Tag: Sheila butt

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News News Blog

Lawmaker Urges Suspension of Syrian Refugees in Tennessee, Haslam Concurs

TN Representative Sheila Butt

Thirty Syrian refugees came to Tennessee last year and eight of them landed in Memphis, according to the Tennessee Office for Refugees.

President Barack Obama wants to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees into the U.S. Over the next year. But in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, states are proclaiming those refugees aren’t welcome in their borders. Obama called this refusal a “betrayal of our values.”

The Tennessean reported Monday that Rep. Sheila Butt, R-Columbia, wants Tennessee the join those other states. A letter from Butt to Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam was leaked on Scribd today.

A few hours later, Haslam issued a statement saying he was asking the federal government to suspend Syrian refugee placements in Tennessee.

“We are currently working to get specifics from the U.S. Department of State on the status of any Syrian refugees currently slated to come to Tennesse,” Haslam said. “While screening, acceptance and placement is legally under the authority of the federal government, they have said in the past they would be open to cooperating with receiving states. Today I’m asking the federal government to suspend placements in Tennessee until states can become more of a partner in the vetting process.”

In the letter from Butt, she asks Haslam to “suspend all efforts to settle any Syrian refugees in Tennessee, through any agencies, until the U.S. Department of Homeland Security completes a full review of security clearances and procedures.”

For context behind the move, Butt points to the “violation and the loss” still felt in the state after the Paris attacks and the attack on a military recruiting office in Chattanooga earlier this year.

Tennessee state Senate Minority Leader Lee Harris, D-Memphis, said this in statement Monday afternoon: 

“We should offer safe sanctuary because we can, and taking several dozen displaced families is the least we can do,” Sen. Harris said. “We should step up when called, because that’s what the good guys do during these days of crises, and we should not turn a cold shoulder, because we understand that the refugees will head into the arms whoever offers help first, including the bad guys and those who might seek to exploit these families.”

Blogs and Facebook posts have swirled after the Friday attacks in Paris noting that “thousands” of Syrian refugees were already arriving en masse across the country. Newspapers are moving to report real figures. 

In Tennessee, the number of Syrian refugees admitted here last year is 30, according to the Tennessee Office for Refugees. The office is a department of Catholic Charities of Tennessee, Inc., which administers the federal Office of Refugees Resettlement for Tennessee. A spokesman for that office confirmed Monday evening that eight of those Syrian refugees have been settled in Memphis. 

Data from the office shows that the 30 Syrian refugees came to Tennessee from October 2014 through September 2015. Two of them came in July, four in August, and six in September, in an apparent ramp-up after refugees flooded out of Syria.

In the same time period, 186 refugees were settled in Memphis, though the data does break down the nationalities of those refugees here.

However, the nationalities of the refugees settled in Tennessee in the last year have been from Afghanistan, Cuba, Palestine, Somalia, Ukraine, and more.  

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News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1379

Mala Vista

Fly on the Wall wants readers to be extra careful if they find themselves walking, biking, or driving near any of the newish solar-powered gates installed along Mud Island’s Greenbelt Park. According to park signage, the city of Memphis isn’t responsible for what might happen if these gates “malfuction.” We’re not really sure what “malfuction” means, mind you, but it sounds really awful.

Punking Punks

Rule #1 for bigots in politics. Be sure to own all internet domains related to your name. And for the love of God and all that’s holy and heterosexual, whatever you do, don’t let those contracts expire. Case in point: Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who has worked to prevent gay couples from adopting and has presided over the passage of numerous anti-gay bills. Last week, the gay and lesbian chat forum LGBTchat.net acquired the domain AsaHutchinson.com, which now redirects to the gay-friendly chat site.

Holt Act

With a serious water crises looming in America and around the world, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery joined the State of Tennessee in a lawsuit led by state Representative Sheila Butt and Andy Holt against the EPA’s “Waters of the United States” rule. WOTUS would ultimately establish whether or not antipollution laws apply to farmers redirecting waterways to create cattle ponds or dumping a million gallons of pig poop all over the place, as Holt has been accused of doing.

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News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1377

Money Shot

Your Pesky Fly doesn’t take sides in electoral politics. Nevertheless, I’m compelled to put in a plug for District 64 Representative Sheila Butt, who has a racy new campaign logo. Yes, that is supposed to be a silhouette of the Maury County courthouse set against the background of the Tennessee state flag. It also looks a like the climactic scene in a porn film.

Viva los Toros!

