Guess who was one of the three to vote no?

I offer the topic with a certain amount of whimsy, but as long as everyone is speculating on these things, I'll offer this one up:

Are we seeing a little Clintonian rope-a-dope action here?

In a meeting with House Republicans today, Donald Trump blithely referred to Articles I, II, and XII of the U.S. Constitution. The bigger headline was his other, more contentious meeting with Senate Republicans, where he insulted and offered to oppose Senators of his own party.

The remark about the nonexistent Article XII of the Constitution is more important, however.

Rep. Jerry Sexton, R-Bean Station, has announced his intent to seek an override of the Governor's veto of the 'Bible as the Official State Book' bill. The Attorney General has said it's unconstitutional. The Governor has said it's unconstitutional and a trivialization of the Christian religion. Everybody knows the bill is unconstitutional and will be invalidated by the courts when it is inevitably challenged.

Sexton nonetheless wants to waste our tax money by overriding the veto and requiring the subsequent court action to invalidate it.

Why is it the people who claim to be most opposed to wasteful government spending and claim to want limited government nonetheless seek to unconsitutionally waste government resources to establish and inevitably fail in a defense of their religion as the law of the land?

From the News Sentinel:

Democratic lawmakers unveiled a bill Thursday to deter gun owners from leaving loaded guns accessible to children — and named it "MaKayla's Law" after the 8-year-old Jefferson County girl who authorities say was killed by an 11-year-old neighbor with his father's shotgun.

Well, I guess it'll be sadly interesting to see just how the NRA and their friends try to say that you can't hold gun owners responsible for the consequences when children get unsupervised access to loaded guns. Here's another sensible proposal, but you know we can't have any of that.

Here's a preemptive question: if guns don't kill people; people kill people, who is responsible when the people in question are children? Normally, young children aren't considered to be fully responsible for their own actions because they're, you know, children. So if somebody's been killed and the gun isn't responsible, and the kid who fired the gun isn't responsible, doesn't it logically come to the adult gun owner who left a gun and ammunition laying around where the kid could find it?

I can't quite anticipate what the argument will be, but you know the NRA (an organization that once promoted gun safety and responsible gun ownership) will find some way to say that gun owners who don't secure their guns aren't responsible when a kid finds it and tragedy follows.

Mutual Loathing Society

What happens when a group of narcissists and sociopaths invite an even more narcissistic sociopath over for a showdown? Today, Republican members of Congress, who have voted dozens of times in recent years to deny affordable healthcare for poor and middle-class Americans, were infuriated at the smirking presence of Martin Shkreli, the former price-gouging pharmaceutical executive. Shkreli tweeted after his appearance in front of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that the members of Congress were imbeciles. Was he wrong about that? Probably not.

One has to wonder if the majority members of the panel were so upset about the prices of life-saving drugs, or simply insane with jealousy at Shkreli's freedom to not even pretend to care about anyone other than himself.

Really, it's only Elijah Cummings' presence at the hearing that diluted the otherwise perfect irony of today's face off on Capitol Hill.

President Obama today announced some executive actions he is taking with regard to guns and gun violence. In the announcement, he referenced the recent heroism and tragic death of Zaevion Dobson here in Knoxville, noting that exhibiting just a fraction of Dobson's sacrifice and determination is all it would take from the rest of us to counter the oversized influence of the gun lobby on Congress. Obama noted that the rest of us exercising this determination is what it will take to effect significant and lasting change, by getting Congress to act on the issue.

Here is the important takeaway from all this:

The gun lobby, through the NRA, always responds to any proposal for new legislation that the government should do more to enforce the laws on the books before proposing anything new.

If you look carefully at what the President has said he is going to do through executive action, it is exactly what the NRA has called for: doing more to enforce the laws on the books.

Apparently, people whose names are on terrorist watch lists can legally pass background checks and purchase guns in the United States. Who would have thunk it? As noted in this AP article: "According to a March analysis by the Government Accountability Office, people on the FBI's consolidated Terrorist Watchlist successfully passed the background check required to purchase firearms more than 90 percent of the time, with more than 2,043 approvals between 2004 and 2014." According to the article, the FBI is alerted when this happens, but you know, that's a classic case of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

Since nobody else has jumped in on this, I'll go.

The big winner of last night's debate? The Democrats, and hopefully the American people.

The Democratic debate, particularly as compared to the GOP debates, was substantive and respectful, as though the candidates vying for the nomination are actual adults.

Hopefully the question that will sink in with voters is this: Who do you really want running the country: the last one to pry their way out of the Republican Clown Car, or the winner of a serious debate of the issues?

Dear Greene County,

I hear you are about to consider displaying a Confederate Battle Flag over the Greene County Courthouse. The stated intent for doing so suggests it is about marking Greene County's "heritage and loyalties." I strongly suggest that you look into the unique history of Greene County, Greeneville and its Courthouse. More than perhaps almost anywhere else in Tennessee or even possibly the entire South, the Confederate Battle Flag very specifically does not represent Greene County's historical loyalties and heritage.

