It has been heartening to me the number of grandmas whose grandbabies have been diagnosed with autism. Whether at church or Curves or the Kroger, grandparents of autistic children come up to me with huge smiles and saying, “We have an autistic grandchild too and you’d never know it.”

President Obama’s appointment of Rashad Hussain, his deputy associate counsel, as special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the second largest inter-governmental organization after the United Nations, charged with safeguarding and protecting “the interests of the Muslim world,” should be of serious concern to Congress and the American public.

Last week the General Assembly convened for legislative days 18-20 of the 2010 session of the Georgia legislature. We have officially reached the half-way point of the 40-day session and there is still much work to be done.

In the second full week of the legislative session, a Republican state senator introduced a brand new property tax overhaul designed to save you money. Under this legislation, he says, appeals will move faster and assessments will be fairer.

By Jacob G. Hornberger

In preparation for two recent back-to-back blizzards, residents in the Washington, D.C., area emptied the shelves of neighborhood grocery stores. Notwithstanding the pre-blizzard panic buying, what’s interesting is that no one was freaking out about whether the stores would be adequately stocked after the blizzards.

In the home in which I grew up, the daily newspaper was almost as important to our everyday lives as the Bible.

Daddy came home every night, finished his supper – which Mama brought to him on a tray as he relaxed in his favorite recliner – then picked up the paper and read every page.

When I was a 25-year-old pastor I had better answers to the questions of life than I do now. When I took my first church at 23, I knew I didn’t know anything about almost everything. By the time two years had passed, I had all the answers.

Few things in life are as clear as the futility of a real debate on the clarity of America’s religious origins.

“Debate,” I said? Lay a finger, unsuspectingly, on The New York Times Magazine’s inspection of the attempt by so-called Christian fundamentalists to overhaul history textbooks, and you require treatment for first-degree burns.

The snowball was the size of a grapefruit, or at least it felt that big when it slammed into the back of my head. With the force of a sledgehammer, it almost bowled me over. Snow then slipped down the inside of my shirt. The wetness brought with it the frigid hand of Old Man Winter.

If eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, incessant distractions are the way that politicians take away our freedoms, in order to enhance their own power and longevity in office.

The Census Bureau estimates that the life cycle cost of the 2010 Census will be from $13.7 billion to $14.5 billion, making it the costliest census in the nation’s history.

At a local high school sporting event recently, a few parents were offended that one school’s supporters sang along with the ending of the national anthem and changed the last word to support their team. The offended parents feel that is disrespectful to our troops and want an apology. The identifying details don’t really matter.

With a sense of literary tragedy, the exit of John DeCotis, Ph.D., coincided with a bitter cold front, snow and the closing of our schools, an image ripe with symbolism.

Last week the Georgia General Assembly convened on Monday through Thursday for legislative days 14-17 of the 2010 Georgia General Assembly session. There were several important bills considered on the floor of the House; also a number of significant bills are working their way through the legislative committee process.

By Gov. Sonny Perdue

Last month I proposed a new plan that will transform the way we compensate K-12 teachers and leaders in our state. It will put them on the same playing field as our state’s top coaches who are rewarded for consistently winning games.

Like any self-respecting Southerner, it’s hard for me to pass up reading a well-written obituary. Especially when it runs in the Wall Street Journal and begins with she was “a dash of Southern class in a raucous old boys club.”

This is the winter our grandkids will mean when they tell their grandchildren, “You call this snow? Ha! Once we had snow so deep I could stand up in it and disappear. This is nothing! Predicting another 18 inches tonight? Pshaw! We had three feet in Virginia in the Winter of 2010, without drifting. In just one day. With another two feet predicted for the next day.”

We’re on the countdown to another wedding, and I look forward to being father of the bride while also performing the wedding ceremony. We had our first family wedding in November, 2008, when my second-born daughter wed at University of Georgia chapel in Athens. It was a beautiful event, and she was a gorgeous bride.

It was 40 years ago, Friday, Feb. 13, 1970, that I arrived at Parris Island, South Carolina at “zero dark-thirty” a.m. I’d like to say that I was motivated to enlist by intense patriotism during a time of war, but the simple truth is less honorable.

Heavy weekend snowfall closed down the capital of the United States. Not that many outside the Washington Beltway were sorry about it. Possibly — by their reasoning — the blizzard was God’s gift to decent government, a holiday from the ceaseless commotion, braggadocio and show-offing that have become the capital’s principle pastimes.

I’ve learned many life lessons during my 51-plus years on this spinning blue orb. Some have been easy to learn, some have been very difficult, and there are still a few I’ve yet to master. Knowing the perfect gift for Valentine’s Day is at the top of my “yet to be mastered” list.

Most of us want to be fair, in the sense of treating everyone equally. We want laws to be applied the same to everyone. We want educational, economic or other criteria for rewards to be the same as well.

“Do you mean he is taller than me am?” sarcastically barked Dr. Martin Rosenberg, my high school English teacher, to one of the students in our class.

“What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “The Philosophy of History,” 1837)

When times get tough, you had better check your priorities.

When you view our economic crisis through the prism of what is truly important to our country, a lot of things can be thrown out while we should be truly fighting for others to remain.

By E. Frank Stephenson

The General Assembly convened this year facing the daunting challenge of closing a billion-dollar budget hole, partly caused by the slumping economy and the consequent decrease in tax revenues.

It is the absence of simple things that has made life so complicated. Those simple things cost nothing yet can make you feel like a million bucks.

Last week the Georgia General Assembly was in session for days 9-13 of the 2010 legislative session. Significant work continued in committees all around the Capitol and the flow of bills on the floor of the House began to increase. In addition, several important pieces of legislation were introduced last week in both the House and the Senate.

When I look back on the 10 or so years that I worked at Peachtree Medical Center, I see the history of medical services in my new hometown. Occasionally another member joined the staff, but for at least its first decade, Dr. Henry Drake’s staff consisted of Bonnie, Juanita, Mary Ann and me.