In its second annual ranking of business-friendly cities in Tennessee, the state’s Center for Policy Research placed Memphis at number 47 out of 50. (What, they don’t think John Ford is business-friendly?)
If that weren’t troubling enough, some place called Soddy-Daisy ranks 16th. Check out the entire list.
With the offseason already at the forefront of discussions about the Grizzlies, there’s been a lot of talk about free agency lately. But the lack of specificity on this issue has been a little bothersome. Everyone talks about the Grizzlies having cap space this summer, but no one ever seems to talk about how much. And that needs to be the starting point for any discussion about the Grizzlies plans in free agency.
So, how much cap room will the Grizzlies have this summer?
Chris Herrington shares some deep thoughts on the forthcoming Grizzlies’ off-season at Beyond the Arc.
Shelby County Democrats have a new leader as of Saturday. Elected party chairman by the newly chosen Democratic executive committee was the Rev. Keith Norman. The vote, at Airways Middle School, was 48 to 18 for Norman over lawyer Jay Bailey. Before the vote, Norman (right) counseled with a supporter.
–j.b.
“Hubbard Street can dance circles around nearly any company you might name. These dancers shine in everything from multiple pirouettes to the most slithery and explosive contemporary moves.”
That’s how the Philadephia Inquirer describes Hubbard Street II Dance Chicago, whose members will slither onto the stage of the Buckman Performing Arts Center this Friday, March 30th, and Saturday March 31st, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $28.
For more information call 537-1483.
As tens of thousands converge on Memphis this weekend to pay tribute to Bishop G.E. Patterson, our sister publication, Memphis Business Quarterly, takes a deeper look at COGIC’s impact on Memphis and its worldwide media empire.
If ever there were a reason for former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson not to run for president, this could be it: If he runs, networks will probably not air reruns of Law & Order, on which Thompson played DA Arthur Branch, to avoid having to give Thompson’s opponents equal air time, as mandated by the FCC.
In the past, networks have not aired programming featuring Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzennegger during their campaigns.
According to the Washington Post, there’s still time to Tivo all the L&O you can before this possible drought: “But even if Thompson announces that he’s getting in the race, the equal-time provisions — and the blackout for the reruns — would not immediately kick in. The law applies only to candidates whose names appear on official state ballots, a step that none of the candidates have yet taken.”
Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, native Memphian Thomas McNamee’s book about Waters and the famed Berkeley, California, eatery she opened in 1971, is brand-new from Penguin, but it’s already stirring up heat.
Is it or is it not a probing look at what the book’s subtitle calls “the romantic, impractical, often eccentric, ultimately brilliant making of a food revolution”? Or is it, according to one Bay Area reporter, a book “content with surface narrative” — in other words, the very book the reserved Waters would wish? Or is it, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, “amusing” but not the “last dish on Waters”?
Let the reviewers have their say, but can we officially retire the word “dish” from any and all future references to hot restaurant tell-alls? Get your own copy at local bookstores or online.
The notion flogged by The Commercial Appeal that Memphis is the most corrupt urban city in America is sophomoric, self-serving, and unsupported by facts.
Ranking cities on sketchy and subjective data is a product of our Internet age, when everything from American Idol contestants to colleges gets a ranking. If the topic is corruption, then the bigger the stink the bigger the hero who rides into town and cleans it up. Gee, thanks, Superman.
The CA asked an interesting question and published a good series this week, but the conclusion is as phony as the designations of “cleanest city” and “quietest city” in Boss Crump’s day.
The indictment is based mainly on the Tennessee Waltz, Main Street Sweeper, and Tarnished Blue investigations, with a few miscellaneous crimes thrown in for good measure. Mercifully, the CA did not include its overblown Logan Young/Lynn Lang effort in the mix.
Let’s look at the scorecard in the Big Three investigations:
Tarnished Blue has not resulted in the indictment of any police director. There have been six of them in the 16 years of the Herenton administration. One of them told me the top brass was aware of the corruption in the property room and was prepared to bust it but was told to let it play out by the FBI and crime consultants, which made the final haul bigger in both dollars and indictments.
Tennessee Waltz has indicted John Ford, Roscoe Dixon, Kathryn Bowers, Michael Hooks Sr., Michael Hooks Jr., and Calvin Williams. Dixon was convicted at trial of taking bribes from E-Cycle Management in a sting operation. Williams was convicted of taking $5000 to influence the Shelby County Commission’s vote on a grant for a community center. Hooks Sr. pleaded guilty to taking money from E-Cycle. The others have yet to go to trial.
