In his first 100 days in office, Barack Obama’s administration passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, and faced problems including struggling banks, a flailing auto industry, piracy on the high seas, and a potential swine flu outbreak, among other issues. The president has traveled to Europe and Mexico and given press conferences and town hall meetings.

How would you grade, on a scale from A to F, President Obama’s performance in his first 100 days in office? What would you like to see him tackle in his next 100 days?

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Meanwhile, Stan Wise of the Georgia Public Service Commission argues: “The carbon cap and trade system and mandated renewable portfolio standards (RPS) will disproportionately hurt ratepayers in Georgia, especially-low income households.”

Read their full commentaries of their two views and have your say about renewable energy mandates.

Two weeks ago, a man entered my son’s high school carrying a knife.

It was my husband. He was also carrying a pound of brie cheese and two boxes of crackers, all for my son’s French class presentation on the foods of France. At the hand-off in the high school lobby, my son noticed the small paring knife and reacted as if his father were passing him a live grenade or a kilo of cocaine.

“I can’t believe you sent dad with a knife,” my son told me later. “Don’t you know that you can’t bring any kind of knives to school?”

In my defense, I did know that high schools have zero tolerance for weapons. But I didn’t think the class would want to tackle a wedge of cheese with a ruler, so I sent the smallest knife I had. Not small enough, though.

Chastened, no knife accompanied the cake I sent to school with my fourth-graders a few days later for the monthly teachers’ birthday celebration. I’m not sure if the teachers used their hands to tear off …

“Here is a teachable moment — for my daughters and other women who may think physical or emotional abuse is OK,” she writes in part. “It is time to come clean about my past, so they might learn. When I tell them the ugly details, they are only mildly fazed. My story, it seems, is more common than I realize.”

Meanwhile, Yolo Okili, an instructor for Men Stopping Violence, writes in part: “Having acted aggressively toward women in my life, and having now worked with hundreds of men who have done the same, I know all too well that we men commit violence on a broad spectrum. I find some reflection of myself in men who use violence.”

Through Men Stopping Violence, he writes, “I deepened my understanding of the ways in which men support the culture of violence against women. I acquired tools that helped me learn to be …

The editorial continues: “That means the buyer of a used, $21,500 minivan would pay a $1,500 fee, and the buyer of a $150,000 Mercedes would pay the same $1,500 fee. In effect, most of the value of that Mercedes would be immune to taxation, while all the value of the minivan would be taxed. That’s unfair to the point of being outrageous. It wouldn’t be hard to fix that problem. The most straightforward approach would be to simply remove the cap and make all the value of vehicles taxable.”

Read the full editorial

But Harry Geisinger (R-Sandy Springs), who authored the bill, argues that here in Georgia, “state and local officials have …

As a longtime fan of advice columnist Dear Abby, I valued her practical answers, especially about raising children. However, one question stumped her years ago, and she threw it out to her readers to answer: Should children who hate piano lessons be forced — even kicking and screaming — to continue because they may eventually find joy in it and even decide that music is their passion?

Abby’s mail was split. Readers wrote that they hated every second of their childhood piano lessons, and the experience soured them forever on music. Others wrote to say that they were now with the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music or the Boston Pops and were forever grateful that their parents held their ground.

One mom maintained that parents force kids to do many things, including bathe, brush their teeth and eat their vegetables. Why should music be any different? Her son begged to quit piano when he was 10. Today, she said, he was a noted conductor and music …

This is the time of year when high schools and colleges crank out press releases about their outstanding students. The releases often describe young women, who along with being at the top of their class, are student government president, captain of the volleyball team, a national yodeling champion, volunteer tutor and the local Sweet Potato Queen. When I glance at their accomplishments, I wonder how these young women can juggle all these roles and remain healthy and sane.

It may be that they can’t.

I’ve had a startling number of conversations with neighbors, friends and college administrators about the stress that female college students face today. Along with eating disorders, many young women are grappling with what used to be called a bad case of the blues. They can’t get out of bed . They can’t focus on their studies.

An admissions director told me that the rise in mental-health problems among female college students has become a recurrent topic …

Angel Food “may be fulfilling its mission by delivering food, but it is not delivering on credibility,” he writes.

W. Joseph Wingo, CEO of Angel Food Ministries, argues: “At the helm of this ministry is a fairly compensated CEO. My idea to help people grew with 17-hour workdays over 15 years, five of which were wholly unpaid. An independent compensation study in April 2008 determined that my salary and compensation ‘falls within a reasonable range of competitive practices for like positions among like organizations providing like services and is therefore …

I still tense up when I recall the day in fourth grade when my classmate Kenny couldn’t decipher the word “definite” on the blackboard. He stood there for what seemed like hours, his face growing redder, tears welling up in his eyes, while the increasingly irate teacher demanded over and over that he read the word aloud.

Kenny simply couldn’t make any sense of the letters on the board, and it seemed, even to a roomful of 10-year-olds, to be an extreme act of cruelty to insist he do so. Kenny pleaded to be allowed to sit down, to go to the bathroom, to go home. But the teacher made him stand in front of the 40 of us until he literally crumpled to the floor.

In our eight years together in a small, urban, Catholic elementary school, Kenny struggled with reading, and I suspect now that he may have been dyslexic. The words written on the board likely made as much sense to him as Egyptian hieroglyphics.

I think about Kenny whenever people lament to me how …

Given what I know now, I would stretch out my college years. I would take a gap year between high school and college to work in a service project or political campaign.

In the last few weeks, my daughter has gone scuba diving in France, climbed mountains in Austria and attended Carnivale in Venice. She’s not on vacation. She’s on a study abroad program, one of more than 6,000 students in the University System of Georgia who will participate this year. Nationwide, about 250,000 college students will study outside the United States this year.

Myself, I didn’t take the scenic route through college. Quite the opposite. I sprinted through college, finishing in two and half years by piling on extra courses and summer classes. Then I worked two jobs for the next 12 months, wrote one whopping check and sent myself to grad school. A week after I earned my master’s, I began a job in New York City and I haven’t stopped working since.

Given that history, …