Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Editorial Roundup
Recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
The Washington Post on Hunter Biden (Aug. 12):
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Friday his appointment of U.S. Attorney David Weiss of Delaware as special counsel in the ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son. This was the right move. It should encourage Americans that the process will be independent and transparent and, therefore, is more likely to be fair.
Such assurances might not have been necessary at the beginning of the Justice Department’s Hunter Biden probe, but they became important after a plea agreement between Weiss and Hunter Biden’s attorneys fell apart under judicial scrutiny. Initially appearing reasonable, the deal turned out to include peculiar details suggesting critics might have been justified to suspect that Biden was being given special treatment.
For example, the plea deal would have required the presiding judge to decide whether Biden was complying with the terms of a diversion agreement that would have allowed him to avoid some formal charges. Diversion agreements aren’t unusual for nonviolent first-time offenders with substance-abuse problems. But asking a member of the judiciary to help enforce one of them may be unprecedented, and the judge expressed concern that the agreement could be ruled unenforceable down the road.
Also, strangely, Biden’s attorneys and prosecutors appeared to have differing views about whether the president’s son could face further charges under the deal, spurring questions about whether the sides came to any private understandings not in the written agreement.
Meanwhile, two IRS whistleblowers claim they weren’t allowed to pursue their investigation into Biden because of political sensitivities, another reason Weiss may have asked Garland to grant him the formal independence that comes with being a special counsel.
Special counsels should not be appointed lightly. They have tended to overspend and overreach. One temptation in the Hunter Biden case might be to investigate the president himself, as many of his critics wish. So far, the record suggests President Biden’s behavior was not spotless — but also not criminal.
Nevertheless, Garland’s move was justified. Under the special counsel regulations, Weiss will not only be clearly authorized but also required to produce a report, almost certain to be made public, on his investigation. The report will allow Weiss to explain the prosecutorial choices he has and will make. The fact that he has to write one will also give him a greater incentive to proceed by the book.
The imperative in this case remains what it has always been: to treat Hunter Biden, as far as possible, like any other defendant. Weiss has all the independence and resources he needs.
The Miami Herald on Florida’s new “woke” target (Aug. 17):
Is it Robert, Rob, Bob or Bobby? Figuring out a student’s nickname used to be as simple as asking a question. Thanks to new rules from Gov. Ron Desantis’ administration, however, it will now require unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy.
And for what? To advance Florida’s over-the-top preoccupation with gender pronouns and control of classrooms, which has been neatly wrapped in a seemingly benign “parental rights” package.
Under a new rule issued by the Florida Board of Education in July, parents must give consent for schools to call their child by a nickname, or any “deviation from the child’s legal name.” The rule, according to a Board presentation, will “strengthen the rights of parents and safeguard their child’s educational record to ensure the use of the child’s legal name in school.”
Make no mistake. This rule isn’t about the integrity of educational records. It smacks of pure bigoted politics. As many LGBTQ rights groups have pointed out, the requirement could hurt transgender and nonbinary kids who are not out to their parents. Unfortunately, not every family is welcoming to their LGBTQ child.
The real issue for Florida’s political appointees and Republican lawmakers likely isn’t that Robert wants to go by Rob. It’s if Robert identifies as Roberta. Creating a rule specifically targeting transgender students perhaps was a step too far — if there’s such a thing as going too far for Florida Republicans who spare no efforts to demonize and ostracize LGBTQ youth.
“It’s basic human decency to call people by their names, the nicknames they go by and their pronouns. Students should always feel like they belong and can be honest about who they are,” GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis wrote in a statement to Miami New Times.
The new rule comes on the heels of Florida’s parental-rights law known as “Don’t say gay.” The law mandates K-12 public schools adopt as policy that it’s “false” to ascribe a gender pronoun that doesn’t align with a person’s sex assigned at birth. Essentially, this is the state of Florida saying that transgender Floridians don’t exist. “Don’t say gay” prohibits schools from requiring teachers and students refer to someone by their preferred gender pronoun. It also bans teachers from asking a student what their preferred pronoun is.
