical to building a strong economy in the 21 st century. That is why we increase funding at the Department of Education by $2.9 billion or 6.2 percent, make the largest proposed request for Elementary and Secondary Education Act programs while reforming it to be more effective, and provide more money for Pell grants and Race to the Top.

To build a more modern infrastructure, the Budget establishes a new $4 billion dollar National Infrastructure Innovation & Finance Fund to focus on infrastructure investments of national and regional significance.

To help put the nation at the top of the pack when it comes to the new clean energy economy, the Budget includes more than $6 billion in funding for clean energy technologies while also eliminating existing fossil fuel subsidies. And to continue our country's proud, innovative history, the Budget invests $61.6 billion for civilian research and development – an increase of $3.7 billion, or 6.4 percent, over 2010 levels. 

As we focus our efforts on spurring job creation and jumpstarting economic growth, we also have to change business as usual in Washington and restore fiscal responsibility. Because of the irresponsibility of the past decade, we've seen a projected 10-year surplus of over $5 trillion at the end of the Clinton administration turn into a projected 10-year deficit of over $8 trillion the day President Obama took office.

The Budget lays out a plan to put the country back on a sustainable fiscal path.

First, we have already taken action to avoid making the hole any deeper. The Administration proposed, and the Senate just joined the House in passing, statutory pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) legislation. PAYGO forces us to live by a simple but important principle:  Congress can only spend a dollar on an entitlement increase or tax cut if it saves a dollar elsewhere.  In the 1990s, statutory PAYGO encouraged the tough choices that helped move the Government from large deficits to surpluses, and it can do the same today.

Second, economic recovery – on its own – would take our deficits from 10 percent of GDP to 5 percent of GDP. To take them down further, the Budget proposes a series of policies including: the three-year non-security freeze mentioned above; restoring some balance to the tax code by allowing the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to expire only for those making more than $250,000 a year and reducing the rate at which these same households write-off itemized deductions; ending subsidies for oil, gas, and coal companies and closing other loopholes; and putting in place a responsibility fee on the largest banks to compensate taxpayers for the extraordinary direct and indirect help they provided while also discouraging excessive leverage.

Third, these policies will take deficits down to 4 percent of GDP – amounting to $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction excluding war savings. But that is still not enough, and the only way to solve this is to change Washington, and bring Republicans and Democrats together to work on this problem. That is why the President wants to establish a bipartisan, fiscal commission to look at a range of proposals and put forward a bipartisan recommendation to balance the budget excluding interest payments on the debt by 2015. This type of process has worked in the past, and if everyone in Washington puts the national interest first, we are confident it will again.

Finally, as I have said many times before and will again (since it's still true!), the key to our long-term fiscal future is fiscally-responsible health insurance reform. All our steps to rein in the deficit will be for naught if we do not reduce the rate of health care cost growth over time.  The legislation passed by both the House and Senate will reduce the deficit over the next decade and put in place the key pieces that will help to bring down health care costs over time. Congress must now deliver on this promise of fiscally responsible health reform – the stakes are high, both for the millions of Americans who lack a stable source of health insurance coverage and for the fiscal well-being of the Nation itself. 

If we take follow the plans laid out in the Budget, I am confident that we will be able to spur job creation now and in years to come and put our Nation back on a fiscally sustainable path, which is critically important to the future growth and prosperity of the United States.

Peter Orszag is Director of the Office of Management and Budget

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/02/01/introducing-2011-budget

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From the Department of Homeland Security

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Readout of Secretary Napolitano's Roundtable with Law Enforcement and Private Sector Partners on Port Security

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010

Fort Lauderdale, Fla.—Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today met with federal, state and local law enforcement officials and private sector stakeholders in South Florida to discuss port security, including passenger and cargo screening procedures.

“Effective homeland security requires vigilance at all points of entry to our country—air, land and sea,” said Secretary Napolitano. “By strengthening partnerships between the private sector and federal, state and local law enforcement to increase information-sharing and establish better screening practices, we can continue to enhance the security of our nation's ports and the American people.”

During her meetings, Secretary Napolitano emphasized the importance of strengthening passenger and cargo screening procedures at our nation's ports—and her commitment to building effective relationships between law enforcement officials and private industry to ensure safety and security while facilitating legitimate flows of trade and commerce.

Secretary Napolitano also highlighted her recent announcement that U.S. Customs and Border Protection will begin enforcement of the “10+2” rule, which significantly increases the scope and accuracy of critical information gathered on shipments of cargo arriving by sea into the United States and bolsters DHS' layered enforcement strategy to protect against terrorism and other crimes at U.S. ports of entry.

For more information, visit www.dhs.gov .

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1265057653958.shtm

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From the Department of Justice

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Thank you, Senator Hagan, for your introduction.

Margaret Mead' s famous insight perfectly describes what happened here in Greensboro 50 years ago. She said: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has"

50 years ago four young students set out to change the world – And I am truly honored to be here today on behalf of President Obama, who personifies the change those students sparked.

