Greg Cravens It is not quite a year after Memphis was able to extricate itself from what had seemed an inescapable fate, the Carter-Watson bill in the Tennessee General Assembly. It seemed to come out of nowhere, passing the House in a jet-propelled jiffy and seemingly destined, on the strength of rural members’ and suburbanites’ […]
Posted inEditorial, Opinion
Corker and Alexander: Stumbling Toward Leadership?
So what have we here? In this space previously, we have lamented the evasions and relative silences from our state’s two senators — Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker — regarding the out-of-control governmental efforts of billionaire ex-builder, President Donald Trump, who seems to be going about the business of running the country as if it […]
Posted inEditorial, Opinion
The Gateway Project Has Great Promise
One of the favorite nostrums of the hard right in this country, as foolishly reductionist as it is misleading, involves a description of the social and economic landscape as consisting entirely of two groups — “makers” (aka “job creators”) and “takers,” whom they imagine to be the unwashed masses who remain perpetually on some kind […]
Posted inEditorial, Opinion
The MLGW Groundhog
The issue of county participation on the board of the city-owned Memphis Light, Gas & Water is, for the time being, moot. Or as Shelby County Commissioner Heidi Shafer, one of the supporters of the now lapsed proposal, puts it, it’s a Groundhog Day matter that will surface again when the political weather changes. The […]
Posted inEditorial, Opinion
Geniune Vetting of Trump Cabinet Nominees Needed
At his annual “issues meeting” with constituents from his 9th Congressional District on Monday, Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen called the roll of what he saw as unsatisfactory or outright dangerous cabinet officer-designates named by Donald Trump, and Cohen’s list was fairly inclusive of the President-elect’s entire list. Those singled out by the Congressman included Attorney General-designate Jeff […]
Posted inEditorial, Opinion
Onward into Trumpland!
Well, here it is: 2017. And anybody entering this new year who is optimistic about the state of things in America and around the world is by definition a Trump voter. The rest of us have forebodings out the kazoo — no few of them having to do with the man whose two most famous […]
Posted inEditorial, Opinion
Van Turner: The Compromiser
In the course of years, individuals in organized groups start to differentiate into what anthropologists call “archetypes” — specific behavior types that can be discerned to recur periodically over the long span of human history. One of the best-known archetypes is that of the messiah — the would-be savior who emerges to attempt drastic alterations in […]
Posted inEditorial, Opinion
Donald Trump: The Manchurian Candidate
The outcome of the 2016 presidential campaign was already regarded as nightmarish by various blocs of Americans — and not just those who call themselves Democrats. But the persistence of President-elect Donald Trump’s bizarre affinity to and connection with Russia has become unnerving to increasing numbers of his constituents-to-be, including members of Trump’s adopted Republican […]
Posted inEditorial, Opinion
TVA Wells
On Wednesday morning of this week, a meeting of true moment for Memphis-area residents was scheduled to be held in the county-government complex on Mullins Station Road in Shelby Farms. The purpose of the meeting, at the Construction Code Enforcement Office building, was for the Shelby County Water Quality Control Board to hear an appeal […]
Posted inNews, The Fly-By
Strapped
Dozens of staffers with Memphis-area colleges and universities are now fully free to pack heat on campus without anyone ever knowing. State lawmakers gave full-time employees at state-run schools permission to carry a concealed handgun on campus this year with a bill Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam wouldn’t sign but allowed to become law. However, those […]
Posted inEditorial, Opinion
Memphis Offers Sanctuary
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to settle in to his forthcoming status as leader of the free world, much of what he is signaling that he has in mind to do is proving unsettling to citizens in this or that locality, including our own. A case in point is Trump’s recent post-election reaffirmation of his […]
Posted inEditorial, Opinion
It’s Still the Economy, Stupid
So, all right, what happened? Hillary Clinton was supposed to win. And we mean that word in its original sense — as a close cousin to the word “assumed.” Everybody so supposed — not just Democrats, but a substantial number of Republicans, as well, including Donald Trump himself, who in his day-after photo op with […]