Editorials
Election report merits a response
The credibility of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is compromised when its chairman and other members become actively involved in partisan politics. Still, much of the substance of the commission's report on Florida voting irregularities in last November's presidential election has merit.

Endangered funding
People who care about wild places and their animal inhabitants won a small victory when a House committee preserved the public's ability to bring lawsuits that place plants and animals on the endangered list. But our ability to protect the country's natural heritage is still undermined by the budget cuts that remain in the bill.

Evolving decency
A Texas case again focuses attention on the question of executing the mentally retarded. It is time for this nation to decide it is wrong.

Letters
Palestinians' plight is self-created
Re: Fighting over the holy land: a place vs. people without a place, by Bill Maxwell, June 3.

Bill Maxwell
Water wars keep Mideast on boil as a long drought continues
George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, is in the Middle East, sent there by President Bush to prop up a fragile cessation of violence between Israel and the Palestinians.

Robyn E. Blumner
Librarians' lawsuit looks like censorship
Political philosophy isn't properly described as a continuum with the radical left and reactionary right at opposite ends. Instead, bend that continuum into a circle, with the extremes of the left and right very close to one another and you get a more apt model of the truth.

Martin Dyckman
Losing life to gambling
TALLAHASSEE -- During a visit to Tampa last week, as a friend and I were walking to a neighborhood restaurant, she pointed out the spot under the LeRoy Selmon Expressway where Harry Lee Coe, the state attorney of Hillsborough County, shot himself last July.