Day: September 17, 2018

Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp CEO Makes $792,000 Per Year

Chris Butler
Butch Spyridon

Butch Spyridon, the CEO of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp makes a great deal of money in annual salary every year, even more so than his counterparts in other large cities. As Tennessee Watchdog reported, Spyridon has used taxpayer-funded resources — even money meant for the 2010 flood relief — to assist the Convention and Visitors Corp and his career. In the past five years, Spyridon got his salary doubled to $792,000, the Tennessean reported. He now makes more than what his peers in Orlando, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and New Orleans make, according to the paper. “Spyridon’s pay exceeds that of CEOs with larger budgets and in cities with higher costs of living, including those in San Francisco and Los Angeles,” the paper reported. “Among his perks are paid memberships to social and health clubs.” Former Nashville Metro Council member Emily Evans told the paper Spyridon makes more than the police chief, fire chief and the head of the public health department. The paper credited Spyridon with recruiting the Titans to Tennessee and, among other things, spearheading the city’s Fourth of July celebrations. “The Music City Center and the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp. are funded largely by hotel room taxes.…

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Georgia Democrat Gubernatorial Candidate Stacey Abrams Refuses To Reveal Source Of Million-Dollar Donations

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Stacey Abrams

by Jason Hopkins   Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee in Georgia’s gubernatorial election, is refusing to disclose the origin of millions of dollars donated to two foundations that helped propel her political career. Former Georgia House of Representatives Minority Leader Stacey Abrams is remaining mum on who funded two tax exempt non-profit organizations. Voter Access Institute and Third Sector Development, both created and led by the Democrat, received a total of $12.5 million in donations from 2013 to 2016. The purpose of Voter Access Institute was to locate “low-propensity” voters and persuade them to go to the polls. Third Sector Development organized a voter-registration initiative that targeted people of color. The two foundations paid Abrams nearly half a million dollars over the course of three years and introduced the former state representative to a national fundraising network. However, the gubernatorial nominee has refused to publish the names of donors involved in her non-profit work. In response to media inquiry, the campaign wouldn’t explain the reasoning behind withholding the names, but instead took a swipe at Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, her Republican opponent in the election. “I’m proud of New Georgia Project’s efforts to register, advocate for, and mobilize…

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Thaddeus McCotter Commentary: We’re All Gonna Die! Vote Democrat!

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Nancy Pelosi

by Thaddeus G. McCotter   Around 1994, R. J. Rummel offered the term “democide” to define the “intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command.” Victims of democide include: “forced labor and concentration camp victims; killings by ‘unofficial’ private groups; extrajudicial summary killings; and mass deaths due to the governmental acts of criminal omission and neglect, such as in deliberate famines, as well as killings by de facto governments, i.e. civil war killings.” In sum, this is governmentally sanctioned murder that is not based upon race or nationality (“genocide”) or political beliefs (“politicide”), but rather it is equal opportunity oppression for the purpose of advancing a “public policy” whereby members of said public are to be killed “for the common good” (as defined by rulers who never believe their deaths should be part of the policy). Rummel believed that “democide surpassed war as the leading cause of non-natural death in the 20th century”; and its heinous practitioners names have been recorded in the annals of infamy—Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others of their murderous and sadistic ilk. Now, the seers in the media warn that the 21st…

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Schumer, Feinstein Call For Delay On Kavanaugh, As GOP Gives Conflicting Signals

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Diane Feinstein, Chuck Schumer

by Kevin Daley   Senate Democratic leadership urged Republicans to delay further action on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, after The Washington Post revealed the identity of a once-anonymous woman accusing the nominee of sexual assault when they were in high school. The accuser, a researcher named Christine Blasey Ford affiliated with Stanford and Palo Alto University, provided additional details about the alleged assault to The Post, the first time she has spoken publicly about her accusations. The report notwithstanding, key Republican lawmakers appeared ready to proceed, though at least one GOP senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee said he was open to further input from Ford. By Ford’s telling, Kavanaugh allegedly held her down on a bed and groped her at a house party at some point in the early 1980s. The alleged encounter ended when a third person, Mark Judge, intervened by jumping on top of them. At the time of the alleged incident, Kavanaugh was 17 and Ford was 15. For his part, Kavanaugh adamantly denies the charge. “I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time,” the judge said in a statement provided…

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Nellie Ohr To Testify Before Congress About Work For Fusion GPS

