Evo Morales' Bolivia? The red revolution people's sidekick of Venezuela, Bolivia? The nationalize all the industries and tell foreign creditors to go to hell Bolivia? The refuse to pay the Brazilian electric company Bolivia?

That Bolivia? Oh please tell me Salon's heroes are corruptible men.

According to the UN, we're on schedule to have a drug free planet by 2008.

So who cares what's happening in Bolvia. It's all going to be over by the next election.

This major victory is coming just in time to preserve rule of law in Mexico, which looked endangered when the military was called in to deal with the narco-trafficantes. The miltary was called in because the narco-trafficantes managed to thoroughly corrupt and intimidate the police...

But whatever. By 2008, that should all be history.

So there's no need for this story, sorry.

Nice try though!

Ted Stevens and Don Young are notoriously crooked. They have been for years. One hand washes the other in Alaska, and Stevens and Young have been washing their own hands, and the hands of many, many other people, for a long, long time.

If the truth of their corruption was ever made truly public, they'd both spend the rest of their lives in a Federal penitentiary. But they'll get fat retirements instead.

They're slimy crooks, pure and simple. Everyone on Capitol Hill knows it...but no-one says shit.

Yes, this may be a drop in the bucket compared to other Halliburton corruption, but still, it's yet another sorted tale of exploiting American Indian policy to line the pockets of greedy white men. The State Department's denials and Ted Stevens almost accusing critics of racism reminds me of the way the so-called Navaho-Hopi Land Dispute was defended by Barry Goldwater and the Udall Brothers (Stuart and Mo). It's a complicated scheme so it confuses the public, who'd rather believe their public officials. Meanwhile, the Eskimos (like other American Indians in such schemes) usually have no idea what's going on while their entitlement, property, and much more wind up in the pockets of the wheeler-dealers. Good eye, Mr. Scherer. Good story.

I mean, like coca eradication is ever going to work. The biggest scam is the program itself, in my opinion.

Living in Los Angeles, I'm more worried about what's going to happen to Mexican democracy once the drug cartels corrupt the Mexican military like they've corrupted the Mexican police.

Corrupting the police doesn't endanger democracy, but a corrupt military -- that's a serious threat.

The War on Drugs corrupts everything it touches, but it just keep going on, unaccountable, with no benchmarks or timetables -- a giant no-bid contract in and of itself.

Drunk drivers in LA County. Thanks to the drug war, there's no room left in the county jail, so unless they're Paris Hilton, they tend to serve their time at home.

This reminds me of another story put out by the Bush (non) administration: What 9/11, Bin Laden and Iraq have in common.

To be fair, there is a common thread in both tales, but it remains nameless on the (non) administration's lips - Halliburton.

Four thoughts.

One, remember when Mr. Cheney responded to Paul O'Neil (Bush's first Secretary of the Treasury) complaining about tax breaks for the wealthy only? He said "It's our turn now." Obviously he didn't mean the GOP or even the business community. He seems to have meant his personal Mafia who think of this country as a placid cow to be milked until it dies. It's akin to electing Al Capone as mayor of Chicago.

Two: Bolivia is not the source of cocaine trafficking. We are. We are the market. Accept this first and procede from that point. Would you put the using addicts in charge of the Betty Ford Clinic?

Three: Obviously,Bolivian farmers need to feed their families another way if they are to give up a steady cash crop. We could get more drug-eradication bang for our buck if we send the entire DEA budget and State Department budget there to buy labor-intensive products (like packaged meals) from small Bolivian firms. We, the market, El Norte, have created the narco-trafficante and narco-terrorist political domination in South America with our policies (and our drug-lust) just like we ruin African farmers by buying U.S. grown rice giving it to African governments to undercut any possible domestic African commodities markets.

Four: Can we please admit that the Emperor has no clothes? Savvy people all over the continent, not just Evo Morales, understand us better than we do ourselves. Ms. Rice does not communicate American policy and values. KBR, Ted Stevens, and every high-school weekend coke-head are, cumulatively, the true generators of American foreign policy in this area.

Black markets exist to overprice commodities. If people want to use cocaine hydrochloride, let them. They will anyway. Legalize it. Case closed. Imagine the money that would be saved. Ah, but that's not the point, is it?

They tried that several times - subsidizing Bolivian farmers to grow anything else, usually coffee. It didn't work. Too much money in coke. Unless you want to figure out a way to charge $30 for a cup of coffee and you get a jones if you can't have 3 of them a day. The only crops that come remotely in range of profit yield per acre are tobacco and herbs & seasoning. Tobacco is out in ninny nanner micromanaging America, hell cigarettes will be illegal soon. And herbs, seasoning are hard to market and the total market is limited. Bolivia isn't all that great for fresh cut flowers either. So pretty much coke is the crop of choice.

In fact wouldn't that be arch if the US legalized hard drugs and outlawed cigarettes and all the farmers became tobacco farmers, for the money?

Running around.......magically creating money? To feed their now legal habits. Right, there's a commonsense approach. Let's lower the drinking age to four and close the FDA which is just an unnecessary expense too.

The first public notice of the contract came in April, when the State Department announced that it was awarding the five-year, $14.6 million deal to Olgoonik for serving food to coca eradicators in Bolivia. In the award, the government announced that "cost or pricing data" for the contract was "not obtained," and the cost had been set through a "negotiated proposal."

This is what passes for transparency in modern Government. I'm not asking for a publicly voted resolution every time the government wants to drop 14.6 million on feeding people in the midst of a futile snipe hunt designed to subsidize the price of cocaine by making it incrementally more difficult to make, but disclosure of things like the "cost and pricing data" and the terms of the "negotiated proposal" (you know, the only relevent data involved) should be available.

What a joke.