Tag: Tennessee

The Occupation Expands

Yet another American city is slated for military occupation.

First it was DC, a blue city, and Donny lied about out of control crime and then he went about threatening other blue cities like Chicago, Baltimore, etc….and now he has ordered his storm troopers into another city….this time Memphis….

President Trump signed an order Monday sending the National Guard into Memphis to combat crime. Trump made the announcement with Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee visiting the Oval Office, calling what’s coming a “replica of our extraordinarily successful efforts” in Washington. The AP describes the move as Trump’s “latest test of the limits of presidential power by using military force in American cities.”

  • “Today, at the request of Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee, who’s standing with us, as you know, I’m signing a presidential memorandum to establish the Memphis Safe Task Force,” Trump said, per the Commercial Appeal. “It’s very important because of the crime that’s going on, not only in Memphis, in many cities. We’re going to take care of all of them step-by-step.”

Trump said that in addition to troops, the push in Memphis would involve officials from various federal agencies, including the FBI, DEA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the US Marshals Service: “We’re sending in the big force now.”

  • Shortly before Trump’s announcement, the White House said on social media that the Memphis total crime rate was higher than the national average and suggested that the rate had increased since last year, bucking national trends. That’s despite Memphis police recently reporting decreases across every major crime category in the first eight months of 2025 compared to the same period in previous years. Overall crime hit a 25-year low, while murder hit a six-year low, police said. Despite the overall decrease, Memphis has dealt with gun violence problems for years. In 2023, the city set a record with more than 390 homicides.
  • A White House memorandum on “Restoring Law and Order” noted that according to the FBI, Memphis had the nation’s highest rate of violent crime per capita last year. “The city, a beacon of American culture that was Elvis’s home and is often called the birthplace of rock and roll and the blues, should be safe and secure for all of its citizens and Americans who visit its historic landmarks such as Graceland, Beale Street, and the Memphis Pyramid,” the memorandum states.
  • Tennessee’s governor embraced the troop deployment as part of a broader law enforcement surge in Memphis. Lee said Monday that he was “tired of crime holding the great city of Memphis back.”
  • Trump first suggested he’d be deploying the National Guard to Memphis on Friday, drawing pushback from the Democratic leader of Memphis, which is majority Black. “I did not ask for the National Guard, and I don’t think it’s the way to drive down crime,” Mayor Paul Young told a news conference Friday while acknowledging the city remained high on too many “bad lists.”
  • The first troops could be deployed as soon as this week, CNN reports. Young says he hasn’t been given a date and he is still waiting for information including the number of troops and their duties.
  • Speculation had centered on Chicago as Trump’s next city to send in the National Guard and other federal authorities. But the administration has faced fierce resistance from Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and other local authorities. Trump said Monday, “We’re going to be doing Chicago probably next” but also suggested that authorities would wait and not act immediately there. “We want to save these places,” Trump said. He singled out St. Louis and Baltimore, but didn’t say either place would be getting federal forces or the National Guard.

WE will see how effective this game becomes.

Now we wait for His Royal Highness Donny to drop the shoe on Chicago.

This is just silly….there are more national problems that beating up of blue cities.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

This Is What Happens

Does anybody remember the protests by legislators in Tennessee?

Probably not so let me enlighten your mind….

In an extraordinary act of political retaliation, Tennessee Republicans on Thursday expelled two Democratic lawmakers from the state Legislature for their role in a protest that called for more gun control in the aftermath of a deadly school shooting in Nashville. The House, where Republicans have a supermajority, voted to expel Reps. Justin Pearson and Justin Jones. A vote to remove Rep. Gloria Johnson failed by a single vote, the AP reports. The chamber has used the punishment only a handful times since the Civil War. Most state legislatures possess the power to expel members, but it is generally reserved for lawmakers accused of serious misconduct, not used as a weapon against political opponents. In a tweet, President Biden called the expulsions “shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent.”

Republicans said the punishment was in response to the Democrats’ behavior last week as hundreds of protesters packed the Capitol to call for passage of gun-control measures. While demonstrators filled galleries, the three Democrats approached the front of the House chamber with a bullhorn and participated in a chant. The protest unfolded days after the shooting at the Covenant School, a private Christian school where six people were killed, including three 9-year-old children.

