Editorial: Mayor de Blasio Looks Forward

Mayor Bill de Blasio took charge of New York City on Wednesday with a forceful Inaugural Address and pledged to begin the head-on attack on "the inequality crisis" as he had promised. He repeated the bullet points from his campaign, but insisted that progressive talking would now give way to progressive governing, without dilution or dithering. "We won't wait," Mr. de Blasio said again and again. "We'll do it now."

It was an encouraging moment, as the mayor vowed to make New York a better, fairer place for everyone.

Mr. de Blasio's words carried an indictment: the city had become unjust and unlivable for too many of the poor and working class. But he tempered this complaint, as he should have, with a New Year's Day call to civic unity and optimism. "We will succeed as One City," he said.

Too bad the speakers on stage with him didn't get the unity part, marring the event with backward-looking speeches both graceless and smug. Worst among them, but hardly alone, was the new public advocate, Letitia James, who used her moment for her own head-on attack: on the 12 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In doing so, she made a prop of a 12-year-old girl named Dasani, who had to hold the Bible and Ms. James's hand as Ms. James called for a government "that cares more about a child going hungry than a new stadium or a new tax credit for a luxury development."

Dasani was profiled in a recent series of articles in The Times illustrating how bad things get for homeless families in the shelter system. Ms. James turned her into Exhibit A of an Inauguration Day prosecution: the People v. Mayor Bloomberg. So did the pastor whose invocation likened New York to a "plantation," and Harry Belafonte, who strangely laid the problem of America's crowded prisons at the feet of the former mayor, an utterly bogus claim, while saying Mr. Bloomberg shared responsibility for the nation's "deeply Dickensian justice system."

Mr. Bloomberg had his mistakes and failures, but he was not a cartoon Gilded Age villain. He deserved better than pointless and tacky haranguing from speakers eager to parrot Mr. de Blasio's campaign theme. It was up to former President Bill Clinton, ad-libbing some gracious thanks to Mr. Bloomberg, and Mr. de Blasio, who did the same, to try to bring the event back to a grown-up level.

The low and high points of Wednesday's ceremony well illustrate the challenge for the mayor. There is frustration and a hunger for a new direction in the city. That's why Mr. de Blasio was elected. But as he promises to take "dead aim" against problems as vast and daunting as inequality and injustice, he is boldly raising expectations for sweeping solutions he — like any mayor — has limited ability to deliver.

Mr. de Blasio, in a superb campaign, showed the keen judgment of a surfer who spots the swell before it becomes a cresting wave. He deserves credit for an ambitious, admirable agenda. Progressive values run deep in this city, and Mr. de Blasio is right that New York at this moment needs to regain touch with its proud history and character.

Everyone in the city should be looking forward to his efforts to give a voice to the voiceless, to ease the suffering of the poor, and to increase opportunities for all. The emphasis should be on "looking forward." After, of course, he handles this week's snowstorm.

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Editorial: No Burden on Religion

The Justice Department is expected to file a brief on Friday in opposition to Justice Sonia Sotomayor's perplexing decision to issue a temporary injunction against requiring an order of Colorado nuns to fill out paperwork required by the health care reform law's contraception mandate.

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A careful review of the matter should persuade Justice Sotomayor and her Supreme Court colleagues, who may also become involved now, that the alleged threat to religious liberty is nonexistent and the stay should be lifted while litigation proceeds in the lower courts.

In November, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two challenges to the birth control mandate brought by secular, profit-making companies seeking to elevate the religious views of company owners over societal interests and the well-being of employees.

The Colorado nuns' group, the Little Sisters of the Poor, is a religiously affiliated organization that is exempt from the health law's requirement that employer insurance plans cover contraception without a co-pay. The audacious complaint in this case is against the requirement that such groups sign a short form certifying that they have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services, a copy of which would go to their third-party insurance administrator. The nuns say that minor requirement infringes on religious exercise in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Under that law, the federal government may not "substantially burden a person's exercise of religion" unless the government demonstrates that the burden is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling interest. The certification requirement, an accommodation fashioned by the Obama administration to bolster the protection of religious exercise without depriving women of an important benefit, does not rise to a substantial burden. A federal trial court denied a preliminary injunction on that basis and a federal court of appeals declined to issue an injunction pending appeal, though decisions in some similar cases have come out differently.

Adding a level of absurdity to the controversy, Little Sisters of the Poor's insurance plan qualifies as a self-insured "church plan" under an insurance statute known as Erisa. The Justice Department has conceded that it has no authority to compel a third-party administrator of such a plan to provide contraceptive coverage. In this case, contraceptives would not be made available even indirectly to the nuns' employees.

