Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Lee held a town hall in Knoxville on Sunday night, the city and date on which a debate between all four GOP gubernatorial candidates was scheduled to be held.
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A new poll released by JMC Analytics and Polling on Monday morning shows that Bill Lee now leads the Republican gubernatorial primary. The poll of 500 registered Republican voters conducted between July 18 and July 21 puts Lee in first place with 26 percent, followed by Randy Boyd in second with 20 percent. Rep. Diane Black (R-TN-06) in third with 19 percent, and Tennessee Speaker of the House Beth Harwell (R-Nashville) in fourth place with 16 percent. Seventeen percent are undecided. “The main takeaways are as follows: (1) Donald Trump remains popular among Tennessee Republicans, and (2) with the primary less than two weeks away (and as of this past Friday, 179,504 have early voted in the Republican primary), Bill Lee leads in the race, and the other three major contenders are not far behind, although his “lead” is at the periphery of the margin of error, depending on whether undecided “leaners” are included,” JMC noted in its statement accompanying the release of the poll Monday. The poll has a margin of error of 4.4 percent and has plenty of caveats. First, the poll was of registered voters only, not likely Republican primary voters. Just 71 percent of the poll respondents…
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Charlotte, North Carolina has been selected as the location for the 2020 Republican National Convention. Nashville was under consideration as a potential location, but local government entities apparently did not pursue the bid with much interest. Charlotte, in contrast, let the Republican National Committee know it wanted the financial benefits such a convention will bring. Tennessee Star Political Editor Steve Gill discussed on Friday’s edition of The Gill Report – broadcast on Knoxville’s 92.3 FM WETR – the Republican National Committee’s pick of Charlotte, North Carolina as the site for the 2020 Republican Convention. “The Republican Party has picked their location for their 2020 convention. Which presumably will be where Donald Trump gets nominated for a second term as President of the United States. While Charlotte, North Carolina is going to be the site. The Charlotte City Council voted six-to-five to accept the bid to embrace the Republicans coming to Charlotte for the convention in 2020,” Gill said, adding: Four Democrats and two Republicans voted yes, Five Democrats voted no because apparently the five Democrats don’t want the crowds, the money and the national and international attention that comes. They didn’t have any problem by the way when the Democrats wanted to bring…
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President Donald Trump claimed Sunday that newly released documents about the origins of an investigation of a former adviser’s links to Russia help vindicate his claim that U.S. government investigators were spying on his 2016 election campaign. He contended in Twitter remarks that “as usual,” the documents “are ridiculously heavily redacted but confirm with little doubt that the Department of ‘Justice’ and FBI misled the courts. Witch Hunt Rigged, a Scam!” Congratulations to @JudicialWatch and @TomFitton on being successful in getting the Carter Page FISA documents. As usual they are ridiculously heavily redacted but confirm with little doubt that the Department of “Justice” and FBI misled the courts. Witch Hunt Rigged, a Scam! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2018 It was not immediately clear how Trump felt the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was misled in the government’s four applications in 2016, and last year after Trump took office, to wiretap Carter Page, his one-time aide. Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a 2016 opponent of Trump’s, told CNN that he did not think the Federal Bureau of Investigation “did anything wrong” in surveilling Page. The FBI said in the first application in October 2016 that it “believes Page has been…
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Tennessee Star Political Editor Steve Gill discussed on Friday’s edition of The Gill Report – broadcast on Knoxville’s 92.3 FM WETR – the departure of Kimberly Guilfoyle at Fox News. Gill stated, “Fox News star Kimberly Guilfoyle is leaving the cable network to join America First Action Super PAC. It’s a super PAC that supports president Donald Trump for President. She has been working for FOX News for twelve years as the co-host of The Five right now.” He continued: But she’s been dating Donald Trump, Jr. after he and his wife Vanessa filed for divorce in March. I don’t think their divorce is over. But they’re dating. In a recent interview Guilfoyle said to Breitbart News Daily that, ‘Donald Trump, Jr is the number one up and coming political figure on the right.’ So, she is hooking up with a rising star and we’ll see how that works out and how that works out for the PAC. The 49-year-old Guilfoyle is no stranger to personal controversy. A former prosecuting attorney in San Francisco, she was married to then-mayor, now California Lt. Governor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom from 2001 to 2006. As their marriage was breaking up, Newsom admitted he had…
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By Printus LeBlanc The mainstream media and the left seem to have forgotten about the border, probably because they read the polls on illegal immigration, the problem still persists. Not only does it persist, it is getting worse. Children have become the accessory of choice for human smugglers, and the left and mainstream media don’t seem to have a problem with it. Their latest tirades against the President show they will stop at nothing to import votes — even putting children in danger. Border Patrol agents on the Mexican border are reporting on a disturbing trend. Children have become a commodity to be traded like baseball cards. Human smugglers know the loopholes in the U.S. immigration system better than Congress. The principal loophole used by the smugglers is the 1997 “Flores Agreement.” The agreement is at the center of the current debacle on the southern border. The most glaring fallacy pushed by the left and mainstream media is that every child in federal custody was ripped from their arms of their parents. This is patently false. The vast majority of children the federal government is housing are what is known as unaccompanied minors (UAC). When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)…
