about make drugs legal here in Amerika and at the same time let every one in prison on drug bust out. It works for me but I know it would hurt business that make money from the bad laws in the US. Oh well I can dream can't I? Yes this will be coming to border towns soon and it already a problem in towns here in Calif.

You keep saying that but how does that happen, and why? Why hasn't it already happened? Is the violence kept south of the border because to bring it north would be bad for business? If things are so bad down there, why wouldn't the tit-for-tat violence not spill over here yet? Or is it and we just don't know about it? I'm not even really sure who is doing what down there or why. Is our government funding a drug business civil war to kill them all and let god sort it out? Why do the Mexican political classes go relatively unscathed? Not their fight? Too scared to take sides? In what manner can the drug cartels swamp Mexican civil society? They can't/won't/don't provide any services. Don't act, speak, quack like a government. Disrupt, yes, but at a certain point when nothing operates, it becomes bad for them too. Is the relevant precedent 1930s Chicago?

I wish someone would explain this to me. Lay it all out. Not all senseless violence is senseless. Reminds me of postwar Iraq chaos.

Rerun.

Welcome to the War on Drugs vs the Second Amendment.

Drugs kill people, bad.
Guns kill people, Good.

But, they say, guns don't kill people, people kill people.
By that rationale, drugs are not harmful, just as guns are not harmful. That is, Drugs don't kill people, capatalists selling drugs, people, kill people.

Oh no, drugs kill people.

Why is it that these people can hold two diametrically opposed ideas in their minds at the same time, and not even begin to comprehend their stupidity?

I had the same discussion with a retired Colonel. "Socalism bad, capitalism good, leave health care private". He said.
"What about roads", I asked.
"Oh they have to be public, people have to drive" he responded.
"What about rail companies, they are private?" I asked.
"Government control is bad" He said.
"What about town planning? It's government control, central and there for must be socialist." I said.
He shut up.

And he was one of our senior military officers. Charged with increasig our insecurity by over spending public monies and thinking the miliary increases our security. Right.

Our problem has shifted from violent conflicts among nations to violent conflicts against extra-national entities, most of whom can be identified as gangs. There is the Al Qaeda gang, the Taliban gang, and they mainly want power and wealth without having to do much of anything except cause havoc. Even considering Iran we see that a gang has seized power by throwing an election and the middle classes are opposed to them and hope to be rid of them. Nation-nation conflicts are obsolete.

I suspect that we are to the point where we need very good intelligence on the activities of the gangs in the US and Mexico and then we must hit them hard to take out the leadership. Then we must find jobs for the underlings so they can build lives for themselves in civil society.

On the other end, of course, we have corporations who have, for decades, treated less developed nations with an attitude of neo-colonialists seeking to profit from human and other resources without giving anything back. That kind of behavior motivated much of the initial gang activity decades ago that is now growing out of control.

Most people, once they reach a certain age, want to live normal lives and not have to be constantly confronting the threat of violence. The top gang leaders, in the drug cartels, have amassed so much wealth that there is no normal for them. Their usual life is very luxurious where they wield a great deal of power and have great status. They will never wish to give that up so they must be taken down. That is the approach the US forces are taking toward the Taliban gang in Pakistan and Afghanistan, taking out the leaders and encouraging many in the Taliban, who were recruited and joined with reluctance or were forced by threats to their families, to slip quietly back into normal life.

That's the strategy if we can persist and actually put up the resources to get the job done. The fly in the ointment would be US legislators at the state and federal levels who have benefited from gang activity. We don't know how many there may be of those. For them, continued prohibition of drugs would seem essential to their continuing to receive rewards from illegal drug trade.

Channing
Ventura CA USA

I did inhale.

Over on The Exiled (http://exiledonline.com/) they have reports from a guy living on the ground in northern Mexico. Grim reading, but interesting.

--
-Geoduck

I read your post several times just to make sure I got the right impression from it. Am I wrong that you decided to use the death of this couple to mock Obama? Or that you're assuming he can wave his hands and fix the problems that lead to their deaths? Or for that matter, all the gang violence going on in Mexico?

Oh and don't worry, at no point in reading that story or your thoughts did I even come close to laughing.

WaPo, By Mary Beth Sheridan, March 16

Dozens of officials from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other U.S. agencies joined an investigation Monday into the killings of three people tied to the U.S. Consulate in the Mexican city of Juarez, scrambling to determine whether the slayings marked an escalation in the region's drug war or were simply cases of mistaken identity, officials said.

[...]

In a sign of how seriously the Mexican government regards the case, Attorney General Arturo Chávez Chávez traveled to Juarez on Monday to oversee the investigation, according to El Diario, a newspaper in the city. Mexican President Felipe Calderón and President Obama expressed indignation at the murders.

U.S. agencies, including the FBI, DEA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, are assisting Mexican authorities by providing intelligence and interviewing witnesses in the United States, Simmons said.

