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Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Jackson Baker’s post, “State House Declines to Override Haslam Veto of the ‘Bible Bill'” …

Such a colossal waste of time and our tax dollars. If only these fools put this much energy into solving real problems.

Jamie Outlaw

A little injection of sanity and common sense never hurt anyone, including the Tennessee state legislature. Well spoken, Steve McManus, the one who really addressed the matter as it should have been addressed.

Packrat

This whole story reads like a synopsis of an old Gilligan’s Island episode.

OakTree

About Bianca Phillips’ story, “Q&A With a Fast-Food Worker on Fight for $15” …

These jobs were originally created to be for part-time teenagers, working after school and on weekends, or seniors working the morning shifts. But the economy has turned these positions into ones from which people, mostly unskilled labor, are looking to support their families. If the minimum wage goes up to $15 an hour, I’m afraid the unskilled labor force is going to be competing with people who have working experience, even possibly college degrees. And although I agree the minimum wage is woefully overdue for an upgrade, I’m afraid doubling it won’t be the optimal situation for the current workers fighting for it.

Mejjep

He wants more money for the same work, and I want to know why he thinks he deserves it. He has put himself in this situation, and it is fair for us to know why. Good intentions don’t mean squat. What I really want to know is why, with all the retraining opportunities the government provides, he is still working at an entry-level position for minimum wage.

Arlington Pop

The problem with APop’s argument is that the minimum wage has been kept artificially low by conservatives for decades. If it had kept up with wages and cost of living from its inception, it would now be something like $21/hour.

The real argument is never stated — that the minimum wage sets the bar for wages across the board. If you raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, then all those slobs who have been toiling away in warehouses and factories and flower shops and kitchens for 20 years to work their way up to $15 an hour are going to want a raise, too. And if they get raises, then they will be making more than middle management, who will want raises, too.

This is what puts the fear of Jesus into the rent collectors. Such a law would create a massive shift of wealth out of the hands of the 1 percent, undoing 30 years of hard work buying off legislators to suppress wages.

That’s why the 1 percent works so hard to elect Republicans, who invariably crash the economy built up by Democrats. However, because they are only 1 percent of the population, they had to make a Faustian bargain with the Bible bangers and Confederate holdouts in order to hold onto power. The terms of that contract are finally maturing, and Donald Mephistrumpheles has come to collect their souls.

Jeff

About Toby Sells’ post, “Shelby Farms Development Clears Another Hurdle” …

Sad and shameful. But what else should we have expected from this sorry excuse for a city council? Follow the money, every time.

Barry Roberson

Soon they will be so successful, they will have to find overflow parking somewhere, somewhere close. There has to be a golf course close by they can park on. Isn’t that what golf courses are for?

CL Mullins

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Editorial Opinion

Tubman vs. Jackson: The Change Will Do Us Good

Harriet Tubman

It’s wonderful that the $20 bill will at some point in the reasonably near future bear the likeness of Harriet Tubman, a genuinely heroic figure in American history and one whose life-or-death efforts on behalf of equality were put to the test as an active participant in the struggles of the Civil War. That she represents two groups — women and African Americans — who had previously been shunned in the ceremony of our currency (the paper version of it, anyhow) was, and is, an additional point to be celebrated.

And there’s no doubting that Andrew Jackson, the general and president whose likeness she will supplant, had his flaws. Yes, he was murderous to the Native American population of the South, whose members he mercilessly slew or moved aside to make room for white settlers. And yes, he was a slave owner, a biographical fact that, on his part as well as many, many others in the group we call “forefathers,” becomes less and less easy to accept, much less venerate.

It is understandable — especially in the wake of last year’s horrific slaughter of nine African-American church-goers by a neo-Confederate racist — that we should start a rethinking process about the events and establishments that bear the name of such known slave-holders. In Tennessee, the matter of changing the name of the Democratic Party’s annual Jackson Day banquet in Nashville was put to a vote of the party’s executive committee. To the surprise of some, the majority favored retaining the homage to Jackson. Was this fair or foul?

