Tag Archives: Tennessee

April 27, 2013 · 7:29 PM

Gun Group Raffles Off Assault Rifle Model Used In Newtown Shooting To ‘Resist Barack Obama’

The First Amendment’s provision of the Right to LIFE, liberty and the pursuit of happiness/property (depending on whose version of the U.S Constitution you read) actually trumps “2nd amendment rights”.

Those 20 children and 6 adults killed in Newtown had the right to LIFE.

The only “right to life” these folks know is the one that   feeds the fetus but starves the child  not to mention allowing them to get shot and killed with firearms because in their mind the 2nd Amendment is the only Constitutional provision that matters.

Think Progress

The Tennessee Firearms Association is raffling off one AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the same weapon used by Adam Lanza to kill 20 children and six adults in Newtown.

According to the promotion, “TFA is giving away a BUSHMASTER AR15 to advance the effort to resist Barack Obama, the federal government and even a few in Tennessee state government who are determined to destroy your 2nd Amendment rights!!”

The promotion began earlier in April to coincide with the Senate’s consideration of gun violence prevention legislation. And while contestants do not have to be a TFA member to enter, the promotion notes TFA would “appreciate” donations, ending with, “Our rights under the 2nd Amendment and even the Bill of Rights are not safe in Tennessee! We must act with force and determination to protect, preserve and restore our rights!!!!”

The Tennessean reports that the raffle has already drawn more than 10,000 entries for the Monday drawing.

But Tennessee gun groups have little reason to fear for their representatives’ position on guns. Both Senators Bob Corker (R) and Lamar Alexander (R) voted against the Senate bill to expand background checks — two of 46 Senators who filibustered a safety measure that is approved by 90 percent of Americans.

“This may illustrate perfectly what I’ve been saying all along: They create these issues to raise money. That just stokes the fire to frighten folks,” former state Rep. Debra Maggart said of the motive for the raffle. Maggart herself was a target of both TFA and the National Rifle Association in her Republican primary last year.

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April 9, 2013 · 9:33 AM

Four-Year-Old Shoots, Kills Deputy’s Wife At Tennessee Cookout

Four-Year-Old Shoots, Kills Deputy’s Wife At Tennessee Cookout

Set aside gun control laws for a second.  The gun owner, a sheriff’s deputy was undoubtedly trained on the proper use and possession of a firearm.  How could this have happened?  What was the gun owner thinking?

TPM

Authorities say a 4-year-old boy grabbed a loaded gun at a family cookout and accidentally shot and killed the wife of a Tennessee sheriff’s deputy.

Investigators say Wilson County Deputy Daniel Fanning on Saturday was showing his weapons to a relative in a bedroom of his Lebanon home when the toddler came in and picked up a gun off the bed. Sheriff Robert Bryan says the weapon discharged, hitting 48-year-old Josephine Fanning.

She was pronounced dead at the scene. The child is not related to her or her husband.

Bryan says the shooting was a terrible accident and that within seconds of Fanning placing the gun on the bed, the toddler picked it up.

The gun was not Fanning’s service weapon and the sheriff says the deputy’s weapons are normally stored in a safe.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

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January 11, 2013 · 7:59 PM

James Yeager, CEO Who Threatened To ‘Start Killing People,’ Has Gun Permit Suspended

James Yeager

That was quick…

The Huffington Post

James Yeager, the CEO who recently threatened to “start killing people” if President Barack Obama pursued an expansion on gun control, has had his gun permit suspended.

Authorities with the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security told Newschannel 5 the suspension was based on “material likelihood of risk of harm to the public.”

In a statement to the station, Commissioner Bill Gibbons said:

The number one priority for our department is to ensure the public’s safety. Mr. Yeager’s comments were irresponsible, dangerous, and deserved our immediate attention. Due to our concern, as well as that of law enforcement, his handgun permit was suspended immediately. We have notified Mr. Yeager about the suspension today via e-mail. He will receive an official notification of his suspension through the mail.

Yeager raised some eyebrows after posting a video to YouTube Wednesday. In the clip he said increased gun control measures would “spark a civil war” and he would “be glad to fire the first shot.”

The video originally ended with Yeager stating, “If it goes one inch further, I’m going to start killing people.” He has since deleted that portion of the video, but an original version, captured by Raw Story, is still viewable below.