San Antonio News

By Lynn Brezosky and Gary Martin
- Express-News

BROWNSVILLE — U.S. officials Friday downplayed the sighting of a Mexican military helicopter hovering as long as 20 minutes over a residential area on the Texas side of the border this week, saying the incursion didn't cause alarm even though it hadn't been cleared in advance.

U.S. agencies could offer no reports of a follow-up investigation and no indication whether a Mexican explanation had been asked for or given.

Gov. Rick Perry's office released a statement late Friday, however, saying the state was working with Customs and Border Protection to investigate.

U.S. officials familiar with the incident, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it wasn't a joint training exercise.

“We made the proper notifications, and the helicopter did cross back into Mexico, and that was the extent of it, really,” Laredo-based Customs and Border Protection spokesman Rick Pauza said Friday. “There really isn't that much to it.”

But Texas officials long have been fearful of spillover violence.

Customs officers spotted the aircraft about 5 p.m. Tuesday about a mile into U.S. airspace over Falcon Heights, a residential development on the shores of the binational Falcon Lake reservoir. The incursion was “brief,” lasting possibly “15 to 20 minutes,” Pauza said.

Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez said witnesses, including Customs agents who live in the area, recognized Mexican navy insignia on it and said it appeared to be doing surveillance.

Pauza said such an operation would require advance coordination with U.S. officials and said the helicopter had crossed without a heads-up. But once it was reported to other U.S. agencies, the matter was put to rest, he said.

Pauza said Mexican military aircraft are occasionally seen along the border, but he didn't know of other instances of aircraft actually crossing.

“It's not something we see frequently,” he said. “We are in contact with our counterparts on the Mexican side. We work together to reduce these incidents from occurring. It's not that big of an issue.”

Perry's statement said he was taking it seriously.

“It's critically important for Texas, U.S. and Mexican law enforcement to appropriately coordinate our efforts,” Perry said, adding that Sheriff Gonzalez, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the U.S. Border Patrol were “working together to gather more information” about the incident.

Gonzalez on Friday called the U.S. response a brush-off, “typical ... of our government, in reality an echo of the Mexican government.”

A spokesman for the Mexican Defense Ministry didn't immediately respond to an inquiry about the incident.

A State Department spokesman said he didn't know of an official complaint being lodged over the incident and said no action by the department was under way.

Homeland Security Department officials in Washington referred questions to Pauza and declined further comment.

Law enforcement agencies from the U.S. and Mexico have increased the number of training exercises in recent years as they beefed up efforts to reduce the flow of U.S.-bound narcotics north and Mexico-bound weapons for drug cartels south.

The Mérida Initiative signed by Mexican President Felipe Calderón and former President George W. Bush provides U.S. assistance to Mexico to train military and law enforcement in the battle against transnational drug-smuggling organizations.

That initiative has funded five Bell-412 helicopters presented to Mexico in December for transportation and reconnaissance missions in Mexico.

Rep. Henry Cuellar, chairman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on border affairs, met with DHS officials to discuss the escalating violence in Mexican border cities.

The Mexican helicopter incursion was just one of several incidents discussed, including recent acts of gangland gunbattles and executions that have provoked fear in the region.

State Rep. Aaron Peña, D-Edinburg, meanwhile, is planning to bring members of the state's Select Committee on Emergency Preparedness to the Rio Grande Valley this spring for a hearing on the violence.

State Reps. Veronica Gonzales, D-McAllen, and Tommy Merritt, R-Longview, also announced plans for a hearing.

The Mexican navy has taken on a more visible role in that effort, including responses to the current surge of drug cartel violence. At least seven people were arrested during an operation involving navy helicopters in Escobedo in the state of Nuevo Leon, according to news reports Friday.

Experts on the drug war say the Mexican army is under increasing criticism after bearing the brunt of Calderón's three-year effort to contain the cartels using military force, including accusations of human rights abuse and acceptance of bribes to leak intelligence to cartels.

“The military's very sensitive to the criticism that's going on, and of course they're not trained to do police work,” narcoviolence scholar George Grayson said in a recent interview. “They're just getting clobbered.”

Al Jazeera, March 19

Police and FBI agents in the US state of Texas have launched a series of raids on a gang thought to have been behind the killings of three people linked to the US consulate in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez.

Around 200 law enforcement officers took part in Thursday's raids targeting suspected members of the Barrio Azteca gang in El Paso.

Officials said the goal of "Operation Knockdown" was to generate leads in the investigation into last week's killings in Ciudad Juarez.

"We believe that major intelligence can be collected here on the US side by going after and getting these members of Barrio Azteca, and that's what they're doing down in El Paso," Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, told AFP news agency.

The Barrio Azteca gang "most definitely" has ties to gangs in Mexico, he said.