I got a chance to speak with Senator Mike Gravel at the Direct Democracy conference last week about ending marijuana prohibition, and his frank opinions were refreshing.

He’s also working to produce a new TV show, I Like Mike, based on the premise that he is now the President of the United States.  A compelling premise, to say the least.

I do not know for the life of me how the discourse about violence on the US/Mexico border immediately devolves into a left-right debate about immigration.  I invited Senator Gravel here today to talk about his thoughts on the subject.

The facts:

• Americans consume $113 billion worth of marijuana each year
• The US government says 1/2 half of that comes from overseas sources, which means it’s being smuggled in and enriching the Mexican drug cartels
• The Arizona shooting that triggered H.B. 1070 was related to marijuana smuggling, not people crossing the border to find jobs
• The battle between the Mexican drug cartels and the Mexican government have left 28,000 dead in the past 4 years
• The drug cartels are now so powerful that they have taken over local government and are collecting their own taxes in certain parts of the country
• 70% of all drug cartel profits come from marijuana
• That money is being used to finance the war with the Mexican government, as well as the war on the border
• The Mexican government is spending so much money on the drug wars that it has no money to deal with its own unemployment problems, driving more people over the border in desperation
• The U.S. Joint Forces Command warned that the Mexican government could experience “a rapid and sudden collapse” due to drug cartel violence.
• The outgoing head of the CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden, warned that drug cartels “threaten … the well-being of the Mexican people and the Mexican state.”
• Former Mexican President Vicente Fox, member of the conservative PAN party, last week said “we should consider legalizing the production, sale and distribution of drugs” as a way to “weaken and break the economic system that allows cartels to earn huge profits…radical prohibition strategies have never worked.”
• Mexican President Felipe Calderone has reversed his previous stance and called for a debate on marijuana legalization, acknowledging that it’s US drug policy that is enriching the cartels, and if Mexico acts alone it would do little good.
• Last week, two Mexican cardinals have endorsed Calerone’s call for debating legalization
• Now a Mexican Archbishop has called for a debate on legalization
• The problem is not limited to the border — the drug cartels now have a presence in 230 cities across the US, up from 150 2 years ago
• Former Brazilian President Henrique Cardoso, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria  have called for and end to “prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalization of consumption” that are fueling violence across Latin America.
• Many police officers, including former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper, are now calling for an end to marijuana prohibition because they’re the ones who are having to deal with the well-funded drug violence in those US cities
• Militarizing the border and handing out $500 million in fat contracts to turn it into a war zone with drones and National Guard, as the Senate did yesterday, will do absolutely nothing to solve the underlying problem
• Neither Arizona’s S.B. 1070, Florida’s proposed anti-immigrant bill, nor repealing the 14th amendment will do anything about the underlying problem, either.

I can tell you from personal experience that there are many members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who would like to be able to speak as directly as Senator Gravel about ending prohibition as a way not only to deal with the problem of violence on the border but also the mounting immigration problem (well, maybe not quite as directly).  But they’re all frightened of stepping into the middle of the culture wars.

Just as it is in Latin America with former elected officials opening the door for those in office to begin the debate, I appreciate Senator Gravel being here today to chat with people about the urgency of the subject.

Senator Gravel’s experience entering the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record and getting them to the Beacon Press also has relevance at the moment, given the situation surrounding Wikileaks. So I thought it would be another good reason to have him here.

Please welcome Senator Mike Gravel in the comments.

The Canadian health care system is now on the receiving end of derision and mockery from Robert Gibbs, and White House courtier Roger Simon tells us Gibbs speaks for Obama.

Remember when the White House had the JournoList set fan out and tell everyone the Bernie Sanders amendment to the health care bill was the first step toward  single payer?

Good times.

Cue the infatuated former Republicans who tells progressives to suck it up because they’re personally quite happy with the direction the Democratic party is taking.

When White House press secretary Robert Gibbs excoriated government critics (“the professional left”) for being ungrateful SOB’s considering all that this administration has done for them, he wasn’t acting as a lone wolf. It’s a refrain that has oft been uttered by this White House, from Rahm Emanuel’s “f*#@ing r&#tards”  to “top Obama advisors” who vent to Politico about an “elite group of commentators on the left.”

Roger Simon defends Gibbs this morning, and I have no doubt he’s right when he says he believes “the president agrees with Gibbs and was neither angered nor disappointed by Gibbs’s statements, which came not in the heat of his daily briefing but in the cool of his West Wing office.“

But with the public’s approval ratings of Congress at near-historic lows and not budging, it’s hard to see how this could be the fault of a couple of bloggers nobody has heard of.  More likely, it’s the result of constituencies who aren’t happy with symbolic gestures while the government’s priority is to battle for the dollars of big corporate donors.

