Today's Opinions

U.S. 58 a road to nowhere

Alaska has its "bridge to nowhere."

Now Virginia has its "highway to nowhere."

The $90 million budgetee'busting Hillsville bypass, from the widening of U.S. 58 to four lanes, continues merrily along while poor Richmond has a multiee'billion dollar shortfall.

If you all think national healthcare reform, which is about to change America for the better, is an unwelcome monstrosity, then the Hillsville bypass makes the overhaul of healthcare look like a Girl Scout picnic.

Budget cutting for Carroll County Public Schools may feel painful, but the hurt can't go nearly as deep as other divisions in the state and even in the Twin County area.

It's probably not too much of a stretch to call Carroll schools a model of fiscal responsibility for anticipating from a long way off the budget crisis that has caught so many divisions off guard this year.

The proposed 2010-2011 schools budget marks the third year Carroll administrators have decided not to hire new employees to fill positions that have recently become vacant.

Obsessing about a far-off border can't be healthy or good for morale.

Most critics of U.S. immigration policy from the Twin Counties probably have never laid eyes on, stood at or passed over the divide between our country and our neighbor to the south. They just know by anecdotal evidence that it's a somewhat porous place where not every foreign national follows all the bureaucratic procedures in order to cross and to enter "The Land of Opportunity."