Columns

Gentle reader: In recent days we have witnessed another step in the growing trend on the part of Corporate America to reduce, if not totally eliminate, all service employees.

We refer to the scene at the checkout area of the Kroger store, a scene duplicated no doubt at Food City, Ingles, and various other emporia.

These major chain stores have all fallen for the sales pitch on the part of the makers of the self-checkout machinery and bought and installed four, or more, of these atrocities.

Since September 2010, the Roane County Executive’s Office has used a system of management called a 5-Point Star System.

It identifies five main topics that are the primary focus of the administration.

Over the last 20 months, some topics have been added and deleted over time, and some are still the focus of our administration. Go to www.roanegov.org and link to county executive’s office to see the progression of the 5-Point Star System.  

Regular readers will recall that as late as 6 February we wrote a scathing critique of Scott DesJarlais’s misuse of our tax money to finance his re-election campaign through federally paid mailings of flyers masquerading as information, but which were nothing more than campaign literature. Some of our Republican friends were unhappy with this criticism of their fair-haired boy. (Oops, as Gov. Rick Perry would say, we forgot. Dr. Scott is as hairless as a Mexican hairless pup, as the many colour photos in the flyers show.)
 

We have been reading a 1965 biography of Henry Addington by Philip Ziegler, which has rested on our shelves for several years.
Addington, a contemporary of the Younger Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh, Liverpool, and other leading lights of the first years of the Nineteenth Century, was for years Speaker of the House of Commons, then for 3 or 4 years King George III’s Prime Minister, and from 1812 to 1821 was Home Secretary.