Editorial: Hope, and Lessons, in Somalia

Somalia has been the paradigm of failed states since before 1993, when militants shot down two Black Hawk helicopters and killed 18 American soldiers in Mogadishu. One of the world's poorest, most violent countries, it has been pummeled by warring militias, famine and pirates. But the country recently has shown enough positive movement that the Obama administration last week hosted President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud in Washington and recognized Somalia's government for the first time in more than two decades. The evolution is worth examining as the West tries to grapple with militants in Mali.

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The election of Mr. Mohamud, a moderate political activist and academic, by Parliament last September ended eight years of corrupt and failed transitional governments. Backed by a new Constitution, he has started building governing institutions with a focus on security, on delivering public services and on judicial and financial reform. Investment from the Somalian diaspora, Turkey and elsewhere is coming back. So are foreign embassies.

None of this would have happened if the security situation had not also improved. Since 2006, the country has been torn by an insurgency led by the militant group Al Shabab, which claims allegiance with Al Qaeda. But since 2011, African Union troops, backed by American drone and aircraft strikes on targeted militant leaders, have pushed Al Shabab out of the capital and other key towns. Washington has poured $650 million into the African Union force over the last six years and spent hundreds of millions more on humanitarian and development assistance for Somalia.

The decision to recognize the Somali government was a reasonable move that will open the door to other American and international aid and may make Mr. Mohamud's political adversaries think twice about trying to throw him out. But it would be a mistake to read too much into the progress that has been made. The government is weak and doesn't control much territory beyond the capital. Its army is virtually nonexistent. Al Shabab still lurks as a dark force. If the African Union force, and especially Kenyan and Ugandan troops, left Somalia anytime soon, the gains could all be lost. It remains to be seen whether competing warlords and clans can ever cooperate to build a real state. Mr. Mohamud needs to follow through on a United Nations plan for reconciliation.

It is early to draw firm conclusions, and there are many differences, but Somalia may offer some cautionary advice for the fight now being waged by France at the other end of the African continent against militants in Mali. Degrading militants is likely to take years. Regional forces, rather than foreign forces from farther afield, are best positioned to lead the fight. And political progress is at least as important as military gains.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Goldilocks and the Three Politicians

When I was a kid, my parents would occasionally go out together for dinner at a restaurant. To make sure the other patrons thought they were engaged in lively conversation, my mother would quietly tell my father stories like "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." He'd nod and ask questions like "What happened next?" It actually worked out very well.

The other day, when I was listening to the House of Representatives debate the debt ceiling, I tried to imagine ways to make Congress as easy to tackle over the dinner table as the Three Bears.

The debt ceiling is the first of several fiscal cliffs the country is facing in the near future and the scenario is certainly riveting: The Treasury is due to run out of money to pay our bills in late February, at which time the national credit rating could crater, sending financial markets around the world into a free fall.

But, in practice, we're just talking about rearranging deadlines. This week, the House voted to push the debt-ceiling crisis back to the end of the line. And the obvious topic of conversation, if you were sitting over pasta with your husband, would be: Which fiscal cliff would you rather fall off first?

Imagine Goldilocks finding the first cliff too steep, and the next one too bumpy. But can you have a cliff that's just right? Maybe we need a poem:

A sequester cuts a big chunk from the spending
For guns, butter and schools — but not lending
It kicks in March One,
Unless something is done
Toward this one the G.O.P.'s tending.

The sequester can sound sort of seductive. If you made the Pentagon really hack away at its budget you know they could find some big, useless projects to get rid of. But as it stands now, the law requires a nasty nibbling away at almost every domestic and defense program in existence rather than a couple of big constructive gulps.

There's a thing called Continuing Resolution
A kicking-the-can institution
In March it will end,
And the government can't spend
Unless they can find resolution

The last time Congress failed to fund the government, the results included, over the long run, the destruction of Newt Gingrich's political career. So something to think about.

