Columns and Editorials

While no one can accurately predict where a traffic accident might take place, information gathered by the Kentucky State Police gives us a pretty good idea of when the odds are certainly more in our favor.

Based on its latest annual report, which was released last week, one of the safest places to be on the highway in 2010 was in a vehicle driven at dawn on a Sunday in March by a woman in her late 60s or early 70s who was making her way between Owensboro and Henderson on the Audubon Parkway.

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.