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by Chuck Ross   Congress will interview Nellie Ohr, the wife of Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, later this week, Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe said on Sunday. Ratcliffe said Sunday that Ohr is expected to appear for a closed-door interview with the House Judiciary and House Oversight & Government Reform Committees, in an interview on Fox News. Ohr worked during the 2016 election cycle for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that investigated Donald Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC. Fusion hired former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous anti-Trump dossier that was used to obtain spy warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. While she worked for Fusion, Ohr’s husband, Bruce Ohr, was in contact with both Steele and Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS. A former assistant deputy attorney general at the Justice Department, Bruce Ohr was interviewed by the congressional committees on Aug. 28. Republican lawmakers have questioned the Ohrs’ relationship to Fusion GPS and Steele. The husband-and-wife duo met with Steele on July 30, 2016, a day before the FBI opened its counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia. Nellie Ohr began working for Fusion…

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Meatpacker, Muslim Workers in US Settle ‘Prayer Breaks’ Dispute

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butchers

A major U.S. meatpacking company has agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle charges of discrimination involving Muslim workers who walked off the job in a dispute over prayer breaks. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced the financial settlement Friday after several years of litigation between Cargill Meat Solutions Corporation and 138 Muslim workers, most of whom were Somali immigrants. The dispute began in late 2016 after the workers were fired following a three-day walkout at a meatpacking plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado. Management had changed policies allowing Muslim workers to take short prayer breaks. The EEOC said it had “reasonable cause to believe that Somali, African and Muslim employees were harassed, denied their requests for prayer breaks and fired.” Cargill disagreed but said it settled the case to avoid further litigation. The company also said it was committed to allowing “Muslim workers to take short breaks to perform their obligatory prayers.” A Teamsters union chapter representing the workers will pay them $153,000 to settle discrimination complaints related to the dispute. The EEOC said Teamsters Local 455 had failed to advocate for the workers—who were dues-paying union members—and had harassed them because of their race, religion and national origin.…

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Nunes: Democrats, Journalists Will Be ‘Frightened’ By Declassified Trump-Russia Documents

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by Chuck Ross   House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said this week that Democrats and the media are likely to be “frightened” by the information contained in Trump-Russia documents that Republicans are asking President Donald Trump to declassify. Speaking at an event hosted by the Center for Security Policy on Thursday, Nunes said that Trump is close to declassifying portions of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant granted against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. On July 21, the Justice Department released heavily redacted versions of four FISA warrants granted against Page from Oct. 2016 through June 2017. The unredacted portions showed that the FBI relied heavily on the infamous Steele dossier to obtain the warrants. Republicans have accused the FBI of abusing the FISA process by citing the dossier even though it was unverified and financed by Democrats as part of an opposition research project. Before that release, Nunes and other Republicans on the House Intelligence panel sent a letter to Trump calling on him to declassify and release 21 pages of the fourth and final FISA warrant. “In the course of the Committee’s investigation, we have uncovered irregularities with the process by which DOJ and FBI obtained information…

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Commentary: Political Correctness, Just One Tool In The Arsenal Of ‘Sustainability’

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by Kathleen Marquardt, Vice President, American Policy Center   “At its worst, political correctness is nothing different from Orwell’s Newspeak – an attempt to change the way people think by forcibly changing the way they speak.” ~ Urban Dictionary “Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future.” Chester M. Pierce, Harvard psychiatrist, speaking as an expert in public education at the 1973 International Education Seminar. The “Dear Hillary” letter, written on Nov. 11, 1992 by Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), lays out a plan “to remold the entire American system” into “a seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone,” coordinated by “a system of labor market boards at the local, state and federal levels” where curriculum and “job matching” will be handled by counselors “accessing…

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Senator Lamar Alexander’s Poll Numbers Reflect Troubles Ahead in 2020 Re-Election Effort

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Lamar Alexander

As the 2018 election swings into full fury some are already looking ahead to the 2020 elections that will feature not only a Presidential cycle but also a likely reelection bid by Republican Senator Lamar Alexander. A new Tennessee Star poll of likely 2018 general election voters indicates that troubled waters like ahead for Alexander. 31.8% of the voters surveyed indicated they had a “favorable” view of Senator Lamar Alexander while 40.8% had an “unfavorable” view. 27.4% were “unsure or didn’t know” which is a remarkably high number for a political figure who has been a fixture in Tennessee politics for four decades. Alexander has not yet announced that he is running for reelection in 2020 when his current term ends, but he is expected to seek another six year term. Tennessee Star political editor Steve Gill says that Alexander’s low approval figures can be traced to several factors. “First, his colleague Senator Bob Corker regularly attacks President Trump; Corker’s behavior is splashing back on Lamar despite the fact that he’s actually been very supportive of the President and isn’t launching the kinds of cheap shots that Corker constantly spews out. Not calling our Corker and standing more clearly with…

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