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Opinion: In today’s pages: solar power, Obama’s budget and Gitmo

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The opinion factory does some heavy lifting today. First the editorial board explains why it opposes Measure B, the solar power charter amendment. The board supports the city’s goals regarding solar energy but says they can be achieved without this measure. Furthermore,the board really doesn’t like the power grab by the City Council and union for Department of Water and Power workers that goes along with Measure B.

Next, the board separates the wheat from the chaff in President Obama’s address to Congress. The president did a good job linking the housing crisisand the credit crunch to the larger, ailing economy and explaining why tax cuts and spending are necessary to stimulate it again. The problem is Obama didn’t say exactly how his plan would fix things.

Across the way in Op-Ed, Columnist Rosa Brooks writes how a tongue-in-cheek article written 30 years ago by her mother on how to make a nuclear bomb (partially fill a bucket with uranium hexafluoride and swing it over the heads for 45 minutes) was used as “evidence” against Binyam Mohamed, the man who was released from Guantanmo to Britain after nearly seven years of detention. The Bush administration agreed to release him onlyon the condition that details of his interrogation remain classified, and Brooks says this is why:

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“My guess is that records of Mohamed’s interrogation would show…the inability of many of our ace intelligence experts to tell the difference between threats posed by serious terrorist masterminds and the threat posed by a hapless young man who once read a satirical article about how to make nuclear weapons.”

On that note, Jameel Jaffer, director of National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, calls for Obama to make public the documents and memos written by the Bush Administration’s Office of Legal Counsel. Those documents, for example, gave a legal foundation to justify the National Secruity Agency’s warrantless-wiretapping program. Doing so would signal the end of an era, he writes, in which the “Justice Department became shamefully complicit in the most egregious crimes.”

Lastly, Patt Morrison writes that the wild west hasn’t been tamed, it has just moved onto the Internet.

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