Editorials

Tennessee Board of Regents Chancellor John Morgan was speaking out, expressing his concern for the safety of students, faculty and staff on college campuses if a bill being discussed in the legislature to allow guns on public campuses is passed.
Morgan has joined the Tennessee Association of Chiefs of Police, University of Tennessee President Joe DiPietro, and numerous other presidents, faculty, staff and students of Tennessee’s public higher education institutions in opposing the bills.

We were pleased to see Chairman Gary Goff and other members of the Harriman Utility Board shoot down plans for a fancy-shmancy $17 million warehouse.
Even if, as proposed, the utility could have received grants to pay for most of what some were calling the “Taj Mahal” warehouse, that’s  still ratepayers’ hard-earned money that could go for much more needed items in this tough economy.

We are pleased to see that the community is having a conversation of sorts over growth.
There has been talk that Roane County’s population increase — slightly more than 4 percent over the past decade — is sluggish compared to others around us.
This has triggered some debate — at county commissioners meetings, among community members and on this newspaper’s news and opinion pages — over what constitutes good growth and whether we should want double-digit population increases decade by decade.

By KEN PAULSON
First Amendment Center
The Tea Party Patriots are divvying up members of Congress.
The advocacy group is assigning its members to track every member of the House and Senate, monitoring their every legislative move.
“We have millions of manpower hours and thousands of people willing to do heavy lifting,” Shelby Blakely, the project organizer, told USA Today.