Month: July 2017

The co-founder of the Washington-based firm that commissioned the explosive and largely unsubstantiated anti-Trump campaign research dossier will reject a Senate subpoena to testify before Congress next week and invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, according to the heads of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Glenn Simpson, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who helped start political intelligence…

A leading psychiatry group has told its members they should not feel bound by a longstanding rule against commenting publicly on the mental state of public figures – even the president. The statement, an email this month from the executive committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association to its 3,500 members, represents the first significant crack in…

State Rep. Judd Matheny (R-Tullahoma) could be the hardest working politician in Tennessee. On Saturday, Matheny, the only announced candidate so far for the Sixth Congressional District seat currently held by Rep. Diane Black (R-TN-06),  stopped by the annual Pleasant View Firefighters Parade and Picnic in Cheatham County, sponsored by the Pleasant View Volunteer Fire Department. Cheatham County is in the far northwestern corner of the Sixth Congressional District. On Friday, Matheny was in Putnam County, handing out 2,500 pencils and book marks to students and their parents at the Putnam County Back to School Bash. Later on Saturday, Matheny was in Lebanon, where he gave a short speech at the Wilson County Republican Party annual picnic. “Senator Beavers has been solid as a rock since I’ve been in the state legislature,” Matheny said of the gubernatorial candidate, who was also in attendance in Wilson County. Matheny noted that during the horn honking protests over the proposed state income tax in 2000, when he was still just a private citizen, Beavers, then serving in the State House of Representatives, helped him navigate his way into and around the State Capital Building to make the case against the state income tax…

By Christ Butler The folks who run the Chattanooga Convention and Visitors Bureau spend taxpayer money like high rollers, yet no policy exists to reign them in, Hamilton County Commissioner Tim Boyd said. The CVB is a nonprofit that gets most of its money, about $8.2 million this year alone, from the county’s 4 percent hotel and motel tax. Boyd said he has a two-inch thick binder full of the CVB’s credit card statements from the past several years. Those statements, Boyd said, reveal CVB members bought top-shelf booze and considered it a “business expense.” CVB employees traveled to a Utah ski resort at taxpayer expense. They also awarded six-figure checks to advertising firms without a formal bidding process, meaning the CVB likely spent more than it should have, Boyd said. Those are only a few of the things Boyd said he uncovered. Tennessee Watchdog can’t corroborate the contents of that binder because Boyd and CVB President Bob Doak said those documents aren’t public record — despite taxpayer money paying for most of what’s on it. But Boyd said that, legally, he can discuss what he knows with the public. He said he plans to share more details next week.…