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by Tom DeWeese There’s lots of talk about where Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh stands on the Roe v Wade abortion decision and if he would vote to rescind it. There is another very controversial Supreme Court decision made just a few years ago, supported by Anthony Kennedy, the justice he seeks to replace. That is the Kelo decision that basically obliterated private property rights in America. So, where does Brett Kavanaugh stand on protection of private property rights? With Kennedy or the Constitution? In 2005, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down an opinion that shocked the nation. It was the case of Susette Kelo, et al. v City of New London, Connecticut, et al. The issue: “Does the government taking of property from one private owner to give to another private entity for economic development constitute a permissible ‘public use’ under the Fifth Amendment?” In 2000, the city of New London saw a chance to rake in big bucks through tax revenues for a new downtown development project that was to be anchored by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. The company announced a plan to build a $270 million dollar global research facility in the city. The local government jumped at the chance…
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by Hans von Spakovsky Peter Strzok’s testimony about the email server scandal involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised headlines because of his defiant, disrespectful, and unapologetic attitude about the bias revealed in his text messages that permeated his work at the FBI. Then, there was the verbal combat between him, Republican members of the two committees holding the joint hearing, and Democratic members who were running interference for Strzok and acting as his defense counsel. The news media jumped on an exchange in which Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, asked Strzok if he lied to his wife about his affair with former FBI lawyer Lisa Page in the same way as he was in testifying to Congress. That was too much for the Democrats and the media, who leaped to Strzok’s defense. The media, however, virtually ignored another exchange between Gohmert and Strzok that revealed a potential bombshell. Gohmert asked Strzok about his meeting in 2016 with Frank Rucker and Janette McMillan, an investigator and lawyer, respectively, for then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough (an Obama appointee). McCullough sent them to see Strzok, who was the FBI’s deputy assistant director for the Counterintelligence Division, to brief him and three…
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Mexico’s President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador sent a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump, seeking to initiate “a new stage in the relationship” of the two countries and to make progress in the areas of “trade, migration, development and security.” Lopez Obrador handed the seven-page letter to a U.S. delegation that visited the country on July 13. Marcelo Ebrard, foreign minister-designate, read the letter to reporters on Sunday, and said Trump had received the letter. In the letter, Lopez Obrador said Mexico is home to the largest number of Americans living outside the U.S. and “the United States is the largest home for Mexicans outside of our borders.” “I believe that the understanding that I propose in this letter should lead us to a worthy and respectful treatment of these communities,” he said. Lopez Obrador suggested creating a development plan that included other Central American countries, where migrants also live in poverty and lack job opportunities. He suggested that if the U.S., Mexico and other Central American countries, “each one contributing according to the size of its economy. … We could gather a considerable amount of resources for the development of the region.” The plan, according to the president-elect, would spend…
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By Natalia Castro The MERIT Act is finally moving forward. After a passing vote in the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the MERIT Act will be moving onto the House floor in the coming weeks for a vote. Congress can take a major step in answering the people’s calls to “drain the swamp” by moving forward with this legislation. The only way to drain the swamp is to fire the swamp, and the MERIT Act will empower managers to remove poor performing employees that are preventing our bureaucracy from working for the people. When Georgia Republican Representative Barry Loudermilk introduced the Modern Employment Reform, Improvement, and Transformation Act of 2017 (MERIT Act) it was attacked by unions who maintain an unabridged desire to protect employees from any form of repercussions for their actions. It makes sense unions are scared. Thanks to union litigation, the federal government termination rate, including layoffs and firings, is a mere 3.37 percent, compared to a private-sector termination rate of over 17 percent. Unions have made the firing process for poor performing employees timely and complex, causing managers to prefer transferring poor performing employees rather than going through the process to dismiss them. But moving an employee does not remove the problem.…
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