Opinion: In today’s pages: Fast food, finances and fundamentalism

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The Times editorial board offers a mouth-watering stack today, weighing in on the fights over legislation to require restaurant chains to post the calorie counts of menu items and lawsuits to force Denny’s to reveal the sodium content of its offerings and hot dog packages to carry warning labels. The board scoffs at the lawsuits, but supports posting the caloric content at chains with more than 20 restaurants of the same name (think McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, etc.). It’s already been done in New York and it’s now on the books in California. The board notes that it might cost restaurants extra to reprint menus or offer lower-calorie foods, but says, ‘tough luck.’

On the op-ed side of the pages, two top officials in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration -- legal affairs secretary Andrea Lynn Hoch and Department of Finance chief counsel Jennifer Rockwell -- contend that the governor’s use of line-item veto to make deeper spending cuts than the legislature approved was well within the law.

Lionel Beehner, formerly a senior writer for the Council on Foreign Relations, gives his insights on tourism in Kurdistan and his recent visit to the region in Northern Iraq:

I was amazed by the variety of tourists who venture to Kurdistan. I met Middle American retirees, a young Brit bent on biking across Iraq, and a pair of Swedish hippies. I met religious tourists and history buffs, anthropologists and archaeologists. Western travel agencies offering guided tours of Kurdistan say they cannot keep pace with growing demand.

Kurdistan is a region teeming with cultural treasures. It has mud-caked ruins and former palaces of Saddam Hussein. Alexander the Great tamed the Persians on its plains. And the mountains east of Sulaymaniyah rival the Rockies for great hiking.

Finally, columnist Gregory Rodriguez endorses the strategy for combating religious fundamentalism outlined by authors Peter L. Berger and Anton C. Zijderveld. Their approach? Striking a balance between doubt and certainty, and using our democratic freedoms to ‘fight back’ against fundamentalist beliefs.