Partly, the vote represented a certain regard for tradition. The name “Jackson” is, after all, one of the most thoroughly embedded names in the landscape of Americana. But, beyond that, the issue is more nuanced than a simple recitation of Andrew Jackson’s grave misdeeds would indicate. The victory of Jackson’s ragtag army over a disciplined British force at the Battle of New Orleans remains one of the signal events of American history. His presidency, moreover, was characterized by systematic efforts to democratize the office (for whites, anyhow) and, a century before FDR, to combat and diminish the power of organized money. Less known is the fact that, 35 years before Fort Sumter, Jackson preserved the Union by backing down the first attempt at secession by South Carolina.

For that matter, if we are to cleanse the national honor roll of slave-holders, what should we do with the name of our national capital? George Washington, too, was an offender on that count.

Let us be real here. Grant, Sherman, Lee, Jackson — they all did things on the battlefield that would have made George “Blood and Guts” Patton turn his head. Woodrow Wilson quite literally set back the progress of desegregation in his time. But just as there are no saints in our national pantheon, there are no Hitlers, either.

So Andrew Jackson will be moved to the back side of the $20 bill, and the front side will become Tubman’s. That seems about right.

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Jen Clarke’s column, “Legalized Bigotry: Tennessee Outdoes Mississippi and North Carolina” …

I doubt the sponsors of this bill have ever met a transgender person. I doubt most people have ever met a person they would call transgender. They’ve seen Bruce Jenner become Caitlyn Jenner, and since that seems bizarre to most people, along with the preferred pronouns thing, the right-wing homophobes have picked this issue as the means to oppose gay rights, which is linked by the acronym LGBT to the transgender issue.

But keep on saying that nobody with a brain thinks like an average heterosexual American. Keep on calling them bigots. Because that’s so sure to make them feel accomplished after 30 or more years of conditioning to the notion of gay rights and a handful of years of conditioning to the notion of transgender.

Brunetto Latini

I don’t think Jen said they didn’t have a brain. In fact, she is encouraging them to use it and not just be swayed by ill-informed sentiment.

Calling the sponsors of this bill bigots is simply descriptive. One of the great mysteries of the South is why we get so worked up over who is using our public bathrooms. Used to be “colored people” who couldn’t use them. Now there’s another group that Southern folks want to keep out of the stalls. Trying to fix it at the statehouse isn’t going to do anything but create a stink in there, and then the Supremes are going to sing. It’s dumb.

I’ll be the first one to stand up for the rights of my neighbors to do dumb stuff. That’s why we have the phrase, “Here, hold my beer …” But at least it should be for something entertaining.

This? It’s just sad.

OakTree

As a parent, I wonder what will happen to parents who bring their opposite-gendered young children into the bathroom with them. Will Mom be forced to send little 3-year-old Johnny all by himself into the crowded, jostling men’s john at the Tennessee/Alabama game? This bill would forbid him entering the ladies room.

Jeff

Next thing you know, our state legislators will propose a bill that if you are not a Christian, you can’t live in Tennessee. As absurd as that sounds, if things continue to go in this direction, it’s a real possibility.

Pamela Cates

I propose eliminating large public toilet areas altogether and go with multiple outhouses (nary a two seater). And what could say Tennessee better than that?

CL Mullins

About Jackson Baker’s cover story “Can a Wild Card Trump the Opposition?” …

Don’t underestimate Terry Roland. His unfortunate vocal patterns aside, he is very smart guy and a shrewd politician. I am happy to see he is working on his temper, which can get him in trouble from time to time.

Arlington Pop

Oh, the humanity.

B

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s column, “(Another) New Day at the CA” …

As a veteran news reporter and former Commercial Appeal news bureau chief, I strongly support the Gannett Company’s not downsizing editor Louis Graham. The CA, to quote the Flyer‘s editor, indeed, “has improved greatly” under Graham’s editorship.

Though it has been painful to watch the transformation of daily metro newspapers across the U.S., including the CA, Graham has remained true to journalistic integrity, as well as the long-dismissed Truth in Journalism Act.