The debt ceiling cliff is in sight
But Congress thinks falling off wouldn't be right
They're postponing that day
Till the 18th of May
When we'll all be too tired to fight

"No one really knows what will happen. But I'm not quite sure I want to look over the edge of the cliff when it comes to the debt limit," Speaker John Boehner said in a speech this week. So, there's one vote.

This was the speech in which Boehner claimed that the Obama administration was attempting to "annihilate" the Republicans and "just shove us into the dustbin of history." He was peeved about the inauguration speech, which actually didn't so much attack the Republicans as ignore them completely, as if they had all the significance of the Modern Whig Party. Nothing more painful than not being noticed.

Boehner's speech, to the Ripon Society, included repeated references to the fact that the Senate has not passed a budget for several years. ("There's nothing that irritates our members more.") Here's another topic for dinner: Why are the Republicans so obsessed with this issue? The Congressional budget isn't all that critical; it's more of a theory than a law. But Boehner and his members behave as if the Senate's failure to come up with one is a threat to the national well-being that makes global warming look like a week of bad weather.

To lure the party's right wing into voting for the debt ceiling postponement, Boehner tacked on a section that would defer lawmakers' pay if their chamber doesn't come up with a budget this year. That would presumably be the senators, since the House passes a budget every year, in the form of a plan so improbable that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan couldn't even drag it through the presidential campaign.

"When I grew up in Wisconsin, if you had a job ... and didn't do the work, you didn't get paid," Ryan declaimed in the House debate. Have you ever noticed how much Ryan talks about jobs he had in high school and college? Do you think he just likes talking about the brief period when he wasn't employed as a professional politician? Or is it just that he wants us to remember that he once drove the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile?

Nevertheless, the Senate should obviously do a budget. When the House passed its bill this week, Senate Democrats said they would. In fact, their leaders were practically wearing party hats. They can't wait.

Once they do, we'll talk about it over dinner. I hope there are bears in the plot.

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Op-Ed Contributor: A Child With Down Syndrome Keeps His Place at the Table

IT'S rare that our daily lives adhere to dramatic form. But as reported on Today.com/Moms ("Waiter hailed as hero after standing up for boy with Down syndrome"), among other places, a little morality play took shape a few days ago in a Houston restaurant.

According to the Today.com article, the Castillo family — Eric, Kim and their 5-year-old son, Milo, who has Down syndrome — were having dinner at Laurenzo's Prime Rib when a family nearby asked to be seated elsewhere.

As the waiter, Michael Garcia, recounted to the NBC affiliate KPRC-TV in Houston: "I heard the man say, 'Special needs children need to be special somewhere else.' My personal feelings took over, and I told him, 'I'm not going to be able to serve you, sir.' "

" 'How could you say that?' " Mr. Garcia said he asked the man before he left the restaurant. " 'How could you say that about a beautiful 5-year-old angel?' "

For many people, this will be a simple feel-good story. But as the father of an 11-year-old girl with Down syndrome, I found the story more complicated. Beyond its satisfying ending, you can learn a lot about the conflicted place of Down syndrome in the world. The casual insensitivity of the patron's remark, while not always expressed this blatantly, is all too common. And whether you call Mr. Garcia a hero or not, he unquestionably did the right thing, and his kind of bravery makes an enormous difference in the lives of people with disabilities.

As Ms. Castillo pointed out, he put his job on the line. Even more inspiring, he knew the Castillo family, who are regulars at the restaurant, and he acted in the name of connection, denying the very separation — between "special" and "normal" — that the unidentified patron implied.

Ms. Castillo's characterization of her son also stood out because it broke through the prescribed roles of the story. Her description is loving and positive, yet she emphasizes ordinary qualities as well as angelic ones. She said her son likes to give hugs, but is also occasionally "obnoxious which, like any other 5-year-old, he can be."

