OPINION

If you've wondered whether DNA testing would really make a difference in the Hank Skinner case -- of if it's just a desperate plea to save the man's life -- you should really read this letter prepared by his lawyers. It explains in detail why DNA testing would provide new evidence that the jury never had a chance to consider.

This letter is written to Rick Perry in an effort to gain a 30-day reprieve. To me, the most compelling argument is this:

Read more and comment.

With all of the attention on "Jihad Jane" and Sharif Mobley, this seems as good a time as any to mention a new documentary film that already has won a major award and is slated for other film festivals this year, American Jihadist. This is the story, inspired by a Washington Post magazine story I wrote in 1990, of Isa Abdullah Ali, an American who grew up in Washington, D.C. and wound up fighting in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, Lebanon and elsewhere on behalf of some fairly radical Muslim groups. In 1984, he was approached by Hezbollah in Beirut and was told about questions I was asking about him while I was a journalist working there. On his orders, Hezbollah kidnapped me and took me for a little joy ride at the point of an AK-47.

The trailer for this film contains a very brief clip of an interview the producers did with me in London in 2006.

The bottom-line message of this film is that home-grown American Muslim converts have been available to radical groups for decades. And they're not going away anytime soon. As Gene Robinson points out on our Viewpoints page on Monday, that's why we won't be saying goodbye to pesky airport searches anytime soon.

Advocates of DART's aggressive rail expansion, which it calls the most ambitious in North America, argue the theory that development will cluster along rail lines because people want to live nearby, park their cars and commute by train. A core objective is to improve the air. Plus, supporters say, rail boosts property values and thereby helps economic vitality.

My observation, from my daily commutes on the Red Line, is that TOD has been painfully slow to develop near DART stations. And I doubt anyone has data indicating whether nearby residents are indeed DART users.

Now comes an article in San Francisco's Fog City Journal, and referenced on the online site New Geography, that takes aim at TOD theory. It maintains development along San Francisco rail lines may have helped developers but hasn't changed commuting habits in ways that help the environment.

Read the rest and comment on the Dallas Transportation blog ...

Is it my skeptical mind that makes me wonder about the timing of the financial accountability bill, which Sen. Chris Dodd says his Senate banking Committee will take up soon?.

As Dodd annouced his legislative timetable, an examiner reviewing the activities of now defunct Lehman Bros. delivered a 2,200 page report on the investment bank's sleight-of-hand accounting tricks that landed in history's trash pile.

Here's what I find really interesting:

"Unbeknownst to the investing public, rating agencies, government regulators, and Lehman's board of directors, Lehman reverse engineered the firm's net leverage ratio for public consumption," Mr. Valukas wrote.

I interpret this to mean that Lehman played with its ratios by moving around assets and liabilities to reach "acceptable" ratios. Kind learn this school - if you want to change ratios play around with the numerator and the denominator. In this case it means putting assets and liabilities in places where they won't count against you. It's also kinda like the game couples play at divorce time.

However, doesn't say whether Lehman violate securities law. If these transactions didn't amount to illegally parking securities, then this is really troubling and points to a major weakness in financial regulation.

Which brings me back to the financial accountability bill. I'm guessing it will not attempt to control what are essentially "shell transactions," which are usually involved in high profile financial crashes.

The Lehman report will give Dodd much to rail about, but I'll be surprised if the bill makes any real headway toward controlling Lehman-style trickery, which likely is rampant on Wall Street, but attracts attention after the bomb has exploded.

Former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines seems to think so. In a piece for The Washington Post's Outlook section this Sunday he attacks Roger Ailes and Fox News:

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals. This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: "The American people do not want health-care reform."

Raines continues:

Under the pretense of correcting a Democratic bias in news reporting, Fox has accomplished something that seemed impossible before Ailes imported to the news studio the tricks he learned in Richard Nixon's campaign think tank: He and his video ferrets have intimidated center-right and center-left journalists into suppressing conclusions -- whether on health-care reform or other issues -- they once would have stated as demonstrably proven by their reporting. I try not to believe that this kid-gloves handling amounts to self-censorship, but it's hard to ignore the evidence. News Corp., with 64,000 employees worldwide, receives the tender treatment accorded a future employer.

While I admit that Fox is often over-demonized, I think Raines makes an interesting point. What about you - what do you think? Should journalists be calling out Fox?

