NYTimes.com

Last week I wrote about the New England-based program More Than Wheels, which helps people get low-interest loans on new or good used cars, and allows them to save money on repairs, gas and financing. Most of the commenters — especially those who live in rural areas — liked the idea of the program, but there were a few persistent questions and issues:

Are cars necessary?

In March 2010, Tammy Trahan’s 1993 Jeep Cherokee broke down on one of the New Hampshire back roads that made up her 90-mile daily commute. “I was in tears,” says Tammy, “I wanted to drive into the river.” As a single mom, the car was her lifeline, taking her to the job that kept her and her family barely afloat. But the car was also dragging her down. Because a bad divorce had left her with terrible credit, she’d paid such high interest rates that the car with a $9000 sticker price when she bought it seven years earlier ended up costing her $20,000 in payments.

The U.S.-Pakistan relationship is a microcosm of international relations more broadly: talking about change has little correlation to actually achieving it.

Before the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the Government Accountability Office released a study criticizing the lack of progress in making aid to Pakistan more effective. Far less has been spent than promised, and far too few inspectors have been assigned to oversee implementation of the projects.

Protests across Syria on Friday, as the government's crackdown continues; remembering the 1982 massacre in Hama, Syria; and the op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman. Reporter Katherine Zoepf also comments.

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... “The Bin Ladens” by Steve Coll also adds new details to our understanding of how the young Bin Laden evolved from a loyal family adjutant into an angry black sheep lashing out at some of the very people ...

... Peter L. Bergen’s book “The Longest War” provides a devastating indictment of the Bush administration on many levels — from its failure to heed warnings about a terrorist threat, ...

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Mark Leon Goldberg, left, of UN Dispatch and Rebecca Hamilton, author of "Fighting for Darfur," discuss whether protests will spread to Sudan.

Original article

When oil prices are high, Americans like to say that the oil markets are broken, driven by speculators, detached from reality, driven by conspiracy. When prices are low, we do not have complaints about the oil markets. Then we say the “markets are working” as they are supposed to. In our minds the “real” price of oil is whatever we consider cheap.

But there is no “real” cost for a barrel of oil -- it’s a number arrived at in markets, between producers, consumers and a host of middlemen and speculators. (More on them in a second.)

By all indications, housing is heading for a double dip. The dramatic fall in new home and existing home sales in July along with the increase in the inventory of unsold houses will almost certainly be followed by a new decline in housing prices in a few months' time.

A double dip in housing will add yet another drag to an already weakening economy, further eroding consumer confidence and precipitating a new round of bank failures. In this sense, housing is a leading indicator -- of another recession.

As he notes, a detailed study of the attacks — “The Year of the Drone: An Analysis of U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan” by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann for the New America Foundation — “found that one-third of those killed by drones were civilians.” ...

Original article

“The C.B.O. process has now been so thoroughly gamed that it’s useless,” writes Megan McArdle of the Atlantic. She’s concerned about how many of the costs have been pushed to the tail end of the budgeting period, and that the excise tax on so-called gold-plated insurance plans won’t take effect until 2018 ...

Original article.