She also noted that Milo has friends "both with and without Down syndrome." That detail stayed with me, not only because it is true to my experience but also because it suggests how far we've come. The history of disability in our country is mostly tragic. During decades of routine institutionalization and sterilization, a shared preschool — let alone friendship, or being a valued regular customer at a Houston restaurant —was not on the table. If there were a slogan for those grim decades, "let them be special somewhere else" would sum things up pretty well.

Most of the progress for children with Down syndrome in the United States — their right to go to school, for instance — is recent and gained momentum, in part, from a recognition that "somewhere else" often meant an institutional horror no human being should ever have to experience. Geraldo Rivera's 1972 hidden-camera exposé of the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island was instrumental in showing exactly how grim conditions could be. That exposé was one small part of a tidal change in which advocates for the disabled inspired by the civil rights movement, committed parents and others fought for the things that today's parents take for granted. When our daughter Laura was born, my wife and I often wondered about the future. But we did not wonder whether she would be allowed to go to kindergarten.

Our advances, however, are still a work in progress. While it's true that open bigotry is less common than it used to be, the absence of direct hostility is not the same as the absence of ignorance. The word "retard" is common in the schoolyard and on our screens: while our taboos about difference shift with incredible speed, slurs about intellectual disability often get a pass. From the movies "Tropic Thunder" to "The Hangover," from Rahm Emanuel to Ann Coulter, "retard" still tends to be seen as edgy, not bigoted. Of course, the issues in question transcend labels: in the Houston restaurant, the word "special" was used as an insult, which only testifies to the resilience of prejudice. Any word can be repurposed for contempt.

What is it about intellectual disability that we find so difficult? Sometimes it seems our focus on "positive" qualities, like being "cute" or "happy" or "sweet," is meant to compensate for disability. We're a long way from seeing all human beings as part of a single continuum. We also, it has to be said, do a lot better with children than adults — perhaps because historically we imagine adults with Down syndrome as children. A child with Down syndrome may have a place at the table, but adults are a different matter. In housing and employment, their place is uncertain; the recent scandal in New York State with rampant, unchecked abuse in group homes should give pause to anyone who thinks that our American history with disability has come to a happy ending.

It's moving to me that Milo Castillo's story takes place in a restaurant, given the civil rights history of lunch counters and water fountains. What's a more visceral expression of belonging than where we're allowed to eat? Where else would manners and rights intersect? As presented in the television report, the opinion voiced by the unidentified patron — "be special somewhere else" — is seen as a shocking instance of rudeness. It is. But more significantly, it's the sentiment that, when widespread, makes it possible for people to lose rights in the first place.

Dehumanizing practices depend on dehumanizing ideas. Instead of seeing the scene in the restaurant as a story with a heroic resolution, we might see it as a debate carried out in words and actions. Taking a kid with Down syndrome to a restaurant is a statement: he's a family member first, and he belongs. Saying that the kid shouldn't be there, as the patron did, is one response; Mr. Garcia's principled refusal to provide service is yet another. That scene, tidy as it is, is only one part of a long American conversation about who does and doesn't belong.

Beneath the human interest story, in other words, is a question about who counts as human. For parents of children with Down syndrome like me, every daily act is an answer. What I live for, though, is the day when the question doesn't come up.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The N.C.A.A.’s Ethics Problem

In late March 2009, Yahoo Sports published a story alleging that the University of Connecticut had violated N.C.A.A. rules in its efforts to recruit Nate Miles, a 6-foot-7 basketball player from Toledo, Ohio. The N.C.A.A. enforcement staff, led by Tim Nevius, one of its top investigators, opened an inquiry.

By then, Miles was back in Toledo; he'd been expelled from UConn in October 2008, before ever playing a game. No longer a "student-athlete," Miles refused to cooperate. Yet Nevius interviewed Dr. Chris MacLaren, a Florida orthopedic surgeon, who had once operated on Miles's foot. Without any consent from the patient, Nevius asked for, and MacLaren provided, details of Miles's surgery and its costs.

