Tag: Tennessee

Grandma Feelgood busted in Tennessee.

It’s always the quiet ones.

To neighbors, Sylvia Hofstetter was a wealthy businesswoman and grandmother who threw extravagant pool parties and went all out to decorate her upscale suburban home on Christmas and Halloween.

That image was shattered when FBI agents raided the health care administrator’s Knoxville home in March. Federal prosecutors say the 51-year-old Florida native was running the largest illicit drug operation in the history of east Tennessee: a string of pill mills that raked in $17.5 million in four years.

Continue reading Grandma Feelgood busted in Tennessee.

Meet Tennessee’s Canary in the Democratic Coal Mine: Charlie Brown, (D CAND, TN-GOV).

He’s… well.  He’s like this:

Democrats in Tennessee have apparently nominated as their candidate for governor a Duck Dynasty and beef jerky loving dog-kennel owner, who once said he would like to electrocute the current governor.

Charles V. “Charlie” Brown, a 72-year-old man whose name was first on the ballot, won the Democratic nomination to take on incumbent Republican Bill Haslam Thursday night.

Brown told BuzzFeed he was “a little bit surprised,” and said national Democrats hadn’t reached out to him yet.

“Not yet, but they will.”

…I wouldn’t count on that. Bill Halsam easily lapped the entire Democratic slate’s primary turnout all on his own, and national Democrats have enough problems already.  Even in the gubernatorial category: right now I can’t imagine why the DGA would care more about Tennessee than it would about Hawaii, Florida, or Illinois.  Even if somebody else had won the primary. Continue reading Meet Tennessee’s Canary in the Democratic Coal Mine: Charlie Brown, (D CAND, TN-GOV).

Oh, look. Steve Cohen (D, Tennessee) is being a scumbag again.

How utterly unsurprising of him:

I understand that getting a Republican in that particular district is perhaps not the easiest thing in the world to accomplish; but surely there is a Democrat living there who would like Rep. Cohen’s job? Shoot, an independent who was willing to have a quiet talk with the Tennessee Republican party about their resource allocation for 2014 might find his or her prospects considerably, if not exactly openly, improved…

Moe Lane

Rep Steve Cohen (D, TN) asked about paternity test, responds by flirting.

Yeah, that’s not creepy at all.

…Wait.  What?

 

You may remember this story from a few months back. The way that we thought that it went: Steve Cohen had some deleted tweets involving a young lady, these were noted, he claimed that this was actually his illegitimate daughter, and we all frankly backed off at that point.  Only… it turns out that the woman’s NOT his daughter, according to a paternity test – which either makes this story very sad, or something out of Faulkner.  I’d suggest that Steve Cohen do better at trying to steer public reaction to the first category; he can start by not answering people’s pertinent questions by telling them how hot they are.

Steve Cohen is now just trolling us.

Or he’s trying to troll somebody.

Steve Cohen, a Tennessee congressman, called Cyndi Lauper “hot” in a tweet and then abruptly deleted it.

Which, it turns out, was part of his secret plan.

“It was all a ruse,” Cohen tells [Howard Kurtz], an effort to fool the media. “I knew by deleting it they would run it, it would give it news, give it life. That was the hook.”

Although why the heck there’s supposed to be a press release on this is beyond me completely. Continue reading Steve Cohen is now just trolling us.

#rsrh Steve Cohen (D, TN-09) suffers karmic redistricting.