UPDATE: A Fox News spokesperson just contacted us with this response:

We find it ironic that Howell is dispensing advice to other journalists after he nearly single handedly destroyed the journalistic credibility of the New York Times.

Earlier this week I promised readers some observations out of my research into Comstock Middle School in Pleasant Grove.

Click here to read more and comment.

Here's what we are writing for the weekend ... feel free to offer up your point of view:

1. POTHOLES -- Barely a street, highway or byway eluded the ravages of a wet and cold North Texas winter, and now these arteries bear the scars of a lost battle with Mother Nature. Some snow, some rain, some more rain and voila: NASA could use some of Dallas' roads to practice lunar landings. And if you thought things were bad after last month's record snow, the rain of the last two weeks is making bad matters worse. Jim writing on behalf of the board.

2. GOVERNOR -- We urge the candidates in the gubernatorial race to get past the sound bites and be honest with readers about the big issues they plan to exploit going forward. For Perry, it's about one of the central messages of his campaign: that four more years of the status quo is good for Texas. We explain why that may sound reassuring to nervous voters, but really it's enormously unsettling - irresponsible even. For White, we challenge him to go beyond simply identifying problems and spelling out more clearly what his alternative plans are and how he'd pay for them. Bill writing on behalf of the board.

3. CARTELS -- Some government officials in Mexico thought they had reached an accommodation with the Gulf Cartel, which dominates the region, to avoid the kind of violence that has wracked Ciudad Juárez, south of El Paso. The understanding, as we reported early last year, was simple: You leave us alone, and we'll leave you alone.
Shockingly, it turns out that a bunch of murderous drug traffickers aren't living up to their word. For Mexican officials who subscribed to an ill-conceived notion of "live and let live," this is a predictably rude awakening. Accommodation means deliberately not enforcing the law and turning a blind eye for the sake of peace. But it never works that way, because cooperating with drug mafias inevitably turns bad for all involved. Tod writing on behalf of the board.

Earlier this week, the editorial board chatted over the phone with DISD superintendent Michael Hinojosa about failing schools and what works and doesn't work to turn then around

This editorial board has a clear viewpoint -- fix or close -- but don't let the problem fester, and fester and fester. And yes, it's not easy. But how many more generations of kids are going to fall through the educational cracks?

I was particularly intrigued about Hinojosa's comments about West Dallas and a mention of the Harlem Children's Zone approach in a somewhat favorable light as a possible model for school reinvention. He even seemed to suggest that the school board might even be open to the idea.

So what is the Harlem Children's Zone? It's charter schools playing major role in the academic and social lives of children. Even the fact that is called a Childrens Zone instead of something mired in educational jargon signals that children are at the heart of the effort. And that's why the best charter schools work and the worst public schools don't.

The seeds of change are being planted in West Dallas, some of which I outline in this entry on the Gap blog.

As I've mentioned before, I'm really disappointed that the Veterans Affairs pulled the plug on UT Southwestern's research into the nature and causes of Gulf War illnesss. Vets deserve better.

But as the research is winding down, we're learning more about UTSW's advances, thanks in part to brain imaging. We're learning that something different and troubling is going on in the brains of Gulf War vets. In this piece in Science News Richard Briggs, one of the UTSW researchers, says, "In the last two years we have learned more about Gulf War Illness than we did in the previous 15."

I don't understand all of the details, but that is a job for the researchers -- to spend countless waking hours conducting meaningful research. They need to be greenlighted. And when the UTSW research ends, I'm not sure who will pick up the ball and run with it.

But I know this much. It must continue --and continue in good faith -- somewhere.

This blog post is written by Destiny DeLaRosa of Richardson, a stay-at-home mom and blogger. She is also a Community Voices volunteer columnist. Her e-mail address is destinydelaro@gmail.com.

Oftentimes we learn of our elected officials skeletons well after they have been taken out of the closet, dusted off and billed for many an escort service's "services." But with the access the unforgiving Internet now gives us into one another's lives, is it fair to proactively go looking for those skeletons when it comes to campaigning candidates?

We hear about corporations doing this all the time with potential hires, and we are often warned to keep our "google-able" assets in order. So, in my opinion, it would make perfect sense that we would vet all of our local candidates as much as possible. And honestly, as much as they have allowed us to.

Here in Richardson, the school board races are just now gearing up and already we have had some very interesting discoveries emerge.