This, of course, was a gross violation of medical ethics. It was also, in all likelihood, a violation of medical privacy laws. But when several lawyers involved in the case brought this potential illegality to the attention of the Committee on Infractions — which metes out punishment to rules violators, and which includes a number of lawyers — the response was coldly dismissive. A medical release from Miles "was not required," replied Shepard Cooper, then the committee director. How did he know? Because Nevius had told him so. So much for the law.

Earlier this week, Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, acknowledged that the enforcement staff had, once again, done something deeply unethical. Except he didn't phrase it like that. In recounting the sordid details, involving an investigation into the University of Miami, Emmert made it sound as if they were aberrations, the actions of several rogue employees who were no longer there. Describing the transgressions as "stunning," Emmert announced that he had hired a lawyer to review its investigative practices, insisting that his goal was to ensure that N.C.A.A. investigations were consistent with "our values."

What sanctimonious claptrap. The only thing stunning about this latest outrage is that Emmert acknowledged it. (My guess is that it was about to leak anyway.)

To recap: Nevin Shapiro, the man at the center of the Miami scandal — who is now in prison for running a Ponzi scheme — claims to have given University of Miami athletes cash, prostitutes, jewelry, "and on one occasion, an abortion" for a player's girlfriend, according to Yahoo Sports, which broke this news as well. Incredibly, N.C.A.A. investigators engaged one of Shapiro's bankruptcy lawyers, Maria Elena Perez, which would seem like an insurmountable conflict of interest. Then, they used her ability to conduct depositions in the Shapiro bankruptcy case to gather information it could not otherwise obtain. Though Perez insists she did nothing wrong, this is the sort of ethical breach that can cost a lawyer her license.

When I expressed astonishment at this turn of events to Richard G. Johnson, a lawyer who has tangled with the N.C.A.A., he scoffed. "This is not unusual," he replied. "This is part and parcel of the way the N.C.A.A. does business." Andy Oliver, a former client of Johnson's who is now a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, became the subject of an N.C.A.A. investigation after his former lawyer violated lawyer-client confidentiality in speaking to the N.C.A.A. (Oliver ultimately won a reported $750,000 settlement.)

In the case of former University of Southern California assistant football coach Todd McNair, which I wrote about several weeks ago, the enforcement staff's evidence against him was so dubious that a judge has ruled that he will likely win a defamation suit he brought against the N.C.A.A. In another case that I wrote about, the boyfriend of an N.C.A.A. investigator bragged that his girlfriend was going to nail a player she was investigating — months before her investigation had been completed.

Indeed, in the Miami case, this is not even the N.C.A.A.'s only ethically dubious stunt. Just before Thanksgiving, the enforcement staff sent out letters to numerous former athletes who had refused to cooperate — as is their right. The letters said that if they didn't talk in the next few days, the N.C.A.A. would assume that they were guilty of rules violations and punish their alma mater.

"The N.C.A.A. thinks it is the 51st state," Johnson told me. Its investigators regularly solicit the assistance of law enforcement officials, acting as if they have some kind of equal standing. But they don't. The N.C.A.A. is not a regulatory body. It is merely an association that creates rules designed to prevent its labor force — college football and basketball players — from making any money. Most of its investigations — investigations that are selective, highhanded and a mockery of due process — are aimed at enforcing its dubious rules.

Over the last year, as I've stumbled across one outrage after another, I've wondered when someone in a position to do something about the N.C.A.A. — college presidents, maybe? Members of Congress? — would stand up and say "enough." It's getting awfully hard to look the other way.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Rig the Vote

If you can't win by playing fair, cheat.

That seems to be the plan of Republican lawmakers in several battleground states that stubbornly keep going for Democrats during presidential elections. Thanks in part to gerrymandering, many states already have — and will continue to have in the near future — Republican-controlled legislatures.

Republican lawmakers in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin are considering whether to abandon the winner-take-all approach to awarding Electoral College votes and replace it with a proportional allocation.

