A sampling of editorial opinion around Texas:



Nov. 21

The Dallas Morning News on more FEMA woes:

Gov. Rick Perry is right to be fed up with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s unfulfilled promises to help clean up the Texas Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Ike.

Trailers didn’t arrive in the numbers promised. Some that did were padlocked and unusable. But if that’s not enough of slap in the face to hurricane victims, FEMA now is trying to dump cleanup costs it should pay onto Texas counties.

This is reprehensible behavior, and to Mr. Perry’s credit, he’s not standing idle. Last week, he announced a new commission to oversee rebuilding costs and ordered state transportation officials to haul away debris. It’s the right thing for the state government to do because residents are suffering and FEMA seems to be running in the opposite direction.

The federal agency should demonstrate a similar sense of responsibility. If FEMA wins this battle to skirt its obligations, Texas counties would be on the financial hook for about $500 million, or 25 percent of the $2 billion cleanup cost an amount they can’t afford. In Chambers County, for example, the cleanup tab would exceed $10 million, nearly half the county’s annual budget. Tapping the state budget surplus and rainy day fund, as the feds want Texas to do, isn’t an option either. Although the rainy day fund contains about $6.9 billion, a large portion is committed to state programs.

FEMA seems to be singling out Texas unfairly. The federal agency paid all debris removal costs after Hurricane Katrina swept across Louisiana, and it should do the same for Texas.

The mess is compounded by the lack of straight answers. Gov. Perry’s office tells us that President George W. Bush didn’t even know of the Texas request for aid when the governor spoke with the president by phone last week.

Meanwhile, Texas coastal communities are waiting for help. Hundreds of residents still live in tents, disabled cars and condemned homes as they await FEMA inspectors, insurance adjusters, mobile homes and utilities. If this is emergency management, we’d hate to see emergency mismanagement.



Nov. 24

San Antonio Express-News on a sovereign Iraq:

It says much about the intentions of the United States that with a 150,000-strong military force in Iraq, it has negotiated with the Iraqi government about a status of forces agreement. If the United States were truly interested in an imperium, or if the Iraqi government were its puppet, there would be no need to go through with the charade.

But over more than 12 months, American and Iraqi negotiators did hammer out a legal framework to shape the U.S. occupation after the United Nations mandate expires at the end of this year. American combat forces will pull out of Iraqi cities by June. By the end of 2011, they’ll leave the country entirely. In the interim, the United States will not use bases in Iraq to launch attacks on its neighbors.

If the Iraqi Parliament passes the status of forces agreement and if it holds, it will mark a monumental change. The violent Baathist dictatorship of prewar Iraq destabilized the Middle East. So did the Iraq of only two years ago that was spiraling into ethnic and sectarian civil war.

What changed?

Al-Qaida and its allies overplayed their hand. Iraq’s Sunni minority grew tired of their depredations. The U.S. military surge and a new counterinsurgency strategy succeeded. U.S. military deaths in October fell to the lowest monthly level of the war.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki challenged the threat posed by the paramilitary squads of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Iranian patrons. The Iraqi military and other governmental institutions have grown more competent. The once distant vision of what a stable, peaceful Iraq might look like is getting closer.

Much can still go wrong in Iraq. Security and political progress is delicate. The enemies of the emerging order both inside Iraq and neighboring countries have ample opportunity to create chaos.

Many Americans and Iraqis aren’t pleased with the three-year time frame for ending the U.S. occupation. But forfeiting the hard won gains of the last 22 months gains achieved with American and Iraqi blood for political expediency would be a mistake.



Nov. 23.

Houston Chronicle on limiting children’s exposure to bisphenol A:

Even after scientists crushingly denounced both its methods and its conclusions, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is still brooding over what to do about bisphenol A.

That’s the omnipresent chemical that makes baby bottles tough and helps keep the inside of metal cans bacteria-free. But a cascade of animal research also links BPA to behavioral disorders, breast cancer, heart attacks, fertility problems and diabetes.

Here, then, is what the FDA should do, considering its mission to protect U.S. consumers, not the chemical industry.

First, the FDA should promptly ban BPA from all containers for children’s food, formula and beverages.

It should require BPA labels on other products, warn consumers not to microwave plastics of any kind and consider an overall BPA ban in food and beverage containers.

And it should educate the public about what is already known about this chemical while pushing industry to replace it.

It’s not as if there’s a shortage of research on BPA. The FDA has just ignored it.

Created in 1891, bisphenol A was intended as an estrogen replacement. By the 1950s, industry was using it to harden plastics and to make resin liners for food and beverage cans.

Because BPA leaches into foods, it now turns up in the urine of 93 percent of Americans. It is especially dangerous, much research shows, to the still-forming brains and bodies of fetuses, babies and children. Unfortunately, BPA lurks in the lining of formula cans and laces baby bottles and sippy cups.

For decades, the FDA like regulators in Japan, Europe and Canada believed tiny amounts of the chemical were harmless. But in recent years, hundreds of scientific studies have persuasively shown the opposite.

Last year, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviewed 258 of the most important BPA studies, and found that almost all linked this endocrine imitator to serious disorders in lab animals.

BPA, the paper found, contributed to breast cancer, testicular cancer, diabetes, hyperactivity, obesity and reproductive problems.

Only a small number of studies, mostly financed by industry sources, found the chemical harmless.

Several scientific panels confirmed the paper’s analysis. Last spring, the National Toxicology Program a separate federal agency from the FDA voiced "some concern for the effects on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants and children at current human exposures to bisphenol A."

And the chemical is everywhere. Just this month, another Journal-Sentinel study found that toxic levels of BPA leach out, after heating, from infant products marketed as "microwave safe."

The evidence finally has piled high enough for regulators in Canada. In October, they branded BPA toxic, banning its use in baby bottles. Wal-Mart, Toys "R’’ Us and CVS have also dropped children’s products containing the chemical.

The FDA, however, seems to prioritize the chemical industry’s safety. In late summer, it released a draft report deeming BPA harmless at current levels of exposure. As for Canada’s ban of the substance? "An abundance of caution," the U.S. agency said.

Since the FDA’s report, scientists inside and outside the agency have rained down disapproval.

Asked by the FDA to review its August findings, an expert panel issued a damning critique. The FDA’s "conclusions are not supported by the available data and science," the group said.

Specifically, they complained, the agency ignored more than 100 studies suggesting BPA’s dangers. Instead, it mostly considered studies bankrolled by industry.

Appallingly, industry representatives actually wrote whole passages of the FDA report, the Journal Sentinel found.

Hammered by criticism, the FDA’s chief has pledged to come up with a response by the end of this month. According to a spokesman, the agency reckons "additional research will be valuable."

Indeed it will.

After all, BPA may have already contributed to behavior and fertility disorders, heart failure and diabetes in millions of Americans.

But the FDA, like its Canadian counterpart, must act now to protect American children and to reclaim its devastated credibility. Banning BPA in baby bottles, formula and food containers is a crucial start.