Despite seemingly never-ending layoffs of reputable staff — and downright crazy bean-counters’ ideas about how to save circulation and advertising dollars — Graham has remained a “Louisville slugger.” (He interned at the Louisville Courier-Journal.) If Gannett lets him go, there will be “no joy in Mudville.”

Fran Taylor

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Tennessee Sharia? Closer Than You Think

Seemingly, few issues have vexed the members of the Tennessee General Assembly in recent years so grievously as has the specter of Sharia law — the Koran-based and severely fundamentalist legal framework which militant

jihadists have imposed on Islamic societies in lieu of secular law, when and where they can.

There has been an infinitesimally small — or nonexistent — prospect of Sharia being imposed on us here in the West, and chances of having that happen in Bible-belt Tennessee are, to say the least, even more remote.

But neither that common-sense circumstance nor the Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom in the United States have been enough to quiet the fears of assorted Tennessee legislators, who in the last several years have suffered Sharia-panic to the point of questioning whether a mop sink installed in a Capitol restroom had not in fact been intended to serve as a means to facilitate foot-washing according to Islamic law.

The same group of legislators made a serious attempt in 2011 at passing a bill declaring the practice of Sharia law in Tennessee a felony. In that instance, as with the mop-sink scare, calmer heads ultimately prevailed, and the anti-Sharia bill was morphed into a much watered-down and abstractly stated “anti-terrorism” measure. The Islamophobe legislators have since moved on to stewing about alleged “no-go” zones, areas in the U.S. where only Muslims are allowed to move around freely. They haven’t found any yet, but they’re still looking.

The sad fact is, they’re looking in the wrong direction to find evidence of religious absolutism aiming at subordinating the legal system and controlling governmental affairs. Even as we speak, the threat of state-supported religion hangs over the General Assembly as it prepares to wind up its affairs for the legislative session of 2016.

We recognize that most of the legislators, in both chambers, who managed to pass a measure to make the Bible an official state book intended no conscious coercion or hatred of others, but we agree with state Attorney General Herbert Slatery that the bill is an attempt, even if indirect, at violating the explicit Constitutional guarantees against an officially established religion. As for the flaws in various pseudo-secular rationales for the measure, see the statements against the bill in this week’s “Politics” column by state Senate majority leader Mark Norris and by Governor Bill Haslam, whose veto of the bill is at risk of override as the last act of this legislative session.

Nor is the Bible bill a solitary instance. Bill after bill in recent years has been introduced in the General Assembly with the intent of imposing the monolithic moral strictures of some upon the recognized freedoms of all. Put in this category the great majority of anti-abortion bills that proliferate in every legislative session. And include also the so-called “bathroom bill,” pulled only at the last minute, that would have put transgendered individuals in a crippling social limbo and compelled them to act against what they have come to perceive, at great cost in personal sacrifice, as their very nature.

Sharia law? It’s closer than you think.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Un-Conventional: High Drama Ahead at Both Parties’ Summer Confabs

Disproved now are trhoseindications earlier in the year that presidential politics would be played the usual way — with one candidate in each major party developing an early lead, usually after only three or four (and sometimes just two) primary victories, and then gradually pulling away until sometime in mid-March or mid-April, when it would all be over. Everybody, at that point, it was presumed — pundits and public alike — would be settling into the Masters or the NBA finals or some other form of mass entertainment and forgetting about presidential politics until the conventions rolled around.

Typically, of course, the conventions are glittering public events that serve mostly to display a parade of luminaries. For years, they have pretended to be about crucial decisions but have largely been ceremonial — something akin to the Country Music Awards.

But this year, for a variety of reasons, neither party has really settled on a candidate, and, for the first time in something like 40 years, there will be at least one convention where the central issue remains to be decided. That’s the Republican Convention in Cleveland, where, to our eyes, at least, eccentric neophyte Donald Trump, who somehow got to be the GOP’s frontrunner, has as much chance of getting out of town with his chances intact as the late, lamented Donner family had of getting to the West Coast safe and sound.