That change would heavily favor Republican presidential candidates — tilting the voting power away from cities and toward rural areas — and make it more likely that the candidate with the fewest votes over all would win a larger share of electoral votes.

One day I will have to visit the evil lair where they come up with these schemes. They pump them out like a factory. Voter suppression didn't work in November, and it may even have backfired in some states, so they just devised another devilish plan.

Pete Lund, a Republican state representative in Michigan, "plans to reintroduce legislation that would award all but two of Michigan's 16 Electoral College votes according to congressional district results," said an article Friday in The Detroit News.

The paper continued, "The remaining two would go to the candidate winning the statewide majority."

Lund, who proposed a similar bill in 2012, made Republicans' intentions completely clear, saying, according to the article: "It got no traction last year. There were people convinced Romney was going to win and this might take (electoral) votes from him."

These bills are a brazen attempt to alter electoral outcomes and chip away at the very idea of democracy, to the benefit of Republican candidates.

The Detroit News also reported that, according to an analysis by Mark Brewer, the state Democratic Party chairman: "Romney would have gotten nine of Michigan's electoral votes and Obama would have received seven in 2012 under Lund's proposal. Instead, Obama garnered all 16 Michigan electoral votes en route to his national tally of 332."

Meanwhile, Obama beat Romney in the state by a margin of nearly 450,000 votes.

Virginia's bill is further along than Michigan's. It's already being debated.

For reference, although Obama won the state of Virginia and all of its electoral votes last year, as he did in 2008, according to The Roanoke Times on Friday, "If the system had been in effect for the 2012 election, Republican Mitt Romney would have won nine of Virginia's 13 electoral votes, and President Barack Obama would have won four." Keep in mind that in November, Obama won the state by almost 150,000 votes.

Republicans in Virginia are just as forthright about their intention to tilt the electoral playing field in their favor.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that the sponsor of Virginia bill's, Charles W. Carrico Sr., a Republican, "said he wants to give smaller communities a bigger voice." Carrico told The Post, "The last election, constituents were concerned that it didn't matter what they did, that more densely populated areas were going to outvote them."

Yes, you read that right: he wants to make the votes cast for the candidate receiving the fewest votes matter more than those cast for the candidate receiving the most. In Republican Bizarro World, where the "integrity of the vote" is a phrase used to diminish urban votes and in which democracy is only sacrosanct if Republicans are winning, this statement actually makes sense.

David Weigel of Slate explained the point of the Virginia plan this way: "Make the rural vote matter more and make the metro vote count less."

Luckily, as the Roanoke paper noted Friday, Ralph Smith, the powerful Republican Virginia state senator, isn't on board:

"Smith said this morning that he opposes the legislation, calling it 'a bad idea.' Smith sits on the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee, which will hear the bill next week. Without Smith's support, it's unlikely the bill could get to the Senate floor."

Paul Bibeau, who writes "a blog of dark humor" from Virginia, points out a numerical oddity about the effects of the Virginia law that turns out, upon reflection, to be more stinging than funny: "This bill counts an Obama voter as 3/5 of a person."

That is because, as Talking Points Memo says, "Obama voters would have received almost exactly 3/5 of the electoral vote compared to their actual population — 30.7 percent of the electoral vote over 51 percent of the popular vote."

This is not where we should be in 2013, debating whether to pass bills to reduce urban voters to a fraction of the value of other voters and hoping that someone with the power to stop it thinks it's a "bad idea."

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Op-Ed Columnist: The Great Migration

One of the features of the Obama years is that we get to witness an enormous race, which you might call the race between meritocracy and government. On the one side, there is the meritocracy, which widens inequality. On the other side, there is President Obama's team of progressives, who are trying to mitigate inequality. The big question is: Which side is winning?

First, there is our system of higher education, which is like a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks up some of the smartest people from across the country and concentrates them in a few privileged places.

Smart high school students from rural Nebraska, small-town Ohio and urban Newark get to go to good universities. When they get there they often find a culture shock.

