New York Times
Every decade, by order of the U.S. Constitution, America counts its inhabitants and, in the process, takes a valuable snapshot of itself. The 2000 national census instantly told us that the country had grown to almost four times the size it was a century ago. Now, as the Census Bureau reveals the richer details from that counting, we can find clues about exactly how the populace has changed.
One out of every nine residents is now foreign-born, and we have already seen some of the responses. On the one hand, politicians from coast to coast are signing up for Spanish lessons. On the other, radio ads in still-homogeneous states somberly warn that if the borders aren't closed, Des Moines will soon look like Los Angeles or New York. While that sort of improbable paranoia is hard to worry about, the extent of the xenophobia now infecting parts of Europe is a reminder of how important it is to stand behind the concept of the United States as a nation of immigrants. ...
Many Americans reported a dramatic improvement in their income by 2000, although their sense of good fortune may have taken a beating lately. But even at the height of the economic boom, the level of poverty showed little improvement -- a sign that the rising tide had left plenty of boats on shore.
Washington Post
After weeks of absurd bickering, Congress finally has acted to revive the trade agenda. House and Senate negotiators reached a deal late on Thursday, and the House approved the package by a vote of 215 to 212 Saturday morning. The Senate now needs to ratify the measure, and Tom Daschle, the majority leader, should ensure a vote before senators pack up for the summer recess at the end of this week. The legislation includes immediate and critically needed benefits for Andean countries and for American workers who lose their jobs for trade reasons as well as authority for the president to negotiate trade deals. ...
Inevitably, the trade legislation that Congress has crafted won't please everyone. The House Democrats are complaining that the bill doesn't do enough to protect labor rights or the environment; dozens of critics with half-ground axes are screaming. But the big point here is that trade liberalization is one of the few policies that just about all economists can agree to favor: It creates wealth; it reduces poverty; it is a positive-sum game. It's a scandal that the U.S. president has had to do without trade negotiating authority since it lapsed eight years ago. With luck this scandal may be about to end.
Boston Herald
The vote by the House to lift the 40-year-old prohibition on general travel to Cuba was the right thing to do -- the more Americans able to travel to Cuba, to interact with the locals, the better. The Bush administration should drop threats of a veto, accept this long overdue change and plan ways to take advantage of it.
As one proponent noted, it makes little sense to maintain the ban on visiting Cuba, 90 miles from Key West, if Americans may still travel to two-thirds of President Bush's "axis of evil,'' Iran and North Korea (not that North Korean officials let them see or do much).
The prohibition made sense when Fidel Castro was trying to export revolution to Latin America, but those days ended long ago. Cuba is not an ideological, developmental or any other kind of model for the Third World (though it may still be for some children of the 1960s now tenured in sociology departments of American universities). Fidel Castro is an old man; the idiocies and oppression of his Communist regime cannot long survive him. (Cuba jails political dissidents and forbids the private ownership of any business more complicated than a 12-table restaurant employing only the owner's family.)
It is doubtful that the absence of American tourists hurts Cuba much economically; Europeans and Canadians have been making excursions to the island's fabulous beaches for many years.
Though journalists have been exempt from the travel ban, the truth about Cuba is not well known in the United States. Myths are more widespread than they should be -- for example, that Castro lifted Cuba out of backwardness in medical care and education. In fact Cuba was socially the most advanced nation in the region when Castro came to power.
The more travelers there are, the more the truth will spread, and that can only help the transition of Cuba out of tyranny when the tyrant dies.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The Berlin Wall has come down, Russia is an ally and the Cold War is over. But there's still that cigar-chomping dictator in Cuba. Forty years after the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. government continues, as part of an economic embargo, to restrict travel to the island. If you want to go to Havana for a holiday, the government says "no."
But soon that might -- and should -- change. Last week the House of Representatives voted to relax restrictions on Americans traveling to Cuba and sending money there. Technically the limits remain on the books, but the Treasury Department would be prohibited from using appropriated funds to enforce the rules.
In approving the legislation by Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, the House turned aside arguments from the Bush administration that relaxing the restrictions would provide a "hand to a repressive regime" that might be sponsoring international terrorism.
This argument is conjectural at best. More to the point, it could equally well be applied to countries, including China and several Middle Eastern nations, that Americans are free to visit. ...
It is a convoluted endeavor to dig up rationales for restrictions that have more to do with the courting of Cuban-American voters than with a consistent policy of boycotting oppressive regimes.
The worst "crisis" that would occur if the ban were eased is that Cuba would be overrun by curious American tourists -- who by their very presence would be advertising the advantages of the American system. The Senate should follow the House's lead and do away with this Cold war relic.
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Americans have a right to know why the nation's intelligence agencies did not see the disaster of Sept. 11 coming so that law enforcement officers and the armed forces might have prevented the assaults on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that took nearly 3,000 lives. Even more important is that Americans need to know what happened so flaws can be corrected and future mistakes prevented.
Sept. 11, 2001, ranks with Dec. 7, 1941, as the darkest days in American history since the Civil War. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an inquiry led by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts was organized 11 days later. Several more investigations followed, ending with an inquiry begun just after the Japanese surrender in August 1945.
That is ample precedent for the current proposal to set up an independent commission to determine why U.S. intelligence agencies failed to warn the nation of the Sept. 11 attacks. ...
The Joint Intelligence Committee and President Bush oppose the independent commission, asserting that the intelligence committee can do the job. That sounds like one of those interminable turf fights that delay so much in Washington. Suggestion: Let proponents and opponents of an independent commission go into a room, lock the door and stay there until they find a compromise.
A question for whatever commission or committee does the investigation: Scholar Zachary Abuza, of Simmons College in Massachusetts, has produced a thoroughly researched study of the terrorist apparatus that pervades much of Southeast Asia. ... If a lone scholar supported by modest academic grants could turn out this striking assessment, how come the intelligence community, with an annual budget of $30 billion, couldn't do better?
Providence Journal
The Organization of African Unity never recovered from the term of Uganda's Idi Amin as its chairman. Africa has had other cruel butchers, but elevating one to a position of continent-wide respect was a testament to the bankruptcy of an organization that had earlier done much to throw off the colonial yoke. Some two decades later, the OAU is history. Earlier this month, the African Union came into being as a successor organization, modeled in many ways after the European Union, but armed, at least conceptually, with teeth to stand up to dictators such as Amin. ...
But it is still too early to say. The OAU was launched with huge fanfare 39 years ago, but it was hardly up to the task. Times are different now. The Cold War rivalry that formed the backdrop of so many African conflicts is long over. Maybe the African Union will be able to carve out a different path from its predecessor. We hope so.
(Compiled by United Press International.)
