The lead article in today’s New York Times, “Romney Regains Stride with Victories in 2 States,” describes two key victories for Mitt Romney — dubbed sarcastically as “Mittens” by Maureen Dowd — in Arizona and Michigan. The latter proved especially significant as Mr. Romney beat back a determined challenge from Rick Santorum, thus avoiding the humiliation of losing in his home state.

Arizona delivered a winner-take-all prize of 29 delegates while Michigan’s proportional representation provided 15 delegates each to Romney and Santorum. Mr. Romney, who is still leading easily in the delegate count, faces a daunting challenge on Super Tuesday, with contests in more than 10 states, many of them in the South, an area particularly resistant to his candidacy.

The Republican nominating race has dragged on through three months and 20 debates, and most of us are getting a little tired of it. The candidates often get sidetracked onto social issues and fail to address the economic concerns of most Americans. President Obama is becoming stronger, and his reelection looks more likely by the day.

Newt Gingrich is poised to make a semi-comeback again, with strong poll numbers in Georgia and Tennessee. Meanwhile, Mr. Romney seems unable to put the race away with a series of gaffes on the campaign trail that continue to dog him.

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “Cities Borrow from Pensions to Pay for Them,” describes a borrow-from-Peter-to-pay-Paul situation, where public employers including local governments and the New York City Public Library borrow from the state pension system to help them pay their annual contributions to the same system.

While these borrowers try to couch their actions by calling it “amortization” of their pension obligations, it really represents a sleight of hand situation in which the “can is kicked down the road” to perpetuate an untenable situation.

Pension funds assume a certain annual rate of return every year, but this system was thrown out of whack with the 2008 financial crisis. But the financial obligations of local governments and other public employers did not change, and the most onerous of these obligations involve generous pension payments to retiring workers.

Governor Cuomo should be commended for his efforts to reform this system. He is trying to institute a 401-k type of arrangement where state employees contribute to their own pension costs. While the amounts per person would be relatively small, the labor unions and state legislators remain resistant to the idea.

Still, the logistics of paying ever larger amounts, and even borrowing to satisfy them, is not sustainable in the long run, and some form of compromise will be necessary.

The lead article in this morning’s New York Times, “Afghan Uproar Casts Shadow on U.S. Pullout,” demonstrates how hard it is for the United States to help a country where most of the citizens palpably hate it.

The burning of Korans at a U.S. Army base has been described as an inadvertent mistake, but one wonders how that could be so. Didn’t military officers anticipate an adverse reaction to the burning of another culture’s holy book, and how could that be anything but a slap at our so-called partners in the nation?

No, the burning could not have been carried out with anything but malicious intent, just like the scene of American Marines urinating on dead Taliban soldiers.

Now, with American civilian advisors having been pulled out of Afghan government offices, rightly so after two top U.S. officials were murdered by their Afghan colleagues, it gets much harder to complete our mission of training Afghanistan security officials to secure their country without our help.

The next pivotal moment will come with the NATO summit meeting in Chicago in May, when the size of the next round of withdrawals will be decided. It’s hard to help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, and maybe, after 10 years, we should just leave that stone-age country to its own devices, and not sacrifice the blood of any more of our young soldiers.

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “Nations Rebuke Leader of Syria as Assault Rages,” describes a valiant effort in a meeting among top officials of more than 60 countries to stop the killing of innocent people in Syria as President Bashar al-Assad continues to bomb the city of Homs to defeat rebel forces.

The crackdown in Syria was escalated shortly after Russia and China vetoed a motion by the U.N. Security Council to censure the government of Syria for its actions. Now, even more important, there needs to be some way to provide humanitarian relief to the injured and those needing food and medicine.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton played an especially large role at the international gathering, citing the Syrian government as well as Russia and China as responsible for the continued killing. Yet it’s hard to see how the situation will change in the short term without any foreign intervention.

Meanwhile, at home, three U.S. senators called on the Obama administration to pursue more tangible actions to alleviate the suffering. Senators McCain, Graham and Lieberman did have a valid point; however, the execution of any actions also carries significant risks of escalation of the conflict into a full-scale war.

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “A Year In, Deep Divisions Hobble Syria’s Opposition,” shows just some of the many difficulties involved in helping the Syrian rebels meet the onslaught of force from President Bashar al-Assad.

Mr. Assad has now resorted to bombing his own cities, including the beleaguered city of Homs, where civilians are struggling to survive. Outrage has grown from other nations including the Arab League, and the United States is also casting about looking for some sort of organization to funnel medical aid and weapons for self-defense.

The problem is that the grassroots activists on the ground have little-to-no connection with the so-called leadership in exile. The largest of these organizations, the Syrian National Council (SNC), only represents about 70 percent of the groups, and it was slow to adapt to the transformation of the movement from peaceful demonstrations to military overthrow of the government.

The mostly helpless Syrian citizens look with scorn at the exile organizations, stating that they are “swanning” from luxury hotel to luxury hotel while the Syrians on the ground are struggling to survive. But even the rebel Syrian military is vastly outnumbered and outgunned, so some way must be found to funnel assistance to them.