Ted Cruz, the ugly-mug, right-wing Senator from Texas, does not impress us so much as an underdog making his move as he does a stalker moving in for the kill. But even if Trump can derail Cruz, House Speaker Paul Ryan looms in the wings, despite his current protestations to the contrary. Ryan, whose entire political philosophy seems to be summed up by the two words “Ayn Rand,” did the same routine while courting the House Speakership without seeming to.

And this is just the Republicans. The Democrats, too, as of this writing, still have a contest going. If it weren’t for that essentially un-Democratic business of having several hundred establishment types licensed to vote as “super-delegates,” balancing out the rude efforts of the people to decide sonething, ol’ Bernie Sanders, with his simple and direct message of “End Economic Inequality Now,” might actually have a chance. (Gee, maybe he still does, anyhow.)

In any case, for all the wailing, hand-wringing, and gnashing of teeth in the two parties, we pronounce ourselves delighted. Most of us have no actual memory of things being decided in smoke-filled rooms (Heck, most of us don’t have much memory of smoke!), but the whole notion of competitive conventions, smokeless or otherwise, strikes us as the soul of romance, the kind of political noir we’ve been waiting for all our lives.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Richard Cohen’s column, “Thinking Small” …

Trump and Cruz have called for Kasich to pull out. That tells me they see the same possible convention outcome. If Kasich stays in it, he could win it by default.

Jeff

I’ve often wondered if Trump was in this thing as a grand conspiracy to try to help Hillary get elected. He’s certainly helping to fracture the GOP, and if he does manage to pull enough support to get into the general, he’s nearly going to lock it up for Clinton.

GroveReb84

I was hoping for a pro-gun-control, free-college-education type like Ronald Reagan.

CL Mullins

About Jackson Baker’s story, “De-annexation Bill Killed for Session” …

Mark Norris, Brian Kelsey, and Reginald Tate are total embarrassments to Shelby County. It’s ridiculous that suburban leaders representing Shelby County in Nashville are constantly against anything that pertains to the city of Memphis. These yokels don’t realize that we are all in the same boat. Memphis not only has to fight middle and eastern Tennessee legislatures, but also those from Shelby County.

I would never vote for Mark Norris as governor. Memphis would be better off with former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean.

BigTime21

I maintain that we must forge a consolidated city/county government and get beyond all this city/county hostility. We have already consolidated the schools, so let’s consolidate the rest. It would save all of us a lot of money in taxes. Running two separate governments is ridiculous. What can we do to get this on the agenda?

ZenRiddler

About Toby Sells’ post “Council Members Say Sunshine Law Not Violoated” …

Where is the independent study that shows that the Memphis Zoo contributes $90 million to the local economy? Zoo people keep quoting that, but where is that number coming from?

The city budgets over $3 million to the zoo to operate annually; the zoo collects between $650,000 to $1,000,000 in annual parking fees (to park on land owned by the city/taxpayers), and taxpayers subsidize the zoo’s utilities. So it costs the city of Memphis/taxpayers anywhere between $4 million and possibly twice that when you factor in utility subsidization annually.

There are two types of tourists: day tourists who come to the zoo and then take their tired kids home (that’s zero in additional revenue to what they spend at the zoo itself) and then those who come to Memphis and do other tourist things (Graceland, Stax, Sun, Beale Street, barbecue, etc.). The zoo isn’t the only driver of that tourism. So what is the real economic impact, and where is the proof?

On the other hand, the annual property taxes from area codes 38104 and 38112 — those immediately adjacent to the zoo — bring in over $18 million annually to the city. And these are people who live, work, eat, shop, and play in the city every day.

Why is the council chasing tourists when they should be serving the residents?

Mary Ost

I have been a neighbor and regular user of Overton Park since 1982. During that time, every part of the park — the zoo, Shell, museum, Old Forest, trails, rest rooms, playgrounds, and gardens — has been significantly improved thanks to city government, the zoo leadership and donors, the Overton Park Conservancy, volunteers, and activists who each played an important part.