Like the cases of the private employers, the suit by the nuns' group boils down to an unjustified attempt by an employer to impose its religious views on workers.

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Editorial: Saving New Jersey’s Coast

Hurricane Sandy made a direct hit on New Jersey just over a year ago, killing 34 people and devastating much of the state's Atlantic coast. Now, communities that want to build sand dunes to provide protection when (not if) another storm hits are being thwarted by landowners who have refused to allow the dunes to be built on their property. Areas with dunes fared better in the storm than those without them.

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As of last week, the state needed 2,889 property owners along the coast to agree to easements for the dunes. About one-fourth, more than 700, were holding out, many of them concerned about losing their views.

Because their resistance is likely to make conditions less safe for everyone, the state and some local communities are threatening to seize parts of their property — essentially part of their front yards — by eminent domain and build the dunes anyway; public safety is a legitimate reason to exercise eminent domain. It is unfair for a few to jeopardize the lives and property of so many others.

Gov. Chris Christie, once skeptical about using eminent domain to commandeer private property, changed his mind in this case, a spokesman explained last week. And once he made that decision, he put the full force of his office behind it. "We are building these dunes, O.K.?" Mr. Christie said at a meeting of homeowners last spring. "We are building these dunes whether you consent or not."

There might have been more diplomatic ways to put it, but the governor was right. In September, he signed an executive order requiring the attorney general to "immediately coordinate legal action" to acquire the necessary easements. It's past time for the holdouts to do their part to protect lives and property, including their own.

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Editorial: Scouting’s Incomplete Evolution

The new year brings a positive change in the membership practices of the Boy Scouts of America. In May, delegates attending the Boy Scouts' national convention voted to allow openly gay boys to participate in the group's activities. That overdue step toward inclusion went into effect on New Year's Day, a welcome — though incomplete — turn for an organization that until quite recently rejected any change in its discriminatory ways.

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The Boy Scouts' reluctance to embrace gay equality has been painful to watch. The organization has hurt many youngsters and its own reputation as it has remained caught between fears of losing donors repelled by bigotry and of losing partnerships with conservative churches that sponsor a large percentage of local Cub Scout and Boy Scout groups. But while the new membership policy caused some churches to end their sponsorship, no mass exodus has materialized. Mormon and Roman Catholic churches are continuing to participate.

Unfortunately, the organization still refuses to fully renounce discrimination, and will continue to prohibit gay and lesbian adults from serving as troop leaders. This will perpetuate the idea that gays are inferior and that being gay is inconsistent with the Boy Scout values of strong moral character and leadership. It also means that gay youngsters who excel as scouts will be denied the chance to serve as pack or troop leaders when they turn 18.

We have hope that Robert Gates, a former Eagle Scout and former defense secretary slated to begin a two-year term as president of the national organization in May, will agree that the ban on gay troop leaders is unacceptable and see that it is quickly ended. During his time at the Pentagon, Mr. Gates supported President Obama's call to end the unjust "don't ask, don't tell" policy that barred gay men and women from serving openly in the military, a record he should build upon by eradicating similar discrimination in scouting.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Weed: Been There. Done That.

For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships.

But then we all sort of moved away from it. I don't remember any big group decision that we should give up weed. It just sort of petered out, and, before long, we were scarcely using it.

We didn't give it up for the obvious health reasons: that it is addictive in about one in six teenagers; that smoking and driving is a good way to get yourself killed; that young people who smoke go on to suffer I.Q. loss and perform worse on other cognitive tests.

I think we gave it up, first, because we each had had a few embarrassing incidents. Stoned people do stupid things (that's basically the point). I smoked one day during lunch and then had to give a presentation in English class. I stumbled through it, incapable of putting together simple phrases, feeling like a total loser. It is still one of those embarrassing memories that pop up unbidden at 4 in the morning.

We gave it up, second, I think, because one member of our clique became a full-on stoner. He may have been the smartest of us, but something sad happened to him as he sunk deeper into pothead life.

Third, most of us developed higher pleasures. Smoking was fun, for a bit, but it was kind of repetitive. Most of us figured out early on that smoking weed doesn't really make you funnier or more creative (academic studies more or less confirm this). We graduated to more satisfying pleasures. The deeper sources of happiness usually involve a state of going somewhere, becoming better at something, learning more about something, overcoming difficulty and experiencing a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

One close friend devoted himself to track. Others fell deeply in love and got thrills from the enlargements of the heart. A few developed passions for science or literature.

