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	Three of a kind Every time I see the Rev. Jeremiah P. Wright holding forth on TV, I think of Jimmy Carter and Zell Miller. All three angry men have spent the latter parts of their careers railing against former allies and sullying their own national reputations. As you may know, pastor Wright, longtime and onetime spiritual adviser to presidential candidate Barack Obama, has been revealed as a strident critic of the United States, a nation damned by the minister for its alleged terrorist activities. The discovery of Wright and his radical views inflicted a serious wound on the presidential campaign that Sen. Obama ... Read Article »
	U.S.'s one-party system I can predict the winner of the presidential election even now; the government. In a one-party system, that's how things work. One-party system? Yes. The American political scene makes much more sense if you think of the two parties as two divisions of the same party. Admittedly that is hard to do at first. All American politics is presented as a tooth-and-claw rivalry between Republicans and Democrats. It is certainly true that elections determine who holds office among the parties' candidates, and who holds office determines whose cronies get sinecures and contracts. That does give the appearance of real competition. ... Read Article »
	Following dolphins home My friend, Elizabeth Johnson, is a boat captain on Tybee Island. For a living she takes anglers 50 to 75 miles off the coast and tells them how to bait up and where to cast and how to reel in. She's the kind of person who goes at life like Earl Scruggs goes at banjo, which is full tilt boogie. Thirty percent of the salt marsh in the U.S. lies off the Georgia coast, and it's a beautiful wilderness out there, an immense and salty meadow of spartina cut by water trails. The marsh is a labyrinth of tidal creeks ... Read Article »
	Congress must rebuild itself With their promise of new energy on Capitol Hill, congressional elections are always a time for hope. This year's contests will be especially significant, for Congress is listing and the nation desperately needs it to right itself. No single issue is the problem. It's Congress itself. The people we elect to fill the House and Senate next January will need to set about not just doing the people's business, but fixing the institution so that they can do the people's business. At some level, Americans understand this. The overwhelmingly negative polling numbers Congress has been putting up recently may be ... Read Article »
	Shining sunlight on Georgia's child welfare system Sometimes it takes someone from the outside making noise to draw our attention to necessary changes. And that's just what a national child advocacy organization did last week when it issued a report critiquing all 50 states' laws on the release of information about deaths and serious injuries from child abuse. In a report, "State Secrecy and Child Deaths in the United States," First Star and the Children's Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law graded each state on two issues. The first was whether the state allows public access to juvenile court abuse and neglect ... Read Article »
	How lucky can Republicans be? Bill Shipp column for April 27, 2008 Read Article »