Sam Cooper, the landscaped eastern approach to Overton Park, is a big improvement over blighted Broad Street 20 years ago. And on the west side, the abandoned expressway corridor is now full of new homes and families. Unless you were in Memphis in those days, you can’t imagine how different it was. It’s hard to think of another Memphis success story as satisfying and broad-based as this one.

Now a debate over parking on the grass, which is commonplace at other parks in Memphis and elsewhere, is overshadowing this and dividing Midtowners and Memphians. I’m sorry to see that.

John Branston

Was Berlin Boyd a contestant for Miss South Carolina a few years ago? If not, he does a great imitation.

Bandit109

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Toby Sells’ post “Greensward Protest Caused ‘Almost Irreparable Harm'” …

A recent statement from the Memphis Zoo to the Flyer regarding last weekend’s protest on the Greensward was filled with false insinuations, half-truths, and outright lies, and I cannot let it be disseminated to the general public without responding. 

Here is a portion of the zoo’s version of what transpired last Saturday: “Many families parked blocks and blocks away because they were directed by protesters acting as zoo volunteers, only to arrive to see plenty of paved parking available but blocked by protesters. Still others were unable to visit the zoo at all.” 

Wrong on all points. 

I am a proud member of the Free Parking Brigade. I was at the corner of Galloway and McLean with my friends last Saturday, and at no point did we impersonate zoo employees. What we did was work our tails off from10 a.m. to 12:45 p.m., directing cars to available parking on city streets. Most of them were from out of town, had no idea what all the fuss was about and, when told, were horrified that the zoo would park vehicles on the grass.

We must have directed over 1,000 zoo visitors to free parking, and a Memphis police officer helped them cross the busy street safely while a zoo employee stood there and took a video of us working. We probably brought in an extra $10,000 for the very zoo that seems to despise us. 

Though they did stand their ground on the Greensward, it is not true that protesters blocked any zoo patrons from using paved parking. 

The Memphis Zoo is held in such low regard at this point simply because they continue to be arrogant and obstinate, and issue false information through the media to support their claim to the Greensward.

It’s way past time to act like a responsible adult, Chuck Brady, and join thousands of other Memphians who love their park and seek to become part of the solution to this controversial issue, and not part of the problem.

Gordon Alexander

Two solutions for the zoo: It should build its own parking with the support and help of the community for funding and planning, as any other responsible community partner would. Or they can choose the path they are on: spin, pivot, and lie to avoid the inevitable. The protests will continue, and eventually people will stop coming, thus also resolving the parking problem.

I’m good with either one.

Fitz Dearmore

Wouldn’t it be hilarious if this whole zoo parking debacle turned out to be part of the conspiracy perpetrated by the old money, East Memphis land speculators and developers to diminish the livability of Memphis proper in order to continue to fuel their ill-conceived (yet so far perfectly executed) concept of “growth”? Or, more correctly, what has been spoon-fed to us as growth but in truth has resulted in nothing more than personal gain at public expense. 

You hear the argument in the news even now; it’s the underlying truth behind “de-annexation” and “tax base.” This phenomenon, this conspiracy, is precisely what has given us the precariously imbalanced city we all know and love, with so much economic power focused out East, while the vast majority of the city (geographically speaking) is an economic wasteland.

Either way, you can rest assured that the real forces behind this situation have little or nothing to do with the big bad zoo bullying a bunch of peaceniks. Ask yourself why so many politicians, people supposedly elected by you and me, are inexplicably siding with the zoo. Or why they seem not only deaf to reasonable compromise, but adamantly opposed to it? I’m not quite ready to watch it all go to hell just yet. I believe I shall take a stand.

Aaron James

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Strickland’s First 100 Days

It has been 100 days since the formal ascension to the mayor’s office of former city Councilman Jim Strickland on New Year’s Day, and, though it wasn’t his formal “First 100 Days” address, which will occur soon, along with the mayor’s first budget message, members of the Rotary Club of Memphis got a preview on Tuesday.

