Columns and Editorials

While traveling the Fourth Congressional District during August, it was clear to me that the top priorities of Kentuckians are jobs and economic growth.  The need for these issues to be our top priority is reinforced by the latest jobs report that zero net jobs were created in America last month, and the unemployment rate remains unacceptably high at more than 9 percent.

As lawmakers returned to Washington last week, President Obama addressed a special joint session of Congress to outline his plan to get the economy moving again and create jobs.

There are only a handful of days in which a whole country collectively remembers what it was doing.  Some have been high points in our history, like V-E and V-J Day at the end of World War II and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.  And some have been moments we wish had never occurred, like Pearl Harbor, President Kennedy’s assassination, and the tragedies of Sept. 11, 2001.

For those old enough to remember that last date, it seems hard to believe that 10 years have slipped by since that cool and clear morning.

Winston Churchill once famously remarked that we make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

That sense of charity has defined our country from the beginning, and even when times are tough, we don’t hesitate to reach out and help.

It has been a little more than a decade ago since the General Assembly revamped the state’s adult education programs, a high point in the legislature’s ongoing efforts to improve the classroom from preschool to the workplace.
While a lot of work remains, the past decade has been exactly what we had hoped. In fact, from 2005 to 2009, adult education enrollment grew by 30 percent – faster than any other state over the same period. There are now about 40,000 citizens who are helped academically each year.