Commentary

An editorial / By Dale McFeatters
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez suffered a humiliating and well-deserved defeat last week in the United Nations.

Chavez elbowed aside announced candidate Guatemala for the two-year Latin American seat on the U.N.

By DAVID A. MITTELL JR.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
PUSTOMYTY, Ukraine _ Tolstoy records that when Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862, word of it began to filter across the vast Russian Empire.

By BILL MAXWELL
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Once again, we should bring back the draft.

I was inspired to return to this subject because of the furor John Kerry created when, while addressing students in Los Angeles, he lamely joked about President Bush's incuriosity and intellectual deficits, saying, "Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well.

Editorial
Thursday, November 09, 2006
When the people of Panama voted last month to spend $5.3 billion upgrading their 94-year-old canal, they did so for their own benefit. But the widening of the canal to accommodate today's bigger containerized-cargo ships should also greatly benefit Americans up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

An expanded Panama Canal is expected to reduce the price of imported goods in our region by slashing shipping costs.

By JOHN M. CRISP
Thursday, November 09, 2006
One might think that interest in the heritage of the Old South would have a natural half-life and that, as the events of 1861-1865 recede into the past, so would our infatuation with the symbols of that conflict.

But as recently as last month the mayor of Franklin, Tenn., endured considerable criticism for urging participants in the commemoration of the 142nd anniversary of the Battle of Franklin to display the Second Confederate National Flag rather than the more well known and symbolically volatile Confederate Battle Flag.

By Thomas P. M. Barnett
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Whatever your political affiliation, you should be pulling for the Democrats' return to majority power in both houses of Congress. I offer no partisan plea _ I'm just convinced that a split government would be better for President Bush, our troops overseas and the world.

By MARC H. MORIAL
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
What happens behind bars in U.S. jails and prisons doesn't stay there. It trickles out into the community. Every year, 13.5 million people _ a disproportionate number of them African-American _ pass through our nation's prisons and jails, with a vast majority _ 95 percent _ eventually re-entering society.

Some leave their periods of incarceration as hardened criminals eager to return to a life of crime.

By MARSHA MERCER
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
He apologized, and the White House accepted it. Maybe some troops did too.

But many people will not soon forget John Kerry's knock on the troops who serve in Iraq or his nod to class distinctions.

By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Whatever your political affiliation, you should be pulling for the Democrats' return to majority power in both houses of Congress. I offer no partisan plea.

An editorial / By Dale McFeatters
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Solemn reports predicting an imminent shortage of some human essential _ oil, firewood, farmland, etc. _ come often enough to seem a naturally recurring phenomenon.

But even though its gloomy prediction is in some dispute, a new report saying that, at current rates of overfishing and pollution, the world will run out of seafood in 2048 bears serious consideration.

For a start, the report has a serious pedigree; a four-year study funded by the National Science Foundation and published in the journal Science of all the currently available catch data by a team of ecologists and economists.

The lead author of the report, Boris Work of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, told the AP, "At this point 29 percent of fish and seafood species have collapsed _ that is, their catch has declined by 90 percent.