AP: Texas

09/26/2005

Associated Press

A sampling of editorial opinion around Texas:

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Sept. 26

The Dallas Morning News on Hurricane Rita efforts:

"So now there's still no plan, for fuel or anything else, to get folks back home except 'Don't come back.'" A from Good Ol Dan on Houston's KHOU-TV message board

Yes, Dan, authorities are still making it up as they go, to a point. Hurricane Rita had that effect scaring the stuffing out of the nation's fourth-largest city and causing an unprecedented near-instant migration of 2.5 million people away from coastal Texas.

They exhausted everything in their path gasoline, highway capacity, motel rooms, emergency shelters, tempers and many contingencies in the planning manual.

Now they are headed back under blue skies and according to an ad hoc plan that encourages staggered arrivals and guarantees gripes from those who don't tolerate inconvenience.

Despite the spectacle of huge traffic jams, the massive undertaking has to be judged a success if measured by the one statistic that matters most: loss of life after Rita's landfall.

A relieved Gov. Rick Perry yesterday said that the toll appeared to be zero in Texas. As the storm pummeled and drenched East Texas and Louisiana over the weekend, untold numbers of citizens were where they needed to be: out of harm's way.

A cruel statistic is the evacuation-related death toll of 24 nursing home residents from Houston whose chartered bus burst into flames near Dallas. Pinpointing the cause is important to more safely evacuating this fragile population in the future and overcoming the obstacles of transporting oxygen tanks and their special needs.

Many Texans will ask the inevitable question of whether it was proper to evacuate these older residents or, for that matter, much of Houston, which ended up slipping Rita's punch.

The answer is an emphatic yes.

The process began as Rita appeared headed toward the coast as a chart-topping Category 5 storm. One of the tragic lessons of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans just last month was that hesitation is foolhardy and often fatal.

The lessons of Rita should be how to do it better the next time.

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Sept. 24

San Antonio Express-News on the price of the 2005 hurricane season in the U.S.:

Congress has allocated $62 billion for Katrina-related expenditures. Damage from Hurricane Rita will drive that figure higher. Over the next two years, federal spending for recovery efforts along the Gulf Coast may exceed $200 billion.

The destruction from these storms was extraordinary. An extraordinary sum of money will be required to rebuild. And that sum requires extraordinary oversight.

The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general has already created an office to monitor the emergency relief effort. Matthew Jadacki, the chief financial officer and chief administrative officer at the National Weather Service, will lead that effort.

But the amount of federal aid pouring in is more than a single bureaucratic office can hope to monitor. Moreover, the reconstruction effort goes far beyond the purview of Homeland Security.

On Capitol Hill, members of Congress have introduced competing oversight measures. Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., want to expand the authority of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction to include all Katrina-related federal expenditures.

Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., propose creating a chief financial officer working out of the White House to authorize federal spending as it occurs rather than an inspector general who reviews spending after the fact.

Other proposals from the House and Senate would utilize existing inspectors general from other areas of the federal government or create an independent watchdog agency. Each proposal has its advantages. Congress needs to agree on one quickly and establish an oversight mechanism.

An estimated $2 billion per day in federal funds is flowing into the relief effort, some of it going to no-bid contracts for corporations such as Halliburton and Bechtel. There's nothing inherently improper about this. In the wake of a catastrophe, the overwhelming priority is to find contractors that can respond rapidly.

Congress, however, needs to move with similar alacrity to ensure money for these contracts and all future recovery and reconstruction efforts is spent wisely and effectively.

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Sept. 26

Houston Chronicle on tuition increases in Texas:

Two years ago, the Texas Legislature passed a bill authorizing Texas universities to set their own tuition rates. While many institutions were quick to institute enormous rate hikes, only one four-year college examined by state auditors bothered to use a legally required formula to identify students who should have been given priority for financial aid.

To cushion expected tuition increases for middle-class families who don't qualify for most forms of financial aid, lawmakers told universities to give special consideration to students whose only assistance likely would be student loans.

According to the audit, only Texas Tech University performed that calculation. That left more than 62,000 students at four-year universities without financial assistance for which they should have been first in line.

This is shameful, considering the staggering tuition hikes that students have been forced to pay since tuition deregulation. The University of Houston raised tuition 40 percent, Texas A&M went up 33 percent, Texas Tech increased its rate 34 percent, and the cost of classes at the University of Texas at Austin soared by 54 percent.

Auditors also determined that universities could hold down tuition increases over the short term, even if their surplus funds were not sufficient to avoid increases over the long run. It's well understood that Texas' largest universities have fixed costs that have increased faster than the rate of inflation, and that economies of scale that work in the widget industry do not hold true in the realm of college education. Tuition increases are inevitable, too, when the state fails to allocate sufficient funding or drastically slashes school budgets.

However, public institutions of higher education have a duty to ensure both that they maintain quality programs to meet the educational needs of future Texas generations, and that they do their utmost to mitigate financial obstacles for families too well off for need-based grants, but not rich enough to pay college costs out of pocket.

If the schools do not do a better job in this regard, the Legislature should fine-tune higher education law to make sure schools set tuition rates responsibly and apportion financial aid fairly.

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Sept. 20

The Victoria Advocate on U.S. sympathy for Germany's recent parliamentary vote:

The United States has had some recent experience with disputed national elections, so Americans cannot help but sympathize with Germans in the aftermath of that country's too-close-to-call parliamentary vote. But the U.S. situation in 2000, with the near-deadlock between George W. Bush and Al Gore, likely was simpler to resolve because of this country's historic two-party tradition.

