Month: November 2007

Auctioning Memphis

Post author By John Branston
Post date November 29, 2007

From South Memphis to Southwind, Memphis is losing value. Two people who ought to know say so. Both are professionals, and neither is an alarmist or a naysayer.

One of them is Shelby County asssessor Rita Clark, whose job is putting a dollar value on houses, buildings, and land for tax purposes. The other is auctioneer John Roebuck of Roebuck Auctions, one of the leading real estate auction firms in the South.

They calculate value differently. Clark and her staff use computer models, comparables, sales histories, and first-hand “windshield” inspections. Roebuck wields a microphone and a gavel and stands in front of a group of buyers and opens the bidding.

But they’ve come to the same conclusion: Real estate prices are declining, which reverses a long trend of increasing values.

“Memphis is a strange city that does not dip and rise like other parts of the country,” Roebuck said. “Right now, Memphis is down about as far as I can remember in 30 years.”

He said people are leaving the city, demand for housing is low, and there is a surplus of new homes and condos. Even the owners of some million-dollar homes are turning to auctions as a way to unload their property.

“Auctions get a bad rap,” Roebuck said. “An auction typically brings the true market value that day. Appraisals are just one man’s opinion.”

He expects to see “a substantial reduction” in home values in the next countywide reappraisal in 2009, leading to an overall decline in the tax base.

Clark doesn’t disagree with that evaluation.

“Absolutely,” she said, when asked if the tax base in Memphis could be shrinking, although she declined to put a number on it at this time. “We follow the market. We don’t predict the market.”

Clark will leave office next September after serving 10 years. In the 1998, 2001, and 2005 reappraisals, the total value of assessed property in Memphis increased an average of 14 percent each period. The suburbs were up even more, led by Collierville (up 24 percent in 2005) and Lakeland (up 30 percent in 2005).

Higher property appraisals are an indication of a healthy economy and provide a cushion for Memphis and Shelby County governments, which operate primarily on property taxes and sales tax. If housing prices continue to fall, lower appraisals will mean lower tax collections and less money for schools, police and teacher salaries, sports facilities, parks, and debt service.

There is also the prospect of no tax collections at all from some property owners. Memphis is one of the top foreclosure markets in the country. Foreclosures are expected to get worse in 2008 as subprime mortgages are reset at higher rates.

The usual way to balance the budget in Memphis and Shelby County is with a tax increase, but Memphians already pay the highest property tax rate in Tennessee. The smell of scandal is in the air. Houses aren’t selling. Values are declining. Mayor Herenton got only 43 percent of the vote. The 2008 City Council will have nine new members. And they’re going to increase taxes? Don’t think so.

Other signs point to a stagnant city that is getting poorer, not richer. In banking as in real estate, it looks like the big money has been made for a while. This has been an awful year for banks. The stock price of First Horizon, the last of the big Memphis-based banks, is $21 a share compared to $43 a year ago. The share prices of other regional banks with a big presence in Memphis, including Regions, Renasant, Trustmark, and Cadence, are all down at least 30 percent this year and are at or near five-year lows. FedEx, our corporate jewel, is off 15 percent so far this year.

At the risk of piling on, there is an unsettling tone in the public relations campaign to “liberate” the National Civil Rights Museum from “corporate interest domination.” Unsettling because it sounds like the preelection rhetoric of our soon-to-be fifth-term mayor who as much as wrote off the white vote. So much for public-private partnerships.

The $30 dinner entrée, the $570 a night hotel suite, the $140 Grizzlies ticket, the $45,000 SUV, the $40,000 a year college tuition, and a $30 million public boat landing look like relics of a golden age. Let’s hope Memphis can still support them a year from now, but I wonder.

Tags budget, city, declining, development, land value, property value, tax

News News Feature

Think Locally

Post author By Charley Reese
Post date November 29, 2007

One Supreme Court justice, 1,500 lawyers, and a disgraced former prime minister out of a population of nearly 150 million people hardly constitute great opposition to President Pervez Musharraf, who has declared a state of emergency in Pakistan.

