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Editor’s Column: In Williamson County’s underbelly, everything old is new again
Recently, a recording of a Williamson County School Board meeting went viral after anti-mask parents mobbed physicians after the meeting, screaming at the doctors and threatening them. National news outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, the New York Times and Esquire, covered the disgraceful incident and many locals shared their feelings of distress on social […]
Editor’s Column: COVID comes home
My husband is a bull of a man. He’s rarely sick and I’ve never known anything to scare him. He joined the Chicago Carpenters Union at 18, swinging a hammer for years before working his way up to superintendent. When a nail went through his work boot into his foot, he pulled it out and […]
Editor’s Column: Welcome to Absurdistan!
Christopher Buckley is known for writing novels of absurdist political fiction, with titles like “No Way to Treat a First Lady,” in which the First Lady is accused of killing her husband, the president, and “Thank You for Smoking,” which was turned into a 2005 film. Buckley’s 2007 book “Boomsday,” revolves around a public relations […]
Editor’s column: The hottest ticket in town
Political tongues have been flapping all over Nashville since community organizer and activist Odessa Kelly announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination in the 5th Congressional District in early April. Kelly is taking on incumbent Jim Cooper, who has served in the 5th District seat since his election in 2002 (and in the 4th Congressional […]
Commentary: The curious case of Dr. Fiscus
We began the week in the soap opera that is Tennessee with the firing of the Tennessee Department of Health’s chief immunization director. Dr. Michelle “Shelley” Fiscus, a pediatrician by training, was unceremoniously sacked on Monday after four years of service with the state. Fiscus said her termination letter gave no reason for her firing […]
Save Nashville Now sues Davidson County Election Commission
The other shoe has dropped in the ongoing dispute over a proposed referendum in Nashville to change the Metro Government Charter and undo a property tax increase levied by Metro Council in 2020. Save Nashville Now, a coalition of city business, community and faith leaders has filed a lawsuit against the Davidson County Election Commission, […]
Commentary: Recapture the flag
When I was a kid, the American flag was a big deal in our house. We had a heavy cloth flag that, unlike flags now, wasn’t just a design printed on flimsy fabric. The red and white stripes were sewn together and the stars individually stitched onto the blue background. When it wasn’t hanging from […]
Editor’s column: America has too little education on race, not too much
When I got out of college in 1987, I realized I was an educated idiot. For the past five years, I’d crammed my head with a lot of facts and knew about the politics of Latin America and the Soviet Union, political theory going back to Plato and Aristotle, the plays of Shakespeare and bawdy […]
Tennesseans celebrate Juneteenth
Tennesseans didn’t wait on President Joe Biden’s Thursday proclamation making Juneteenth a federal holiday to begin organizing celebrations marking the occasion. In the Nashville area alone, more than 45 events were held to celebrate a traditional holiday for Black Americans. On June 19,1865, U.S. Major Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston Texas bearing a copy […]
Editor’s column: Refute the big lie
Almost five months ago, Joe Biden was inaugurated President of the United States, an event that came after months of lawsuits filed by former President Donald Trump’s campaign team, outright lies and a disgraceful and violent insurrection against Congress the very day that body was certifying the results of the federal election. That was bad […]
Commentary: In comparing COVID-19 vaccines to the Holocaust, the idiots have outdone themselves
It should go without saying that one should never trivialize the Holocaust. The Holocaust, after all, was the systemic —and damn near successful—effort to wipe out the Jewish people by Adolph Hitler’s Nazi government. Six million Jews were marginalized, herded into ghettos, tortured and murdered—some by firing squads until Nazi officers realized that was too […]
Editor’s column: Lee is either ignorant or dishonest in migrant children situation
In this week’s manufactured crisis, I give you the situation of unaccompanied migrant children being transported to shelter in Chattanooga. To hear Tennessee’s Republican leaders, the kids were snuck into our fair state in the dead of night, with no consultation with local leaders and against explicit warnings to the Biden administration that we don’t […]