The board game’s creator, Bob Johnson, says in a statement that the game “was forced off the retail market in the 1980s by government officials working with the NAACP, NOW, and other welfare ‘rights’ groups.”

According to a press release announcing the rerelease of the game:

“Obozo’s America” is essentially the same as “Public Assistance” with these new features: the “Welfare Promenade” is now “Obozo’s Welfare Promenade;” each of the 50 Welfare Benefit cards and each of the 50 Working Person’s Burden cards begins with “Obozo Says;” and, an image of Obozo the Marxist Clown, juggling Hope and Change balls, appears in each of the corners.

Players begin on Obozo’s Welfare Promenade with an initial welfare grant of $1,000, then maneuver along the Promenade, getting cash for producing out-of-wedlock children, for drawing extensive welfare benefits, and for their success in four “Saturday Night” crimes (Prostitution, Armed Robbery, Gambling, and Drugs). Players can also get a job for their live-in on the “Government Cakewalk,” and if they are caught in crime, experience the “Jail Jaunt” – one roll of the dice and they’re back at the welfare office collecting all benefits. [Emphasis mine]

Players try to avoid landing on one of the dreaded “Get a Job” blocks which forces them off Obozo’s Welfare Promenade into the Working Person’s Rut. Hey, somebody has to pay for all the welfare, crime, and government!

Besides depicting welfare recipients as prostitutes, violent thieves, gamblers and drug addicts, the game’s website features an image of the president as “Obozo the Marxist Clown.”

In the right-wing publication American Thinker, Johnson writes:

First, ACORN is the NAACP, NOW, ACLU, and other “welfare rights advocates” all rolled into one, funded by you and me to facilitate the expansion of the welfare empire and its socialist/Marxist agenda. Obama was, and still is, an advocate for ACORN. That means he is an advocate for the suppression of free speech and free press. The only “civil right” Obama honors is the “right” of some to fare well at the involuntary expense of the productive members of society.

Second, the American Public Human Services Association, or APHSA (formerly the APWA) runs a half-a-trillion-dollar welfare empire. Had you ever heard of this fourth branch of government and its elitist parasites before? They, or an affiliated group, will run Obama “Care.”

Third, like the APHSA, the Obama administration is determined to maintain its power through propaganda, agitation, and projection. The false “racist” attack worked against us and our game in 1980, and it still works today.

Fourth, the welfare game board graphically portrays Obama’s destructive vision for American society. The hundred-dollar bill in the game pictures Karl Marx with the motto “Equality Taxation Poverty.” Is that not Obama’s unspoken goal?

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida is currently fighting a new law in Florida that requires welfare recipients to take a drug test before receiving benefits. Howard Simon, the executive director of the ACLU of Florida, has called the law a propagation of offensive stereotypes about welfare recipients. “The law is not just unconstitutional and illegal, it’s a public policy that rests on ugly stereotypes,” Simon said.

The ACLU’s client in the lawsuit is a welfare recipient — as well as a Navy veteran, a student at the University of Central Florida and a single father.

If either of those scenarios takes place, press secretary George Little said, “we would be looking at, in all likelihood, the smallest Army and Marine Corps in decades, the smallest tactical Air Force since [the branch] was established and the smallest Navy in nearly 100 years.”

George Little

Automatic cuts to the Defense Department would take place, through the 2011 Budget Control Act’s sequestration mechanism, if the Committee members don’t offer a plan to reduce the deficit by Nov. 24. The cuts would also take place if the whole of Congress fails to adopt a plan by the Committee in December.

For the Defense Department, that means another $500 billion from defense spending over 10 years, on top of $350 billion in cuts already identified over the same period.

The department has been looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been adamant, Little said, that moving to sequestration would be a “devastating” scenario for the nation’s security.

The secretary “has reiterated time and time again that we don’t have to choose between our fiscal security and our national security,” Little said, “but if we go to sequestration, we would very well have to make that choice.

Little said that $1 trillion in cuts would make it necessary for the Pentagon to break faith in some areas — including jobs and salary benefits — with those in uniform who are serving the nation.

“In a time of war,” he said, “that’s unacceptable.”