For Americans to prattle about a “return” to democracy is both silly and hypocritical. Musharraf was a dictator when we asked for his help after 9/11, has been a dictator ever since, and very likely will remain a dictator unless some assassin gets lucky.

Furthermore, democracy in Pakistan has a sorry history of corruption, coups, and assassinations. The best and smartest thing we can do is simply keep our mouths shut and let the Pakistanis work it out for themselves. In a country where Osama bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush, our influence is virtually nil anyway. As long as President Bush wants to keep troops in Afghanistan, he needs Musharraf more than Musharraf needs him.

Unfortunately, too many of the baby-boomer generation are blathermouths. They have this insane notion that they have to “make a statement” on everything in the world, not realizing that words won’t even ruffle the wing of a gnat. To make matters worse, we’ve developed an industry of chatterers on radio and television, hardly one of whom is the least bit knowledgeable of the topics he beats his gums about.

No American who hasn’t spent years in Pakistan is qualified to talk about the situation there. It takes that long to learn who the players are and where the power structure lies. Looking at fleeting images of crowds on television doesn’t tell you anything except that there are crowds in a very crowded country. Ignorance is best served by silence, lest it spread.

Besides, we have only a limited and narrow legitimate interest in Pakistan. It’s not our country. It’s not on our borders. Our only interest is, will Pakistan assist us in the war against terrorism (to use the bad metaphor of the Bush administration)? If the answer is yes, it doesn’t matter to us who is in charge of the country. As the ancient saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Right now would be a good time to turn off the television sets in America. The writers are on strike, and soon there will be nothing but reruns of reruns. Apparently, none of the late-night comedians is able to write his own material. The news shows are a joke. If you get lonesome for a talking image, play a DVD or a tape.

In the meantime, your local newspaper will keep you informed, though keep in mind much of what we journalists classify as news is really irrelevant to our readers. If you live on the East Coast, you might have some idle curiosity about wildfires in California, but you can easily do without the information. Random crimes and accidents outside of your local community are likewise irrelevant and useless. It is not a good idea to clutter up one’s mind with useless and irrelevant information.

For years, Americans have been propagandized to “think globally” when we should be thinking locally, which is the only place where we have any influence. I know there are busybodies who desire to save the world and actually think they are doing it if they buy a sack of organic coffee or send a check to some self-proclaimed charity.

But the world is a pitiless place, where power rules. If you have no power, you have no influence. Sometimes even if you have power you have no influence, because most people in the world are not cowards. Palestinians, for example, have been defying Israeli power for more than 60 years.

Think and act locally. It’s our only chance at making a difference. And forget about Pakistan’s internal politics.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

Tags American, Bush, democracy, dictator, foreign policy, global, Local, media, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf

Film Features Film/TV

Cruel, pretentious ending ruins King creature-feature.

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date November 29, 2007

The Mist opens on a dark and stormy night in Castle Rock, Maine, in the home of a book-cover artist (Thomas Jane) whose horror, fantasy, and sci-fi images cover his living room. If you’ve read much Stephen King, you sense the author’s presence even if you haven’t seen the Stephen King’s appendage on the film’s title.

For a while, The Mist, adapted from a novella at the end of his ’80s-era story collection Skeleton Crew, seems like it’s going to be a pretty good King adaptation.

The bad storm wrecks the artist’s house, so father and son head into town to stock up on supplies, getting trapped in a grocery store with an assortment of stock townsfolk while a mist enshrouds the store and rumors swirl of unseen dangers.

An entertaining, low-key cast fills out the broadly drawn collection of refugees — the hot checkout girl, the existentialist bagger, three soldiers from a nearby military base, a Bible-thumping town loon, a couple of rough-edged blue-collar guys, etc.

Into this familiar set-up, King and director Frank Darabont (of prestige King adaptations The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption) conspire on something that’s half monster movie and half nature-of-man talkfest. An octopus-like creature sucks a bloodied Norm the Bag Boy out into the mist. The ensuing in-store conflict pits fundamentalists against rationalists against existentialists.

