Page 4A
OPINION
East Oregonian
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
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Founded October 16, 1875
KATHRYN B. BROWN
DANIEL WATTENBURGER
JENNINE PERKINSON
TIM TRAINOR
Publisher
Advertising Director
Managing Editor
A
Support our students
ll college commencements are
happy, but community college
commencements are the
Opinion Page Editor
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costs, and, once they do that, they’re
much more likely to lose touch with
is read, big cheering sections erupt
You’d subsidize guidance
David
Brooks
Comment
graduates often know exactly where
they’re going to work; they walk with
an extra sense of security as they head off
These bright days serve as evidence that
America can live up to its dream of social
mobility, that there is hope at a time when the
So when President Barack Obama unveils
his community college plan in the State of the
Union address Tuesday night, it represents an
opportunity — an opportunity to create days
Many students don’t have intimate
relationships with anyone who can
guide them through the maze of
registration, who might help bond
courses are supposed to bring them up to
speed, but it’s not clear they work, so some
states are dropping remediation, which could
college students nationwide have dependent
Obama’s headline idea is to make
years of tuition costs to zero
for students with decent
grades and who graduate
Obama’s address:
State of the Union
The evidence from
a similar program in
Tennessee suggests that
the simple free label has an
important psychological
Editor’s Note: These are excerpts
from President Obama’s State of the
Union speech, delivered Tuesday night
from the Capitol in Washington D.C.
The problem is that
getting students to enroll
———
I believe in a smarter kind of
terror touching our shores; that unfolded
we combine military power with strong
diplomacy; when we leverage our power
with coalition building; when we don’t
let our fears blind us to the opportunities
long and costly wars; that saw a vicious
recession spread across our nation and
exactly what we’re doing right now
– and around the globe, it is making a
———
At this moment — with a growing
industry, and booming energy production
— we have risen from recession freer to
write our own future
than any other nation
to us to choose who
we want to be over the
———
In Iraq and Syria, American
leadership – including our military
Instead of getting dragged into another
ground war in the Middle East, we are
leading a broad coalition, including Arab
nations, to degrade
and ultimately destroy
We have
risen from the
recession freer
to write our own
future than any
other nation on
Earth.
Will we accept
an economy where
only a few of us
do spectacularly
well? Or will we
commit ourselves
to an economy that
generates rising
incomes and chances
for everyone who makes the effort?
———
will continue to work, as long as politics
———
In fact, at every moment of economic
change throughout our history, this
country has taken bold action to adapt
to new circumstances, and to make
up worker protections, Social Security,
Medicare, and Medicaid to protect
We gave our citizens schools and
colleges, infrastructure and the internet
– tools they needed to go as far as their
is — the idea that this country does
best when everyone gets their fair shot,
everyone does their fair share, and
We’re also supporting
a moderate opposition
in Syria that can
help us in this effort,
and assisting people
everywhere who stand
up to the bankrupt
ideology of violent
In an opinion by Art Way of the
Drug Policy Alliance (A5, Jan. 17)
he indicated that since Colorado
has legalized marijuana, marijuana
possession charges and arrests are
down, more than $40 million have
been raised by taxing marijuana, there
is a slight decline in youth use rates,
unemployment rates is at its lowest, and
In short, you wouldn’t
write government checks
structures around the
the lived environment of
actual students and create
relationships and cushions
We’ve had two
generations of human capital
was designed to give people access to schools
college dropout rates now hover somewhere
Spending $60 billion over 10 years to make
community college free will do little to reduce
students who qualify for Pell grants and other
students had their tuition covered entirely by
grant aid, and an additional 33 percent had
The Obama plan would largely be a
class students who are now paying tuition and
The smart thing to do would be to scrap
community college free now have tragically
then be spent on things that are mentioned in
Obama’s proposal — but not prioritized or
liberal orthodoxy that poor people just need
more money, that the government could write
people not just enroll but to complete
more sophisticated understanding of how
people actually live, on the importance of
emphasizes noncognitive skills — motivation,
grit and attachment — and how to use policy
The tuition piece of the Obama proposal
proposal, scrap it and rededicate the money
toward programs that will actually boost
completion, that will surround colleges,
students and their families with supporting
that will lure students into colleges only to
David Brooks became a New York Times
Op-Ed columnist in September 2003.
