A peek at this weekend's Opinion pages:

Editorial:

A wider net for fraud
The pension reform that Attorney General Andrew Cuomo helped push through Albany during the last legislative session was a significant, but small step forward. He is now expanding his investigation of pension fraud beyond school lawyers, and this is a good thing.

FEMA does right for a change
Earlier this month, with hurricane season in full swing, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which did such a subpar job after Hurricane Katrina, did the right thing for Long Island. After some prodding by our public officials, FEMA is now returning hurricane emergency supplies here.

Propping up Fannie and Freddie
Reluctantly, but inevitably, taxpayers will have to shore up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have taken a hit along with the entire housing market. But while there’s little choice but to take the necessary steps to stabilize Freddie and Fannie, the administration’s bailout plan is not the answer.

Village idiocy
Some people in Mastic Beach and Smith Point think that creating two new villages — on an Island with more than 900 units of government already — will solve problems with code enforcement and zoning control. Oh, so wrong.

Opinion:

Put public transit on the map
Andy Darrell, vice president for Living Cities at the Environmental Defense Fund and a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s Sustainability Advisory Board, says the soaring gas prices is making New Yorkers turn to rapid transit. Though that's a refreshing change, he writes, "the system lacks the resources to meet demand." Washington has a role to play: a "massive reauthorization for the federal transportation system is an extraordinary opportunity to help America build next-generation transit."

Living with memory loss
Our Sunday feature looks at how people with Alzheimer's and other forms of memory loss are forging support networks and finding ways to remain vital members of their communities.

Read about the experience of memory loss, hear patients tell their stories, and talk with experts in our online community forum.

Newsday reports today that the Federal Aviation Administration couldn't require commercial airliners to carry a system to prevent explosions like the one that doomed TWA Flight 800 until the technology became light enough, small enough and cheap enough. This happened after two "eureka" moments for researchers in 2002. Then came years of wrangling with the airline industry.

Fortunately all was settled in the nick of time, as the 12th anniversary of the TWA crash was about to roll around.

The acting FAA administrator, Robert Sturgell, greeted the new regulation on the day before the anniversary as "another step forward on what has been a long journey of investigation, discovery, innovation and cooperation."

His boss, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, welcomed the FAA's achievement with a crash victim's brother at her side, as "a memorial to the victims and a tribute to dedicated public servants who have spent their lives making flying safer."

You can't complain about the outcome, but you might wonder about the timing and these folks' dedication to our safety.

Since the research was ready six years ago (perhaps on the anniversary of no significant event) and the parties had years to work out a deal, might the regulation have been ready to go, say, three days before the anniversary? Two months before? Seventeen months before?

Wouldn't federal and industry officials committed to the safest possible skies want to rush such a regulation into effect as soon as it was available? Why risk even one more midair explosion?

We've become so accustomed to the news being packaged for consumption and timed for maximum impact and availability of related video that nobody is even asking these questions.

A major stretch of the Alaskan wilderness rumbled yesterday with an announcement by the Bureau of Land Management that the government has made millions of acres in the Northeast National Petroleum Reserve available for oil and gas exploration. The move toward more leasing on the reserve, which--like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge--is at the center of a tug of war over the country's natural resources, suggests that the global oil crunch is shifting political tides toward homegrown spigots.

While the initiative basically invites industry to feed on perhaps billions of barrels of untapped oil, the government handed environmentalists one victory--an agreement to shield some of the reserve's most sensitive and ecologically rich swaths, surrounding the Teshekpuk Lake, from leasing for another decade.

The Wilderness Society and other mainstream conservation groups saw that as a triumph, after waging a legal battle to make the government's development plans more protective of the local ecosystem.

But pro-drilling interests may have more to be giddy about: the government's announcement comes just as lawmakers are scrambling for new ways to sate the country's relentless energy appetite.

Continue reading "Hungry for energy, politicians try to drill it home" »

The impending arrival of hurricane season is a handy reminder that preparedeness is everybody's business.

As our editorial today about Long Island MacArthur Airport says, failure to think ahead about potential disasters is a more than potentially disastrous attitude. That's why the Town of Islip is smart to work toward expanding fuel-storage capacity at the airport. In an emergency, a lot of rescue workers and materials would fly into MacArthur. But right now, there's not enough fuel stored there to make sure they could fly out again.

The expansion of fuel storage at the airport isn't the only recent sign that officials are at least thinking ahead. Earlier this month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency--yes, the same FEMA that performed so abysmally after Hurricane Katrina--did the right thing for Long Island. It took some nudging from our politicians, but FEMA is finally getting around to returning hurricane emergency supplies to Long Island. The agency brought in emergency supplies two years ago, but took them away after the season ended and didn't return them last year. The idea behind that decision was to create consolidated stockpiles in larger regions. But our officials squawked, and FEMA relented.

Continue reading "You can't be too ready for disaster" »

The Ravitch Commission is reportedly hard at work, and it's a good thing, too. Because MTA Chief Lee Sander is going to update the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board next Wednesday on the state of the MTA's finances, and it ain't gonna be pretty. So, the fact that Sander can add that the legendary Richard Ravitch and crew are working on a solution will soften the blow.