But, despite that bid for significance, The Mist is at its best as a gee-wow horror/action movie: Pterodactyl-like creatures break through the glass and invade the store, warded off with makeshift weapons (and one revolver) created from store items. Jane’s protagonist leads an expedition through the fog to the drug store next door, which is enshrouded with webbing from a breed of spiders that would have scared away anything from Arachnophobia.

Darabont isn’t satisfied with making a minor pleasure, though, so he turns the film into a major monstrosity, with an ending that made me angrier than anything I saw at the movies this year. I never read The Mist as a kid King fan (one of the few King titles of the era I skipped), but I skimmed the end of the book recently to see if King himself was to blame. He wasn’t.

Unsatisfied with King’s open-ended conclusion, The Mist tacks on an extreme ending (which I won’t give away, though I’m tempted), more worthy of an ironic Eli Roth horror movie than the middling creature-feature The Mist actually is. There’s something smug, pretentious, and self-congratulatory about the utter pessimism and cruelty of the ending. It might have worked in a better, more severe movie, but it angered me here because I didn’t think the movie earned it. Or maybe even because the movie — or at least its actors — actually earned better.

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Tags film, movie, Review, Stephen King, The Mist

Cover Feature News

Endpapers

Post author By John Branston
Post date November 29, 2007

You’ve got an A-list of book lovers to give to this Xmas, but you’re already short of ideas? Don’t be. It’s easy as ABC. Here you go: “A” is for art history and astronomy, Abe Lincoln and Alice Waters. “B” is for bacon, Balenciaga, the Bible, and bird songs. “C” is for cartography and craftsmanship.

That family member or friend with an interest in art history? Good chance he or she is familiar with the first two volumes of John Richardson’s biography of Pablo Picasso. Volume three, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf, $40), is now in stores. Look for it. Stargazers, look up. Starfinder (DK Publishing, $30) is a practical guide to navigating the night sky. Comes complete with maps and a flashlight for viewing the stars; comes with moon maps and a guide to the planets if you’re sticking closer to home: our very own solar system. From DK Publishing too and for that fan of all things Lincoln, see Lincoln: The Presidential Archives ($40) by Chuck Wills. It’s a biography, but it’s also a storehouse of reproduced notes and sketches. Vellum envelopes contain added treasures, including a facsimile of Lincoln’s handwritten Emancipation Proclamation. Go back about a hundred years, and you reach 1776. So reach for 1776: The Illustrated Edition (Simon & Schuster, $65), a new edition of David McCullough’s hugely popular history of the American revolution. The book comes with its own set of reproductions, maps, portraits, and what’s more: more vellum envelopes containing facsimiles of primary documents. And speaking of revolutionary … Alice Waters is at it again in The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution (Clarkson Potter, $35).

While you’re at it in the kitchen … fry up a mess of bacon, be it the everyday variety or artisanal. James Villas — a Southerner by birth, an award-winning food writer by trade — knows how to bring home the bacon, a world of bacon, in The Bacon Cookbook (Wiley, $35), a title that Gourmet magazine just named one of the best cookbooks of the year. The years 1947 to 1957? It may have been a lean postwar decade in Europe, but in Paris and London it was a golden age for Balenciaga and Balmain, Dior and Givenchy. Richard Avedon and Cecil Beaton caught it on film. See for yourself in the pages of The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-1957 (Victoria and Albert Museum, $45), edited by Claire Wilcox. Then settle down with another book — the good book: the Bible. But have at hand Karen Armstrong’s The Bible: A Biography (Atlantic Monthly Press, $21.95), a scholarly but readable history of who wrote the Bible and when and a history of biblical interpretation, be it by Jew or gentile. The word for Armstrong: brilliant. But that sound you hear … it’s bird song, and it’s coming from Bird Songs From Around the World (Chronicle Books, $45) by Les Beletsky. It comes with its own built-in digital audio player, and it contains a description of the over 200 songbirds sampled. The world’s within earshot.

