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Red Bull Air Racing

Gas price by zip at Seti

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Working with Iran - Diplomacy is best course on nuclear plants

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

April 4, 2006

When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with foreign ministers from permanent U.N. Security Council member states and Germany in Berlin last week, she was trying to get agreement to impose limited sanctions on Iran if it did not agree to inspections of its nuclear facilities. She did not get such an agreement.

She was able to secure agreement setting a deadline for Iraqi compliance. But both Russia and China, which have trade and other economic arrangements with Tehran, insisted that sanctions language not be part of any agreement.

Fearing that Iran is on a path to developing a nuclear weapon, the United States is working with its European allies to pressure Iran to reopen its facilities to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran is a signatory to the decades-old Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and it has the right to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. But given Iran's threats to “wipe Israel off the map” and its support for terrorism, few are is willing to accept Tehran's assurances.

After nearly two years of negotiations with European diplomats, it is far from clear that Iran is willing to accept compromises with the West. Other nations in the region have nuclear weapons, and the United States currently occupies two of its neighboring nations, Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush also calls Iran one of America's greatest security threats and refuses to take a military option off the table for dealing with Iran's nuclear program.

The one positive development since last week's foreign ministers meeting is that Secretary Rice's tone has softened. The U.S. and Iran had agreed to direct talks on Iran's role in contributing to stability in Iraq. Rice, in comments over the weekend, said further that the United States is “committed to a diplomatic course because we believe a diplomatic course can work.”

We certainly hope so. Most believe a military strike would unleash forces in the Middle East that would make conditions there far worse than they are already. Iran is also thought to be capable of launching terrorist attacks within the United States and could make things worse for U.S. troops in Iraq.

With the American military already stretched thin with Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomacy must work. The price of other options simply is too high.

Muzzled by fear - Mexico's press is falling victim to violence

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

April 4, 2006

Freedom of the press in Mexico is under brutal assault from drug-trafficking cartels and assorted other criminals. Murders, assaults, kidnappings and intimidation of Mexican journalists are now so prevalent that some newspapers are seeking refuge in self-censorship, declining to report on organized crime and drug trafficking.

The losers, beyond the endangered journalists and their newspapers, are the people of Mexico. They are increasingly deprived of a free flow of information about the sustained assault by drug traffickers and other organized criminals on their country's struggle to assert a rule of law. Absent that rule of law, Mexico's efforts to further democratize its politics and build a modern economy will be grievously crippled.

Eleven members of the media have been murdered in Mexico since 2004 and another journalist has been missing for nearly a year with little hope that he will be found alive. At least six of these murders are cases in which journalists were killed in the line of duty, in effect murdered because of what they reported, wrote or broadcast.

In the five years since President Vicente Fox took office, there have been 208 attacks against Mexican journalists, 60 more than in the previous five years.

One especially brazen attack last February is a measure of the perils faced by Mexico's beleaguered journalists, especially those in the violent narco-trafficking zones close to the U.S.-Mexico border. On Feb. 6, armed men burst into the offices of the newspaper El Mañana in the violence-wracked border city of Nuevo Laredo. The invaders sprayed the newspaper offices with automatic weapons fire and tossed a grenade. One journalist was seriously wounded in the attack, whose purpose seemed less to kill than to intimidate.

El Mañana had distinguished itself reporting on Nuevo Laredo's drug-trafficking turf wars. Last January it hosted an international seminar attended by 150 Mexican and foreign journalists to discuss covering high-risk stories. Following the attack, El Mañana's shaken editors announced a new editorial policy avoiding publication of information about organized crime.

Thus, El Mañana joined a growing list of dozens of Mexican newspapers, magazines, radio and television organizations muzzled by the fear of violence. In its own uniquely brutal way, this process of intimidation imposes a press gag no less effective than the government censors of previous eras.

In Tijuana, two editors of the crusading weekly newspaper Zeta, which reports extensively on the Tijuana-based Arellano Félix drug-trafficking cartel, have been attacked. Editor in chief Jesús Blancornelas, a courageous journalist and co-founder of Zeta who recently announced his retirement, barely survived an assassination attempt by AFO gunmen in 1997. Zeta editor Francisco Ortiz Franco was shot to death in June 2004, almost certainly by an AFO assassin.