Gov. David Paterson came up with the idea for Ravitch to head a commission shortly after congestion pricing failed. So, it's a good bet that some sort of alternative congestion pricing idea will come out of the commission's deliberations, which are scheduled to finish by Dec. 5. Congestion pricing was supposed to produce $400 million to $500 million a year for mass transit upgrades. Without it, there is a huge hole in the MTA's proposed 2010-2014 construction budget.

But don't let them fool you. Even with congestion pricing money, the original $29.6 billion construction, or capital, budget was $9 billion short.

Yesterday, the world watched Omar Khadr cry. Human rights advocates publicized a video of the interrogation of the young Canadian national, imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, charged with terrorism-related crimes. The blurred footage, which a Canadian federal court ordered released last month, depicts the 16 year-old distraught and sobbing as he is questioned. Rights activists say Khadr is one of many examples of systemic abuse of detainees.

The video provides a rare window into conditions at Gitmo, which functions variously as a prison camp and a quasi-judicial court, and, to activists, a symbol of rights abuses in the name of fighting terror.

Along with Khadr's image, the legal ordeal of Salim Ahmed Hamdan has also shed light on Gitmo’s special Military Commissions, which the Bush administration has set up to judge "unlawful enemy combatants."

The Commissions have run into various moral and legal stumbling blocks: allegations of cruel treatment, a vacuum of federal oversight, and growing evidence that many of those detained may have had effectively nothing to do with terrorism and hold little strategic value in America’s war against it.

As Hamdan, a Yemeni national accused of facilitating terrorism while serving as Osama Bin Laden’s driver, inched forward this week in Gitmo’s serpentine legal system, advocates with Human Rights First (HRF) broadcast an inside view of the court proceedings.

Continue reading "The view from Guantanamo Bay" »

Barack Obama is doing some serious publicity on his war plans with a Times-op-ed-stump-speech double header. Though he didn't really present any new ideas, the bullet points (16-month Iraq withdrawal timetable with "tactical adjustments" as needed, building up an Iraqi security force, refocusing U.S. military strategy around Afghanistan) offer a window into how the candidate might handle (and publicly present) military strategy.

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic reads between the soundbites in Obama's op-ed and teases out some hypothetical snags:

"There's still some wiggle room here. Obama writes that he'd ask commanders for advice about where to withdraw troops first and 'would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected. We would move them from secure areas first and volatile areas later.'...

"In practice, this would mean that combat troops would remain in volatile areas much longer than those who now patrol stable areas. Left unanswered is what would happen if the ground commanders urged Obama to keep troops in volatile areas for longer than a year -- or what would happen if Obama began to withdraw troops at one to two brigades per month, and his commanders asked him to keep a brigade in place for an extra two or three months -- or what would happen if violence erupted in places the U.S. recently evacuated -- or whether Obama's residual force would be supplemented with brigades transferred from other parts of the country."

Continue reading "Obama puts his boots on the ground" »

The dust-up over Bernie Mac's crude jokes at an Obama fundraiser brings to mind all the fuss a couple years ago, when Stephen Colbert played the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. Back then, I had to wonder if the people in charge of booking entertainers for the dinner had ever actually watched "The Colbert Report," or if they had, if they got the joke.

Fast-forward to this past weekend, when first Barack Obama distanced himself from Mac -- even while adding an "I'm just messing with you, man" -- and later a spokeswoman for his campaign denounced the jokes outright. I'm thinking this is not the first time Mac has referenced "hos" in his stand-up routine, however. Could the campaign really have been surprised?

Some of the best comedy is controversial, eyebrow-raising stuff. Candidates and politicians --whose staffs should have all the resources they need in this YouTube age to thoroughly vet entertainers -- should extend invitations with their eyes open or not at all. The flustered, after-the-fact backtracking is pretty ridiculous.

Over the past few days, the news has been awash with word that the mortgage crisis has finally rammed the most insulated attic in the subprime house of cards. It seems that to observers of the economy, corporate bigwigs and regulators, the crumpling of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae has been both disturbing and predictable.

The groundwork was laid years ago, according to the New York Times, with the gradual erosion of regulatory oversight.

Now, Fannie and Freddie are sitting atop a crisis that may amount to an estimated $1.6 trillion in losses. And Congress may soon step in to cushion the fall of the two mortgage-backing giants.

So for those of us who don't think of our finances in terms of trillions, what do Fannie and Freddie's money troubles mean for homeowners and taxpayers?

Continue reading "Fannie and Freddie's chickens come home..." »

What’s a life worth? Apparently not as much as it used to be.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the value of a “statistical life” is $6.9 million. That sounds like a lot — even for something that is, in many ways, priceless — until you find out that the comparable figure five years ago was $7.8 million. That’s what the Associated Press discovered when it reviewed 12 years of cost-benefit analyses from the EPA, admittedly a less-than-flawless methodology.

Why is the EPA putting a dollar value on human life? When considering a proposed regulation, government agencies calculate how much it would cost if implemented and weigh that against the value of the lives that would be lost if the regulation isn’t imposed. If the cost is more than the benefit, then the proposed reg is deep-sixed.

Regulators are right to weigh cost versus benefit. They have to draw the line somewhere on how much money businesses or taxpayers should be made to pay in exchange for some marginal improvement in, say, air or water quality. Still, you have to wonder if the notoriously regulation-averse administration of President George W. Bush has stacked the deck in order to keep new regulations off the books.

The AP reported that, “according to the EPA, people shouldn’t think of the number as a price tag on a life.” But isn’t that just what it is?