WASHINGTON, D.C. — On May 15, 1963, the late Rowland Evans and I published our first column. That makes today (Thursday) the 45th anniversary (the first 30 years under the Evans & Novak byline) of the nation’s longest-running current syndicated political column. It achieved that distinction Feb. 27 with the death of William F. Buckley Jr., whose column started 13 months before ours.

Some people think that the reason the public misunderstands so many issues is that these issues are too “complex” for most voters. But is that really so?

With gas prices topping $4 a gallon in some regions of the country, now may not be the best time to say something positive about “big oil,” but here goes anyway.

Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place.

We've been down to Lake West Point, camping at R. Shaefer Heard Park with about 25 friends, as we do twice a year.

I don’t have to tell you how the junk slouching out of Hollywood seems to counter your best efforts to teach your kids character and values.

By Ed Sherwood

So, Rev. Jeremiah Wright is back in the news. That is not a surprise. What is surprising is that the controversy over Barack Obama’s former pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has missed an important issue.

My friend, Susan, married the other day. Been claiming that she was going to. Then, she up and did it. Just like that.

Do you own a cell phone? Seems like we can’t do without this piece of 21st century technology. They’re a great convenience when used appropriately, but can be a safety hazard if we’re not careful. How many wrecks have occurred because the driver was talking on the phone instead of watching the road? Or attempting to text message and drive at the same time?

Just as I thought it was safe to move on … I received first some information from Frances Hanson Arnold on her Jesse Cole and second a letter from Ken Arnold which gave further information on this same Jesse. Because of the area they lived in, I would bet dollars to doughnuts these Coles are related to our other Jesse (son of Robert Cole and Elizabeth Fambrough) and even maybe to Marcus Cole of Butts County from last week's column. That is what really drove me to include this Jesse of Frances and Ken's. This Jesse, like Marcus, had a daughter named "Aletha" or "Eletha" Cole. Now, that is not your usual, run-of-the-mill female name and I thought it was worth mentioning.

“It’s a recession,” said former President Harry Truman, “when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.”

“You’d think that boy was raised in a barn!” my mother would often exclaim when she saw someone exhibiting minor uncivil behaviors. These “incivilities” may not always rise to the level of obnoxiousness, but they are still irritating enough to gain notice and to cost bystanders some level of comfort.

Are you ready for hope and change? Barack Obama better hope his bitter half has a change of attitude if she expects to assume the title of first lady in November.

The Hillary Clinton-John McCain gambit on sky-high gasoline prices — suspend federal gasoline taxes for the summer — is a tactic sensible voters might constructively latch onto.

The fact the deck had been both swept off and stained a deep redwood didn’t startle The Wife. The fact that for two nights the back door stood closed but unlocked did.

Sometimes unrelated events nevertheless tell a coherent story.

One newspaper story that caught my eye recently was about two high-powered schools in South Korea where Korean girls study 15 hours a day, preparing themselves for tests to get into elite colleges in the United States. Harvard, Yale and Princeton already have 34 students from those schools.

“It doesn’t matter who gets the credit as long as the job gets done.”

Someone told me either Harry Truman or Ralph Waldo Emerson said that, but Bartlett’s Quotations does not confirm it.

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let’s look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.

While the Rev. Jeremiah Wright continues to play out in sound bites on cable TV and talk radio, it isn’t Wright who might be president. It is Barack Obama who wants that job.

For a couple of years, I had been trying to get Mama to write my column one week. Well aware of how much readers loved her, I knew they would be tickled to get her side of our story.

In my years of ministry, I’ve come to learn a lot about not just older adults, but about society’s attitude towards aging and older people.

We're going to pick up where we left off last week with information from documents generously contributed by Tex Dix of Spalding County, a descendant of Emily Jane Cole and John Singley. The problem we had in the beginning was identifying the names of all the children of Jesse Cole (son of Robert Cole and Elizabeth Fambrough) and his first wife, Elizabeth Crawford. Elizabeth died before 1836, Jesse remarried, and all the "first" children were grown by the time the 1850 census was taken naming all his "new" children. We knew of only two sons for sure, Robert S. and William Thomas Cole, and that was only because someone had written stories about them in "Memoirs of Georgia" in 1895 and in "Coweta Chronicles" in 1928.

I came very close to committing the unpardonable sin recently. Actually, it wasn’t THE unpardonable sin spoken about by Jesus in the New Testament, but it came pretty close.

Barack Obama looked pale and wan at what he called his “big press conference” about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Tuesday afternoon. Numb. Chastened. Defeated. Extolled for his eloquence, Obama stuttered and stammered his way through the question-and-answer session. It appeared he was having an out-of-body experience.

Politics is crazier even than we sometimes think. Half the time, it seems, instead of addressing issues of great solemnity with the attention they deserve — foreign foes, energy supplies, government overspending — we talk endlessly about ... would you believe, Jeremiah Wright?

Many years ago, a great hitter named Paul Waner was nearing the end of his long career. He entered a ballgame with 2,999 hits — one hit away from the landmark total of 3,000, which so many hitters want to reach, but which relatively few actually do reach.

ATLANTA — Residents of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Memphis and dozens of other cities around the nation who are opposed to the merger of Atlanta-based Delta Airlines with Northwest Airlines may be shocked to learn that less than 50 percent of Georgians are supportive of the proposal. Delta is based in Atlanta.

While it’s politically popular to impose confiscatory taxes on America’s 40 million tobacco smokers, there are a number of consequences one might consider, but let’s start out with a quiz. If a carton of cigarettes sells for $160 in New York City, and $35 in North Carolina, what do you predict will happen? If you answered tons of cigarettes will be going up I-95 from North Carolina to New York City, go to the head of the class.

When I was a little girl, living in Harrisburg, Pa., two of my playmates were Jewish. I didn’t know what that meant so I watched what they did and listened to what they said to see if I could figure out what “being Jewish” meant.