Pam Sohn

Masks can and have saved lives during this COVID-19 pandemic.

Don't you find this odd? Poll after poll — the latest from Morning Consult — finds 77% of Americans (and 59% of Republicans) say they support a COVID-19 relief bill.

And just like that, we have six more weeks of Chattanooga city election campaign news to digest before the April 13 runoff election we've dubbed the Tim and Kim show — mayoral hopefuls Tim Kelly and Kim White.

As we wait for the dust to settle on Chattanooga's post-election news, let's review the myriad ways our local and state governing bodies can confuse themselves and confound their constituents.

There's clearly just too much testosterone in the water in Nashville where our lawmakers are tying themselves and our state in knots with concerns about civil protests by sports teams, women's birth choice, everyone's gender choice.

Heaven help the Republican senators who in the future tweet their minds.

The days are ticking down to Chattanooga's mayoral and council election day.

If the hearings this week in Washington about the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection showed us nothing else, it was that we still don't know enough about what really happened that day.

Too often, our infrastructure conversations take on the tone of fixing old things, when what we should be doing is imagining and creating new things.

Something has to give with policing and police training.

There's great truth in the saying that "all politics are local."

The Texas weather blame game has been a telling moment for Lone Star State Republicans. And it doesn't tell anything good.

After several months of record high numbers, Hamilton County's COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have begun to trend downward toward October measures, according to the Hamilton County Health Department.

Shortly after Donald Trump's acquittal Saturday with only seven Republicans willing to vote for his conviction on an impeachment charge of incitement of insurrection, a pundit on CNN said the vote to convict just "didn't have enough Republicans."

It has been a given - almost from the beginning of talks about TennCare III - that anything the Volunteer State would do about exchanging a Medicaid health care waiver for a Trump administration health care "block grant" would end up costing us more money and giving Tennessee's working poor less coverage.

Chattanooga has a strong mayor form of government, but we've seen over the years that our nine-member city council has plenty of sway - sometimes helpful and sometimes not.

Chattanooga has had a hard year, as has our country. But here in the city of many names - the Dynamo of Dixie, Scenic City, Environmental City, Gig City, Best City Ever - we augmented our year of COVID-19 and virus recession with an Easter tornado and a summer of protests.

"Tucked inside President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan is a seemingly radical notion that children should not grow up in poverty."

President Biden won't have time to watch his predecessor's second impeachment trial as it begins today, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told us Monday.

Help is on its way