Comment Archives: Stories: Opinion: City Beat Blog
Re: “Beale Street Club 152 Hearing Postponed”
"The DA has to realize that you can't trample the rights of people, you can get away with it for awhile with poor, powerless people, but you can't pull that with people of means."
OTP, if only you'd apply that unusual bit of sage advise to the man in the White House.
Re: “Beale Street Club 152 Hearing Postponed”
Barby910
Another conservative until something happens to you personally.
Why not arrest the people that were selling and buying drugs at the time they were doing it. It seems as though she had the club in her sights, not the criminals.
What is so bad about this is that with this publicity, when that clubs opens again, it will have overflow crowds and be able to charge more than it does now. It is just like putting Martha Stewart in prison for 9 months on a bullshit charge. While she was locked up, she made another 400 million dollars. Was she really punished?
If the club goes all the way in court and does not make a deal with the DA, a judge will have to rule whether the DA overstepped her bounds. No, I don't believe the DA wants this to go to a full blown hearing.
Re: “Beale Street Club 152 Hearing Postponed”
Closing at the busiest time IS sending a message .... money talks, sh*t walks. It's the American way...unfortunately ;-/
Re: “Beale Street Club 152 Hearing Postponed”
oldtimeplayer mumbled:
"The DA may have took on more than she bargained for.
The owners of Club 152 are not poor. They have the resources to fight and make the DA publically prove how pervasive these drug violations were.
I don't believe that the DA wants to air this in public, hence the first postponement of the hearing."
------------------------------
I'll wager the DA has everything she needs to support what was done.
Let's see what comes out in court, ok devil's advocate?
Re: “Beale Street Club 152 Hearing Postponed”
The DA may have took on more than she bargained for. She is trying to punish and send a message to the owners of Club 152, but, I am afraid she has bumped into a hornet's nest.
The owners of Club 152 are not poor. They have the resources to fight and make the DA publically prove how pervasive these drug violations were. How many were there and by how many different people (employees). If they had been investigating for 6 months, what was the rush to close the club on the busiest weekend of the year, instead of the following Monday? Why was the press notified of what was to happen so that they could be there? I don't believe that the DA wants to air this in public, hence the first postponement of the hearing.
It is just like the fight that happened between members of the police force. The off duty officers that were assaulted and arrested are suing the city. The general, illegal, policy of the police clearing a public street at 200am is being challenged in court. They will find that this policy is unconstitutional. You can't force people off of a public street, regardless of the time, unless you can prove that there is a strong government interest in doing so. There is no compelling interest to make people get off of Beale Street at a certain time.
The DA has to realize that you can't trample the rights of people, you can get away with it for awhile with poor, powerless people, but you can't pull that with people of means.
Re: “Beale Street Club 152 Hearing Postponed”
To drug users, do not use drugs inside of a bar or public place, even if the owners do not disapprove. The law never has enough to do, and they actively look for cases like this to bust businesses like this. Drug dealers, do not sell your dope in a public place. The problem is that the owners of the establishment is going to get blamed, and they get in trouble.
And even though America is slowly liberalizing their drug laws, in Tennessee, any amount of pot, even a joint is punishable by up to 11 months 29 days. Hell, in Tennessee, one cannot buy wine in a supermarket or wine or liquor from a package store on Sundays, so legalized weed here is a dead issue.
I wish we lived in a World where one can look at naked women, snort drugs, shoot guns in the ceiling. We don't so shut up.
Re: “Beale Street Club 152 Hearing Postponed”
They will be open by Friday, I suppose that's enough time to change a few employees, but not a culture of tolerance for criminal activity, if that is what it is.
Re: “Beale Street Club 152 Hearing Postponed”
In about two weeks a major rock concert is planned in Memphis and Club 152 is one of the venues holding some of the events. Lets hope some of this can be cleared up and the event can go on without a hitch. Nothing makes Memphis look better than shut down clubs. Poor Scion / Toyota...
Re: “Beale Street Club 152 Hearing Postponed”
This sounds like a simple case of someone forgetting to make a contribution to "DA Amy's" re-election campaign and they've just received a gentle reminder to do so. Everything will be smoothed over in short order, with no cause for alarm.