According to Gallup, Obama’s approval ratings among Hispanics has dropped 20 points this year.  They note that “the two major drops in Hispanics’ approval of Obama this year — in February and May — coincide with two periods when the president was under fire for not doing enough to promote comprehensive immigration reform in Congress.”

As I wrote in April of this year:

Immigration just might be the issue that breaks through the White House “veal pen” strategy and forces them to deal with an issue — or risk the defection of an important part of the Democratic base in the 2010 elections.

When the White House punted on immigration reform lat year after the Sotomayor confirmation, I started asking members of Congress if they thought immigration would actually come up for a vote this year.  They all laughed, as if anyone would expect them to do something so controversial in a midterm election year.

But even before the Arizona law was passed, the standard White House strategy for quelling liberal discontent was already at risk of failure.  Captivating community validators, engaging in symbolic gestures and then blaming the GOP for their inability to carry them out has worked well on issues like health care, choice and LGBT rights, but there were signs that those who care about immigration reform were not going to be so easily pacified.

Nobody believed that Luis Gutierrez was actually going to tell Hispanic voters to stay away from the polls in 2010, but the fact that he was already threatening to go nuclear was a sign of the pressure he was already feeling from his constituents.

The Democrats are now on an all-out crusade to blame the Republicans for blocking comprehensive immigration reform.  But the truth is, they couldn’t get their own caucus to support it.  As Jonathan Martin wrote, “[F]or Democrats to pass immigration reform before November, party leaders would have to force members from conservative-leaning districts to cast yet another tough vote that could raise the ire of swing voters.”  There was no way that was going to happen.

And so we have cable news is full of attacks Sharron Angel for shutting out Hispanic media, and Harry Reid saying he doesn’t know “how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.” With GOP establishment stalwarts like Lindsey Graham talking about repealing the 14th amendment, that’s not without cause.

Meanwhile, Reid reconvened the Senate this morning just to pass the $600 million border security bill that puts National Guard troops and drones on the border.

“It is really unfortunate, misguided and a major political misstep,” as Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change, told Politico. “There will need to be a lot of repair work by the Democrat leadership with the immigrant advocacy community.”

America’s Voice reports that deportations have skyrocketed under the Obama administration:

In a 2008 interview with Univision’s Jorge Ramos, an anchor on the nation’s largest Spanish-language television network, Obama promised to draft an immigration reform bill during his first year in office.  This week, Ramos and other Spanish media are blasting Obama for his failure to fulfill that promise — especially after the Latino vote gave Obama the electoral edge in four key states in 2008:

“If he was able to get 60 votes for financial reform, if he can get 60 votes to extend unemployment benefits, how come he can’t get 60 votes for immigration reform?” Ramos asked. “So many Latinos feel there is a lack of leadership, and he is not fighting for immigration reform with the same intensity that he fought for health care reform.”

In other words, we’ve all seen how the White House can twist arms when it wants to.  The White House says it’s behind the DREAM Act.  If they were really whipping on it, does anyone think there would only be 138 cosponsors, especially with the Republican cover of support from the likes of Orrin Hatch?

The border security bill is basically Rahm Emanuel’s warmed-over SAVE Act.  The fact is, this is what the White House wants to do.  They certainly aren’t doing anything to rein in Democrat Joe Donnelly, who is running ads against amnesty “because nobody should ever be awarded for breaking the law.”

Ramos’ critique of Obama has become the dominant message throughout Hispanic media:

“There is a disappointment of a promise that has not been fulfilled,” said Henrik Rehbinder, La Opinion’s editorial page editor. “More than disappointment is some anger, some resentment, over the fact that this administration was going to be sensitive to family separations, and they really are not.” The critique from Ramos could prove particularly damaging to the White House.

The Hispanic vote is absolutely critical to Democratis this fall, but as John Zogby notes, turnout numbers are looking dismal.  Adding to the problem: when Obama took office, the jobless rate among Hispanics was 9.7%.  It’s 12.1% now.

“The Hispanic vote is probably the No. 1 issue in terms of whether Democrats retain the House,” says Zogby. “Democrats can’t survive if they only get 54 percent of the Hispanic vote.”