Florida has made it clear that trans people should have no place in our public institutions. It doesn’t stop with “Don’t say gay.” Another law passed this year bars transgender students and staff from using school bathrooms — unless it’s a single-stall restroom — that align with their gender identity.
Lawmakers’ disdain for trans people is no longer concealed or reprimanded. Republican State Rep. Webster Barnaby faced no consequence after he called trans people “demons and imps” during a House hearing. State Sen. Ileana Garcia gave a mea culpa after facing national backlash for saying, on the Senate floor, that “LGBT is not a permanent thing.”
These are the people running Florida and making laws that affect millions of children in public schools. It’s no surprise the state has come up with absurd policy after absurd policy, enshrining into law and policy unnecessary and burdensome requirements that are more about electoral politics than education.
Nicknames have little bearing on students’ academic achievement, but, apparently, it has a lot on the people in Tallahassee who use their power to regulate their own discomfort with cultural changes.
Silly rules on a child’s nickname would be laughable if what’s going on in Florida weren’t so serious.
The New York Daily News in praise of President Biden getting federal workers back to in-person work (Aug. 14):
Nearly 2 million Americans work for the federal government, but — four months after President Joe Biden declared the COVID emergency over — way too many of them are still doing their work in their pajamas. This month, in the wake of an embarrassing report by the Government Accountability Office revealing that “17 of the 24 federal agencies used on average an estimated 25% or less of the capacity of their headquarters buildings,” the president called for federal agencies to “aggressively execute” plans to get their employees back to the office.
Long overdue. Ask taxpaying private-sector workers like waiters and grocery-store stockpeople and nurses and doctors and custodians, or public-sector workers like teachers, cops and firefighters, how much sympathy they have for desk jockeys who refuse to countenance being made to return to the office a few days each week.
As fans and practitioners of remote work, we don’t scoff at its benefits. They include child care flexibility and saved commuting time and expense. But neither do we begrudge employers’ interest in establishing a new hybrid normal, in which employees get to spend some time at home while still being required to come in on a regular basis. Research, while incomplete, shows that some amount of inperson time is crucial to establishing work rhythms and company culture, enabling productive brainstorming, boosting collective morale and familiarizing new employees with their colleagues and responsibilities.
Which is to say, those on opposite sides of the work war should find common ground in hybrid schedules.
Too-rigid pronouncements that there shall be no flexibility are an insult to workers, as well as a drag on recruiting and retaining staff. But it’s unreasonable for workers to just squat in their home offices indefinitely if and when their agencies or companies decide they need them to show up.for the federal government to have let so many of its workers perform their duties entirely from home, seemingly without end in sight, was unfair to the taxpaying public. If buildings are truly going to sit empty in perpetuity, they should be offloaded so that the public doesn’t have to pay the rent or the upkeep. If, on the other hand, space is truly needed, then it ought to get filled with people who have work to do. In other words, the feds need to use their space or get off the pot.
For some companies in some industries, fully remote arrangements make sense. And for all the handwringing about the small businesses suffering in America’s downtowns, which no longer have a steady-enough stream of commuters, many a neighborhood has benefited from having more people stay home during the day.
But given the benefits of hybrid work, it’s no surprise that employers want people to get off Zoom or Microsoft Teams or Google Meet and actually meet their teams in the same room. And when the employer is federal, state or city government — which is to say, all of us — hybrid is increasingly the way to go.
The Wall Street Journal on COVID shutdowns and cancer (Aug. 13):
The damage from COVID lockdowns continues to appear, and another example is an increase in more lethal cancers. A new Lancet study finds that patients were more likely to be diagnosed with advanced cancer in 2020 following delays and disruptions in NON-COVID health care.
Researchers from the American Cancer Society compared the change in the stage of new cancer diagnoses in the U.S. in 2019 versus 2020. Early in the pandemic, routine health care was disrupted as hospitals prepared for a surge of COVID patients that didn’t materialize in most places. States also suspended “elective” care, including cancer screenings.
