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Bipartisan win

In a bipartisan vote, Congress has passed a $168 billion economic stimulus package, praised by President Bush as robust, broad-based, timely and effective.

The Trib's take:

We'll see if the package ultimately does any good.

But the approval did show that Congress can act quickly and in bipartisan fashion when it's clear the public will blame the lawmakers if they don't. Not everything needs to end in stalemate.

The package and the bipartisan support were largely the work of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who worked with House GOP leader John Boehner, enlisted Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the White House and even got the Senate to go along.

Meanwhile, in the congratulatory mood after the passage of the package, only a few Republicans were rude enough to point out that all $168 billion is being borrowed from a future generation.

• • •

Last WWI vet

Harry R. Landis, born in 1899, one of only two known surviving U.S. veterans of World War I, died this month in Florida. He was 108.

The Trib's take:

In November, it will have been 90 years since the guns fell silent and the Doughboys began coming home. Now, the final chapter of their exploits is drawing to a close.

The remaining U.S. veteran, Frank Buckles, lives in Charles Town, W. Va., and is 107. The last known German World War I veteran, Erich Kaestner, died New Year's Day at age 107.

There is sadness when the voices of an era die out; it means the living history of an era is disappearing. Soon, there will be no eyewitnesses to this historic event.

In 27 years, the 90th anniversary of the end of World War II will occur, and the ranks of those who served then will have dwindled to a few. And history will again become a little less rich.

• • •

Sneak attack

A paragraph buried deep within the massive federal budget President Bush sent to Congress calls for abolishing the Office of Government Information Services in the National Archives and transferring its functions to the Justice Department.

The Trib's take:

The authors of the Open Government Act of 2007 have pledged to block the move, and they should do it if for no other reason than to give the law a fair chance to show it works.

Congress passed the act in part because of the Bush administration's excessive secrecy, which the president reluctantly signed on the last day of the year. It didn't take him long to try to gut the act.

The law's mechanism for promoting open government is the Office of Government Information Services. It was to monitor federal agencies' compliance with the principal open-records law, the much-abused Freedom of Information Act, and act as an ombudsman by helping citizens appeal adverse FOIA rulings.

The Justice Department, by contrast, is hardly the most open and forthcoming of agencies. Why did Bush want to abolish the office? A good guess is that the Justice Department would be more politically responsive to the White House than the professional record keepers in the independent, nonpartisan National Archives.