I love it! The people who are so dismissive of Leviticus when it comes to tattoos are the same ones who thump it as carved in granite against gay people.
Truth told, most Bible quoting is just verse out of context decoration for whatever the fears and passions of the moment happen to be.

@Abbesays: Oh, please. 5 points via the Macon Hwy. You must be new here.

Oconee county clearly owes most of its prosperity to Athens-Clarke County, much as ring suburbs act as parasites on the cities that drive their economies elsewhere all across the USA. Highly paid folks move to archaic, tiny jurisdictions with low property taxes (fueled here by intense unplanned and "big box" development at the county line that feeds off of Athens), while leaving behind the problems that their taxes would be used to ameliorate: low wage workers at the source institutions (UGa, Hospitals, etc), descendants of former manufacturing now outsourced, and vast tracts of UGa land off the tax roles. Why Oconee and not some of the other neighboring counties? Closer proximity to UGa, Athens' better neighborhoods, and Atlanta.

@Used2baFreeCountry: The state only requires church corporations (secular legal entities) to provide complete insurance, including birth control, to their secular employees. Churches don't have to teach that birth control is okay for their members, and no one has to believe in or take advantage of that birth control if they don't want it. It's not different than if you hired a Jewish person as your church bookkeeper--you wouldn't be able to impose celebrating Easter on them.

Don't confuse however your church teaches about marriage or your beliefs about marriage with the very concrete legal contract called marriage by the state. Part of the pain for southern conservatives is that they grew up in a world where everyone was Methobapterian with similar experiences, beliefs, and expectations, or they were invisible. Now they live in a wider world. So what if your neighbor doesn't celebrate Halloween or puts out lights for Diwali? Relax, it's not as horrible as you are afraid it is, but you might have to think.

@Ferrol Katz: sounds more like he is a narcissist with a persecution complex

False dilemma, John. Firstly, the Greek Orthodox church is not "unchanging" as even a cursory glance at its history and theology will attest, though it does seem stuck in a provincial memory of the last Byzantine dynasty.

Second, the Bible and your church both seem to long for a King and Priesthood to be the mirror of heaven on earth, but you seem to have accommodated quite well to living in a country that is secular in civil matters and practices the separation of church and state without coming to any harm. Indeed humankind has flourished under secular democracies and made far more progress than under absolute monarchies. Syria, anyone?

Many of the commentators here still don't seem to understand the difference between sacraments or practices in their religion and the civil contract called marriage. In the USA, you can join a church and subscribe to any rules it puts on you and any interpretations of life it promulgates: eat candy on Tuesdays, the earth was settled by aliens, what have you, without fear being persecuted by the state, though it won't necessarily protect you from ridicule. Your church can establish whatever rules it wants for you to follow about marriage and you can volunteer to follow them: no divorce, wear special underwear, whatever. You can't impose them on other people just because you believe they are true or it's not fun doing them if no one else has to do them, too.

The state regulates property rights of couples and insures the physical well being and rights of children, if any (and that's a big "if"), with a secular contract called "marriage" and confers various rights and benefits to those relationships.

In other words, my partner and I can take care of our own happiness without bothering the government. However, the government offers protections and benefits to its citizens that we think we are as entitled to as other couples for the same reasons they have them, because we are citizens. You can keep your sacraments, thanks, and have our blessing on your enjoyment of them.

Lots of money to be made by political contributors building buildings. No money to be made staffing them well. Interesting to compare the quality and quantity of the sports related infrastructure here to the education related. Guess which one is state of the art?

@TeeWee: You might have a point, but who can tell unless you make it in some form that readers of English can understand?

In the timeline in the print edition (slideshow here) several important things related to media failure were left out (wonder why?):

The Valerie Plame outing in retaliation for her husband's negative report about uranium sales to Iraq out of Africa.

Co-opting news organizations by "embedding" reporters.

Staged PR stories such as the Rescue of Jessica Lynch and Toppling the Saddam Statue in Baghdad.

Plus no mention of the current effort to rebrand the whole notion of why we went to war by the instigators, most recently as "a noble war of liberation" at CPAC

Anyone care to investigate which Boards of Directors Tony Blair, Cheney, Rummy, et al., now have cushy seats on? Lots of money to be made off of a war. It would be interesting for someone to follow some of it.

So many commentators seem unaware that the House of Reps is in charge of the money, not the President. He cannot run up trillions in debt. It's fine if you don't care for Obama, but when dislike moves over to pathological it gets ridiculous. There are those people who rant daily as if the more they post, the more sage they will seem, when in fact they read more and more as if they sit behind a computer all day with nothing better to do when they could be at therapy for their anger issues.

Tina makes some good points here. There are a lot of victims of bank gamblers: its not just some neutral wobbling of the economic cycle or some unavoidable change like the weather. The people who caused the problem are not paying for it, while many who had nothing to do with it are. People who believe financial organizations should "self regulate" need only look as far as the recent horse meat scandal in the European food supply.

Things may have changed for the better in many ways here, yet there was still a display ad for the complete Amos and Andy DVD set in today's paper. Speaks volumes about the peculiar virulence of so many of the anti-Obama comments.

