Nashville News Blog

Local Wiccan after running into the Green Train

Nashville’s Green Train, an eco-educational non-profit run by Merle Haggard and restaurateur Bob Wolf, had a witch in its ranks until recently. Or, to be more precise, a pagan. Not the kind historically drawn and quartered or burned at the stake, but rather the contemporary tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, vegan variety.

That was until Wolf charged this Wiccan ordained minister, Susan Hunter, with creating Green Train’s MySpace page. The personal networking catastrophe that followed-- replete with online earthy salutations and pentagrams--saw Hunter canned in spectacular fashion back in mid-September. She’s crying discriminatory foul. He’s got his hands up, as if to say, “Hey, read our mission: We’re a-political, a-religious, a-everything except the environment.”

Hunter created Green Train’s MySpace page to get the word out about a train laden with musical greats like Vince Gill, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard set to hit the rails in 2009. Their glowing celebrity will, Wolf hopes, attract crowds at whistle-stops across the country, who could then be proselytized on the greener side of life.

Any MySpace neophyte knows that a personal page is pretty lonely without a bunch of friends to festoon it. To address this dearth, Hunter sent out “friend invitations” to 40 of her friends who also happened to be earth-loving hippies and pagans of various stripes. When the messages started flowing in—“Blessed be” or “Faerie blessings,” usually accompanied by a pentagram and pictures of ivory-skinned ladies identifying themselves exotically as Asterope Morgaine and Feryia—Hunter says Wolf blew a gasket, ordering that all pentagrams be deleted. She says she deleted the Christian symbols too, out of spite before being summarily dismissed.

On the matter of U.S. House Republicans turning on the Wall Street bailout bill Monday, we get our daily dose of analytical sophistry from Tennessee’s own economic scholar-in-residence Marsha Blackburn, who buys into the dubious notion that we can solve the credit crisis by suspending part of the tax code. In a radio interview on WTN this morning, Blackburn pointed to taxpayer alarm over the prospect of a bailout that raises the federal debt limit to $11.3 trillion. I’m as alarmed as the next person, but Blackburn is delusional if she thinks we can solve a liquidity problem in credit markets in the short run by cutting taxes, spending and debt. But that’s her plan:

“Why don’t you reduce that debt limit and require every department to go in and make a 5-percent across-the-board cut. That’s 100 billion dollars…just by cutting out the waste. And then you come in and you say all right, cap gains suspension. We’ve got a liquidity issue. Suspending cap gains for a two-year period of time. Every economist that we have talked to, every small business owner that we have talked to, thinks that that deserves attention.”

Shock of shocks—business owners think eliminating the capital gains tax would be swell! Economist Michael Ettlinger offers up several reasons why this is a loopy idea. It’s also a silly one politically: With quick action needed to restore market confidence, it makes minimal sense to suggest measures that have zero chance of passage during a campaign season. The plucky Blackburn sums it up: “We just gotta buckle down and get this taken care of.” (How hard is it to conjure up Tina Fey saying that?)

OK, excuse the rant, but this is exactly what's wrong with Tennessee politics today. The governor, who has accomplished very little in six years except the dismantling of TennCare, enjoys a sky-high approval rating, according to this Chattanooga Times Free Press poll.

State GOP chair Robin Smith credits Bredesen's "well-oiled communications machine." That's laughable. Bredesen's so-called communications machine doesn't do much communicating. It takes reporters days, sometimes weeks, to persuade his press secretary, Lydia Lenker, to phone back. Then when she finally does, she won't say anything that isn't obvious. Bredesen has a "communications director," Michael Drescher, but he doesn't communicate either. I've never been able to figure out exactly what he does.

No, what makes Bredesen popular is the very fact that he doesn't try to do much of anything. That's what Tennesseans want: a do-nothing government. A potted plant as governor would score record high poll numbers. In many ways, it's understandable, since our legislature is filled with rubes. But the state also faces mounting unmet needs in health care and education. Our tax system is inadequate and unfair. Our acceptance of the status quo should be a source of shame. As long as the public rewards governors for acquiescing, nothing will change.

One of the most remarkable art projects of recent years makes a stop tomorrow, Oct. 1, in Nashville on the campus of Belmont University—and anyone can participate.

