Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Editorial Roundup
Recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
The Washington Post on the growing popularity of women’s college basketball (April 6):
Women’s college basketball has become a cultural phenomenon. Arenas are selling out. Records have been set for Division I all-time college points, three-pointers and TV viewership. Women’s Final Four tickets have been reselling for double the men’s tickets.
The top players are now household names — Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, LSU’S Angel Reese, Uconn’s Paige Bueckers, the USC’S Juju Watkins, South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardoso, to name a few.
But the images of young girls and boys — begging for autographs, crying when they meet players — have been the most evocative. (Yes, even more so than the tiara Reese brought to her final game.) For decades, women’s professional sports have been a cultural afterthought, with vast differences in pay and player treatment, relative to men’s teams, justified by middling interest (though passionate) among the public. That could change.
This moment feels akin to that of the 1990s Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, or when soccer star Brandi Chastain won the World Cup for Team USA and ripped off her shirt.
And it has been a long time coming. Many of the coaches of Elite 8 teams had to beg friends to attend their games, which they played in rotting facilities that men’s teams had long abandoned. Title IX, a 1972 federal law, mandated more equality between men’s and women’s college sports. The early 2000s saw players — such as Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird — who generated many TV viewers in college with their faster game and then went on to elevate the WNBA’S stature. Now, women’s basketball is reaching new heights.
There’s already buzz about next year’s college season, with the return of players such as Watkins and LSU’S Flau’jae Johnson. Meanwhile, the WNBA is about to welcome the once-in-a-generation talents of Clark and Reese, who could start selling out professional stadiums next year, too.
The Wall Street Journal on Trump, Biden and the two-party system (April 5):
Many Americans are unenthused, to say the least, about a 2024 grudge match between two grumpy old men, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. But after months of No Labels teasing an alternative “unity ticket,” this week it pulled the plug after failing to find a candidate. The exercise says something about the country’s political system and this particular moment.
No Labels isn’t wrong that many voters think the two big parties are serving up the equivalent of week-old leftovers. In the latest Harvard/harris poll, 62% (and 71% of independents) say the nation “needs another choice.” Or look at Tuesday’s primaries: In Wisconsin, nearly 21% of Republicans spurned Trump, with 12.8% for Nikki Haley and 3.3% for Ron Desantis, long after both left the race. In Rhode Island, more than 17% of Democrats refused Biden, with 14.8% for “uncommitted” and 2.6% for Dean Phillips.
Yet a longstanding feature of America’s political system is a balance between two major parties. The Electoral College forces a majority winner among the states. Even if an upstart third party earned a plurality (say, 40%) for its presidential nominee, this would throw the election to Congress, back to the control of Republicans and Democrats.
Compounding the difficulty is that third parties are required to hustle merely to get their candidates on the ballot, though No Labels said it had qualified in 21 states. Two-party systems have drawbacks, but the upside is that they avoid the political fragmentation that ails many parliamentary countries, where it’s a struggle to put together any kind of governing coalition. See Israel or much of Europe.
Also, successful political movements tend to rally voters to some specific issue or cause, and it was never clear what a No Labels agenda would look like. Immigration is one place that Republicans and Democrats are doing damage by refusing to compromise. But splitting the difference on everything isn’t a galvanizing message. The left wants higher taxes. The right wants lower taxes. Would a No Labels nominee pledge to keep taxes the same?
Without a larger cause, No Labels needed a strong political personality. One by one, its best prospects said no. Some didn’t want to be a spoiler. “If my candidacy in any way, shape or form would help Donald Trump become president again,” former New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie said, “then it is not the way forward.”
Others courted by No Labels (Haley) might still hope for a future inside their parties, especially since whoever wins the White House in November will be a lameduck president ineligible for 2028.
Given those dynamics, it was always a long shot that a unity ticket straight out of a buddy cop movie — Larry Hogan for president, with VP Joe Manchin riding sidecar, or vice versa — could take mellow centrism to the Oval Office. Crazier things have happened, but it probably would have depended on a collapse in support for either Biden or Trump, which isn’t in evidence, despite their manifest political and personal liabilities.
The public is left with an unappealing choice. Biden and Trump are in a codependent political relationship. Each imagines that he’s the only candidate who can defeat the other, when the truth is that each is being propped up by the other’s flaws.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no good alternative. He’s a vessel for the discontented, a man of the left who feints to the populist right. Unlike No Labels, Kennedy apparently doesn’t mind being a spoiler, but which side he’ll hurt more is hard to guess and the polls offer conflicting evidence.
It’s going to be a mean and ugly campaign, and a perilous four years of high polarization, no matter who wins. On the bright side, at least the winner can only serve one more term.
