The first NY Times editorial is on the
Dubya's failures at nation building. "More than two years after American-led forces evicted the Taliban from Kabul, much of Afghanistan remains insecure. A relatively enlightened constitution has been adopted, but is not enforceable in most of the country where warlords rule. Women still face severe legal and social discrimination....After nearly a year of American occupation, Iraq still suffers from pervasive insecurity, which has now spread from the Sunni heartland to predominantly Shiite and Kurdish areas...[N]o satisfactory formula has yet been devised for creating the interim government due to assume power July 1." The second calls for a
Senate Ethics Committee investigation of "Senator Larry Craig, Republican of Idaho, who sits on the N.R.A.'s board of directors in addition to his day job as a federal lawmaker." The third is on the too-common tragedy of
asthmatic kids in homeless shelters. The fourth approves of
McDonald's ending supersizing.
More summaries below:
William Safire celebrates the
good work done by the NEA Chairman. Bob Herbert has a great piece discussing the details of the
latest job numbers. "A number of demographic groups are getting absolutely hammered. A new study...found historic lows in the reported labor force participation of 16- to 19-year-olds." "A more ominous finding was that over the past three calendar years the number of people aged 16 to 24 who are both out of work and out of school increased from 4.8 million to 5.6 million, with males accounting for the bulk of the increase." "Unemployment lasting half a year or longer grew to 22.1 percent of all unemployment in 2003. That was an increase from 18.3 percent in 2002, and the highest rate since 1983." "Among those having a particularly hard time finding work, according to the report, are job seekers with college degrees and people 45 and older." Madeline Albright has a guest editorial on
assisting democracy in the Ukraine. No surprise - none is coming from Dubya's administration. "Unfortunately, while our ambassadors have spoken out with eloquence and courage about events in Ukraine, the administration has spoken privately, and from a distance. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been the only senior official to visit Ukraine recently, and that was to get support for the Iraq war. President Kuchma made clear to me during our nearly two-hour meeting last month that he sees the Bush administration as giving little thought, good or bad, to Ukraine, except to repeat what it hears from Russia. The suspicion within the political opposition is that Ukraine's contribution to the coalition in Iraq was intended to buy amnesty from the United States." Zbigniew Brzezinski has a guest editorial on how Dubya has bungled everything about his
Greater Middle East initiative. To me, it is hard to take seriously any claims this administration makes about spreading democracy when it does nothing in places that need help now like the Ukraine.
The Post has yet another day where it avoids discussing any serious topic like jobs, the economy, Iraq, terrorism, or the environment. The first Post editorial is about murderers that got to commit more murders because the INS and FBA databases are incompatible. The second is about how the DC Metro has been bilked out of millions. The third is on the President's Council on Bioethics. The Post is supportive of the council - "The council is unusual both because its membership includes 'right-to-lifers' as well as some of the country's best-known scientists, and because its nuanced, painstaking public reports have tried to accommodate the views of all, albeit not always to everyone's satisfaction." My impression is that the council is yet another conduit for Dubya's administration to politicize science.
The first guest editorial is on the intimidation and arrest of a journalist in Uzbekistan. The piece has a terrible headline, "Homophobia's Reach", when it is really about the freedom of the press. Fred Hiatt writes about the Governor in Virginia raising taxes. A guest editorial writes IMHO a stupid piece that the most worrying aspect about the cloning progress in South Korea was that "eggs were extracted from 16 female volunteers." I can make a list of the worrying aspects of human cloning technology and that 16 volunteers were discomforted would at the very bottom. William Raspberry has a waffle column on whether there should be single-sex education in public schools.