Finally, I think we had a vague sense that smoking weed was not exactly something you were proud of yourself for. It's not something people admire. We were in the stage, which I guess all of us are still in, of trying to become more integrated, coherent and responsible people. This process usually involves using the powers of reason, temperance and self-control — not qualities one associates with being high.

I think we had a sense, which all people have, or should have, that the actions you take change you inside, making you a little more or a little less coherent. Not smoking, or only smoking sporadically, gave you a better shot at becoming a little more integrated and interesting. Smoking all the time seemed likely to cumulatively fragment a person's deep center, or at least not do much to enhance it.

So, like the vast majority of people who try drugs, we aged out. We left marijuana behind. I don't have any problem with somebody who gets high from time to time, but I guess, on the whole, I think being stoned is not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure and should be discouraged more than encouraged.

We now have a couple states — Colorado and Washington — that have gone into the business of effectively encouraging drug use. By making weed legal, they are creating a situation in which the price will drop substantially. One RAND study suggests that prices could plummet by up to 90 percent, before taxes and such. As prices drop and legal fears go away, usage is bound to increase. This is simple economics, and it is confirmed by much research. Colorado and Washington, in other words, are producing more users.

The people who debate these policy changes usually cite the health risks users would face or the tax revenues the state might realize. Many people these days shy away from talk about the moral status of drug use because that would imply that one sort of life you might choose is better than another sort of life.

But, of course, these are the core questions: Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture? What sort of individuals and behaviors do our governments want to encourage? I'd say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

In legalizing weed, citizens of Colorado are, indeed, enhancing individual freedom. But they are also nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.

Paul Krugman is off today.

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Editorial: Preserving Wireless Competition

The corporation that controls Sprint, the third-biggest cellphone company in the country after Verizon and AT&T, is reportedly planning to make an offer to buy the smaller rival T-Mobile in a move that would reduce competition in an important industry that already has too little of it.

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Most Americans have a choice of just four national cellphone companies — Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile — compared with six in 2003. The Federal Communications Commission recently described the industry as "highly concentrated" based on an index used by regulators to measure how competitive a market is. In 2011, the Department of Justice used a similar analysis to effectively block AT&T from acquiring T-Mobile.

Sprint, recently bought by the Japanese company SoftBank, appears to believe that regulators might look favorably on a proposal to purchase T-Mobile because the combined company would still be smaller than AT&T and Verizon in revenue and customers. Sprint would probably argue that the combined company would become a more effective competitor to the two larger companies.

Because T-Mobile uses a different wireless technology than Sprint, SoftBank could face significant technological hurdles in trying to integrate the two. But that's a separate issue; the main issue is whether consumers would benefit from the acquisition, and the evidence suggests they would not.

As an independent company, for instance, T-Mobile has recently cut prices aggressively and simplified its cellphone plans. Its phone plans are often much cheaper than comparable packages offered by other cellphone companies. It no longer forces customers into two-year contracts; its subscribers can switch to another wireless firm whenever they like. And it slashed the high international roaming charges it levies on calls customers make when they are traveling abroad and eliminated roaming charges for text messages and Internet service.

As you would expect in a competitive environment, other companies like AT&T have been forced to respond to T-Mobile's price cuts and policy changes with similar moves. It is hard to imagine that any cellphone company would have been as aggressive as T-Mobile if the administration had allowed AT&T to buy the company. The logic that the government used to step in still holds today, and antitrust regulators should look closely at any proposal that would reduce competition in the wireless business.

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Op-Ed Columnist: My Jewish State

LONDON — A year ends, another begins, time for reminiscences and resolutions, regret and hope, best-of and worst-of lists, confessions and crystal-ball gazing — most of it pretty excruciating. It will take a nanosecond longer to scroll back to one's year of birth. So it goes.

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Roger Cohen

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I am not going to gripe about brilliant Twitter. I have nothing new to say about Miley Cyrus. But I am going to make one prediction for 2014. It is that, for all John Kerry's efforts, this will be another year in which peace is not reached in the Middle East. (And if I am wrong, I vow Sisyphean penance in eternity.)

