Columns

Column as I see ’em …
Last week’s editorial (I write those, too) about the county’s need to get serious about trashed- and burned-out houses and the story that prompted it certainly lit a fuse.
I received numerous calls and e-mails about other houses in similar shape that, frankly, amount to festering pimples on Anderson County’s otherwise beautiful landscape.

Congratulations, rural Anderson County. You will soon have high-speed internet accessibility.
That’s a big deal to some. As my good friend Monty Collingsworth of Collingsworth Consulting once said, “High speed internet may not bring new jobs, but it will sure stop them if they decide to locate to one of our rural areas and we don’t have it.”
I would personally like to thank Collingsworth the most because he did much of the groundwork for this breakthrough.

Column as I see ’em …
Several years ago I wrote a fairly unpopular column about my life as a jinx.
Although somewhat tongue in cheek, it nevertheless has a foundation in reality because, frankly, no matter where I’ve lived nearby college and pro teams just can’t win a championship.
As a kid, I suffered through my beloved Buffalo Sabres losing to Philly’s Broad Street Bullies for the Stanley Cup. They came close again years later, only to lose on an absolutely terrible call to the Dallas Stars.

Less than a week after the 2011 Regular Session concluded, my colleagues and I once again found ourselves at the state capitol to address the inevitable—a compounded Medicaid budgetary shortfall.
With the projected shortfall for the upcoming fiscal year at an estimated $166.6 million, the governor exercised his ability to call the legislature back to Frankfort for an extraordinary session.
The authority to call and to set the agenda for an extraordinary session lies solely with the governor, and he placed only two topics on the session call.