10/10/2008

Dexter Filkins: Pakistan's long road to chaos
It's all the greater a paradox, then, that the Taliban militias now threatening the stability of Pakistan owe their survival – and much of their present strength – to a succession of Pakistani governments that continues to the present day.

Roger Cohen: The most dangerous job on earth
Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's new president, is very smart, a wheeler-dealer in an area full of them, secular, pro-American, committed to democracy, determined and brave. I never heard Pervez Musharraf frame Pakistan's fight against terrorism with such candor.

John Renehan: I am not having a crisis
When I joined the military, I was prepared for a certain range of responses in New York, from puzzlement to backslapping support to outrage. What I wasn't prepared for was the quality – not simply surprise or distress, but something deeper and more permanent.

Matthew Quirk: Is wind the new ethanol?
These are boom times for wind power -- zero emissions, endless supply -- but it's hard to ignore the parallels to the recent ethanol boom, which was also fueled by mandates and subsidies and is now viewed almost universally as a disaster.

Tod Robberson: Never an excuse not to vote
We take our right to vote for granted because most Americans have never considered what life would be like without it. But to witness democracy's birth pangs in other parts of the world is to understand how precious it truly is.

Rod Dreher: The positive act of not voting
We all want change, but John McCain is not credible on that front, and Barack Obama only offers a fresh new gloss on tired, old Democratic boilerplate. When neither candidate is tolerable, what does the responsible voter do? Withhold his vote in civic protest.

Gregory Rodriguez: Asking the right god question
Atheists make up only about 4 percent of the U.S. population, or about 5 million adults. But thanks to a slew of best-selling books and Bill Maher's new film, Religulous, atheism has never had a higher profile in this country.

Robin Marantz Henig: Rethinking the war on obesity
A core argument of fat acceptance is that it's possible to be healthy no matter how fat you are, that weight loss as a goal is futile, unnecessary and counterproductive – and that fatness is nobody's business but your own.

10/03/2008

Witold Rybczynski: Why can’t we build an affordable house?
The term “affordable housing” has come to be associated with social programs and government subsidies, but it once meant commercially built houses that ordinary working people could afford. A pioneer of affordability was the builder of the famed "Levittowns."

Rod Dreher: The speech John McCain should give
John McCain has gifts that Barack Obama does not, convictions and leadership traits that the country could very soon need more desperately than policy expertise. Mr. McCain should risk that Americans don't want to be mollycoddled and manipulated this time.

Gustavo Arellano: My dad, the illegal immigrant
Although millions of Americans might consider Dad a repeat violator of national sovereignty, I see in his borderland adventures the pluck of the Pilgrims, the resolve of a homesteader, the type of pioneer ethos that has fueled this country for so long.

William McKenzie: Why firing Hinojosa is a bad call
The quick-'n'-easy choice for Dallas school trustees is clear: Fire Michael Hinojosa. It's also the wrong choice. Trustees should do the harder thing, show substantial courage, defy public anger and keep him. Here's why.

Tod Robberson: Dallas must rethink affordable housing
I spent my early childhood in the Denver equivalent of a Levittown "affordable home." Thousands of young families in Dallas are looking for the same home-ownership opportunity my parents had, but the housing market is an entirely different beast today.

Irwin M. Stelzer: An immigration fix for the Sam's Club set
Employers can be prevented from fobbing off the costs of their hiring practices onto others by laws forcing them to internalize these costs, just as we force polluters to pay for permits that reimburse society for the costs their manufacturing activity creates.

Bill Bishop: Three reasons Congress imploded
When House leaders looked around for a consensus to confront what they were convinced was a national emergency, consensus had left the room. The partisan collapse was a product of at least three changes that have been taking place quietly for 30 years.

Dahlia Lithwick: How would Clarence Thomas see Sarah Palin?
Like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Sarah Palin has been blasted for inexperience and has fought back with claims that she is not being judged on her merits but on her gender, just as he felt he was inevitably judged on his race.

Point of Contact: Pollster John Zogby
Our Q&A with John Zogby, president and CEO of the Zogby International polling firm and author of the new book, "The Way We'll Be." He spoke in Dallas last week at an event co-sponsored by Southern Methodist University and the World Affairs Council of Dallas-Fort Worth.

