I got cash for my first clunker, but it wasn’t a government rebate.

It was $100 or so from a guy at a gas station who figured he could salvage enough parts to turn a slight profit from a vehicle that had been wrapped around a locust tree.

I know it is a cliché, but in my case it is true: I never cease to be amazed. It happened this morning before my coffee had dripped into its carafe. Bill Steigerwald, a columnist from Pittsburgh, stated that large numbers of polar bears are not starving and drowning because of global warming. I disagree, but that wasn’t the amazing part. It was his reasoning. His evidence was that no one has published pictures of dead polar bears.

After learning that people armed with guns have been showing up at President Barack Obama’s town hall meetings, I must change the last sentence of last week’s column.

It read, “I’m thinking that many of the 54 million supporters want you to lead marches and demonstrators, too.”

On June 10, I left Staunton on a train to New York because my sister was having surgery for a brain tumor.

A little over a year ago, on July 9, 2008, to be exact, the Rev. Jesse Jackson was caught on tape making crude remarks about presidential candidate Barack Obama. Jackson was frustrated that Obama, in an effort to become president for all Americans as opposed to being the president of African Americans, never openly spoke about blacks’ issues. By not focusing on black issues, Obama was elected president.

Very reasonable members of our community have questioned why the new name for our local hospital.

1. Three people can keep a secret, but only if two are dead.

When Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley arrested Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for resisting arrest July 16, racial profiling once again raised its ugly head. The next week during a presidential news conference about health care, a reporter asked President Barack Obama about the incident. Obama answered the question, saying Cambridge police acted “stupidly,” arresting a 58-year-old (black) man with a cane for breaking into his own home.

After the withdrawal of Del. Chris Saxman, R-Staunton, the entrenched four-term incumbent well funded by special interests in Richmond, the 20th House District suddenly became the only open delegate seat in the Valley north of Roanoke, making it the area’s most competitive race (“A familiar ring in the 20th,” July 30). It became a doable race for a moderate, fiscally conservative Democrat to win.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell on Monday allowed former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick to return to the pro footfall, conditionally. NFL teams have begun returning to training camp. Vick can join one and play in the final two preseason games. He could be cleared to play in the opening week of the regular season or forced to wait for a decision from Goodell until Week 6.

The state has closed 18 interstate rest areas and plans to close another by September. Traveling I-64 over the weekend, my family and I can attest to the need to keep all of the stops open.

Almighty God hath created the mind free.” So Thomas Jefferson opened his Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. In that founding document of our Commonwealth, Jefferson went on to decry fallible religious or political leaders who would try to influence freedom of conscience through social or political pressure, begetting “habits of hypocrisy and meanness.”

Do you know the old saying, that if you tell a person that he or she did or said something often enough he or she will eventually believe it, even if from day one they were sure they didn’t?

Hallelujah! Shout it from the rooftops. Employers may discriminate again. A 5-4 Supreme Court decision two weeks ago takes this country back 51 years to the time just before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Discrimination won’t be as blatant as it used to be but it will occur. Employers who were hesitant to discriminate before won’t feel any pressure now not to do so.

Up until our 13-year-old daughter went to the beach with extended family and left my wife and me behind to fret about shark attacks, sunburn and teenage boys, I had, over the course of my life, sent no more than a dozen text messages.

I read yet another one of those editorials about the joys of simple living.

While having lunch several years ago, I told several co-workers that Michael Jackson would one day be considered the equal of Wolfgang Armadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach. One of them was astonished that I’d make the statement. After Jackson’s sudden passing last week and taking into account not only America’s but the world’s reaction to it, I stand by my previous prediction.

As the crow flies — or more appropriately as the snake slithers — the Savannah River Ecology Lab in South Carolina is roughly 200 miles from my house.

A 13-year-old boy was recently suspended from his crumbling, inner-city middle school in Michigan.  His family had immigrated to the United States because, in his words, “My parents wanted a better life for us than fighting. There is no government in Somalia, no army or police to keep the peace. Different tribes and groups of people were fighting and killing each other to gain power.”

I applaud Augusta County supervisors’ decision to hire an economic development director, a move that will increase the county’s tax base and job opportunities for the area’s unemployed. But I have several questions.

Suze Orman says it. So do the other financial advisors I see in magazines, newspapers and on television. It keeps popping up. The advice is this: Take care of yourself first; only after you are sure that your financial future is secure do you help anyone else.

In a June 11 column (“Guns, fear being stockpiled”), Nelson Graves asked to be enlightened concerning some issues that appear to be disturbing for him.

It is with the purpose of enlightening him that I now write, and while I do not have room to respond to all of his concerns, I intend to address the points where he needs enlightenment the most.

I hear daily, as do most of you, that the “government” is the enemy. Conservative radio talking heads, most leading Republicans and conservatives and a great many Independents all complain about the government interfering in their lives.

To quote the great philosopher Alice Cooper, “School’s out for summer.”

I am tempted to take a vacation from the news.

Recent reports indicate gun sales are going through the roof.

Newspapers are in trouble.

There are a lot of jobs I know nothing about. I am not talking about astrophysicist. I am talking about jobs that are right here where I live. I have known people in law enforcement, but I have never known personally a bail bonds person. I don’t even know exactly how that business works. I have known people who managed restaurants, but I have never known a person who owned a fast-food franchise. My maternal grandfather was a foreman for road building crews before I was born, but I have never known anyone in road building or paving. I have known people who wrote books, but I have never known anyone in the publishing industry. I have had students who worked as cashiers in grocery stores, but I have never known anyone in grocery store management despite spending a ridiculous amount of time shopping for food. Never until today, that is.

When George W. Bush was selected president (elected if you’re a conservative or a Republican), I was displeased, to say the least. Even so, I resisted immediately criticizing him. I figured he deserved at least a year’s time in office to get his bearings and feet wet.

I love a good auction, especially when they clean out a dead guy’s house, haul his stuff into the yard and let his friends and neighbors fight over it.

I got a pair of snow tires that way.