The world’s at your fingertips in Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations (Little, Brown, $60). Authored by Vincent Virga and drawn from the collection of the Library of Congress, Cartographia offers an outstanding array of 200 of the most beautiful and important maps the world has known, and that includes imaginary territory: a 17th-century map of the “soul” and William Faulkner’s hand-drawn map of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Two hundred is the number too in Craft in America: Celebrating Two Centuries of Artists and Objects (Clarkson Potter, $60) by Jo Lauria and Steve Fenton — two centuries in 200 images of signature objects in wood, ceramic, glass, fabric, and metal, from Native Americans to African Americans to Shakers to contemporary artists. Make it or any book from you to a loved one this Christmas. — Leonard Gill

Happy Hanukkah?

Let’s face it: The potato is extraordinarily ordinary, even when it’s baked, fried, mashed, or shaped into pancakes called latkes with a little onion and salt. So how did this workhorse of the Jewish kitchen take center stage for the celebration of Hanukkah in The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming (McSweeney Books, $9.95)?

Kicking and screaming in a pan of hot oil, that’s how, then leaping out a kitchen window into a snowy night for a break beneath a pine tree, too weary to compete with the glitz of Christmas. Happily, this misunderstood latke finds peace and purpose with a family who knows that “different things can often blend together,” much like Lemony Snicket’s holiday storytelling and the infectious illustrations of Lisa Brown. — Pamela Denney

Got a dog- and book-lover on your Xmas list?

Memphian Jack Kenner’s Dogs I’ve Nosed is a collection of Kenner’s photographs of Memphis dogs (all shapes, all sizes), with a few shots thrown in of the owners too, including Cybill Shepherd, proud owner of not one but two German shepherds. For the record (and for the book’s cover): That’s Murphy and Winston (above), Kenner’s own West Highland terriers.

axmen

“Only a Gibson is good enough.”

That was the guitar company’s slogan for years, and for countless musicians around the world, they were right. More than half a century after tinkerers at different companies finally coaxed tunes from an electrified guitar, most performers have still banded together into three fiercely loyal camps: Gibson enthusiasts, Fender fans, and all the rest.

The Gibson Electric Guitar Book (Backbeat Books, $24.95), written by former Gibson Company historian Walter Carter, presents the Gibson side of the “guitar wars,” but it’s not the glowing advertisement you might expect. The author makes that clear from the beginning: “Gibson did not invent the electric guitar and did not invent the solid-body electric guitar (nor did Les Paul).”

Those words might be considered sacrilege coming from anybody else, but Carter presents a detailed — and accurate — history of the development of rock-and-roll’s signature instrument, giving credit where credit is due.

With all its high-tech talk about humbuckers, patent-applied-for pickups, and other gizmos, this book may not appeal to beginners. But it does present an excellent, decade-by-decade overview of Gibson’s classic products, eye-catching designs, and technical contributions. The photos of such classics as a mint-condition 1952 Les Paul or a 1961 “reverse body” Firebird are enough to make any collector drool. — Michael Finger

Tags books, holidays

News The Fly-By

Q & A: Bill Gibbons

Post author By Bianca Phillips
Post date November 29, 2007

New Orleans has made some recovery since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005. The population is almost 70 percent of what it was before the hurricane. In some parts of the city, especially in the tourist-friendly French Quarter, the only evidence of the storm are T-shirts that say, “I survived Hurricane Katrina.”

But the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office has yet to bounce back. In the first half of this year, many felony cases were dismissed, due in part to inadequate staffing levels. In other cases, key witnesses never returned to the city after Katrina.

Then last month, after a federal judgment levied $3.7 million against the office for firing 42 white employees, New Orleans district attorney Eddie Jordan resigned.

Shelby County district attorney Bill Gibbons and four other D.A.’s from across the country spent November 12th to 16th in New Orleans evaluating the local office and meeting with judges, community leaders, and law enforcement. In the next 60 days, the group will recommend how to repair the Orleans Parish office.

— Bianca Phillips

Flyer: How did Katrina affect the Orleans Parish office?