You may have seen Sheryl Oring on the ABC News (where she was a "Person of the Week"), Countdown with Keith Olbermann or in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. In 2004 she began a project called "I Wish to Say," for which she toured the country in a sort of ’50s secretarial ensemble. Stationing herself in public at a manual typewriter, she invited passers-by to dictate postcards to the president, which she gathered and sent to the White House.

Samples can be found at her website, and while dissatisfaction typifies a great many of them, others are shows of support, or simply warm greetings. (That does not include the one which begins, "Here are our terms for your surrender.") But the entire process restores some of the personality to written communication: you're not just sitting at a keyboard firing off a disembodied missive into the void. It turns a private act of communication into a public address, holding up a bullhorn to each participant's single voice—an engaging demonstration of free speech.

Oring's current project is called "I wish to say to the future president," and she sets up tomorrow from noon to 2:30 p.m. in the gazebo next to Belmont's School of Music. Anyone can come by and dictate a message to whoever's in the White House come January. She gives a talk at 10 a.m. in Belmont's Massey Performing Arts Center, then after her session with the public she will attend an exhibition opening in Gallery 121 in the Leu Center for the Visual Arts at 4:30 p.m. All events are free and open to the public, and people are encouraged to park on the side residential streets near Belmont.

And please, spread the word to as many people as you can.

(UPDATE: I initially had the event listed as today; that has been corrected. My apologies.)

If you believe Bob Tuke's latest poll, he's catching up to Lamar Alexander. (And the Easter Bunny lives!)

In an earlier Tuke poll, respondents were told that Alexander’s in Big Oil’s back pocket, that he voted for “unfair trade deals” that cost 43,000 jobs in Tennessee, that he voted against Medicare and updating G.I. Bill benefits for veterans and—after all that—Tuke still trailed by 10 points.

In the second poll, which Tuke released last week, he claims to have cut Alexander’s lead to 12 points even before he tells respondents bad things about the senator. A 12-point deficit a month before the election—that’s what passes for good news for Tuke.

Even that doesn’t accurately portray just how badly he's going to lose. In two independent polls released at the same time, he's twice as far behind. In one, more than half the respondents never heard of Tuke.

Alexander is so worried that, when you ask his flacks to comment on Tuke's polling, they don't even take the opportunity to criticize the Democrat or call him a liar or anything. Instead, here's Alexander campaign spokeswoman Jill Bader:

“The people of Tennessee know and trust Lamar Alexander, and he is thankful for the overwhelming support he continues to receive from Democrats and Independents, as well as Republicans, from across our state.”

Look ma, I made a funny!

Big news for Commodore fans: ESPN's College Gameday is coming to Nashville for the first time in the show's history. For those unfamiliar with Gameday, think of it as college football's version of the Today Show and adulthood's answer to Saturday morning cartoons rolled into one.

The premise is simple: Every week, ESPN's traveling circus sets up shop on campus of the week's most important game. A couple thousand college kids show up at an hour normally reserved for sleeping and scream their heads off between commercial breaks. Then Gameday's resident zany Lee Corso dons the mascot head of the team he thinks will win.

Trust us when we say it is never not funny to see a 60-year-old man wearing a furry animal head.

Anyway, part of the Gameday tradition involves the home-team's students waving around a bunch of home-made signs in the hopes that they can impress their friends later when they replay the DVR'ed broadcast. Most signs are dedicated to the opposition and the reasons why they do in fact blow. Some kids take aim at the host's themselves (see above). Either way, the level of discourse is roughly equivalent to a truck-stop bathroom stall.

Which brings us to our point: Vandy kids should raise the bar.

Any state-school slacker can equate a TV host with male genitalia. It takes real wit to try to fit something more subtle, perhaps topical, on to a 24x24 sheet of poster board. How 'bout some commentary on our current fiscal crisis or a jaunty limerick about growing tensions in Pakistan deftly woven into an elaboration on why Auburn sucks? Is that too much to ask from Nashville's best and brightest?

I can’t recall the year, but it was sometime in the mid-‘90s. Dan Quayle was in Columbus, Ohio as part of a book tour to peddle his autobiography. I was among the media geeks summoned to chronicle this very minor moment in American history.

At the time, Quayle had been cast aside by the Republican Party. Bush I’s attempt to channel John Kennedy by making this Ken doll senator his vice president had failed miserably. The public, quite simply, thought Quayle was a moron -- though in a benign way, like that nice neighbor you tend to avoid for fear that each minute of conversation will cause a corresponding drop in your IQ.

