Oklahoma City Oklahoman

It is raining in Oklahoma. As we move closer to the legislative session, state revenue collections remain well below projections and the prospect of a recovery in the near future does not look promising.

Current shortfalls have resulted in the loss of $660,000 to the Norman Public Schools in the first four months of this school year.

WASHINGTON — While military officers wait for President Obama to conclude his agonizingly slow review of Afghanistan policy, they’ve been reading a paper by an Army Special Forces operative arguing that the only hope for success in that country is to work with tribal leaders.

This tribal approach has widespread support, in principle.

OFFICIALS dreamed but could have not known in 1993 what the original MAPS projects would mean for Oklahoma City’s tourism and convention business.

NO further tax cuts are in the offing for the foreseeable future, so Oklahoma’s tendency to tax lower-income citizens disproportionately is also unlikely to change any time soon.

The state is rated as having an exceptionally regressive tax system by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which says low- and moderate-income Oklahomans surrender a greater portion of their incomes to taxes than those with higher incomes.

The problem is multifaceted and begins with the fact that Oklahoma’s highest personal income tax rate (now at 5.5 percent) kicks in at a relatively low income level.

WASHINGTON — What city contributed most to the making of the modern world? The Paris of the Enlightenment and then of Napoleon, pioneer of mass armies and nationalist statism?

Congress is considering Senate Bill 1147, the Prevent All Cigarette Trafficking Act. This widely supported bill is good for Oklahoma’s residents, retailers and the state budget and is worthy of Sens.

The 19th-century American writer Henry Adams said the descent of American presidents from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant was enough to discredit the theory of evolution.

On his recent trip to Asia, President Obama found China, Japan and South Korea — like many nations these days — in no mood to hear more American lectures.

Beijing is worried about owning so much American debt.

TERRY Cline’s frustration was evident as he re-acted to a national report that placed Oklahoma next-to-last on a listing of healthiest states.

"This is a reflection of what we live every day,” said Cline, who returned to Oklahoma this summer to become the state’s health commissioner.

Dead policy walking? That’s how one blogger described global warming legislation in the U.S. Senate — which Majority Leader Harry Reid put on ice this week, astutely recognizing the public and the politics are against this turkey.

"We’re going to try to do that sometime in the spring,” Reid said.

MAJORITY Leader Harry Reid unveiled Senate Democrats’ health care fig leaf Wednesday, and what a fig leaf it is — totaling $848 billion.

We call Reid’s merging of competing Senate health care bills a fig leaf for what it hides — more than $2 trillion in actual program spending — funded with tax increases and Medicare cuts, which legislates insurance mandates and an expanded government role in Americans’ health care.

There are detail differences between the Senate’s version and a bill passed earlier this month by the House.

Mental health professionals work terribly hard to throw the shroud of secrecy off of mental illness and provide help for those in need.

It would be hard for anyone not to admit that Oklahoma City is on a roll. We have the lowest unemployment rate in the country and hardly a week goes by that we aren’t named on another top 10 best list of cities.

WASHINGTON — Calm.

That’s not a word one hears much these days, but calm is what some are urging in the wake of a new federal report on breast cancer screening.

Released Monday, the report has caused a stir with its recommendation that women in their 40s don’t need annual mammograms and that self-exams no longer should be part of a doctor’s instructions to female patients.

WASHINGTON — For late-19th-century anarchists, terrorism was the "propaganda of the deed.” And the most successful propaganda-by-deed in history was 9/11 — not just the most destructive, but the most spectacular and telegenic.

And now its self-proclaimed architect, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has been given by the Obama administration a civilian trial in New York.

We’re celebrating NBC’s Green Week here at Rockefeller Center.