Publisher’s Positions
Vote NO On Proposed City Sales Tax Increase
Much of the war chest raised for the advertising campaign on behalf of Mayor Indya Kincannon’s effort to raise the sales tax inside the City of Knoxville was due to large contributions by wealthy people. There is something unbecoming about millionaires and billionaires funding a campaign to raise a tax that is largely paid by the middle class and the poor. Of course, millionaires and billionaires prefer a sales tax to taxes on income and property. There is nothing civic-minded about taxing someone else to pay for a questionable agenda by a mayor who has frankly done a terrible job in running the City of Knoxville.
When Kincannon originally proposed increasing the city’s portion of the sales tax by 22%, she had already raised property taxes by 40% and the first thing she did was to reduce services to the people of Knoxville by announcing that officers from the Knoxville Police Department would no longer respond to the scene of traffic accidents unless there was injury involved. That has driven up the number of lawsuits as well as the cost of insurance for drivers.
Knoxville has no school system and, aside from providing police and fire protection, as well as garbage pick-up, has managed to spend a great deal of money with little to show for it. Knox County hasn’t raised property taxes in almost 30 years, while the City of Knoxville is increasing taxes every two or three years.
Kincannon and her minions on the Knoxville City Council mouth about “affordable” housing without acknowledging the basic fact that raising the property tax also raises rents and mortgages for everyone except for those whose housing is subsidized by the taxpayers. They deserve some blame for rising rents.
The immense number of people moving to Knox County has placed a growing burden on our infrastructure, and there will be an increasing demand to expand our existing schools and build new ones. We are building apartment complexes on every piece of scrub land inside the city without adjusting our roads, and new traffic clogs our roadways. Knoxvillians are spending more time in their cars commuting due to the haphazard planning of city leaders who have all the vision of a blind man and the planning skills of a dead man.
The wealthy who have funded Kincannon’s bid to raise the sales tax on every food item you and your family eat, every piece of clothing you and your family wear, and the school supplies for your children and grandchildren, is on the ballot. Tomorrow is the final day to go and vote against the proposed increase in the sales tax. If you haven’t voted, make a point to go to the polls and vote. Whether we like it or not, we get what we vote for. When you are too lazy to go and vote, you take what comes. Be sure to go and vote.
Corporate Media Hypocrisy
It is very difficult to tell if the corporate media in this country has realized the depth of its fall from credibility with most of the country. The biggest scandal in this country involving the media is its intentional and deliberate refusal to report on the cognitive decline of Joe Biden when he was president. The goal post has and continues to move. Those who insisted that Biden was as sharp as ever and could run circles around aides a third his age when he couldn’t even walk up a flight of steps, have been retreating inch by inch, lie by lie, now saying, well, he could have served as president, but it would have been difficult for him to campaign to remain in office. That, too, is – to put it politely – complete and utter fiction. Biden is a soon-to-be 83-year-old man who is undergoing radiation treatment for advanced prostate cancer. A host of people who worked in the Biden White House, including Biden’s personal physician, have pleaded the Fifth to questions beyond their name, rather than tell the truth about his frailties and mental state.
More Media Hypocrisy
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are now on a tour of their book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up and the Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” Tapper, much as he might like to rewrite history, was visibly and verbally one of those who not only refused to report on Biden’s obvious mental decline but pushed back against those who mentioned it. Alex Thompson, on the other hand, DID report on Biden’s continuous gaffes and readily apparent mental slippage. Tapper said nothing when Robert Hur was assailed and abused throughout Tapper’s own CNN network and all across the galaxy of the mainstream media universe for his mild observation that Biden was a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory, which is far more polite than the unfortunate truth. While Jake Tapper was busy maintaining the status quo and defending the notion that Biden was the best he had ever been, like the moron Joe Scarborough, The Focus noticed it and reported it. Average Americans saw it for themselves. None of us were shocked when Joe Biden opened his mouth on the evening of June 27, 2024, and what came out was gibberish and incomprehensible to anyone. Jake Tapper says he was stunned by Biden’s performance. He has now taken to saying none of his sources had either revealed or had failed to notice the all-too-obvious mental slippage of the President of the United States. Ian James, the presidential aide who went to the TV networks to proclaim Biden was in full bloom of his mental vigor every day, was fudging a bit; as it turns out, he saw Biden personally twice in 24 months.
We are left to believe what was painfully clear to many working and average Americans somehow eluded the elitists who were scarfing down another bowl of rainbow stew and planning to spend another $2 trillion on climate change and putting on trans plays in Uzbekistan, while inflation was eating up the savings of working families, and the wild spending drove up the cost of everyday necessities.
Abuse of power is a crime; abuse of trust may be as bad as a crime. I don’t believe for a minute people like Jake Tapper “missed” the story of Biden being seriously mentally impaired. What they wished to avoid, at all costs, including lying to the faces of the American people day after day, night after night, was to keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House. That is also why they and every institution and agency of government were subverted to keep Donald Trump’s name off the ballot. If the blue states did not remove his name from their ballots, the Biden Department of Justice would bankrupt him and his family and put him behind bars. That’s why nobody in their right mind believes people like JB Pritzker or Gavin Newsom when they squall about “democracy.” None of them cares about democracy, nor do they care about crime or protecting the lives of American citizens. There’s a reason why they cannot bring themselves to even speak the name of an American who was raped and killed by an illegal alien.
If we accept the premise Jake Tapper presents in his book that he and other “journalists” like him just “missed” the story, while Joe Biden’s head-full of pudding did not surprise average Americans in the least, then it answers one big question: Who is smarter, the media and leftist elitists who think we will believe whatever slop they feed us, or the average American? Don Lemon may not be the dumbest man on television after all. He might just be par for the course of the average talking head on mainstream television.