The Main Street Sweeper has swept up Edmund Ford and Rickey Peete. Both have pleaded innocent and have yet to be tried. The charge involves taking bribes for zoning billboards for a minor player in the business.
So far then, we have a bribe for a day-care center and bribes for a billboard, and bribes for dealings with a phony company that was not really doing public business. Four years after the onset of Tennessee Waltz, not one indictment for a road project, a public building, a sports facility, a major zoning case, an MLGW contract, or a big bond deal.
Members of the City Council and County Commission vote on hundreds of six-figure and seven-figure-and-up deals every year. Not one has been shown or even formally alleged to have been tainted by corruption.
Corruption and the rumor of corruption are two different things. If Michael Hooks Sr. or Edmund Ford or Rickey Peete or someone else eventually gives prosecutors a list of names and tainted votes and criminal payoffs and prosecutors produce indictments and convictions, then it will time to reevaluate whether Memphis is in the big leagues of corruption.
But it’s too early to make the judgment. A day-care center grant and a billboard case, in the scheme of things, are not big deals.
James Carville, the political guru whose strategic guidance helped convert a promising but obscure Arkansas Governor named Bill Clinton into a two-term president back in the early ‘90s, carried his patented blunt but honest act to Rhodes College Thursday, for a day-long visit that culminated with a speech to an audience of several hundred at the school’s cavernous Bryant Hall.
The man who, back in 1992, coined the war cry “It’s the economy, stupid” minced no words at Rhodes. Sample question during an informal afternoon session with students: “What happens [here] if you smoke dope?” The same candor was on display during his evening address when he confessed that Rhodes’ uniformly Gothic architecture had struck him as “fake” on first sight, “like some Potemkin Village.”
But Carville paid his host college some effusive compliments as well. As he’d said in the afternoon: “How fortunate you are to be in this kind of place.” He went on to warn: “Things that your parents took for granted, you aren’t going to be able to take for granted….Your future is not secure.”
That was Carville’s way of saying the forthcoming presidential election of 2008 would be as seriously important as any in the nation’s history. It can no longer be assumed that the U.S. is “the most dominant nation” in the world, he said. “History happens very quickly in this day and age.”
The celebrated uber-activist ventured some striking predictions for the election of ‘08:
*That long-presumed Republican front-runner John McCain would be gone from the presidential race by the time of the Iowa caucuses in January of next year. “He looks tired, he’s trying to be an Establishment guy but can’t play the role, he hasn’t raised any money, and the Republican s don’t care for him.”
*That both former vice president Al Gore and former House speaker Newt Gingrich would enter the presidential race. Carville noted that Democrat Gore had run for president before and likened the experience to having sex: “There’s a high recidivism rate.”
*That former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the current president’s brother, would be the eventual Republican nominee.
*That the presidential race would see the emergence of both a significant third-party candidate and a fourth-party candidate.
Carville noted the presence in the presidential field of a black (Obama), a woman (Hillary Clinton), an Italian (Rudy Giuliani), an Hispanic (New Mexico governor Bill Richardson), and a Mormon (Mitt Romney) and suggested the diversity of candidates reflected the country’s developing diversity.
Though in the afternoon session he had acknowledged his long ties with the Clintons and his general support for New York Senator Clinton, he rated her chances of winning the nomination as “less than 50 percent” though better than any other Democrat running. In the evening address, while doing a rhetorical turn on the Democrats’ “Obama and Mama” duo, he suggested, “Obama needs more seasoning; Mama needs more spice.”
Carville proved himself a ready man with a quip (though most of his sallies were standard parts of his repertoire).:
*Recalling former HEW secretary Joycelyn Elder’s suggestion in the ‘90s that masturbation might be taught in school, Carville said, “Damn. Just my luck! Now they come up with a course I could make an A in.”
*Complimenting the academic acumen of Rhodes students, he said, “The average IQ here is higher than my S.A.T. score,” though, he added, he, too, used to score 4.0. “But that was my blood alcohol level.”
*Reprising a joke once told on him by wife Mary Matalin (a Republican operative who doubles as Carville’s ideological sparring partner) and attributing the line Thursday night to film legend Milos Forman (who’d directed him in The People vs. Larry Flynt), the balding, gnome-like Carville said he’d been described as looking like he’d been “sired out of the love scene in Deliverance.”
*Dismissing conspiracy theories concerning President Bush’s Iraq intervention, Carville concluded: “Stupidity as an explanation is good enough.”
*Beltway veterans might measure their duration one of two ways, he suggested: “I’ve been in Washington so long I can remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger was a Republican and Joe Lieberman was a Democrat,” or “I’ve been in Washington so long I can remember when James Carville had hair and Joe Biden [the Delaware senator who’s had hair transplants] didn’t.”