Following protests from the Inter American Press Association and other international groups, the Mexican government created a special prosecutor's office to investigate crimes against journalists. That was a welcome step in a country where local and state police and prosecutors are often on the drug cartels' payrolls and where most crimes against journalists go unsolved.

Yet, the culture of impunity for attacks against journalists persists in Mexico. Nearly two years after Francisco Ortiz Franco was gunned down in front of his two young sons, not a single arrest has been made.

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The Ethnix of Congress.

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Democracy at risk - Venezuela's ChÁvez is shackling the press

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

April 5, 2006

Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez and his leftist “Bolivarian Revolution” are throttling that oil-rich country's free press. Half a dozen Latin countries have turned moderately left in recent years but only Venezuela, so far, is moving to silence press criticism and stifle dissent.

Chávez, a crude populist and ex-army officer, sees his critics among Venezuela's newspapers and broadcast networks as bourgeois reactionaries out to sabotage his self-styled revolution. Much of the Venezuelan press sees itself as fighting a desperate battle to preserve the country's democratic institutions against a strong-armed president whose political hero is Fidel Castro.

At first, Chávez used demagoguery and denunciation against the press. Then he resorted to direct action, inciting street mobs to attack journalists and their press organizations. Chávez's incitement has prompted a series of assaults in which journalists have been beaten or threatened.

Now, Chávez and his government are moving systematically to undercut press freedoms and silence press criticism of his lurch leftward. A Venezuelan congress and judiciary effectively controlled by Chávez are enacting laws and regulations that criminalize dissent. “Social responsibility” laws are being used to impose de facto censorship on radio and television news and commentary. A tangle of new arbitrary laws, decrees, regulations and rules is being put in place to stifle press criticism and give Chávez and his revolution an ever freer ride in the media.

While Chávez's critics in the press are hounded and harassed, Chávez gets an average of 40 broadcast hours a week, unchallenged by critics, to harangue Venezuelans.

The new laws and regulations plus higher taxes and punitive fines amount to a neo-totalitarian infrastructure for muzzling Venezuela's once-vibrant press. In an ominous portent, the 100-year-old El Impulso newspaper of Barquisimeto, Venezuela, was arbitrarily closed and prevented from publishing by government tax collectors for a day last October.

Chávez's campaign to muzzle Venezuela's press is provoking strenuous protests from outraged Venezuelan journalists, publishers and broadcasters, plus an international who's who of press-freedom defenders: the Inter American Press Association, Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, the Institute for Defense of Journalists and the International Association of Radio Broadcasters. In addition, the Organization of American States' Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has signaled its disapproval.

More must be done, by human rights groups and democratic nations in the Western Hemisphere especially, if Chávez is to be deterred from even worse transgressions against the rights of all Venezuelans to a free press. If press freedoms in Venezuela are completely extinguished, what's left of Venezuela's democracy won't be far behind.

A few realities about immigration

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

April 5, 2006

Those who crusade against illegal immigration – claiming that cheap labor depresses wages and hurts low-skilled American workers – like to talk about the economic impact. Americans would have a better debate if we started accepting some undeniable economic realities.

Undeniable Reality No. 1: Guest-worker programs often don't work as advertised. Workers are often exploited because employers tend to conclude that trying to ensure otherwise – through fair wages, housing, etc. – trims profits. Once that happens, employers lose interest in the program and look elsewhere for labor.

Undeniable Reality No. 2: Illegal immigrants don't depress wages, employers do. I'm sure immigrants would love to take home more pay every week, but they don't have the power to make that happen. One complaint can get them fired.

Undeniable Reality No. 3: The idea that illegal immigrants will “self-deport” if you dry up all the jobs isn't realistic. What do immigrants have to go home to? The self-deport argument is simply a cop-out for those who don't have the will to deport millions of illegal immigrants or give them amnesty.

Undeniable Reality No. 4: There will always be jobs for illegal immigrants because many Americans want to enjoy upper-class luxuries on middle-class salaries. Like the man who called in to a radio show I was on and volunteered that – as a single parent – he had hired an illegal immigrant to baby-sit his kids while he worked. The caller said he paid the nanny about $6 per hour, but that hiring a U.S. citizen might cost him twice as much. Multiply this guy by millions, and you start to get the picture.