They've been raised in an atmosphere of social equality and now find themselves in a culture that emphasizes the relentless quest for distinction — to be more accomplished, more enlightened and more cutting edge. They may have been raised in a culture that emphasizes roots, but they go into a culture that emphasizes mobility — a multicultural cosmopolitanism that encourages you to go anywhere on your quest for self-fulfillment. They may have been raised among people who enter the rooms of the mighty with the nerves of a stranger, but they are now around people who enter the highest places with the confident sense they belong.

But the system works. In the dorms, classrooms, summer internships and early jobs they learn how to behave the way successful people do in the highly educated hubs. There's no economic reason to return home, and maybe it's not even socially possible anymore.

The highly educated cluster around a few small nodes. Decade after decade, smart and educated people flock away from Merced, Calif., Yuma, Ariz., Flint, Mich., and Vineland, N.J. In those places, less than 15 percent of the residents have college degrees. They flock to Washington, Boston, San Jose, Raleigh-Durham and San Francisco. In those places, nearly 50 percent of the residents have college degrees.

As Enrico Moretti writes in "The New Geography of Jobs," the magnet places have positive ecologies that multiply innovation, creativity and wealth. The abandoned places have negative ecologies and fall further behind.

This sorting is self-reinforcing, and it seems to grow more unforgiving every year. One small study caught my eye. Robert Oprisko of Butler University found that half of the jobs in university political science programs went to graduates of the top 11 schools. That is to say, if you have a Ph.D. from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and so on, your odds of getting a job are very good. If you earned your degree from one of the other 100 degree-granting universities, your odds are not. These other 100 schools don't even want to hire the sort of graduates they themselves produce. They want the elite credential.

Barack Obama (Occidental, Columbia, Harvard) benefited from this sorting system. So did his wife (Princeton, Harvard). So did most people in his administration. So did many people who read this newspaper and many of us who write for it.

Members of the administration have worked reasonably hard to mitigate the inequality that their own rise has produced. They've worked reasonably hard to redistribute money from the rich people in the magnet areas to the poorer people in the flight areas. For example, the health care law increases taxes on the top 1 percent by about $20,000 per household. It increases benefits for the working class by between $400 and $800 per household. The recent tax increases will do more of the same.

The first problem with the effort is that it's like shooting a water gun into a waterfall. The Obama measures, earned after a great deal of political pain, simply aren't significant enough to counteract the underlying trends.

The second problem is the focus on income redistribution. Recently, there's been far more talk about tax increases than any other subject. But the income disparities are a downstream effect of the human capital and geographic disparities. Pumping a few dollars into San Joaquin, Calif., where 2.9 percent of the residents have bachelor's degrees and 20.6 percent have high school degrees, may ease suffering, but it won't alter the dynamic.

The final problem is that, in an effort to reduce the economic concentration of power, the administration is concentrating political power in Washington. If the problem is that talent is fleeing blighted localities, it's hard to see how you make that better if decision-making and resources are concentrated faraway in the nation's capital.

This is not to make a partisan point. The Republicans do not have a better approach. It's simply to say that the liberal agenda is not very good at addressing the inequality problem it seeks to solve. The meritocracy is overwhelming the liberal project.

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Editorial Observer: Aurora’s Suffering Beyond the Spotlight

The cinema complex in Aurora, Colo., reopened last week, six months after a gunman killed 12 patrons, wounded 58 and left deep scars on a community still struggling to recover. "Everyone heals, some slower, some in different ways," contended Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado in the face of angry complaints from some of the victims' families that the reopening, with prayers, a "night of remembrance" and a screening of "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," was insensitive and crass.

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His point about the certainty of healing, while undoubtedly heartfelt, is too often and too easily offered by political leaders when, in fact, Aurora, like Newtown, Conn., and countless other places savaged by multiple shootings across decades, must struggle for years with the legacy and its wounds, largely alone as the spotlight fades. The trials of gun-damaged victims who survive mass assaults is one of the intangibles that must not be overlooked if the nation, and the political system, is to have any hope in the renewed fight for stronger gun controls.

