By Peter Nicholas and Julia Love, Tribune Washington Bureau

August 14, 2010

Reporting from Washington

President Obama on Friday took a strong stand in favor of building a mosque near the site where Muslim terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, breaking his silence on a political tempest that has left the country divided.

Speaking at a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan, Obama framed the issue as one of religious freedom.

Muslims "have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country," Obama said, according to a White House transcript. "That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances."

The uproar over the proposed mosque has rekindled a debate over religious tolerance in a post-Sept. 11 society. Some relatives of Sept. 11 victims have come out against the mosque, as have prominent politicians.

Republican Rep. Peter T. King of New York said Friday that Obama was wrong.

"It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero," King said in a statement. "While the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque, they are abusing that right by needlessly offending so many people who have suffered so much.…Unfortunately the president caved into political correctness."

A majority doesn't want to see the mosque built, national surveys show. A CNN/Opinion Research poll earlier this month showed 68% opposed plans to build the mosque, with 29% in favor. Count as part of the minority New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently gave a speech defending the planned Islamic center.

In a statement released Friday night, Bloomberg said: "As I said last week, this proposed mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan is as important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime, and I applaud President Obama's clarion defense of the freedom of religion tonight."

As the debate raged, Obama stayed out of it. As recently as last week, his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, described the matter as one "for New York City and the local community to decide."

But the White House's Ramadan celebration, held in the State Dining Room with about 90 guests, presented a unique moment for Obama to make his position known.

"Now, we must all recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of Lower Manhattan," he said, according to the White House transcript. "The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our country. And the pain and the experience of suffering by those who lost loved ones is just unimaginable. So I understand the emotions that this issue engenders."

That said, he added: "This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable."

Supporting the mosque is a dicey proposition for Obama. Polls have shown a certain percentage of Americans mistakenly view him as a Muslim. He is Christian. Defending the mosque invites suspicion that he is overly sympathetic to the Muslim faith. At the same time, Obama has taken pains to reach out to the Muslim world. He gave a major speech in Cairo last year calling for "a new beginning" between the U.S. and Muslims.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-mosque-20100814,0,6746973,print.story

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From the Associated Press

August 14, 2010

BUFFALO, N.Y.

Police say eight people have been shot, four fatally, outside a restaurant in Buffalo, N.Y.

Homicide Chief Dennis Richards says officers responding to a shooting at a restaurant in the city's business district around 2:30 a.m. Saturday discovered three people dead. He says a fourth died at a hospital.

Richards says there was a wedding reception at the restaurant, City Grill, earlier in the night. He says police don't know whether anyone in the wedding party was involved.

Richards says police are investigating whether an argument inside the restaurant led to the shooting.

He says they don't know how many shooters there were.

Richards says the dead include three men and one woman. He says four other people were injured, but he doesn't know their conditions.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-naw-buffalo-shooting-20100815,0,4980862,print.story

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By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times

August 14, 2010

Reporting from Cairo

Russia announced Friday that it will soon begin loading fuel into Iran's first nuclear power plant, the initial step toward bringing the long-delayed project on line at a time when the U.S. is attempting to weaken Tehran's atomic program with new international sanctions.

Russia's state atomic agency, which is overseeing the plant near Bushehr, said low-enriched uranium would be added Aug. 21 but that the power station may not be fully active for months. Work on the facility began in the 1970s, when Iran staked much of its national pride on the development of nuclear energy.

"The event will symbolize that the period of testing is over and the stage of physical start-up has begun," according to a statement released by the Russian atomic agency.

The $1-billion contract between Russia and Iran is designed to prevent Tehran from enriching uranium to weapons-grade strength. Russia has provided the 1,000-megawatt plant with low-enriched uranium, which has been sealed and monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran is also required to return fuel and plutonium generated at Bushehr to Russia for reprocessing.

Ali Akbar Salehi, chief of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, was quoted by IRNA news service as saying: "God willing, we will prepare ourselves to transfer the fuel of the nuclear plant from outside of the plant to the heart of the plant inside the premises next week."

Although the Bushehr project is not connected to Iran's secret enrichment program, which Western powers suspect is designed to make nuclear weapons, Washington has been frustrated that Russian plans to activate the plant send mixed signals to Iran.

The Obama administration pushed for a new round of United Nations economic sanctions in June in another effort to force Tehran to make its atomic program more transparent. The U.S. and European Union followed that move with tougher sets of unilateral sanctions.

A senior administration official who requested anonymity played down U.S. concerns about the Russian action, while acknowledging that American officials have raised objections to the arrangement for more than a decade.

He noted that the plant would be monitored by the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency and that the facility's purpose was to provide electricity.

"We do not view it as a proliferation risk," he said, adding that Tehran's willingness to receive nuclear fuel from Russia "undercuts Iran's rationale for having its own, indigenous enrichment capability."

Iran says its nuclear ambitions center on generating civilian energy and producing medical isotopes. Salehi said U.N. inspectors would be invited to watch the unsealing of the fuel and that an inauguration ceremony would be held at Bushehr in coming weeks.

After nuclear fuel is transferred to the reactor, the next step involves loading the fuel into the core, followed by the triggering of a nuclear reaction by moving fuel rods closer to one another.

The project was begun by the German firm Siemens in the 1970s under the rule of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The plant on the Persian Gulf coast fell into disarray after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and was restarted in the mid-1990s when Russia took over.

Bushehr was supposed to begin producing electricity in 2006, but there were construction delays and suggestions that Russia was impeding progress as a diplomatic tool to rein in Iran's nuclear program in order to placate Washington and gain favor with the West.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran-russia-nuclear-20100814,0,7259635,print.story

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The Obama administration says attempts to change the U.S. constitutional amendment that grants automatic citizenship to people born in the United States are “just wrong.”

