Thursday night, March 28, just before midnight, the gavel came down and brought the 2013 legislative session of the Georgia General Assembly to a close.

As always, the challenges were many, but it turned out to be a very productive session. I wanted to write a column and mention a couple of the more high profile items that were adopted this year and will write a subsequent column with a list of many of the bills that passed that did not receive as much media coverage.

I hope this will be helpful as residents seek information on what the General Assembly worked on during this session. Read More»

Our universities are typically diverse in every way except thought, and examples abound of students paying a price for straying from the liberal script. Nevertheless, we have high hopes for our finest schools close to home, like Emory University, where President James Wagner is under fire.

Wagner has been censured by the university faculty, condemned from various quarters of the officially sensitive, and now awaits a confidence vote by the faculty as they press the Board of Trustees to toss him under the bus. Read More»

Spring has arrived and, once again, Fayette County will be celebrating Earth Day. This year the gathering will be on Saturday, April 27.

The Earth Day Committee is looking for volunteers and additional groups that would like to display or demonstrate your products or projects that relate to caring for the world around us.

If you are interested, visit our website at: www.fayettecoearthday.org. Read More»

Boy, can people be mean. I’m thinking particularly of a reader named Samantha, whose scolding of me turned into a scalding.

By the time she was finished with her vicious tirade, I was skinned, boiled and over-cooked. It didn’t make me mad, though. It didn’t even hurt my feelings. It made me sad. Real sad.

She wrote to point out a factual error I had made in a column about the King James Bible when I said it was the first English translation. I was wrong and I apologize for my mis-information. It was not the first English translation. Read More»

Genetic engineering is in the news again. I say, bring it on.

When they passed out the genes that give women a sense of style, skill with a curling iron, artistry with the paint pots, I drew blanks. Genetic engineering might be the answer.

A church committee chairperson called and invited me to participate in a church fashion show. I agreed, thinking I might give other glamour-challenged women hope. Read More»

Dr. Sam Brown was my family’s doctor when I was a boy. I remember him being a kindly man who smiled a lot, especially when dealing with fidgety kids. I don’t recall that I was ever panicked about going to see Dr. Brown as I was when I was going to the dentist.

When I was 7 years old, I was in my parent’s home in Kingsport, Tenn., and, strangely, everything seemed to go distant. My mother, in the kitchen, appeared to be a football field’s length away from me and my hearing became muffled. Apparently, I then passed out. Read More»

No matter how careful you are, sometimes things just don’t always work out the way you planned. That’s why you gotta have a backup plan. I learned this lesson early on in life — at the tender age of 8, to be exact — and it all started with a stick.

Unusual? Yes, but where I learned that lesson was even more so. To do so, I actually had to go out on a limb — the limb of giant oak tree some 50 feet above the meanest kid that ever lived on Flamingo Street. Read More»

I recently became a new member in a special club. Everyone already in the club before me has bragged and bragged about how wonderful it is, and I’m finding out that they are, of course, absolutely right. It’s The Grandparents Club, and I’m now “Grandpa Kollmeyer” to my new-born grandson Philip. Amen! Hallelujah! Praise The Lord! Read More»

Bill and Hillary Clinton have endorsed gay marriage, completely reversing their support of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman, and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton calls herself a “progressive.” It’s funny: I wrote an entire book on Hillary Clinton, and never once heard her call herself a “progressive.”

Well, that’s just as well. The progressive tag fits best. After all, that’s what she and other liberals are doing: they are ever evolving, changing, progressing along to something. Read More»

“If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.” — Abraham Lincoln

History is full of warnings about what happens when people follow public opinion instead of standing by their principles. In its most extreme manifestation, public opinion might well become mob rule when vigilantes take the law into their own hands. Read More»