As President Barack Obama announced his decision to send 30,000 more soldiers to war in Afghanistan, I received a copy of Greg Mortenson's book, Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Greg has devoted his life to building schools where there are none in remote mountain villages in those countries. He creates the conditions for real change to succeed.

I don't know if President Obama's strategy will create positive lasting change. My heart aches at the thought of more lives destroyed through military action knowing military contractors will make obscene money during these difficult days at home. To win a war against insurgents, we must win the hearts and minds of local populations who harbor them, and give them confidence that we are truly interested in their well being. Greg Mortenson has it right. I pray Obama does too.



With Obama's administration adopting some of the worst legacies of his predecessors — the "state secrets" subversion of justice, military commissions, renditions, acceptance of crimes at the highest levels, the Afghan quagmire, assassination squads outside the chain of command, rejection of the land mine treaty, and so on — one wonders what calculations are at work in the White House.

I suspect that these vicious legacies, going beyond the Bush/Cheney regime, are so entrenched in the military, corporate, government, and TV-thriller mind-sets, that for President Obama to reject them outright is to endanger constitutional government by provoking conspiracies of assassination, subversion of the chain of command, and shrill attacks by the demented right wing now controlling the Republican Party and most of the corporate media.

Thus these subversions endure. The monster lives and breathes, and may devour much that we love, including constitutional government, and only some that we hate.



Some old Russian veterans must be laughing at us now over Afghanistan, where Russia exhausted its economy and brought down the Soviet state. It is suicidal for us to engage in these meaningless wars. Just as the incessant Peloponnesian Wars exhausted the ancient Greek state, these wars are exhausting our economy, and we are tragically committing national suicide by pouring lives and financial and industrial resources into them, which we cannot afford, and for which we will have no future benefits.

It is not our job to "straighten out" or micromanage Afghanistan. Obama deceived us. He is doing the bidding of all those stupid lying fascist generals (and bankers, and war industrialists) urging him on. Afghanistan is a place where empires go to die, or at least waste away.



There are about twice as many "sober" highway fatalities in New Mexico as DWI fatalities: 261 fatalities that did not involve intoxicated drivers and 133 that did, according to data for 2007 from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In 2007, New Mexico was the 10th worst state for DWI fatalities per 100,000 population and the ninth worst state for sober fatalities.

This stunning fact, that we rank worse for sober fatalities than for DWI fatalities, has been overlooked by the media, and effectively hidden from the New Mexican people. Media reports of sober highway fatalities are almost non-existent, while a first-time DWI citation is front-page news.

High-profiling DWI citations and crashes while ignoring sober crashes does a disservice to us all. It distorts perceptions while it ignores the fact that New Mexico highways are fundamentally dangerous. DWI-related injuries and fatalities are certainly tragic, but so are sober injuries and fatalities. See supporting data and charts at dwiwatch.org.