Carville also waxed earnest, professing outrage at the country’s widening income disparities and excoriating Circuit City for the electronic chain’s recent decision to fire 3400 workers “just so they could replace them with lower-paid workers.” He cautioned his audience not to feel superior to the unsavory aspects of Iraqi culture and other foreign ones, noting America’s long experience with slavery and subsequent racial ills.
The test of any democracy, he said, was “how well the majority treats the minority.”
Carville concluded his evening remarks with an anecdote relating to former president Bill Clinton’s problems during the long-running Monica Lewinsky scandal. When a heckler asked him what he would tell his daughters about his own role in Clinton’s defense, he replied that he’d “had a good friend who did a bad thing” and that “I decided to forgive the bad thing and stick with my good friend.”
Whether good, bad, or ugly, Carville put on a good show at Rhodes. And his track record as a political sage suggests that his predictions might be worth remembering.
How long do you think it will take the national media to follow the strands of the fired federal prosecutors story to Tennessee? I’d say about two weeks, at most.
On April 9th, former state senator John Ford goes on trial in federal court in Memphis. He’s a big fish in his own right and he’s the uncle of Harold Ford Jr., who is a celebrity, and the brother of Harold Ford Sr., who had his own federal trials in 1990 and 1993. The second trial, which resulted in Ford’s acquittal, was marked by exactly the sort of political meddling in the Justice Department that is now being exposed in the Bush administration.
There are so many good angles it’s hard to cram them all in, but here goes.
Don Sundquist’s name could come up in the John Ford trial because the powerful senator from Shelby County was a go-to guy from 1994 to 2002, when Sundquist was governor. Ford has a May 22nd trial date in Nashville on charges related to consulting.
But there’s much more. When he was a congressman in 1991, Sundquist recommended that Hickman Ewing Jr. be replaced by Ed Bryant as U.S. attorney for Western Tennessee. Ewing and his assistants were on the trail of Harold Ford Sr., who confronted Ewing in an elevator in the federal building in 1989 and told him, “You are a pitiful excuse for a U.S. attorney, but I can guarantee you that you won’t be the U.S. attorney much longer.”
Like the eight fired prosecutors who are now in the news, Ewing was replaced in mid-term. Ewing, Sundquist, and Bryant are Republicans, while Ford is a Democrat. In 1993, Bill Clinton was the newly elected president, and when Democrats in the Justice Department tried to influence jury selection in the second Ford trial, the government’s two trial attorneys resigned, albeit for only a day. So did Bryant, who was going to be replaced anyway along with 92 other U.S. attorneys as part of the new administration.
Sundquist, of course, went on to become governor. In his second term, when Tennessee Waltz was still just a song, federal prosecutors began an investigation of fraudulent state contracts. One close friend of Sundquist, John Stamps, was sentenced to two years in prison in 2005. Another Sundquist friend, Al Ganier, was indicted on federal obstruction charges in 2004. Three years later, he doesn’t even have a trial date. But in a court order in 2005, U.S. district judge Karl Forester wrote that Sundquist was “the impetus” for the federal investigation and said prosecutors had evidence that Sundquist “improperly interceded” on Ganier’s behalf.
Sundquist has not been charged and has said he is confident he is not under investigation. If the phrase “improperly interceded” rings a bell, that’s what has Joseph Lee on the hot seat over at MLGW in connection with another Ford, brother Edmund.
Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in Memphis and Nashville who were there at the start of the political corruption investigations have moved on. In Memphis, Terry Harris took a job with FedEx. In Nashville, Jim Vines resigned in 2006, and first assistant Zach Fardon left in January.
Will Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resign? He apparently lied about what he knew about the firings and when he knew it. Lying can be criminal. It was one of the factors that got Roscoe Dixon such a harsh prison sentence, and it’s one of the charges against Michael Hooks Jr., scheduled to go to trial later this year.
The bumbling of the Justice Department has been criticized by, among others, Bud Cummins, former U.S. attorney in Arkansas, who was fired last year to make room for a pal of Karl Rove and then smeared by his old bosses. Two years ago, Cummins, a Republican, staunchly defended Gonzales and President Bush.
If Republican prosecutors are upset, how do you suppose Democratic pols feel about being seven times as likely as Republicans to be indicted? A suggested opening argument in the John Ford trial: “Ladies and gentlemen, in the 1996 presidential election, Memphis delivered Tennessee, whose electoral votes clinched it for Clinton/Gore. The Republicans and Karl Rove never got over it, and Mr. Ford is the victim of a political vendetta by a Justice Department whose leadership lies.”