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says she is surprised that Republican congressional leaders are joining a push to reconsider the 14th Amendment instead of working with Democrats on comprehensive changes in immigration rules. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says President Obama agrees with Napolitano's position.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said he supports holding hearings on the 14th Amendment, although he emphasized that Washington should remain focused on border security.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dcnow/2010/08/obama-administration-slams-attacks-on-birthright-citizenship.html

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President Obama has signed into law a $600-million border security bill that will put more agents and equipment along the Mexican border.

Obama signed the bill in the White House Friday. The measure will fund the hiring of 1,000 new Border Patrol agents to be deployed at critical areas along the border, as well as more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. It also provides for new communications equipment and greater use of unmanned surveillance drones.

Some Republicans, including border state Arizona Sen. John McCain, say that though the legislation is a start, it falls short by not dramatically increasing the number of customs inspectors along the border and not funding a program that charges illegal immigrants with a low-level crime.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dcnow/2010/08/obama-signs-600m-border-security-bill-into-law.html

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An Afghan girl featured on the Aug. 9 cover of Time magazine after her nose was cut off met with Southland doctors this week in preparation for treatment.

The 18-year-old, identified only as Bibi Aisha (Miss Aisha), told Time that her nose and ears were cut off by her abusive husband -- with Taliban approval -- to punish her for running away. The controversial photo appeared with the headline, "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan."

The Grossman Burn Foundation, based in Calabasas, paid to bring Aisha to Los Angeles, found an Afghan host family that speaks Pashtun and is funding her treatment at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital. That could include a prosthetic nose or reconstruction of her nose and ears using bone, tissue and cartilage from the rest of her body, according to Dr. Peter Grossman, a plastic surgeon and the center's co-director.

Aisha has met with Grossman and other surgeons twice since she arrived last week, most recently on Thursday, according to a statement released Friday by foundation spokeswoman Stacy Tilliss.

“The purpose of these meetings has been to evaluate her physically and emotionally in order to determine the best course for her treatment, and to explain to her everything the surgeries will entail so she can make informed decisions before consenting to moving ahead with the operations,” Tilliss said.

“This is a difficult time for any patient, but especially so for Bibi Aisha,” Tillis wrote. “She has not agreed to make any media appearances yet, and her doctors feel that exposing her to the kind of intense media scrutiny that she faced before coming to the Grossman Burn Center would only distract her from focusing on this critically important phase of her treatment plan.”  

Aisha had been given away by her Pashtun family in Oruzgan province at the age of 16 to pay a debt and married to a Taliban fighter, according to her account. She fled, but her husband's family tracked her down last year and, upon order from a Taliban court, her husband cut off her nose and left her in the mountains to die, according to a statement on the foundation's website.

“Bibi Aisha is only one example of thousands of girls and women in Afghanistan and throughout the world who are treated this way,” the statement said. “Aisha is reminded of that enslavement every time she looks in the mirror. But there still times she can laugh. And at that moment you see her teenage spirit escaping a body that has seen a lifetime of injustice.”

Aisha was assisted by an American military provincial reconstruction team and a women's shelter in Kabul, where she stayed until last week, when she boarded a plane to the U.S. via London, leaving behind a sister and other family, according to the foundation statement and Tilliss.

Officials at Women for Afghan Women, the nonprofit that operates the Kabul shelter, have said Aisha's case shows why international forces must not leave the country.

“Soldiers in Afghanistan saved Bibi's life, nursed her back to health in their clinic, flew her to the WAW shelter,” said Esther Hyneman, a member of the Fresh Meadow, N.Y.-based group's board, in a statement posted on their website last week.

“As we write this letter, a female soldier from that base who established a deep relationship with Bibi is flying to California to meet Bibi's plane, to provide the love and support Bibi will need in the next few months. The presence of soldiers may not have stopped the horrendous abuse Bibi suffered, but that does not mean they should leave.”

For more information, contact stacy@grossmanburnfoundation.org or call  (818) 597-5211 or visit http://www.grossmanburnfoundation.org/aisha.htm

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/08/afghan-girl-whose-nose-was-cut-off-meets-with-doctors.html#more

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OPINION

Tim Rutten

August 14, 2010

Two millenniums ago, an itinerant young Galilean teacher with a fondness for parables told one of his audiences that no sensible person ever would pour new wine into old wineskins. The skins, after all, would burst, and ruin would follow.

It's an apt metaphor for this increasingly frenzied and foolish moment in our history. Rising tides of anti-Muslim hysteria and animosity toward undocumented immigrants, most of whom are Latinos (the bitter new wine), have conjoined and are forcing us toward an eerie recapitulation of the Nativist movements (the dreary old skin) that roiled our nation's national and state politics for more than 120 years. Ever since 9/11, a sensible rejection of Salafism and other variants of politicized Islamic neo-fundamentalism has been given way in many quarters to a generalized antipathy to Islam itself. Step by step, that prejudice is migrating into the political mainstream, a process that has accelerated with the controversy over a proposed Islamic study center a few blocks from ground zero.

This week, for example, Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis at the American Family Assn., wrote that 1st Amendment guarantees of religious freedom do not apply to Muslims and that no more mosques should be constructed anywhere in America. As he told a reporter for a leading political website (talkingpointsmemo.com), every single mosque is a potential terrorist training center or recruitment center for jihad and thus "you cannot claim 1st Amendment protections if your religious organization is engaged in subversive activities."