After the book-signing, Quayle hosting a brief Q&A with the media geeks. He answered the initial questions the way many politicians do: You ask question X, and he responds with a prepared monologue, whether it relates to the question or not.

But it wasn’t long before Quayle ran out of pre-fab rhetoric. The questions were still coming, yet he was now forced to page answers from his own mind. His face tensed with visible panic, his truncated sentences spilled out in a random selection of half-thoughts. He had spent a lifetime being coached by expert handlers. Without these people, the man could barely speak.

Up until that moment, I never believed our leaders were as stupid as they seemed on TV. But here was a former vice president, taking softball questions from reporters just going through the motions. We all knew that our “Has-Been Politician Visits Ohio” stories would attract a collective audience of eight readers. It’s not like we came with sharpened spears. We just wanted to get in and get out.

But Quayle could barely keep up with this perfunctory exchange. He literally looked like a deer in the headlights, though the deer would probably fair better on a middle school sociology exam. That’s when I knew: Dan Quayle was truly stupid. I walked away feeling sorry for the guy.

I hadn’t thought of this episode in years until I begin seeing Sarah Palin interviews. I hate to say it, but I think she’s Dan Quayle, The Sequel.

287g was impotent against this alleged killer

On Friday Metro police announced that 19-year-old Edgar Rodriguez is the man who gunned down convenience store owner Vinod Shah on September 19. The arrest comes after a nice piece of police work by Metro detectives, but the murder itself calls into question the efficacy of Sheriff Daron Hall’s 287g program.

That’s because Rodriguez was arrested for driving without a license on August 20, 2007. After a 287g check revealed he was here illegally, he was deported back to his native Mexico last October. But Rodriguez snuck back into the U.S.—cops don’t know exactly when—and would eventually kill a Nashville shop-keep.

“Despite the Sheriff’s 287(g) work in this case, the federal government still can’t secure our nation’s borders,” says police chief Ronal Serpas. “Unfortunately, the cold blooded murder of a Nashville market owner is intertwined with the federal government’s inability to deal with a broken immigration system and border security.”

I agree with the chief. The fact of our nation’s porous southern border led directly to the murder of an innocent Nashvillian and 287g was helpless to stop it. In the meantime many, many, peaceful, law abiding, economy boosting immigrants where forcibly removed from this city, never to return. What was the point of this policy again?

With Mindy McCready heading to a Tennessee jail tomorrow to serve a 60-day sentence for probation violation, these scenes from Naked Nashville—a terrific 1998 British documentary about Nashville's country music industry—seem particularly prescient. After a brief bout with celebrity in the late '90s, McCready's career took a nosedive as she battled drug problems and other personal demons, including two suicide attempts. Celebrity self-destruction is not uncommon, but seeing its beginnings on video is rare indeed.

The above video from Naked Nashville starts with McCready's tour bus waiting on the bratty then-21-year-old, who's always running late. Things get interesting at about 5:05 into the video. Reba McEntire talks about the political nature of being a woman in country music—"You don't scream, you don't holler, you don't throw tantrums, you don't bitch about stuff.... You've got little eyes watching you all the time"—immediately followed by a scene of McCready in her hotel room throwing a tantrum, bitching and refusing to go to soundcheck. At 7:25, over footage of McCready lying on her hotel bed blowing bubbles and watching TV, Reba says:

"There's one rule: Work hard. Continue to work hard. And keep working hard. If you slough off, if you think, 'Well, I can back off just a little bit,' there's just 8 million people out there that's wantin' to take your place. They're just waiting for you to just kind of slack off just a little bit so they can run past you. And they'll do it."

At the moment, we're trying to finish an album. At the moment, Mindy is in L.A. with [actor Dean Cain, then McCready's boyfriend].... There is a Christmas season coming up that Mindy has to understand.... If you miss Christmas, you miss 60 percent of the year in terms of sales. It also means that, once her album doesn't come out, she no longer qualifies for the Grammies, she won't qualify for the American Music Awards because she won't have any new product. [Cue ominous music] And in our business, out of sight, out of mind. So Mindy has to make a choice what she wants to do. And that if she chooses not to do that, she's made a major mistake, because the window is now. It's not a year from now. It's not six months from now. It is now.

