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Houston is at a turning point. With a boost from noted urbanist Joel Kotkin, our city has begun recasting its national reputation from "that ugly, sprawling, weird city without zoning" to the exemplar city for "Opportunity Urbanism," a compelling new paradigm for cities in the 21st century. This paradigm asserts that the fundamental (but recently forgotten) core mission of cities is to accelerate the upward social and economic mobility of its inhabitants. This may sound obvious to the average person, but in the wonkish world of urban policy and planning, the themes of the past decade have been environmentalism (smart...

Mayor Dave's trolley plan is an extremely weak idea. The trolley will make only a tiny difference in overall transit ridership, but cost tens of millions of dollars to build and operate. The feds won't help. Far less costly alternatives exist that can exceed the trolley's ridership, but these are being ignored by the politically stacked committee reviewing the issue. Building the trolley would also drain the bus company budget, hurting Metro bus riders over time. In almost every case, you can increase transit usage far more, per dollar of expenditure, with bus than with rail. Most trolley riders would...

Report just issues, mapes finally fired

REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW PANEL DICK THORNBURGH AND LOUIS D. BOCCARDI ON THE SEPTEMBER 8, 2004 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY SEGMENT “FOR THE RECORD” CONCERNING PRESIDENT BUSH’S TEXAS AIR NATIONAL GUARD SERVICE JANUARY 5, 2005 KIRKPATRICK & LOCKHART NICHOLSON GRAHAM LLP Michael J. Missal, Esq. Lawrence Coe Lanpher, Esq. 1800 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 (202) 778-9000 Counsel to the Independent Review Panel i TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................................1 II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ...............................................................................................4 A. 60 Minutes Wednesday Background..............................................................................6 B. The Pursuit of a Story on President Bush’s TexANG Service ......................................7 C. Obtaining Documents ....................................................................................................8 D. The Production of...

By Jim Emerson Editor, RogerEbert.com October 14, 2004Who's the, uh, biggest villain in "Team America"? Kim Jong Il or Hollywood celebrities?"You should learn to keep your opinions OUT of your reviews!" Every critic I know has received at least one letter like that from an indignant reader. Of course, it's an absurd proposition; critics are paid to express their opinions, and the good ones (who exercise what is known across all disciplines as "critical thinking") are also able to cite examples and employ sound reasoning to build an argument, showing you how and why they reached their verdict. Well, since...

"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling seacoasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties, without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in...

Well, over that last few years, I have pretty much started downloading all of my music off of P2P sites, because so many artist are such left wing whack jobs, that I refuse to support them financially but I still want to listen to their music. The one last and final holdout whom I would always go and buy the CD was Eminem, because, and I believe this 100 percent, there is not another lyricst on the face of God's green Earth who can match his skills on the microphone. Nobody who has ever laid words over a beat can...

<p>WITH THE HUGE amounts of money appropriated by Congress and additional billions pledged by international donors to address the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is now evident that if an issue has priority, money can be located. Without question, Iraq and Afghanistan must be rebuilt, but other pressing human needs cannot be forgotten. As World Bank President James Wolfensohn recently emphasized, the world devoted about $800 billion to military expenditures in 2002, compared with $56 billion in development assistance. To put it another way, UNICEF's annual budget is being spent on military purposes every 15 hours, even as 1.3 billion people, half of them children, live on less than $1 per day, in almost unimaginable conditions of deprivation.</p>