Fischer is hardly a figure from the fringe. He will be speaking at next month's Values Voter Summit — his organization is one of the event's sponsors — along with GOP presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Speaking of plots, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) continues to insist that the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to those born in the United States, should be repealed because jihadists are sneaking across our borders and having children, who they then take back abroad to be trained as terrorists but who one day will reenter the country as citizens bent on our violent destruction. The FBI says there is no evidence to support this claim, but on CNN this week, the former judge compared himself to Winston Churchill warning his countrymen against Adolf Hitler's rise.

There were vulgar Nativist firebrands from the 1840s forward who indulged in hysteria about Catholic and, later, Jewish and Orthodox Christian immigrants. More influential, and insidious, were what might be called "reasonable Nativists," like the otherwise admirable John Quincy Adams, who were too fastidious for overt bigotry but argued more in sorrow than in anger that immigrants who believed what Catholics believe simply couldn't be assimilated into the United States because their fundamental beliefs were foreign to our values.

Obviously, if you really thought the millions of Catholic immigrants pouring into the United States lived their lives in full conformity to every papal tic and dictate, there was reason for concern. In fact, Catholic parishes across the country, particularly under Irish-born pastors, became powerful educational forces, inculcating American notions of middle-class respectability into new immigrants. Patriotism was preached from those pulpits far more often than any papal bull. Similarly, recent studies have shown that young American Muslims whose families are formally affiliated with a mosque are far less likely to flirt with any form of radicalism than those without that connection.

The notion is ludicrous that the legions of Americans who profess Islam and go about their daily lives exactly like the rest of us somehow are hanging on the latest fatwa from some benighted Wahhabi imam back in the Middle East.

So too the movement to repeal or gut the 14th Amendment. It's little recalled today, but from its inception in the Alien and Sedition Acts, Nativism has sought to alter the legal terms of citizenship. Throughout the 19th century, states attempted to pass similar measures, attaching different times and conditions to full citizenship. Though it's fashionable in the current debate to assert that the 14th Amendment was conceived simply to guarantee the rights of freed slaves, serious constitutional historians point out that it also was intended to impose one uniform standard of citizenship.

Nativism was one of our history's most painful chapters. Reliving it would be torture.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0814-rutten-20100814,0,5854651,print.column

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OPINION

August 14, 2010

Saturday marks the 75th anniversary of Social Security, the largest and most enduring of the social programs enacted during the New Deal. Created as a modest retirement program for workers, it has morphed into a safety net for their families, the elderly and the disabled. It is also the federal government's single largest program, accounting for a fifth of all spending.

The anniversary of the law's enactment arrives just after the board overseeing the Social Security Trust Fund warned yet again that the program was on a gradual path to insolvency, with too few workers supporting the retirements of the baby boom generation. There are enough reserves in the trust fund to last a few more decades, but the longer Congress waits to address the problem, the harder it will be to fix.

By the end of last year, about 53 million retirees, disabled workers and their survivors or dependents were drawing Social Security benefits. That's one of every six Americans, with an average benefit of about $1,000 a month. Although much of that money goes to people who may not need it — just as all workers' wages are taxed regardless of income, so do all who were taxed receive benefits when they retire or become disabled — the monthly checks account for more than half the income of about 60% of those over 65, and help keep nearly 20 million people out of poverty.

As Social Security has grown, though, the cost to taxpayers has increased dramatically. The program is funded through taxes on wages and on Social Security benefits paid to higher-income recipients. The payroll tax rate has climbed from 2% in 1937 — half paid directly by workers, the other half paid by employers — to 12.4% today. That's more than two-thirds of U.S. wage-earners pay in income taxes.

The challenge facing Social Security isn't the expanded benefits as much as it is changing demographics. The taxes paid by today's workers finance current retirees' benefits, but a drop in birthrates and family sizes following the baby boom generation is reducing the ratio of workers to retirees. Anticipating this, Congress raised the payroll tax and scaled back benefits in 1983 to build up the trust fund's reserve, but those steps haven't been enough to solve the problem.

The cost of benefits is on track to surpass payroll tax revenues for good by the middle of this decade. Interest on the trust fund should cover the gap until 2025, at which point benefits will start draining the fund. By 2037, the trust fund is projected to be empty. Whether it lasts more or fewer years, though, will depend on several variables, including the increase in lifespans, the growth in the economy and wages, and the rates of inflation, unemployment and immigration. The harder it is for new workers to enter the country and pay payroll taxes, the more quickly the trust fund will be depleted.

Coming up with a solution that works actuarially is relatively simple. The hard part is the politics. Any path lawmakers choose will involve sacrifice on someone's part — workers, beneficiaries or both.

Conservatives have tried for several years to use the trust fund's long-term troubles as a rationale for privatizing Social Security. But allowing workers to take control (and responsibility) for all or part of their accounts would only exacerbate the problem. That's because, despite $2.5 trillion in reserves, the trust fund isn't large enough to finance the benefits promised to workers already in the system. Shifting payroll taxes from the trust fund to private accounts would make the shortfall worse.

Privatization would also remove the most important feature of the system: its ability to provide a stable source of income. The trust fund invests in long-term U.S. government bonds, which deliver returns that are smaller but far safer than the stock market's. If you doubt that, compare the performance of Treasury bills with what's happened in recent years to your 401(k).

