An editorial / By Dale McFeatters, Scripps Howard News Service

If at first you don't succeed try, try again goes the old saw. After herculean efforts by Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the U.S. is set to try yet again to broker a lasting peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

These are times that make one despair for the republic. Maybe as a nation we are pretty dim.

A study of the results of the 2010 ACT college-entrance exams found that less than 25 percent of high-school grads had the skills to pass entry-level college classes.

The 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, had the distinction of having been the last U.S. combat brigade in Iraq when the last of its armored vehicles rolled across the Kuwaiti border in the predawn hours Thursday.

Pakistan is not, to much of the world, a terribly sympathetic country -- a crossroads for terrorists, rogue supplier of nuclear weapons, sometime ally of the Taliban, alternating between military dictators and corrupt, ineffectual civilian governments.

For all the talk of electricity produced by windmills and solar arrays, the Department of Energy has seen the future of electric power generation and it's coal.

Ten years ago this month the submarine Kursk, one of Russia's most advanced, sank while on maneuvers in the Barents Sea. The Russian navy quickly blamed the United States, saying the Kursk must have collided with, or even been hit by, a torpedo fired from one of two U.S. subs in the area.

If Plato was right that the people best equipped to handle power are those who don't seek it, Robert Gates is the platonic ideal of a secretary of defense.

Perhaps because it's August, when offbeat controversies grab the public imagination, but the issue of the proposed Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan has become needlessly divisive.

There go President Barack Obama's skimpy-to-nonexistent socialist credentials.

General Motors will take a major step toward reprivatizing itself with a planned new initial public offering (IPO) that will reduce the U.S. government stake in the company from 61 percent to less than 50 percent, opening the way for the Obama administration to get out altogether.

The United States has a problem in leaving Iraq: Many Iraqis don't want us to go, at least not yet. They reason that Iraq faces too many internal and external threats for a complete U.S. withdrawal.