As Mayor of Nashville, Karl Dean Made LGBT a Specially Protected Class Under Metro Law

Karl Dean

In 2009, when Karl Dean was Nashville’s mayor he signed into law an ordinance making “sexual orientations” and “gender identity” protected classes in Nashville’s non-discrimination employment policy. Two years later, Dean tried to require vendors wanting to do business with the Metro government to include the same LBGT protections in their employment policies. Megan Barry was the Metro Council member that sponsored the 2009 ordinance which did not define the terms “sexual orientations” or “gender identity” which are generally understood to refer to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender. The ordinance passed by the Metro Council and signed into law by Dean continues to apply to all Metro employees including public school teachers. Two years later, the Metro Council passed and Karl Dean signed the Contract Accountability Non-Discrimination Ordinance (CANDO) requiring any vendor seeking to do business with the Nashville government to also include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” in their employment non-discrimination policies. The Tennessee General Assembly responded by passing the Equal Access to Intrastate Commerce Act which stopped Dean’s CANDO law. The legislature’s action stopped the over-regulating of businesses resulting from Dean’s CANDO law, but it has not slowed the LGBT agenda from advancing in Tennessee. For example, despite efforts in…

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New Blackburn Ad Touts President Trump’s Support

Donald Trump, Marsha Blackburn

Republican Senatorial candidate Marsha Blackburn’s campaign launched an ad featuring President Donald Trump supporting her at a May rally. The digital and statewide TV ad that launched Tuesday shows footage from a Nashville rally in May when Trump boosted Blackburn, WREG reports. The ad touts Trump’s endorsement and Blackburn’s commitment to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall, repeal the Affordable Care Act and keep tax cuts permanent. Rep. Blackburn is in a tight race against Democratic ex-Gov. Phil Bredesen. In the ad, the president says, “We need Marsha Blackburn. We need Marsha in the Senate to continue the progress and work that we’ve done over the last year and a half.” Blackburn says in the video, “Tennessee needs a senator who is going to support President Donald Trump. I am going to be there to stand with President Donald Trump and take your Tennessee values to Washington, D.C. to fight with him to get the job done. I am Marsha Blackburn, and I approve this message.” Speaking about the ad, Blackburn campaign manager Kevin Golden said, “Tennesseans from all walks of life support the president’s work to cut taxes, rebuild the military, care for our veterans, and nominate constitutionalist justices and…

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Governor Bill Haslam Wades Into Governor’s Race with Endorsement for Republican Bill Lee

Bill Haslam, Bill Lee

Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, current Chairman of the Republican Governor’s Association (RGA), is working to ensure that while he works to keep or expand the number of Republican Governors across the country he doesn’t drop the ball in his home state. He’s endorsed Republican nominee Bill Lee in a new television ad purchased by the RGA. In the ad, Haslam touts the progress that Tennessee has made during his tenure as Governor and says Bill Lee is the “right choice” to take the state to the next level. The RGA has put $500,000 behind the ad buy. RGA ad “Right Choice” transcript: Bill Haslam: “For eight years I’ve had the privilege of being your Governor. Together, we’ve made a lot of progress. More people have jobs than ever before. Our taxes are lower, our students are improving faster than anywhere in the country. Tennessee is stronger than ever. Bill Lee is the right choice to take Tennessee to the next level. We can trust him to make the right decisions, not the political ones. He’s been doing that his whole life. I’m asking you to join me in supporting Bill Lee for Governor.” Ironically, much of the criticism directed at…

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Three Budget ‘Reforms’ That Would Make Matters Worse, Not Better

by Dody Eid and Romina Boccia   A congressional select committee on reforming the budget process recently held another public hearing, supposedly with the ultimate aim of designing a more transparent, accountable, and responsible budgetary process. Any such changes should also re-establish and enhance Congress’ power of the purse. But if those are the goals of the Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform, it is badly missing the mark by repeatedly discussing only three proposals. They are unlikely to be much of an improvement—and could make matters even worse, if that’s possible: biennial budgeting, earmarks, and moving from a fiscal year to a calendar year. Biennial budgeting: Among the proposals considered by the committee, one that is gaining traction is biennial budgeting. That would relieve Congress of the obligation to submit a budget resolution each year. Instead, it would only prepare a budget every two years. Proponents contend that such a change gives the legislative branch more time to dive deeper on the issues presented by the growing budgeting challenge, to provide more oversight of the executive, and to reduce budget dysfunction as fiscal year deadlines approach. At the July 12 hearing, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who served early in…

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Confederate ‘Cleansing:’ Louisiana’s East Feliciana Parish Could Be the Next Place to Remove Its Civil War Monuments

Confederate monument

The statue of the unnamed Confederate soldier has stood since 1909 in front of the courthouse in Louisiana’s East Feliciana Parish, hands resting on his rifle looking down on the flow of lawyers, jurors and defendants going into the white columned building. Ronnie Anderson, an African-American man charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, illegal possession of a stolen firearm, and speeding, was one such defendant and the statue gave him cause for concern. “It’s just intimidating to walk into a courthouse that’s supposed to be a place of equality, fair justice and to see this monument that made me feel like … I don’t stand a chance,” Anderson said. Anderson wants his case to be moved to another parish without such a memorial; his motion to change venue argues he can’t get a fair trial in the same place where a “symbol of oppression and racial intolerance” stands. Confederate flags and monuments – long a part of the Southern landscape – have come under renewed scrutiny following the 2015 shooting by Dylann Roof of nine black churchgoers in South Carolina and the 2017 deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Supporters say the statues are a…

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President Trump Set to Tighten Controls in Foreign Access to Tech Investment

Donald Trump, Xi Jinping

Already threatened by escalating U.S. taxes on its goods, China is about to find it much harder to invest in U.S. companies or to buy American technology in such cutting-edge areas as robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. President Donald Trump is expected as early as this week to sign legislation to tighten the U.S. government’s scrutiny of foreign investments and exports of sensitive technology. The law, which Congress passed in a rare show of unity among Republicans and Democrats, doesn’t single out China. But there’s no doubt the intended target is Beijing. The Trump administration has accused China of using predatory tactics to steal American technology. “As a policy signal, it speaks with a very loud voice,” said Harry Clark, head of the international trade practice at the law firm Orrick. “Leading decision makers and Congress are very concerned about technology transfer to China.” The Trump administration has already imposed tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese exports, is preparing taxes on a further $16 billion and has threatened to target an additional $200 billion of Beijing’s exports and maybe still more. As part of the same punitive campaign, Trump had initially ordered the Treasury Department to draft investment restrictions…

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Nashville Taxpayers Funded Expensive Abstract Art Under Karl Dean

Karl Dean

Tennessee Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate Karl Dean has no comment about what some people call a taxpayer-funded boondoggle erected in downtown Nashville during his tenure as mayor. At least no one from Dean’s campaign returned a request for comment Tuesday regarding the public art project known as Stix. That project cost the city $750,000. Some people refer to it as art. Other people call it a waste of taxpayer money. Either way, it’s nothing more than a bunch of sticks. Oh, and the sticks have bright, shiny colors. The Tennessee Star wanted to know if a possible Dean administration would force taxpayers at the state level to pay for public art projects such as this — or any public art period. As for Stix itself, the artist, Christian Moeller, called it an homage to the Native Americans who first lived in Middle Tennessee. Nashvillelifestyles.com says it’s “the most expensive public art piece ever in Nashville.” Dean and other city officials could have sent that $750,000 check to a local artist — where the money could have gone right back into Tennessee’s economy. Instead, they sent that money out to California, where Moeller resides. Moeller, at the time he got that six-figure…

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Software Glitch Disrupts Lawrence County Election

Tanya White

A glitch with the electronic voting machines in Lawrence County delayed the results of last Thursday’s election by almost a day, said county Election Administrator Tanya White. Instead of using a computer, county officials had to tally votes by hand, she said. “Do you know how long it takes to count votes manually?” White asked. “A really long time.” White told the Tennessee Star that MicroVote, a company out of Indiana, manufactured the software that suddenly went erratic. Election officials in 46 of the state’s 95 counties use the same software, said Madison Tracy, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Secretary of State’s Office, in an emailed statement. MicroVote has yet to explain what happened, White said. “We had our results off the machines, but we could not print off summary pages that showed all the totals for everyone,” White said. “That caused us not to be able to release anything. What was released was manually counted off what we had here. That is why all the confusion happened. That is the reason for the delay. That is the reason why what was released at first was incorrect.” No one at MicroVote returned repeated requests for comment Tuesday. County officials immediately notified…

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All Signs Suggest Russell Lowe Is Feinstein’s Former Staffer Who’s Accused Of Being A Chinese Spy

Dianne Feinstein

by Peter Hasson    – It was reported that Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein employed a Chinese spy.  – Her longtime staffer, Russell Lowe, fits the description of the reported spy.  – Feinstein’s office refused to comment on whether Lowe was the spy. All the details of a former, longtime Sen. Dianne Feinstein staffer who’s accused of relaying information to Chinese intelligence services while working for the California Democrat point to Russell Lowe, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has determined. Lowe worked for 20 years in Feinstein’s San Francisco office, where he was a staff liaison to the Asian-American community before leaving approximately five years ago. All those details match up with the descriptions of the Chinese spy Feinstein reportedly employed. “Chinese intelligence once recruited a staff member at a California office of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, and the source reported back to China about local politics,” Politico Magazine reported on July 27, describing the staffer as “a liaison to the local Chinese community” who was secretly “reporting back” to Chinese intelligence services. Since then, more details have emerged about the alleged spy, including that he worked for Feinstein for 20 years, “attended Chinese consulate functions for the senator” and was fired five years…