Talking Points
Some of the week's most interesting comments, from the French prime minister and a Ford sales analyst to a custom-built Western furniture salesman.

09/28/2008

David Leonhardt: Bubblenomics
There is something familiar about what is happening. For as long as markets have existed, bubbles have formed. And whenever one of those bubbles begins to leak, it typically needs years to deflate, causing enormous economic damage as it does.

Rod Dreher: And it was written, our blame
Novelist David Foster Wallace once said his generation had been morally "gutted" by a pseudo-sophistication that sneered at boring everyday truths, that the sort of truisms that supposedly only children and suckers believe is actually, you know, valid.

Steve Bartlett: Former mayor on Wall Street mess
Our Q&A with Steve Bartlett, former Dallas mayor and congressman who now heads the Financial Services Roundtable. With members like Bank of America, Citigroup and Allstate, his organization has been in the middle of the debate over Congress' bailout plan.

Mark Davis: Three campaign lessons so far
We all have breathless questions about how the next five weeks will unfold. But with the vast majority of the 2008 presidential campaign behind us, the ink is drying on three lasting lessons no matter who wins.

Randall Kennedy: How will blacks react if Obama loses?
Political gravity would seem to favor the Democratic candidate, but the possibility is very real: Barack Obama could lose. Then what? How will I feel? How will other black Americans feel? How should people like me feel? Much depends on what might underlie that defeat.

Shawn Williams: Securing the Cotton Bowl's future
The Cotton Bowl's greatness, as always, rests squarely on the shoulders of the young men who play in the Texas-OU and Grambling-Prairie View games. The time is now to lay the groundwork for the future and attract more college football to Fair Park during the State Fair.

Meisel and Pines: Why people go to the ER when they shouldn’t
The problem is that this story of the healthy, cavalier, uninsured ER abuser is largely a myth. ER use by the uninsured is not wrecking health care. In fact, the uninsured don’t even use the ER any more often than those with insurance do.

Point of Contact: Haleh Esfandiari
Our Q&A with Haleh Esfandiari, Middle East program director at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, who was arrested in May 2007 during an academic trip to Tehran.

Talking Points
Some of the week's most interesting comments, from an asset manager to a financial mogul to a "competent" mayor.

09/26/2008

Steve Bartlett: Former Dallas mayor talks bailout
Steve Bartlett, who once served Dallas as mayor and a GOP congressman, now heads the Financial Services Roundtable. With members like Bank of America, Citigroup and Allstate, his organization has been in the middle of the debate over Congress' bailout plan for financial institutions. He spoke Thursday with Dallas Morning News editorial writers Jim Mitchell and Bill McKenzie.

09/21/2008

Stanley Fish: I am, therefore I pollute
Time for a confession: I resist and resent the demands made on me by environmental imperatives. I don't want to save the planet. I just want to inhabit it as comfortably as possible for as long as I have.

Jeanne Haegele: How I gave up plastic
Would it be possible to live without plastic? It seemed unlikely, but I decided to go for it. Looking back now at those first few months, I understand why people feel green fatigue. I had to throw out so many of my old routines and rethink fundamental aspects of my life.

Jonah Lehrer: Be more productive - daydream
In a culture obsessed with efficiency, daydreaming is derided as a lazy habit or a lack of discipline, a sign of procrastination, not productivity. But in recent years, scientists have begun to see daydreaming very differently, as a fundamental feature of the human mind.

Rod Dreher: The Beehive buzzes for Sarah Palin
If you want to understand why Sarah Palin has made such a powerful connection with American voters, don't listen to the political professionals. Listen to the voice of the Beehive.

Trey Garrison: The politics of fear
No one should be surprised that politicians have little to sell but fear itself. Crime, global warming, drugs, terrorism – a mere mention is all that's needed to close the deal. But if the rest of us are so smart, why do we keep buying it?