Strickland eschewed grandiosity in outlining what he called the “big picture,” just as he had during last year’s mayoral race, when he campaigned on a triad of what could be called housekeeping issues — crime, blight, and accountability in government. On Tuesday, Strickland stated his goal as that of having the city be “brilliant at the basics.”

Crime control was, once again, at the top of that list, along with such other basics as attending to potholes, making sure the city’s 911 system was functional and responsive, and conforming to state law that now requires that Memphis, along with all other Tennessee local jurisdictions, must maintain its pension obligations in a condition of complete funding.

Those matters had to be dealt with “so that the great things in Memphis can grow and grow,” Strickland said.

One of the matters he considered in some detail was the specter of population loss, a circumstance the mayor saw as being the proximate cause of most urban decline in the nation and which had been an undeniable aspect of recent Memphis history. Strickland cited statistics showing that Memphis’ population, which stood at 650,000 30 years ago, had been maintained at that level only by means of continuous annexations.

Strickland noted that some 110,000 Memphis citizens (including, he said, his own parents) had left the city in the period from 1980 to 2010, and they had been replaced by as many newly annexed residents in adjacent areas, not all of them — as introduction of a de-annexation bill in the current session of the General Assembly made clear — happy at the change in their status.

Hence the passage of legislation two years ago that blocks further urban annexations without a reciprocal vote of acceptance in areas about to be annexed, and hence also the more recent de-annexation bill, which easily passed the Tennessee House and was stalled in a commmittee of the state Senate only via the strenuous efforts of a coalition partly engineered by Strickland.

That coalition — including representatives of Memphis and other city governments statewide, the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce, and influential bill opponents in the legislature and state government at large — succeeded in relegating the de-annexation measure to the limbo of “summer study.”

But the challenge of maintaining the city’s population and improving its economic base remains, Strickland said, who cited various programs, including a massive effort to increase the city’s police force and to hire a world-class police director, along with upgrades to the city’s transportation system, encouragement of universal pre-K, and an effort to regain Memphis’ lost reputation as one of the nation’s cleanest cities. (“Be Clean by 2019” is the slogan for that endeavor.)

There was a lot more to what the mayor said, but that idea of being “brilliant at the basics” is the key to all of it. We hope he succeeds. It will not be easy.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Joey Hack’s post, “Questions Raised by Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man'” …

The answer to these questions, and many more like them, is that in 1974, Prozac had only just been invented. It wasn’t until years later that it went into wide circulation.

OakTree

He should be wearing a piano key necktie in that photo. And why is Billy Joel brandishing a Telecaster, anyway?

Packrat

I love that moment when he hits that soaring final chorus in “Piano Man,” and dozens of catheters come flying onto the stage.

Mark

Who cares about all the damn metaphors in “Piano Man”? I understood what he was saying. I also remember when Billy and his small group played to a packed house at the old Lafayette’s Music Room at Overton Square in the early 1970s. I listened to it live on FM-100. Billy loved Memphis, and Memphis loved Billy. He became a superstar almost overnight after that show.

Paul Scates

About Jackson Baker’s Politics column, “Another City/Suburban Battle” …

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but did the city not determine that South Cordova was going to lose money for the city immediately after annexing it? I’ve been saying for a while that the annexation strategy is and has been failing.

If you were to do a postmortem on the annexations, I believe you’d find that even the ones that at first were profitable for the city likely are no longer profitable.

The big problem the city has is that the minute it annexes an area, property values in the area drop. So any business case the city did based on the potential tax revenue of the annexed area was wrong if they didn’t assume that the pool of funds would be reduced after annexation. Knowing how most governments operate, I doubt that kind of analysis was ever done on any of the annexations.

GroveReb84

Mark Luttrell: 26%; George Flinn: 11%; Brian Kelsey: 9%; David Kustoff: 8%; Tom Leatherwood: 7%; Steve Basar: 1%; Undecided: 38%.

Given the choice of the above, it’s easy to see why Undecided is winning.