Gibbons: In the first half of 2007, over half of their homicide cases were dismissed, as well as over half of their robbery cases. A lot of those were pre-Katrina cases.

[Missing witnesses] ranged from people who were on the scene and needed to testify about a particular crime, to former police officers no longer on the force. On the other hand, the office did not have the adequate staff and resources to locate witnesses who may still be in New Orleans.

Is crime on the rise in New Orleans?

They have a very high homicide rate and a fair amount of drug trafficking. The levee issue [people not returning because they aren’t sure the city is safe from storms] has been replaced by the crime issue as the major hurdle in persuading people to come back to New Orleans.

Was the D.A.’s physical office destroyed in Katrina?

The office was about six feet under water. Since then, it has been closed, and it’s my understanding that there’s a serious mold problem. It’s probably going to need to be gutted and totally redone.

For now, they’re in temporary office space. They don’t have an office-wide e-mail system. They have three to four employees sharing telephones. They don’t have enough computers for the office staff. The office is operating off of folding picnic tables.

On top of all that, the D.A. resigned.

[New Orleans D.A. Eddie Jordan] had been sued for race discrimination as a result of terminating a fairly large number of employees when he took office. They were primarily investigators and victims-service assistants, as well as support staff. The federal district court recently ruled that the assets of the office could be seized to satisfy that judgment.

Who’s running the office now?

An interim D.A. was appointed, Keva Landrum-Johnson. I’m pretty impressed with her. I think she’s smart, tough, and savvy. She faces more challenges than any D.A. in America right now.

A federal judge froze six of the office’s bank accounts this month as the first step in seizing the $3.7 million. Is that having any effect?

They had great difficulty making payroll last week. They’ll face the same problem at the end of this month. My guess is that they will end up securing a loan to pay off all or part of the judgment.

Why did you go to New Orleans?

The National District Attorneys Association was looking for D.A.’s from cities similar in size to New Orleans, as well as cities that may have something in common with New Orleans. In our case, we’re larger in city population than New Orleans, but our metropolitan area is about the same size. And Memphis has so many commercial and cultural ties with New Orleans.

What did you do?

We interviewed as many stakeholders as we could. We talked to the interim D.A. and to her key staff members. We talked to the police chief and other key people in the police department, Mayor Nagin, various judges, and representatives of the business community.

We’re not trying to come up with some five-year strategic plan for the D.A.’s office. We were more of a MASH unit that comes in and identifies some specific things that could be done in the immediate future.

Could New Orleans’ problems affect Memphis?

New Orleans is our sister city, so what happens down river affects us here. If New Orleans can make some headway on its crime problem, I think that will benefit us in the long run.

Tags Bill Gibbons, interview, katrina, New Orleans, Orleans Parish

News The Fly-By

Ho Ho Ho

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date November 29, 2007

Sure, local politicians are for sale, but how much exactly should a person expect to pay to own one? Is it the sort of purchase you can make outright, or will a loan be required? And will prices remain steady throughout the holiday gift-giving season or will costs soar in the wake of former county commissioner Bruce Thompson’s indictment on charges of trading his influence for more than $250,000 in consulting fees.

Sting operations like Tennessee Waltz and Main Street Sweeper have shown Bluff City shoppers that, if you look hard enough, bargains abound. The services of various civic officials may be rented for only a few thousand dollars. Purchase prices, however, vary widely, and the serious shopper should be prepared to spend as much as they would for a new or gently used car.

Charged with taking less than $10,000 each, city councilman Edmund Ford and state senator Roscoe Dixon are clearly the 2001 Honda CRVs (with less than 200,000 miles) of local politics. Admitting that she shared $11,500 with an accomplice, Kathryn Bowers pled guilty to accepting slightly more than the price of a base model 2007 Kia Rio but slightly less than a Kia Rio LX. Rickey Peete, who once went to the hooscow for less than the cost of a rusty 1989 Malibu, recently upped his alleged value to $14,000, or the price of a new Chevy Malibu.