Five major parties ran candidates for the German Bundestag, and the results show the difficulties inherent in multiparty elections and coalition politics. Incumbent Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats won 34.3 percent of the popular vote.

Challenger Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic-Bavarian Christian Social Union alliance won 35.2 percent. Neither came close to winning a parliamentary majority.

"Official results showed Merkel's group winning 225 seats, three more than the Social Democrats. The Free Democrats got 61, the Greens 51 and the new Left Party 54. Voting in one district, in the eastern city of Dresden, is delayed until Oct. 2," The Associated Press reported. "The Bundestag has at least 598 seats, plus seats added under the country's system of proportional representation; the final number will be known after the Dresden vote," the AP continued.

So who will ally with whom to provide a needed majority?

Schroeder has governed in coalition with the Greens, but that party and the Social Democrats fall short of a majority in the new Bundestag. Likewise, the Christian Democratic-Christian Social Union alliance if it joins with the pro-business Free Democrats, which has pledged not to join any coalition that includes the Greens. And both of the two top parties have rejected an alliance with the Left Party, largely made up of former communists.

The U.S. Supreme Court must be glad it will not have any role in deciding the outcome of this election. German political analysts are speculating that a grand coalition of the two major parties is the most likely result, but that prospect contains two problems that may be insuperable.

The first is that the platforms of the two major parties differ considerably. Schroeder's is more European in its focus, committed to maintaining the power of trade unions and retaining high levels of social services and the taxes needed to fund them. Merkel wants to rebuild closer ties with the United States while simplifying the tax system and giving businesses more power to fire workers.

"An unstable government and a perpetual election campaign with an uncertain outcome is the last thing our country needs," said Hermann Franzen, the head of Germany's HDE retail trade association. Second, Merkel wants to become Germany's first woman chancellor, but Schroeder wants to retain his office.

"We are the strongest group in the parliament and the government has no majority," she said. "The chancellor needed a new confirmation, and he did not get it." Social Democrat chairman Franz Muentefering countered, "The message was clear: This country does not want Mrs. Merkel as chancellor.

The new Bundestag has to convene within 30 days to attempt to elect a chancellor. If it cannot do so in three tries, figurehead President Horst Koehler can do so, even if the new chief minister lacks a parliamentary majority. If that happens, it could lead to continuing instability unless the two major parties can find sufficient areas of agreement or compromise to preclude that.

Germany is too important to Europe and to the world to undergo a lengthy leadership vacuum. As the Financial Times reported Monday, "The uncertainty produced by the result was already being reflected in the markets on Monday morning as Frankfurt-listed stocks started to slide. The Xetra Dax index fell 2.2 percent in early trade, pulling Europe's other markets down alongside. The euro also suffered a modest fall in early trading."

So it is no surprise that Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, called on Germany's political parties to end the country's instability quickly.

"I have a duty on behalf of the European institutions to urge Germany's political leaders to a solution as soon as possible that is stable for Europe," Barroso told the European Parliament.

This kind of election outcome is unprecedented in post-World War II Germany. And it was unexpected, because Merkel had been handily leading Schroeder in the polls until toward the end of the campaign. The result of the voting, however, does recall the political instability that allowed National Socialist leader Adolf Hitler to come to power in the early 1930s.

That instability partly resulted from post-World War I Germany's multiparty political system in which extremist parties of the left and the right made it difficult for the parties of the center to create governing coalitions. While the situation in Germany now does not resemble what happened there more than seven decades ago, the country's political leaders should carefully consider the possibility that future instability caused by too many parties might lead to a scenario far worse than today's.

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Sept. 24

Odessa American on the Patriot Act:

The sadly misnamed Patriot Act, which granted federal law enforcement a laundry list of powers it had sought throughout the 1990s but which Republicans in Congress opposed until 9/11, is in its final stages of reauthorization.

A conference committee between the House and Senate is expected to begin meeting soon to reconcile differences between the House and Senate versions. The Senate version is modestly less objectionable than the House version, and it should be the basis for compromise.

The Patriot Act, remember, was rushed into being within 45 days of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It consisted of a law enforcement wish list of intrusive new federal powers that the Clinton administration had sought without success, plus a few new wrinkles.

It was being rewritten even as the votes were taken, and it is safe to say that no legislator read it in its entirety before voting on it. The one concession congressional leaders gave to legislators who worried about this rush to empowerment was to have certain provisions of the law scheduled to "sunset" in four years unless they were reauthorized, that is, at the end of this year.

However, the Bush administration wanted the entire act made permanent, and most Republicans went along. Both the House and Senate versions make permanent 14 of the 16 provisions scheduled to sunset.

Two provisions Section 215, which authorizes snooping through library and business records, and Section 206, which authorizes "national security letters" that allow seizure of records without judicial approval in intelligence investigations, have new sunset dates.

The House version would reconsider them after 10 years, while the Senate version would extend them for "only" four years. The Senate version also places some modest restrictions on the use of "sneak and peek" warrants. It is unfortunate that short sunset periods for all 16 provisions were not retained.

Knowing that provisions are scheduled to be reconsidered in a relatively short period is a powerful incentive for federal agents not to abuse these new powers. Neither version of the Patriot Act reauthorization is what we would prefer. But the Senate version is a slightly better basis for compromise.