On The Tennessee Star Report Tuesday morning, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Jeff Hartline to the studio to discuss his recent commentary endorsing Manny Sethi for the Tennessee U.S. Senate seat.
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Mayor John Cooper’s proposed 32 percent property tax increase is a terrible idea and would be detrimental to the city of Nashville, potentially creating a chilling effect across Middle Tennessee. An increase of such magnitude would bring additional pain and suffering to untold thousands of Nashvillians already harmed by the government-mandated COVID-19 lockdown and the tornado that preceded it.
Decisions about tax increases should be delayed until next spring. After the Mayor has made significant cuts and structural changes in Metro government. It also must come after Mayor Cooper has hosted townhall meetings in every Nashville neighborhood. At such times he can educate voters about what he will have done to cut spending and exactly how he will operate the city in a fiscally conservative manner.
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by Robert S. Spalding and Zachary Glanz From Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 to Deng Xiaoping’s sweeping economic reforms, the United States assumed that capital success, American investment, and expansion of diplomatic relations inevitably would lead to a democratized China that embraced the United States. This folly has produced a growing adversarial threat posed by a rising, ambitious superpower. With Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2013, he made clear that despite China’s transformation into an economic superpower with unparalleled growth, the Chinese Communist Party’s pursuit to exert authoritarian control, advanced by enhanced technological prowess, will remain unwavering. To continue the notion that further investment and economic relations would contribute to reducing the CCP’s ideologies is to once again repeat the mistakes that let China prosper without democratic commitments in the first place. Unfortunately, most of U.S. academia espouses this false belief. An open letter in the Washington Post to President Trump, titled “China is not an enemy,” downplays China’s growth as a military power, questions the U.S. presence in the South Pacific, and expresses a lack of concern for China’s exploitation of American economic cooperation. John Pomfret, also at the Washington Post explains that these scholars “deny agency to the Chinese Communist…
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In an exclusive interview Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – host Michael Patrick Leahy spoke with Dr. Manny Sethi in-studio to discuss why he’s running for Tennessee Senate.
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On Wednesday’s Tennessee Star Report with Steve Gill and Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Gill and Leahy pondered why the Mayoral race in Nashville was so quiet and questioned why Swain and Cooper weren’t utilizing an attack while Briley was throwing them softballs. Towards the end of the segment, the men discussed how Davidson County is a deep blue county and will unfortunately always be that way. Gill: A lot of folks are taking this whole week off. Leahy: Yeah. Gill: We’re going to take off Thursday and Friday. (Gill laughs) Leahy: You know who’s really taking the week off, is all the challengers to David Briley. He’s throwing them softballs and they’re not hitting back. Gill: Yeah, he’s giving a pay raise to teachers with money that’s not in the till and not giving pay raises to police officers, first responders, and firefighters because he doesn’t think he’ll get their votes anyway. And he figures he can buy the teachers votes. And Briley, giving away pay raises with money we don’t have. Leahy: And the fraternal order of police, of course, endorsed…
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MURFREESBORO and NASHVILLE, Tennessee – Governor-Elect Bill Lee joined middle Tennessee grassroots conservatives, his base, at Christmas celebrations of groups with their hubs in Murfreesboro and Nashville. The two groups called “Sentinels,” originally organized around the Heritage Action for America (HAFA) model of activism. Personal relationships with federal legislators are leveraged with tools like calls to Congress, Twitter and letters to the editor, using data and solutions from Heritage Foundation, so that Sentinels can hold their representatives accountable. “Action” being an integral part of the groups’ very existence, Sentinel activities extend deeper into state and local arenas as well. With 2018 being an election year, for one, and a number of other issues arising, it was a particularly busy year for Sentinels. While the Murfreesboro and Nashville Sentinel groups are separate, they are not so much distinct as there is a fair amount of overlap, and the Nashville group could be considered a more recent extension of the more established and longstanding Murfreesboro group. As independent thinkers and activists, it was not a group decision to endorse a particular candidate for governor in the August 2018 Republican primary. Without any obvious exceptions, however, Sentinels were behind Bill Lee and demonstrated…
