The Disgruntled Republican in Nashville

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Tennessee's newly drawn congressional district boundaries will be revealed next month

Republican reps keep quiet on Nashville's redistricting future

... U.S. Rep. Mark Green has gone on the record expressing his opposition to dividing Nashville among multiple Republican House members.

.... State Rep. Bob Freeman, D-Nashville, who serves on the House redistricting committee, tells Axios the 5th district is likely to be divided among Republicans.

... Green was quoted in the Nashville Post in September calling the concept of an 8-1 map "greedy" and "a bad idea." He warned splitting Nashville and its liberal voters into suburban districts could backfire in future election cycles.

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Monday, December 20, 2021

Mayor’s Aide Courtney Pogue on Frustrations, Priorities for Nashville Neighborhoods

Courtney Pogue

by Rod Williams, Dec. 20, 2021- In an article in the Nashville Scene today, Stephen Elliott interviews Courtney Pogue, Mayor John Cooper’s director of economic and community development for about the last nine months Pogue expresses his frustration about a lack of direction in city government and a tendency to focus on newsmaking economic development deals — like those with Oracle or Amazon — rather than the kind of work that can bring grocery stores or other vital businesses to underserved neighborhoods.

He says the city does not really have a community development strategy for the city. The city follows the lead of the Chamber and focuses on big deals but there has been no focus on small business development.

I am not so sure, the city should even be steering development. We should avoid overtaxing businesses so they will want to open or expand in Nashville, we should provide good police protection so businesses can safely function and provide quality education so we have a good workforce and the city should do the other things that constitute good governance and then essentially let the market determine who gets the grocery stores.

This is an interesting article. I think it is rare to find someone who serves at the pleasure of the mayor be so blunt in what amounts to criticism of his boss. To read the article follow this link.

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Sunday, December 19, 2021

Tennessee ranked 3rd for election integrity.

From Heritage. Org, Dec. 19, 2021- Every citizen's vote is sacred. The vote is how we guarantee that our government remains of the people, by the people, and for the people. Americans need and deserve elections that they can trust. Legitimate voters should be able to vote in privacy without being harassed, secure in the knowledge that their vote will not be lost, stolen, altered, or negated by a vote cast by an illegitimate voter. Americans need and deserve a transparent system in which fraud can be easily detected and false allegations of fraud can be easily dispelled. Americans need and deserve a system in which it is easy to vote and hard to cheat.

In order to help voters, state legislators, election officials, and all Americans who are interested in ensuring a fair and secure election process, The Heritage Foundation has published this Election Integrity Scorecard, which compares the election laws and regulations of each state and the District of Columbia that affect the security and integrity of the process to the Foundation's best-practices recommendations.

....

In 2012, the Pew Foundation released a report on the voter registration systems maintained by the states. The report found that:

Approximately 24 million—one in every eight—voter registrations were either no longer valid or significantly inaccurate.
More than 1.8 million deceased individuals were listed as voters.
Approximately 2.75 million individuals were registered in more than one state.

....

In 2020, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) released a similar report, Critical Condition: American Voter Rolls Filled with Errors, Dead Voters, and Duplicate Registrations, using an even bigger database of voter registration and voter history information obtained from 42 states covering the 2016 and 2018 elections. Like GAI, PILF supplemented the state registration information by using other commercial and government databases such as credit agencies and the Social Security Administration’s Master Death Index to obtain unique identifiers and sift out as many “false positives” as possible when comparing the data.

PILF’s comparison of the state data, also using a conservative matching program, revealed that:

8,360 individuals registered and voted in two different states during the 2018 election.
Votes were recorded for 7,890 deceased individuals in the 2016 election and 6,718 deceased individuals in the 2018 election.
43,760 individuals who registered more than once at the same address in the same state voted twice in the 2016 election, and 37,889 individuals registered more than once at the same address cast two votes in the 2018 election. Thousands of these duplicate votes were cast using mail-in or absentee ballots.
5,500 individuals registered at two different addresses in the same state and voted twice in the 2018 election.
Votes were recorded in the 2018 election for 34,000 individuals who were registered at nonresidential, commercial addresses such as gas stations, casinos, and restaurants.

(For more, follow this link.)

