A sampling of recent editorials from Colorado newspapers:
NATIONAL:
The Durango Herald, June 10, on privacy and National Security Agency surveillance:
Most Americans have probably long (and correctly) assumed that the federal government knew whom they called and what they read and said on the Internet. Communication providers collected that data; the federal government surely had access to it.
The real question is, should it?
Last week, the president and two senators told Americans that access really was no big deal.
“It’s called protecting Americans,” said Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “This is nothing particularly new,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, the ranking Republican on the committee. “This has been going on for seven years under the auspices of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) authority, and every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this.”
Colorado Sen. Mark Udall disagrees, as do many of his constituents. The argument that if they haven’t done anything wrong, they don’t have anything to worry about is not persuasive; far more accurate is the contention that because they have not done anything wrong, they have a right to privacy even from their government.
This weekend, a young CIA contractor claimed to have leaked information about the scope of National Security Agency surveillance of civilians not suspected of any crime or national security threat.
“I don’t want to live in a world where everything I do or say is recorded,” said the man, 29-year-old Edward Snowden.
Too late.
Reportedly, only statistical information about the caller and recipient, including location and time, was collected, for the purpose of analyzing patterns to identify communications with known terrorists and contact with people in places where terrorism is suspected to originate. Then federal wiretap warrants could be obtained for those specific communications. That was the official scope of the program, anyway, and whoever heard of the government targeting citizens unfairly?
Right, IRS? Right, Justice Department?
The difficulty with targeting only suspects is that they do not become suspects until information is gathered. Most people understand that. They likely understand that the best chance of identifying those potential threats is through computerized data mining, and that human eyes really do not view many of those records – until they are flagged.
But that is not entirely the point. Some crimes could be averted if the government knew everything everyone did and thought, and if it had the ability to analyze that information accurately and completely – a big if, since so far the feds have failed even to keep track of individuals on terrorist watch lists, and terrorists know it.
Does that give the government the right to all that information? What degree of threat justifies that intrusion into the privacy of many millions of people who are no threat at all? Colorado has more than 5 million people, and most of them have cellphones and computers. Most of them are citizens. How many of them are terrorists? How many have legitimate business or family reasons to communicate with individuals in places (such as, say, Boston) where terrorists might hang out?
This level of monitoring may be acceptable to Americans, who after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have been willing to tolerate many erosions of their privacy. It should probably be assumed to be inevitable; when data exists, someone will use it. But neither of those conditions, nor even proven results, automatically make it right. They only make it worth discussing
Editorial:
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The Denver Post, June 11, on No Child Left Behind:
The latest attempt to retool the outdated federal education accountability law known as No Child Left Behind is a balanced effort that retains some of the better ideas embodied in its landmark predecessor and improves on others.
We hope this rewrite makes it to the finish line, particularly since No Child has been up for reauthorization since 2007. But it’s clear the measure faces difficulties.
The 1,150-page bill already has managed to draw criticism. The political left says it’s too test-dependent and the right says it gives Washington too much power to impose standards.
From where we stand, it looks just right on those counts.
It retains strong accountability standards, but modernizes the method to include not just measures of achievement, but of growth, too.
And it continues the requirement that standardized test results be reported so the progress of racial minorities, students with disabilities and English language learners can be easily discerned.
The bill does not mandate national standards, but it does require “college and career ready” academic standards in science, math and reading.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been coaxing states to adopt Common Core standards by offering them Race to the Top money and waivers from the looming, draconian requirements of No Child.
And it has worked. Forty-five states, including Colorado, have adopted Common Core. It’s not a national curriculum, but rather an agreement on shared goals that states are free to accomplish by teaching however they like.
Colorado’s Sen. Michael Bennet, formerly superintendent of Denver Public Schools, issued a statement supporting the bill.
“We’re not going to fix public education from Washington, but we can drive reform at the local level that will give every child a chance at a quality education no matter what ZIP code they are born into,” he said.
As the bill moves forward, we hope to see constructive debate and compromise that is pointed toward bipartisan passage, which is how No Child became law.
The rewrite is long overdue.
Editorial:
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The Gazette, June 11, on global poverty, economic growth and the Obama administration:
As President Barack Obama wages class warfare, promoting economic policies designed to share Joe the Plumber’s wealth, good old-fashioned crass capitalism leaves him in the dust. Worldwide poverty is heading the way of dinosaurs. It’s not because of redistribution schemes to transfer wealth away from developed countries. It’s because of economic growth inspired and paid for by profits.
Even before Americans elected him president, Obama sought to ease global poverty by taking from the rich and giving to the poor. During his short tenure as a United States senator, Obama initiated only one bill. When Obama introduced the Global Poverty Act of 2007, he wanted government to take $845 billion from Americans and give it to the United Nations for distribution to less successful parts of the world. A version of the bill passed the House but was never funded.
Since then, Obama has tried to establish domestic equality by raising taxes and mandating equal access to the country’s limited health care supply. He clearly has no vision of growth; only a Malthusian belief that one person’s fortune comes at another’s expense.
In a world with a fixed supply of wealth, only redistribution from haves to have-nots can ease human suffering. But, as most defenders of free markets understand, wealth is not fixed. It is created by men and women who are free to invent, buy, sell and trade with minimal interference from governments. Wealth grows when individuals have freedom to spend and invest capital at will. Human interactions protected by the Constitution have made the United States the most economically successful country in history.
The Economist reminds us that Harry Truman decried poverty in his 1949 inaugural address, explaining “more than half the people in the world are living in conditions approaching misery.”
Truman and other world leaders did little to ease poverty, but something amazing occurred in the past two decades. More than 1 billion of the world’s 7 billion people emerged from extreme poverty between 1990 and 2010.
Cutting extreme poverty in half by 2015 was a target of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals of 2000. Largely considered pie-in-the-sky at the time, the goal was met five years early – despite a lack of funding for Obama’s Global Poverty Act.
Global poverty has eased because capitalism has emerged as a dominant force throughout much of the world, just as our country moves in the direction of less-free markets, higher taxes, more regulation and more central control of wealth. Worldwide poverty has eased mostly because of liberalization of markets in China, Russia, Brazil and other countries that learned the hard way the effects of constraining economic activity and international trade.
That’s why The Gazette has opposed President Obama’s blatant demands to take from the rich and give to the poor. When the rich get richer, the poor have more work and more wealth.
Few individuals succeed at an expense of the poor. They succeed by creating wealth, which is nothing more than an abundance of goods, services and commodities humans want and need to improve their living conditions.
History and current events tell us unrestrained markets – with freedom to create and control wealth – comprise the best social services network and safety net the world has known.
Editorial:
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STATE:
The Denver Post, June 11, on Adams County’s ‘free speech areas’ and the need to open commissioners’ study sessions:
We were pleased to see that Adams County commissioners are nixing the creation of a tiny “designated free speech area” for protests outside the county’s administration building. It is regretful, however, that it took public outrage to torpedo the idea.
The rule, which commissioners approved two weeks ago, barred protesters from sidewalks nearest the entrance to the administration building and penned them in a 945-square-foot area away from the building’s front door.
Officials had said the policy was needed so that citizens conducting other business weren’t hindered. To us, the policy sounded more like a way to keep citizens with grievances from being seen or heard.
One part of the county’s policy that remains, however, is a $10 charge for copies of audio recordings of the commissioners’ study sessions. We still believe the county should put these archived recordings online so that citizens can listen to them for free, the way they do for archived recordings of commissioners’ regular meetings.
Editorial:
