Archive for the ‘Opinion/Editorial’ Category
December 24th, 2009
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Author: by Flyer Staff
The year ends with the Memphis City Council playing what appears to be a game of Russian roulette with the issue of funding for Memphis City Schools. When a council majority last week rejected Mayor A C Wharton’s call for a 31-cent tax increase to comply with a judicial order to fund Memphis City Schools, it could propose no clear alternative — other than the time-dishonored one of eliminating waste and cutting-to-the-bone and all that. Oh, and poaching from the…
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by Flyer Staff
Addressing the lingering but increasingly moot question of the 2008 Tennessee Voter Confidence Act, Tennessee secretary of state Tre Hargett last week insisted in Memphis that “we’re going to be prepared to implement that law, no matter what” and went on to float two options. One was to lease optical-scan voting machines with 2002-vintage specificatons; another was to buy newer ones, scheduled to be marketed next spring. Either set of machines would do what the TVCA — passed with virtual…
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by Flyer Staff
News on Tuesday of the death of former state representative Joyce Hassell constituted something of a continuum and a contrast to the previous week’s special-election news. Hassell had been a longtime member of the state House of Representatives, until she was defeated in the 2000 Republican primary by Paul Stanley, who went on to hold the seat until he won a race for the state Senate in 2006. That Senate seat, which Stanley relinquished after becoming the center of a…
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by Flyer Staff
This last week has seen some serious losses in the Memphis political community. Elsewhere in this issue (Politics, p. 14), the life and career of Larry Turner, who for a quarter century represented the southernmost rim of Memphis and Shelby County in the legislature, are dealt with in some detail. His passing is a major event; so is that of Alzada Clark, who died last Thursday. Clark had been inactive in recent years, but in her prime she participated in…
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by Flyer Staff
In September, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan came to Memphis bearing a message of possible federal largesse to come. “We’d love to see the city and state compete vigorously for funding. We’re looking for dramatic change, not incremental change,” said Duncan, who appeared in tandem with Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander at a sort of summit conference of local and state education leaders. (Duncan may come back this way if an informal invitation tendered in October by then mayoral candidate Jerry…
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by Flyer Staff
In September, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan came to Memphis bearing a message of possible federal largesse to come. “We’d love to see the city and state compete vigorously for funding. We’re looking for dramatic change, not incremental change,” said Duncan, who appeared in tandem with Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander at a sort of summit conference of local and state education leaders. (Duncan may come back this way if an informal invitation tendered in October by then mayoral candidate Jerry…
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by Flyer Staff
Memphis mayor A C Wharton got in some smack talk last Wednesday, in response to Shelby County commissioner Joe Ford’s critical remarks earlier in the week about the financial prowess of Wharton’s recent administration as county mayor. Ford made the remarks in the course of his then still-unresolved contest with fellow commissioner J.W. Gibson to become interim county mayor. Midway through the nearly 30 ballot-marathon that failed to produce a winner, both Ford and Gibson bridled at Commissioner Deidre Malone’s…
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by Flyer Staff
Let’s not kid ourselves, as most of the direct participants have, about the outcome of the showdown over the 2008 Tennessee Voter Confidence Act. When Nashville chancellor Russell Perkins declined last week to issue the injunction sought by plaintiffs trying to force the hand of stonewalling state election authorities, he in effect foreclosed on a guarantee that the act can be enforced in 2010. Without such an injunction, it seems clear that Secretary of State Tre Hargett and state Election…
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by Flyer Staff
As noted this week in our Politics column, key members of the Shelby County Republican Party are actively rethinking the viability of partisan primaries for local countywide offices. Ironically, it was the local GOP which took the initiative in instigating such primaries back in 1992, and they quickly became institutionalized, when the local Democrats, to keep pace, followed suit. Primaries for local office — county mayor, sheriff, various clerkships, and seats on the Shelby County Commission — were a bad…
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Congress hasn’t yet begun the lengthy process of bargaining out the differences between House and Senate on the actual formula for health-care legislation. But, miracle of miracles, the Democratic majorities in both chambers now seem committed to inclusion of a so-called public option. What that phrase means is not that the government will “take over” health care, as various Republicans and tea-partiers maintain. Nor will the public option, as proposed, come anywhere close to being the single-payer system — aka…
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