Guantanamo prison camp

The (Findlay) Courier, March 31

Five former U.S. secretaries of state are now urging the government to shut down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The reason? The camp makes us look bad to the rest of the world. ...

We've long advocated the downsizing of Gitmo. But it has to be done in a way that doesn't jeopardize this country's security, and without the vast concern for world opinion that motivates our past secretaries of state.

It seems clear that the U.S. should try, by military tribunals if necessary, any Gitmo detainees who are deemed serious threats. We also should continue to work to repatriate any remaining detainees who should be released.

But closing the camp? That presumably will happen when the war is over. If the radical Muslims would like to speed up that process, they could always give up their jihad.

State's education reform

The Cincinnati Enquirer, March 30

In his State of the State address, Gov. Ted Strickland called education "the central issue I face as governor." In no other area has Strickland been bolder -- appointing a chancellor of higher education, creating a more tightly connected university system, pushing a plan to allow high school students to spend senior year on a college campus, and calling for the state department of education to come under the governor's oversight.

Now the governor's office is holding private education stakeholders' meetings around nine focus areas, inviting business, education and social service leaders to brainstorm with him. ...

Clearly, Strickland is concerned about the state's low college graduation rate, its high college costs and remediation rate, and about increasing educational accountability without creating a system that sucks the life and passion out of learning.

The governor has talked a lot about empowering the state's best teachers and lessening the power of the state superintendent of schools and the state school board. And besides being interested in how groups of students do on state tests, he wants the testing program to do more to guide and support individual children.

Those are the philosophical parameters for the conversation Strickland now wants to have with those he's identified as education stakeholders. The ideas that have bubbled up so far are a mix of likely and unlikely, platitudes and paydirt. ...

The point right now -- and it's a very good one -- is just to let ideas flow.

China's actions

The (Youngstown) Vindicator, March 29

When riots and protests in Tibet broke out March 14, it was easy to predict that the Chinese government would move quickly to diffuse the situation.

But no one could have envisioned the kind of brutal response from Beijing -- not with the opening ceremonies for the summer Olympic games less than five months away.

What it suggests is that China, which is hosting the games for the first time in its history, sees itself as such a major player in the global economy that it is not worried about a wholesale boycott. ...

Protectionism wrong

The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, March 29

Robert Reich visited Oberlin College about a month too late. It would have been nice if Bill Clinton's secretary of labor had been here before the Ohio primary, when his party's leading presidential candidates were busy bashing trade in general and the North American Free Trade Agreement in particular.

Reich, now a professor of public policy at the University of California, told an audience in Finney Chapel that protectionism is a familiar response to economic hard times, but that it is almost always the wrong one. He noted that manufacturing employment in Ohio actually grew after NAFTA's ratification. The numbers have declined since the recession that hit in 2000, but that was almost surely driven more by technological advances than foreign competition. ...

What Reich offered was the kind of common-sense talk that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama need to hear, especially from a fellow Democrat with a long history of standing up for working Americans. This region's many trade skeptics - including Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and Reps. Marcy Kaptur, Dennis Kucinich and Betty Sutton -- need to hear it, too. ...