The Guardian on Biden’s Gaza warning (April 5):
A pivotal point has arrived in the cataclysmic six-month war in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces’ killing of seven foreign aid workers and their Palestinian driver has spurred the U.S., the UK and other European allies to draw the line that they should have established long ago. On Thursday, Joe Biden called for an immediate ceasefire and told Benjamin Netanyahu that future support would depend on Israel taking steps to protect civilians and relief workers.
These warnings come too late for tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly women and children. But they could now protect others from the continued offensive, the threatened ground assault in Rafah, and the famine setting in: Oxfam says that people in the north are consuming on average just 245 calories a day. Faced with the prospect of sanctions or a halt to arms deals, Netanyahu’s war cabinet agreed to the opening of the Erez crossing and temporary use of the port of Ashdod in southern Israel. But as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said, “the real test is results.” The U.S. government wants to see them within days.
A massive scaling-up of aid must be matched by a dramatic reduction in casualties. The killing of the World Central Kitchen staff highlighted not only the desperate need in Gaza but also the IDF’S conduct of the war. It has now sacked two senior officers over the “grave mistake,” but these deaths were not an anomaly; they underscored the hollowness of its claims to minimize civilian casualties. That is made even more starkly clear in testimony from intelligence officials over the use of artificial intelligence to identify targets and the “very lenient” rules on how many civilian deaths were permissible.
Biden’s call came amid growing pressure. The president had looked not only complicit but weak, as the Israeli prime minister ignored pleas and criticism alike. On Friday, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution calling for Israel to be held accountable for possible war crimes and crimes against humanity. The public sympathy and support for Israel engendered by the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7 were immense. Yet more voters in the U.S. now disapprove than approve of its conduct of the war. Most UK voters want to stop arms sales. This is not just a moral issue but a legal one. Hundreds of legal experts, including four former supreme court judges, have warned that Britain is breaching international law by continuing to arm Israel.
Even if the war in Gaza stopped tomorrow, the toll of the dead, wounded, orphaned and traumatized ensures that Palestinians will pay the price throughout their lifetimes and over generations. Biden’s embrace of Netanyahu was supposed to prevent regional escalation, yet there is growing concern about an all-out conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel is on high alert amid fears of Iranian retaliation for the killing of Revolutionary Guards commanders in diplomatic premises in Syria.
The opening of aid corridors following Biden’s call only reinforces the fact that Israel’s allies should have acted decisively earlier. Instead, the U.S. allowed a critical UN security council resolution to pass, then called it non-binding; the president spoke of red lines, then erased them moments later. What is needed now is what was needed months ago: a ceasefire in Gaza, the release of hostages, and a massive, sustained humanitarian relief effort. Nothing short of that will do.
Los Angeles Times on plan to kill owls (April 6):
There is something shocking about trying to save one species by killing nearly half a million of another species. That’s what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed in a plan to save the spotted owls of the northwestern United States from extinction by shooting hundreds of thousands of barred owls over three decades.
There’s no question the number of spotted owls is dwindling precipitously as barred owls have muscled into their territory in Washington, Oregon and — to a lesser extent — Northern California over the past 50 years.
This situation has pitted not just owl against owl, but also put animal welfare and conservation groups at odds with each other. In a letter to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland sent on behalf of 75 animal welfare and wildlife advocacy groups, Animal Wellness Action President Wayne Pacelle and Scott Edwards, general counsel for the Center for a Humane Economy, called the plan “a colossally reckless action” which would doom the government to perpetual killing to keep the number of barred owls down.
On the other side, Kieran Suckling, the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity — which has long fought to save the spotted owl — supports the plan. Without it, he says, the northern spotted owl in Oregon and Washington will go extinct and the California spotted owl will become endangered.
Shooting any owl seems like a horrible idea, and the Fish and Wildlife Service should put this fraught plan on hold and look for other options. We know the government biologists didn’t come to the plan lightly or quickly. The service has spent years testing its plan by killing a few thousand barred owls in smaller areas to see if spotted owl populations stayed stable. They did. But this is a far bigger plan covering far more territory.
Spotted owls, native to the area, are smaller and breed less often. Picky about where they nest and what they eat, they favor particularly cool and dark cozy cavities of old-growth trees, the supply of which has been dramatically reduced from decades of logging.
Barred owls, on the other hand, are somewhat bigger, more aggressive, and not above taking a spotted owl’s locale and food supply. They have been known to kill spotted owls — as well as mate with them, producing what some biologists have nicknamed “sparred owls.” The Fish and Wildlife Service calls them hybrids and says they should be shot as well.
