Day: April 3, 2017

More Trade Workers Needed To Close ‘Skills Gap,’ Expert Tells Nashville Homeschool Convention

Wendy Wilson
Tennessee Star

The U.S. is facing a “skills gap” that will only get worse unless more young people develop an interest in trade jobs, experts say. Homeschool guidance counselor Phylicia Masonheimer delivered that message to homeschoolers  and their parents over the weekend at the Teach Them Diligently homeschool convention in Nashville. It was a message very familiar to fans of television host and narrator Mike Rowe. Rowe told Tucker Carlson on Fox News last month that there are 5.6 million job openings in fields that typically do not require a bachelor’s degree. The former Dirty Jobs host said that taking vocation-technical training out of high schools contributed to the skills gap by teaching students that the best path to success is a college degree. “If you really want to make America great again, you gotta make work cool again,” he said. Rowe runs a foundation that provides scholarships and information to get more people interested in trade jobs. The mikeroweWORKS Foundation aims to address “the country’s dysfunctional relationship with work, highlighting the widening skills gap, and challenging the persistent belief that a four-year degree is automatically the best path for the most people,” according to the foundation’s website. Many others are also increasing efforts to highlight the…

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State Rep. Sexton Tells Speaker Harwell: ‘Hit The Restart Button’ On Gas Tax, Send It Back to Subcommittee ‘To Be Debated Fairly and Openly’

Laura Baigert
Tennessee Star

  State Representative Jerry Sexton (R-Bean Station), joined by more than a dozen colleagues in the Tennessee House of Representatives, held a press conference Monday blasting the Republican leadership for their heavy-handed and ethically questionable tactics to ram through the Governor’s gas tax hike, the key element of the IMPROVE Act. “We are calling on Speaker Harwell, House Leadership, and those that support this bill to hit the restart button in regards to the IMPROVE Act and to send the bill back to Transportation Subcommittee to be debated fairly and openly,” Sexton announced. The Tennessee Star was there with cameras rolling: The Star has reported extensively on how State Rep. Barry Doss, Chairman of the House Transportation Committee, broke the rules of the House of Representatives to push Haslam’s gas tax through the committee. On March 22, for instance, The Star published a story titled “Boss Doss Breaks Rules to Ram Amended Gas Tax Increase Through House Transportation Committee,” which provided a blow-by-blow account of the subterfuge behind the bill’s passage that day. “The people have elected Republicans to govern at all levels of state government. The Republicans control the Governors Mansion, the state house, and the state senate. We,…

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Police Padlock Motel in South Nashville as Public Nuisance

Wendy Wilson

Police raided and padlocked The Thrifty Inn in South Nashville on Friday after responding to hundreds of calls over the past three years. From January 2014 through this March, police responded to 586 calls about illegal drug sales, domestic disturbances and shots fired, according to a Metro Nashville Police Department news release. The motel is located on Harding Pike near I-24. “The Thrifty Inn has proven to be a drain on resources,” said Police Chief Steven Anderson. “The men and women of the South Precinct work to protect a 70 square mile are. It is not fair to other neighborhoods and businesses when we have to keep sending officers to the same place for the same issues, over and over, for years.” The motel was declared a public nuisance in a temporary injunction and padlocking order issued by Criminal Court Judge Steve Dozier after the district attorney’s office filed suit. The order directed that the entire property be vacated and that motel owner Kiranbhai Patel appear before the judge Wednesday morning. On Friday as the motel was being closed, several agencies were available to provide guests with assistance, including transportation to another motel. Registration fees paid in advance by confirmed…

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Davidson County General Sessions Judge Casey Moreland Resigns Amid Corruption Charges

Wendy Wilson
Tennessee Star

Davidson County General Sessions Judge Casey Moreland has resigned from the bench following his arrest on corruption charges. Moreland announced his resignation, effective April 4, in a letter to Nashville Mayor Megan Barry and the Board of Judicial Conduct, according WKRN News 2. Moreland was in federal court Friday for a hearing on charges that include tampering with a witness and obstruction of justice. The FBI says he tried to thwart their investigation into allegations of corruption. Moreland is accused of fraud and extortion. He had faced mounting pressure to resign from various officials, including Barry and House Speaker Beth Harwell and other lawmakers. Moreland was released from custody Friday but has house detention and an electronic monitoring device and his cell phone will be monitored by federal government officials. His case was bound over to a grand jury. The Associated Press reported that according to a criminal complaint, Moreland learned in February that the FBI was investigating him for possible corruption. Moreland is alleged to have extorted sexual favors as well as travel and lodging in return for official acts, such as having fines dismissed for defendants. A female witness told the FBI she believed Moreland wanted sex in return for offering his…