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Acting Mayor David “Boondoggle Briley” has vowed “continuity” if voters in Nashville/Davidson County elect him to serve the remaining one year and three months of disgraced former Mayor Megan Barry’s term in tomorrow’s special mayoral election. Nothing illustrates Briley’s embrace of his predecessor’s progressive policies better than this pink hat he donned back on January 21, 2017–and proudly featured on his Facebook page– shortly after President Trump was inaugurated to express his support for the women’s march in Washington where far left critics gathered to decry the new president’s “Make America Great Again” agenda. The Tennessee Star has identified the policies that constitute this promised “continuity” in a potential Briley administration, following on the heels of eight years of former Mayor Karl Dean, now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, and two years and six months of former Mayor Megan Barry. Briley earned his nickname “Boondoggle Briley” for supporting the original Barry boondoggle–the $9 billion transit plan conceived of by Barry and the developers, lobbyists, attorneys, engineers, and architects who stood to benefit from its adoption. Fortunately, the voters of Nashville/Davidson County overwhelmingly rejected that particular set of boondoggles on May 1 by a 64 percent to 36…
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State Rep. Harold Love (D-Nashville) sat down with Tennessee Star political editor Steve Gill on Thursday for the first in our series of exclusive interviews with the top tier of candidates in the May 24 special election for Mayor of Nashville. Love identified education and safety as his two top priorities in a potential Love administration. (See the 20:10min mark of the video below) “Our high school graduates who choose to go to college, only 24 percent graduate from college,” Love told Gill, adding: Anybody who hears that number and let’s it flow through their mind knows that we can’t succeed as a city if only 24 percent of our high school graduates who choose to go to college are graduating. That means they come back to the city and they are not going back to college. I know that college is not for everybody, but those who choose to go to college . . . we have to improve our educational excellence of our high school graduates.” Love added that education and safety go hand in hand. “A recent Washington Post report said . . . where are America’s prisoners born? They said of all the zipcodes in the…
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The fifth day of early voting in Nashville’s special mayoral election on Wednesday saw another stunningly low turnout–only 194 residents of Nashville/Davidson County cast their ballots, bringing the five day early voting total to an anemic 1,039. After five full days of early voting, less than one-third of one percent of the active registered voters in Nashville/Davidson County (which is slightly more than 360,000) have cast their ballots in the May 24 special mayoral election to select a mayor who will serve out the remaining one year and three months of disgraced former Mayor Megan Barry’s term. Barry resigned on March 6, the same day she pleaded guilty to a felony theft charge related to her two year long affair with her bodyguard, former Metro Nashville Police Department Sgt. Rob Forrest. The anemic turnout levels spells big trouble for the campaign of Acting Mayor David Briley. First, it confirms that voters find him an uninspiring candidate. Second, it indicates that voters are likely burned out on politics, after they turned out in droves–about 123,000 total voters went to the polls–to decisively reject the $9 billion transit plan Briley endorsed, 64 percent to 36 percent. Finally, and perhaps more importantly, it…
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Acting Mayor David Briley demonstrated that he is not ready for prime time when he repeatedly stumbled Monday night in his responses to questions about the Nashville Transit Plan to a large group of voters in Bellevue. The 90 minute meeting was intended to be a last minute pro-transit pep rally, but it ended up being more like the cross examination of a witness who was not particularly compelling. Briley admitted several things damaging to the plan during the evening. He conceded to the audience that he did not think he would get federal funding for the $9 billion transit plan, already criticized as being hugely and disproportionately expensive. He also admitted that residents of Bellevue are not likely to use the proposed mass transit system. “I don’t really understand how a $9 billion investment for 3 percent turns out to be a good investment for the majority of us,” one member of the audience said, and asked Briley to explain how that math made sense. “Lots of people are not going to get on light rail or any sort of transit. I know that. We’re not saying everybody should,” a defensive Briley responded. “What we’re saying is if we…
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Several of the 14 candidates who will be on the ballot in the special election for Mayor of Nashville reacted on Tuesday to the news that the Tennessee Supreme Court has decided that the date of the election should be set between May 21 and May 25, rather than on August 2 as previously determined by the Davidson County Election Commission. “The Supreme Court has ruled, and I’ll be ready for the election,” Acting Mayor David Briley said in a statement, Fox 17 reported. “I appreciate all the support I’ve already received, and I’m looking forward to a strong campaign over the next six weeks,” Briley added. “Congratulations to Chief Justice Bivins and the Tennessee Supreme Court for its unanimous decision upholding the rule of law in Tennessee,” former Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain, who earlier in the day received the endorsement of conservative author and film maker Dinesh D’Souza for her candidacy for Mayor of Nashville, said in a statement. “I especially applaud former NAACP President Ludye Wallace for his courage and leadership on this critical matter,” she added. “We the People can individually and collectively ‘Be the People’ who change colonies, states, and nations,” Swain noted. At-Large Metro Council member…
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