Plenty of bad things have happened between Israelis and Palestinians of late. There has been a steady uptick in violence. Israel's freeing of 26 long-serving Palestinian prisoners was naturally greeted with joy in Ramallah, and by a wave of Israeli government tweets condemning the celebration of terrorists. Along with the release came word that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government will likely announce plans for 1,400 new housing units in the West Bank, just as Kerry arrives for his 10th peace-seeking visit. This has infuriated Palestinians. So, too, has an Israeli ministerial committee vote advancing legislation to annex settlements in the Jordan Valley. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said the vote "finishes all that is called the peace process." Such contemptuous characterization of a negotiation from a leading protagonist is ill-advised and bodes ill.

Then there is the rebounding Israel-is-a-Jewish-state bugbear: Netanyahu wants Palestinians to recognize his nation as such. He has recently called it "the real key to peace." His argument is that this is the touchstone by which to judge whether Palestinians will accept "the Jewish state in any border" — whether, in other words, the Palestinian leadership would accept territorial compromise or is still set on reversal of 1948 and mass return to Haifa.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, says no; this "nyet" will endure. For Palestinians, such a form of recognition would amount to explicit acquiescence to second-class citizenship for the 1.6 million Arabs in Israel; undermine the rights of millions of Palestinian refugees; upend a national narrative of mass expulsion from land that was theirs; and demand of them something not demanded from Egypt or Jordan in peace agreements, nor of the Palestine Liberation Organization when, in 1993, Yasir Arafat wrote to Yitzhak Rabin that it "recognizes the right of Israel to live in peace and security."

This issue is a waste of time, a complicating diversion when none is needed. As Shlomo Avineri, a leading Israeli political scientist, put it to me, "It's a tactical issue raised by Netanyahu in order to make negotiations more difficult."

Of course, any two-state peace agreement will have to be final and irreversible; it must ensure there are no further Palestinian claims on a secure Israel. It may well require some form of words saying the two states are the homelands of their respective peoples, a formula used by the Geneva Initiative. But that is for another day.

If Israel looks like a Jewish state and acts like a Jewish state, that is good enough for me — as long as it gets out of the corrosive business of occupation. Zionism, the one I identify with, forged a Jewish homeland in the name of restored Jewish pride in a democratic state of laws, not in the name of finicky insistence on a certain form of recognition, nor in the name of messianic religious Greater Israel nationalism.

When I spoke to him in Tel Aviv a few months ago, Yair Lapid, a top government minister, said: "The fact that we demand from Palestinians a declaration that they recognize Israel as a Jewish state, I just think this is rubbish. I don't need that. The whole point of Israel was we came here saying we don't need anyone else to recognize us anymore because we can recognize ourselves. We are liberated."

That's right. It's also true that Palestinians leaders, with zero democratic accountability, and through facile incitement, are not preparing their people for territorial compromise at or close to the 1967 lines. Then again, nothing in Israel's actions facilitates that. And on we go to more failure, more victories of narrative over normalcy.

A last word: This column is dedicated to Mike O'Connor, fearless journalist, great Bosnia hand for The New York Times, vivid chronicler of the Israel-Palestine conflict over several years for NPR, and most recently representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists in Mexico, where saving press freedom is a daily struggle. Mike was an acute observer of the kind of human folly, fatuousness and self-interest that perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It brought him to tears. Yet he always found a way to laugh. Mike died suddenly last week, age 67, in Mexico City. If nothing else, I hope Kerry and the rest prove me wrong for him.

Maureen Dowd and Thomas L. Friedman are off today.

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Editorial: The New Year Within

Sometimes the New Year comes in feeling merely newish, a matter of changing months and not much else. But sometimes the New Year brings with it a powerful sense of regeneration, as if, like certain insects, you were entering a new stage of complete metamorphosis.

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It's hard to know which kind of New Year is coming until it comes. Changing digits — from 2013 to 2014 — may be all the change you feel you need. Yet there are only so many New Years in any one life, and it never hurts to be ready for the eventful year, which, as Thoreau once wrote, will drown out all our muskrats. (Or, as the muskrats might say, the year which will drown out all our Thoreaus.)

There are no hymns to the New Year, and the only music most of us associate with this holiday is that dirge of the departing year, "Auld Lang Syne."

There is no traditional ceremony either — everyone seems to celebrate the day in a different manner. And perhaps this is a holiday that defies both tradition and ceremony. Does it make sense, after all, to welcome the New Year in the Same Old Way? There is not much ritual in turning to a new page in the calendar. All the ritual lies within us, in the aspiration to live up to our highest hopes.

The dead of winter is not a natural season for rebirth. Yet all of nature, dormant now under the cover of cold and snow, is preparing for a re-emergence that always seems spectacular when it eventually comes. Meanwhile, we persist, as much like ourselves on Jan. 1 as we were on Dec. 31. The newness we hope for is something that is ours to construct day by day.