While most physician offices reopened in summer 2020, many faced a backlog of patients, which delayed screenings, exams and treatment. Some patients also delayed doctors’ visits for symptoms that may have been caused by undiagnosed cancers because they were afraid of catching COVID.
As a result, patients were 5.4% less likely to be diagnosed with a stage 1 cancer and 7.4% more likely to be diagnosed with a stage 4 cancer in 2020 than in 2019, according to the Lancet study. The biggest relative increase for stage 4 disease occurred for liver (13%), stomach (13%), prostate (14%) and thyroid (19%) cancers.
The study also notes that “due to safety concerns, guidelines often recommended postponing elective outpatient procedures for patients deemed to have less aggressive disease, and most endoscopy centers mandated patients to have COVID-19 tests before procedures after their reopening,” which “might have created additional obstacles for patients.”
Survival rates are much higher when cancers are caught early, and they can often be treated without chemotherapy and radiation. The five-year survival rate for stage 1 prostate cancer is nearly 100% compared with 32% if the disease has spread to other areas of the body.
The impact of late diagnoses is evident in more cancer deaths. Age-adjusted cancer mortality rose 1.7% in 2021 after falling 17% between 2009 and 2020. Cancer deaths were 2.8% higher during the first six months of this year than the same period in 2021.
The Los Angeles Times on the police raid of a Kansas newspaper (Aug. 10):
It was the sort of conduct one usually associates with totalitarian governments: Law enforcement officers swarm a newspaper office and confiscate computers, servers and cellphones of reporters and editors. Yet this raid took place not in a faraway autocracy, but in a small town in Kansas, despite a federal law prohibiting such searches in most cases.
On Friday, police acting on a warrant searched the offices of the Marion County Record, a weekly newspaper with seven employees and a circulation of about 4,000. Simultaneously, officers searched the home of Eric Meyer, the publisher and co-owner, seizing computers, his cellphone and the home’s internet router, according to Meyer. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother — a co-owner of the newspaper who lived with him — collapsed and died Saturday. Meyer blamed her death on the stress of the raid on their home.
Drastic as they were, the searches originated in what might appear to be a trivial dispute between the Record and a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell, who has accused the newspaper of invading her privacy and illegally accessing information about her and her driving record. (The newspaper says it obtained information about her driving record unsolicited and verified it through online public records; and it didn’t print a story referencing the information.) The search warrant alleged identity theft and unlawful use of a computer.
The searches left the small news operation in such a dire state that it was not clear whether it would be able to publish the next scheduled edition Tuesday evening; Meyer memorably described the police action as “an atomic flyswatter.”
It may also have been illegal. The federal Privacy Protection Act of 1980 requires that in most situations, law enforcement seek to obtain material from journalists through a subpoena — which gives the target the opportunity to make a legal challenge — rather than through a surprise search conducted with a warrant.
The 1980 law was passed after the Supreme Court upheld a search by sheriff’s deputies of Stanford University’s student newspaper seeking photographs from a protest. It serves as a necessary recognition that a free and inquisitive press serves the public interest, and that raids and searches of newsrooms can intimidate reporters and stop their vital work. The law broadly defines who is protected: those “reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication.”
The law does contain an exception for situations in which “there is probable cause to believe that the person possessing such materials has committed or is committing the criminal offense to which the materials relate.” In a statement to NPR, Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody pointed to this exception to justify his department’s search of the Record.
That claim is unpersuasive. In a letter to Cody signed by the Los Angeles Times and more than 30 other news organizations, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press noted that the suspect exception cited by the chief “is inapplicable when the relevant conduct consists of the receipt, possession, communication, or withholding of the material, with only limited exceptions for certain federal statutes that are not at issue here.”
These searches took place in a small town, but the temptation of law enforcement to overreach in dealing with journalists exists in communities of all sizes. In 2019, police in San Francisco searched the home and office of freelance journalist Bryan Carmody in an apparent bid to identify a confidential source. The city later agreed to pay Carmody $369,000 in a settlement.
Congress decided that journalists needed protection against searches. Local police and judges need to honor that judgment.