• Herald News, West Paterson, N.J., Dean’s election as DNC chairman Herald News, West Paterson, N.J., Dean’s election as DNC chairman Before the Iowa caucuses, presidential hopeful Howard Dean was the most popular Vermonter since Ben and Jerry. Like ice
• Herald News, West Paterson, N.J., Dean’s election as DNC chairman
Herald News, West Paterson, N.J., Dean’s election as DNC chairman
Before the Iowa caucuses, presidential hopeful Howard Dean was the most popular Vermonter since Ben and Jerry. Like ice cream, Dean didn’t hold up well to intense heat. The former governor let out a war whoop during his concession speech in Iowa, and the media destroyed him. Rumors of Dean’s political death were greatly exaggerated. On Saturday, he was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee. …
The party chairman is not really the frontman for the party; the 2008 presidential nominee will fill that role. In the interim, Democrats need to build up local party machinery. They need someone who understands grass-roots organizations. They need someone who is willing to step back and let the candidates take center stage. Dean may be better suited for that role than Republicans think. Dean’s first test will be gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia in November.…
To win back Congress and the White House, Democrats need a message that appeals to moderate, and even some conservative, voters. If successful, Democrats will have something to cheer. Dean would be advised this time around to keep his enthusiasm in check.
The Daytona Beach (Fla.) News-Journal, on Kyoto Protocol
Glaciers are retreating in mountains from Alaska to the Andes to Tibet. An age-old Antarctic ice shelf the size of Rhode Island shatters and melts into the sea. Greenland’s ice, which holds enough water to raise ocean levels 21 feet, is starting to melt.…Yet James Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator and chairman of an environmental committee, calls global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”
Inhofe’s thinking is echoed more mildly by the White House and is winning the day in the United States for now, at least politically. On Wednesday, the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change goes in effect, but without American participation. It isn’t just a failure of diplomacy characteristic of the Bush administration, which has been either unwilling to negotiate through international forums or inept at doing so. It is a failure of imagination as well. The administration’s promised alternative to Kyoto has yet to coalesce in the form of policy.…
…The United States contributes more than a quarter of the world’s pollution (and greenhouse gases). Its absence from the treaty means progress on emissions will be even slower, if at all effective.
The San Diego Union-Tribune, on enviromental law and border barriers
Suppose that, whenever the federal government wanted to build a major project…it simply exempted itself from the labyrinth of environmental laws that applied to everyone else. Why have such laws in the first place, if Washington is going to sweep them aside for its own convenience while enforcing them rigorously against all other parties?
This question is more than academic now that the House has voted to waive all state and federal environmental laws in order to speed completion of the proposed triple-fence barrier at the border. In our view, such a blanket exemption is not only unnecessary but also hypocritical. Worse, it would establish a terrible precedent, undermining the fundamental idea that no one, least of all the federal government, is above the law.
…The Senate should stand firm against the sweeping House waiver.
The Blade, Toledo, Ohio, on ethics in Congress
House Republican leaders in Washington have delivered an unmistakable message to Capitol Hill: Don’t bother to lodge ethics complaints, no matter how offensive the stench of corruption.
They did so by firing the chairman of the ethics committee, replacing him with a more pliable associate, and adding to the panel two members who have made no secret of their support for at least one major ethics scofflaw, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, of Texas.
The action makes it less likely that House members will take the time to complain about the kind of incipient corruption that goes on daily in and about the halls of Congress. In a process that already was difficult to negotiate, the deck is further stacked against them.…