B

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s column, “Medium Cool” …

Maybe the Flyer is too “cool” to educate themselves on Trump’s policies, but you can read them here if you can find time between comparing IPA’s: donaldjtrump.com/positions.

Clyde

Dubya was cool to a certain segment of the country — largely the same segment that loves Trump, and for many of the same reasons. The difference is that many of the people who voted for Dubya but weren’t fond of his cool trusted that his handlers would actually run the country for him. They don’t have the same trust with Trump. They know he’ll surround himself with yes-men and do whatever he damn well pleases, and that’s what scares them.

Hillary Clinton’s cool is 10th-grade math teacher cool — the teacher everybody hates after the first day of class, but toward the end of the year decide she’s all right, and by the time they graduate, remember her quite fondly as one of the best teachers they ever had.

Jeff

Bruce, you’ve gone too far. How dare you insult the noble brotherhood of “Siding Salesmen.”

I prefer to think of Trump as more like the guy who owns a bunch of sleazy and failed businesses and has the audacity to show up uninvited to the party, referring to himself as a “Business Genius, and VERY, very rich to boot.”

Oh … Wait a minute. Never mind.

So maybe we can just call him what he is: the turd in the punch bowl of the 2016 election year. And that’s not cool.

John Shouse

I dunno, I have sat in a bar with John Kerry and voted for him anyway.

CL Mullins

Categories
Editorial Opinion

De-Annexation Pollyannas

We know that politicians, even wise and knowledgeable ones, whose local constituencies lie primarily outside the current boundaries of the city of Memphis, may find it difficult to fully tell it like it is in the case of the de-annexation bill under consideration in the Tennessee General Assembly.

That fact might explain why Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, whose views on city/county affairs are normally quite balanced, professes not to be unduly concerned about a bill which, on the face of things, threatens to dismember Memphis, depriving it of geographic areas that are prime sources of sustaining revenue.

At this moment, Luttrell necessarily has to be looking to that part of his bailiwick — suburban east Shelby County — that will supply the lion’s share of the votes in the pending election for the 8th District congressional seat which Luttrell is seeking in this year’s election. Fair enough. Sentiment in that area seems, on the basis of attitudes taken by its representatives in the legislature, to be either favorable toward the bill or indifferent to its consequences. However, if the final version of the bill, in its sanction of easy dissolutions, turns out to apply to all incorporated municipalities statewide, including all of those in Shelby County, they may have another think coming.

In any case, we note by contrast to Luttrell’s hands-off approach the response of Sheriff Bill Oldham, who has viewed with concern and simple common sense the increased burdens, financial and otherwise, that will accrue to his department if it becomes wholly responsible for law enforcement in areas that might separate from Memphis.

Unfortunately, the attitude of the Shelby County’s aforementioned suburban legislators seems characterized either by an attitude of vengefulness toward Memphis, as in the case of state Representative Curry Todd, or an affected Pollyanna-ism in the case of state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris, both of Collierville. We find disingenuous Norris’ protestation that the bill doesn’t de-annex anybody but merely gives annexed populations the right to vote on their status. That’s especially misleading, given Norris’ public rebuke of Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland for laying out the consequences to Memphis of the bill, at least as originally written — notably the potential financial losses to an already cash-strapped city of from $27 million to $78 million.

Norris blithely upbraided Strickland for stressing the bill’s downside (one that the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce, other Tennessee mayors, and major business leaders like AutoZone founder Pitt Hyde and ranking officials of First Tennessee Bank have testified is realistic). According to Norris, Strickland should be emphasizing Memphis’ advantages to residents rather than what he calls “the parade of horribles” itemized by the Memphis mayor.

Norris seems to believe that the proponents of de-annexation are seeking to physically remove their areas miles away from Memphis, distant from the job opportunities and attractions and developed infrastructure that the city offers. The fact is, all these amenities would still be available to the de-annexed populations; the latter would simply cease to help pay for them. They would become exploiters of Memphis rather than partners in maintaining the city. He should know better, and probably does.