The real options for improving the trust fund's solvency include raising the retirement age, which analyst Henry Aaron has likened to an across-the-board benefit cut of more than 6% per added year. The trust fund board's report also said the gap could be closed by immediately and permanently raising payroll taxes by nearly 2% or by cutting benefits by 12%. But the former would deter employers from hiring, sabotaging the economic recovery, and the latter would have the greatest impact on those struggling to stay afloat.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has outlined several less draconian approaches. These include trimming the automatic cost-of-living adjustments, which some analysts believe overcompensate for inflation; tweaking benefit formulas to replace a smaller percentage of high-income workers' wages; and basing an individual's benefits on a longer work history, which would reduce benefits for some workers by factoring more of the years they spent working for lower wages. Another alternative is raising the amount of wages subject to the payroll tax above the current cap of $106,800. Unless the taxes on those wages translated into higher benefits for the people who paid them, however, the change would make Social Security look less like insurance and more like a transfer of wealth.

Again, there are no pain-free approaches. But the longer lawmakers wait to fix the problems lurking in the trust fund, the larger the percentage increase in taxes or decrease in benefits will have to be. It may take years to drain the Social Security Trust Fund, but the most painful option for Congress is to do nothing in the meantime.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-socialsecurity-20100814,0,627947,print.story

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OPINION

By Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen 

August 14, 2010

Alf Landon, the Kansas governor running as the Republican Party's 1936 presidential candidate, called it a "fraud on the working man." Silas Strawn, a former president of both the American Bar Assn. and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said it was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempt to "Sovietize the country." The American Medical Assn. denounced it as a "compulsory socialistic tax."

What was this threat to American prosperity, freedom and democracy they were all decrying? It was Social Security, which Roosevelt signed into law on Aug. 14, 1935 — 75 years ago Saturday.

The opponents of Social Security were not right-wing extremists (the counterparts of today's "tea party") but the business establishment and the Republican Party mainstream.

In the early Depression years, more than half of America's elderly lived in poverty. But most business leaders and conservatives considered the very idea that government had a moral responsibility to help senior citizens retire with dignity to be outrageously radical, a dangerous trampling of individual liberty. They predicted that the Social Security tax would bankrupt the country.

As New York's former governor, Roosevelt knew that business groups had opposed the most important pieces of social legislation on that state's books, including the factory inspection law (passed as a result of the 1911 Triangle Shirt Waist factory fire that killed 146 women), the law limiting women's workweek to 54 hours, unemployment insurance, pensions for the elderly and public works projects to put people back to work.

Once elected president, FDR viewed Social Security as part of his broader New Deal effort to humanize capitalism. Born to privilege, he understood that many wealthy people considered him a traitor to his class. They were, he thought, greedy, unenlightened and on the wrong side of history.

FDR outmaneuvered Social Security's opponents, using his bully pulpit to explain why they were misguided.

"A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing," he said in a June 1934 "fireside chat" on the radio. "Sometimes they will call it fascism, sometimes communism, sometimes regimentation, sometimes socialism. But in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.... I believe that what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment of what Americans have always been doing — a fulfillment of old and tested American ideals."

Most Americans agreed. Running for reelection the next year, FDR beat Landon in a 60.8% to 36.6% landslide.

Today, Social Security insures families against the loss of income caused by retirement, disability or death. It provides more than $600 billion in benefits to 51 million people. It lifts more than 35 million older Americans out of poverty. One-third of Social Security's beneficiaries collect survivors or disability insurance, keeping millions of families with a disabled or deceased breadwinner from destitution.

Americans view Social Security as a central component of the nation's social contract. It is probably the most popular federal government program. Not surprisingly, when President George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security — essentially asking Americans to put the security of their future in the stock market — the people considered it a preposterous idea, especially after they had watched thousands of Enron investors lose their savings and saw the stock market lose 38% of its value between January 2000 and October 2002.

Today, 77% of Americans — even 68% of Republicans — believe that policymakers in Washington should "leave Social Security alone" and find other ways to reduce the deficit, according to a national poll in June by the University of New Hampshire. In fact, 75% of tea party supporters favor Social Security and Medicare, a New York Times/CBS News poll found in April.

There are still a handful of Americans who bash Social Security. They dress up their arguments in different clothing, but their views haven't changed much from those of their counterparts 75 years ago. We can't afford Social Security, they say. It's going bankrupt. It will destroy our economy and our society.

America, one of the world's wealthiest nations, can afford to provide an economic cushion for the elderly and the disabled. By making some minor adjustments, Social Security will remain vital and solvent for this and future generations. Economists say that raising the income ceiling on the payroll tax, applying the Social Security tax to nonwage income or adding a modest increase to the payroll tax could add decades to the health of the Social Security trust fund.

In retrospect, it is obvious that Social Security's Depression-era opponents engaged in fear-mongering, not economic reality. Their opposition was based on a free-market fundamentalist ideology that abhorred any attempt to use government to improve Americans' living conditions.

Just as the early battle over Social Security wasn't really about old-age insurance, current fights over public policy are really placeholders for broader concerns. They are about what kind of country we want to be and what values we consider most important. Today, business groups and right-wing zealots oppose healthcare reform, tougher financial regulations, stronger workplace safety laws, policies to limit climate change, higher taxes on the rich and extension of unemployment insurance to the long-term jobless. The issues vary, but the mantra is the same: This policy will kill jobs, undermine the entrepreneurial spirit and destroy freedom.

The White House and progressive activists should aggressively challenge assertions about the disasters that will befall us if government protects consumers, workers, seniors, children, the disabled and the environment. Throughout our history, progress has been made when activists and politicians proposed bold ideas and then won a series of steppingstone reforms that redefined the social contract.

Peter Dreier teaches politics and chairs the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College. Donald Cohen is the co-founder and president of the Center on Policy Initiatives, a San Diego-based think tank.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-dreier-social-security-20100814,0,2100566,print.story

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OPINION

By Dennis P. Culhane

August 13, 2010

In 2007, Los Angeles County launched a pilot program, Project 50, intended to provide "housing first" — no treatment or sobriety required — to the worst 50 cases of homelessness on skid row. A recent series in The Times profiled several of the new tenants and their caretakers.