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Commentary: It’s Time For President Trump To Go Full Andrew Jackson On Overreaching Judges

John D Gates

by CHQ Staff   The news that a Bush-appointed federal district judge, John D. Bates (pictured), has ruled that Obama’s executive amnesty, not actual immigration law, is the law and that Trump must fully restore and renew the program is such a radical exhibition of judicial overreach that it should have been a banner headline or lead segment in every major media outlet. Instead it generated hardly a mention, let alone any outrage, from the establishment media who long ago fell into the trap of accepting the anti-constitutional concept of judicial supremacy over the Executive and Legislative branches of government. For a complete rundown on this outrageous usurpation of the powers of the legislative and executive branches of government see Daniel Horowitz “Bush judge demands that Trump rule as king. Really!” “The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come,” Jefferson wrote Madison six weeks before Washington’s first inauguration. “The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.” Jefferson, Adams, Madison and other members of the founding generation of the American republic rightly feared the tyranny of the…

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Maverick Musk Eyes $72 Billion Buyout to Take Tesla ‘Private’

Elon Musk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is considering leading a buyout of the electric car maker in a stunning move that would end the maverick company’s eight-year history trading on the stock market. In his typically unorthodox fashion, the eccentric Musk dropped his bombshell on his Twitter account, which he has used as a platform for pranks, vitriol and now for a proposal to pull off one of the biggest buyouts in U.S. history. Musk got the ball rolling Tuesday after the stock market had already been open more than three hours with a tweet announcing he might buy all of Tesla’s stock at $420 per share with no further details. At that price, the buyout would cost nearly $72 billion, based on Tesla’s outstanding stock as of July 27, but it’s unlikely the deal would cost that much because Musk owns a roughly 20 percent stake in the Palo Alto, California, company. He also said he intends to give Tesla’s existing shareholders the option of retaining a stake in the company through a special fund, if they want. “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,” Musk wrote in his first tweet, following up with “good morning” and a smiley…

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How Medicare’s Private Plans Surpass the Traditional Program

doc nurse senior patient

by Dr. Kevin Pham and Robert E. Moffit   Medicare Advantage, a system of competing private health plans, is surpassing the traditional Medicare fee-for-service program in delivering high quality, cost-effective medical care for senior and disabled citizens. The prominent research firm Avalere recently published a major study showing that Medicare Advantage generally outperformed traditional Medicare. This was especially so in caring for the most challenging patients who suffer from chronic conditions and complicated medical problems. Major structural differences between traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage largely account for the differences in performance. Traditional Medicare, enacted in 1965, pays doctors and other medical professionals on a fee-for-service basis, meaning that the government reimburses medical professionals a specific fee for every one of thousands of services provided to Medicare patients. After almost two futile decades of trying to control costs, in the 1980s Congress overhauled hospital and physician payment. In 1989, Congress created a new physician payment system in which the government would reimburse Medicare doctors based on a calculation of the putative value of individual medical services—including the resources and time required to provide them—and capping the payment. This bizarre reimbursement formula, plus subsequent payment updates, proved faulty. Medical stakeholders compromise the entire process because they also are involved in setting the prices of Medicare’s services and continuously fight to evaluate their own services higher, leading to questionable fee schedules, confusion, and inefficiency. For years, traditional Medicare’s payment system generated perverse incentives, allowing hospitals, for example, to overtreat their patients, delivering more care and more services, more reimbursements, and higher revenues. Congress created Medicare Advantage in 2003 as…

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Phil Bredesen Claims Fellow Democrats ‘Too Elitist,’ While Owning 5 Homes, Private Jet

Phil Bredesen

Phil Bredesen wants the voters to know he’s one of them, a working-class guy just working to earn a living — but that’s far from the truth. The former governor who hopes to flip Bob Corker’s seat from Republican to Democrat shares one thing besides friendship with the former Chattanooga mayor: they’re both extremely rich. Bredesen has reported assets between $88.9 million and $358 million, The Washington Free Beacon said. CBS News reported that Corker is one of the wealthiest senators, with an average net worth of $50.7 million. In replacing Corker, Bredesen would also become one of the richest members of Congress. Public records show he is the owner of five homes—two homes in Nashville, two lakefront properties in upstate New York, and a five-bedroom home in Jackson, Wyoming. Like finding a place to hang his hat at night, traveling is no issue for Bredesen: He is one of the registered owners of an Embraer Phenom 300 private jet, according to Federal Aviation Association records. The Embraer Phenom 300 sells for $10 million, according to CNBC. And yet Bredesen says the Democratic Party is  “too elitist and too distant from the concerns of the very down to Earth people that…

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