It would be interesting to hear from Robert Gibbs — or Rahm Emanuel, or any other “Senior White House Aide” — whether they think these Hispanic journalists are simply ungrateful “elite liberal commentators,” or if the 20% of Hispanics who no longer approve of Obama constitute a faction of “the professional left.”

On MSNBC today, I talked about the “professional left” with fellow Robert Gibbs-irritants Glenn Greenwald and Dylan Ratigan.

Gibbs, with his contempt for the “Canadian health care system,” is merely reflecting the attitude of a White House that marched into the health care debate committed to giving corporate “stakeholders” everything they wanted in exchange for campaign donations to Democrats.

From August of 2009:

Just as it was during the bank bailout, the goal of the White House was clear:  more important than saving the financial system was keeping the financial institutions happy and stop them from financing Republicans.

Who would think that way?  Whose primary objective would be to keep anyone from funding a GOP ascendancy, to sell out health care reform worth billions for a hundred fifty million in pro-reform advertising?  Who would think to ask PhRMA to run ads in the districts of vulnerable freshmen, as well as Blue Dog Mike Ross, who is anything BUT vulnerable?  Certainly not some policy wonk.

But ask yourself –  would consider it a victory to use the “public plan” as little more than a political pawn with which to threaten stakeholders and force them to stay at the table, with no thought as to the emotional and moral consequences suffered by the people who had pinned their hope on having one?

Someone who had worked as the head of the DCCC.  Who remembered the 54 seat swing to the GOP in 1994 after the failure to pass health care reform.  Someone whose sole goal was a “political victory,” so the White House could be 14-0 not “13-1.”

Someone like Rahm Emanuel

Rahm’s genius strategy paid off last night in Connecticut, which saw 20% turnout in a hotly contested Democratic primary (down from 43% in 2006). If that keeps up, November is looking awfully grim for the Democrats The White House is in la-la land if they think this is happening because a few cable TV hosts and a couple of bloggers are being mean to them.

Obama failed in his promise to stand up to corporate America, and it’s not just liberals who are upset. Tossing progressives a few bones and telling them to be happy about it while handing the government over to JP Morgan, PhRMA and AT&T is just not going to get it done.

I was on ABC’s “Top Line” today with Rick Klein and Yunji de Nies, discussing Robert Gibbs’ comment about the “professional left”:

Twolf made up a card for me:

Best post I’ve seen on why Gibbs went off is by Chris Bowers.  Also, read Dave Dayen’s post about the 20% turnout in the Connecticut Democratic primary last night, vs. 43% in 2006.  I don’t see how the Gibbs comments help the situation.

I’ll be on Dylan Ratigan’s show today on MSNBC with Glenn Greenwald at 4:00 pm ET for an unofficial group meeting.

Professional lefting is hard work.

President Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, decided to attack single payer health care, a system used very effectively in many first-world countries, as some wacky, crazy idea.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

It pains me to see a Democratic administration attacking the idea of single payer as an idea so unrealistic that you must be high on drugs to push for it. The push for universal single payer health care, Medicare for all, has been was a goal of the Democratic party for decades.  Virtually every single health care economist or policy expert on the left, after examining the domestic and international data, has concluded that single payer either is the best way or is among the best ways to provide universal health care. I guarantee that you won’t find a single expert on the left who thinks the system created by the new health care law is markedly superior to single payer.

We know that single payer is a fair and dramatically cheaper way to provide health insurance. America’s single payer health care system for those over 65, Medicare, is very popular and is a clear success.

As recently as seven years ago, even Barack Obama was a public supporter of adopting single payer health care. So,  according to Gibbs, I guess we should question whether Obama was under the influence of drugs when he advocated for that logical position.

I’ve long accepted that we didn’t elect a Democratic president who is willing to fight for single payer health care, but today is truly a new and sad low. I never thought that we would have a Democratic administration that would actively mock and attack the idea of Medicare for all. Yes, the right wing and the private health insurance industry have won. Even a Democratic administration has thrown empirical evidence out the window and is now attacking “Canadian healthcare” as crazy for some reason.

I guess someone should tell Canadians, or even American seniors on Medicare, how terrible their single payer health care systems are, with their dramatically lower costs and much higher life expectancies. Either tell them, or parhaps just order up a whole heck of a lot of drug tests for them.

Dan Froomkin and Ben Craw of the Huffington Post put together a video of Obama’s statements regarding war in the Middle East during the Bush administration, and what he’s saying now.

As I wrote earlier, if the White House is wondering why Americans are disappointed with Obama, it’s isn’t because of the criticisms of the “progressive left.” They can find the answer in the gap between what he sold himself as during the campaign, and the policies he has affirmatively pursued as President.