To readers familiar with the story of Nathaniel Ayers, the occasional subject of Steve Lopez's columns and of a subsequent book and film, the portraits were unsurprising. The lives of the tenants were tragically derailed by unyielding addictions and terrifying, untreated psychoses, and the train wreck is tough to watch.

But the real news in the series wasn't mentioned until the fourth installment, when The Times finally reported that the program worked. More than 80% of the hardest-core homeless of L.A. stayed housed, and nearly all were in treatment voluntarily, many now sober. Moreover, the program operated at a net savings to taxpayers. Had any comparable solution for cancer or failing schools been found, one would expect it to be the lead of the series.

Permanent supported housing for people who are chronically homeless, even with no strings attached, is a scientifically proven intervention. Consider that as L.A. officials struggled to gather support for 50 units, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his plan to create 10,000 such units in five years. This is on top of the 30,000 units New York City developed since 1990 for homeless people with severe mental disorders and with AIDS, including thousands of active injection drug users. Bloomberg wasn't taking a radical chance; he was instead acting on the basis of well-established research and the proof on the streets.

One need only compare the streetscapes of L.A. and New York to see the difference. In the late 1980s, New York had homeless people practically underfoot on virtually every street corner and subway station. Some parks were home to hundreds of homeless residents. In 1990, the U.S. Census Bureau counted 10,000 people on the streets of New York, a figure subsequently revised to 15,000 because of undercounting. This year, the city pegged the number at about 3,100. The streets, and tens of thousands of lives, have been transformed, and New Yorkers no longer dread the constant need to confront public destitution at every turn.

Los Angeles, by contrast, counted about 28,000 people living on its streets last year. L.A. looks like New York once did, with the streets overtaken by people failed by traditional treatment programs and living their tragic, destitute existence in full public view.

Project 50 is a major success, well beyond the painful stories of the people it has helped. Moreover, many of the city's chronic homeless are not "worst cases" and will have even better chances of success. Readers shouldn't get distracted by the stories of pathology; these folks and their stories would still be living on L.A. streets if not for the new housing program, and at greater cost to the taxpayers.

Los Angeles should go from the pilot program to a real policy. Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky has proposed expanding the effort to Project 500.

Based on the pilot program's results, and if the public wants a real and visible victory, the county would do better to be even more ambitious. Congress and both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama have accepted the evidence and created 70,000 such housing units for the chronic homeless since 2000. Another 20,000 are pending in the federal budget, including 10,000 for veterans. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development credits the efforts with a one-third decline in chronic homelessness since 2005, now at 112,000 persons nationwide.

If Los Angeles wants to join this national success story, it should think about Project 5,000 — or better yet, Project 10,000. The homeless, taxpayers and local communities deserve the effort.

Dennis P. Culhane is a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice, and is director of research for the National Center on Homelessness among Veterans at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-oew-culhane-project50-20100813,0,1927026,print.story

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OPINION

August 14, 2010

More than 28,000 people have died in Mexican President Felipe Calderon's nearly four-year war against drug cartels. The government of Mexico says a majority of those killed were traffickers, dealers and their associates, including kingpins Arturo Beltran Leyva in 2009 and Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel Villarreal last month. According to the U.S. State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy report issued in March, removing such important cartel leaders has "narrowed the operating space of criminal gangs, who are now fighting among themselves for diminishing territory and profits."

That's one interpretation. But Times correspondents Tracy Wilkinson and Ken Ellingwood presented another picture this week of cartels continuing to expand their reach with industry earnings estimated at as much as $39 billion, and a growing list of places the State Department says American citizens should avoid: no longer just the border cities of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez but also highways around Mexico's industrial city of Monterrey and down the Pacific Coast to the central state of Michoacan. In fact, Beltran Leyva was killed at a luxury apartment in downtown Cuernavaca, in the central state of Morelos, and Coronel in the suburbs of Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city.

Even Calderon has acknowledged that the traffickers pose a threat to Mexico's national security. As Wilkinson and Ellingwood noted, he called the criminals "a challenge to the state, an attempt to replace the state." That's also true in countries such as Guatemala and Jamaica, where the state is smaller and weaker and traffickers no less aggressive. The drug violence is tearing apart these societies, as is the violence used to combat it in Mexico.

Calderon is pressing the judicial system to step up prosecution and convictions of criminals, and is calling for a remaking of myriad state and local police forces that have been infiltrated by the drug mafia. The State Department says Mexico is on the right track with its law enforcement actions and longer-term institutional reforms. Although reforms obviously are necessary and removing drug lords is a good thing, we're not convinced that the U.S.-backed drug war can succeed. Neither is former Mexican President Vicente Fox, of Calderon's center-right National Action Party, who last week called for legalization of "production, sales and distribution" of all major drugs in Mexico. This went far beyond an earlier proposal by three former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico for decriminalization of marijuana consumption. Fox said prohibitionist policies were ineffective, while legalization would break the economic power of the cartels.

Sadly, even legalization in Mexico would not solve the problem, because most of the market for illegal drugs is in the United States, and cartels have diversified into other illegal businesses. Where there's lots of illicit money to be made, the cartels will find a way. Legalization, either in the United States or Mexico, may raise new problems even as it solves old ones. Nevertheless, Fox deserves credit for exploring every solution to a crisis that is ravaging his country.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-mexico-20100814,0,2542312,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Falsely Convicted, Freed and No Longer Quiet

ASHIKAGA, Japan

ON a December morning in 1991, Toshikazu Sugaya's quiet, anonymous existence in this sleepy city north of Tokyo ended abruptly with a knock on his door.

