Publisher’s Positions
By Steve Hunley
Good Job, Senator Blackburn
Senator Marsha Blackburn and Congressman David Kustoff are sponsoring a bill that, if passed, will require 15-year mandatory sentences on those individuals who have three or more serious felonies and are subsequently found guilty of illegal firearm possession. The legislation has been christened the “Restoring the Armed Career Criminal Act” and reconfigures a “three strikes” law passed in 1984. That same act saw parts of it struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015. Senator Blackburn is cosponsoring the bill in the Senate with Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. The bill has won a strong endorsement from Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.
Senator Blackburn stated, “Violent, repeat offenders have no business being back on our streets.” That was seconded by Congressman Kustoff, who said, “Career criminals are a danger to our citizens and our communities.”
Amen! For too long, the emphasis by Democrats in this country has been on a policy of “restoration” and conciliation with too many criminals who have been relabeled as victims because of their race or identification, while ignoring their crime. It is akin to condemning the Israeli government for bombing strikes in Gaza while ignoring the October 7 attack, which was premeditated and deliberate, against Israeli civilians. The Left in this country blatantly ignores laws it disagrees with and encourages others to do the same. Anyone the Left identifies as an “oppressor” evidently deserves any terrible thing and the perpetrator of the crime, irrespective of how brutal, is excused. Another example is the worshipful attitude of many on the Left for Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of a health insurance executive who was a husband and a father.
Skrmetti praised the Blackburn-Kustoff Bill as a “common-sense approach” to removing “violent criminals off our streets.”
It is a good bill, in the best interests of the law-abiding, hardworking people of this country, and we hope the Congress will pass it quickly.
City Loses Another Federal Grant
The daily newspaper, what’s left of it, is upset the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by Congress “just sunk” the nearly $43 million federal grant requested by the City of Knoxville, which, according to city officials, would have helped to “rebuild the lost connection between Knoxville’s east side and downtown.” Mayor Indya Kincannon hurried to say that her proposed sales tax increase would not replace the lost federal dollars.
The City of Knoxville had already lost another federal grant to build the “pedestrian” bridge intended to span from South Knoxville across the river to Neyland Drive near the stadium. City of Knoxville officials have already created another pedestrian bridge unintentionally by closing the Gay Street Bridge, saying it cannot withstand automobile traffic. Only those walking, riding bicycles and driving emergency vehicles may use the Gay Street Bridge until it is repaired.
One wonders why those repairs aren’t in place yet while the city continues to raise taxes repeatedly. The proposed hike in the sales tax follows a whopping 40% increase in property taxes inside the City of Knoxville. Mayor Kincannon and the city council continue to spend money on anything and everything without any effort to live within their means. It simply taxes more to spend more, despite providing few real services aside from police and fire protection and garbage pick-up. The city did cut services immediately after hiking property taxes, with Kincannon’s announcement that the Knoxville Police Department would no longer respond to traffic accidents unless there was injury involved.
The daily newspaper, quick to pounce whenever it notices a dollar out of place in the county government, never seems to find any fault in the city government. Of course, the Sentinel and its Gannet mothership are to the Left of the spectrum just as our own newspaper is right of center. The daily newspaper is appalled that the quotas, imagined racial diversity imperatives pursued by the Biden administration have been sunk by the Trump administration. As our Congressman Tim Burchett said, our country is nearing $40 trillion in debt. We can’t afford everything we need, much less everything we might want.
People Behind The Russia Hoax Need To Be Held Accountable
What goes around comes around. Cliches are cliches for a good reason. At the heart of them, they are true. And what went around is coming around for John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey, all of whom were involved in the Trump-Russia hoax. The FBI is conducting a criminal investigation into perjury and conspiracy charges. Leftist heads continue to explode and blubber that they are martyrs who investigated Trump, which is a lie. They concocted and carried out a plot to frame Donald Trump so that he would be investigated. Marc Elias is already squawling about “misuse, abuse, [and] authoritarian takeover” as the investigation of Brennan, Comey and company is underway. Elias’s whimpers would, ironically, perfectly describe what was done to President Trump by the corrupt CIA and FBI. When the Left charges Trump with pursuit of his enemies, it ignores the ruthless, unethical and largely fictitious pursuit of Donald Trump by both the Obama and Biden administrations, in particular, and agents of the Left like the immoral Fanni Willis, Letitia James and Alvin Bragg.
Contrary to the popular narrative of the mainstream news media, there was evidence that Vladimir Putin and Russia did NOT prefer Donald Trump in 2016 because the Russians considered Trump too unpredictable. They preferred Hillary Clinton, who, after all, had pushed the reset button on relations with Putin and Russia. It was Hillary Clinton, whose campaign paid for the infamous Steele dossier which was used to get the FISA warrant, who publicly blamed her loss of the 2016 election on Putin’s supposed “personal grudge” against her.
Christopher Steele had been fired as an informant by the FBI on November 1, 2016, according to journalist Matt Taibbi. Taibbi has reported “there would have been no pre-inauguration report saying ‘Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.” As Taibbi has reported in his columns on Racket News, there were two actions that were both irreversible and critical, which were the decision to use the Steele dossier and its subsequent leak of “the report’s classified contents to the public before Trump was sworn in.”
It is an interesting and important story that is still developing, although here in Tennessee, we can sum it up aptly by repeating, “What goes around, comes around.”