Pamplona’s encierrÓ, or “running of the bulls,” always claims a few casualties. This year, two Americans were injured and one British man was gored in the groin. But State Senator Brian Kelsey, the pride of East Memphis, dodged all the hooves and horns without incident. Here’s a post-run photo of Kelsey with his friend and fellow bull-runner Pedro.

Tony Tweets

In a series of tweets, SuperGrizz Tony Allen exposed the hidden dangers of getting a couples’ massage at the day spa. Grammatical errors are his own.

• “I’ll never get in a jacuzzi at a day spa again. Dude just jumped in Butt Naked i had to get out of Dodge.”

• “I’m calling the police”

• “I thought u was supposed to at least have on swimming trunks.”

• “See I wouldn’t of ran in to this problem if, I didn’t have go get a couplesmassage ”

Lesson learned.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (March 5, 2015)

Representative Butt. I love saying that out loud in my best Cartman voice from South Park. It would be a great name for a band. Unfortunately, it’s the name of one Sheila Butt, a Republican Tennessee lawmaker who recently posted on Facebook that she thinks there should be an “NAAWP.” This was in response to an open letter from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil liberties organization in the United States, urging 2016 GOP candidates to engage Muslim voters and reject Islamophobia. Now, you might automatically assume that the W in her imaginary dream organization stands for “white,” just like it did years ago when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke actually founded a group named NAAWP. But Butt, who at first wouldn’t even offer an explanation of the post, eventually stated publicly that that was not the case. She said it stood for “National Association for the Advancement of Western Peoples.”

Sheila Butt

Is she talking about Californians? Cowboys? Or is she trying to say we need to advance Western people, like real Americans versus Asian and Middle Eastern people? She obviously thinks the latter is acceptable. That has been her “go to” response as she explains her remarks while basically running down hallways from reporters and pretending to be talking on her cell phone. She shoos them away by acting like she’s too busy to talk with them and too in demand and too important to comment on this issue that she thinks liberals have jumped on because Christians don’t get a fair shake in the good ol’ U.S. of A. and that the liberal media is just making a story out of nothing.

But she pretty swiftly took down the Facebook post. It wasn’t even on her own page, but on the page of a Muslim-hating organization called dailyrollcall.com, which, if you’ve never seen, you simply must. A Tennessee woman named Cathy Hinners writes it, and it is really, really something. She’s like a dog with rabies and a computer. I had never heard of it, so I took a look when the issue of us needing an NAAWP came up. I don’t know where this woman came from (by that I mean, which planet), but she is apparently so obsessed with being anti-Muslim that she has dedicated her entire life to it. But I digress.

Once Butt got the Facebook post down, she replaced it with, “We need groups that will stand for Christians and our Western culture. We don’t have groups dedicated to speaking on our behalf.”

Really? Have you looked around at your own political party and its Tea Party offshoot? And what makes you think all people living in “Western culture” are Christians? Do you also have something against Jews?

One of the things I’m fascinated with regarding this entire issue is the school of thought that if there is a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, why would it be racist for there to be a National Association for the Advancement of White People?

The last time I checked, not all that many white people were captured on a different continents, packed into ships like animals, separated from their families, paraded around naked in front of crowds, bought, sold, traded, beaten, forced to drink from separate water fountains, denied the right to vote, denied education, and other basic human rights. Of course, there needed to be, and still needs to be, an NAACP. And there is no need for an NAAWP — whether the “W” stands for white or western. There’s no way Representative Butt or anyone else can make that notion make sense.

There are still cities in this country where high schools have separate proms for white students and black students. To this day, there are country clubs right here in Memphis, Tennessee, that do not allow any members other than white people. They hide behind that mask of it being a “private club,” and, yes, in the year 2015, will not allow an African American, Asian, or Jewish person to have a membership. Representative Butt, I think they may just be standing up for your Christian/Western values, so you might have a little less to worry about than you think.

When are people going to learn a) that if you are an elected official, you are under a microscope and anything you say publicly is fair game for the kind of controversy you’ve stirred up? This is not the liberal media trying to make a story out of nothing; and b) that you don’t need to be posting this kind of crap on social media.

Social media posts never go away. You can remove your heinous comments once you get caught, but that doesn’t matter. There’s a little thing called copy and paste and those comments are out there forever. If you have any spine at all, just own up to the blunder and apologize — unless, that is, you still don’t think you did anything wrong, which I suspect is the case. And it looks like you have plenty of Butt fans in your party enough, at least, that they are going to, er, back you.