Opinion Forum

The First 100 Days

April 29th, 2009

The Liberal Hour, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal, looks at President Obama’s first 100 days somewhat differently than the rest of the mainstream media. Most of the media are falling all over themselves praising the President, but that’s to be expected. They long ago abrogated their responsibility for honest, straightforward reporting and analysis. I [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: 100 days, Obama
Categories: Media, Politics | Comments (11) | Home

Rumor About Stephenie Meyer

April 27th, 2009

A rumor is going around that Stephenie Meyer is getting sued for plagiarism because she stole ideas for New Moon from her roommate, Heidi, and that they had to stop the production of the movie version of New Moon. When I first heard this I was totally shocked. I really was upset that they weren’t going [...]

Articles written by Amber
Tags: literature, Stephenie Meyer
Categories: Arts | Comments (2) | Home

Selective Moral Outrage

April 26th, 2009

In Our Selective Moral Outrage in The Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal, Bret Stephens asks why there is so much moral outrage directed at Israel in regard to the Palestinians and so little at Russia in regard to Chechnya. Russia’s actions have been far more aggressive and deadly than Israel’s. However, if the issue is [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Chechnya, Israel, Palestinians, Russia
Categories: History, Politics | Comments (11) | Home

Sending Signals

April 25th, 2009

“It’s unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States.” — President Barack Obama That is a fascinating statement by the President. On the surface, the words he uses seem pragmatic, insightful and forward thinking. It [...]

Articles written by Trevor Dane
Tags: Chavez, foreign policy, Obama
Categories: Politics | Comments (11) | Home

What the Heck Is Going On?

April 23rd, 2009

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist, military historian, and expert on ancient warfare. He also writes on contemporary politics. He’s a registered Democrat and a political conservative (yes, that’s possible, but it requires actual thinking). Hanson wrote a column today that perfectly expresses the confusion and frustration I’ve felt over the past few months as I’ve watched [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: doublethink, newspeak
Categories: Economics, Politics | Comments (13) | Home

Cows and Such

April 22nd, 2009

Like everyone else, I get lots of unsolicited rants in my e-mail inbox. Once in a while, there’s a pretty good joke among them. Here’s one of them—and remember, I didn’t write it!

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: 10 Commandments, cows
Categories: Humor | Comments (7) | Home

From Piracy To Welfare

April 21st, 2009

Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, the Somali pirate who survived a failed attempt to seize a U.S. ship and the Navy’s rescue of his hostage, was arraigned in federal court in New York today. If convicted of piracy and other charges, he will be sentenced to life in prison. While in most photos he was smiling and seemed happy, during the [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Law, piracy, pirate
Categories: Media, News, Politics | Comments (5) | Home

“This War Is Lost”

April 19th, 2009

It was two years ago that Harry Reid, great American and distinguished leader of Senate Democrats, made his historic pronouncement. With all the solemnity and gravitas of a serious man who knew more about the war in Iraq than the President and all the generals, he declared, “This war is lost…and the surge is not accomplishing [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: accountability, Harry Reid, Iraq
Categories: Military, Politics | Comments (11) | Home

City of Bones

April 19th, 2009

I just finished a book this week called City Of Bones, written by Cassandra Clare. I got this book at Barnes and Noble. I also got the second book in the series but not the last one. I’m going to wait for the last one because it cost more than the other two. Stephenie Meyer (author of the [...]

Articles written by Amber
Tags: City of Bones, literature
Categories: Arts | Comments (3) | Home

Inkheart

April 18th, 2009

I finished reading a long book called Inkheart last week. It was written by Cornelia Funke. It’s about a girl named Meggie who lives with her father, Mo. One night, a man named Dustfinger shows up at their door and talks to Mo. Dustfinger keeps calling him Silvertongue. Mo tells Meggie that they are going to [...]

