Dale McFeatters

Still in the country club

The U.N. rankings on the quality of life in 182 countries are out, and like the U.S. News & World Report rankings of American colleges and universities, only those who finished at or near the top are happy.

October 10, 2009

A bump in the road

Speed bumps are a minor irritant of American life. Now there's another, more major irritant - drivers who honk when they come to one.

October 3, 2009

Czarist Washington

No question about it. The number of "czars" in government has proliferated under President Obama and has provided a rallying point for his Republican opposition.

September 19, 2009

Health care hijinks

Congress is returning to Washington and President Obama's health care overhaul is in trouble thanks in large part to the noisy misinformation spread at town-hall meetings while lawmakers were on their August recess.

September 5, 2009

MCFEATTERS: Sri Lanka at peace

After 16 years and 70,000 dead, one of Asia's longest-running civil wars has come to a bloody end. In a relentless campaign since January that alone produced 8,000 civilian dead and 265,000 refugees, the government forces of Sri Lanka pounded their nemesis, the Tamil Tigers, into half a square mile on the northern coast before overrunning the remnants of a once-lethal guerrilla army.

May 30, 2009

MCFEATTERS: High hopes and high mileage

It was, to use a current Washington cliche, a kumbya moment. Standing with President Obama in the White House Rose Garden for his announcement of new fuel-efficiency standards were auto-company executives, lawmakers and governors, regulators, industry defenders and critics and environmentalists.

May 23, 2009

MCFEATTERS: Race car called ‘Chery’?

The great American sport of stock-car racing may be contemplating a future in which there aren't any American cars to race. This is so embarrassing.

May 16, 2009

MCFEATTERS: Pontiac’s engine dies

General Motors Corp. is doing more than trashing an American automotive icon by folding Pontiac. It is messing with my personal automotive history, and I don't appreciate it.

May 2, 2009

MCFEATTERS: Games need cut in ticket prices

The 1989 film "Field of Dreams," about a baseball field carved out of a cornfield, gave us the phrase "Build it, and they will come." New Yorkers figured if that worked for the rubes out in Iowa, it would work a million times better for them, so they drew on the wildly generous New York taxpayers for $2.3 billion to build two new ballparks.

April 25, 2009

MCFEATTERS: More czars are born

For a country that fought a long war to shed itself of royalty - the Declaration of Independence goes on at length about how awful King George III was - we seem to be heavily staffing our government with czars.

April 18, 2009

MCFEATTERS: Barricading the boss

Trust the French to come up with an exciting new wrinkle in labor-management negotiations.

April 11, 2009

MCFEATTERS: Steering away from the market

Unless you wandered off the beaten path in the business pages, you probably missed the dispatch out of Detroit that President Obama's auto task force is participating in meetings that "have focused on educating the Treasury on the world of auto manufacturing."

April 4, 2009

MCFEATTERS: When the Fed comes calling

The U.S. government is about to leverage nearly $3 trillion into the economy to get it moving again, but none of that money will do any good if the recipients don't spend or lend it. But this is the U.S. government. It knows people. It has ways.

February 15, 2009

McFEATTERS: Shortcut to the Senate

Test your knowledge of public affairs. Who are J. Bonnie Newman, Ted Kaufman, Michael Bennett, Kirsten Gillibrand and Roland Burris, and what do they all have in common? (And, yes, I had to look a couple of them up.)

February 6, 2009

MCFEATTERS: Getting careful

It's considered bad form nowadays to flaunt your money if you've still got it. And it's considered really bad form to flaunt your money if you've still got it and your investors don't. This is a lesson learned with some pain by Citigroup and John Thain, the former chief of Merrill Lynch.

February 1, 2009

MCFEATTERS: Deficit or recession priority?

President-elect Barack Obama is taking office embracing two almost mutually exclusive economic goals. On the one hand, he wants to gain control over the spiraling federal budget deficit - the excess of spending over revenues - and on the other he is seeking massive federal spending to kick-start the flagging economy.

January 12, 2009

MCFEATTERS: On again, off again

Europeans likely didn't need much more evidence of how unreliable a partner Russia can be, but last week the Kremlin gave them definitive proof.

January 11, 2009

MCFEATTERS: A futuristic view

Every year the Futurist magazine compiles the forecasts and predictions of assorted visionaries and is now out with its "Outlook for 2009 and Beyond."

January 4, 2009

MCFEATTERS: Mugabe sickens Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe's dictatorial Robert Mugabe has added another misery to the long list of miseries he has inflicted on his long-suffering country - cholera.

December 14, 2008

MCFEATTERS: Recession’s silver lining

Inside every recession there's a silver lining and in this one it's falling oil prices, down from $147 a barrel in July to $48 this week and maybe headed toward $40.

December 6, 2008