I think it stinks. It takes food off the table of working people -- the cab drivers. The rule in question allows drivers of compressed natural gas taxis to cut to the front of the taxi line at Love Field, which can cause the other drivers to lose fares. Converting their cabs would cost thousands of dollars.

One of the cabbies who jammed council chambers yesterday called the rule unfair, immoral and un-American. Others, at the airport, explained to Channel 5 the realities of working the terminal.

Here's what I don't get: how Mayor Tom Leppert and other city leaders maintain that this new rule will make any measurable difference -- will move the needle -- in the quality of our air. The arithmetic doesn't make sense.

Read the full post on the Dallas Transportation blog ...

Carrollton car dealer Shomari Staten is suing the Carrollton police department a year after he was roughed up in a parking lot. The incident was caught by a squad car dash cam, which the police department tried to avoid making public after Staten demanded it with Freedom of Information Act request. And when you view it, it'll become apparent why they weren't anxious for the public to see it.

Staten alleges he's a victim of racial profiling. He's definitely a victim of abuse of authority. He abided by the law and declared clearly that he had a license to carry a concealed weapon. He eventually was arrested for failing to display his concealed weapon permit (which would have been hard, considering the way the Carrollton police officer was restraining Staten at the time). What's clear is that the police tried to punish him for refusing to keep quiet about their poor judgment. This is one case Carrollton would be smart to settle out of court.

For those of you who enjoy political cartoons, I highly recommend that you follow Nick Anderson's blog over at The Houston Chronicle. Having just blogged about the sometimes misplaced anger at Washington, I particularly enjoyed this cartoon, entitled "Mixed signals."

And I hate to pick on our governor, but this one is also clever:

We usually publish our "10 Drops in the Bucket" the first week of the month. This month, it was pushed back a week because we had so much elections-related commentary the first week of March.

This month's installment features the addition of a new quarterly column on Viewpoints that will spotlight one of the "drops" on our list. Colleen McCain Nelson is the dogged pursuer of fixing those 10 drops -- quality of life issues in the southern half of our city -- and she will also write the quarterly column. (Hint: the bulldozer in the photo here is a clue to content of the column -- stay tuned for what nasty neighbor to that church was torn down.)

Read more about our "10 Drops" project here and its role in our overall "Bridging Dallas' North-South Gap" project.

The following guest blog post is written by John C. Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis and co-author of "Lives at Risk: Single-Payer National Health Insurance Around the World." Respond to his comments here.

This is in response to Michael Landauer's questions about selling insurance across state lines.

If restrictions on buying insurance across state lines are lifted, Blue Cross of Texas would not "go" anywhere. However, it would have the ability to obtain a license in all 50 states. It will use the same physician network it now has. But you, as a consumer, would be able to get lower premiums in return for less onerous regulations.

Texas, by the way, is one of the worst states as far as mandated benefits are concerned. With 57 mandated benefits, only four states have more mandates than Texas. Rhode Island is the worst with 70, while Alabama has only 21 and Idaho ranks lowest with 13.

If you want all these mandates and are willing to pay for them, you will always be able to buy insurance under each state's rules.

But do you really want a plan that requires you to pay for in vitro fertilization? Acupuncture? Drug and alcohol abuse? Contraceptives? Hearing aids for minors? Marriage counseling? Or would you be willing to give up some of those benefits in order to pay less for coverage best suited to you and your family?

Every week, we poll the members of the editorial board on a timely and divisive topic. This week, that topic is the Smith County jury that sentenced a man in possession of 4.6 ounces of marijuana to 35 years in prison. He had two prior felonies, plus he was within 1,000 feet of a day care.

And this week's question is:

Is a 35-year sentence for possessing 4.6 ounces of marijuana too stiff?

Here are board members' responses:

We're working on editorials today regarding these two topics. Descriptions below. Please feel free to offer suggestions in the comments section about these topics or about others of import you think we're overlooking.....

DATES - We explain why it makes sense for public schools to share common start date and urge lawmakers to resist districts' pressure to allow a free-for-all here. Colleen McCain Nelson writing on behalf of the Editorial Board.

MJ - We are respectful but streamlined-persuasive in our tone suggesting that the guy sentenced to 35 years in Smith County for procession of 4.6 ounces of pot is extreme. Yeah, he was pretty darn stupid and this is a third offense, but do we really want to litter our jails up with a guy like this, who will essentially cost taxpayers upwards of $600,000 if he serves his full term (which we acknowledge he likely won't). Rodger Jones writing on behalf of the Editorial Board.

