By PAUL C. CAMPOS, Scripps Howard News Service

Rocky Mountain News editorial page editor and columnist Vincent Carroll has taken exception to my observation last week that -- especially in the context of contemporary Middle East politics -- the word "terrorism" is gradually being drained of meaning.

Over the last decade I've written more than 500 opinion articles, but, to the best of my recollection, I've never written a column on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The reasons are simple: First, it's an immensely complex issue about which I have very little actual knowledge (it's unfortunate this fact doesn't deter pundits more often).

Barack Obama got himself into hot water recently with various liberal groups by inviting evangelical preacher Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Obama's inauguration.

The strange and sad story of Bernard Madoff -- the legendary Wall Street financier who appears to have been running the largest Ponzi scheme in history -- is yet another installment in a cautionary tale that can never be told often enough.

Upton Sinclair once remarked that it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.
This observation is borne out by the reactions of Barry McCaffrey to the extraordinarily damming revelations contained in a very long front-page New York Times story, regarding McCaffrey's role as a military analyst for NBC.

Last week I gave a talk before a local theatre's production of Neil LaBute's play "Fat Pig." The play revolves around a workplace romance between a conventionally attractive (read: slim) man and a fat woman.

About ten years ago, I read a remarkable essay about an obscure tennis player named Michael Joyce. Joyce, a Californian who at his professional peak was ranked just inside the world's top 100 players. He was attempting to qualify for the main draw of a big tournament in Montreal, and the author of the essay, David Foster Wallace, chronicled the attempt.

Summer, 1990. I'm looking something up in the Harvard Law Review, and I notice the name of the review president on the issue's masthead: Barack Obama. My first thought (I'm white, by the way): A black guy is president of the Harvard Law Review. My second thought: He's got one of those "radical" names politicized people gave their kids in the 1960s.

A man I know has been doing a lot of flying lately while, among other things, conducting a more than normally problematic love affair. His agitated mental state has made him particularly prone to noticing and being annoyed by the absurdities of what has been labeled "security theater."