Undeniable Reality No. 5: We all benefit from illegal immigration. Even if you don't benefit directly – like that single parent – chances are you benefit indirectly by enjoying the fruits of a robust economy or lower prices on goods and services. From Phoenix to Denver to Charlotte to Las Vegas, U.S. cities with high concentrations of illegal immigrants are enjoying construction booms and thriving economies. At the other extreme, economically depressed states such as West Virginia have – according to surveys – very few illegal immigrants.

Undeniable Reality No. 6: Mexican workers are going to continue to come to the United States – legally if possible, illegally if necessary – as long as they can earn 15 to 20 times more in this country than they can back home. In many villages in Mexico, workers might earn just $3 to $6 per day. In the United States, they might earn $60 per day for farm work or $90 per day for construction work. Ask yourself: What would you be willing to do to make 20 times what you make now?

Undeniable Reality No. 7: When you're talking about employers and workers, and the workers are here illegally, the laws of supply and demand fall apart. After a speech at a college in southern Indiana, an economics professor suggested that one way to force farmers in Mexico to pay higher wages was to encourage more immigration from that country. The logic seemed to be that if you further drain the labor supply, you'd force employers in Mexico to raise their wages. By extension, the same sort of pressure could be applied to manipulate the behavior of U.S. farmers.

Not so fast. What the professor was talking about was white-collar economics. From her vantage point, if another college wanted to lure her away and offered to increase her salary by 20 percent, then the college she's at now would be forced to increase her pay by at least as much to keep her on staff. That's generally how it works in the white-collar world.

But the professor could use a quick tutorial in Farm Economics 101. Her theory involved low-skilled farm workers – people who perhaps can't read or write, who usually have limited skills, who can't defend themselves against unscrupulous employers and who are easily replaced, on either side of the border. These people are at the bottom of the economic food chain, and they don't have any leverage. There's a wide chasm between such workers and their employers – socially, economically and culturally – and it makes it difficult for those workers to ever earn the respect they deserve.

If American farmers are squeezed with labor shortages, they'll simply do what they have done for decades – intensify their demands on Congress for more guest workers from other countries.

Which brings us back to Undeniable Reality No. 1.

A few realities about immigration

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

April 5, 2006

....

Look Dogbytes! This is what I was trying to tell you the other day!

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Reality Internet Personality

A few realities about immigration

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

April 5, 2006

....

Look Dogbytes! This is what I was trying to tell you the other day!

Do my eyes deceive me? Is that Es99 posting in the political thread?

A few realities about immigration

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

April 5, 2006

....

Look Dogbytes! This is what I was trying to tell you the other day!

Do my eyes deceive me? Is that Es99 posting in the political thread?

Yes..I took the risk..I'm sure I'll regret it later when all the right wing facist capitalist pigs come out to play. ;-)

DB..to jog your memory..it was one of those conversations we had you phoned me up and we ended up yelling at each other about politics...ok..that doesn't narrow it down much...

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Reality Internet Personality

A few realities about immigration

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

April 5, 2006

....

Look Dogbytes! This is what I was trying to tell you the other day!

Do my eyes deceive me? Is that Es99 posting in the political thread?

Yes..I took the risk..I'm sure I'll regret it later when all the right wing facist capitalist pigs come out to play. ;-)

That sounds like a racist statement against right wing facist capitalist pigs. :P

That sounds like a racist statement against right wing facist capitalist pigs. :P

Are right wing facist capitalist pigs a separate race now? :P

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Reality Internet Personality

Do my eyes deceive me? Is that Es99 posting in the political thread?

Yes..I took the risk..I'm sure I'll regret it later when all the right wing facist capitalist pigs come out to play. ;-)

That sounds like a racist statement against right wing facist capitalist pigs. :P

How can you tell? To me it looks just the same as her usual remarks.

Do my eyes deceive me? Is that Es99 posting in the political thread?

Yes..I took the risk..I'm sure I'll regret it later when all the right wing facist capitalist pigs come out to play. ;-)

That sounds like a racist statement against right wing facist capitalist pigs. :P

How do you tell? To me it looks just the same as her usual remarks.

I knew it was a mistake to take you off my filter list...back you go.

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Reality Internet Personality

Sounds like a 3 pointer at the buzzer.

Sounds like a 3 pointer at the buzzer.

Hm? :)