It is appropriate that we mark this historic anniversary with the landmark grand opening of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. Our most important historic moments would lose meaning if we didn't work hard to remember them, and to continue to learn from them.

Those four young men, tired of injustice, hatched a plan to challenge it. They knew it would take courage to sit down at that lunch counter and stand up for their rights. They understood what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., meant when he wrote four years later, in a narrow cell in Birmingham, that "I am not afraid of the word tension…Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension on society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood."

Those four young men created tension. They forced this city to face up to its shortcomings, to acknowledge that there was injustice here. The nonviolent tension they created led to real change, and today we celebrate that change.

Our nation's laws no longer allow segregated lunch counters. Thanks to the courage and persistence of those four students, and so many other civil rights heroes, our society no longer condones discrimination on buses, in schools, in places of business. Our laws now protect equal rights and forbid acts of hate.

But that doesn't mean the work is complete. The long journey toward equal justice is not over. To be sure, we have reached some remarkable milestones along the way toward our most worthy goal. But discrimination and bigotry persist. They persist in blatant forms – burned crosses, burned churches, hate-fueled assaults. And they persist in more subtle, yet equally devastating ways in so many of our communities and institutions.

We see it in our education system, where many children still go to schools that are all too frequently substandard. We see it in the foreclosure crisis, where communities of color were all too frequently preyed upon by lenders who used the corrosive power of fine print, and bait and switch tactics – discrimination with a smile – to transform the American dream into a nightmare. We see it in our workplaces, where glass ceilings often shatter opportunities for qualified women and minorities. We see it in the voting booth, where poll tests and taxes have been replaced by more subtle tactics that dilute voting strength.

In short, we need this Civil Rights Museum so that we remember our history, however painful it may be. We need a robust Civil Rights Division so that we can continue to break down barriers to equal opportunity, and continue our quest to fulfill our nation's promise of equal justice for all. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have made clear that the Civil Rights Division is open for business, and I can think of no better way to pay tribute to Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Jibreel Khazan and David Richmond than to ensure the vigorous enforcement of our nation's civil rights laws.

http://www.justice.gov/crt/speeches/2010/crt-speech-100201.html

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WASHINGTON - Six alleged members or associates of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT) have been indicted and arrested for their alleged roles in the 2007 murder of two people in Nacogdoches County, Texas, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney John M. Bales of the Eastern District of Texas. 

The indictment, returned by the federal grand jury on Jan. 21, 2010, and unsealed today, charges the six defendants with violent crimes in aid of racketeering activity.  These activities include conspiracy to commit murder and murder.  Additional charges of carrying a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence and accessory after the fact in the murders were also filed against several individuals.

According to the indictment, the ABT is a powerful race-based state-wide organization that operates inside and outside of state and federal prisons throughout Texas and the United States.  The ABT was established in the early 1980's within the Texas prison system.  It modeled itself after and adopted many of the precepts and writings of the Aryan Brotherhood, a California-based prison gang that was formed in the California prison system during the 1960's.  According to the indictment, previously the ABT was primarily concerned with the protection of white inmates and white supremacy/separatism.  Over time, the ABT has expanded its focus more towards a criminal enterprise to include illegal activities for profit.

The ABT enforces its rules and promotes discipline among its members, prospects and associates through murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to murder, assault, robbery and threats against those who violate the rules or pose a threat to the enterprise.  Members, and oftentimes associates, are required to follow the orders of higher-ranking members, often referred to as a “direct orders.”

The indictment alleges that a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, David Clyde Mitchamore Jr., aka “Super Dave,” and his girlfriend, Christie Rochelle Brown, were murdered by Charles Cameron Frazier, aka “Mojo,” and Brent Nicholas Stalsby, aka “Twist,” because Mitchamore failed to repay an outstanding debt he allegedly owed to Carl Richard Carver, an alleged general in the Aryan Brotherhood.   The indictment alleges that after Mitchamore was killed, Frazier and Stalsby murdered Brown because they did not want to leave any witnesses to Mitchamore's killing.  The bodies of Mitchamore and Brown were discovered in Nacogdoches County on Aug. 10, 2007.

The following individuals were taken into custody today without incident. 

• Carl Richard Carver, aka “C.C.”, 43, of Lufkin, Texas, is charged with conspiracy to commit murder and murder;
  
  
• Charles Cameron Frazier, aka “Mojo”, 28, of Nacogdoches, Texas, is charged with conspiracy to commit murder, two counts of murder, two counts of carrying a firearm during a crime of violence and being a felon in possession of a firearm;
  
  
• Brent Nicholas Stalsby, aka “Twist”, 29, of Lufkin, is charged with conspiracy to commit murder, two counts of murder, two counts of carrying a firearm during a crime of violence and being a felon in possession of a firearm;
  
  
• Terry Lynn Stalsby, aka “Peaches”, 28, of Lufkin, is charged with two counts of accessory after the fact;
  
  
• April Nicole Flanagan, 30, of Lufkin, is charged with conspiracy to commit murder, murder and accessory after the fact;
  
  
• Carrie Christine Wood, 37, of Lufkin, is charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and murder.
  