Apparently it is a damnable sin to protest the murder of children…..at least in Tennessee.

This seems a bit extreme considering the number of ‘violations’ some of the legislators have had in the past and still held their positions….

What violations?

The Tennessee House chamber where Republicans expressed outrage this week at a breach in decorum was filled daily, for years, by the sound of their colleague ringing a cowbell to mask the lack of applause. A lawmaker’s office chair was urinated on by a fellow Republican, a reporter who used to cover the GOP-controlled House writes in Politico. The quick expulsion of two Democrats on Thursday for supporting a protest was of a piece, Natalie Allison says. “The place has been defined by partisan vitriol, pique, scandal, racism and Olympic-level pettiness for years,” she writes. Here are other actions committed by Republican House members in the past that did not lead party leaders to remove them:

  • Lynching suggestion: In a committee hearing in March about capital punishment, Rep. Paul Sherrell asked if he might offer an amendment to include “hanging by a tree” as a method of execution; the state has a history of lynching. An uproar followed, but Sherrell has not been reprimanded or censured.
  • Sexual assault allegations: Three women accused Rep. David Byrd of sexually assaulted them when they played on a basketball team he coached. They were minors at the time. Byrd denied the accusations, but a recording captured him apologizing to one of the women without specifically saying what he was sorry for, per WSMV. GOP leaders twice blocked attempts to remove Byrd, per the Washington Post. “You have to balance the will of the voters and overturning the will of the voters,” said Speaker Cameron Sexton in 2019.
  • Historical revision: Rep. Justin Lafferty described the Three-Fifths Compromise as necessary to end slavery during a 2021 debate on the House floor. Historians were among those who objected to that interpretation.
  • Slurs: Republicans joked twice publicly in 2020 about Black people eating fried chicken. A lawmaker speaking about his bill on sanctuary cities used the term “wetback.” The chief of staff for a former House speaker texted, “Black people are idiots.” Other texts showed the speaker endorsing disparaging and sexual comments the aide made about women.
  • Mean tweets: An investigation in 2019 found that Rep. Rick Tillis was behind an anonymous Twitter account filled with gossip and criticism of lawmakers and staffers. It was his chair that eventually was soaked with urine.

This situation is pathetic…is this what has become of our so-called democracy?

I weep for this country.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Closing Thought–07May21

I live in what is being called these days as the “New South”….I have questioned the title for some time…..my premise is that very little has changed from what is the “Old South”…….the racism that all seem to think that is on the wane is far from……

Those in-bred spineless white boys that keep winning thanx to the legislation that the old white boys keep enacting prove their bias….and the most recent example is from Tennessee……this idiot wants to re-write history with the hope of continuing the racial bias…..

A Tennessee Republican falsely declared Tuesday that an 18th-century policy designating a slave as three-fifths of a person was adopted for “the purpose of ending slavery,” commenting amid a debate over whether educators should be restricted while teaching about systematic racism in America. During lengthy debate on the GOP-controlled state House floor, several Black lawmakers expressed concerns about the bill’s impact on how certain subjects would be taught in schools, specifically highlighting the Three-Fifths Compromise, the AP reports. The policy was made during the nation’s Constitutional Convention in 1787 and classified that three-fifths of a state’s slave population could be counted toward its total population when apportioning taxes and states’ representation in Congress. Historians largely agree the compromise gave slaveholding states inordinate power over choosing a president—and decisions of the Continental Congress. That clout eventually faded when Northern state populations began to rapidly rise.

Rep. Justin Lafferty, who is white, stood up and talked at length about what he saw as sparking the compromise. At one point he asked colleagues to note on paper their best guess for the reasons that led to the policy. “By limiting the number of population in the count, they specifically limited the number of representatives who would be available in the slave holding states and they did it for the purpose of ending slavery,” said Lafferty, from Knoxville. “Well before Abraham Lincoln. Well before Civil War.” None of the other lawmakers in the chamber directly challenged Lafferty’s false claims but some applauded when he finished talking. While the House overwhelmingly approved the legislation on Tuesday, the GOP-controlled Senate chamber refused to accept the House bill hours later. Its fate now remains unclear in the final days of the legislative session.

Historical revisionism just to keep the minorities in their “place”.

I would say that the New South smells as racist as the Old South….What about you?

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”