Shopper sings its support for schools

Ho, ho, ha. If you missed it, then – and whenever it’s up – you have to check out the oddness that happened at today’s County Commission meeting, courtesy of the Halls-Shopper.

(Disclaimer: Scripps, which owns KNS, which I work for, owns the Halls-Shopper.  Now back to our regularly scheduled entry . . . .)

Anyhoo, the a bunch of folks bombarded the commission as they championed (my editor hates that word) Superintendent Jim McIntyre’s multi-zillion dollar school budgetary proposal. At this point, everyone knows the county mayor, El Cheap-Skate-O Tim Burchet,t isn’t going to part ways with the coin (he’d rather pay off debt) and he hasn’t found enough treasure out there metal detecting, so . . .  folks are now headed to the commission to argue their point.

And that apparently means the Shopper-News, too.

(Oh yeah, here’s the story about the meeting, right smack here, before I forget. And by tomorrow, you can probably find the video right smack here.)

Jake Mabe, the features editor, writer, columnist, was at the podium, talking to commissioners and saying something that I really wasn’t paying attention to. Because, at the same time, Editor Sandra Clark was carrying around a bucket that looked like it had some kind of Indian (should I say "Native-American" or are still allowed to call ‘em Indians) headdress in it.

Lot of feathers and stuff sticking out.

So, she starts handing them out to commissioners (I’m guilty of snagging one just cause I like feathers). 

As she’s doing that, Jake starts singing the chorus from John Denver’s “Grandma’s Feather Bed.”

No kidding. Funny stuff.

I told him he had a pair of brass ones.

Commissioner Chairman Mike Hammond, however, told him not to quit his day job.

Heh.

In the meantime, you can find the Shopper's explanation over on its Facebook page, right smack here.

Local GOP Party inside baseball

Brian Hornback, the great agitator of all things related to Scripps and the News Sentinel, published a few interesting posts recently on is blog about some inside baseball going on in the Knox County Republican Party and its move to reorganize.

Now, I did hear a week or so back that the reorganization was set for next Friday, also the day that the school kids will be on Spring Break and the building will be closed. I guess they’ll just pay a janitor to show up in let them in. Or not.

Anyway, I confess to not knowing all the intricacies about what’s going on, so you should probably check out his post here.

Local GOP Party chairman Ray Jenkins also posted a note here on the organization's website.

(By the way, what's up with excluding county Law Director Joe Jarret - a Republican - from the site? All the other local Republican officeholders are on there, even a few I think are really Democrats in disguise.)

Anyhoo, a few days later the Scripps agitator talked about a TN GOP probe into the local Republican Party for possible bylaw violations in this post. It all has something to do about when a meeting was supposed to be advertised in the KNS.

He wrote:

“It is clearly 3 days late of the TN Republican Party bylaws. State Chairman Chris Devaney has referred this item to the bylaws committee. It seems that the spin to Chairman Devaney is that the News Sentinel delayed publishing the notice.”

Even Hornback, who can’t stand the paper, says this is crap.

I’ve got to agree.

We need the money.

Heh.

So we’ll publish a legal ad as soon as possible. We don’t like losing customers.

Although I’m sure there are plenty of folks out there who would argue with me on that one.

On a side note, I'm not a big fan of just linking to other blogs without doing my own research first. But it's Sunday night and I just ate a bunch of horse tranquilizers, so I'm lazy.

Kidding.

Or not.