It was the police. They wanted to question Mr. Sugaya, then a 45-year-old divorced school bus driver with no friends, in connection with the grisly murder in 1990 of a 4-year-old girl. After 13 hours of interrogation, during which Mr. Sugaya says the police kicked his shins and shouted at him, he tearfully admitted to that murder and to killing two other girls. He was convicted of one murder and sentenced to life in prison.

But last year, after prosecutors admitted that his confession was a fabrication made under duress and that a DNA test used as evidence had been wrong, Mr. Sugaya was released. A court later acquitted him .

The disclosure that Mr. Sugaya had been wrongfully imprisoned for more than 17 years shocked Japan even more than his conviction as a serial killer had. His release drew a barrage of news media coverage, shaking the public's faith in the police and the courts at a time when Japan's prolonged economic decline has created growing doubts about Japan's national institutions in general.

Mr. Sugaya, now 63, has become a national figure, and perhaps the country's most vocal critic of forced confessions — a recurring problem here. He has written or co-written three books, including one titled “Falsely Convicted,” and tours the country giving talks about his experience.

“I tell people not to believe the police,” said Mr. Sugaya, a small, slightly built man whose face seems almost hidden behind a large pair of wire-rim glasses. “Look what they did to me.”

Indeed, with slumped shoulders and an almost cowering demeanor that brings to mind a frightened animal caught in car headlights, Mr. Sugaya seems as unlikely a crusader against the abuse of power as he did a serial killer. But he can be disarmingly open, and his voice exudes a quiet confidence that he says he acquired in prison, where he learned to fend for himself.

During those years, he said, he met other convicts who told him they had been convicted because of false confessions. He said a desire to help them and others is one reason he has embraced his newfound celebrity, though he remains visibly uncomfortable with all the attention.

“I want to go back to my quiet life of before,” Mr. Sugaya said. “But when I think that others have suffered the same treatment as me, I want to work to help them.”

Before his ordeal, Mr. Sugaya described himself as a shy man who avoided conversations and rarely said more than a few words. After a marriage that lasted just three months, he divided his time between living with his parents and spending weekends alone at a small house he rented.

Unbeknown to him, the police had been following Mr. Sugaya for a year before his arrest. A witness had told them that Mr. Sugaya had been at a pachinko game parlor about the same time that the 4-year-old victim, Mami Matsuda, was last seen there.

In 1991, after his initial confession and subsequent arrest, Mr. Sugaya said he spent weeks concocting increasingly complex stories about how he murdered Mami and two other girls who had been killed in the 1980s. Mr. Sugaya, who said he had never really met any of the girls, said that at the time he was actually afraid that the police would discover he was lying and would start shouting at him again, a prospect he said paralyzed him with fear.

THE police now admit that they missed glaring discrepancies between Mr. Sugaya's fabricated accounts of the killings and actual forensic evidence. Mr. Sugaya said he took the girl away on his bicycle; a witness reported seeing a man lead her away on foot. Mr. Sugaya also failed to identify the sites where the bodies had been buried.

Still, even when Mr. Sugaya started to proclaim his innocence midway through his trial, judges, prosecutors and Mr. Sugaya's own defense attorney ignored him, apparently in the belief that his initial confession was correct. Legal experts say this reflects the extreme importance that Japanese prosecutors and courts still place on confessions.

Mr. Sugaya said the question he is now asked the most is why he confessed so quickly to crimes he did not commit. Describing himself as insecure and “excessively spineless,” he said his willpower just seemed to collapse after what he said were hours of police officers screaming at him so loudly that his ears still ring 19 years later. He said he finally confessed to all three killings just so the ordeal would end.

Hiroshi Sato, a defense lawyer who later took up Mr. Sugaya's case, said another problem was misplaced faith in a rudimentary DNA test that matched Mr. Sugaya with sperm found on one of the murdered girls. After years of fruitlessly petitioning courts for a retrial, Mr. Sato finally won Mr. Sugaya's freedom after a more advanced genetic test disproved the earlier result.

“We've had cases of false confessions before, but never one where the evidence was this clear-cut,” said Akira Kitani, a former judge who now teaches law at Hosei University in Tokyo.

The police said mistakes were made because they were under pressure to solve the murders of the three girls, which shook this quiet community. The actual killer has never been found and could not be prosecuted now because Japan has a statute of limitations in murder cases.

Mr. Kitani said Mr. Sugaya's release has prompted broader moves to hold retrials in several similar cases, including one involving a 1967 robbery-murder in which two men were imprisoned based solely on confessions that they later recanted.

AS part of his efforts to draw attention to false confessions, Mr. Sugaya said he had visited that trial, which is now under way. He said his presence in the courtroom was intended to spur the news media to report that the two men might be innocent.

Still, he says, he finds his new prominence oppressively hard to escape. On a recent afternoon, just walking across a parking lot, Mr. Sugaya was stopped by uniformed attendants.

“You're Sugaya-san, aren't you?” asked one of the men.

“Before, I was famous for being a criminal,” Mr. Sugaya said a few moments later. “Now I'm famous for being innocent.”

He said the toughest part of his experience has been coming to terms with what he lost while in prison. In particular, he said, he was never able to meet his parents again. His father, a medicine salesman, died two weeks after the arrest, apparently of shock, Mr. Sugaya said.

His mother refused to visit him in prison, and once told the police that she wished they would execute him so he could be “sent home in a box.” She died three years ago, before her son was exonerated.