It's easy to drink in the schadenfreude when a celebrity self-destructs. But coming from a broken family and then obtaining success at such an early age was in this case a recipe for disaster. Maybe 60 days in the hole will give her time to reflect and get her life back on track.

Cover America Now will hold a rally next Monday prior to the presidential debate to push for health care reform. The rally -- you'll find the details here -- will take place 4 to 7 p.m. on October 6 on Legislative Plaza in downtown Nashville.

Instead of us telling you about it, we'll hand the microphone to Gene TeSelle, a retired professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Tennessee Alliance for Progress board member, who will tell you why raising hell about health insurance might get you a few points with St. Peter:

Illness and medical bills are the No. 1 cause of bankruptcy in Tennessee. Many families will face financial disaster if a major illness or injury occurs. People shopping for coverage run into unaffordable premiums and rising drug costs. And if you have a "pre-existing condition" you will probably have to forget about coverage, even though the purpose of insurance is supposed to help sick people. But the bottom line is the bottom line - corporate profits.

An estimated 47 million Americans are uninsured, and many more are "under-insured," facing high co-payments and limits on what will be covered. The housing crisis and the slump in the economy are only making the health care crisis worse.

In case you missed it, David Letterman's rant on McCain after the senator blew off his show. (It's actually much kinder than the spin it's getting.)

"She’s out of her league" reads the headline over a piece by conservative columnist Kathleen Parker over at that leftist rag National Review. Parker pulls few punches:

My cringe reflex is exhausted. Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there....If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

Parker advises Her Alaskaness to run for the tundra: "She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first." So it's begun. Who knew that Katie Couric could actually do influential journalism?

See an excerpt from Couric's interview with Palin after the jump:

Looks like banks aren’t the only ones receiving a bailout from Uncle Sam this week.

While not nearly the tax dollar-o-rama that Wall Street might be getting, the federal department of Housing and Urban Development has launched what it’s calling a Neighborhood Stabilization Program, which essentially dumps a ton of cash on municipalities so that they can “acquire and redevelop foreclosed properties that might otherwise become sources of abandonment and blight within their communities.”

According to HUD, the Nashville-Davidson County area currently has a low “local abandonment risk,” with a 3.1 percent foreclosure rate. The department is still going to drop a cool $4,051,397 on the city, almost double what Chattanooga and Knoxville will get.

Then there’s Memphis, with its staggering—by Tennessee standards—6.7 percent foreclosure rate. It will receive $11,506,414 in HUD money. Someone should be sure to tell the feds that Memphian politicians would like their “neighborhood stabilization” dollars in non-sequential, unmarked bills.

If the words "Spring Creek bladderpod" were alien to you prior to this week, you're in good company. The rare flower is only found in certain spots around Lebanon in Wilson County. One of those locales happens to be on property owned by Jim and Sandy Donnell.

The Donnells made news yesterday with an objection to a city sewer line set to run through their back yard. They say the project will cause undue disturbance to the bladderpod's habitat. The city says it won't. In the midst of the stalemate looms the specter of eminent domain.

The thought of the government bullying its way through our vegetable garden is enough to send us running for our muskets. This visceral reaction is understandable: eminent domain is a holdover from English rule. And if it weren't for the 5th amendment, which limited intrusion for public use only and required just compensation, families like the Donnells would be doubly screwed.

It is for this reason that we're apt to side with the Donnells. But that'd be ignoring the larger issue.

Although claiming private land remains a sin in our book, it is the option of last resort for the city. What hasn't been reported is that the Donnells are not alone in being inconvenienced: the proposed sewer line passes through 30 properties. They're the only family not to sign.

While the funny-sounding plant is getting most of the press, the problem, says Lebanon city engineer Chuck Boyett, can be boiled down to something much simpler.

"The bladderpod is not the issue here," he says. "The bottom line is the Donnells don't want (the sewer line) on their property. And I can't blame them for that."

Dan Rostenkowski: This guy understood how to strong-arm people

State Senator Rosalind Kurita (D-Clarksville) has a legitimate beef. A few weeks ago, the Tennessee Democratic Party threw out her 19-vote primary win over Tim Barnes. Though they won’t offer this as an official reason, party bigs are pissed at Kurita for selling out to Republicans to better her personal Senate status.

