Especially on New Year's Day, our leaders -- locally and nationally -- may want to make a few nonbinding resolutions that they can't, even likely won't, keep.
With smiles, we'll offer them a few suggestions:
To Hamilton County Commissioner Joe Graham, we suggest he resolve to buy a clipboard on which he can keep a revolving checklist to micro-manage the work of every county official and employee -- especially those in purchasing who were involved in "Chairgate," the moniker government workers have given to the months-long controversy over a $59,000 bid to replace 144 county courtroom chairs that are 22 years old.
Everyone knows that those leather-covered, ramshackle and dangerous chairs that attorneys and jurors keep falling out of could simply be recovered with terry-cloth stretch material, right? And surely no one thinks those litigious attorneys or court-weary jurors would sue our county ...
To the faculty at Chattanooga State Community College, we offer a resolution to buy a new piece of campus art -- a series of falling dominoes. The art piece could depict what will be happening in campus offices in coming weeks and months after president Jim Catanzaro's 24-year-tenure ended on Wednesday. Some of Catanzaro's right-hand men and women, as well as some of his pet projects (like the questionable partnership with the University of the West Indies), may fall, too. Just like dominoes.
To House Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La, and the GOP as a whole, it seems a resolution is in order to retool your talking points.
How about this? Scalise spoke at a gathering hosted by white-supremacists in 2002 (decades after everyone not born last week knew what the KKK and David Duke stand for) as part of the GOP's Big Tent plan to diversify. Scalise and the GOP just wanted to invite folks into the party from all walks of life.
Oh, but wait, the GOP is already lots white and male and clannish ...
To good law enforcement officers everywhere who must endure the slings and arrows of bad-apple officers who tarnish your name, we suggest something of a scarlet-letter resolution: When one of your own falls short of the respectful behavior that most of you show daily, pin an offender vest on them or plant a sign in their yard.
We're talking about people like the North Georgia magistrate convicted on federal charges after arranging to have drugs planted on a woman who wouldn't sleep with him, and the Cleveland police chief who retired in disgrace after his storage-unit love nest was discovered, or the Chattanooga police detective who texted sexually harassing messages to a rape victim whose case he was handling, or the Red Bank officer who went to the shooting range for target training while he was drunk.
Please resolve not to circle the wagons of your thin blue line around these black eyes. Instead, announce and denounce them.
To Tennessee's Gov. Bill Haslam and Attorney General Herbert Slatery, we offer a resolution that they spend some state money to get themselves new calculators.
Clearly the ones they now use are faulty, otherwise they would be thinking differently about joining a multistate lawsuit aimed at blocking President Obama's executive order on undocumented immigrants because it "tramples" on portions of the U.S. Constitution. After all, some 24 other states -- yes, GOP-controlled states -- also are suing. So doesn't Tennessee have better things to spend money on?
Back a couple of years ago, our then-attorney general, Bob Cooper, a Democrat, refused to join in another effort by mostly Republican attorneys general to challenge Obama's health care law. Cooper said it would "not have been a wise use of state money." He was right, of course, but he still lost his job to the GOP mob anger. Slatery is his replacement.
The Affordable Care Act still stands, and just before Christmas Gov. Haslam announced that Tennessee will, after all, be expanding Medicare under the ACA (assuming he can whip up the General Assembly votes). Spending money on another lost cause is not a good use of Tennessee resources. Stop posturing with our money, guys.
Happy New Year, everyone!