Bangor Daily News, Sept. 17
Another study, another $30 million plus missing from the Department of Human Services. The further the Baldacci administration looks into the bookkeeping at DHS, the worse the situation looks. On Tuesday, the governor announced a “funding deficit” of $37 million in the department’s Medicaid account between fiscal year 1996 and the end of 2002. This deficit demands that the administration push up the timeline for the overhaul of DHS and consider asking the Attorney General’s Office to investigate.

The missing Medicaid money comes just a month after PriceWaterhouseCoopers concluded that DHS had misplaced $31 million in welfare money. … PWC also did the Medicaid review, and in both cases concluded a lack of staff and lack of training contributed to the problems. The pattern being established in these reviews requires Gov. Baldacci to go further to determine whether criminal activity is being hidden by these significant and improper shifts of money. …

DHS handles a lot of money and its staff shortages are now well known, but the department is rapidly approaching the point when it loses the confidence of the Legislature and the public. …

The Baldacci administration is now accustomed to having to explain what steps it will take to improve fiscal responsibility at DHS. It offered such a plan Tuesday that increases oversight, adds personnel, establishes templates for accounts and insists on a faster reconciliation of accounts. It is hard to argue with any of it except to wonder why substantial errors were necessary before the actions were proposed.

The administration is correct to pursue these problems aggressively, but the public should expect to see equally aggressive reforms to put an end to this pattern of failed accounting.


Red light, green light
The Cincinnati Post, Sept. 15
Beginning sometime next summer, the federal government plans to assign every airline traveler a color.

Green, you board the flight with no problems. Yellow, you get pulled aside for extra screening. Red, you’re barred from the flight and likely will be turned over to police for questioning and possible arrest. The Transportation Security Administration expects up to 8 percent of passengers to be coded yellow, and 1 percent to 2 percent red.

For every traveler who books a flight, the airlines will provide the government the passenger’s name, address, phone number, date of birth and itinerary. The TSA will run that information through various commercial databases to verify the passenger’s identity. It will also run the names through law-enforcement databases to search for outstanding felony warrants.

In essence, a government bureaucracy will decide who gets to fly and who doesn’t. …

Before this system is turned on, the TSA should come up with a simple, straightforward way for passengers who are wrongly coded to clear their names. …


Death, overturned
The Buffalo (N.Y.) News, Sept. 15
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco recently overturned the death sentences of more than 100 prisoners in Arizona, Idaho and Montana because judges, as opposed to juries, determined the sentence. The court ruled that a year-old Supreme Court decision striking down the capital sentencing laws in those three states and two others have to be applied retroactively.

Despite the wails of some, it’s not as if jailhouse doors will be flung open. Those affected simply will be entitled to a new sentencing proceeding, but they will remain locked up. …

As the appeals court noted, it would have been incredibly arbitrary to execute people simply because they were sentenced before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a jury, and not a judge who may be swayed by political influences, had to make the choice between life and death. …

In light of the mounting examples of innocent people who have been sentenced to death, every decision that leads to more debate on the wisdom of capital punishment or, more to the point, the lack of it is welcome


Collapse of WTO
Posten, Copenhagen, Denmark, on Sept. 16
The World Trade Organization is in crisis after 146 member countries failed to agree on a free trade agreement Sunday in the Mexican holiday resort of Cancun.

During the four days of talks, the superpowers the European Union and the United States were obviously surprised that a joint coalition of middle-income and developing countries stood firmly together. …

The frightening scenario for the EU, as well as global trade, is that the United States has decided to distance itself from the WTO, focusing instead on making bilateral agreements with trading partners.

It is neither the EU, the United States or the WTO that stand as the biggest losers. Instead some 144 million people in the developing world do. According to the World Bank, they would have their standard of living improved noticeably with a free trade agreement.

That is the real scandal of the failure in Cancun.