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Top 10 Classes Taught at This Year’s ‘Sex Week’ University of Tennessee

Tennessee Star Staff

Undergraduates at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville are not learning about the Constitution this week, the focus of The Tennessee Star’s new series of articles for secondary students in grades 8 through 12. Instead, they are participating in the school’s fifth annual “Sex Week.” “Sex Week is a whole week of student activities that our student organization called SEAT puts on during the spring semester,” the web site says: Sex Week 2017 will be April 3-7. Our goal is to create a safe space where students can openly engage in comprehensive and academically informed discussion about all things related to sex, sexuality, relationships, and gender. Basically, we want to educate, because this stuff is important! “We firmly believe that sex education is not comprehensive without including conversations about pleasure and empowerment. Learning about consent, how to communicate your needs with partners, and how to find pleasure and fulfillment in yourself is really critical to building a healthy and safe campus. Not convinced? Sexual pleasure is included in the World Health Organization‘s definition of sexual health,” the website adds. Some of the important classes University of Tennessee undergraduates can attend during Sex Week include this top ten list: (1) Sex…

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Zan Tyler Tells Nashville Homeschooling Parents: Appreciate Freedoms But Be Alert To Government Overreach

Wendy Wilson

Homeschooling wasn’t always as accepted as it is today. Zan Tyler has stories about parents who tried to keep it a secret. Some pulled down their blinds and didn’t let their kids outside during the day. One family bought Catholic school uniforms for their children to wear out and about, as if they had been pulled from school for a doctor’s appointment. Another family would pile their kids in the car in the morning and drive off as if they were going school, only to have the kids duck down for the trip back home where they were really being schooled. Tyler has her own remarkable story. In 1984, when she set out to homeschool her oldest child who was a struggling reader, she was threatened with jail by the South Carolina superintendent of education. The late Sen. Strom Thurmond personally intervened on her behalf and cleared the way. It was a pivotal moment in a journey that Tyler never could have imagined as a young woman, when she was determined not to have children or be a teacher. She had studied economics in college and was planning on law school. But then she married and started a family. When…

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Commentary: War on Freedom Caucus is Really War With Trump’s Base

Tennessee Star Staff

by Richard A Viguerie, CHQ Chairman Mr. President, Steve Bannon said at CPAC this February, “Hold us accountable for what we promised. Hold us accountable for delivering what we promised.” We knew Reince Priebus and Paul Ryan would not read the memo. Et tu, Mr. President? Your fit against the Freedom Caucus for not going along with supporting RyanCare certainly is not fooling the members of the Freedom Caucus. They have long been under attack by the GOP establishment for doing things like actually voting on bills consistent with their campaign promises. Going to war with the Freedom Caucus is going to war with your base. You have to decide, Mr. President, whether you will align yourself with the leaders of the swamp – or grassroots Americans. You are a branding mastermind, but siding with the Priebus-Ryan wing of the GOP is the defective, knock-off, cheap imitation of the product you claimed to be selling when you were campaigning. Declaring war on the Freedom Caucus for sticking to their ObamaCare promise in the face of GOP establishment attacks makes them heroes to us. People voted for you because they are fed up with politicians campaigning on promises that are broken…

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Constitution Series: A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Claudia Henneberry
Tennessee Star

  This is the first of twenty-five weekly articles in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Series. Students in grades 8 through 12 can sign up here to participate in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Bee, which will be held on September 23.   Minutes after the Constitutional Convention adjourned in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787, Elizabeth Powel, a friend of George Washington who hosted many social events for the political class of the time, asked Benjamin Franklin if the convention had given us a republic or a monarchy. “A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” the venerable 81-year-old delegate, ambassador, and inventor responded. Fifty-five delegates, from all the states except Rhode Island, attended that convention, which began four months earlier in May of that year under the premise of forming a more perfect union by revising the Articles of Confederation. You see, the United States of America was not officially formed as the republic of which we are currently citizens in 1783 when the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain acknowledged the independence and sovereignty of its former colonies, was signed. The Continental Congress of the thirteen rebellious colonies, convening in York Town, Pennsylvania (now simply called York), adopted the…

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