Call it old school enforcement: The Dems feel they must show the rank-and-file that there will be blood for treachery.

Kurita has naturally chosen to sue pretty much everyone involved, leading to a protracted battle involving mean little lawyers hurling large amounts of paperwork and billable hours at each other. Though such methods of dispute resolution are surely a sign of civilization decline, we’ll save that for another day.

The bigger issue is this: Democrats really suck at corruption these days.

Simply overthrowing a vote – not even in secret, mind you – is so Brezhnev. Where’s the originality? Where’s the cleverly brutal smiting of one’s enemies through vicious yet impenetrable means? Couldn’t Democrats have found a way to simply dump a few key ballot boxes in the river? Perhaps offered Kurita a no-show job in Gov. Bredesen’s administration, only to renege after she resigned her Senate seat?

That’s what Dan Rostenkowski would have done. He surely wouldn’t have left it all to dueling lawyers, which is like settling a vendetta with a winner-takes-all tennis match.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to vote for a low-life, I expect him to be a respectable low-life, the kind who can take out treachery with no visible sign of blood on his hands. Doesn’t the Tennessee Democratic Party respect craftsmanship anymore?

Why is there no boxing in this town?

Every U.S. city, town or village I’ve lived in has some kind of professional boxing venue or is near a pro boxing venue. Sure there’s Memphis, but that’s kinda far to drive for a fight. And no, Mixed Martial Arts does not count. That’s like comparing rugby and the NFL. They both have big guys and oblong balls in common, but that’s about it.

While I respect the hell out of that sport and Nashville has a small, increasingly vocal MMA community, it ain’t boxing. I want ropes, left hooks and card girls.

There are some boxing gyms here being run by some really knowledgeable folks, but for some reason they don’t produce many—any?—professional fighters. My biggest hope for Nashville is in the Mexican community, where boxing is still a popular sport. Over at the San Juan Fiesta restaurant off I-24 they sometimes have fights on the TV and the place’s owner, Jose Arelleno, owns a small gym on Nolensville Road.

There’s also this rumor that a real stinker of a fight might be held here. Who knows? Better than nothing I guess.

Before the Nashville gas crisis, Hitler was astounded by Tennessee's loss to UCLA. "I MISS AINGE!"

Reported by Scene's Brantley Hargrove:

On Monday, NewsChannel 5 aired a searing exposé (video above) on the pugilistic tendencies of McGavock High School students, featuring a video mined from the ever-reputable YouTube titled, “McGavock Fight.” Well, like anything you find on the internet, journalists—yes, even television journalists—would do well to consider the source suspect at the very least.

In fact, the video looked fake enough that several YouTube posters commented emphatically, “Fake Fake Fake...” and “fake as hell…”

For McGavock teacher Adrian Bahan, therein lies the rub—he knows both of the students shown in NewsChannel 5’s “shocking” video and can say with certainty that those flying fists are just phantom flailings thrown for shits and giggles (original video below). Perhaps the audible voice of a kid behind the camera saying, “Action,” should have been one clue for our well-groomed, suited counterparts, but, alas: At 2:45 into the report, as the staged video airs for the second time, investigative reporter Ben Hall says, “[Metro Schools Security Director] Rob Thompson believes gangs are responsible for this attack.”

“I’m frustrated by shoddy, lazy journalism,” Bahan fumed. “When stories like this come out, everyone pulls their kids out of McGavock and puts them in Goodpasture. If you watch that video, as a reporter, how can you not know that was staged?”

The gasp-inducing number of arrests Hall cites at Nashville’s largest high school when compared to other schools similarly chafes Bahan, who’d like to give him a lesson in arithmetic.

“We're the largest school in the state, so if you go by percentages instead of numbers, it's no story,” Bahan said. “You have to look at the number of fights relative to school population.”

But like any teacher worth his salt, Bahan turned a ridiculous journalistic blunder into a lesson.

“My students learned how the media can use bias to sensationalize a story.”

Rosalind Kurita, Tennessee’s Lieberwoman, has only just filed her federal lawsuit naming as defendants just about everybody and their brother connected in any way to the state Democratic Party. But already, the party is denying one of her main allegations: that she was in the dark about the rules the executive committee followed in deciding to toss out her 19-vote primary victory over Tim Barnes. According to the lawsuit (specifically counts 31-33):

31. Plaintiff did not agree or to submit herself to the Rules of Procedure adopted the morning of the hearing.

32. The Rules of Procedure did not exist at the time Barnes filed his election contest, and were only created after Barnes filed his election contest.

