Don't we all long for someone — better yet, a group of someones — who will promote more transparency in political fundraising, lobbying, elections and ethics enforcement?

Let's hope Santa and his elves and reindeer are good swimmers and won't mind a greener Arctic landscape.

Sometimes, people just need a little bit of help. Or help that would seem little to most of us, yet to them it's the difference between lying alone on the floor all night or calling 911 for stronger arms to get them back on their feet or into a chair.

Here we are. House Democrats on Tuesday morning unveiled two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump — abuse of power and obstructing Congress in the investigation of his behavior involving Ukraine.

The Justice Department's inspector general report, released Monday, finds that the FBI's Russia probe was both justified and unbiased — completely debunking Trump's accusations that political bias was behind the probe and that former bureau leaders conspired to sabotage him.

The Kingston ash spill left an indelible memory on Tennesseans after a towering wall holding toxic coal ash from TVA's Kingston power plant sent a tsunami of sludge spilling onto about 400 acres of the Emory river and rural residential land in Harriman in 2008.

Look around at all the politicians sniffing the wind.

The Trump administration, brushing aside tens of thousands of protest letters, gave final approval Wednesday to a rule that will remove nearly 700,000 people from the federal food stamp program by strictly enforcing federal work requirements.

Bring on this impeachment vote. It's time. It's past time.

Here we are: Sugarplums are dancing in our heads, advertisements are bombarding us to buy stuff we don't need, our president is manipulating the stock market (truly the only thing he knows how to do) by popping off about his fake tariff war and the earth is relentlessly heating up.

It's undeniable that climate change is happening. It's happening all around us, and it's happening right now.

On Nov. 21, the Times Free Press reported that Chattanooga has broken 17 weather-related records in 2019.

Happy Thanksgiving.

For weeks, as impeachment hearings came and went, Republican and Trump choirboy Devin Nunes took the microphone when it came his time to speak as ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee and made some inane comment like, what a "farce" he thought it was to suggest that President Donald Trump was soliciting foreign officials to intervene in the 2020 election.

Once upon a time, both of America's current political parties believed in the Constitution. We say once upon a time with the realization that the fairy-tale implication is just that. We thought both parties believed in the Constitution but maybe we were dreaming.

Tennessee statesman Lamar Alexander stands tall like a tree with his renewed push to pass what he's dubbed the Restore Our Parks Act before he retires from service in the U.S. Senate in 2020.

Perhaps the many bad news headlines for Erlanger over the past year finally got the attention of the hospital's board of trustees and the folks who appoint citizens to serve on the board. Or maybe not.

If you watch nothing else of the impeachment hearings on Capitol Hill from this past week, please watch Dr. Fiona Hill's opening statement.

Science, given even just half a chance, can save us from ourselves — if we're careful to stir in morally right motives.

If you're looking to see who among your local elected officials actually work to have your back when the going is tough and raises don't happen and schools are falling down, look no further than the list of officials who showed up for a Sunday town hall to talk to 200 people about topics related to funding education at the Brainerd Youth and Family Center in Chattanooga.

Hey, out there in readerland: Where do you get most of your news? TV? Local TV or cable? From radio? Sirius XM, NPR, Talk radio? Twitter and Facebook? The internet as a whole? Newspapers? Digital ones or print ones? Local or national?

The testimony in this week's impeachment hearings before the House Intelligence Committee has been commanding and damning toward President Donald Trump.

It is increasingly hard to watch the absurd lengths that some members of the Republican Party — especially in Tennessee — are reaching toward to defend Donald Trump.