At the Pentagon, internal analysis shows that sequestration also would have a profound impact on the U.S. industrial base, he added, by threatening many of the 3.8 million military and civilian jobs that the sector represents.

“We’re not talking about just military jobs, we’re also talking about jobs in the private sector that support the innovation and creativity and capabilities that we need to keep America strong,” he said.

Moving to sequestration and the additional budget cuts it would require, department officials believe “would potentially add 1 percent to the national unemployment rate,” Little said.

Panetta, he added, has made Congress aware of the consequences of such deep defense cuts.

“We want to make it very clear [to everyone] that sequestration is a red line that this government should not cross,” Little said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen (Oscar Matatquin/ZUMA Press)

President Obama announced in his State of the Union address that national security programs would not be subject to his proposed spending freeze. But that hasn’t stopped Pentagon officials from placing what they consider to be outdated military programs in the budgetary icebox.

In its master planning document for the medium-term defense outlook, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon will announce cuts to some Navy and Air Force programs. The Pentagon will not purchase any more of the costly C-17 transport aircraft for the Air Force. It will delay purchase of the Navy’s LCC command ship. It will cancel production of the Navy’s planned CG(X) cruiser. And it will contend that these steps and others are necessary for reorienting the U.S.’s defense posture around the wars the U.S. is fighting now and the threats it presently faces.

[Security1] According to a knowledgeable Defense official who requested anonymity, the cuts in the QDR will not be as extensive as the ones announced in last year’s Pentagon budget. Last spring, Defense Secretary Robert Gates ended several persistent, expensive and underutilized or unproven defense systems like the F-22 fighter jet and the Army’s Future Combat Systems vehicle, steps lauded by defense reformers and the subject of a tough but successful congressional fight. Those cuts “created the space for the QDR to focus on areas of reinvestment,” the Defense official told TWI.

The QDR is scheduled to be unveiled on Monday. Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, will testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday about both the QDR and the fiscal 2011 defense budget, the first budget guided by the new document. An early draft of the QDR that leaked to Defense News and InsideDefense on Wednesday did not identify the three systems as slated for cuts, and the Pentagon official said the final document will change substantially from the version that leaked.

Delaying production of the LCC and canceling the CG(X) would probably not “equal a big cost savings,” said Laicie Olson, a defense analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, since it is unclear how much replacing those systems with different ones would cost. But ending the C-17, manufactured by Boeing, would be a “huge cost saving,” she said, representing an estimated $2.5 billion — that is, if the administration can persuade Congress to stop authorizing the purchase of a plane that provides about 30,000 jobs in more than 40 states.

In any event, the budget request the Obama administration will send to Congress next week is expected to total $740 billion when factoring in the cost of sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, up from $663 billion last year. But when not factoring in the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget is expected to grow by 2 percent over last year, or about the rate of inflation.

Both the QDR and the anticipated cuts reflect the document’s reorientation of Pentagon thinking, planning and budgetary decisions toward immediate and manifested threats over the next four years — principally the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan, which the leaked draft anticipates continuing throughout the four-year life of the QDR — and away from remote or hypothetical ones. The 2010 document abandons a construct of its predecessors that instructs the military to prepare to fight two simultaneous conventional wars, the result of painful experience fighting two simultaneous unconventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that earlier QDRs did not envision.

Rather than instruct the military to prepare for particular conflicts against particular enemies, the 2010 QDR will instruct it instead to defend against demonstrated enemy capabilities and to support specific missions. Those missions include supporting civilian authorities, improving cyberspace capabilities and performing counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and stability operations — the first time a QDR has embraced these once-marginal functions as core Pentagon capabilities. It instructs the military to deter, counter and defeat weapons of mass destruction and “anti-access capabilities” possessed by adversaries, like missiles and cyber defenses that inhibit the U.S.’s ability to project its military power. And the document urges the military to increase its supply and use of remotely piloted vehicles like the drones used by the Air Force in Afghanistan.

“This QDR focuses on the wars we are actually fighting, not the wars we sometimes wished we were fighting,” the official said, adding that a “hypothetical calculus” like the abandoned two-wars concept that did not focus on specific capabilities had “done far more harm than good.”