Re: “The Comparison of Detroit and Memphis, Again”
Diogenes-
“How is the payroll tax fair? It is bullying everyone that does not live in Memphis but works there. Are there a lot of cities in the nation that do that to their suburbs and adjacent counties and even into another state”.
Yes, actually there are. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia allow cities, counties, and municipalities to levy their own separate individual income taxes in addition to state income taxes. These include but are not limited to: Birmingham, Denver, D.C., Willmington (DE), Bowling Green, Lexington (KY), Lousiville, Paducah, Baltimore, Detroit, Kansas City, St. Louis, NYC, Newark, Columbus (OH), Toledo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Portland (OR), Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and San Francisco among many others. In addition, there are many examples of school districts that set and collect income taxes for those who work within their districts. So as you can see, Memphis would hardly be the first city to institute a payroll tax.
Re: “Two Cheers for the Unified School Board”
By the way, the point of my example was to say that given a free society, anyone has the opportunity to make something for themselves. It may not have always been that way, but it's there now.
Re: “Two Cheers for the Unified School Board”
OTP
"As an aside. Did you know that the great, late Maxine Smith and her husband, Vasco, a dentist, had to use a proxy to buy a house in Germantown? That was in the early 70's or later, I think? Grove, you only know what you know through the perspective of those who taught you. What you were taught was not the truth of the matter."
Are you seriously implying that they could not buy a house because of race in the early 70's? And Mrs Smith was Executive Secretary of the Memphis Branch of the NAACP from 1962 to 1995. And you are saying she was denied buying a house in Germantown. Where in the world do you get these things?
Re: “Two Cheers for the Unified School Board”
Point of clarification, my wife's grandfather that started out with nothing started his own business from scratch. He made his own contacts, built his customer base, all of that on his own. He didn't get a job from someone else.
Re: “Two Cheers for the Unified School Board”
OTP
The links I used were .gov I think you know what that means. One was wiki which list the origins and why. All you do is put links down that do not work or from all things a BLOG. Are you serious? Really a blog? All of your statements are just points from your neighbor. Put down proof of your version otherwise I will consider the links I posted as FACT.
the link you posted that doesn't work is http://www.livingstoryfarm.org/farming. And if you didn't know .org means organization. It is just group and there points of view. NOT FACT.
http://www.changelabinfo.com/2012/10/18/wh…. Bad link
http://www.forbescom/sites/kellyphillipser…. Bad link
As for the poor poor black man that is always kept down by the man because of race let me say one thing. HERMAN CAIN. Read about him and you MIGHT learn something about working for a living and making a very big success of ones self.
Tom
You were right about the link. I don't know why it doesn't work because I just cut and pasted the link. Here is a more correct one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_(ho…)
About the food stamp project I posted it because I could not find any official site that substantiate any of OTP's racist statements. It just listed when it was started and why it was originally. The surplus food and all. Even JFK and West Virginia where the first couple that bought food stamps were from Welch, West Virginia and the man was a miner. But I have not found any credible evidence of food stamps were used to calm black people and the riots of the 60s.
Re: “Two Cheers for the Unified School Board”
@OTP
I accept your non-surrender surrender.
But honestly, if you assert something to be true, the onus in on you to document when challenged, not on others to disprove.
That is is way it works in the rest of the world, anyway.
Re: “Two Cheers for the Unified School Board”
It's a matter of costs. Those post tests cost millions. They have to pay someone to write them and then grade then and then analyze them (because having teachers look at them is bad, really bad). They were all supposed to be electronic this year. That didn't happen. Don't know if it was cost or equipment or failure on Pearson's part.
No two kids are created equal and because the prior year teacher is highly inconsistent, you really never know what you get when they walk in the door. This holds for both standard and honors, but not so much in the advanced classes. They are screened on admission.
Re: “Two Cheers for the Unified School Board”
Homersimpson
I can appreciate what you are doing. Why can't this be done district-wide?
Way back in the day of the two separate school districts in Memphis, The Ne**o Board of Education required all students to be pre-tested at the beginning of each school year. The teachers knew who they were getting and at what level they were at and could be evaluated at the end of the year. Hell, that was over 50 years ago. It worked then and it will work today.
