By MARK ALEXANDER

To ensure we Americans never offend anyone — particularly fanatics intent on killing us — law enforcement and security screeners are not allowed to “profile” people in public places or security checkpoints.

By HAROLD BROWN

Children can produce a remarkable horse drawing from a numbered, connect-the-dot outline, but confusion reigns when dots are missing or numbers are missing. Watching the efforts of activists to link mercury from electric power plants to danger to unborn babies of pregnant mothers is much like watching a confused young “artist” try to make sense of unnumbered dots.

By BENITA DODD

The Water Council has gone public across Georgia, holding town hall meetings to present to the public its draft policy recommendations on managing the state’s water quantity.

ATLANTA - Georgia Chamber of Commerce President and CEO George Israel July 11 condemned the remarks of the president of the State Bar of Georgia, who has recently made comments tantamount of “the involvement of business folks in the democratic process pollutes the purity of the judicial process.”

By Dr. James R. Harrigan

G. K. Chesterton, an Englishman, remarked in 1922 that ”America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.”

By Dr. Robert Balling

Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” open[ed] around the country [recently]. In the film Gore pulls together evidence from every corner of the globe to convince us that climate change is happening fast, we are to blame, and if we don’t act immediately, our Earth will be all but ruined. However, as you sit through the film, consider the following inconvenient truths:

By Jerry Bowyer

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and has been reprinted with the author’s permission.

By Steve Forbes

One of the great vulnerabilities of capitalism is the perception that it is somehow less than moral, if not positively amoral. A common view of business was depicted in the movie “Wall Street,” in which Michael Douglas’s character made famous the phrase, “Greed is good.”

By Hans Zeiger
VirtueOnline Correspondent
www.virtueonline.org

COLUMBUS, OHIO (6/20/06) — The House of Deputies of the 75th General Convention of the Episcopal Church today overwhelmingly refused to even consider a resolution that affirmed Jesus Christ as the “only name by which any person may be saved.”

By George Archibald

Arizona’s two U.S. senators and House members are at loggerheads on the immigration issue. They are a snapshot of the nation.

By DENNIS CHASE

As a biologist, I sometimes become involved with development and government issues that impact the environment. I usually represent the Line Creek Association of Fayette County, though sometimes it makes more sense to handle topics as my personal position. As the representative of this association, or on my own, comments always relate to the health of our environment.

By JENNIFER GAYNOR

Higher education. That’s what we generally call the four years after secondary school, implying that college is the academic summit of one’s career as a student.

By JOEL SCHWARTZ

Americans spend tens of billions dollars each year on measures to reduce emissions of smog-forming pollutants from motor vehicles, power plants, and a host of other sources. Costs continue to rise over time, as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tightens its ozone standards and adopts ever more stringent regulations.

By HAROLD BROWN

How quickly we forget. Today the push to preserve a single tree in a metropolitan area can become an environmental mission that unites neighborhoods and irritates property owners, produces overbearing ordinances and sometimes results in tragedy when ailing trees damage homes and injure people.

By RANDY GADDO

This year on May 27, just before Memorial Day on May 29, in Peachtree City you will see men and women standing outside various stores such as Wal-Mart, Kroger’s and Kmart offering small red silk flowers with green stems.

By Dr. Dirk Mateer

Like most people, I feel the sting when it costs $55 to fill up the family minivan. As a result, I’ve been driving around town more often in our Civic, which gets twice the gas mileage. I suspect many of you are wrestling with similar choices.

By Marvin Folkertsma, Ph.D.

In a fascinating documentary about Dwight Eisenhower, entitled, “Ike: The War Years,” one particularly arresting scene shows the general (superbly played by Robert Duvall) standing before a room filled with reporters, all ravenous to snatch the least lagniappes of hard news about impending military operations.

President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez have joined the chorus of politicians clamoring for more investigations of “price gouging.” Senate majority leader Bill Frist promises that “if the facts warrant it, I will support a federal anti-price gouging law.”

By BENITA DODD

You don’t have to have your ear to the tracks to hear the hullabaloo blaming “big oil” and Americans’ “addiction” to foreign oil for alarmingly high energy prices. Once again, snake-oil salesmen are out-shouting reasoned discussions about three-dollar gas.

By James Bovard

Another poll has confirmed that most Americans are constitutionally without a clue. Americans’ political illiteracy is good news for Washington politicians hungry to seize more power. But this ignorance is one of the most perilous elements of attention deficit democracy.

By Senator Johnny Isakson

When I was running for Senate in 2004, illegal immigration ranked second only to the war on terror among the issues people asked me about on the campaign trail. And since I was elected, it’s the issue people still ask me about more than any other.

By KATHY COX

Like many Georgians, I watched the members of the 48th Brigade Combat Team return home from Iraq with joy in my heart and tears in my eyes.

By Chad Thompson
and Warren Throckmorton

For over a decade, parents have warred with gay advocacy groups who want to infuse school curriculum with messages about homosexuality.

By JILL PROUTY

This is the second installment in a series of commentary by Peachtree City Library Administrator Jill Prouty about reading.

By HERMAN CAIN

Hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens and their supporters voluntarily stepped out of the shadows last week by waving the Mexican flag and marching in the streets.

By BENITA M. DODD

Hindsight being 20/20, the critics who back in 1997 were doom-saying the deregulation of Georgia’s natural gas market are back again, gleefully pointing to high energy bills as a reason to return to the good old days when energy was “cheap” under the watchful reins of Big Brother.

By Rep. David Lucas

In 1997, then-state Senator Sonny Perdue met with representatives from the Atlanta Gas Light Co., at the office of his grain company in Bonaire. He agreed to carry legislation to deregulate Georgia’s retail natural gas business.

By MARK WESTMORELAND

Out of the clutter I cry to you, O Lord. From behind the heaps of excess and yellowing stacks of good intentions, from beneath the mound of past mistakes counted and recounted and old regrets still dripping with guilt, I call to you. I am weary from the load of grudges inordinately treasured; and my eyes ache from numbering the sins of others. I have carried it all too far and far enough.

By JILL PROUTY

(This is the first in a series of commentary by Peachtree City Library Administrator Jill Prouty about reading.)