In last week’s contest, EricB edged out Nindid by less than a minute to win it. The correct location was North Little Rock, Arkansas. Here’s this week’s – in honor of a heavy travel weekend. Good luck!

It’s amazing how little attention this is getting:

President Felipe Calderón and his government defended their fight against public corruption and drug trafficking Friday, asking for greater powers to go after organized crime. They conceded that most Mexicans feel unsafe and that many police are unqualified to do their jobs.

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More than 4,500 people have been killed in drug-related violence since Calderón declared war against the cartels in early 2007. The campaign has transformed border cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez into war zones, complete with 20,000 occupying troops.

Calderón touted the recent arrest of Noé Ramírez Mandujano, a former chief of the anti-organized-crime unit at Mexico’s attorney general’s office, who is accused of taking at least $450,000 from drug traffickers in exchange for information about police investigations. Other top law enforcement officials have also been detained in recent weeks in “Operation Clean House,” including Mexico’s former liaison to Interpol, the international police organization.

There is a full-scale war going on just across the Mexican border, and the cartel leaders still have the resources to buy people at the highest levels of the Mexican Government. All Calderón can do is boast about something that is really just evidence of how much the deck is stacked against him.

In written answers to questions put to him by the National Congress, Calderón reported Thursday that half of the 56,000 police officers evaluated in a federal review failed to reach minimum standards. The examinations included drug and lie detector tests, psychological profiling and reviews of personal wealth.

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In the state of Baja California, where Tijuana is located, almost 90 percent of the officers received failing grades. It is not known how many will be fired or retrained. There are more than 375,000 police officers in Mexico.

The revelation that so many rank-and-file police officers fail to pass scrutiny is likely to come as no surprise to most Mexicans, who harbor deep distrust of law enforcement officers. A poll released Friday by a Mexican research group found that 60 percent of Mexicans do not feel safe and that the great majority do not report crimes because they distrust the police.

Due to American demand for illegal drugs, Mexico is now a country where controlling drug markets gives one nearly untouchable power over large areas. It’s simply not possible to arrest or shoot our way out of this situation. And the only solutions to this problem involve doing things that nearly all American politicians consider to be politically impossible. Throw in a worsening economy and higher unemployment driving up demand for drugs and we just get sucked further into the black hole.

How long will it be before people start treating Black Friday like an American version of Pamplona, where people dash into a Wal-Mart at 5am not to buy stuff, but solely for the thrill of surviving the stampede?

This special hits the air on December 2 at 10PM.

When the conflict between Georgia and Russia erupted this summer, it was initially presented to us as a fragile beacon of liberty (Georgia) being attacked by a big anti-freedom bully (Russia). Since then, that narrative has been shattered by continued revelations about Georgia’s role in starting the conflict. This conflict, as are many conflicts around the world, was one where the governments on both sides didn’t feel accountable for their actions – or to their own citizens – and no one was willing or able to hold them accountable.

For more evidence of how that’s true in Georgia as much as it is in Russia, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union released this video on the alarming human rights violations going on in Georgia under the premise of fighting drugs:

Looking for an Alternative – The Drug Policy Situation in Georgia from HCLU 3 on Vimeo.

In a country of 5 million people, police in Georgia are arresting 60,000 people a year for drug crimes. But that’s only the beginning of the problem. Police don’t need any evidence to arrest someone, so when people are arrested, they must take a drug test to prove their innocence. 70% of those arrested last year tested negative. In the video, one official spoke of a man who was repeatedly arrested outside his house and forced to take drug tests as a form of harassment.

You know, it’s so surprising that one of our close allies is as willing as we are to give the police too much power to wage the drug war.

Itchy and Scratchy are breaking up at the end of the year.

A while back, I was showing Will the Birds Eye Views of Detroit to show just how run-down that city has become. Large swaths of the city are empty now, blocks and blocks of empty and abandoned lots. The picture below is just one area where there was once a bustling neighborhood, but is now desolate.

Via Obsidian Wings, I found these two posts from Sweet Juniper about what happened to that school in the picture, which was amazingly in operation until 2007.

The Young Turks discuss the tie between the Bengals and Eagles last week and how bizarre it was that Donovan McNabb was unaware that there are ties in the NFL:

Jason Whitlock tries to defend McNabb here, but I just can’t. I’m as big a Donovan McNabb fan as anyone, but that was a shockingly dumb admission – not just that he didn’t know there were ties, but to be so unembarrassed by that lack of knowledge that he admitted it on camera. How do you play in a professional sports league for so long and not know something like that? Has he never looked at the standings of the league and seen the ‘T’ next to the ‘W’ and ‘L’?

If it wasn’t for this, it would be the dumbest thing I’ve heard all season.

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa, who just barely beat out Toby Nixon. The correct answer was Southport, Queensland, Australia.

Here’s this week’s contest. I think you’ll have to be quick to win this one…good luck!

How are your fantasy teams looking?

Last week’s winner was waguy. It was main street in Saugerties, NY. Here’s this week’s, and check out some additional views that have recently been added.

The PI had a story yesterday on a Jefferson County medical marijuana patient who was caught up in a Border Patrol roadblock near the Hood Canal Bridge. Under new laws, the Border Patrol can set up checkpoints anywhere within 100 miles of the Canadian border. The man, Stephen Dixon, is a 55-year-old disabled veteran who has a doctor’s approval to use medical marijuana for chronic pain. He was a passenger in the car that was stopped by the Border Patrol and had three grams worth of pot (a paper clip weighs one gram).

Thankfully for Dixon, his case was dismissed because the political environment is forcing even staunch drug warriors to re-prioritize:

In addition to dismissing the drug charges this week, [Seattle’s U.S. Attorney Jeff] Sullivan told the Border Patrol not to bring his office any more small-time pot cases.

“Today, I informed the Border Patrol that all future small possession cases may be referred to state or local law enforcement, but will not be pursued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office due to a lack of federal interest in the prosecution,” Sullivan said Thursday in a statement released to the Seattle P-I and a Port Angeles newspaper.

The Bush Administration’s DOJ has made medical marijuana prosecutions a higher priority than white-collar crime, yet even the man who’s been trying to extradite seed-seller Marc Emery isn’t willing to prosecute these cases now. Sadly though, Dixon’s own Congressman, Norm Dicks, voted to allow federal dollars to be spent to arrest people for medical marijuana in states like Washington where voters have made it legal. Fortunately, the idiots in Border Patrol who try to arrest people for having small amounts of pot on them likely won’t have any place to refer those cases to any more.

Nope, not satire. An actual poster from the Drug Czar’s new ad campaign. I wonder if there’s anyone in the Office of National Drug Control Policy who could do my job sober as well as I could do theirs stoned.

[via Pete Guither]