02/09/2012

Ruben Navarrette: U.S. should pay more attention to Mexico
SAN DIEGO — Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said recently that her biggest regret from her time in the George W. Bush administration is that she didn’t focus more on our backyard.

Ruth Marcus: Santorum makes choice
WASHINGTON — The stories about Rick Santorum — to be precise, the stories about Rick Santorum’s 3-year-old daughter — tiptoe around the issue with all deliberate delicacy:

02/08/2012

Charles Krauthammer: Syria not just about freedom
WASHINGTON — Imperial regimes can crack when they are driven out of their major foreign outposts. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not just signal the liberation of Eastern Europe from Moscow. It prefigured the collapse of the Soviet Union itself just two years later.

Froma Harrop: Komen affair sets off alarm
The blowup at Susan G. Komen for the Cure set off a political alarm that Republicans dare not ignore. The leading breast cancer group, Komen tried playing Republican-base politics by cutting its funding to Planned Parenthood for breast-health services. The sisterhood and its allies exploded, and Komen reversed course with abject apologies.

02/07/2012

George Will: Trio tries to counter loss of dads’ love
LOS ANGELES — The worst day of Sugar Bear’s 55 years was one of the days — there have been many of them — when he got out of prison. In the early 1990s, in a prison where persons whose sentences have ended and are being released, and who see those whose sentences are just beginning, he saw one of his sons coming in.

02/06/2012

David Brooks: Rebels need label to be effective
A few weeks ago, a 22-year-old man named Jefferson Bethke produced a video called Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus. The video shows Bethke standing in a courtyard rhyming about the purity of the teachings of Jesus and the hypocrisy of the church. Jesus preaches healing, surrender and love, he argues, but religion is rigid, phony and stale.

Other Voices

02/04/2012

Donna Fielder: Nan Nan’s hands offer measure of guidance
I measured that cabinet door a dozen times. You’ve heard the old saw: “Measure twice; cut once.” Well, I measured and measured and then I measured again.

Gail Collins: Romney opens mouth
On the morning after the Florida primary, Mitt Romney bounded out of bed, inhaled the sweet air of victory, donned his new cloak of invulnerability ... and went on CNN to announce that he doesn’t care about poor people.

02/03/2012

Jonah Goldberg: Wild claims of racism get liberals in an uproar
Jesse Jackson is right. In response to the face-off in Arizona between President Obama and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer recently, Jackson said, “Even George Wallace did not put his finger in Dr. King’s face.” And it’s true; he didn’t. Similarly, not even Josef Stalin wrote two autobiographies the way Obama has.

Katherine Schlaerth: File sharing may backfire
It sounds like a great idea when you first hear it: Medicare is making its claims files available to insurers, employers and consumer groups so they can prepare report cards on individual doctors.

Kathleen Parker: Romney’s perfection his main problem
WASHINGTON — When a friend was writing a novel, he was concerned that his protagonist was too perfect. People can’t identify with perfection, he said. For the character to be sympathetic, he needs to have a flaw. He needs an injury or a wound of some sort so that people can identify with and care about him.

Leonard Pitts: Now high noon in America
A picture, the saying goes, is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, we have only about 550 with which to appraise a picture that has raised eyebrows across the country: In it, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is seen wagging her finger in President Obama’s face during his visit to her state recently.

02/02/2012

Thomas L. Friedman: U.S. needs national strategy
The Associated Press reported recently that Fidel Castro, the former president of Cuba, wrote an opinion piece on a Cuban website, following a Republican Party presidential candidates’ debate in Florida, in which he argued that the “selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”

Herb B. Berkowitz: Holly’s music lives on
The Jan. 20 death of 72-year-old rhythm-and-blues legend Etta James, just three days after the death of her mentor, bandleader Johnny Otis, is a sad reminder that the early pioneers of rock ’n’ roll are a dying breed.

02/01/2012

Thomas Sowell: High-speed rail getting nowhere, very fast
California has a huge state debt and Washington has a huge national debt. But that does not discourage either Gov. Jerry Brown or President Barack Obama from wanting to launch a very costly high-speed rail system.