33. Because she was not given the finalized Rules of Procedure until the morning of the hearing on the contested election, Senator Kurita did not have a chance to properly prepare for the election contest or to properly defend the results of the August 2008 election in the September 13th hearing.

Obviously, if Kurita never agreed to the rules and didn’t even find out about them until the morning of the hearing, then that's a pretty strong case for due process violations.

But party spokesman Wade Munday tells Pith that's not the way it went down. “There were all the rules that she agreed to through counsel prior to the meeting that Saturday. The terms were agreed upon prior to the meeting.” Munday adds:

“The executive committee acted in its rightful capacity as the state primary board. All the actions taken were conducted in the open and in accordance with state law established in 1972.”

Conservatives may have John Rich, but the left has Richard Aberdeen and the Nashville Session Players. Their new CD Who Would Jesus Bomb? was released this month and is available for free download here. Click on the above video for the title track, and a bio for the band is below:

Tired of being told by various and sundry music industry insiders that many of his songs are good in quality but will never be recorded in Nashville due to political and social content, songwriter Richard Aberdeen rounded up some of Nashville’s top musicians and session vocalists and began to record material content that many here in Nashville (and elsewhere) believe should be heard on 21st Century American radio, given the dire straits that members of both major political parties have managed to drag our nation into. So far, four CDs have been released under the generic band title "Nashville Session Players".

Bring it back! Bring it back! Bring it back!

Yesterday, Lamar Alexander, the lead water-carrier for judicial nominee Gus Puryear, read the campaign its last rites. Alexander's statements are the last nail in the coffin for Puryear, lead counsel for private prison giant Corrections Corporation of America. They're also an unofficial acknowledgment of the power of the one-man campaign.

No matter where your loyalties lie, it's tough to argue that anyone deserves more of the credit (or blame) for Puryear's failed nomination than Alex Friedmann. Getting the locals to care about who swings a gavel in Middle Tennessee is one thing. Getting pub from national outlets is another.

Now with the campaign over, Friedmann is a stick without a spoke. He says he'll continue working on the humdrum elements of vigilanteism and may even aim his scope at larger targets.

"There's always Palin," he jokes.

We here at Pith, however, think Friedmann's bandwagon should be steered elsewhere. Trudging through the muck of rancorous politics during this election season has left us exhausted. It's time all of Nashville had a cause worth championing. Something fun and family-friendly that makes us forget about the world while alternately making us worry about the cleanliness of our undergarments.

That's right, it's time to bring back the Wabash Cannonball!

Every piddling little town has a mall, but only select locales can offer the gut-busting thrills you get from pulling 3Gs in a corkscrew. OpryLand used to be one such place. It's time we regained our reputation as a place where you can regurgitate funnel cake while being hit with spray from the Flume Zoom. THAT'S the kind of only-in-Nashville experience a tourist will never forget. Hot Topic be damned.

John McCain: From straight talk to organized fraud

Every sophisticated campaign understands the PR power of letters to the editor. A few weeks ago, after Sarah Palin’s address to the Republican convention, the Obama campaign mobilized its supporters in Nashville. Suddenly, Scene was flush with letters from everyday Tennesseans, describing in varying detail how much Lady Palin sucks.

But according to Dutch writer Margriet Oostveen, the McCain campaign has taken the tactic to a whole new level – a level usually described as “fraud.”

Oostveen, who volunteered for the McCain campaign, says the former Straight Talker’s new strategy is utter fabrication. She was assigned to write letters to the editor for McCain. She could say whatever she wished, pretend to be anyone she wanted to be, so long as it advanced McCain’s cause. These letters would then be sent to campaign offices around the country, where some dupe would sign their name and mail it to a local paper.

Oostveen’s story appears in Salon, along with instructional letters provided by the campaign. In the annals of pure shamelessness, this here’s a playoff contender.

How long will this last?

Our long nightmare is over. Vanderbilt football has finally made its triumphant return to college football's version of Hot or Not: The Associated Press Top 25.

