03/19/2010

Niall Ferguson: America, the fragile empire
What if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic — at times almost stationary but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?

Point Person: Our Q&A with Joel Kotkin
Many urban planners warn that if we don't start preparing now, American life in 2050 will be one huge mess. Joel Kotkin offers a far more optimistic vision in his new book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.

Adam Liptak: The right brew for constitutional conversations
Brash and young though it is, the Tea Party movement has already added something distinctive to contemporary political discourse. It has made the Constitution central to the national conversation.

Sophia Dembling: We all have a role in creating an uncivil society
I consider myself a civil human being. I say please and thank you. In department stores, I always rehang clothes, and in airplane bathrooms I use my paper towel to wipe the washbasin as a courtesy to the next passenger. But I lose it on the road.

Ken Zornes: A prep-school strategy for failing middle schoolers
Texas legislative leaders recognize the need to focus on ways to better prepare our middle school students for high school. One possible solution is prep schools – eighth-grade campuses – for students who need extra tutoring before high school.

David Firestein: U.S., China must join forces on cyber-security
Cyber-security remains a major blind spot in U.S.-China relations. Why? A major deficit of trust exists between the two, including on cyber matters, but that doesn't prevent the two from engaging on other contentious issues, from Tibet to human rights.

Leonard Pitts: The Gospel according to Glenn Beck
Ultimately, I suppose, what we're talking about is a clash between the sweet by and by and the fierce urgency of now. Into the tension between these two disparate views of Christian mission stumbles one Glenn Beck, the Fox News showman.

Betsy Simnacher: Guilt. It's what's for dinner.
You can't win with guilt. I felt it for putting my career on hold while the family survived, in essence, on one income. I felt it for working, too. There's enough guilt in the world without adding family dinners to the mix.

Kristy Gudmundsson: You can be anything but not everything
All my life I've been told that I have the freedom to achieve anything, to achieve everything. But with boundless possibilities come a sense of obligation. "You can do it all" has become "You must do it all." And most of this pressure is self-imposed.

Tracy Begland: Music education hits all the right notes
What if a class could teach your child self-discipline, time management and self-reliance? Raise his SAT score and boost his math proficiency? Place him among those with the lowest use of alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs? There is. It's called music.

Marvin Jones: Where have all our jobs gone?
We take for granted that the U.S. economy will always create jobs for any American or immigrant. That is a huge assumption. My greatest fear is the recent economic meltdown has shed us of jobs that won't be coming back.

03/18/2010

Margaret Spellings: School accountability down the rabbit hole
In the same month that Tim Burton released his 3D version of Alice in Wonderland, the Obama administration released its blueprint for rewriting No Child Left Behind, taking us to an imaginary place where what made sense before no longer does.

Tamar Jacoby: New heartland voices on immigration
Let's not forget, to pass immigration reform, we also need Republican lawmakers. And those on the Mall aren't the only voices calling for reform; theirs aren't the only reasons why it's essential for America.

Balance of Opinion: Health care's political price
While the Congressional Budget Office has been busy this week calculating the cost of health care legislation, the punditry has been going about the task of toting up the political costs.

03/16/2010

Carl Leubsdorf: Myths and misrepresentations about ObamaCare
President Barack Obama's top strategists have belatedly challenged the Republican argument that Congress should kill his health care reform plan because the American people have rejected it. That's one myth. Here are some others.

03/17/2010

Michael Seringhaus: Keep every American's DNA profile on file
The president was correct in saying that we need a more robust DNA database, available to law enforcement in every state. But critics have a point that genetic police work, like the sampling of arrestees, is fraught with bias. Here's the solution.

Clarence Page: Expanding the DNA database is a bad idea
As if Barack Obama didn't have enough on his platter, he's calling for people accused of crimes to have their DNA samples collected and stored in a national database, whether they're convicted or not. He's a brave man to open that can of worms.

Thomas Friedman: Beyond U.S.-Israel spat is a strategy
Fayyadism, which aims to replace the Israeli occupation of the West Bank with an independent Palestinian state, is the biggest threat to Iran's strategy. So the smart thing right now would be for the other three parties to have a clear strategy to back Fayyadism.

03/16/2010

Mark Davis: Let me referee the textbook fight. No, really
Well, maybe some books needed rewriting to wrestle them from previous biases. Everything truly is relative: If the textbooks are shifting right, is that a departure from accuracy or a move toward it?

O'Hanlon and Sherjan: 5 myths about the war in Afghanistan
If we want to develop realistic expectations about the war in Afghanistan — how it might unfold from here and when it could begin to wind down — it would help to dispel some of the popular mythologies that have emerged.

Kathleen Parker: Afghan women's courage pays off
If your impression of an Afghan woman is of a shapeless, frightened form engulfed in yards of heat-trapping fabric, you haven't met Shafiqa Quraishi. Make that Col. Quraishi, one of 900-plus female members of the Afghan National Police.

Eugene Robinson: Katrina's toxic legacy lives on
The federal government is selling housing units that it knows are unsafe. No warning sticker can absolve the government, the wholesalers and the eventual retailers of these trailers and mobile homes of their moral responsibility

03/15/2010

Gerald Britt: A growth opportunity awaits Eric Johnson
Eric Johnson's ability to garner support from the broader business community was viewed with suspicion, and his lack of "grassroots" leadership experience and, disturbingly, his Ivy League education were seen almost as liabilities.

William McKenzie: Right-wingers work without a theological net
There's a difference between learning about religion's role in our nation and pressing students to think of America as having Christian roots – and hoping young people will re-create that nation. That appears the intent of board members like Cynthia Dunbar.

Trudy Rubin: Iraq's future depends on refugees' return
One move the next prime minister could make that would signal a desire to reunify Iraq: speeding the return of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who fled the violence, of whom about 60 percent are Sunnis and 15 percent are Christians.