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Talking about responsibility

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The NEW YORK TIMES today tips its hat to President Bush for accepting some responsibility for the lackluster governmental response to Katrina. Still, the Times is skeptical that Bush has grappled with the extent to which his administration should have responded to the disaster. Its editorial encourages Bush to announce during his speech in New Orleans tonight the creation of an independent inquiry into the disaster and to apologize for stacking FEMA with cronies. Of course, none of this will probably happen, the Times concedes.

In a separate editorial, the Times applauds Bush’s commitment at the United Nations on Wednesday to follow through on promises to take dramatic action to ease world poverty. The president’s speech, though, was filled with diplomat-speak that most Americans probably don’t understand, so the Times devotes much of its editorial to a primer on exactly what Bush promised.

The Wall Street Journal wants the president to declare the Gulf Coast an “enterprise zone.” Its editorial calls for low taxes for investors in the region and the lifting of any “regulatory obstacles to rebuilding.” (Translation: Privatize the relief effort.) After all, big government was the problem in the first place: “It was certainly a collapse of government, but more accurately of bureaucracy and the welfare state,” the Journal writes. It doesn’t explain, though, how the Great Society got in the way of FEMA’s response.

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Elsewhere, the Washington Post editorializes that, despite a promised veto by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the passage of California’s gay marriage legislation signals that “legislatures can still be engines for positive change.”

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Paul Thornton

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