Yeager is the CEO of Tactical Response, a Tennessee company that teaches people weapons handling and other tactical skills.

In a video statement released on YouTube Thursday, Yeager acknowledges, “I was mad when I said it and probably allowed my mouth to overrun my logic, but I don’t retract any of my statements.”

Watch Raw Story Video…

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October 2, 2012 · 8:10 PM

Republican candidate posts his gun on Facebook: ‘Welcome to Tennessee, Mr. Obama’

Brad Staats speaks to WKRN

These Tea party characters will never learn:  Barack Obama is the President of the United States, not some damned “runaway slave”.  I’m sure this guy will get a visit from The United States Secret Service.

The Raw Story

A Republican nominee for Congress is defending his decision to post a photo of his gun on Facebook along with the message, “Welcome to Tennessee, Mr. Obama.”

In a Saturday night Facebook post, Brad Staats attached a photo of his silver and black Colt 1911 semi-automatic pistol along with a message directed at President Barack Obama:

Many people in Tennessee keep asking me about my opinion on Second Amendment rights. Apparently Tennesseans are part of that crazy crowd that Obama says “cling to their religion and guns.” Well, then I must be part of that crazy crowd. Here is something that I usually have with me. Welcome to Tennessee Mr. Obama, where we appreciate our 2nd Amendment rights and the Constitution that was wisely given to us by our founding fathers.

“Good Lord, no,” Staats told The Tennessean when asked if he had threatened the commander in chief. “Absolutely not. I’m not one of those that would ever threaten the president. He’s probably got enough of his own stuff to worry about without me.”

Staats later wrote on Facebook that his remarks had been “completely taken out of context.”

“My post from Friday was regarding the fact that the UN Small Arms Treaty, passed last week will undermine our Second Amendment Rights,” the candidate explained, although his original post had never mentioned the UN arms treaty.

“I’m going to say what I mean and mean what I say and I want Tennesseans and Americans to know that I’m not going to back up on what I say,” Staats insisted to WKRN on Monday.

“I do want President Obama to know as well as the rest of Congress and everyone else regarding our constitutional rights, don’t tread on America’s Constitution. I think that your liberties, your life can be defended by the proper instructed use of a handgun,” he said, adding that his mother’s life had been saved because she carried a weapon.

“She would have either been raped or murdered had she not had a handgun in her car. [She] actually got ran off the road and it was obvious she was getting ready to be assailed.”

The Secret Service said it was aware of the Facebook posting and would investigate if necessary, according to The Tennessean.

Staats is hoping to unseat Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper in November.

Watch this video from WKRN, broadcast Oct. 1, 2012.

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August 13, 2012 · 6:13 PM

Tea Party Group Fined For Booking 1,600 Rooms In Vegas, Not Paying For Them

I know that the value called integrity has pretty much left politics in general, but why didn’t the Tea Party head of Las Vegas Operations at the time consider making a deal to pay some portion of the money to the hotel?

The Huffington Post

Apparently what doesn’t happen in Vegas also stays in Vegas.

A judge slammed a now-defunct Tennessee outpost of the Tea Party for reserving more than 1,600 rooms at a Las Vegas hotel and cancelling just weeks before the group’s scheduled event — without paying the bill, according to the Tennessean. The judge ruled that the group owes $500,000 for the cost of the rooms plus more than $200,000 for the accrued interest. In total they’re on the hook for $748,000, according to Bloomberg.

The convention, which never happened, was originally scheduled to take place at theVenetian Casino Resort from July 14-18, 2010, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The meeting was first postponed until October and then later cancelled.

The Tea Party group decided to cancel the event in September, citing the economy. Judson Phillips, the founder of the Tea Party Nation, told the Daily Caller at the time  that there just weren’t enough people willing to pay $399 to spend the weekend watching Laura Ingraham and Lou Dobbs spout their wisdom.

Watch this Bloomberg video here…

 

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August 1, 2012 · 12:18 PM

Tennessee State Rep. Claims Obama Will Fake Assassination To Prevent An Election

The crazies are escaping the asylum again.  This man’s imagination has tilted to extremely irrational.

Actually, I remember back in 2004, some progressives were saying that George W. Bush was going to impose martial law to prevent an election.  So there are crazies on both sides of the aisle…

Think Progress

Tennessee state Rep. Kelly Keisling (R) is spreading a conspiracy theory to his constituents that claims that President Obama will fake his own assassination to avoid an election against Republican candidate Mitt Romney.

