Monday, August 03, 2009
Time to Settle
There are many ways President Obama can express token appreciation of Native Americans, and indeed he has availed himself of some of these. But if Obama wants to do something substantive as an act of genuine reconciliation, then there are but a handful of things he must do. One of those is settling Cobell. No one is asking for the long list of embezzlers (that rotated from the energy industry over a century and a half through the Department of Interior mineral management service) to be indicted for fraud, but the stolen funds must be restored. And the first step for Obama is to stop fighting Cobell; the government is guilty, it's been proven guilty, everyone acknowledges that.