In particular, the QDR instructs the military to counter “ballistic missiles, anti-satellite capabilities and other systems” that adversaries can use to deter the U.S., the Pentagon official previewed. While it does not call out particular enemies and focuses instead on the capabilities they might possess, “we argue that the proliferation of some of these things to non-state actors will also magnify the problem — think Hezbollah using anti-ship missiles in 2006” during its war with Israel, the official said.

The QDR also emphasizes that military forces require “seamless integration” with a “range of civilian and military partners,” both from within the civilian sectors of the U.S. government and across the international community. But Raymond Pritchett, one of the leading naval bloggers, said that delaying the LCC command ship, a platform that allows several militaries to network together aboard essentially a floating headquarters, appeared at odds with the broader approach. “The command ship is a big deal,” Pritchett said. “If your stated strategic direction is partnership with other countries, the last thing you want to do is get rid of a platform that brings all those capabilities together.” He worried that delaying the LCC indicated that “the Navy is disconnected from strategy.” But some contend that the Navy’s advanced communications infrastructure means the LCC is no longer required for the Navy to operate alongside partner militaries.

By contrast, Pritchett saw the cancellation of the CG(X) as an inevitability that will cause the Navy to redesign its cruisers and destroyers into a single ship class. “From the perspective of defense reform, it’s a good thing, standardized to one hull,” he said.

Whether Congress will accept the cuts is an open question. The C-17 transport plane has limited utility in a war like Afghanistan, since the plane is too big for most of the country’s available landing space, but the plane has a lot of legislative allies. “They’ve tried to cut the C-17 before, and it hasn’t worked. They can’t get the cut through Congress,” Olson said. “As far as delays, that’s usually easier to get through. But those 30,000 jobs are going to be a kicker.”

Similarly, the Pentagon is preparing for a struggle with the Hill and the press about the anticipated cuts — and the focus of the QDR itself. Emphasizing the need to counter threatening capabilities rather than specific enemies opens the administration up to the political argument that it is neglecting particular U.S. adversaries. Monday and Tuesday will be filled with extensive press briefings, think-tank lectures and congressional testimony from Gates, Mullen and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, whose subordinates conducted the QDR process.

“We’ll take some hits for not having a bumper-sticker force planning construct, but screw it,” the Pentagon official said. “The world is complicated.”

$4.4 billion for two Navy destroyers and one littoral combat ship. Yow. Maybe it is time to start buying warships from South Korea, or at least invite competitive bids? Folks, this is billions, not millions. Imagine what $4.4 billion could do to rebuild our highways, or send deserving kids to college, or rebuild New Orleans.

$1 billion for Navy F-18s. Lots of money for an airplane that is, well, yeeehh. Better spent on unmanned combat aircraft?

$2.6 billion for V-22 aircraft for the Marines and Air Force. I wish the Marines had just gone with the UH-60 Black Hawk two decades ago. Now the Marines have dug a hole that is killing the rest of their aviation. It makes me wonder whether the Marines, the smallest of the armed forces, should be in the business of technology innovation.

I tell you, I’m sick of these hippies.

From a cyber warfare perspective, the short term solution to the UAV video issue is not to encrypt the data (which is the long term solution), rather to use the unencrypted video stream to go after the cyber insurgents – with the specific intention of getting inside their network. It is not complicated to have a normal UAV camera send a video signal exactly as intended for the military function, but include packet data that exploits vulnerabilities in software like skygrabber, or to include code that exploits known vulnerabilities in popular video players. I’m sticking to very common examples that are easily understood by the masses, but at many layers of the UAVs video signal the potential to exploit the unencrypted broadcasted video feed as a weapon is significant.

I’d be lying if I said that I knew how this works, or whether it’s actually applicable to the kinds of signals the drones employ, but Galrahn knows what he’s talking about in general. And I imagine in cyberwarfare, like in counterintelligence, your actual capabilities are less important than the way the enemy perceives your capabilities. Galrahn is recalling the famous command issued by French military genius Ferdinand Foch when trying to prevent the Germans from piercing the French line during World War I: “Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack.”

My test on this is easy: Would George C. Marshall have accepted such payments? I doubt it. (Remember, he declined to write a memoir that would have made him wealthy because he thought it would have been improper to get into the failings of some of his comrades.)

