Opinions

On Friday, Donald Trump became the U.S.A.’s 45th president. Despite the fact that he lost the popular vote, he won the Electoral College vote.
Some of his critics on the left have sought to delegitimize his election because of that quirk, but they are wrong. For better or worse, Trump is legally our president. [Full Story »] 

There is a misperception, promoted by heated rhetoric during last year’s presidential campaign, that the U.S. is being flooded with dangerous refugees. Most people also believe that refugees coming to the U.S. are all Muslim and are coming here to invade and upend our culture. And many people believe that most U.S. refugees are Syrians.
None of that is true. [Full Story »] 

What are we to think about the Obama administration’s parting shot at Israel?
The administration didn’t use the U.S. veto power to stop a UN resolution that took Israel to task over its increasing settlements in the occupied West Bank. A few days later, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a scathing speech about the settlements.
Those action have angered some on both ends of the U.S. political spectrum who believe the actions show a lack of support for Israel. [Full Story »] 

Those old enough to remember the chaos of 1968 should be forgiven if they felt a sense of de ja vu in 2016. This past year was perhaps the most unsettling for Americans since ’68 when the Vietnam War and school integration issues led to violence in the streets.
Over the past 12 months, the world has become more dangerous and Americans more divided. We enter 2017 under a dark cloud. Uncertainty runs deep.
There are a lot of aspects to this, but most fall into one of four large trends emerging here and around the world. [Full Story »] 

There are dozens of smiling faces in the community this week, faces which mute the cynics and renew the faithless.
Each Christmas, children take on a special glow, a sense of wild-eyed wonder and anticipation. It is a time they will long remember, a touchstone for the rest of their lives.
And for the adults, it’s more than just the rush and madness; it’s also a time of wonder, a time we will also recall in the future. [Full Story »] 

There was a lot of grumbling about how the Georgia High School Association moved the recent playoff game involving Jefferson High School’s football team. Despite the fact that JHS officials had made plans to put additional seating in place for the game at home, the GHSA denied that effort, forcing the game to go out-of-town. [Full Story »] 

Seventy-five years ago today, the world was torn apart by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The surprise attack brought the U.S. into WWII fighting on two fronts — in Europe against Nazi Germany and its allies, and in the Pacific against Japan.
Ironically, a current popular movie is a bookend to Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific. “Hacksaw Ridge” is a Mel Gibson directed epic about the real-life fighting on Okinawa, which was the last major battle in the Pacific and in WWII.
The focus of Gibson’s film revolves around one man, Desmond Doss, an army medic who is a conscientious objector to killing, but who believes strongly in the rightness of the U.S. Doss refuses to handle a gun during training and was harassed by both fellow soldiers and his superior officers. Eventually, however, Doss was granted permission to be an army medic and was shipped to the Pacific. [Full Story »] 

Three decades ago, textile manufacturing was a major industry in Northeast Georgia. Dozens of plants dotted the local area.
Textile jobs were a major part of the South’s transition from an agrarian economy to one of industrialization and manufacturing in the post-Reconstruction era.
Today, few of those textile factories remain. The combination of automation and offshoring has taken most of those low-skilled, commodity textile jobs to other countries. What remains in the U.S. are high tech, heavily automated textile jobs that require a higher level of skills than the textile jobs of a generation ago. [Full Story »]