As we get ready for this fall's governor's race, we Texans need to prepare to deal with some myths coming from the candidates.

The first one I want to talk about is likely to be the biggest one, and that is this idea that Texas, like Gauguin's native, would be free at last if Washington would just leave us alone. Since my Texas pride runs deep, there's an element in that mythology that resonates with me. I certainly have a lot of friends who feel that way.

And Rick Perry's camp, which is running hard against Washington, has this fact going for it: Texas is a donor state when it comes to the amount of federal taxes that are collected in Texas and the amount of federal funds that are spent here.

According to Eva DeLuna Castro of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, the feds collected $236 billion in taxes within Texas' borders in 2008 and they spent $210 billion within them. When you do the math, only 89 cents of every dollar collected in Texas was spent in Texas.

If you stop there, those numbers make for a terrific sound-bite. I won't quarrel with the ad-makers on that one.

But when you dig deeper, those numbers are skewed.

Call me cynical, but I just don't believe it when conservatives tell me there would be no downside to allowing people to buy insurance across state lines. John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis is very smart and knows a lot about this subject, so I looked to his blog today to convince me not to be so cynical.

No such luck.

This is what it's come to: White House Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell can't get Israelis and Palestinians to sit down at the same table and talk. So this week, he is spending his days shuttling back and forth between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah in hopes of finding something -- anything -- the two sides can agree on.

So, it looks like we're back to where we were in 1992, when the PLO was a terrorist organization and there seemed like zero chance of ever getting Israelis and the PLO (which was, at the time, the "sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people") to hold direct talks. Then the Oslo peace process occurred in 1993, leading to a series of breakthroughs culminating in Israeli and PLO mutual recognition. They emerged with the Oslo Declaration of Principles. Then came the Oslo Interim Agreement. Then came the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In 1998, there was the Wye River Plantation agreement, followed two years later by the second Intifada.

Etc.

(See also: Yasser Arafat. Gun. Olive Branch. Ariel Sharon. Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo. Ehud Barak. Benyamin Netanyahu. Gilad Shalit. Mahmoud Abbas. More guns. More olive branches.)

The last time there were direct talks between the two sides as December 2008, when Israeli troops invaded Gaza.

If anyone has the patience and experience to negotiate peace, it's George Mitchell, who mediated talks that led to peace in Northern Ireland. Still, the Israeli-Palestinian picture looks exceedingly bleak.

On Wednesday from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at the Addison Conference and Theatre Center, I will be moderating a Briefing on the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process with Emile Sahliyeh, Ph.D., Professor of International Relations and Middle East Politics at the University of North Texas and Gil Elan, Executive Director of the Southwest Jewish Congress.

I can't promise we'll come up with a formula for peace, but I can guarantee a very lively and thought-provoking discussion.

To create a forum for informed debate, we need the help of people in the classroom. From that perspective, we can learn a lot about how teachers and students react to the latest school reform idea out of Austin. Or how teachers feel about the cultural changes happening in their community. Or how young people feel about the changing world and their place in it.

News pages can give us the facts, but these people can tell us what others in our community think about those facts. And they can effect change.

For these reasons, The Dallas Morning News is accepting applications for Teacher Voices and Student Voices for the 2010-2011 school year. Voices volunteers contribute a few full-length columns per semester and are the stars of our weekly Sounding Off feature on Sundays. They also participate in writing workshops and other special events with the editorial staff. To apply:

For students:

1. Write a little about yourself, including your hobbies and activities. How would others describe you? Why should we choose you to be part of this diverse panel?
2. Share samples of your writing or write something on a current topic that could be published. Letters to the editor should be about 200 words, and full-length commentary should be about 650 words.
3. Jot down three topics you would like to write about.
4. Attach a letter of recommendation from a teacher or an adult supervisor in one of your extracurricular activities. No, the teacher does not need to be a journalism adviser. Please include your reference's full daytime contact information.
5. E-mail the application to voices@dallasnews.com. Include your address and phone number. Please send the entire application in one e-mail -- with minimal attachments.

1. Write a little about yourself: How long have you been a teacher? Where do you teach? What subjects do you teach? Why should we choose you to be part of this diverse panel?
2. Tell us (in a few paragraphs): Why do you teach?
3. Jot down three topics you would like to write about.
4. E-mail the application to voices@dallasnews.com. Include your address and phone number. Please send the entire application in one e-mail -- with minimal attachments.