In an email sent from a government email address in his office, Keisling forwarded along a warning that the President and the Department of Homeland Security are potentially working together to try to implement martial law, heading off an election by pretending the President has been killed.

The Huffington Post has the story:

Keisling’s assistant, Frankie Anderson, confirmed that the email was sent “at Keisling’s request” from a state account under the name of Holt Whitt, who is identified in the email as Keisling’s assistant. Anderson said he is filling in for Whitt.[...]

Janet Moore, one of the recipients of Keisling’s email, said she called the lawmaker Tuesday morning to express her disagreement with his decision to send the email. Moore, who lives in an adjoining legislative district in rural Tennessee, told HuffPost that Keisling told her that the rumor was “pretty ridiculous, isn’t it?”

When she asked Keisling why he sent the email, if he found it ridiculous, she said that Keisling told her, “I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.”

It’s unclear why Keisling would send to voters such a conspiracy theory based on race-baitingand paranoia, and his office would not offer any comment to the Huffington Post.

The Constitution Party of Florida also has the rumor posted on its website.

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April 23, 2012 · 1:05 AM

Tennessee Conservative Backed Bill Could Criminalize Natural Miscarriages

The misguided puritanical positions of Hard Right Conservatives will be their downfall in national and state-wide elections in 2012…

Addicting Info 

The Republican controlled Tennessee House has passed a bill that would criminalize harming an embryo, which is a group of cells that eventually forms into a fetus. Republicans say House Bill 3517 is meant to clarify an existing law that allows the prosecution of those who harm any fetus. But opponents of the bill claim that it could criminalize women who lose a pregnancy via natural miscarriage.

The Tennessean reports that Democratic Rep. Jeanne Richardson predicted that the bill could lead to the criminal prosecution of women who naturally miscarry, which according to the National Institutes of Health, around 50% of all fertilized eggs terminate naturally before reaching full term, and during the embryonic stage the rate of natural termination is higher.

‘Fetus’ is a term most often used after eight weeks of pregnancy. Before that, the term ‘embryo’ is used. By passing this bill, Republicans are trying to mandate that embryos can be victims of crime, which would basically define embryos as persons from the moment of conception. It’s a sneaky way to pass a personhood law. And since abortion is the unnatural termination of an embryo or fetus, the legislation could be used to prosecute women and doctors for murder. This bill IS an anti-abortion law that could scare women from getting an abortion and scare doctors from performing an abortion, even if an abortion is medically necessary. Women who are raped could also face prosecution for getting an abortion. But ultimately, this bill could give any law enforcement official the power to pursue criminal charges against women who naturally miscarry. And considering that many Republicans think miscarriage is murder, it’s not that far-fetched. Last February, Georgia Republican Bobby Franklin introduced a bill that would require investigations of natural miscarriages. If a miscarriage was found to be unnatural, a women could get the death penalty. That’s the direction Tennessee may be heading. So, if you are a woman who has a miscarriage and your nosy anti-abortion neighbor finds out and tells authorities, a conservative prosecutor who wants to score political points could invade your privacy and put you through a rigorous investigation to see if the miscarriage was indeed natural or not and could even have you arrested on the charge of murder because of the ambiguous nature of the bill’s language.

Tennessee Republicans have already tried to mandate that the names and information of doctors who provide abortions be publicized. That law would have outed not only the doctors, but the women they serve as well. Clearly, Tennessee Republicans are seeking to be the most anti-abortion conservative state in the nation. This is yet another shot fired by Republicans in their war against women.

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April 13, 2012 · 3:49 PM

Tennessee Senate Approves Bill To Warn Students That Hand-Holding Is A ‘Gateway Sexual Activity’

What the heck is wrong with GOP legislators?

Think Progress

Like any state legislature dealing with 8 percent unemployment and thousands of itsresidents facing disenfranchisement, the Tennessee Senate is targeting the menace of underage hand-holding.

Last week, the Senate passed SB 3310, a bill to update the state’s abstinence-based sex education curriculum to define holding hands and kissing as “gateway sexual activities.” Just one senator voted against the legislation; 28 voted in favor.

