Opinions

By Susan Harper

As my sweet little mother, wrapped head to toe in a cozy quilt, was lifted gently from her bed last night and rolled down the long hallway of her home, headed for the door and for the dark hearse in the driveway, a song started singing itself quietly in my head, almost as if she were whispering it from under the quilt: “Pack up all my care and woe, here I go, singin’ low. Bye bye, blackbird.” It sounded half jaunty and half regretful, as if she were looking ahead to “where somebody waits for me” and yet also looking back to where her suddenly bereft children stood speechless in the hall. How could we let her go?
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Finally, someone is doing something about the absurd notion of “zero tolerance” in school law. State Senator Emanuel Jones has introduced a bill to ban the mandatory, knee-jerk reaction to minor school offenses.
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By Willis Cook

If you’re like me, the one thing you have heard all your life is that government deficits are unsustainable. Sooner or later a “day of reckoning” will come, whatever that means. But the strange thing is that we have been hearing this warning for a generation or more and we have had virtually continuous federal deficits during all that time.

And now with a deficit projected to be $1.6 trillion — almost four times the deficit under George Bush — no one, especially no one in the government, seems particularly concerned.
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By Mark Beardsley

Following the debacle (for the Republicans) of 2008, they can be forgiven for seeing in the Massachusetts election results last week as a cause for celebration. I mean, Ted Kennedy replaced by a Republican? It’s champagne time.

As an un-republican, I, of course, am never thrilled by the election of someone of that stripe, but neither am I dismayed. You get used to such things living in Gawgia. [Full Story »] 

Brace yourselves. The U.S. Supreme Court just overturned a portion of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill that limits corporations’ ability to influence elections. In short, the ruling allows corporations, including those owned by foreigners, to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence the political process.
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By Mark Beardsley

It’s a revisiting of the 2004 tsunami, just closer to home and more accessible to the media — unimaginable destruction, an incalculable human toll, unfathomable devastation in a country where at the best of times things are very, very bad. [Full Story »] 

By Mark Beardsley

The General Assembly had not even convened, but the legislation allowing me to carry a pistol to church or to a University of Georgia football game was progressing through the legislature last week. [Full Story »] 

By Willis Cook

Exclusive telephone interview with Sen. Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader.

“Senator, this is Willis Cook, representing The Commerce News.”

“Yes, I know it well.”
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