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “Romney, Seeking Traction, Duels with Santorum,” provides a vivid description of the Republican Presidential debate, but it was unclear whether anything had really changed.

Rick Santorum, the new Republican frontrunner, was on the hot seat due to his status and faced a withering series of attacks by Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. He parried them all fairly well but was definitely on the defensive. Michigan and Arizona have primaries in six days with “Super Tuesday” a week after that, but this could still be a long, drawn-out contest. Even after Super Tuesday, the majority of the delegates will still remain to be chosen in future primaries.

Romney and his Super PAC continue to pound the airwaves with negative ads, a tactic that may win in the short run but could eventually prove problematic due to the eclipse of any positive vision by Romney for the country. And while he was the only person last night who could claim no Washington experience, I’m not sure how much of a benefit that will be in a general election.

The debates at times can get a little puerile, with a contentious atmosphere and topics that are not really on the minds of voters. They tend of make all the candidates look a little small, and that could prove to be troublesome in November as well.

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “Justices Take Up Race as a Factor in College Entry,” has the potential to deal a major blow to use of race as a factor to ensure diversity in some of the most selective colleges in the country.

Those who oppose affirmative action ignore the fact that we live in a society that still maintains many prejudices that hinder the success of its citizens. These programs have already been prohibited from using quotas, so they only take race into account in a general way. To do otherwise would doom the chances of many promising minorities.

There is also something to be said about the benefits to white people of meeting all types of people in a college environment. College is not just about academic learning, and some of the most growth occurs when we meet people with different backgrounds from our own.

And it is not just minorities who benefit from affirmative action. It is those from lower levels of the economic strata as well, those who can’t afford to hire a personal tutor for the SATs for example.

The outcome of the case that the Supreme Court will hear is very much in question thanks to the changing nature of the court. One hopes they will either decide the case on a narrow basis or re-affirm the ability of college admissions to have the most flexibility possible.

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “Campaigns Grow More Dependent on Super PAC Aid,” releases the contribution figures for January for both the Presidential candidates and their “non-affiliated” Super PACS. The results show the overwhelming results of the Supreme Court’s Citizen United ruling that authorized these new structures to begin with.

The Super PACs for the four main Republican candidates, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, raised more than $22 million in January, more than the candidates themselves, and they ended the month with more cash on hand than the candidates, too.

One important fact to note is that for the traditional campaign channels, where the contributions are limited to $2,500 per person, Mitt Romney has maxed out on a larger percentage of his contributors — 44 percent — than the other candidates. This means it will be more difficult for him to raise funds through this channel, thus foreshadowing an even greater role for his Super PAC.

Of course, all this money in politics is tantamount to corruption, or, at the very least, undue influence by the donors. One hopes that after the campaign is over, the Congress will consider some form of legislation to eliminate this travesty. At this level, donations are not equivalent to the type of free speech that our Founders had in mind. And even the Supreme Court has acknowledged some limits to free speech: you don’t have the freedom to yell “Fire” in a crowded theater!

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “Taliban Gaining More Resources from Kidnapping,” shows how resourceful our enemy has become in securing the money it needs to continue operations.

The employment of kidnapping as a fundraising tool is nothing new in Pakistan where it was originally used against British colonialists. Now, however, the victims are often taken on an overland trek to the province of Waziristan where the Taliban operate freely with little to fear from government sources.

The Taliban also tend to be more brutal than the kidnappers of yore, and more thorough. The cases can take up to six months to resolve compared to six weeks in the past, and the demands, typically from $500,000 to $2 million, can also include the release of prisoners held by the Pakistani government.

The use of kidnapping, while based on a safe haven in Waziristan, has spread across the entire country, including the populous center in the province of Punjab. The perpetrators often research potential victims, and the Taliban frequently collaborate with criminal gangs.

This crime wave is hurting Pakistan in more ways than providing financial support for suicide bombings and other violent actions. Foreign aid workers are leaving the country in droves because it is just too dangerous to help the needy, and the atmosphere of lawlessness drives potential investors away, too.

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “Unwed Mothers Now a Majority before Age of 30,” is an unusual lead story in that it analyzes relationship shifts in our society as opposed to more mainstream news such as politics, government policy and foreign relations.

The article documents the increasing phenomenon of mothers raising children prior to marriage, and despite its headline provides statistics that can reassure people about the permanence of marriage as an institution.

Why? When people have a choice, they still overwhelming opt for marriage. While the figure for minorities is worth noting, those for whites, especially those with college degrees, show the preference for marriage resoundingly.

Approximately 92 percent of college-educated women are married when they give birth. And the same holds true for 71 percent of whites of any educational level.

The column also delves further into the nature of marriage. While in the past, women were satisfied to rely on men for financial reasons, today they look primarily for emotional support. Thanks to the increasing participation of women in the workplace, they have now risen to a situation of financial independence and can insist on more of a partnership than was previously the case.

These kind of stories about the so-called deterioration of marriage are typically raised by conservatives to spur alarm about the downfall of our society. But if you look at the numbers more closely, you will see a positive trend that shows that marriage is as strong as ever.