“I don’t know any SEALs,” said Sarosdy, 81, speaking by phone from his home in Pensacola, Fla. “I have no idea who transmitted that.”

Sarosdy said he received the e-mail from a friend – he thinks it was another retired military officer – a few days after the stand-off ended, he said. He thought it was interesting, so he forwarded it to a couple dozen other people.

And so another hoax email about Barack Obama was born.

The USS Bainbridge (Navy photo)

Ironic as it may appear, Naval reformers think the successful rescue of Maersk Alabama captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates may have highlighted structural imbalances in the U.S. Navy’s ability to handle irregular warfare — just as difficulties experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan awakened the U.S. Army to counterinsurgency requirements.

To be sure, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, the liberation of Phillips after five days of captivity by what Defense Secretary Bob Gates called “untrained teenagers” off the Somali coast was an unambiguous victory. Three Navy SEALs parachuted into the region, swam aboard the USS Bainbridge, which U.S. Central Command dispatched to monitor the area after the pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama, and fired three shots at night to kill three pirates and free Phillips. As an example of an irregular challenge to global commerce — pirates in small boats armed with crude weapons have hijacked 18 ships in 2009 alone — the United States deployed a minimum of force and used it effectively. “Three Seals, three shots, three take-downs,” an anonymous U.S. official told The Wall Street Journal with evident pride.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The trouble, experts say, is that beyond the rescue lie warning signs about continued threats from low-tech adversaries operating in shallow waters. The current U.S. Naval strategy, written under then-Navy chief Adm. Mike Mullen — now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — has won plaudits for emphasizing increased international maritime cooperation. But reformers say it hasn’t gone far enough to restructure the Navy around low-intensity operations and support to special operations forces, rather than operations far out at sea. “You have to have a balanced force,” said Eric Wertheim, a columnist for “Proceedings,” the journal of the U.S. Naval Institute, and author of “Combat Fleets of The World,” in an interview.

What Wertheim and like-minded Naval theorists have in mind isn’t a rebalance of the U.S. fleet overwhelmingly for close-encounter anti-piracy missions, but increasing Naval capabilities for such actions alongside traditional Naval priorities like deterring and fighting adversaries far out in the oceans and protecting shipping lanes. In that respect, they sound much like their ground-force counterparts who argue for a place in the U.S. Army to emphasize counterinsurgency operations as well as combat between two traditional states’ armies. The Maersk Alabama incident may have provided public attention to the threats they’ve been warning about. “Before, [the Navy] didn’t see a need for it,” said Raymond Pritchett, a U.S. Naval Institute analyst and blogger, though he cautioned that it still might not. “There’s a maverick community in surface-warfare community that’s pushing for” greater low-intensity conflict efforts.

In the wake of the Phillips hostage situation and rescue — which saturated media coverage last week — the Obama administration and the military have pledged to make anti-piracy efforts a priority. In a Tuesday morning interview with ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” Mullen said the military would think “broadly and widely and deeply” about what to do about piracy. President Obama said that the U.S. had to “continue to be prepared to confront” piracy in collaboration with other nations.

The incident threw into relief an effort that Defense Secretary Bob Gates began earlier last week. On April 6, Gates unveiled a defense budget that accelerated a Navy program to build the Littoral Combat Ship, a light and fast ship capable of operating in coastal waters that are too shallow for other Naval ships. “It is the kind of capability that would have enormous value against fast boats, for example, in the Persian Gulf,” Gates told a blogger conference call on Wednesday. “You don’t need a $5 billion-ship to go after pirates.” Pirates had boarded the Maersk Alabama just that morning.

While the Littoral Combat Ship has been beset by cost problems, the concept of such a vessel has long been embraced by Naval reformers, who see both international maritime cooperation and coastal operations as critical to protecting the freedom of the seas for global commerce. Pritchett noted that the Navy has been slow to embrace the concept. Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Navy gave many of many of its coastal patrol vessels to the U.S. Coast Guard, “but found it needed them for offshore [operations] in Iraq,” he said.

“The Navy doesn’t always like to get involved in coastal operations,” said Wertheim. “It’s not always considered a core mission.” As a result, promoting coastal operations doesn’t always provide a Naval officer a steady path to career advancement.