Maureen Dowd: Tarmac tiffs aid Obama
MIAMI — What is it with Barack Obama’s penchant for getting in tangles with blond politicians on airport tarmacs?

01/31/2012

Joe Nocera: Et tu, Harvard?
If the worst thing that ever happens to Temi Fagbenle is that she gets to play college basketball for only three seasons instead of four, she’ll have lived a blessed life. No question, the wrong being perpetrated on this 6-foot-4 Harvard freshman pales compared with some of the injustices in college sports that I’ve been recounting lately.

E.I. Dionne: Time to find compromise
WASHINGTON — One of Barack Obama’s great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health care law.

01/30/2012

Ross Douthat: Government and its rivals
When liberals are in a philosophical mood, they like to cast debates over the role of government not as a clash between the individual and the state, but as a conflict between the individual and the community.

Caitlin Flanagan: Hysteria’s causes still around
LOS ANGELES — Cheerleaders with Tourette’s syndrome. Like a fly buzzing against the window, this weird arrangement of words flitted across the edge of my consciousness last week.

01/28/2012

Donna Fielder: Beauty pageant mishaps magnified
Not many cities can claim a Miss America, says my first managing editor Keith Shelton in a Page 1A story today. He thinks Denton may be the only city in the U.S. that can claim two.

Tom Spencer: We need to go back to paying our own way
Everybody wants to be happy;/Nobody wants to cry./Everybody wants to go to heaven,/But nobody wants to die. If anything describes the state of transportation funding in Texas and really the nation, that little ditty sure does the job.

Henry M. Levin and Cecilia E. Rouse: The true cost of dropouts
Only 21 states require students to attend high school until they graduate or turn 18. The proposal President Obama announced on Tuesday night in his State of the Union address — to make such attendance compulsory in every state — is a step in the right direction, but it would not go far enough to reduce a dropout rate that imposes a heavy cost on the entire economy, not just on those who fail to obtain a diploma.

Daniel Akst: Industry tends to medicalize normal life
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a mental health professional, evidently, an awful lot looks like mental illness. The latest scary story on this front came to us last week from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which finds that each year 20 percent of American adults suffer some form of mental illness. If it’s any consolation, things are even worse in Europe, where a similar survey, published in September, found 38 percent of the entire population suffering each year from mental or brain disorders.

01/27/2012

Nicholas D. Kristof: Down the Web’s dark alleyways
In November, a terrified 13-year-old girl pounded on an apartment door in Brooklyn. When a surprised woman answered, the girl pleaded for a phone. She called her mother and then dialed 911.

01/26/2012

Ruth Marcus: Arizona could go purple
PHOENIX — Presidential travel, especially in an election year, offers an insight into the favored electoral road map. So it is no surprise that President Obama’s post-State of the Union schedule includes traditional battleground states:

James A. Wilcox: Catalyst needed to spur sales of homes
BERKELEY, Calif. — Many potential homebuyers who can afford to buy are instead waiting, worried that home prices will continue to decline.

01/25/2012

David Brooks: Social forces have bearing on economy
I hope President Barack Obama read about Maddie Parlier as he was working on his State of the Union address. Parlier is the subject of Adam Davidson’s illuminating article in the current issue of The Atlantic.

Guest Column / William Stewart
A recent article in the Denton Record-Chronicle reported on an offer, put out for proposals by Denton Municipal Electric, to purchase electricity from an as-yet-unbuilt solar electric generation facility. I would suggest that before approving any such contract, the City Council carefully assess this project with the following considerations:

01/24/2012

Jonah Goldberg: President’s priorities not what he says they are
“In the Treasury we do not speak of tons of silver. Our unit is the troy ounce.” That was the response from some bureaucrat when Leslie Groves, the man who oversaw the Manhattan Project, sought thousands of tons of silver to be turned into electrical wires.