“I wish I could explain to her what really happened,” Mr. Sugaya said, his voice breaking the only time during a two-hour interview that touched on many painful topics.

Mr. Sugaya said that he felt a growing anger, and that he had started having trouble sleeping because of flashbacks to his interrogation. He also said that he had wanted to find some sort of closure by filing a lawsuit against the two detectives who forced him to confess, but that his lawyers and supporters advised against that because it could prove too emotionally traumatic.

“In the end, I still end up blaming myself,” Mr. Sugaya said. “If I just had been a bit stronger in front of the police, none of this would have happened.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/world/asia/14japan.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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U.S. Sees North Korea as Rattling Sabers for an Heir

WASHINGTON — In the 16 years since he assumed his father's role as North Korea 's sole leader, Kim Jong-il has been denounced by the United States as a vicious dictator who starves his people, runs gulags, sets off nuclear tests and orders attacks on South Korean ships.

But now the Obama administration is concerned that what comes next could be worse.

What is coming, they fear, is Mr. Kim's third son, Kim Jong-un , who is thought to have been the moving force behind a new wave of aggressive actions by the North and appears to be in line to succeed his father .

On Thursday night, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates — who took an intense interest in North Korea during his many years as an intelligence officer and then the director of the C.I.A. — offered an on-the-record glimpse of the administration's internal analysis, saying that the North's provocative actions were indications that the dictator's son “has to earn his stripes with the North Korean military.”

He voiced suspicions that it was the succession struggle — in which Kim Jong-il is helping to build the credentials of his son, who is either 27 or 28 — that could explain the attack on a South Korean frigate , the Cheonan, that killed 46 South Korean sailors in March. “My worry is that that's behind a provocation like the sinking of the Cheonan,” Mr. Gates said during an appearance in San Francisco.

In a question-and-answer series after his speech, the defense secretary, echoing statements by American military leaders, said that until the North Korean succession was settled, the Cheonan sinking could turn out to be the first of several such attacks. Last week a South Korean fishing boat was seized in disputed waters, and the North Koreans, apparently reacting to recently completed military exercises conducted by the United States and the South Koreans, raked the area with gunfire. The action was mostly symbolic; there were no other forces nearby.

“We're very concerned that this may not be the only provocation from the North Koreans,” said Mr. Gates, who, along with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton , held talks with their South Korean counterparts last month. But Mr. Gates also characterized the North right now as “very frail,” apparently referring to continuing reports of widespread hunger and the outcry from a failed effort early this year to revalue its nearly worthless currency, which wiped out what few savings North Koreans could scrape together. That effort was later reversed when it appeared likely to set off uprisings.

Next month the North Koreans are expected to convene a meeting of the country's top political leadership. There has been widespread speculation in the Japanese and South Korean media that the younger Mr. Kim will make his debut, either as the designated successor to his father, or in some central role in the country's politburo or its most important institution, the National Defense Commission.

One leading theory is that if the elder Mr. Kim, who suffered a stroke in 2008 and appears to have only partly recovered, dies in the next few years, the country would be run by a regent, probably his brother-in-law, Jang Song-taek.

But the younger Mr. Kim, who was briefly educated in Switzerland as a teenager, would be the designated leader, and presumably would ultimately take charge. Many analysts are focusing on a possible transition in 2012, the 100th anniversary of the birth of North Korea's founder, Kim Il-sung, the father of the current leader and grandfather of the presumed successor. He died in 1994.

“You hear all these theories about how Kim Jong-un is aggressively pressing for more attacks on South Korean targets, or maybe even striking out at its allies,” said Jonathan Pollack, a professor at the Naval War College in Rhode Island and one of the country's leading North Korea watchers. “And it's easy to believe, because this is what happened 30 years ago,” when Kim Jong-il, also young, untested and unpredictable, was thought to be responsible for many North Korean attacks.

It was presumed that the elder Mr. Kim, like his son now, was looking to win the allegiance of the North Korean military, which is constantly trying to bolster its image as an unbeatable, nuclear-armed force.

“But remember, we don't even know what the kid looks like, or even exactly how old he is,” Mr. Pollack said. “So this is a mix of intelligence and speculation, like everything else in North Korea.”

Among the speculation is that the elder Mr. Kim may be restraining his son from conducting a range of other attacks, much as he himself was restrained decades ago.

But so far, there is scant evidence that the younger Mr. Kim has any independent authority. “The last transition took place over a period of 10 years or so, during which Kim Il-sung gradually gave authority to Kim Jong-un,” said Joel Wit, a former State Department negotiator with the North. “But there is no evidence that the son has that authority now.”

At the same time, he said, “There is a sense that if the Obama administration doesn't want to negotiate with Kim Jong-il these days, they could be positively nostalgic for him in a few years.”

Mr. Gates, in his comments in San Francisco, noted that the United States had been working with China to restrain North Korea's adventurism, but he seemed persuaded by China's declarations that when it comes to succession, Beijing has limited clout. Moreover, there is some evidence that the Chinese are trying to protect their lines of communication to the North Koreans.

China's leadership seems even more focused than ever on preserving stability in the North, fearing that a collapse now would send millions of refugees across the border and could ultimately result in a scramble for control that could put South Korean forces — and their American allies — on the Chinese border.

Without referring specifically to those possibilities, Mr. Gates said that fear of a collapse was “one of the reasons why they are unwilling to put much pressure on that regime, because maybe they, even more than we, believe it's very frail.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/world/asia/14policy.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Birthright of a Nation

DESPITE persistent calls for comprehensive immigration reform, the hot debate today is about an old issue: birthright citizenship.