Since the bill specifically bans teachers from “demonstrating gateway sexual activity”, educators would be prohibited from even demonstrating what hand-holding is. Breaking these laws could result in a lawsuit, as Hunter from Daily Kos notes:

If your teacher teaches you anything about sex that isn’t specifically on the approved curriculum, like demonstrating “holding hands” for the class instead of quietly talking about the dangers it poses, they can be sued.

Still, this anti-hand-holding push may only be the second-worst bill passed in Tennessee this month. Nearly a century after the Volunteer State played host to the Scopes Monkey Trial, the legislature has now enacted a new law allowing educators to teach creationism alongside evolution.

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January 24, 2012 · 8:11 AM

Tea Party Groups In Tennessee Demand Textbooks Overlook U.S. Founder’s Slave-Owning History

What’s wrong with the Tea Party in Tennessee, not enough publicity lately?  This is absurd on so many levels…

The Huffington Post

A little more than a year after the conservative-led state board of education in Texas approved massive changes  to its school textbooks to put slavery in a more positive light, a group of Tea Party activists in Tennessee has renewed its push to whitewash school textbooks. The group is seeking to remove references to slavery and mentions of the country’s founders being slave owners.

According to reports, Hal Rounds, the Fayette County attorney and spokesman for the group, said during a recent news conference that there has been “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”

“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” Rounds said, according to The Commercial Appeal.

During the news conference more than two dozen Tea Party activists handed out material that said, “Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”

And that further teaching would also include that “the Constitution created a Republic, not a Democracy.”

The group demanded, as they had in January of last year, that Tennessee lawmakers change state laws governing school curricula. The group called for textbook selection criteria to include: “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

The latest push comes a year after the Texas Board of Education approved revisions to its social studies curriculum that would put a conservative twist on history through revised textbooks and teaching standards.

The Texas revisions include the exploration of the positive aspects of American slavery, lifting the stature of Jefferson S. Davis to that of Abraham Lincoln, and amendments to teach the value of the separation of church and state  were voted down  by the conservative cadre. Among other controversial amendments that have been approved is the study of the “unintended consequences” of affirmative action.

The board approved more than 100 amendments affecting social studies, economics and history classes for Texas’s 4.8 million students.

The influence of the amended textbooks will likely reach far beyond the state of Texas. The state is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks, and many other states adopt Texas’s books and standards.

Continue reading…

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December 27, 2011 · 1:54 AM

93-Year-Old Tennessee Woman Who Cleaned State Capitol For 30 Years Denied Voter ID

Voter suppression is alive and well in 2012.

I’m happy to know that the Department of Justice is looking into the South Carolina voter suppression issue, but I honestly believe all the states that implemented those laws should be investigated as well.

Think Progress

A 93-year-old Tennessee woman who cleaned the state Capitol for 30 years, including the governor’s office, says she won’t be able to vote for the first time in decades after being told this week that herold state ID failed to meet new voter ID regulations.

Thelma Mitchell was even accused of being an undocumented immigrant because she couldn’t produce a birth certificate:

Mitchell, who was delivered by a midwife in Alabama in 1918, has never had a birth certificate. But when she told that to a drivers’ license clerk, he suggested she might be an illegal immigrant.

Thelma Mitchell told WSMV-TV that she went to a state drivers’ license center last week after being told that her old state ID from her cleaning job would not meet new regulations for voter identification.

A spokesman for the House Republican Caucus insisted that Mitchell was given bad information and should’ve been allowed to vote, even with an expired state ID. But even if that’s the case, her ordeal illustrates the inevitable disenfranchisements that result when confusing voting laws enable state officials to apply the law inconsistently.

The incident is the just latest in a series of reports of senior citizens being denied their constitutional right to vote under restrictive new voter ID laws pushed by Republican governors and legislatures. These laws are a transparent attempt to target Democrat constituencies who are less likely to have photo ID’s, and disproportionately affect seniors, college students, the poor and minorities.

As ThinkProgress reported, one 96-year-old Tennessee woman was denied a voter ID because she didn’t have her marriage license. Another senior citizen in Tennessee, 91-year-old Virginia Lasater, couldn’t get the ID she needed to vote because she wasn’t able to stand in a long line at the DMV. A Tennessee agency even told a 86-year-old World War II veteran that he had to pay an unconstitutional poll tax if he wanted to obtain an ID.

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