Clocking in at #21 (take THAT, Land o' Lincoln!), the Commodores ranking is their first in a quarter-century. It's the kind of validation that only comes when 242 overweight sports writers get together and declare, "Yeah, they're good enough to cover against the Gators."

As you might be able to tell, we're still not ready to hop on the bandwagon. Beating South Carolina and Ole Miss is nice (better than losing, we suppose), but this season still has the feel of the classic Vandy letdown: growing fat on early-season cud only to be slaughtered by the prize steers of the SEC.

Three of the next five games come against ranked teams: Auburn, Georgia and Florida, a virtual murderer's row. And don't sleep on Tennessee. Big Brother may have gotten spanked last week, but it still puts more talent on one side of the ball than five years of Commodore recruiting combined.

Vandy's nightmare streak may be over, but if you think this is a sign of things to come, we've got one thing to say to you: You're dreamin'.

Our favorite feminist hero has swung into action again to defend Sarah Palin on television. But as usual with Marsha Blackburn, the words just didn’t come out quite right.

Asked by Bill O’Reilly to explain why Palin wouldn’t take reporters’ questions yesterday about her meetings with Hamid Karzai and other foreign leaders, Blackburn essentially admitted John McCain’s running mate won’t be ready on day one.

“What they’re doing is giving her time to kind of establish her credentials in foreign policy and to prepare herself to be vice president. What she’s having the opportunity to do is prepare for the meetings, go in ask some questions, begin to build some relationships and then move away from that and more or less put that information to work in preparing for the role of vice president.”

Even O’Reilly seemed a little taken aback: “OK,” he said, “but we’re only six more weeks from the vote … “

Next, Blackburn listed Palin’s foreign-policy credentials. Let’s see, she was commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard, “her neighbors are Russia and Canada” and, oh yes, “she has a son who is a member of the U.S. military.”

“She keeps up with things,” Blackburn assured us.

OK, so Blackburn was a little shaky at first in this interview, but she ended with a haymaker. “I don’t think it’s necessary to study at an elite institution to understand some of the workings of the world,” she said.

Attacking eggheads--it works everytime. The big question: Will Blackburn campaign for Rosalind Kurita?

On Monday night, Anton Andreev crept into his 13-year-old step daughter’s room and began taking pictures of her with a flash while she slept. His wife saw the flashes and the next morning checked the family’s home computer for photos.

What she found were close-up photos of her daughter’s “buttocks and vagina with [her husband’s] hand clearly visible as the panties were being pulled to the side,” according to an affidavit filed in Metro court. The wife also found a video on the hard drive of a ten-year-old girl touching herself while another person touched her as well.

She put the disgusting data on a thumb drive and went to the cops, who went to Andreev’s house and interviewed him. He admitted to sneaking into his step-daughters room and taking the pictures and was arrested on the spot. He’s got a date with a judge at 9 a.m. Friday in courtroom A on the third floor of the Birch Building if anyone wants to show up with pitchforks and torches.

If you think political commercials are goofy in the South -- get a load of this SNL-like commercial from Marsha Blackburn -- be assured that they're just as dumb in the North.

It's an article of faith that any Democrat campaigning in the Midwestern industrial states must pay homage to organized labor, even if that means paying tribute to labor's moronic employers. And it doesn't get any weirder than in Michigan, where the issue above all is always the health of the auto plants.

That's why Barack Obama has produced the incredibly dumb ad above, in which he accuses John McCain of -- gasp! -- owning three foreign cars. Believe it or not, this will actually play well in Michigan, where owning a Prius is like being a pedophile or a vegan. Where it won't work is... say... pretty much the rest of the country.

Sadly for Obama, this isn't Abraham's Lincoln's time, where a president can pronounce himself anti-slavery in the North and pro-slavery in the South. Due to the miracle known as the internet, we now get to see how completely full of shit our candidates are at all times. Which means that the rest of country -- which statistically prefers Toyota and Honda over Ford and GM -- will now get to hear Barack lament their automotive purchases as if they were some sort of sin.

It also opens up Obama to easy return fire from his nemeses. Behold this Tennessee Republican Party missive from this afternoon:

The school board will decide tonight whether to go ahead with the student rezoning plan that has polarized the city along racial lines like something out of the Sixties.

Board member Ed Kindall says he’ll ask the board to suspend the plan for a month of study about whether it’s a good idea to zone 1,300 additional poor, black children to Pearl-Cohn schools. Those kids are bused from North Nashville to Hillwood now.