Spiro Agnew — sorry, Robert Gibbs — says “the professional left is not representative of the progressives who organized, campaigned, raised money and ultimately voted for Obama.” Well, the Obama in the White House is not representative of the Obama who organized, campaigned, raised money and ran for office, so I guess it’s a wash.

Gibbs does the only thing you can do when trying to defend a record of corporatist capitulation: triangulate against your critics as extremists. But the fact is, the positions Obama has abandoned aren’t the exclusive territory of Dennis Kucinich. Standing up to the banks and the insurance companies, reducing the political influence of corporate money, defending Social Security and ending the wars are issues that are broadly popular with the American public. That’s why Obama campaigned on them in order to pave his way to the White House.

I don’t recall Obama making campaign promises to increase the defense budget and cut Social Security benefits, order the assassination of American citizens without due process, or cut sweetheart deals with the pharmaceutical industry in exchange for political patronage. Where was the bold, inspirational speech where he vowed to give AT&T immunity for operating their own private corporate spy network, tax people’s health insurance benefits, abandon gay rights and throw a party in the rose garden for Bart Stupak’s presidential signing statement? When did he promise to re-appoint Ben Bernanke, protect the bonuses of bailed out bankers and keep shoveling money at Wall Street?

Marshall Ganz was the field organizer responsible for Obama campaign programs that motivated those progressive volunteers. During the health care debate, when it was clear Obama was abandoning his campaign rhetoric on health care, he said “If Barack had campaigned on the politics of narrow self-interest, he never would have won the nomination, let alone the election.”

Maybe Gibbs should stop and revisit some of those campaign speeches and ask himself if the guy in the oval office looks like the guy on the campaign trail. He might figure out why people are upset, and it’s not just the “professional left.” According to Gallup, Obama’s approval ratings among Hispanics was 73% in January of 2010 and is now at 54%. That’s largely over his failure to fulfill the promises he made about immigration.

Are they the “professional left” too?

Gibbs’ slam on progressives just as the August break begins means that Congressional Democrats across the country are going to have to bear the brunt of his comments as they try to whip up enthusiasm for their campaigns. They’re going to have to explain why they deserve support even as the White House holds progressives in contempt. Progressives are the people who volunteer, who donate, who vote, and the polls show a serious enthusiasm gap. Members of Congress are already angry that the president blames “Washington DC” for the country’s ills, and that’s a group that includes them. Pissing off the base like this isn’t going to help — it’s a self-indulgent, petty and ill-timed move.

But more than that, it demonstrates that the spokesman for the White House has no better defense of the administration than to try and brand their big, omnibus corporate-friendly legislation as “progressive,” and then point to a couple of female appointments. It’s hard to see how victories for PhRMA, Aetna, Halliburton and JP Morgan are victories for the American people. And if diversity at the top is the definition of “progress” we’re using, Condi Rice had a lot more power and access to the President than any woman does in this administration. Just ask Christina Romer.

Gibbs echoes the oft-heard refrain that George Bush left such a mess, and people expect too much change too fast. But if Obama were actually fighting for the change he promised and losing because of overwhelming opposition, the “progressives” Gibbs is whining about would be behind him 100%. The problem is not that he’s fighting corporate America and losing. The problem is that all too often, it’s obvious that he’s fighting for the other side.

Find the latest marijuana policy news on the JustSayNow page. You can also follow JustSayNow on Twitter and  Facebook.

Last week, Mexico’s President Calderon called on President Obama to join the debate on legalizing marijuana. The US drug policy has lined the pockets of the drug cartels with billions of dollars, and they are threatening to destabilize not only Mexico but countries across Latin America.

In many regions, the drug gangs are seeking to replace the government, imposing their own taxes in towns they dominate.

Three former Latin American presidents — Cesar Gaviria of Colombia, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Fernando Cardoso of Brazil — wrote an oped in the Wall Street Journal, urging the legalization of marijuana as a way to undermine a major source of income for cartels.

Recently, the U.S. Joint Forces Command warned that the Mexican government could experience “a rapid and sudden collapse” due to drug cartel violence.  And the outgoing head of the CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden, warned that drug cartels “threaten … the well-being of the Mexican people and the Mexican state.”

The problem is so bad that following President Calderon’s statement, two Mexican cardinals have endorsed his call to open a debate on the merits of  legalization.