Carver, Frazier and Brent Stalsby appeared today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Keith Giblin.  Wood, Flanagan and Terry Stalsby will make their initial appearances tomorrow before Judge Giblin.  The punishment range for these offenses includes life in prison or the death penalty.

The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Texas – Lufkin Office and the Criminal Division's Gang Unit, in full cooperation with the Nacogdoches County District Attorney's Office. This case is being investigated by the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration; the National Gang Targeting, Enforcement & Coordination Center (Gang-TECC); the National Gang Intelligence Center; the Nacogdoches Sheriff's Department; the Nacogdoches Police Department; the Angelina County, Texas, Sheriff's Department; the Lufkin Police Department; the Texas Department of Public Safety; and the Texas Rangers.

An indictment is not evidence of guilt.  All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/February/10-crm-110.html

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The Criminal Justice System as a Counterterrorism Tool: A Fact Sheet

The Obama administration is committed to using every instrument of national power to fight terrorism – including intelligence and military operations as well as the criminal justice system.  As a counter-terrorism tool, the criminal justice system has proven incredibly effective in both incapacitating terrorists and gathering valuable intelligence from and about terrorists.  In every instance, the administration will use the tool that is most effective for fighting terrorism, and will make those decisions based on pragmatism, not ideology. 

I.  Intelligence Collection

The criminal justice system has been the source of extremely valuable intelligence on al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.  The criminal justice system provides powerful incentives for suspects to provide accurate, reliable information, and the Department of Justice and FBI work closely with the rest of the intelligence community to maximize information and intelligence obtained from each cooperator.  Below are just a few public examples.

Cooperators Provide Intelligence on al-Qaeda and Other Terror Groups

• L'Houssaine Kherchtou, who was arrested, Mirandized , charged with terrorism offenses, and cooperated with the government, provided critical intelligence on al-Qaeda.  He testified in 2001 against four al-Qaeda members who were later sentenced to life in prison after being convicted in connection with the East Africa Embassy bombings.
  
  
•  After his capture in Afghanistan, John Walker Lindh pleaded guilty in 2002 to supporting the Taliban and, as part of his plea agreement, provided valuable intelligence about training camps and fighting in Afghanistan.
  
  
•  Mohammed Junaid Babar, arrested in 2004 for supporting al Qaeda and plotting attacks in the United Kingdom, has provided intelligence on terrorist groups operating along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border and has testified in the successful trials of terrorists in the United Kingdom and Canada.  He is scheduled to testify in another terrorism trial in New York later this year.
  
  
•  David Headley, arrested in 2009 and charged in connection with a plot to bomb a Danish newspaper and his alleged role in the November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, has provided extremely valuable intelligence regarding those attacks, the terrorist organization Lashkar y Tayyiba , and Pakistan-based terrorist leaders.
  
  
•  Adis Medunjanin, an alleged associate of Najibullah Zazi, was taken into custody in January 2010, and, after waiving his Miranda rights, provided detailed information to the FBI about terrorist-related activities of himself and others in the United States and Pakistan.  He has been charged with conspiring to kill U.S. nationals overseas and receiving military-type training from al-Qaeda.
  
  
• Other law enforcement cooperators are currently providing important intelligence regarding terrorist activity from East Africa to South Asia and regarding plots to attack the United States and Europe.
  

II  Incapacitating Terrorists

Hundreds of terrorism suspects have been successfully prosecuted in federal court since 9/11.  Today, there are more than 300 international or domestic terrorists incarcerated in U.S. federal prison facilities.  Events over the past year demonstrate the continuing value of federal courts in combating terrorism.  In 2009, there were more defendants charged with terrorism violations in federal court than in any year since 9/11. 

Past Terrorism Convictions and Recent Terrorism Indictments

•  Richard Reid was arrested in December 2001 and convicted pursuant to a guilty plea in October 2002 of attempting to ignite a shoe bomb while on a flight from Paris to Miami carrying 184 passengers and 14 crewmembers.  He is serving a life prison term.
  
  
•  Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was convicted in November 2005 of conspiracy to assassinate the U.S. President and conspiracy to commit air piracy and conspiracy to destroy aircraft. Ali was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
  
  
•  In May 2006, Zacarias Moussaoui was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to various terrorism violations, admitting that he conspired with al-Qaeda to hijack and crash planes into prominent U.S. buildings as part of the 9/11 attacks.
  
  
•  In September 2009, Najibullah Zazi was charged with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction as part of an al-Qaeda plot bomb targets in the United States. Several of his alleged associates have been arrested and charged in federal court.
  
  
•  During 2009, 14 individuals were charged in the District of Minnesota connection with an ongoing investigation of individuals who have traveled from Minnesota to Somalia to train with or fight on behalf of the terrorist group al-Shabaab .
  
  
•  In September 2009, Daniel Patrick Boyd and others were charged with plotting an attack on U.S. military personnel at the Quantico Marine Base, as well as recruiting young people to travel overseas in order to kill.
  

http://blogs.usdoj.gov/blog/archives/541

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