The Miami Herald finally has added not one, but two, conservative columnists, and in the second month of the change I judge it a resounding success.

This doesn't mean that I agree with Jackie Bueno Sousa and Glenn Garvin, but that they have brought interesting, lively points of view that represent the sensibilities of large parts of South Florida's readership -- and challenge the rest.

''A true conservative is not afraid of the reaction to the truth,'' wrote reader Jaime Basagoitia in welcoming them.

But no opinion would be appropriate without an opposing one. Reader Scott J. Siegel wrote, in the case of Sousa: ``From the looks of your first column, you're a stereotypical conservative, led by self-interest instead of truth; hypocritical and dogmatically stubborn, seeing the world through a very narrow lens.''

American democracy in action -- I love the debate.

The two new columns bring some political balance to the paper's local opinion writers. Think Leonard Pitts, Carl Hiaasen, Fred Grimm. To be fair, all of the paper's columnists, those three included, are independent-minded, strive to be fair and can surprise you on any given issue. Think Andres Oppenheimer, Myriam Marquez and, of course, Dave Barry. How do you classify them?

That is how it should be. In an era in which the media -- the Web, radio, television and print -- are fragmenting and becoming ever more extremist in appealing to ever finer ideological slices of the audience, most of us in the middle are left out. We're a little to the right on this issue, a little to the left on that one. Today. Tomorrow, we might flip.

We want firm, informed opinions to help us decide what to believe, but what we're getting instead is too much scorched-earth ranting that undermines the comity needed for a community, a nation and a democracy to stay whole and survive. How loud you shout has nothing to do with how right you are.

Sousa and Garvin fit admirably so far in The Herald's tradition of responsibly argued and supported opinion.

Garvin is refreshing. He has been The Herald's television critic, and before that he covered Latin America for 19 years as a reporter, including five years as The Herald's bureau chief in Managua. He has written two books, one on Cuba and the other on Nicaragua. He has a deft, clever voice on domestic political issues.

Take this brilliant lead on a column on union balloting: ``If consistency is really the hobgoblin of little minds, then Hilda Solis and George Miller must be America's top ghostbusters.''

His sarcasm, like that of Hiaasen, is sometimes unfairly broad-brush, but it's entertainingly written, directed at fair-game political players, and hits at bigger possible truths that he factually supports.

In his column on the Obama administration's bailout of home-loan borrowers, for example, he writes as if the administration doesn't know, or is trying with Orwellian language to hide, the fact that the program mostly just borrows time for over-extended borrowers. Everyone involved in the considerations, beginning with administration officials, openly know that the program may only be extending a day of reckoning for the borrowers and banks, at taxpayer expense. The administration and others think it's worth the cost because of the risks of inaction. Garvin doesn't. I personally don't think I agree with him. Today. But I am not sure, and so I appreciated his good arguments.

My real complaint is that the column, which appears in Other Views, runs only every other Tuesday. Joe Oglesby, Editorial Page Editor, said the schedule is the same as for other Other Views columnists, Carlos Montaner, Michael Putney and Marifeli Perez-Stable.

Sousa, who runs weekly in the news pages, has a strong business background as a former Wall Street Journal reporter, editor of The Herald's Business Monday section, editor of the Daily Business Review and then co-founder of her own magazine, Coral Living. As she lays out in her first column, she is not a populist, like so many self-styled conservatives today, but she does believe in personal responsibility and that life involves hard choices.

Her early columns challenge conventional wisdom by drawing on a critical understanding of economics and costs, and then add delightful humor. She bravely uses a joke and salary statistics to remind us, for example, that, in the popular demonization of CEOs today, envy is as ugly and destructive as greed.

In another column, she lies on the tracks in front of the political railroad charging ahead to build a new baseball stadium. Comfortable with numbers, she reports -- guess what? -- local bars and restaurants and their employees are actually hurt by professional sports teams. Such prudence is the best of conservatism.