Herenton has no guts

The deteriorating cesspool that has become the Herenton administration reached its nadir on Friday by announcing that it is laying off 2100 city employees, 198 of which are full-time, ONLY 3 of which are in the EXECUTIVE areas.

While the Memphis Police Association and the city's branch of AFSCME are vowing to fight this in court, it may be tough to stop, as due to Herenton's mismanagement, the city is in financial trouble. Humorously enough, Standard & Poor's today RAISED the COUNTY's bond rating from weak to stable. Maybe he should call AC for advice!

By the way, where was Willie? He didn't have the guts, the common decency to face the city or its employees; he sent his chief administrative officer, Keith McGee, to do his dirty work for him. What a brave man; he's getting more Bush-like by the day!

The Pink Palace will lose the Sharpe Planetarium; in addition, they will only have TWO staff people to run reservations AND their box office after March 23. No wonder they will have to close 2 days a week.

Recycling will be cut back to every TWO weeks instead of every week as Public Works is losing 70 people. What happens if we have another freak ice storm come April? who's going to man the salt trucks? Willie? No, he'll just be "unavailable" like he was today.

Remember, we can't start collecting signatures for a recall petition until 75 days prior to the filing deadline for the May 2006 election. However, I assure you, we WILL get this on the ballot because 2007 just isn't soon enough to get him out of there.

I've always thought of Republicans as whores, but this is ridiculous

Thanks to some spectaular investigating work from the blogosphere, it appears that the White House repeatedly gave temporary press credentials to a "Jeff Gannon" from TalonNews, which is not a legitimate news service, but a mouthpiece of some Texas Republicans.

OK, so what, you may ask? It seems that Mr. "Gannon" is actually James D. Guckert, who has been connected to gay prostitution websites. John Aravosis at AMERICAblog has dug this up and provides the whole sordid story at "A Man Called Jeff".

This is a must-read. How did a male hooker get that kind of access? What, you mean Republicans aren't morally superior to Democrats, as they've been telling us for years?

What's a Default Among Friends?

Josh Marshall has been all over the President's speech today in which he hints at defaulting on Treasury bonds, indicating that the Social Security Trust Fund doesn' t EXIST.

Some in our country think that Social Security is a trust fund -- in other words, there's a pile of money being accumulated. That's just simply not true. The money -- payroll taxes going into the Social Security are spent. They're spent on benefits and they're spent on government programs. There is no trust. We're on the ultimate pay-as-you-go system -- what goes in comes out. And so, starting in 2018, what's going in -- what's coming out is greater than what's going in. It says we've got a problem. And we'd better start dealing with it now. The longer we wait, the harder it is to fix the problem.

Uh, that's not what the Greenspan Commission's report back in the 1980s suggests. Go read Josh here.

It's time for war....

As this TENNESSEAN report notes, Bredesen is now trying to have Gordon Bonnyman removed from the TennCare case. It's not enough that he knows he is wrong for dumping patients from TennCare and that the court understands it, he is trying to rig the game by removing Bonnyman.

In short, this is despicable, doubly so for someone who ran on the Democratic ticket. Even worse, as the NASHVILLE SCENE reported this week, Bredesen proposed a bold new education reform with $600 million, which will DISAPPEAR if the ruling by Judge William Haynes is upheld by the appellate courts. Thus, he can pretend to be the savior of education if the courts rule for him, and if they don't, he blames Gordon Bonnyman.

I cannot stress this enough; if the Bredesen cuts go through, people in Tennessee will DIE. Just as if he had signed their execution orders personally, people of all income levels (many of those who cannot be insured at ANY price) will lose the medicines that they need to survive, and they will die.

Next year, when this worthless SOB is running for renomination on OUR ticket, I will do what ever I can to prevent his renomination. If he should happen to win our primary, I will not vote for him, I will write in Gordon Bonnyman.

Whatever you do, don't come to me with the BS that "Steve, you have to support him, he's a Democrat." I will remind you in short order that we haven't had a REAL Democrat in the Governor's mansion since Ned Ray left office, and he just barely made the cut.