Bangor Daily News, Dec. 18

If the senior management at the Department of Human Services didn’t hear things clearly enough from Gov. Baldacci before, a recent news story spoke loudly. It is clear the governor has lost confidence in DHS officials and will no longer defend the agency.

Given the many problems there, this is not surprising, but it demands that the governor speed up the process of replacing officials with people he trusts.

The latest problem for DHS was printed by the Maine Sunday Telegram this week … a story asserted the agency could not identify how many children it had in its Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program for a particular month. DHS officials said a since-repaired computer problem caused what appeared to be a huge jump in the number of children receiving welfare for last August to 32,538.

But, it turns out, the actual number hadn’t changed much between February 2002 and August 2003. This week they noted it rose from 19,129 to 20,935 during that time. The latest figure, for November, is 20,393.

Rather than defend the agency, point out that computer problems aren’t unusual or argue that DHS had taken appropriate steps to fix the problem, the governor’s spokesman, Lee Umphrey, said of the confusion, “I think it’s worrisome. Part of the reason the governor has become so intimately involved in DHS is, too often, there are these discrepancies.”

That, in political-speak, is as clear a signal as DHS leaders will get that the governor has had enough. After a series of complaints about child-care services and a disastrous string of financial problems, the story delivers a terrible message about DHS. And the fact that the agency had a glitch in its computer, while understandable, doesn’t explain how the inaccurate number was filed with the federal government initially. …

Despite the problems at DHS, Gov. Baldacci has hesitated to make changes at the top of the agency, but for everyone’s sake, he needs to move this process along now. Similarly, the governor’s committee on the restructuring … should recommend broad and substantial changes when it submits its final report next month.

DHS provides services that are too important to allow the agency to drift for months more while its restructuring takes place. Given its string of troubles, it has drifted for too long already.


A question of trust


The Anniston (Ala.) Star, Dec. 17
… With thousands of cheering supporters, some flown in just for the occasion, with martial music playing and loyal lawmakers crowded about, President Bush signed the new Medicare bill into law and laid the domestic cornerstone for his run for re-election.

The rhetoric was pure campaign oratory. …

The beauty of it, politically speaking, is that between now and the election, no one will know. So right up to when the votes are cast the president and his supporters can brag about what they have done and the Democrats can only answer “yes, but …”

The president, of course, won’t need an answer. He can just promise that the bill will produce everything he says it will and hope the voters will believe him. The Democratic candidate will promise that the bill will be a disaster and hope voters will believe him.

And whomever the voters believe will be elected.

And not long after that, all the questions will be answered.


Problems remain in Iraq


Ilta-Sanomat, Helsinki, Finland, Dec. 15
The ouster of Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein is the first good news in a long time out of Iraq for the United States and Britain whose governments have drifted into growing domestic political problems caused by the bad security in Iraq and the proven weak grounds for going to war.

The propaganda value of Saddam’s capture, however, could vanish if there is no significant improvement in the security situation in Iraq.

Osama bin Laden managed to give the Americans the slip in Afghanistan and had Saddam done “an Osama” it would have been an additional humiliation for the Americans. It would have led to uncomfortable questions about the relative effectiveness of the world’s most efficient war machine.

Saddam’s arrest does not change the problematic relations between the various ethnic and religious groups in Iraq. Unless these are solved satisfactorily, there is no hope of a bright future for Iraq.


Don’t create a martyr


The Guardian, London, Dec. 16
Britain … has rightly abolished the death penalty; so too have all EU members. Britain has consistently lobbied against continued use of capital punishment in the U.S. and other countries. … Yet why is this “abolitionist” government now apparently prepared to countenance the future use of the death penalty in Iraq against Saddam and others?

… It seems content to allow an inexperienced, untested panel of five Iraqi judges, set up under U.S. guidance in Baghdad, to handle what may prove to be the most internationally significant prosecutions since Nuremberg. …

This is not just about making Saddam pay. It is about delivering justice to a whole nation and, indeed, a whole region, in a spirit not of vengeance, but of impeccable, exemplary legality and legitimacy. This must be seen to be done right. The last thing Iraq needs is another corpse or a martyr.