What they're saying…

Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:

Dec. 12

The Baltimore Sun, on cocaine sentencing guidelines:

With a welcome dose of common sense, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that federal sentencing guidelines are advisory, not mandatory, and that a judge is still free to exercise discretion, depending on the circumstances of the case. The court's reiteration of the principle that judges should use their judgment is particularly appropriate in drug cases, where mandatory minimum sentences are often unnecessarily harsh and disparate punishments involving crack and powder cocaine are especially glaring.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission's unanimous vote yesterday in favor of a retroactive review of many of these sentences should help restore some fairness, but it comes after too many people have already served too much time. Congress needs to enact more comprehensive relief.

The guidelines that went into effect in 1987 were meant to address widely uneven sentences, particularly among racial and ethnic groups, but they helped exacerbate the problem. Viewing different forms of cocaine as more or less potent and dangerous sent many urban, minority crack users and sellers to prison for longer terms than their mostly white counterparts who were using and dealing powder cocaine. ...

But even as the commission has taken important steps to amend the guidelines, Congress needs to adjust the drug laws to which the guidelines apply. The House and Senate have been slow to move on bipartisan bills to change the 100-to-1 ratio for amounts of cocaine powder compared with crack that qualify for mandatory minimum sentences.

Dec. 10

The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, on President Bush's mortgage crisis fix:

Large-scale government intervention to remedy the bad investment decisions made by individuals never is the ideal course, but the prospect of a million-mortgage meltdown with far-reaching effects on the U.S. and world economies makes some action justifiable.

The deal worked out between the Bush administration and leading mortgage lenders appears to be appropriately limited in scope and duration.

The plan doesn't put taxpayers on the hook with a bailout that the nation can't afford.

By limiting the freeze to those mortgages that are not delinquent, it avoids rewarding borrowers and lenders who struck deals that were unsustainable from the start.

Dec. 9

Houston Chronicle, on conservation models for fishing:

For many years, conservationists, supported by federal rule-making, believed that the best way to reduce over-harvesting of many types of fish was to impose limits: on the size and number of fish that could be caught, and on the total number of days in any given year's harvest.

But those seemingly logical rules have caused great harm in the Gulf Coast to the red snapper they are supposed to protect, and to the fishermen who make their living by them.

Now, Environmental Defense, along with commercial fishing interests and other coastal businesses that depend on a healthy Gulf and robust fish stocks, says the time has come to adopt individual fishing quotas, a new and better model for ensuring a sustainable fishing industry. ...

An individual fishing quota, or IFQ, imposes a catch limit to the snapper fishery overall but no size or trip limits and then allocates a percentage of the total to individual fishing enterprises. IFQs can be traded, a feature that acts as a buyout system that reduces overcapitalization in the Gulf. Fewer boats equals bigger profits.

More important, IFQs end the need for speed fishing. And they permit year-round fishing so that fishermen no longer have to take their boats out in bad weather to maximize their take over the few days of the fishing season. Fishermen can fish in response to market pricing, maximizing their revenue. Also, IFQs reduce waste from catch-and-release practices that returned tons of size-limited dead fish to the sea.

Dec. 11

St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, on destroyed videotapes of CIA interrogations:

The Bush administration serves up one outrage after another in its handling of terror suspects, from its use of secret overseas detention facilities to its use of harsh interrogation techniques. Now it appears the CIA destroyed hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the brutal interrogations of two top al-Qaida suspects, despite warnings that such destruction could be illegal.

As it has in the past, the CIA is beginning to look like a rogue agency that doesn't feel constrained by the law. ...

Investigations are under way by the House and Senate intelligence committees. ... A joint preliminary investigation also has been launched by the Justice Department and the CIA internal inspectors.

All this attention is more than warranted. This act of destruction that took place in 2005 not only suggests that the agency ignored the advice of Justice Department lawyers and the warnings of lawmakers. It also may have set itself up for obstruction of justice charges. ...

How aggressively the Justice Department digs into this will be the first test of political independence for Attorney General Michael Mukasey. At his confirmation hearings, Mukasey refused to classify waterboarding as torture. But the issue here is not torture. It is whether the CIA destroyed evidence and obstructed justice.

Dec. 7

The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J., on presidential candidates and religion:

Had Thomas Jefferson been subject to the religious scrutiny American presidential candidates undergo now, he'd have been a nonstarter long before the Iowa caucuses. ...

Jefferson did not believe in the divinity of Christ. "To the corruptions of Christianity, I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other," Jefferson wrote in 1803.

Certainly many Americans then and now would disagree with Jefferson. But does it matter? Does learning that one of the most brilliant men ever to lead the nation wasn't a Christian in the strict sense of the definition lessen any of his contributions?

And does it matter that Mitt Romney is a Mormon? Or Mike Huckabee a Baptist preacher? Is the test merely the church a candidate attends on Sunday morning? ...

Is it possible that fealty to the Constitution, to the laws of the nation and its traditions, including religious tolerance, ought to be considered as well as proposals to end the war in Iraq, attack climate change, create a fair system of health care and shore up Social Security?

Jefferson wasn't one to press his religion on others. In 1813, he wrote: "Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle."

Amen.