World-Herald editorial: Appropriate hotel expansion?

Here are thoughts on a variety of topics in the news:

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Omahans will rightly debate whether Omaha city leaders — Mayor Jim Suttle and the City Council — have made a sound decision by voting to use a $35 million revenue bond to expand the city-owned Hilton Omaha. There’s no denying the element of risk over whether revenues will prove adequate in coming years to cover the debt payments.

At the same time, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that city leaders leaped at this decision. An outside bond counsel was brought in to analyze the costs, for example. Unlike the approach taken toward the Qwest Center debt, the approach for the hotel expansion won’t involve an abrupt spike in payments. Interest rates for such new debt are low right now. And three sets of reserve funds, totaling around $10 million, will be available as financial backups.

Any way you frame it, there’s still a degree of uncertainty.

Having a hotel of a robust size next to the Qwest Center is a concept that goes back to the very start of the facility, of course.

One positive aspect is that the hotel expansion will arrive just as Omaha hosts the 2012 U.S. Olympic Swim Trials. There seems to be a pattern here:

Omaha has had particularly good fortune these days to be able to show off to visitors some encouraging signs of civic ambition — Midtown Crossing, the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge, development in the north downtown, the ballpark construction, the Qwest Center itself. The hotel expansion will provide one more example.

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The WikiLeaks release of thousands of pages of documents about the war in Afghanistan contained no major surprises. In fact, a lot of the information was pretty old.

In terms of effects, the biggest result probably was the friction the release caused in U.S.-Pakistani relations, given that Pakistan’s leadership has long denied — far too hysterically — that its intelligence service coordinates with al-Qaida elements.

The Obama administration did a pretty good job of smoothing things out with Pakistan’s government last week when it became known that the release was imminent. And it appears that Pakistan’s intelligence chief is expected to have a constructive attitude when he soon visits Washington, D.C.

It would be a mistake to think that all of the “information” released in those thousands of documents was accurate. On the contrary, WikiLeaks tossed out raw intelligence data of widely varying credibility — and in some cases little or no credibility.

Indeed, one of the functions of a professional intelligence community is to wade through the mass of raw data and separate what is verifiable and credible from what is not. The collection of raw intelligence, after all, means scooping up not just significant data but also a jumble of trivia, hearsay, rumor and propaganda.

People are completely free to oppose the war in Afghanistan and to use information to argue against U.S. involvement, but one shouldn’t see WikiLeaks as an organization that seeks to provide information in a neutral fashion. Rather, WikiLeaks makes no secret of its opposition to U.S. and NATO military involvement in Afghanistan.

The release of the documents, then, wasn’t the act of an objective provider of information. It was an exercise in calculated political advocacy.

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An info-nugget from the Platte Institute notes:

“Since the recession began at the start of 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that government jobs in Nebraska have increased by 4.27 percent — rising from 163,700 to 170,700. Meanwhile, in the same time frame, private-sector jobs have decreased by 3.68 percent. Those jobs have shrunk from 802,200 to 772,600.”

Government serves important and respectable purposes, but we also need to keep public-sector numbers within appropriate bounds. And it’s private-sector jobs that generate the revenue on which government depends in the first place.

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Way back in 1840, presidential candidate William Henry Harrison reached the White House in part by portraying his opponent, Martin Van Buren, as a fancy-pants elitist, while Harrison was depicted as a man of the people raised in a humble log cabin.

“I have no champagne but can give you a mug of good cider,” read a pro-Harrison cartoon of the era.

Harrison was elected, becoming one of two Whig nominees who won a presidential contest in antebellum times.

Fast forward to 2010, where there was a bit of minor political jostling this week among potential Republican presidential hopefuls. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty tweaked wealthy Mitt Romney by hinting that Pawlenty was an aw-shucks regular joe. That triggered sniping from a third potential presidential aspirant, Rick Santorum, who complained that Pawlenty was stooping to “class warfare.”

Political season sure brings out the best in people, doesn’t it?

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