Furious about President Obama's interference in a decades-old feud that actually currently pitches Republicans against Republicans, the Ohio GOP Congressional delegation is demanding that Ohio's Cuyahoga Valley National Park be renamed for Alaska's former governor and GOP gadfly, Sarah Palin.

Our legislature is dominated by a conservative Republican supermajority. These folks claim to be conservative Christians. They claim to value the Constitution. They claim to value the authority of the State.

This week, they are ignoring the Christian value of helping the poor, but are expending considerable energy to pass otherwise irrelevant legislation that belittles the Christian religion, violates the US Constitution and violates the Tennessee Constitution.

A KNS article notes the planned opening of a new Ruby Tuesday's office in Florida.

The choice quote is this:

JJ Buettgen, Ruby Tuesday chairman, president and CEO said in a news release that the Florida office would "serve as a great complement to our Restaurant Support Center in Tennessee, allowing us to continue focusing on our brand transformation efforts."

We all knew that they have long ago given up on the business of serving good food. At least now we know what they are in the business of: brand transformation efforts. Sounds delicious.

The FCC recently ruled that broadband internet is a public utility, and that municipalities may provide this public infrastructure to residents.

The Republican-controlled Tennessee government is now demonstrating that corporate money trumps citizens' needs and the supposed conservative value of government closest to the people being best at serving their interests.

In short, Tennessee is suing the FCC to seek to overturn the new ruling that would allow cities like Chattanooga to expand the coverage area of their extremely fast internet to bring broadband to nearby rural customers who have been ignored by the corporate internet monopolies. Tennessee says that the FCC is interfering with the state's ability to smack down meddling cities that would interfere with the plans of state politicians' favored corporate donors. Well, they probably don't word it quite that way, but that's the gist of it.

Who needs Stacey Campfield, anyway? Bean Station freshman state Rep. Jerry Sexton has introduced House Bill 615, to insert into the Tennessee Code that "The Holy Bible is hereby designated as the official state book."

When these knuckle draggers first roll into Nashville, do they not take some time to sit them down and familiarize them just a little bit with the state and federal constitutions? Both are pretty clear on the fact that you can't do what Sexton has proposed.

In any normally functioning world, I'd laugh it off, assuming the bill will go nowhere, because, even though Jerry Sexton is a willfully ignorant fool, there would be enough others who would have the sense keep the bill from getting out of committee. Unfortunately, we don't live in a normally functioning world, and there are probably enough yokels running around the Capitol who would never, ever, ever be willing to go on record voting agin' the Bible.

In a Wired op-ed, FCC Chair Tom Wheeler has announced a proposal to vigorously ensure net neutrality. The responses to it demonstrate just how far off the rails conservative politics have gone.

Wheeler is proposing to regulate broadband internet as telecommunications infrastructure. By doing so, the FCC will ensure that everyone -consumers, small business, big business- has equal access to high-speed internet. A small, independent content provider won't have to pay a premium to reach its customers at the same bandwidth and Amazon or Netflix.

In no small part because this is exactly what President Obama advocated should happen, conservatives are bizarrely arguing against fair, open competition, somehow re-imagining this as a tax and government over-reach.

The people who benefit the most from this proposal are individual customers and small businesses, because they won't be at a disadvantage to the big guys. If we went instead with allowing ISPs to charge extra for access to bandwidth to provide content, only the big corporations and oligarchs would be able to afford access.

How does this more generally relate to the current state of conservatism? Well, if you read the comments below Wheeler's op-ed, you see a herd of conservatives falling over themselves to argue against their own interests and in favor of giving more power to the oligarchs. It really makes no sense at all. The proposed FCC rule would ensure an online marketplace open to all competitors. You'd think free and open competition is what conservatives would value most, but no. Unfortunately, that's become the name of the game for the conservative movement now. Convince voters that the oligarchs' interests are their interests, and they'll fall all over themselves to hand the farm over to the new overlords.

This should cheer just about anyone up. Inexplicably, KOCH Industries has been a sponsor of the Daily Show recently, running ads to explain all the wonderful things they do. The Daily Show reworked the ad just a little and included that version in the actual show. Does that count as product placement?

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Please enjoy this video of Stan Brock patiently looking on as Bob Corker intentionally misses the point.

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The main question here is: did this just occur organically, or did the Palin gang plan it out in order to reaffirm Sarah P's street cred with the bubba crowd?

Sarah Palin's Family Allegedly in Alaska House Party Brawl

“I heard Sarah Palin yell do you know who I am? All of us could not believe it. We thought we were watching an episode of Jerry Springer.”

What is it with this new(-ish) KNS website? I can't be the only one who finds the frequent front-page 'Kilroy Was Here' photos to be oddly amusing. (This is where portrait photos are cropped so that only the top half of peoples' faces are peering out at you.) I assume maybe it's some sort of automatic thing that happens, but a quick survey this morning of the other scripps newspaper websites (which all use the same template) didn't turn up any other examples of it.