For all the talk at the movie house of healing, one surviving victim, 23-year-old Caleb Medley, remained in grievous suffering on his back with severe brain and motor damage and the loss of an eye. His family exulted when he was briefly helped to his feet last month, and hoped that he might be able to leave rehabilitation soon for an extended care facility, however limited his horizons. Seven family members of another victim, Ashley Moser, take turns making sure the 25-year-old woman, a paraplegic after a neck wound, is rotated twice a night in her bed. Her aunt, Annie Dalton, reports Ashley remains deeply depressed with little motivation as she faces the fact that her 6-year-old daughter, Veronica, was shot dead that night while the paralyzed mother lost a fetus soon after the gun spree.

"There is no closure here," Ms. Dalton, a retired public school principal, politely reported of Ashley's life. "It's a tough road," she said, citing all manner of bureaucratic tangles about health insurance, fading rehabilitation coverage, other financial demands beyond estimating, and endless tasks like the family's learning to move Ashley on a board to distant doctors' appointments.

There is familiar ritual in Aurora's aftermath that the rest of the nation needs to know. A charity fund that grew so quickly after the carnage — to about $5 million — is depleted. It was distributed by Ken Feinberg, the respected compensation guru from 9/11 and other tragedies, under a formula that devotes 70 percent to those who suffered brain damage or paralysis — something more than $200,000 each. "There's not enough money," Mr. Feinberg apologized to claimants with lower-rated trauma. "It's a horrible situation," he said of Aurora's needs.

In caring for her niece, Ms. Dalton can barely speak of the fresh massacre in Newtown or the "unreal" power of the National Rifle Association in dominating the conversation about a problem that in the last 40 years has taken one million lives and left countless others like Ashley and her family to manage unspeakably debilitated lives. "The next tragedy is on its way," Ms. Dalton said of the one certain lesson in Ashley's fate.

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Editorial: Hubris in Virginia

The dark art of statehouse gerrymandering reached a new low in Virginia this week. Senate Republicans in Richmond used the absence of a Democratic member, who traveled to the presidential inauguration, to ram through a surprise redistricting map patently designed to aid the G.O.P.'s grab for majority power in the next election.

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The chamber is divided 20-20 between the parties. A redistricting plan had been adopted after the 2010 census. But no sooner had Senator Henry Marsh III, a black civil rights leader, left for the inauguration on Martin Luther King's Birthday than the Republicans pounced like street thugs to limit debate to 30 minutes and pass their shabbily partisan ploy by a vote of 20 to 19.

Like most states, the Virginia commonwealth has a long history of political eye-gouging in the pursuit of voting maps that boost the careers of one party's members while keeping voters in the dark. But the Republicans' blitzkrieg was breathtaking as they dredged up an innocuous House bill, grafted their remapping scheme onto it, and rushed it to the floor without any notice to the public.

The Republican House is expected to approve the changes, which would make eight of the state's 40 Senate districts — including six held by Democrats — more heavily Republican. At the same time, more Democrats would be packed into three solidly Democratic districts. Republicans laughably argued that the remapping was needed to meet civil rights laws for fairer minority representation — this despite the party's statehouse history of blocking Congressional redistricting plans bolstering minorities.

The Senate maneuver created such instant scandal that even the Republican governor, Robert McDonnell, had to admit, "I certainly don't think that's a good way to do business." He can best make his point by vetoing the remapping as a piratical exercise in legislative hubris.

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Editorial: New York’s Low-Buzz Budget

Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York presented an extra-lean state budget this week, his third conservative spending plan since taking office in 2011. The total outlays for fiscal year 2013-14, including federal funds to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy, will be almost $143 billion. The budget contains some real bonuses, including a plan to raise the minimum wage and a proposal for a workable database for gun ownership. But it could also raise the debt load, especially in struggling upstate areas.

