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Today's Opinions

  • Buford Middle students make reading count

    Chalk up a state title for Buford Middle School. What makes this honor so impressive is that it came when school wasn’t in session – over the summer.

    During the Buford Middle School students’ down time over the 2008 summer break, they were cracking books and opening them to more than 1 million pages read.

    Buford Middle School is this year’s statewide winner of the No Book Left Unread summer reading contest.

    The initiative began last year as a way to encourage recreational reading over the summer.

    Click here to read more...
  • This is not the time for distraction politics

    I learned a good bit last week about what’s wrong with government.

    First, I went to my opponent’s 75-minute “education issues forum.” I heard two sentences about education (my opponent likes charter schools, by the way). The other 74 minutes and 45 seconds were spent talking about some guy from New York who donated $50,000 to a House campaign in Landrum last spring.

    Then, I got a bizarre e-mail falsely accusing me of “digging for dirt” on my opponents’ 9-year-old son.

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  • Instead of complaining, help community

    A group of us wanted to respond to Sheila Bickford’s letter attacking Mick Mulvaney – and the rest of us – for helping mow the grass recently on U.S. 521.

    This was not a campaign “stunt.” The idea was brought up at our weekly Indian land Rotary group, of which Mick is a member. Rotary was planning to pick up trash on the road, but could not because the grass was too high. Several folks commented that mowing the grass would improve safety for kids and parents, especially around the school, and would also make our community look better.

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  • Teen grateful to be alive after wreck

    On Aug. 20, two of my best friends and I were in a wreck. Gregory A. Summers, features editor, wrote about the wreck in his article,“Seatbelts protect teens in crash.”

    I would just like to thank him so much for that article. It meant a lot to have the paper waiting for me to read when I got home from the hospital two weeks later.

    I can’t remember much from the wreck. Most of what I know is from the article and told to me by my parents, my friends and their parents.

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  • Powers Norrell will be voice for us in Columbia

    On Nov. 4, we have the opportunity to elect a fine Christian woman, Mandy Powers Norrell, to the S.C. Senate. Mandy has written several guest columns for the paper sharing with us glimpses of her life.

    She has told us of her more than 200 years of ancestry in Lancaster County, her heartfelt concern for the present generation and her vision for the future.

    I have been impressed by Mandy's overwhelming concern for those in our community whose lives and livelihoods have been diminished by our recent economic problems.

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  • I will help you; why won't you help my family?

    I just returned from changing a flat tire for my wife – a common enough event, for certain.

    What is bothersome about this particular incidentis that she sat in a busy parking lot with a 2-year-old and 4-year-old inthe carfor over an hour and only one person offered assistance and that was just a couple of minutes before I arrived from 30 miles away.

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  • Don't get caught up in rumors; get the facts

    No doubt about it, this is going to be a historic election year. Nationally, we are going to have the first black president or the first female vice president.

    Locally, we’re going to have either the first female representative from Lancaster County in the S.C. Legislature, or the first black representative since the Reconstruction Era.

    We could also have the first female state senator from Lancaster.

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  • Bail out people, not big banks

    I am writing regarding the situation of the American public. We hear each day about the big money business pitfall. But their problems become our problems. How can the government come up with $700 billion to bail out the big guys? And we – the unemployed workers and our families – also need a bailout. There are no jobs. No one is hiring. We’re the ones who need to be bailed out. If we don’t have jobs and money to survive, how are the banks supposed to have money?

    Our government needs to start from the bottom, not the top. We the people make up the latter.

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