In a November paper on maritime strategy for the Center for a New American Security, a defense think tank that employed many Obama Pentagon officials, retired Marine Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman argued that the Navy needed to invest more in ships that could handle coastal operations.” American security interests will have to be secured and advanced in tomorrow’s ‘contested zones’: the urbanized littorals of the rim lands of Asia and Africa,” Hoffman, who did not return a Tuesday phone call, wrote. “That will require more than a [deep] water fleet that commands the commons from standoff distance. He specifically called for “greater emphasis to smaller craft” beyond the Littoral Combat Ship that can facilitate what he termed “offshore partnering,” for international and commercial security.

The trouble — as Gates will confront when he presents his budget request to Congress when it returns from recess next week — is that “Congress doesn’t consider small ships [part of] shipbuilding,” Pritchett said, and as a result “the Navy doesn’t ask for them” sufficiently. Shipbuilding is a jobs engine in states like Maine and Mississippi.

One way reformers confront the realities of addressing both Congressional pressure and low-intensity conflict is by proposing ships that can take on more than one mission, or by creating new naval formations that provide for a mixture of capabilities. One such proposal, called “Influence Squadrons” in the April issue of “Proceedings,” came from Navy Cmdr. Henry Hendrix. Hendrix envisioned a squadron composed of a panoply of naval assets, including destroyers, Littoral Combat Ships, Coastal Patrol ships “to operate close in” to the land and “an amphibious mother ship.”

Hendrix contended that the Influence Squadrons would provide multiple benefits. “Their understated capabilities would epitomize America’s peaceful, non-aggressive intent, and would carry out the new maritime strategy’s stated purpose of providing positive influence forward,” he wrote. In addition, they’d provide enough weaponry to “either dissuade or destroy pirate networks that might seek to prey upon increasingly vulnerable commercial sea lines of communication.”

Other recent anti-pirate activity lent apparent support to Hoffman’s “offshore partnering” strategy of robust maritime collaboration. Wertheim pointed to the Strait of Malacca, a waterway between Malaysia and Indonesia that is one of the most important commercial maritime traffic areas, as it bridges the Pacific and Indian oceans. Piracy in the area, a traditional problem, shot up in the mid-2000s. “Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia realized they have to coordinate, had to work together,” Wertheim said, and accordingly stepped up patrols in the waterway and shared radar and other intelligence assets. While the International Maritime Bureau still considers the strait to be vulnerable to piracy, it notes on its website that “the number of attacks have dropped due to the increase and aggressive patrols by the littoral states Authorities since July 2005.”

But not every aspect of piracy is exclusively a naval problem. Andrew Exum, a counterinsurgency expert at the Center for a New American Security, noted that the piracy problem resulted from “ungoverned space” in Somalia, and as a result, U.S. efforts at coordinating international responsibilities could mitigate but not eliminate the problem. The new U.S. military command for Africa, known as Africom, is “helpful for an international blessing” in terms of “coordinating states to allow the U.S. Navy and allied navies to use their ports,” but ultimately the problem is “no one has the appetite to go into Somalia and provide governance.”

Whether the “maverick community” Pritchett describes – and identifies with – will prove to be as influential as their counterinsurgent counterparts in the land-warfare community remains to be seen. But “this incident is what gets the American people going,” he said, and there is a robust international consensus – complete with over a dozen countries’ ship deployments to the waters where the Somali pirates operate and U.N. Security Council resolutions to confront piracy – behind the anti-pirate mission.

Maritime shipping “is a $7.8 trillion industry and there are a lot of trickle-down effects,” Pritchett said. “The insurance rate is going up and that’s going to make our goods cost more. That starts affecting global commerce, which is already struggling … none of this is in our interest.”

Update: Cmdr. Hendrix’s article appeared in the April 2009 issue of “Proceedings,” not “Parameters,” which is the Army War College journal, as this article mistakenly reported originally. We regret the error.

So naturally it attracts the attention of the U.S. Naval Institute’s awesomeblog when The New York Times runs a piece about an embarrassing and messy divorce that Mabus and his ex-wife endured. The White House, rightly, tells the paper’s Jim Rutenberg that Mabus’ divorce is irrelevant to his potential service in the administration. But the Naval Institute’s contrib-blogger Springboared wonders:

Airing dirty laundry is, sadly, a tradition for high-level appointees.  But given how orchestrated anti-nominee media campaigns can be, is this New York Times piece a first salvo in a messy nomination drama?

