Opinion: In today’s pages: “Snort a rail, save a trail”
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The editorial board can’t commit to a trade pact with Colombia:
Colombia has a terrible record of labor violence and abuses. Labor organizers there don’t just get fired, they get fired on; more organizers are killed in Colombia in one year than in the entire world. President Alvaro Uribe has created a special department to prosecute crimes against unionists, but the statistics are still dreadful. According to the International Trade Union Confederation, in the last 12 years, only 14 people have been sentenced in more than 1,100 cases of documented union murders.
The board also marvels (enviously) at New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s cunning ‘crack tax,’ and cheers on Orange County watchdog Shirley Grindle’s proposal for a commission to hold politicians’ feet to the fire.
On the Op-Ed page, Reason editor Matt Welch wonders what anti-war independents are doing in the McCain camp:
Too many people, wowed by the candidate’s considerable charm, have convinced themselves that launching wars is for icky people like that Bush fellow, not Our John.... For Californians tempted by such delusions, it’s wise to recall the famous words of the last septuagenarian to successfully seek the presidency: Trust, but verify.
Joel Stein soothes Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s frazzled nerves, and Michael Kinsley pops the GOP candidates’ Reagan bubble. Ronald Brownstein watches the subprime crisis hit minority homeowners the hardest, and cartoonist Ed Stein sees an overseas power broker in the primaries.
Readers respond to the Kennedy family’s split support for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama by issuing their own endorsements. Rosemary Wolohan is rooting for Clinton:
Face it, it’s not 1960 any more. This is not the time to dream of idealism. We have to elect someone who is canny and tough-minded to end the war in Iraq and undo the terrible damage that has been done to the Constitution and our reputation in the world in the last seven years.
But Erin Fairbanks is setting her sights on an Obama in the Oval office:
America needs a leader who will inspire us to be better citizens, motivate our youth to action and put a face on our country that tells our shrinking world that we as a nation are capable of change, of strength in ideas and solutions, and remind us that we are one people with a powerful voice in our own destiny.