Esther J. Cepeda: Obesity still crisis in U.S.
CHICAGO — Friends, don’t believe the hype. Despite well-intentioned headlines proclaiming that the obesity crisis has finally leveled off, we can’t yet say “mission accomplished.”

01/23/2012

Charles Krauthammer: Republicans coming to Obama’s aid
WASHINGTON — It’s the campaign line of the year, and while the author won’t be carrying it into the general election, the eventual nominee will. The charge is straightforward: President Obama’s reckless spending has dangerously increased the national debt while leaving unemployment high and the economy stagnant.

Mary Sanchez: Time to cut the buttah
Don’t expect Paula Deen to go cold turkey on the hoecakes. If she did, she wouldn’t be Paula Deen. And her ardent fans — people who stand to learn from her newfound health challenges — would disengage.

01/21/2012

Kathleen Parker: Mrs. Obama undergoes cruel gaze of inspection
WASHINGTON — My recent column about Michelle Obama, which I wrote to counter the negative responses to Jodi Kantor’s new book, The Obamas, apparently has been misinterpreted by some. I did not intend to indict Kantor, who, in fact, wrote a mostly complimentary portrait of the first couple.

Maureen Dowd: ‘Real Romney’ revealed
CHARLESTON, S.C. — What a choice we’ll have in the fall: one man on a pedestal, another behind a wall. Democrats and independents may have fallen out of love with President Barack Obama, but Republicans and independents can’t fall in love with Mitt Romney.

01/20/2012

Thomas Sowell: Disparity in  achievement the rule, not the exception
With all the talk about “disparities” in innumerable contexts, there is one very important disparity that gets remarkably little attention — disparities in the ability to create wealth. People who are preoccupied, or even obsessed, with disparities in income are seldom interested much, or at all, in the disparities in the ability to create wealth, which are often the reasons for the disparities in income.

Other voices: Change not easy
Hoarding may be taking on a whole new aspect as the phase-out of 100-watt incandescent light bulbs begins. As of Jan. 1, manufacturers had to stop selling the “old-fashioned” 100-watt incandescent bulbs in the United States.

01/14/2012

Donna Fielder: Twins by any other name still handful
I called each of the twins one morning last week. Each of them answered with that “I know what’s coming now and I just have to endure it” tone of voice. “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. You are now older than your mommieeeeee, and I’m better looking too.”

Adam Briggle: Uneasy alliance forms
The city of Denton’s Gas Well Task Force met recently to debate the issue of air quality as it guides the formation of a new municipal drilling and production ordinance.

Kathleen Parker: Candidates continue to offer up baloney
WASHINGTON — One thing we’ve learned since the Republican primary season began: There’s an awful lot of pious baloney out there. The vast majority of it is on the plate of the man who coined the phrase — Newt Gingrich. Not that he’s dining alone.

Nicholas D. Kristof: Put education into debate
Suppose your child is about to enter the fourth grade and has been assigned to an excellent teacher. Then the teacher decides to quit. What should you do? The correct answer? Panic!

01/12/2012

George Will: Team that won without playing still speaking out
CHARLESTON, S.C. — They are nearing 70 now, the 11 men who were 12-year-old boys in 1955 and who are remembered for the baseball games they could not play. They were — actually, with their matching blue blazers and striped ties, they still are — members of the Cannon Street All Stars.

Leonard Pitts: ‘Boo!’ to Rick Santorum
We gather here today to parse the meaning of “boo.” Not “boo” as in the greeting of ghosts and goblins but, rather, “boo” as in the chorus that drowned the bigot Rick Santorum recently after he defended his opposition to gay marriage before an audience of college students in Concord, N.H.

01/11/2012

Thomas Sowell: Post office should face free-market competition
The news that Eastman Kodak is preparing to file for bankruptcy, after being the leading photographic company in the world for more than a hundred years, truly marks the end of an era.

Froma Harrop: GOP’s motives suspect
Let’s set aside the back-and-forth over the recess appointment of Richard Cordray as chief watchdog at the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. President Obama named the former Ohio attorney general to lead the agency when the Senate was supposedly out of session, which he’s allowed to do.

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