This week we are having a bit of trouble picking a topic for Viewpoints. Most of the hot topics right now are either the elections, the economy, or a gun supreme court case. I want to try to not rehash old topics(economy), beat a dead horse(gun issues), or talk about something most people are already sick of(elections) in the hopes of not boring any of you. With that in mind I want to know what you want to read.


BTW it needs to be a topic that we can approach from different schools of thought or else its just a news column.

How about (since congress is holding hearings to address the cost of oil, and possibly start an investigation of big oil) you talk about
1) the best way to handle trade monopolies
2) which alternative energy source should receive the most funding and research(i.e. Nuke, Solar, Wind, Tidal, Geothermal, High-Altitude, Electric)
3) What the government should do with big oil
4) Who should win? EPA or OIL regarding the Alaskan Frontier and the other 95% of the US coastal waters for domestic oil
5) The recent trucker's strike
6) If you just want a different dead horse to beat, there is always abortion ethics.


Sorry if most of these have a central theme, but that is the part of the news today that has captured most of my attention. Combined, most of these topics may make a good article.

Hmm 1, 3, 4, and 5 could work as articles. Kinda liking 5 myself just so there is not a glut of information to wade through.

for more ideas, you could always click on the government link on CNN's website. They archive their stories, so there is plenty of subjects to peruse.

The problem is I'm asking this after looking through drudge report, drudge retort, worldnetdaily, cnn, digg, politico, and a couple blogs without seeing anything good. Also, I don't know about you but I can't stand CNN anymore. They are just as bad as fox news nowadays but with a pretentious air.

pretentious? sounds like home

How about congress bitching out the oil execs?

Or you could pull out just about anything.... why does it have to be recent news? Something like viewpoints on minimum wage or censorship would be interesting, not meaningless commentary about news stories.

Death penalty is always a good one.

me and my fiancee are both conservatives from texas, we both believe in the death penalty, and she has first hand experience with an execution*. We also watched a movie the other day, The Life of David Gale, which is about texas and the use of the death penalty,starring kevin spacey, and it sparked some conversation which included many different aspects of life and death and justification and flaws in the system.

*A close family friend of hers is the director of Texas Department of Criminal Justice Victim Service unit and she interned there for a summer. During that she got to go and witness an execution and be there for the mediation of the victims' family afterwards.

Personally I prefer newer stories for articles. Partially so that the paper will be different each year instead of abortion, gun control, death penalty, censorship and other lingering topics making a convenient rotation which I believe was part of the reason the political section for the Miner sucked hard for so long. Also, the news has been getting worse and worse at actually providing any researched analysis when they report the news to provide perspective. I want to provide the analysis these journalists lack even though only 5 people read the column each week.

Not sure about death penalty, the paper did a column about lethal injection in January. Also, I don't know if we can provide any take on it you haven't read yet. Sure we each have opinions on it but if we can't provide you with something original do we really deserve to get paid?

No with what ever way you decide

The trucker's strike was a non-issue. Some people shut down for a day, some people shut down for like six hours. Most everybody's gotta run the truck though. Those who refused loads just basically gave up the good loads to those who would run them for a cheaper wage/smaller cut of fuel surcharges--just like any "strike" goes. People running company trucks are forced dispatch--if they don't run their dispatcher finds somebody who will. Owner-operators and lease-operators have that truck payment to take care of, plus a mortgage and a family to feed. Fuel prices suck but they can't afford NOT to run.

This wasn't even a strike. No organization. OOIDA had to stay out of it; since the trucking industry is a vital defense industry they can't legally organize a strike so their hands were tied--they're the same as a union of air traffic controllers or subway line operators. Teamsters members are already getting paid by the hour anyway so what do they care? Trucking companies care about the CUSTOMER--to them that's the party paying them to do the shipping, not the guy in the truck.

This was nothing more than those chain e-mails you get telling people "Oh we're gonna stick it to EXXON on Friday the 15, nobody pump gas! Tell all your friends! IT'LL REALLY WORK!!" Same deal, about the same amount of press, about the same amount of net effect.

I think most of the people who "parked it" on April 1 just used it as an excuse to reset their hours for the week.

Doing political columns on news items gets pretty ridiculous. You take a news story and you find some way to blame people that don't think like you for whatever negative thing happened? That's pretty much the only thing that can come from people who've been assigned some political stereotype and told to bitch and moan about happenings.

Sorry to be negative, just keepin' it real.

My roommate last year was the "Libertarian" writer for the paper, I know how this shiz works.

Eh, I like to take a different approach. I prefer to analyze a situation and look for interconnected events to explain things. Thats why I like current events. It lets you show the tapestry of the world. My only problem with the political labeling is that when I called myself a Republican in my article my editor got perturbed. While I write under classical liberalism I personally am a Republican in more ways than Bill Weaver can ever hope to be but then again I have a vendetta against him so theres likely a bit of anger on my part over that. I think I liked your roommate's articles, they had some intelligence to them I think.

Bagvwf I suggest you read next weeks article, theres a bit more to the issue then that. A good one to start looking up is Mary Peters.

Yeah, well, he left UMR to be a creative writing major at missouri state. roflcopter.

It's great that you like to analyze current events, but why is it necessary to have some political bias toward your observation? There might be times when that is useful**. But what do you expect? "Here's a libertarian explaining the news story." Great. I get an analysis, and it's all libertarian-y. Big deal.

My whole point is that displaying the person's political bias (and needless to say encouraging its employment and making it overt) actually takes away from an analysis. I don't like to read analysis with the thought of "Oh, here's what the token republican has to say" unless it really matters.**

**How about something like "What are Hillary Clinton's strengths and weaknesses." I would be interested to see people of various political persuasions pointing out things.

Brilliant - I'm tired of red vs blue