The plan is ballyhooed as a return to neighborhood schools. But as we pointed out in this story, it flies in the face of decades of education research on how best to teach poor, urban children.

“Everyone said when they were running for office that they thought we ought to revisit this plan to get some clarity,” Kindall tells Pith. “The mayor even said that at one point. We never had a discussion on this. When it was brought to us that night, it was just, ‘Are you ready to vote?’ I can’t see where it hurts anything to discuss this for 30 days.”

The plan's foes question whether the school board can keep promises to spend an extra $6 million annually to improve Pearl-Cohn schools to help them cope with so many poor children.

Kindall’s not likely to succeed. Alan Coverstone, a new board member, is seen as the swing vote, and he’s already telling everyone he won’t support reconsidering the plan. Coverstone represents Hillwood, where some white parents object to the presence of black children from North Nashville.

"Another English First post on the same day?" you may be asking. But a charter amendment proposal this colossally stupid demands rigorous ridicule.

As the City Paper's Nate Rau reported early this morning, Metro Council member Eric Crafton planned to submit his 5,000 petition signatures to the Metro Clerk's office today—far more signatures than the 2,475 he needs to to put his English First charter amendment proposal on the ballot for a special election. You may recall that Crafton's attempt to put the proposal on the Nov. 7 general election ballot failed because it didn't clear the required two-year waiting period since the last referendum vote.

To stand up to the level-headed opponents of Crafton's bill, a group is planning a protest beginning at 6:30 tomorrow morning in front of Jimmy Kelly's Steakhouse, where Mayor Karl Dean and Gov. Phil Bredesen will attend a breakfast fundraiser for state Sen. Joe Haynes. Dean, Bredesen and Haynes are all critics of the proposal.

The protest group's website casts the three politicians as the Three Amigos—get it? "Amigos"? That's Mexican...or Spanish...or whatever they call that language—and features this line: "Evidently, the 'Three Amigos' must not care how much of our tax dollars they waste." That's particularly ironic, since the special election that English First proponents are demanding will cost taxpayers about $350,000 to accomplish...um...we'll get back to you when we figure it out.

Oh, and these fierce defenders of our mother tongue not only spelled Crafton's name wrong ("Grafton"—talk about a Freudian slip), but they did it in underlined, oversized type, as this screenshot shows:

No, it wasn't a picture of JC's Girls on the cover of Gospel Today that got it pulled from shelves at Lifeway Bookstores. That might actually make sense, since the outfit is a gaggle of mostly former sex workers who've given up the g-string to preach the gospel. That's a titillating controversy, 'cause they hang out at strip clubs and buy lap dances to get these wayward ladies to grind up on Jesus for a change.

No, what got Gospel Today pulled from Lifeway Bookstores--owned by the Southern Baptist Convention--was its cover featuring a gaggle of female pastors. For some god-forsaken reason, Lifeway still hits the pillow at night believing only dudes should be ordained. Southern Baptists hold the same myopic view, though some of their churches do have female-led congregations. Are these the same people who support Sarah Palin to help head the country but not actually head up a church? Am I missing something?

Oh, but you can totally still get the mag if you ask for it. It's right back there behind the counter with Juggs for Jesus.

They're just the same people who hated Bush

Reader Fay Forlines writes in with a little insight on the anti-Palin movement:

Is it any surprise that the people who hate Sarah Palin are the same people who hated President Bush from day ONE and threw monkey wrenches into his plans for the U. S. throughout his presidency?

Pity those people. Here are some possibilities of why they are the way they are. They are jealous:

They are eaten up from the inside out with atheism, hate, death wishes for themselves and others, destruction of civilization, jealousy, envy, underhandedness, graft, pessimism, snobbery, exclusionism, and hoodlumism. They want to play God.

Evil people hate people who are characterized by freshness, love of life, goodness, gratitude, generosity, openness, empathy, faith, hope, love and concern, innate talent and ability, knowledge without structured schooling, effectiveness in the absence of degrees and certificates, productivity, human kindness, big heartedness, magnanimousness, grace, optimism, fertility, virility, potency, and peace.

People who hate Sarah Palin, not for herself, but for what she stands for -- the positive factors which leaves the world a better place to live.

Fay Forlines
Nashville