Tennessee lost a good state representative and a good Republican over the weekend.

In the same week when more and more Republican lawmakers were making light of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol - one Georgia representative even saying it looked to him like "a normal tourist visit" - top Democratic and Republican members of the House Homeland Security Committee reached agreement on legislation to form a 9/11-style bipartisan Jan. 6 commission to investigate the riot and insurrection.

Can we talk? Just talk. Comfortably and uncomfortably. But thoughtfully. Truthfully.

Oh happy day!

Being disingenuous seems popular with public officials these days. Even local ones. Even some in law enforcement and in the judicial system.

Please, please, please Hamilton County folks! Please get your free, safe and readily available COVID-19 vaccinations as soon as possible.

There was so much going on last week that you may have missed this stunningly clear Associated Press headline: "Republicans promote pandemic relief they voted against."

We all know - or should know - that legacies persist. That's why we call them legacies. They have persisted.

We've all heard the sayings about seeing things right in front of us. Chief among them: "We can't see the forest for the trees."

Tennessee's Republican lawmakers are mounting a last-minute effort to ban public schools' teaching of certain concepts involving systemic racism, with the bill's sponsor saying citizens "must take a stand against hucksters, charlatans and useful idiots peddling identity politics."

Trust our Tennessee legislators and governor to continue devising ways to ignore our votes and our wishes. This time, they want to thwart elected judges - whose decisions they don't condone - by creating a kangaroo court of their own liking. They have dubbed their would-be proxy as a statewide "super" chancery court.

Who could be against learning more about the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol with a 9/11 style commission and probe? U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, that's who.

Countries are often judged by the way they treat their children, so the fact that the richest country in the world - the United States of America - has one of the highest, if not the highest, child poverty rate of all developed nations does not reflect well upon us.

What a pleasure it was to watch a real president give a truly thoughtful address to Congress, America and the world on Wednesday night.

It used to be that we called the weeks and months running up to Election Day - any election day - the silly season. Now we just call all of our days the silly political season.

We often lament that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Surely Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is confused.

Trust in police and our justice system is a tenuous thing right now.

It is so disheartening that too many people in Tennessee - and in fact in most "red" states - still seem to be allowing themselves to be wagged by political dogma as they shrug off COVID vaccines and other simple protections.

Chattanooga has new opportunity today after electing a new mayor and three new council members to breathe new life into its cast of leaders.

On edge as we all are, it is increasingly disconcerting to watch the clips of the Derek Chauvin trial in Minnesota while even more police-involved deaths and assaults continue to play out across our nation — even one at a school on Monday in Knoxville.

If one shocker of our COVID-19 pandemic era has been the enthusiastic embrace of fixing up our homes, a second and related shocker has been the skyrocketing cost of lumber.

Coming off of a year and a half of pandemic virus and recession, coupled with a tornado, protests and floods, we believe Chattanooga - with its ever-growing economic divide - faces a future more uncertain than any we've seen since the 1960s, making this year's mayoral election among the most critical in decades.