The first NY Times editorial is about the
bombings in Madrid. "We are all Madrileños now." The second editorial kicks the House Republican leadership up-and-down the street over the
cheeseburger bill. I will reprint it complete in the extended text. The third editorial calls on the military to address the problem of
rape in its ranks. A guest editorial writes about the
magnificent work Martha Stewart did and how her conviction diminishes not just herself.
Bob Herbert tells the story of a soldier severly injured in Iraq. His point:
Thousands of U.S. troops have been wounded and injured in Iraq. They have been paralyzed, lost limbs, suffered blindness, been horribly burned and so on. They are heroes, without question, but their stories have largely gone untold.
Krugman has another delightful column where he destroys
Republican spin on jobs then rips apart Dubya's "policy" for creating jobs. He ends with:
No sensible person blames Mr. Bush for the onset of the recession in 2001. But he does deserve blame for the fact that all he has to show for three years of supposed job-creation policies is a mountain of debt.
A guest editorialist provides a personal view on
terrorism in Spain. Another guest editorialist asks us to
reconsider how airport security screening is done.
More summaries below
The first Washington Post editorial discusses the
bombings in Madrid and how it was apparently a punishment for Spain's long, tough fight against terrorism. The second is about the
IMF's mishandling of Argentina. The third editorial is on the
Virginia's Republican party inability to deal with that it has to raise taxes.
The former president of Costa Rica has an editorial on a topic that seems to have disappeared for our national conversation, Haiti. Harold Meyerson raves about an
Illinois Democratic Senate candidate.
Charles Krauthammer gets hot and bothered that editor of Le Monde bashed Dubya in the Wall Street Journal. It is amazing to see Krauthammer contradict himself within a few paragraphs. Krauthammer admits
The investigations have established that the weapons [of mass destruction] have not been found and may not exist.
Krauthammer then writes:
Colombani decries the fact that containment has given way to preemptive war....Only a fool would advocate containment against the new threat that has risen in its place: terrorists and terrorist states acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
But if Iraq had no WMD's, how was containment unsuccessful? Personally, I would love to see conservatives write editorials like this every day from now to the November election, because each one reinforces that they are a bunch of liars.
David Ignatius is unimpressed with Dubya's Greater Middle East initiative. E. J. Dionne has a disappointing piece where he seems to say that Dubya's #1 job is not to create jobs, but to trick Americans into thinking he is creating jobs. It is about the political horserace and not the underlying reality.
Here is the complete editorial I mentioned above:
Call it legis-lite: the Republican leaders of Congress have been running one of the least demanding workloads in decades, politicking most of the year while scheduling only 94 days in session, 40 fewer than four years ago. Yet the House still invested a day's debate in passing what is known as the cheeseburger bill - a supersize sop to the fast-food industry. It's a gift that Republicans love doling out to their friends in big business, namely, immunity from being sued.
At issue are lawsuits blaming fast-food chains and their marketing practices for obesity. Only a few such cases have been brought across the nation, and none have succeeded. Yet a Congressional majority rose up against this phantom judicial crisis. It's almost enough to make us miss those spellbinding debates about naming airports after politicians and establishing freedom fries as the preferred fare in Capitol dining rooms. Exempting much of American industry from being subject to the legal system is far more damaging.
Proponents righteously heaped blame on individual overeaters in the debate, while once again indulging the G.O.P.'s obsession for curtailing Americans' basic right to go to court. The House performance was an exercise in special-interest pandering, not calorie counting.
"Suing your way to better health is not the answer," said the Republican speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, a master of the simplistic debate in which trial lawyers were once more demonized while the majority ducked a truly complex public health problem.
Obesity could soon overtake smoking as the leading cause of preventable death, according to federal health officials. They estimated the social costs of the problem at $117 billion a year. Public awareness is growing. The fast-food industry has begun anxiously retreating from its supersize mania to market high-fat, high-calorie and sugary foods. School officials are trying to deal with the growing problem of obese students. What to do? The House of Representatives' answer: first, kill all the lawyers.
The nation has a time-proven tort system that should not be tampered with to protect individual industries. The judiciary is capable of dismissing frivolous suits, and if any tort reform is needed, it should not be tailored to benefit any one class of defendants.
The cheeseburger bill reflects the trivializing agenda of late-night TV comedy and talk-radio rants more than the public interest. It will most likely die in the Senate, which recently blocked a similar lawsuit shield for the gun industry.
The public health threat posed by obesity is a far more serious national problem than any imagined epidemic of fast-food "frivolous lawsuits." But then, with the House in legis-lite mode, it must be hard to find the time to grapple with real issues.