Considering the $24,000 given to Michael Hooks and the $55,000 given to former state senator John Ford, it’s fair to say that, at present, Memphis’ average corrupt politician may be purchased for about the same amount as a 2007 Chrysler Sebring (loaded) or a more basic version of the Chrysler’s much nicer 2007 Town & Country.

If Thompson’s charges stick, he’ll send the average cost of corruption over the $50,000 mark and into Cadillac Escalade territory. But that’s still chump change compared to John Ford. He could be convicted of accepting an additional $800,000, raising the average purchase price of a local politician to nearly $170,000, or the cost of a sweet 2007 Bentley Continental GT.

Happy shopping.

Tags bribe, extortion, politicians, Politics

Music Music Features

Return of the Third Man

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date November 29, 2007

Because Memphis music is so consumed by its roots heritage — blues, soul, rockabilly, garage-rock, alt-country — creative success can often be had by fighting against those expectations. In recent years, artists such as Snowglobe, The Coach and Four, Lost Sounds, and Jay Reatard (among others) have made some of the most exciting local music outside the boundaries of what most listeners immediately associate with Memphis music. And so it is with The Third Man.

The Third Man is composed of multi-instrumentalists Jake Vest and elder brother Toby Vest, guitarist/keyboardist Jeff Schmidtke, bassist/keyboardist/trombonist Dirk Kitterlin, and drummer Preston Todd. At this juncture, the band is probably better known to local music fans by its original name: Augustine.

“There is a Hawaiian nü-metal band called Augustine,” says Jake Vest, explaining the name change. “They sound like P.O.D. or Disturbed and sent us a few e-mails that stated they were about to go on tour and if we didn’t change our name, they would take us to court.” Something else also helped the band with their decision: “All of their e-mails were in all-caps, and I don’t like it when people send us e-mails in all-caps,” Vest says.

Along with a name taken from the classic 1949 film that stars Orson Welles, another noticeable change came with the sound of the band’s new album, Among the Wolves.

When they were known as Augustine, these local faves probably deserved a few of the Radiohead comparisons with which they were saddled. But, as the Third Man, the band has dialed down that frame of reference with an incredibly realized, catchy blend of ’70s hard rock, bluesy boogie, and ’60s psychedelia. This bevy of interesting influences does wonders with the band’s lingering indie-rock elements, emerging as a best-case scenario of what might happen if Scandinavian cult favorites Dungen were, well, from the South.

“The Stones’ Exile on Main Street was a big influence on the making of this record, as was the Love, Peace, and Poetry series of compilations, especially the Brazilian one,” explains Jake Vest. Each volume of the Love, Peace, and Poetry compilations, released by Normal Records, showcases a selection of late-’60s/early-’70s garage/psychedelic tracks from a particular country or continent. But a local influence in the same vein also provided inspiration for the Third Man’s current direction: underground Memphis rock band Moloch.

“I love that self-titled album by Moloch from ’69,” says Vest, a longtime friend of Ben Baker, son of the late Moloch guitarist and Memphis music legend Lee Baker.

The Third Man is a team effort (all of the members are in their early-to-mid 20s), though the Vest brothers form the songwriting core. “At this point, my brother and I come up with the basic ideas for the songs, which we then bring to the band for everyone to work out,” Jake says.

Keyboards, a Mellotron, and a 12-string acoustic guitar are among the instruments that take a front seat on Among the Wolves. “We were going with a more organic sound with this record, but it’s a natural progression,” Jake continues. “You can hear those instruments creeping in on the Augustine album.”

Augustine’s 2005 debut Broadcast was released to local critical acclaim on the Makeshift Music imprint and was recorded at Easley/McCain Studios. Among the Wolves will be self-released and was recorded at Young Avenue Sound. Continuing with the band’s DIY approach, the Third Man plans on self-releasing future albums, and they are in the midst of constructing their own practice space and studio.

To support Among the Wolves, the band plans on organizing a tour in early 2008 around a performance at Austin’s South By Southwest Music Festival.