The Obama story on the front page today was certainly buried on the online site. I just wanted to note how it was yet another story in the print edition spoiled by bad copy editing.

juxtaposed in the same print issue of the ABH this morning: an ad for the complete Amos and Andy DVD set. Much has changed and much has not here in the south.

A factual error in the article is the "right" to "life, liberty and property". This formulation was specifically rejected by the founding fathers. The holder of ultimate title to all land is the government; this is the basis of eminent domain. There are many safeguards to personal property, but it is not an absolute right. "An Englishman's home is his castle" may be a popular sentiment, but it has no basis in law.

Meanwhile, I fail to follow the argument that the right to bear arms means arms of any kind may not be regulated in any way. Artillery in the back yard, anyone?

Jim T needs to spend less time surfing the net and more time copy editing. The ABH has become a real reader's nightmare. It would have been helpful if the author of the article had included an address besides the vague "downtown", for instance.

A huge proportion of the legislature never went to college. Many of those have no idea about the point or value of education. They may have some successful business. They are maybe deacon in their church, president of the Rotary, used to being deferred to, to having their ideas lauded in the bubble of their small, local spheres. It makes for a breathtaking self-satisfaction and strong convictions based on not much more than hubris. It's like the little old lady in podunk that thinks she's an aristocrat because she's the only one in town with a silver-plated tea set, never mind that that tea set would be seen as only fit for thrift store goods in, say, New York.

Rah rah rah for belt-tightening and stiff upper lip in the face of economic adversity. The photo in the print edition of two very overweight good ole boys shows two people who have never had much experience of prudent self-denial, much less classically defined temperence or chastity (the oposite of luxury). You can bet their pensions, health care and salaries will not be affected by budget cuts.

The university system has been big on new giant buildings ("job creation" for legislative buddies) but not on staff quality or quality of life. "Useless" departments that teach people how to think and expose them to the larger world of ideas have had to bow down to advanced job training courses. What grand iteration of the Terry College of business are we up to now?--teaching things at student and taxpayer expense that corporations used to have to do on their own dime.

@melmarino: "bitter...party of one"

@melmarino: Who said stark can't be wonderful?
And visiting someplace for its historical value isn't the same as going somewhere to savor its artistic value. There are lots of interesting and even beautiful places in the old Eastern Bloc. However, I don't think even you feel compelled to visit Moscow's suburbs (or Snellville) for aesthetic fulfillment, even for the sake of contrariness.

Why is it that the people who get all bent out of shape about the art expenses of a building never question anything else--as, for example, columns, or floor coverings, or fancy windows. If you follow their art logic, all new building in Athens should look like the Federal Building or perhaps be built of cement block and corrugated steel.

And there's a reason nobody visits Volgagrad (or whatever it's called nowdays) while lining up to see Florence, Rome, London and Paris.

Public art is not the same as private art, but it should no more be subjected to complete popular mob domination than the architects of a building or our government itself is. After all, from the Eiffel tower to the Iron Horse, most people are not comfortable with the new. This is not saying there should be no popular input, but there must be some level of respect for expertise.

While I'm all for new media, I do like a print edition with my morning coffee. The Banner Herald seems to treat its print edition like the proverbial red-headed stepchild, however. Today's printed comics were yesterday's, and vice-versa. It makes a difference with those that run a story line and the answers to puzzles.
Articles daily bring the reader to an abrupt halt with such proofreading gems as: (Tuesday) "..only to find that someone had entered his pickup and stole the bow he packed...", or (Wednesday) "The house sets back in the woods..."

Is this a college town? Or do you just not pay much?

@E.J.:
What??! Socialist France??! Former home of "Freedom Fries"?

Half a page of vague neo-con rant. He wants us to go see the movie because he likes it--because it is against Obama. No other analysis.

Then a long seque into the typical anti-Obama yada-yada: again, backed up with nothing specific except a lot of ad hominem irrelevance (he hate's my granddaughters! I spent time in a Hanoi prison!).

As with so much of the hysteria in this type of criticism, it seems to boil down between the lines to simmering resentment among older white guys who are upset that they aren't automatically in charge any more, that what they say doesn't automatically go, that everybody doesn't automatically dance to whatever tune they play. A "heritage" that hasn't served us well and indeed impedes what we might become.

Interesting to look at the pictures of the UGAs through the years printed next to each other. The first one was a lean, athletic dog who lived a long time. The successive ones seem to be bred more and more for exaggerated characteristics so that Russ looks as different from the first UGA as a wild turkey does from a Butterball. Or as different as a 20 yr old quarterback does from his 55 year old self who's been eating the same training diet since his youth while sitting behind a desk. No wonder the new ones don't live very long. Kinda like a metaphor for the whole metamorphosis of collegiate athletics in the TV money age, yes?

@jtsim: the never-was world of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver, where black people didn't exist, polio was not an issue, the soviet union or korea were never mentioned, jews weren't allowed in the country club, and so on? It was a golden age indeed if you were in the third of the population that called the tunes for everyone else.