With schools only lasting x number of grades for each category, elementary, middle and high school, a student can go a long way, not knowing anything before the administrators are aware of the weak link in the chain.
Without beginning and ending quantitative data, how can a teacher be given a true evaluation?
I asked my BOE member the same question and he looked at me like I was crazy. I explained to him that all children come to a teacher at the same skill level. How do one know if and how effective the teacher was that year without knowing where he/she started from?
Like I said, I am no education expert, far from it, I am just trying to use old fashioned commonsense. Help me understand this?
Re: “Two Cheers for the Unified School Board”
OTP:
Those making decisions are rarely educators. Pretesting pretty much makes the state tests invalid. You cannot measure growth (read TVAAS) without a baseline. This is the first rule I teach my students as they develop lab skills. State tests are not predictors like ACT or SAT, but knowledge based tests. How much can a student regurgitate. When you have no idea what they started with, you have no idea how they grow.
In some ways English works. While the specific objectives tested from one year to the next are different, the subject matter is relatively consistent. But without a baseline, you still have no idea what is retained from the prior year.
History, math and science all are complete crap shoots. TVAAS has so many variables in its calculation. The error percentages are cumulative. THis means that the actual error in the calculation can be up to 30%. So a student that scores average - right in the middle at 50% - could be as high as 80% and as low as 20%.
I have a national test that I give to every kid on the first day of school. It's a test based on well research misconceptions. I give it again and measure the changes in students growth. It's from work at Harvard. It's only first semester material. My growth is about .8 - that means my kids are 80% better than when we started. I cannot equate this to months or years. I just know they are better than we started. My data goes into a national study that also draws a relationship on how the material is taught. Each year we get a report that describes what techniques got the best results. THis is how we measure effectiveness.
Re: “Beale's Club 152: "We'll take care of it," says Kevin Kane”
JuliusJones or whatever
For Beale Street to be the number one tourist attraction in the state, someone must like it.
As for drug sales, you could probably go to any club in Memphis, the suburbs, anywhere and have instances where drugs or other illegal activity happens.
If people visit an establishment and don't like the atmosphere, all they have to do is return and not come back. I don't and have never liked strip clubs, but they are not a nuisance to me, for I don't go to them.
Owners don't put 10 million a year at risk for a few sales of drugs.
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Re: “Bikes and Memphis Aim Beyond Paint on Pavement”
As the blogger for Car-Free Memphis, I wonder why it is that anyone is wondering if biking has gone beyond the white middle class. How ignorant can one get than to think such a thought. Poor black folks, for example, have always been ahead of this curve for several decades when it comes to walking, biking, and riding on public transit. In fact, their carbon foot print is far smaller than any other group of people. It's just that poor black people, about 40,000 strong here in Memphis, TN, do not have a place to walk, bike, or push a wheel chair to that is within ten minutes of their homes. Indeed, poor black people have food deserts and junk food stores and liquor stores on every corner; and for them to get anything nutritious to eat, it generally takes them as long as five hours to get back and forth to such stores via our despicable public transit service. The poor spend at least 30 hours or more on a Memphis Area Transit Authority bus each week and at best the poor can only make one pit stop per day; because, these buses only run every hour and these buses are generally late getting to the bus stops. For example, some people wait as long as 20 minutes out in open air rain or shine at bus stops. Therefore, the only question that should be asked at this point is as follows: When is there going to be any social justice whereby the poor communities are redesigned to be more like car-free cities so that the poor people can meet all of their essential needs without leaving their community just like the weathly class people are doing right now? Instead, what is going on is that the poor are getting booted out of their community; and then, the rich are redesigning these same communites to fit their rich lifestyle; once again proving how greedy they are when they want their way...and then acting as if they are the one's who are ahead of the curve and how much they are throwing the poor a bone by giving them vouchers to move further out to more desolate locations far and away from bus stops and still without having cars to get around. What gets to me is that the weathy class is doing all of this redesigning process to accommodate their gas guzzling vehicles, and then has the gal to fund it heavily with billions of corporate welfare tax dollars; while they do not ever want the poorest or the poor to even have a miniscule amount of welfare and food stamps. I have got news for those people who feel this way: there is plenty of money for everyone to live comfortably within a car-free zones and these zones can be off the grid via solar and wind power.