The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States...” This language has traditionally been interpreted to give automatic citizenship to anyone born on American soil, even to the children of illegal immigrants.

Congress plans to hold hearings this fall on a constitutional amendment to change that language, something even moderate Republican senators like South Carolina's Lindsey Graham support. With a new study showing that undocumented mothers account for a disproportionate number of births, even some Democrats might find it hard to stand opposed to altering the citizenship clause.

Fortunately, the history of the clause suggests an effective, pragmatic solution that should appeal to both parties.

The clause's purpose was to guarantee citizenship for former slaves — a right Congress had enacted in 1866 — and to overrule the infamous Dred Scott decision, which had denied blacks citizenship and helped precipitate the Civil War.

But the clause also excluded from birthright citizenship people who were not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” This exclusion was primarily aimed at the American-born children of American Indians and foreign diplomats and soldiers, categories governed by other sovereign entities.

The citizenship clause reflected a new American approach to political membership. Under common law dating back to the early 17th century, national allegiance had been perpetual, not consensual. Our country contested this assumption during the War of 1812 after the British impressed Americans into the Royal Navy, insisting that they remained the king's subjects.

By 1868, Congress had come to view citizenship as a mutual relationship to which both the nation and the individual must consent. This explains why it passed — one day before the citizenship clause was ratified — the Expatriation Act, allowing Americans to shed their American or foreign citizenship.

Particularly relevant to today's controversy was the floor debate on the citizenship clause. It suggested that the American-born children of resident aliens would indeed be citizens, a suggestion confirmed in an 1898 Supreme Court decision involving the son of a resident Chinese couple.

Congress did not, however, discuss the status of children of illegal immigrants — at the time, federal law didn't limit immigration, so no parents were here illegally.

Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that Congress would have surrendered the power to regulate citizenship for such a group, much less grant it automatically to people whom it might someday bar from the country. The Supreme Court has never squarely held otherwise, although it did assume, without explanation, in a brief 1982 footnote that the American-born children of illegal immigrants were constitutional citizens. This history suggests that Congress can act on birthright citizenship without a constitutional amendment.

Fast-forward to today to an America with 11 million illegal immigrants. If the Constitution permits Congress to regulate their children's citizenship by statute, what should that statute provide?

This question is much harder than the zealots on both sides suggest. The argument against any birthright citizenship is that these children are here as a result of an illegal act and thus have no claim to membership in a country built on the ideal of mutual consent.

In the extreme case of “anchor babies” — children born after a mother briefly crosses the border to give birth — the notion of automatic citizenship for the child strikes most people as not only anomalous but also offensive. No other developed country except Canada, which has relatively few illegal immigrants, has rules that would allow it.

At the same time, we rightly resist punishing children for their parents' crimes. Without birthright citizenship, they could be legally stranded, perhaps even stateless, in a country where they were born and may spend their lives. And because more than a third of undocumented parents have a least one American child, ending birthright citizenship would greatly increase the number of undocumented people in the country.

Fortunately, these strongly competing values, combined with the notion of mutual-consent citizenship, suggest a solution: condition the citizenship of such children on having what international law terms a “genuine connection” to American society.

This is already a practice in some European countries, where laws requiring blood ties to existing citizens have been relaxed to give birthright citizenship to children of illegal immigrants who have lived in the country for some time — Britain, for example, requires 10 years and no long absences from the country.

Congress should do likewise, perhaps conditioning birthright citizenship on a certain number of years of education in American schools; such children could apply for citizenship at, say, age 10. The children would become citizens retroactively, regardless of their parents' status.

Other aspects of the larger immigration debate would continue, of course. But such a principled yet pragmatic solution to the birthright citizenship question could point the way toward common ground on immigration reform.

Peter H. Schuck, a professor of law at Yale, is a co-editor of “Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/opinion/14schuck.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the White House

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As we know from last week's Medicare Trustees report, the Affordable Care Act will strengthen Medicare by extending the Trust Fund for 12 years -- the largest extension in history -- and cut costs for seniors.  The new law will also save Medicare $575 billion over the next ten years  and provisions of the law that are already being implemented will save $8 billion for Medicare in just the next two years alone. At the same time, the new law protects seniors' guaranteed benefits and helps bring costs down. By 2018, seniors will save on average almost $200 per year in premiums compared to what they would have paid without the new law and the law ultimately will completely close the prescription drug donut hole.

But as we're moving forward, cutting health care costs and protecting seniors, some in Congress want to take us back and tell seniors they are on their own. Today, Rep. Paul Ryan published an op-ed in the Washington Post on his plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program.

Under the Ryan plan, the Medicare seniors know and trust would disappear. In its place, seniors would receive a voucher to buy insurance on the private market.  Last month, former OMB Director Peter Orszag spoke about Rep. Ryan's voucher plan and its impact on our seniors and the cost of health care:

Unfortunately, these plans would do little if anything bring down health care costs and would leave seniors with bigger bills. As Orszag noted:

And Orszag discussed how the Ryan plan would cut Medicare and put seniors at risk:

The bottom line under the Ryan plan: Costs would continue to rise, the value of benefits provided to seniors would continue to fall, and seniors would be stuck with fewer benefits and bigger bills. And, according to outside analysts, his plan would substantially increase the deficit in the medium-term.

We won't go down Rep. Ryan's road.

The President has stated repeatedly that we have a solemn vow to protect and strengthen Medicare. Under President Obama's leadership we have taken historic steps to do just that. There's more work to be done, but the President and his team are committed to protecting Medicare and ensuring seniors have the high-quality care they expect and deserve.

Stephanie Cutter is Assistant to the President for Special Projects

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/13/a-bad-road-seniors

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