The Houston Chronicle

"One in seven families is dealing with a debt collector," Ray Boshara and Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation think tank wrote in a Washington Post commentary. "Children today are more likely to live through their parents' bankruptcy than their parents' divorce," they wrote. And that likelihood will increase this year. ...

WASHINGTON - President Bush has called Iraq a crucial battleground in a decades-long struggle against Islamic terrorism...For Bush, the lesson of history seems to be that patience is a virtue - patience for a long war against radical Islamist terrorism and patience for the war in Iraq.The president has been urging patience since the earliest phase of the war on terrorism."We are planning a broad and sustained campaign to secure our country and eradicate… more

Since the start of the millennium, Houston and other cities have been pumping millions of dollars into revitalizing their downtowns.

The urbanists fueling much of this effort say folks will move into city centers as long as there are urban amenities to support them.

Joel Kotkin thinks that's a lot of hype.

Kotkin, a lecturer and writer on economic, political and social trends, believes the suburbs are where the action is and that a healthy urban core is only a small fraction of… more

In the 1960s, the civil-rights movement owed much of its momentum and power to a moral authority derived from historical circumstances. Most fair-minded Americans accepted the idea that blacks' historical experience of discrimination justified legal and social redress.

By contrast, the addition of women, Latinos and Asians to the civil rights movement was more politics than morality. One consequence is that race lost its… more