How the US gave guns to Mexican cartels

The Border Gun ScandalBy John Dodson

In September 2009, John Dodson, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, was assigned to the ATF’s Phoenix office. What he found there shocked him. The bureau was encouraging gun dealers to sell weapons in bulk to known straw buyers, who would funnel those guns to Mexican drug cartels. Known as Operation Fast and Furious, it ended with the death of at least one American law enforcement officer. Dodson became a congressional whistleblower, and the investigation into the operation is ongoing. In this exclusive excerpt from his new book, “The Unarmed Truth,” Dodson explains how tragically inept Fast and Furious was.

‘It’s like the underwear gnomes,” my ATF colleague Lee Casa told me one time as we recounted the latest bizarre goings-on in Phoenix.

“What?” I asked.

“You ever watch ‘South Park’? There’s this episode where all the boys get their underwear stolen by these underwear gnomes. They track them down to get it back and one of them asks why they are stealing everyone’s underwear. The gnomes break out this PowerPoint and reveal their master plan: Phase One: Collect underpants . . . Phase Two: ? . . . Phase Three: Profit.”

“We’re doing the same thing,” he explained. “We know Phase One is ‘Walk guns’ and Phase Three is ‘Take down a big cartel!’ ”

Both of us were laughing now; a more fitting and appropriate allegory could never be found. Casa concluded, “Just nobody can figure out what the f–k Phase Two is!”

What was happening did at times almost seem like a spoof. Letting guns “walk” was a tactic that I had never before seen or even contemplated. It simply wasn’t done.

I couldn’t understand how anyone could argue that allowing guns that ought to have been in law-enforcement custody to go to known or suspected criminals — people who shouldn’t have been near a gun, people who almost certainly would be passing them on to Mexico’s most brutal drug cartels — wasn’t madness.

Read more at the New York Post

Should We Bail Out Cities?

iALF7L8oomuABy Megan McArdle Nov 26

In the latest City Journal, Steve Malanga writes about an issue that hasn’t yet gotten a lot of attention but is virtually guaranteed to become a serious topic of national debate in the not-so-distant future: Do we bail out cities that have become insolvent?

Malanga quotes a Steve Rattner op-ed from the summer: “The 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs, and eventually Congress decided to help them.” Rattner is right, of course; Detroit was largely undone by massive structural changes in the auto industry, which now employs only a small fraction of the people that it used to. And yet, there’s more to the story, isn’t there? Detroit’s biggest problem is the combined burden of its pension funds and retiree health benefits. And the reason that its pensions are in such a state is that they were bizarrely mismanaged by people who apparently didn’t quite get fifth-grade math.

It’s true that it would be easier to deal with these problems if Detroit were more like New York and less like, well, Detroit. But it’s also true that if Detroit had been responsible about its pension contributions instead of underfunding the pensions while simultaneously handing out extra benefits above and beyond what the city already couldn’t afford, its retirees would not now be facing dire straits. New Yorkers did not get to vote for the corrupt Detroit politicians who appointed the terrible Detroit pension managers who made all of Detroit’s problems so much worse than they had to be. Why should they have to pick up the check for all those mistakes?

Read more at Bloomberg