In lighter news: it turns out that Steve Cohen of Tennessee just had a lot of bad behavior on his part over the years… rewarded… by the Tennessee legislature.  While the federal redistricting process from Tennessee didn’t look particularly unusual at first glance (the 7R/2D Congressional split after the last election was more or less locked in by the process), it turns out that the state legislature’s new Congressional map removes switches out a bunch of Democratic voters used to Cohen for a bunch of Democratic voters who are not – and that part of the voters being moved include a key voting and fundraising bloc (Memphis Jewish voters) from Cohen’s district.  If you’re wondering why that’s important, it’s because Steve Cohen is a white Democrat who has been representing a majority-minority district since 2007… and every primary election since then has been vicious.  Extremely vicious.  So much so that his likely primary opponent this go-round (Memphis Urban League leader  & school board member Tomeka Hart) is apparently planning to play it a good deal smarter: which is to say, a good deal less race-baiting.  Which, paradoxically – and coupled with the aforementioned switching of voters around – could seriously threaten Cohen this time.

Personally, I think that Steve Cohen deserves to get destroyed in the primary: he’s a nasty man who tells vicious lies about people who saved Jews from the Nazis (no, I haven’t forgotten this one).  It may take ten more years to root him out of that district, but I’ll see the bigot gone at some point, and then I will cheer.  And I applaud the Tennessee state legislature for giving us all some hope that it will happen this year…

Amazon, Tennesee, Bill Haslam, and a national sales tax.

(Full disclosure: I am an Amazon.com Affiliate for Maryland.)

Glenn Reynolds noted this apparent contradiction in what Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam’s position actually is with regard to having Amazon.com collect sales tax: is the Republican Governor for it, or against it?  I say ‘apparent’ because there isn’t one, really; there’s just not enough context.

Basically, the position that Haslam is taking is that the state of Tennessee trying to impose an Amazon tax would probably wreck ongoing negotiations between the state and Amazon.com when it comes to getting a couple more job-creating distribution centers built in-state (which it probably will).  Haslam also thinks that a national, standardized system for sales tax is both necessary and proper:

[Haslam] said Tennessee is already losing between $300 million and $500 million a year on untaxed Internet sales — a growing number since the states and Congress have been unable for more than a decade to agree on a “streamlined sales tax” process enabling online retailers to collect taxes easily for the nation’s thousands of state and local taxing jurisdictions.

“It’s not going to begin eroding the state’s tax base; it already is. Something has to happen nationally. The whole streamlined sales tax is a big deal, and I’m more than willing to play a leadership role,” Haslam said. “It has to be addressed on a national level or we’re going to keep playing these kinds of move-around games.”

Continue reading Amazon, Tennesee, Bill Haslam, and a national sales tax.

TN Democrats go, charitably, nuts over teacher reform bills.

The alternative is ‘deliberately inflammatory in a very literal sense because they want to see Tennessee burn.’  Which is a bit of a mouthful.

Based on their latest email blast, the Tennessee Democratic Party seems to have a problem understanding what “fascism” is, not to mention “terrorism.”  Apparently, Tennessee Democratic chair Chip Forrester and House Democratic chair Mike Turner seem to think that these terms are appropriate for describing several reform bills currently being considered by the Tennessee legislature.  Presumably they mean HB 2012 and HB 0130; the first is a tenure reform bill that introduces merit into the tenure process and the second is a collective bargaining reform bill that removes the Tennessee Education Association’s privileged status as the only permissible agent for bargaining with school boards.

Or perhaps Forrester and Turner don’t mean those bills, given that neither actually does anything like set up a system for mass murder of inconvenient minorities, create a totalitarian state that controls every aspect of life, and/or start aggressive wars of conquest.  It’s a bit of a puzzler – unless you assume that this is just a cynical ploy to get money, which is a notion that Jim Geraghty is cynically suggesting and I am just as cynically endorsing.

Continue reading TN Democrats go, charitably, nuts over teacher reform bills.

#rsrh TN-09 Update.

(Via Instapundit) The race-baiting, trash-talking Steve Cohen (D, TN-09) may continue to enjoy the effects of earned karma* by facing yet another candidate in the Democratic primary ready to win it by… race baiting and trash talking.  May Cohen have everything he deserves in the next two weeks.

That is a… hold up. 

Charlotte Bergmann for Congress.

That is all.

Moe Lane

*He may also continue to pog mo thoin.