Before our staff meeting yesterday morning we were talking Oscars. We were missing a couple of people, but it was revealed that only two of us had seen any of the ten movies nominated for best picture. I was one of the two and I had only seen two of the movies, The Blind Side and Up. That's not uncommon for me. My tastes and the academy's taste don't ever really match. Seeing only 20 percent of the best picture nominees is par for the course for me. But I still found it interesting that only two of us in attendance had seen any of the movies. SO, I have a question for both board members and readers, how culturally aware should members of the board be?

For me, I don't think we need to be recording TMZ every night to keep up with Hollywood's celebutants, but I do think we need to have some cultural awareness and maybe that means we need to be seeing more movies and watching more of the popular shows on TV.

1. CLOSE - We build off the weekend news story and continue our calls for accountability when it comes to school performance. Yes, closing schools can have dire consequences in the short-run for students, but so does keeping failing schools operating. That's why we think that while it's a risk to close schools, it's a risk worth taking in certain cases to improve the odds of progress for at some of the students because not to close the worst performers guarantees continued failure. We are careful to urge surgical closures - closing schools that aren't showing progress on any barometer, be it NCLB, state standards, etc. We caution against closing schools that are still sagging but showing documented progress. Our hope that by closing the worst at least some of those kids would go to other schools and be surrounded by a better system in which they may succeed and/or go to a burgeoning charter school system designed to meet such needs, etc. The real issue here, however, must be confronted: Too many kids are arriving in high schools not ready to learn high school material. This shifts the onus onto middle schools and ninth grade to get serious about reform. This is the nut of the issue that DISD and other districts simply must confront and conquer. Bill writing on behalf of the board.

2. IRAQ - We remind readers how monumental it is that Iraq has now had two major elections with high turnout and this week's without significant US presence. We explain what this means going forward. Tod writing on behalf of the board.

Join in the discussion in comments below.

Like everyone else, I've got concerns about the deadlock in Washington. But I don't think Washington is broken - the system works pretty well. The real problem is the current American political culture. On Sunday's Face the Nation, Lindsey Graham and Evan Bayh had a great discussion about what's going on and how we can overcome America's current can't-do funk.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

As I watched, I found myself asking, "How come we don't have more politicians like those two?"

The problem is that voters don't always rally behind the more pragmatic, deal-making politicians. The Associated Press warned, "The moderate middle is disappearing from Congress." Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln may be among the next batch to get booted out. And in Texas, voters just chose Washington-bashing Rick Perry over stateswoman Kay Bailey Hutchison (to be fair, part of the problem was Hutchison's snoozer of a campaign.)

I think most Americans want pragmatic politicians who are able to govern effectively. But our culture is not one where politicians are rewarded for moderation or compromise. Politics is now a zero-sum game. After all, we are a nation that watches Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann. Americans can't tune in to talk radio, watch shout-a-thons on cable and then be shocked when the tone in Washington is shouty and partisan.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas has a great piece out this week entitled "We the Problem" exploring why Washington is giving Americans the politics they deserve:

Jackson Diehl has a great column in today's Washington Post wondering why Obama doesn't seem to have many foreign friends:

The paradox here is that Obama remains hugely popular abroad -- from Germany and France to countries where anti-Americanism has recently been a problem, such as Turkey and Indonesia. His following means that, in democratic countries at least, leaders have a strong incentive to befriend him. And yet this president appears, so far, to have no genuine foreign friends.

It's baffling that Obama has failed to turn his popularity overseas into more policy wins for the U.S. Just a few examples of missed opportunities and blunders: he left Britain drifting this fall regarding Afghanistan and snubbed France's Sarkozy, who has responded by not being very helpful on Afghanistan. Then the Obama administration totally bungled the announcement of a shift on U.S. missile policy in Eastern Europe - they announced the decision on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, leaving many staunch American allies in Eastern Europe feeling abandoned. And in Asia, democratic India has felt neglected as well.

Diehl offers up one possible explanation for Obama's lack of foreign friends:

... another big cause seems to be lack of interest on Obama's part. Focused intently on his domestic agenda, the president is said to be reluctant to take time to build relationships with foreign leaders. If something has needed to be done or decided, he has readily picked up the phone. If not, he generally hasn't been available.