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Friday, December 17, 2021

2021 Pork Report: 12 Recipes for Government Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

The Beacon Center, December 15, 2021 - The Beacon Center is proud to release its “recipe book”
themed Tennessee Pork Report, revealing hundreds of millions of dollars in government waste, fraud, and abuse.

This year’s infamous Pork of the Year “winner” was Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS). MNPS entered into an $18 million no-bid contract with Meharry Medical College Ventures which produced a $1.8 million website with all the visual appeal and functionality of AskJeeves.com. Experts say this website should have cost no more than $75,000.

As if the no-bid contract and lighting tax dollars on fire weren’t bad enough, at the same time the city of Nashville decided to shut down schools because in-person learning was too dangerous due to COVID, MNPS partnered with the YMCA to have…in-person learning for children of Metro School employees and students from K-5th grade.

Other 2021 Pork Report entries included:

$702 million government-owned broadband plan in Knoxville, despite 98% of Knoxville residents having multiple choices in broadband internet.
A $20 million (and counting) taxpayer gift to build a waterpark in Jackson.
Davidson’s County continued “emissions testing” tax grab that was deemed unnecessary by both the state legislature and the EPA.
Hamilton County’s $16 million purchase of nearly 2,200 acres to turn into a manufacturing hub, yet only about one-third of the land is ready for development.

The 2021 Pork Report comes from state and local budgets, media reports, state audits, and independent research conducted by Beacon Center staff and scholars. You can read the full report here.

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Pork of the Year: Over-Stuffed Baked Apples. Metro Nashville Public School's COVID Favoritism and $18 Million No-Bid Contract with Meharry Medical Ventures

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Rick Perry Pitched Meadows On Plan To Steal Election Even Before Results Were In

by Rod Williams, Dec. 17, 2021 - Shame, shame, and embarrassment. The evidence is overwhelming and continues to mount that there was an attempt by and on behalf of Donald Trump to steal the Nov. 2020 election. I don't know that there is enough evidence of treason to convict anyone of the crime, but the conspirators should go down in history as traitors who attempted a coup, and they should not be welcome in polite society. Their names should be removed from buildings and if they have highways or bridges named after them, those structures should be renamed. They should be shunned and treated as shameful embarrassments.

I was not surprised that there was a coup attempt following the 2020 election. I had a bad feeling that we would see violence and maybe a coup attempt following the election, but I badly missed how it would play out. I thought President Trump would win the election and there would be a coup attempt from the left. Liberals hated Trump with such a passion and many thought of him as the next Hitler. If one is stopping the next Hitler then a coup is justified.

I always thought that if there ever was a coup, or attempted coup, in America it would come from the left. Liberals, I reasoned, do not really love America the way conservatives do. They scoff at patriotism and they see the Constitution as not much more than an impediment to the enactment of the general will. Conservatives, on the other hand, are patriots and they revere our republican form of government, liberty and order, and the constitution.

As it turned out, conservatives (Republicans or those who have co-opted the label "conservative,") are willing to defile the constitution and illegally seize power. What is labeled as "conservatives" today consists of people who are no better than progressives. Trumpinistas, including former Governor Rick Perry, assuming the allegation is true, are traitors who plotted to betray their country.

Please see the following excerpted article. There is always the possibility that this article is untrue or that Perry was framed. I hope that is the case, but I don't expect that to be the case. Click on the title below to read the full article.

CNN: Rick Perry Pitched Meadows On Plan To Steal Election Even Before Results Were In

By Josh Kovensky, December 17, 2021- Investigators on the Jan. 6 Committee believe that former Energy Secretary Rick Perry authored a Nov. 4 text to Mark Meadows suggesting that three state legislatures overrule their voters and cast electoral votes for Trump, CNN reports.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) presented the text on Tuesday night, which reads: “HERE’s an AGRESSIVE (sic) STRATEGY: Why can t (sic) the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS (where conflicts and election not called that night) and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the SCOTUS.”

Perry sent the text on Nov. 4, one day after the election was held and as votes in key states were still being counted.

... the plan resembles what Trump would partly spend the following two months doing: trying to pressure state legislatures into sending Trump, and not Biden, electors to Congress, regardless of their vote counts.

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