Yes, barred owls are technically “invasive.” But no one hand-carried them here as pets or imported them for food or entertainment. The barred owls spent the last century expanding their range from the east and Midwest of the U.S. and Canada and now they’ve been in the Pacific Northwest since the 1970s. They came here because they could.
This predicament is a result of an ecological horror show — huge amounts of old-growth trees cut down, the increasing frequency and severity of wildfires and the fact that few scientists, if any, realized that barred owls were moving into this area until it was too late to do something less drastic to stop them.
Stuck between letting one species probably die off or killing hundreds of thousands of another species, Fish and Wildlife officials should give some other ideas a look. Instead of shooting birds dead, perhaps consider stopping them from reproducing. The agency says it looked at that and several other methods to control reproduction but they took too long to reduce barred owl populations or were too difficult and expensive to carry out.
It’s illegal to hunt either of these birds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act but the Fish and Wildlife Service can get a permit to allow the killing of animals in order to protect a species listed under the Endangered Species Act. The northern spotted owl is listed as threatened. The agency would also have to get permission from state authorities. And it’s not that they haven’t laid out a meticulous protocol for killing. Shooters must be trained and able to distinguish a barred owl from a spotted owl. Birds must be stationary on a perch and “present a full, frontal and unobstructed view,” according to the proposal. Any bird wounded but not killed should be euthanized immediately.
The issue is whether they should be killed at all. The plan has never been to eradicate all barred owls — you really can’t — but to lessen their numbers enough to give spotted owls some breathing room in the forest. But that could still mean a perpetual killing program as the spotted owl population stabilizes or goes down. (Currently it’s decreasing as much as 9% a year in some areas, according to one study.)
Maybe the government should consider what one biologist who has long studied spotted owls has suggested: Let nature take its course and leave it to the owls.
Star Tribune of Minneapolis on the ‘zombie’ Comstock Act (April 6):
In 1873, Ulysses S. Grant was president, the institution that would become Ohio State University opened its doors and Jesse James’ gang carried out the first successful railroad robbery in what was then considered the American West — the small Iowa town of Adair.
Another noteworthy event that year: the enactment of the notoriously prudish Comstock Act, which criminalized the mailing of “every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device or substance.”
Much has changed in the 151 years that have passed since then. Unfortunately, Comstock’s antiquated, puritanical parameters on Americans’ freedom of choice and expression remain on the nation’s books. It’s time to repeal this legal relic, which was considered priggish by many even as it debuted.
A key reason that Comstock is still law is that lawmakers throughout the years have focused their energy on addressing current challenges, not cleaning up outdated statutes. While Comstock has essentially laid dormant during the modern era, there’s a new urgency to eliminating this so-called “zombie” law.
Comstock came up three times in recent oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving access to mifepristone.
The drug is one of two prescribed in medication abortions, and it can also be used to manage a miscarriage. Comstock could be wielded to prevent the drug’s shipping to clinics or patients and prosecute anyone involved.
In 2023, medication abortions accounted for 63% of all U.S. abortions, up from 53% in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The medications, which are taken by mouth and have a strong safety profile, are viewed by many as preferable to a surgical procedure. Impeding shipping of the drugs would likely reduce the number of women who can access them and therefore significantly reduce abortions. That’s why abortion opponents see the 1873 law as a modern-day opportunity.
Sen. Tina Smith, D-minn., lambasted “radical” judges and anti-abortion forces who would dust off Comstock to impose their narrow views on all. She plans to introduce legislation that would repeal it.
As concerns mount over Comstock’s misuse, Minnesotans should not be lulled into complacency. In early 2023, legislators passed the PRO Act, which codified access to reproductive health care in state law.
But as University of Minnesota law professor Jill Hasday noted, the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution means that federal law, as long as it is constitutional, would take precedence over state law. Comstock would trump the PRO Act and other state safeguards.
What makes Comstock powerful is that it’s already on the books, said Hasday, who is a Distinguished Mcknight University Professor and Centennial Professor in Law at the U.
Congress doesn’t need to pass anything in order for Comstock to be tapped to limit abortion rights. That it’s already federal law also provides cover to a presidential administration wanting to use it to restrict health care for women. “It’s just laying there in wait until the law is repealed,” Hasday said, adding that “There’s no reason for Comstock to stay on the books one more day. It is serving no positive purpose.”
Advocates for repealing Comstock include conservative legal scholar Jonathan Turley. In a March commentary in The Hill, he wrote that Comstock is “one of the most glaring attacks on free speech principles in our federal code.”
Turley is right. Another critical point: Women weren’t allowed to vote in 1873. The Comstock Act was passed at a time when women had no political voice. Yet their health care today could be limited by restrictions enacted during an unenlightened, unrepresentative era.