Health care costs are once again poised to create almost unbearable pain for state health officials and legislators.

Conducting background checks on teachers and other workers is expensive. But not doing them can also be costly.

The way to evaluate the president's initiative is by what it achieves, not how it's organized.

Three decades ago, as a young man in his early 30s, John H. Chichester left Virginia's Democratic Party because he thought it had become too friendly to big government. Fifteen years ago, at the mid-point of the Reagan years in Washington, he ran for lieutenant governor as a Reagan supporter and spokesman for his party's conservative wing.

Back when Lester Maddox was governor of Georgia, in the late 1960s, there was a riot at the state prison. Reporters asked him what he planned to do about the conditions that caused the trouble. Maddox rejected the entire premise of the question. "There's nothing wrong with our prison system," he said. "We just don't have a very good class of prisoners anymore."