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Editorial: Saying ‘I Do’ Amid the Roses

By all accounts, the standout entry in Wednesday's Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Calif., will surely be the marriage of two men, Danny Leclair and Aubrey Loots, beaming amid the array of lavishly flowered floats to be viewed on national television and beyond.

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This is a first — a newly married same-sex couple highlighting the grand parade. They'll do so like punctuation marks on the surprisingly rapid rise of same-sex marriage in America. In little more than a year, the number of states allowing same-sex marriage has tripled to 18, following a Federal District Court ruling in Utah.

Opponents of the single-gender nuptial display in the hallowed parade have dished heavy umbrage in petitions and blogs, calling it "unbiblical" and urging a boycott by onlookers. But the tournament executives have said they are pleased that love will triumph on a day when the tournament theme is "Dreams Come True."

The vows are scheduled to take place aboard a float sponsored by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation to celebrate victories in the old year — that is, 2013 — including the Supreme Court's upholding the repeal of California's Proposition 8 and striking down a basic part of the Defense of Marriage Act.

In 1890, as California was evolving as the cutting-edge state of the nation's future, little could local promoters foresee what the future might bring as they invented the Tournament of Roses to lure winter-hardened tourists to Pasadena's balmy climate. "Let's hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise," they avowed. It wasn't long before a football game was added to the fun.

And now, Danny and Aubrey saying I do. The new couple's float is titled, "Living the Dream: Love Is the Best Protection." It is hard to disagree as the new year parades forward.

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Editorial: More Guns Will Not Save Iraq

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The bloodshed has reached catastrophic proportions. More than 8,000 Iraqis died in 2013, including 952 members of the Iraqi security forces. Over all, it is the highest death toll since 2008 and shatters a trend that in 2012 prompted a top administration official to assert that "Iraq today is less violent" than "at any time in recent history."

The deadly surge is attributed to Al Qaeda's regional affiliate, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a Sunni group that is a potent force in northern and western Iraq. Its predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq, waged the insurgency that brought the country near civil war in 2006 and 2007 before suffering big defeats from Iraqi Sunni tribal groups and American forces. Since the United States withdrew at the end of 2011, the group has gained strength against Iraqi security forces that are incapable of fully protecting civilians, and it has taken in foreign fighters from neighboring Syria and the region. American officials say that Islamic State is deliberately trying to tear the country apart.

Mr. Maliki sought help from Mr. Obama at the White House in November, a turnabout after he failed to reach a deal to keep a small number of American troops in the country after 2011 for training and intelligence gathering.

Some 75 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, to be fired at militant camps with the C.I.A. providing targeting assistance, were delivered to Iraq last week and 10 reconnaissance drones are expected to follow in March. The Obama administration also plans to provide 48 other reconnaissance drones and the first of an order of F-16 fighter jets. It is pushing a reluctant Congress to lease and eventually sell Apache helicopter gunships to Iraq.

The United States has a strategic interest in Iraq's stability, which is undoubtedly at risk, making increased counterterrorism cooperation and intelligence-sharing essential. But even the most lethal weapons will not have much positive effect if Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi leaders bicker rather than unite the country around shared goals through credible democratic processes. Mr. Maliki has been central to the disorder, wielding power in favor of his Shiite majority brethren at the expense of the minority Sunnis, stoking sectarian conflict and enabling a climate in which militants could gain traction.

American officials say Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi officials finally understand the dangers of the growing extremism and the fact that a security-only approach will not bring stability. They say that Iraqi security forces have lately been more successful against the militants and that Mr. Maliki and his government have shown more willingness to work cooperatively with Sunnis, resolve oil disputes with the Kurds and put in place a new agreement aimed at promoting civil and social peace. Given his authoritarian duplicity, it is hard to be optimistic. On Tuesday, more than 40 Sunni lawmakers submitted their resignations from Parliament and Sunni ministers threatened to withdraw from the Cabinet after Mr. Maliki's security forces dismantled a camp used by Sunnis protesting second-class treatment by the Shiite-led government.

As it doles out weapons, intelligence and advice, the Obama administration needs to press Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi leaders to do those things, to ensure that the election in April is free and fair and to commit finally to adopting laws that will address Sunni grievances. It also needs to be prepared to halt or withhold deliveries of weapons if they are misused or if Mr. Maliki continues to put his own interests over his country's.

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