Raucous rock-n-roller and premiere pundit Dr. Frank has moved his Blogs of War. Update your linkage pronto.
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Good News/Bad News
The good first:
Still, Iraq is in most respects further along the road to recovery than we could have expected before the war. All major public hospitals in Baghdad are again operating. Sixty percent of Iraq’s schools are open. Nationwide distribution of food supplies has resumed. Despite some damage to the oil wells, petroleum production exceeds domestic needs, and exports should begin again soon. More Iraqis are receiving electric power than before the war. This progress is the result of efforts by capable Iraqi civil servants working with experts from the coalition governments and international humanitarian groups.
The bad next:
After World War II, the United States rebuilt Germany and Japan with great success. Against this admittedly very high standard, the country’s performance in the 1990’s began abysmally, and improved only slowly. While it is too early to pass final judgment on the Afghanistan and Iraq missions, it would be hard to present them as improvements over their most recent predecessors, Bosnia and Kosovo.
In other words, things are gong better in Iraq than some would like you to think, but we have a really lousy record at nation building in recent years.
Fallen Heroes
The Washington Post has a collection of pictures of all the photos of our soldiers lost in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Very depressing.
Coastal Drilling
This makes sense to me:
The Senate voted today to allow a federal inventory of offshore oil and gas reserves, a program that opponents said would undermine longstanding bans on new drilling along much of the nation’s coastline.
Considering a broad energy bill, senators voted, 54 to 44, to let the Interior Department use a variety of technologies to try to measure the amount of oil and gas beneath the outer continental shelf.
Supporters said that in light of fluctuating energy supplies and rising natural gas prices, it was prudent to determine what was available if the nation had to rely on domestic sources. They denied it was a precursor to drilling in areas now off limits.
I am not sure why some people think their state shoujld be immune from helping to carry the burden of meeting the nation’s energy needs. Why shouldn’t we be able to drill where the oil is? Where do all the Greenpeace and Sierra Club members think the oil that they used to drive their Subaru to the co-op comes from?
Changes to Head Start
Some of the proposed changes in the House Bill to reform Head Start:
The $6.8 billion bill drops plans to transfer Head Start to the Education Department from the Department of Health and Human Services in what was probably the most visible signal of the new academic emphasis. The measure, however, would still require all Head Start teachers to have four-year college degrees by 2008.
The proposal would also scale back plans to permit states to take control of Head Start. Critics had contended that would lower the quality of Head Start and reduce the money available for children.
The federal administration of Head Start is now paid from a separate allotment. So essentially all the money that Congress appropriates for the program goes to the day care centers.
The bill now says that no more than eight states may take over Head Start in a demonstration project. Those states have to pledge not to reduce the number of children in the federal program and to provide services as extensive as the children now receive. The bill would also allow religion-based groups that run Head Start programs to consider religion in hiring, exempting them from antidiscrimination clauses in the bill.
The usual suspects are against the bill, and are actually being quite whiny:
On Wednesday, the National Head Start Association sued the Bush administration, saying it had violated First Amendment rights of Head Start providers. The administration has in recent weeks written to providers to warn them that the Hatch Act bars using federal money to lobby Congress. The Head Start Association accused the administration of trying to muzzle criticism.
This Is Good News
Times are a changing:
A third night of student protests outside Tehran University’s dormitories exploded into the surrounding middle-class neighborhoods early today, with large gangs of students fighting running street battles against vigilantes armed with sticks and chains. At one major intersection demonstrators hurled bricks at trucks of riot policemen who were rushing to lift barricades and douse fires protesters had ignited in the streets.
The protesters chanted “Death to Khamenei,” a slogan that can bring a jail term in this country, where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader, goes unquestioned.
“I’ve been lashed, jailed for having a satellite dish,” said a student, underscoring the simmering social frustrations behind the riots. “It’s time to stand up for what we want.”
In a nationally televised speech on Thursday, Ayatollah Khamenei accused the United States of trying to foment disorder here and warned protesters that the government would be merciless against those acting in the interests of foreign powers.
Good luck to them.
Policy Changes
Federal authorities said today that they planned to use stricter standards for identifying and locking up terrorist suspects in light of concerns raised in a recent report that hundreds of illegal immigrants were mistreated after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Law enforcement officials plan to make at least 12 structural changes that were recommended in a report issued last week by the Justice Department inspector general, according to interviews with officials at the agencies affected by the report. Nine other recommendations are being actively considered, they said.
They had an investigation into previous occurences and problems, they published it, and now they intend to make changes. Isn’t this how it is supposed to work? This does not excuse them for the past mistakes, but this is how government is supposed to work. I am assuming TalkLeft will keep us up-to-date on whether they follow through.