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The budget, which must be approved by the Legislature before April 1, increases state spending by less than 2 percent statewide. That is admirable restraint, but the budget is not free of Albany's traditional sleight-of-hand, like one-time cash infusions. For instance, the governor would dip into reserves for the state insurance fund, although he does say that the money will go mainly to capital projects, not daily expenses. And since the state is nearing a debt limit imposed in 2000, the governor wants to free the State University of New York to issue more of its own debt in the future.

One of the more questionable aspects of the budget is a provision labeled the "Stable Rate Pension Contribution Option." Innocent as that sounds, the provision would give local communities the freedom to stretch out their pension obligations to the state by paying less now, and almost certainly more later on. The mayor of Syracuse, Stephanie Miner, describes this as "kicking the can down the road."

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli would have to approve this idea, a decision he should consider carefully. Communities like Syracuse pay pension costs into the state's $150 billion pension fund, and lower contributions from these communities could make the state plan more vulnerable.

Besides, most of these cities need more help than this revision to the pension plan. Many are struggling with the 2 percent property tax cap Mr. Cuomo and the Legislature imposed in 2011, and there has been little relief from state mandates. Nor does this budget offer these communities anything new in the way of unrestricted state assistance.

There are other questions for legislators to consider, but by Albany standards this is mostly a low-trauma budget that will need only a few fixes.

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Editorial: Women in the Battlefield

The Pentagon's decision to end its ban on women in combat is a triumph for equality and common sense. By opening infantry, artillery and other battlefield jobs to all qualified service members regardless of sex, the military is showing that categorical discrimination has no place in a society that honors fairness and equal opportunity.

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Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who overturned the ban this week, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who unanimously urged him to do it, deserve praise for bringing military policy in line with reality. Women have been in the thick of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade. More than 280,000 have been deployed there, thousands have been injured and more than 150 killed. With the rule abolished, such service and sacrifice will no longer be unofficial and unrecognized.

It is encouraging that the push for change came from the top, from leaders who said integration was no bar to a stronger, better military. The Pentagon also was facing pressure from lawsuits, including one brought last November on behalf of four service women and the Service Women's Action Network, an advocacy group, claiming that gender-based discrimination was unconstitutional and unfairly harmed their careers.

One plaintiff, Maj. Mary Jennings Hegar, an Air National Guard helicopter pilot who was shot down and wounded in Afghanistan, said she could not seek combat leadership positions because, in the Pentagon's view, she had not officially seen combat. Major Hegar is only one of untold thousands of women whose career paths have been sharply limited by that gap in their résumés.

When the new policy is fully in place, we hope many more women will apply for jobs that they wouldn't have considered, in certain schools, leadership courses and in those branches of service — namely the Army and Marine Corps — where their opportunities have been most proscribed. The result will be more diversity, from a deeper pool of talent, and thus a stronger, better military.

There will also be grumbling. When the news broke Wednesday afternoon, military news sites like Army Times and Marine Corps Times lit up with comments, some ranging from laughably sexist to reprehensible. "They shouldn't be bused in from the field every 3 days for a shower while the guys stay out for 45 days," said one commenter. "The castration of the U.S. Army continues," said another. "God help us all."

Some right-wing commentators rehashed false stereotypes that women couldn't hack it, and warned that women would be captured and raped and men would get shot trying to protect them instead of killing the enemy. These lurid hypotheticals deny the reality that military women face far greater danger of sexual assault and harassment from their fellow troops — a crisis that the Pentagon has slowly been addressing, and that full combat integration should help to remedy. Adding women to the leadership corps will foster a healthier military culture freed from testosterone-soaked abuse and scandal.

Many in the military already understand that many women can do combat jobs as well as men, if not better, but none have the chance to prove it. "Fully support," one Army Times commenter wrote of the new policy, "as long as the training and the physical standards for such positions remain what they need to be to accomplish the mission and make every team member able to provide support and cover for their teammates."

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