David Broder: Count on economy to bring election back into focus
A calamity has occurred in the financial world. The nonsense about Sarah Palin's family dynamics and other matters, down to and including lipstick on pigs, has been banished by the mayhem on Wall Street as ruthlessly as the Gary Condit story was erased seven years ago.

Veronica Miller: It's not just campaigns getting nasty. It's you
I can't wait for Nov. 4, and not just because I'll finally cast my first presidential ballot. I'm hoping - hard - that on Election Day, all the ugliness we've seen this past year and a half will finally begin to fade.

Point of Contact: UTA's Kaushik De, on the Large Hadron Collider
Our Q&A with Kaushik De, a University of Texas at Arlington physicist who works on the Large Hadron Collider that recently debuted in Geneva, Switzerland.

Talking Points
Some of the week's most interesting comments, from a Wall Street broker to a hacker to a cabinet secretary prepared to kick some butt.

09/14/2008

Andrew Cherlin: Meet the new American family
If the candidates wished to convince viewers that their families were just like ours, they were undone by a 21st-century reality: There is no typical family anymore. This was the unspoken lesson of the national political conventions, as four strikingly different kinds of families came into view.

Leonard Pitts: African-Americans, sometimes we are guilty
If Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick were white, don't you think he'd have been thrown out of office a long time ago? Heck, he'd be out of jail by now and shopping his memoirs. Racial victimization? Jim Crow justice? Give me a break.

Rod Dreher: Bobby Jindal in the eye of the storm
Had the national media bothered to stick around after Hurricane Gustav spared New Orleans, they could have told the rest of us this Louisiana governor, unlike his predecessor, was aggressively competent in dealing with a a disastrous storm.

Carol Steiker: No mercy at the court
How did we scale the soaring peaks of mass incarceration? Reformers at every stage of the justice system have sought to limit the power of discretionary actors to say no to punitive policies.

Point of Contact: DISD trustee Edwin Flores
Our Q&A with Edwin Flores, a member of the Dallas school district ethics committee working to revise a policy to address potential conflicts of interest when trustees have links to companies doing business with DISD.

Talking Points
Some of the week's most interesting comments, from a weather service to a teachers' union boss to a jilted husband.

09/07/2008

Dusty Horwitt: If everyone's talking, who will listen?
The information avalanche coming from all sides – the Internet, PDAs, hundreds of television channels – is burying us in extraneous data that prevent important facts and knowledge from reaching a broad audience. The implications for democracy are troubling.

Sarah Kershaw: Now, just pay for the news you want
The Spot Us idea of "community-funded journalism" is to solicit ideas for investigative articles and the money to pay for the reporting. Should this also raise concerns of journalism being bought by the highest bidder?

Francis Fukuyama: Is this the age of the autocrat?
U.S. dominance of the world system is slipping; Russia and China offer themselves as models, showing off a combination of authoritarianism and modernization that offers a clear challenge to liberal democracy. They seem to have plenty of imitators.

Rod Dreher: Palin's a fighter - and worth fighting for
Does the Angry Left really want to launch a culture war over Sarah Palin? Fine. Lock and load. If conservatives were indifferent or hostile to the Republican ticket, the cultural elite's savage treatment of Ms. Palin reminds them what's really in play this year.

Bob Herbert: Sarah Palin is just the latest GOP distraction
She's meant to shift attention away from the real issue – the awful state of the nation after eight years of Republican rule. The Republicans are brilliant at distractions. Willie Horton. The chatter about gays, guns and God. The Swift-boat campaign.

Stephanie Saul: Addicted to tobacco taxes
Smoking isn't good for you, but through taxation and legal settlements, government has become a financial stakeholder in you doing it, even as public health officials warn people about its deadly consequences.

Dalton Conley: Rich man's burden
Today, it's rich who are the most stressed and the most likely to work longer and harder. Perhaps for the first time since we've kept track of such things, higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do.

Point of Contact: Rob Schlein, Dallas County Log Cabin Republicans
Our Q&A with Rob Schlein, head of the Dallas County chapter of Log Cabin Republicans, an organization for gay and lesbian Republicans.

Talking Points
Some of the week's most interesting comments, from John McCain to Sarah Palin to a former senator from Texas.