Articles written by Amber
Tags: Inkheart, literature
Categories: Arts | Comments (1) | Home

Independent Voters

April 18th, 2009

In Independent Voters and the President: Myths and Realities at Rasmussen Reports, Alan Abramowitz discussed the large gap between what most people think political independents are and what they really are. The perception is that there’s a large group of independents who aren’t aligned with either party, and a candidate who fails to win over most [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: independents, Obama
Categories: Politics | Comments (2) | Home

Computer Modeling and Climate Change

April 17th, 2009

When I studied Computer Science way back in the 80s, we were constantly impressed with the lesson “GIGO,” which means “garbage in, garbage out.” It means that if your input data is no better than what I clean out of my pigs’ cages every couple of weeks, then your output (the whole purpose of writing [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: climate change, computer modeling
Categories: Life, Politics | Comments (16) | Home

The Curse of Spam

April 16th, 2009

Anyone who runs a website with submitted content, like Opinion Forum, suffers from the curse of spam. We’re only about five months old, and it took the comment spammers a while to find us. Now we’re under daily attack. So far, we’ve been hit by almost exactly as many spam comments as we’ve received valid comments. [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Akismet, spam
Categories: Life | Comments (6) | Home

Rough Men and Heroes

April 15th, 2009

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. George Orwell could have been referring to soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, or even law enforcement officers. In the rescue of the captain of MV Maersk Alabama, the “rough men” doing violence on our behalf were Navy SEALs. According to press [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Navy SEAL, special operations
Categories: Military, News | Comments (7) | Home

Milking Goats

April 13th, 2009

On Saturday my grandma and grandpa took my sister, Ashley, and me to Brian Bagent’s house. Ashley and I were waiting the past week to go to his house. We know Brian because he and my grandma work together at the hospital. Like he described in the article posted below, Brian has lots of animals. He [...]

Articles written by Amber
Tags: animals, goat, milking
Categories: Life, News | Comments (8) | Home

And now for something completely different…

April 12th, 2009

No politics, philosophy, or economics today. Well, OK, a little philosophy, but not really the kind you’d expect. C.S. Lewis wrote, during the height of WWII, that we should continue to live our lives. I couldn’t agree more. To that end, here are some of the things I recommend to live your life, and I’ll [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: good life, independence, philosophy
Categories: Life | Comments (12) | Home

Follow the Money

April 11th, 2009

If you were spending $787 billion, wouldn’t you want to know where it’s going? Seems the Obama Administration isn’t too worried about it, and neither is the majority in Congress. The thing is, the money Congress and the Administration are throwing at the economic crisis is our money. We’ve already had indications that they don’t have much of an [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: economy, stimulus
Categories: Economics, News, Politics | Comments (3) | Home

The Value of Derivatives

April 10th, 2009

As I proved in an earlier article, Does Dark Matter Matter?, I don’t know much about quarks and hadrons in particle physics. I know even less about derivatives and credit default swaps in high finance. From everything I’ve heard, the financial crisis began with subprime mortgage defaults, transmogrified into derivatives and maybe credit default swaps, and [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: derivatives, economy, finance
Categories: Economics, Humor | Comments (5) | Home

Paglia Responds to Readers

April 8th, 2009

Camille Paglia writes a column on Salon.com once each month. Every third column consists of her responses to questions and comments from readers. Her are a few samples from the column published today: On President Obama’s responsibility for selecting inadequate advisors and staff: Obama’s staffing problems are blatant—from that bleating boy of a treasury secretary to what [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: conservatives, liberals, Obama, Paglia
Categories: Humor, Life, Politics | Comments (6) | Home

The Myth of Bipartisanship

April 7th, 2009

The Pew Research Center has just released a comparison of presidential approval ratings early during their first year in office (chart at left). It shows President Obama with a 59 percent approval rating, which ranks him just above Clinton and both Bushes and just below Reagan, Carter, and Nixon. The fact highlighted in the Pew report [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Democrats, Obama, Republicans
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (20) | Home

« Older Articles