After another terrorist incident last week, it is obvious that Great Britain is paying a huge price for allowing millions of Muslims to enter the country largely unsupervised. If those bombs had gone off in central London, scores might have been killed, and it was just luck the lethal cars were discovered before they blew.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing increasing Democratic criticism for using Mark Penn as her presidential campaign’s chief strategist while he also serves as CEO of Burson-Marsteller, the public relations giant with corporate clients whose policies run opposite to Clinton’s.

That Americans, after all these years of tearing their hair out and trying everything in the wide world else, still can’t iron out their racial predicaments tells us numerous things we need to understand.

Amnesty is dead. Now, let’s talk about the other “A” word. It’s the word and the concept completely abandoned during the immigration debate: assimilation.

Whatever happened to Warren Buffett, the world’s third-richest man? Guilt, a feeling of being blessed by luck, forgotten lessons — who knows? In any case, Buffett now believes that government should redistribute the wealth earned by others to those who did not earn it.

Just in time for the Fourth of July, John Lott, author of the groundbreaking 1998 book “More Guns, Less Crime,” has released another amazing book: “Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t.” This book provides studies and analysis proving that your every right-wing instinct is based on sound economic analysis.

Now that the Democrats are raking in more campaign dough than the Republicans, it will be interesting to see if the media demonize the role of money in politics as they have in past elections when the GOP was winning the contributions race.

Washington, Indiana — It's a long way from Washington, D.C., to Washington, Ind., where my father was born a century ago next January and where I am attending a Thomas family reunion. On the drive from Indianapolis, one passes towns that could fill a Norman Rockwell album. My favorite is named Freedom because, though the town has only a single flashing caution light, it displays many flags. If I don't slow down, I will miss both.

With the White House, the leaders of both political parties, and the media all solidly behind the “comprehensive” immigration “reform” bill, how could it be stopped in the Senate, as it was last week?

It’s too easy to quit these days. Quitting, in fact, is seen as an acceptable path, almost a virtue. Don’t like a course in school? Drop it. Don’t like the pastor? Get another one. Don’t like your church? Find a new one. Work a little tough? Quit. Having a rocky marriage? Get a divorce. Parents a little hard on you? Run away from home. Unexpected pregnancy? Kill it.

At age 7, my time had finally come. The years of waiting and anticipating were over. The day of passage from just being a little brother to — well, someone important — was now at hand. My dad had chosen me to pick out the Fourth of July Watermelon.

When I was doing the stories on the Line Creek families over the past few weeks, I received an email from Carol Hoyt who lives in Kansas. Carol had been reading the stories on the Internet and said that she was from another Line Creek family - the Grays. Well, the Grays were no strangers to me. It seemed that everywhere I went searching for information on those four Line Creek families, I stumbled across a Gray who married into one.

“We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who comes on at 5, she can tell you ‘bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye. It’s interesting when people die — give us dirty laundry.”

Hundreds of residents in Fayette and Fulton in 2006 were introduced to a chemical mix called MOCAP wash water, a concoction that contains the organophosphate pesticide ethoprop and the chemical odorant propyl mercaptan. By government accounts, the onion-like chemical emissions originated at the Philips Services Corp.(PSC) waste treatment plant on Ga. Highway 92 just outside Fairburn.

Whenever Miss Virgie, my beloved mentor formerly of Pascagoula, Miss., now of Carson City, Nevada, learns I am dating a new guy, she is quick to pounce.

Two years ago at the Peachtree City 4th of July parade, I showed my daughter how to stand respectfully straight and silent with right hand over her heart as the honor guard with our flag passed.

“Was it worth it?” they asked.

Was it worth standing in line for two-and-a-half hours to get a dozen barely legible words scribbled in the fly page of a book I hadn’t even seen reviewed?

I have been a small-membership church pastor for about 12 years now. My first appointment was waaaaay out in the country, which was a small cultural shock for a city-slicker Yankee like me. However, I tried to get into the spirit of things. I learned to quilt, to crochet, to sew and eventually to can tomatoes and make salsa. I even made ketchup once just to say I did it.

I'm sitting in the green room and have just completed the makeup portion of the program. I've just been told by MSNBC that my first "hit" or interview will be at 9:15 a.m.

The Edwards campaign is apparently still running low on donations, so this week they went back to their top fund-raiser: me.

Every night around 11 o’clock my wife reluctantly relinquishes the remote control so that I can select the local newscast we will watch. The scene is familiar to millions of people for whom the TV remote can sometimes cause marital friction and spark a battle for the power to determine what others watch.

Immigration reform is dead. But before conservatives who killed this bill start popping champagne corks, they ought to consider the following.

WASHINGTON — There is no need to wait until a new president is elected next year for the great national health care debate. It is underway right now, disguised as a routine extension of an immensely popular, non-controversial 10-year-old program of providing coverage to poor children.

It may seem too early to be talking about whom the Republican Party might select as its vice-presidential nominee in 2008. After all, there’s not yet even a clear view of whom the GOP presidential nominee will be.

When the Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the Bush administration did not act unconstitutionally by sponsoring conferences largely designed to teach faith-based groups about federal grant applications, hard-core secularists were aghast: Here comes theocracy!

“The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” — Thomas Jefferson

This is an article about a man who did not want me to write it.

A few weeks ago, I gave a commencement speech at a Catholic elementary school. I received the invitation from a 13-year-old young lady, Elisabeth, who began listening to my radio show at 6-and-a-half years of age, who has now finished the eighth grade and prepares, next semester, to enter high school.

Just about the most difficult lesson for first-year economics students, and sometimes graduate students, is that economic theory, and for that matter any scientific theory, is positive or non-normative.

Among the interesting people encountered by my wife and me, during some recent vacation travel, were a small group of adolescent boys from a Navajo reservation. They were being led on a bicycle tour by a couple of white men, one of whom was apparently their teacher on the reservation.

Free speech — which means, to entirely too many self-styled liberals, “speech I agree with” — won a modest victory this week in the U.S. Supreme Court. A conservative majority of five reminded their four liberal brothers and sisters that the First Amendment to the Constitution encourages us to chatter on till kingdom come.