OTHER VIEWS
tonight, I call on this
Congress to show the world that we
are united in this mission by passing a
resolution to authorize the use of force
———
No foreign nation, no hacker, should
be able to shut down our networks,
steal our trade secrets, or invade the
privacy of American families, especially
government integrates intelligence to
combat cyber threats, just as we have
legislation we need to better meet the
identity theft, and protect our children’s
If we don’t act, we’ll leave our
we do, we can continue to protect the
technologies that have unleashed untold
opportunities for people around the
YOUR VIEWS
Colorado isn’t better off
with legalized marijuana
surged when high school
students learned that they
could go to community
Getting students
to enroll is
neither hard nor
important. The
important task is
to help students
graduate.
Many students drop out
because something happens
at home and there’s no one
L
A detainee’s diary
ast week, several Republican
senators, including John McCain,
called on President Barack
Obama to stop releasing detainees
from the prison at Guantánamo Bay,
the terror attacks in Paris, the 122
prisoners still in Guantnámo should
be made to stay right where they are,
sections of the book that describe his
Chained to the ground, he was forced
Joe
Nocera
On Tuesday, one of those detainees,
Comment
Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was sent
It is hard to read about his torture
to Guantánamo in 2002 and remains
there to this day, is poised to offer a powerful
Does Slahi crack? Of course: To get the
years during which he was isolated, tortured,
and it took years of litigation and negotiation
by Slahi’s pro bono lawyers to force the
extraordinary document — “A vision of hell,
In 2013 Clackamas County Mental
health services in Oregon revealed
that of the 242 kids 18 and under who
As a native of Oregon and someone
who has been the victim of the crimes
committed by pot dealers, Way’s
notations are about as ridiculous as his
comment that, “Colorado is being real
and facing the fact marijuana is here to
Sometimes during interrogations,
female interrogators rubbed their
Carré aptly describes it in a back cover blurb
in several languages — he learned English
while in Guantánamo — and lived in Canada
member, who had been based in Montreal —
where Slahi had also lived — was arrested
and charged with plotting to bomb the Los
interrogators what he thought they wanted to
hear, just as torture victims have done since
“In order to stop torture, the detainee has to
please his assailant, even with untruthful, and
who was tortured in Vietnam, knows this;
last month, he made a powerful speech in
which he condemned America’s use of torture,
saying, “the use of torture compromises that
which most distinguishes us from our enemies,
our belief that all people, even captured
is also why it is so disheartening that McCain
has allied himself with those who want to keep
In 2010, a federal district judge ruled in
favor of Slahi’s habeas corpus petition because
government appealed, and the order remains
was questioned about this plot several times,
I asked Nancy Hollander, one of Slahi’s
Forbes noted that legit sales in
Colorado are slower than expected and
taxes are lower than predicted as many
What was he accused of? Slahi asked this
question of his captors often and was never
“I have only written what I experienced, what
Second, the Colorado Rocky
Mountain HIDTA (High Intensity Drug
Advocates try to convince the public
that by legalizing pot it will get rid of
of the problem with Guantánamo, a prison
where being formally charged with a crime
indicates:
interdiction seizures of marijuana
tell the truth — that he had no involvement
in any acts of terrorism — only angered his
Will Oregon look like Colorado after
legalizing marijuana? Of course it will,
because the truth is that increasing the
availability of marijuana, and increased
use, will result in arrests for crimes
related to that use, such as impaired
driving, crimes committed under the
dog, smells like a dog, barks like a dog, must
But the quote that sticks with me most is
something that one of his guards told him,
was the best his captors could do to explain
for Guantánamo itself: “I know I can go to hell
Way’s notations are high in hyperbole
and low in being a trustworthy source for
of how marijuana is really impacting
First, marijuana remains illegal under
testing positive for marijuana have
increased 100 percent from 2007 to
growing more than permitted by law and
selling their excess to the under 21 and
and expulsions increased 32 percent
public health approach to minimize the
Shirley George
Welches, Ore.
that had been signed off by the secretary of
wonders of the book is that he does come
Joe Nocera is an Op-Ed columnist. Before
joining The Opinion Pages in April 2011, he
wrote the Talking Business column for The
New York Times each Saturday and was a staff
writer for The New York Times Magazine.