There have been 28,000 people killed since 2006 in the war with the drug cartels,  including 1200 in July –  the deadliest month yet.  The recent shooting in Arizona that triggered the debate between right and left over immigration was the result of marijuana smuggling, not people trying to get over the border to find jobs.  It’s insane that the conversation instantly devolved into a right-left battle over immigration.  The Arizona law does nothing to address the underlying problem.

Yesterday the Guardian had a piece on the push to end prohibition, including the Just Say Now campaign we launched last week.  Further,  the Guardian editorial board called on David Cameron and Nick Clegg to “launch a national debate on whether we should try legalisation,” and to “tear up the current policy. It has failed.”  “That debate must be opened in Britain and the recent change of government provides a rare opportunity,” they say.

But as Peter Guither notes, although there is strong interest in the issue among both progressive and conservative voters, leadership on both sides of the aisle have been unwilling to address it.  Most are terrified of walking into a meat grinder of social taboos left over from the culture wars, and they won’t brave it until the public demands it.

That’s why we launched the Just Say Now campaign.  Over 30,000 people have already signed the petition to President Obama, saying it’s time to end the war on marijuana.  America’s prison population has quadrupled since 1984 when Nancy Reagan’s war on drugs began, and the private prison system exploded.

Last fall, Eric Holder issued a directive that the DEA should respect state medical marijuana laws.  But as  Jacob Sullum notes, that directive had a lot of wiggle room and as a result the DEA’s raids on medical marijuana suppliers continue.

Please show your support and sign the petition asking President Obama to end the war on marijuana.

Since the big victory for Prop C in Missouri, I’ve seen several “progressives” rush to defend the individual mandate that requires individuals to buy private insurance. I find such action indefensible for individuals who call themselves progressives. At most, progressives should think of the individual mandate to buy poorly regulated private health insurance as a highly suboptimal solution to expanding coverage.  The mandate is neither good politics nor good policy.  Defending it strikes me as nothing more than a reflective defense of the Democratic party masquerading as progressivism.

If the true goal of progressives is to produce truly universal health insurance in the best, most cost effective manner, then there is no honest progressive who would recommend the individual mandate. There must be at least a half dozen better policy solutions to the problem.

A universal single payer health care system, such as Medicare for All, is probably as close as you can get to an optimal solution. It is dramatically better by all measures than a system based on an individual mandate.

Even if you wanted to keep a mainly private health insurance exchange system, there are several second best options that are better policies than the government collecting an individual mandate tax. One option is creating an extremely bare-bones default public health insurance plan that would automatically cover anyone who didn’t sign up for a private insurance plan.

Another option would be for the government to select the private plan from the lowest level with the best metrics (medical loss ratio [MLR], consumer service, etc...) and automatically enroll everyone without insurance in that plan. If their subsidies fully cover the cost, then there is no problem.  If their subsidies are not enough, then additional money would be automatically withheld from their earnings along with their payroll taxes.  Wealthier individuals would have the ability to opt-out of this automatic withholding only if they sign away their right to community ratings and subsidies for a set time or accept that they will have to pay a large penalty if they sign up after getting ill.

Obviously, I feel that giving people  the choice of a public option makes the individual mandate a noticeably worse policy.  With the public option, the government is technically only requiring you to  give money to a government agency instead of  making it a crime not to hand money over to a private company.

I would even consider it a policy improvement to replace the government-run individual mandate with a premium back payment penalty that is combined with the government sending out directed warning letters. That gives insurance companies the right to charge people a back premium penalty worth up to six months of premiums if they try to sign up for insurance without being able to prove they were previously insured. It creates nearly the same type of financial incentive to not be a “free rider”  (that is, wait until you get sick to sign up for insurance), without the creepy idea of the government actually forcing you to buy a product from a private company.

I accept that some progressives honestly feel the new system created by the law with the individual mandate is an improvement over the status quo, but no one should pretend that it is actually good policy rather than the ugly compromise that it really is. It is not the best solution, or even the second or third best solution, for expanding coverage. Progressives do themselves a huge disservice when they defend this piece of poor policy and bad politics. What they should be doing now is acknowledging that the individual mandate isn’t good and needs to be replaced with a more progressive alternative.

I can only compare the individual mandate to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” back in the 90’s. It was technically an improvement over the than status quo, but it was still an ugly, stupid policy. While possibly better than what was happening before, it was clearly a suboptimal solution. Just like “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, progressives should not pretend that the individual mandate is a good idea simply because it is part of the bad compromise created by “their” party. That is the difference between true ideological activists and people who see themselves as defenders of the party even when the party’s ideas are truly bad.