School board should avoid Smith buyout
I agree with school board member Rhonda Thurman for voting against Rick Smith’s proposed buyout. It took him days to tell the taxpayers anything and then very little could he say. It is time for Smith to just leave. The right thing for the school board members to do is to turn down Smith’s request for a buyout.
Ronnie Proctor
East Ridge
Some elections worth losing
Some things are worse than losing an election. Like losing your soul. That is the choice facing Republicans, as the most profoundly unfit candidate since Lyndon LaRouche marches toward nomination as the party’s standard bearer.
Serious Republicans with more than a few grey hairs remember a conservative movement built upon an intellectual foundation. It was easy to be a liberal, since liberalism embodies the admirable but misguided impulse to redistribute income. Conservatism was hard, resting upon a cerebral argument favoring equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. Being a conservative required rigor in thought and principle in action.
What happened? How did “true conservatism” descend into anti-intellectualism? From climate change denial to anti-immigrant bigotry, the conservative movement is being hijacked by fortune seekers who feel compelled to learn more about the KKK before deciding whether to disavow their support.
Donald Trump is an unprecedented catastrophe for the Republican Party and the conservative movement. A Trump nomination will almost certainly cost the Republicans control of the Senate. But more sorrowfully, it will cost the Republican Party its soul. Some causes are worth dying for, and some elections are worth losing.
Christopher A. Hopkins
Voters don’t know enough to vote
The most entertaining thing on television today is the election circus. What I think is the most entertaining is voters who are interviewed. It’s funny but sad that some of these voters are, in fact, voting.
Some say they are voting for Ted Cruz because he is anti-establishment. What a laugh. What is more establishment than being a U.S. senator?
Even funnier is why voters are voting for Bernie Sanders. They say they like him because he is anti-big government. He has been paid by a government entity all of his adult life – first as a mayor, next 16 years as a U.S. congressman, and lately 10 years as a U.S. senator. Until the voters of this country think about what they are voting for, things can only get worse.
Jack Pine
Dunlap, Tenn.
November vote key to country’s future
In today’s Free Press editorial it was written that “in the first four primaries the voters were either energized by Trump or simply by the desire to vote for someone – anyone – who would change the country’s direction.”
These are primary elections. It would have been more accurate to replace the words “change the country’s direction” with “change the Republican Party’s direction.” The November elections will determine whether the voters want to change the country’s direction.
Bill Hayes
Hixson