Tags Among the Wolves, Augustine, Local Music, Music, Review, South by Southwest Music Festival, The Third Man

Politics Politics Feature

Looking Ahead

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date November 29, 2007

“The tide is turning.” That’s Jim Kyle‘s confident declaration about the forthcoming election season in state government. Kyle, the Memphis Democrat who leads his party in the Tennessee state Senate, cites a number of precedents for his belief that 2008 will be a triumphant year for long-suffering state Democrats, who have been seeing their legislative numbers recede for a decade or two.

“Democrats just took over the Virginia state Senate, for one thing. And we’ve got more Democrats running in Republican districts, even in East Tennessee, than we ever had before,” Kyle said Tuesday — the very day that his opposite number, GOP Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, was due in Shelby County for a meeting of the East Shelby Republican Club.

Ramsey, a Blountville Republican, came with Mark Norris, a Shelby Countian who is currently serving as the Senate Republican leader and who, Kyle and most other observers believe, wants to succeed Ramsey as Speaker and lieutenant governor should the GOP regain the tenuous majority it held for most of this year’s session and should Ramsey go on to run for governor in 2010, as all the selfsame observers expect.

“Oh, he’s running. No doubt about it,” said Kyle of his GOP counterpart’s gubernatorial hopes — though Ramsey’s immediate concerns are likely to be the same as Kyle’s: to gain a majority for his party in next year’s statewide legislative races. (For what it’s worth, the Democratic majority in the state House — 53 to 46, at the moment — is unlikely to be overturned, though the Republicans will surely try.)

As things stand now, the two major parties are tied in the Senate at 16-16. There is one “independent,” former Republican Micheal Williams of Maynardville, who was a reliable ally of (and vote for) John Wilder, the venerable Democrat who was deposed as Speaker early this year when Democrat Rosalind Kurita of Clarksville cast a surprise (and decisive) vote for Ramsey during Senate reorganization for the 2007-’08 term.

Kurita thereupon became Senate Speaker pro Tem, displacing Williams, who simmered quietly for a while then announced in mid-session last spring that he was leaving the GOP. Though he didn’t join the Democrats as such, he aligned with them for procedural purposes, giving Kyle’s party a technical majority by the thinnest possible margin.

When Chattanooga’s Ward Crutchfield, a longtime Democratic pillar in the Senate, was forced to resign after copping a guilty plea as a defendant in the Tennessee Waltz scandal, the Republicans nominated Oscar Brock, son of former U.S. senator Bill Brock, to vie for Crutchfield’s seat.

But Brock was beaten by Democrat Andy Berke in this month’s special election and with a percentage of the vote, 63 percent, that Kyle contends is 10 points in excess of the normal Democratic edge in the District 10 seat.

“That’s one more reason why I think the tide is moving our way,” Kyle said.

Of course, the Republicans are not sitting idly by without mounting a strategy of their own to gain control of the state Senate. They, too, evidently intend to compete seat by seat, district by district, as Kyle says the Democrats will, and one obvious GOP target is octogenarian Wilder of Somerville, who has so far given no indication whether he will seek reelection to his District 26 seat.

“Nobody knows. He’ll just have to decide how much he wants to be in the Senate for four more years,” said Kyle, who carefully skirted the issue of whether Wilder, who served as Speaker for 36 years until the narrow January vote that cast him out, might have ambitions of regaining the position. As Kyle noted, several other Democrats — not least, himself — might decide they want to be Speaker when the time comes.

Republican state representative Dolores Grisham, also of Somerville, has signaled her desire to compete for Wilder’s seat, and she expects to be strongly funded for the effort. “I don’t have any worries about John Wilder’s seat in a race against Dolores Grisham,” Kyle said drily.

In any case, the state Senate will be technically, and actually, up for grabs next year, and the two parties will both be making serious efforts. That fact may preclude Kyle’s making waves by recruiting a primary opponent for Kurita, whom he still has not forgiven for her vote on Ramsey’s behalf.

“We don’t,” the Democrats’ Senate leader said simply when asked how he and Kurita were getting along. That’s one thing that probably won’t change in 2008.

Tags Democrat, Election, GOP, Jim Kyle, legislation, Politics, republican, Senate, Tennessee