Pam's Points: Somebody please bring back unstunning news

When will the news get boring again? We're ready for that day.

It seems the stunner that was our election was just the beginning.

In the past week, we've had two purple - nor orange or red, but purple - air alert days thanks to at least 20,000 acres of wildfires burning in our region.

Over the weekend we learned that the Hamilton County Board of Education says it should not be held responsible for last December's Ooltewah basketball hazing rapes while the team was out of town to play in a tournament. In short, the board says it was the fault of students and their parents.

On Sunday, we were greeted with the news that President-elect Donald Trump named his campaign chief and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon as his new chief White House strategist and senior counselor. So it's official: The alt-right is moving into the White House.

Then Monday, we were told that the Tennessee Valley Authority is selling the unfinished Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Hollywood, Ala., to Franklin Haney for about two pennies on the dollar what we taxpayers over several decades spent on the $5-billion-plus plant.

First, look at our school board

The school board Friday filed a 22-page response to the lawsuit brought by the family of the 15-year-old Ooltewah High School freshman who was raped by his basketball teammates with a pool cue during a team tournament trip to Gatlinburg, Tenn. The teen had to be rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery to repair a perforated colon and bladder.

The team was accompanied by then-Ooltewah basketball coach Andre "Tank" Montgomery, and then-Athletic Director Allard "Jesse" Nayadley and chaperones. The coaches and chaperones were in the cabin at the time that rape and three other assaults occurred in the cabin basement. Further, records show the then-principal, Jim Jarvis, knew of other reports of hazings and inappropriate sexual contact on at least some of the schools' previous athletic teams.

But the board's response argues the board acted "in good faith" and the responsibility lies with the three older teammates who held the 15-year-old down and used the pool cue. Further the board's response blamed - you guessed it - their parents.

"If anyone should have been aware the three boys were going to commit the attack, it would have been their parents, not the school board," Chattanooga Times reporter Kendi Rainwater paraphrased the report in her Sunday story.

Here's the trouble with that mindset. We parents and grandparents send our children to school and to play on school teams every day, and we rightly expect the teachers, coaches, school officials and school board officials to keep them safe - to have policies and procedures and disciplinary plans to place to keep our children safe.

This happened on school watch. Own it.

What to fear from Steve Bannon

Breitbart News, under new White House strategist Steve Bannon's oversight, has been denounced by many Democrats, some Republicans and civil rights groups as misogynist, racist and xenophobic. Throughout the presidential campaign, Breitbart News served as a clearinghouse for attacks on Trump's adversaries, spreading unsubstantiated rumors about Hillary Clinton's health and undermining its own reporter, Michelle Fields, after she accused Corey Lewandowski, then Trump's campaign manager, of assaulting her.

But Americans should take heart: It could have been worse. Instead of "strategist," Bannon might have been chief of staff. That title instead went to Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The Anti-Defamation League, in a statement, called Bannon "hostile to core American values," and said: "It is a sad day when a man who presided over the premier website of the 'alt-right' - a loose-knit group of white nationalists and unabashed anti-Semites and racists - is slated to be a senior staff member in the 'people's house."

Just think what we have to look forward to.

Bellefonte waste and uncertainty

Chattanooga developer and financier Franklin Haney emerged Monday as the Bellefonte auction winner with a $111 million bid - about three times the starting price TVA put on the unfinished plant and the 1,600 acres it sits on along the Tennessee River in Alabama.

Haney has said he hopes to finish Bellefonte and sell the power, preferably to TVA. But TVA put the plant on the market, saying the utility won't need additional power generation for at least two decades.

This begs the question, of course: Why would TVA set itself up for a competitor? Clearly many other questions must be answered before that can happen. Questions like if and how Haney could get a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to finish the plant and load fuel.

Haney won out over one other bidder, Jackson Holdings of Alabama LLC, which represented investors who wanted to scrap the plant (again as TVA already has done once) and use the unfinished reactor for a plant in India.