Sometimes you have to wonder whether intelligence and commonsense are required characteristics in business executives as they climb the corporate ladder.

Bedford County Supervisor Annie Pollard came close to asking the most important question the other night about the spread of biosolids on farmland in the county. But she stopped short of it.

The clock is ticking on thousands of acres of important Civil War battlefields in Virginia, battlefields that would help future generations better understand the bloody conflict that divided America between 1861 and 1865.

While no one likes the heavy hand of government telling him what to do or how to do it, events do call for government to step in from time to time.

In the early days of the 1950s, when the economies of Japan and Germany were in shambles following World War II, Detroit’s automakers had a 95 percent share of the domestic market.

With the excitement of a historic presidential election as a backdrop and with a chancellor suggesting they could make a difference in the national outcome, students at Liberty University registered by the hundreds in Lynchburg to vote earlier this month. And they voted — nearly 4,200 of them.

The federal government’s $700 billion financial stabilization package started life almost two months ago as a fairly straightforward plan for the Treasury Department to buy toxic mortgages from at-risk financial institutions.

With the United States poised to turn to more nuclear power as an energy source for the future, the decision to at least study the impact of mining a rich uranium ore deposit is a welcome one.

When the rainfall deficit in the region drops to 13.5 inches below normal, most city water customers know what is happening. The Pedlar Reservoir is dropping to abnormally low levels for this time of year, a time when the reservoir should be storing up water to offset the effects of the summer drought. At the same time, the city has to pump more water from the James River to make up for that rainfall deficit.

At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns of World War I fell silent. The war that robbed Europe of an entire generation and simultaneously laid the stage for World War II just 21 years later was over.

A regional arts council for Lynchburg has made sense from the first public discussion back in June. Among other things, it would promote the arts and help publicize events, sponsor forums and act as an advocate for the community’s arts organizations.

Tuesday night, there shouldn’t have been a single American who wasn’t proud of his country when Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States.

Growth in Bedford County is fine for real estate developers, the housing industry and for the county’s tax base. But what about the growing number of services that come along with it? Can the county afford to keep up with the demand of those services?

After the fourth traffic fatality in slightly more than a month last year, a group of residents along Virginia 151 in Nelson County decided that was enough.

As this News & Advance editorial was being written Tuesday, millions of Americans were headed to the polls to cast their ballots in the presidential election.

The 2008 election will go down in history as one of the most important in our country’s history.

A mere four decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the bloody struggles of the civil rights era, a person of color — Barack Obama — was the Democrats’ nominee for president and actually won the presidency of the United States of America.

Today, thousands of Central Virginians head to the polls today to cast their ballots in the presidential and congressional races. That citizen participation is key to success of the greatest political experiment in world history, the United States of America.

The 2008 presidential election will go down in history on many counts — the possibility of the first president of color, the possibility of the first woman elected vice president, but one that should concern Americans of all political persuasions is the cost.

You would think from the way some political partisans on both sides of the ideological divide are talking, the sky will fall Tuesday night if the presidential candidate they oppose is elected to the White House.

You just want to look them square in the eyes and slowly and calmly say “Breathe … take deeeeep breaths.”

First it was the vehicular traffic on Wards Road. Spawned by shopping centers, restaurants and other new businesses, there were too many vehicles and not enough road. Additional turn lanes and more strategically located traffic signals helped resolve the problem and keep traffic moving at a reasonable pace. Now it’s pedestrian traffic on the same road, a road that’s not terribly friendly to either those who are walking or those on bicycles.

How could mass transit improvements help the flow of traffic on U.S. 29 through Charlottesville? If that sounds like a convoluted question, it is. Yet, it’s the response that Charlottesville officials are giving to the most recent charges they are dragging their feet on a U.S. 29 bypass around their fair city.

When a high-pressure natural gas pipeline leaks and explodes in the neighborhood, folks have every right to be gravely concerned.

With the challenges this country faces today and in the future, on the economic and foreign policy fronts, we sincerely believe voters would be making an unwise decision to toss aside two capable, seasoned, experienced legislators such as Bob Goodlatte and Virgil Goode.

We strongly, and enthusiastically, endorse both Goodlatte and Goode for re-election.

Presidential elections are always times when emotions run high, but this election season, things seem to be super-charged.

There’s a lot to like about each man who would be president.

But this election is too important for its outcome to hinge on whom voters like more; it’s about the political principles that this nation chooses to embrace.

John McCain, a conservative Republican of the “old school” with a modern outlook for the future, is our choice for president in 2008.

More often than not, when the topic of the Appomattox Town Council comes up, all you can do is just shake your head and wonder “What in the heck are those guys thinking?”

You can’t blame state transportation officials for not sugarcoating the grim budget news about Virginia’s system of roads and highways. The cuts will be severe and the state will have to reduce services accordingly.

For high school students, the education process at times is a matter of having someone nearby who cares. It’s having someone to help students through their struggles and to applaud when they succeed.

It’s a pathetic — but predictable — part of every political campaign season. Some small-minded people who disagree with a candidate’s yard sign deface it — or worse, steal it altogether.

Presidential elections have always been times when partisans’ emotions run high. Throughout American history, there are examples of supporters of one party or another, of one candidate or another spouting that the world will come to a sudden and abrupt end if “the other guy” is elected.