Springboared also finds a 1971 picture of Mabus as a young Naval officer wearing a seriously righteous beard. If the man’s divorce will be an issue in his hearing, why not get on his case about his facial hair? (Not that Springboared is saying that, but still. Honestly. Let’s grow up as a country, shall we?)

Adm. Patrick Walsh reported that based on more than 100 interviews over 13 days, inspections of all the camps at the prison and observation of daily operations, “it was apparent that the chain of command responsible for the detention mission at Guantanamo consistently seeks to go beyond the minimum standard in complying with Common Article 3,” he said. “We found that the chain of command endeavors to enhance conditions in a manner as humane as possible, consistent with security concerns.”

Advocates for the detainees such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, however, were not convinced.

“The men at Guantanamo are deteriorating at a rapid rate due to the harsh conditions that continue to this day, despite a few cosmetic changes to their routines,” said CCR staff attorney Pardiss Kebriaei in a statement released yesterday. “They are caught in a vicious cycle where their isolation causes psychological damage, which causes them to act out, which brings more abuse and keeps them in isolation. If they are going to be there another year or even another day, this has to end.” The advocates have released their own report on conditions at the prison.

Of course, both things could be true. Men who are abducted, beaten, hooded, flown across the world and thrown in a rudimentary cage-like prison, subjected to “extreme” interrogations and held for up to seven years without charge aren’t likely to be all that cooperative after a while. Their captors may well believe that isolating the men will ensure security, even if it contributes to destroying the prisoners’ mental health. And whether isolation, force-feeding someone who’s trying to starve himself to death, or not letting a prisoner out in the sunshine violates the Geneva Conventions’ ban on “humiliating and degrading treatment” is arguable.

But that seems to be missing the point. The controversy over conditions at Guantanamo really raises two key questions.

First, if the Pentagon is so proud of the conditions at Guantanamo, why not let human rights advocates and journalists in to see it, as they’ve requested? So far, access has been extremely limited, and the lawyers have to count on descriptions of conditions and treatment from their clients, who may have an incentive to exaggerate the deficiencies and abuses, or who, after all this time in prison for crimes they may never have committed, may have truly lost their minds. Allowing independent human rights advocates and journalists to see the prison and interview detainees — and maybe even installing an independent human rights monitor at Guantanamo to observe and make recommendation on how to improve it until it’s closed — could go a long way toward both making the prison a more humane and constructive place, and would give the Obama administration some credibility on an issue that it claims to care about.

Second, the administration needs to move quickly to send more of those prisoners home if they don’t have evidence to warrant holding them. Yesterday, the Pentagon released Binyam Mohamed, the Ethiopian-born U.K. resident picked up in Pakistan and flown to Morrocco, where he says he was interrogated under torture before being sent to a CIA prison in Afghanistan and then to Gitmo. Mohamed was held there for more than four years because the Bush administration alleged he was plotting with al Qaeda to set off bombs in the United States. The charges against him, however, were eventually dropped. Almost seven years after his capture, he was allowed to return home.

Compared to some of the other Gitmo prisoners, Mohamed is lucky. Because he was from the United Kingdom, the United States was able to negotiate his release. Many more are still being held, even if the United States has little to no evidence against them — sometimes even after it is determined they’ve done nothing wrong. Just last week, a the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that a federal judge had no authority to release into the United States the 17 Chinese Muslim Uighurs who are stuck at Guantanamo and have never been charged, but can’t return home for fear of persecution by Chinese authorities. Only the executive has the authority to release them into the United States, the court ruled.

The fact that innocent men are still being held in prison weeks after a new administration has taken over with the promise to restore the rule of law is astonishing. Sure, President Obama has a crashing economy to worry about  among other things. But as Obama put it himself on the campaign trail, when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) threatened to cancel a debate to attend congressional negotiations on a bank bailout bill: “Presidents are going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time.”

Fortunately, the president has a large staff of highly capable people to help him out.  It’s time for Obama to make good on his promises.