Opinion: In today’s pages: Digital TV, Cuba, transit funding and nukes
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Monday begins with the Times chiding President-Elect Barack Obama for wanting to delay the Feb. 17 transition by broadcasters to digital television. Like it or not, the transition is coming, and there will be stragglers no matter when in comes.
[P]ostponing the transition will simply delay the pain it will inevitably cause while denying the public some of its benefits — such as new, innovative uses of airwaves no longer occupied by analog channels. The trial run in Wilmington showed that the main hurdle isn’t a lack of awareness among TV viewers, it’s procrastination and technical naivete. The relatively simple task of hooking up a converter box stumps some people; others have trouble obtaining the $40 government subsidy and purchasing the box. To overcome these problems, communities will need to line up plenty of volunteers, particularly to help the elderly and minorities.
In a chiding mood, we also chide California’s Democratic lawmakers for their oh-so-clever ploy to pass a midyear budget revision only a majority, and not a two-thirds, vote. The problem is not their creativity, but the fact that in the process of dreaming up their plan they may have defunded public transit funding. Bad move. There are plenty of cuts to go around, and transit will take a huge hit, at least for a while -- but it shouldn’t be forever.
And to make it a sweep, we chide the Bush Administration in general and Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey in particular for their new stance: noncitizens have no right to challenge their deportation based on incompetent legal representation. That decision ignores the obvious similarity between removal and criminal proceedings, for which the Constitution guarantees the right of competent counsel. Unless Bush tries to reverse that, too, in the next week and a day.
On the other page, columnist Gregory Rodriguez has a run-in with Falun Gong but doesn’t see the light. William M. Leogrande and Peter Kornbluh talk about talking about talking with Cuba.
And Stephen I. Schwartz, editor of the Nonproliferation Review at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and Deepti Choubey, deputy director of the nonproliferation program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, criticize the amount the U.S. spends on nuclear weapons, the dearth on public data available, and the small amount spent on minimizing the risk of nuclear and radiological attacks.
More than 17 years after the end of the Cold War, it may come as a surprise to most Americans that the U.S. still spends relatively large annual sums upgrading and maintaining its nuclear arsenal ($29 billion), developing ballistic missile defenses ($9.2 billion) and addressing the deferred environmental and health costs associated with more than 50 years of unconstrained bomb building and testing ($8.3 billion).... More alarmingly, the government spends relatively little money locking down or eliminating nuclear threats at their source, before they can reach U.S. shores ($5.2 billion), or preparing for the consequences of a nuclear or radiological attack on U.S. soil ($700 million).