Today's Opinions

Two of the Nobel prizes awarded over the past few days struck us as noteworthy in respect to the USA.
The first is that awarded last Monday to three economists, including Professor Peter Diamond, of MIT.
What makes his winning particularly interesting is the fact that President Obama nominated him some months ago to a vacancy on the Federal Reserve Board.
However, one of the Republicans’ leading intellectual pygmies in the Senate, Alabama’s Richard Shelby, put a hold on his nomination so that it could not even be considered for confirmation.

According to the 2010 tax reappraisal, our 1-acre lakefront lot is valued at $200,000, twice its value five years ago; our house is valued at $100,000 more.
To understand the method used for evaluating lakefront land, we had a helpful and informative meeting with our tax assessor, Teresa Kirkham.
Here are some comments that may help others regarding their lakefront reappraisal values.
She gave us a list of 58 lakefront property sales in 2008 and 2009. One hundred qualified-sale (no duress) properties were used in the appraisals, but usually 200 are used.

By LEONARD PITTS JR.
Lyndon Johnson once said of Gerald Ford that  he “played too much football with his helmet off.”
Theodore Roosevelt once called William Howard Taft “a fathead with the brains of a guinea pig.”
Harper’s Weekly once described Ulysses S. Grant as “a drunken Democrat dragged out of the Galena (Ill.) gutter.”