Using that specious logic, the money for education belongs to the parents. But it doesn’t.

Being speaker of the House is the most difficult job in politics, whether you are presiding over the state legislature or the U.S. House.

Are people happier with the present structure, or have term limits and turnover made the difference?

You would think the murder of 20 Connecticut school children and a national debate on gun safety would prompt the gun lobby and its legislative allies in Tennessee to reconsider spending the upcoming session pushing another gun bill. You would ...

Knoxville has fewer hospitals than it did, but the city remains the health-care center for Middle East Tennessee, and the health-care industry here is one of our largest employers. What’s looming in the health-care industry is important for us all ...

Anytime we try to discuss state’s rights and federalism, some moron on one side starts screaming about seceding from the union and the other side dismisses the issue as just a right-wing fantasy.

Critics argued that these liberalizations of gun laws would lead to a “wild West” atmosphere. Considering the thousands and thousands of gun permits that have since been issued across the country, there have been remarkably few instances of these concepts ...

It used to be said that the Tennessee electorate consisted of one-third Democrats, one-third Republicans, and one-third independents. If that is still true, the independents have been spending a lot of time in the Republican camp of late.

Highway projects never die, they just move down the list. Decades ago, Knoxville billed itself as the Gateway to the Smokies and the James White Parkway would deliver tourists through Knoxville to Gatlinburg and the park.

Republicans are doing a lot of soul-searching about what happened last week when a president presiding over a lousy economy managed to beat a successful businessman and former governor. If you are looking for reasons, let me help.

Does anyone think it would be good public policy if we stopped public funding of high schools? After eighth grade we would require all parents and high school students to pay to get a high school diploma.

When rumors surfaced about the Southeastern Conference expanding by two teams, the discussion about whether the league ought to expand shifted rather suddenly to a guessing game about which teams it would be, which teams it should be, and which ...

Being the contrarian that I am, I made a sucker bet on the presidential election. I didn’t bet on who would win, but I bet that the winner would do so by a margin of 10 percent in the popular ...

There are a lot of interesting nuggets in a comprehensive survey of American religious views in the annual Pew Research Study on the topic. The survey, using land lines and cell phones, discovered that, for the first time, the number ...

Here in traditionally Republican East Tennessee we tend to be more fiscally conservative and less intense on social issues. Middle Tennessee has become the hotbed of radical on-the-march anti-immigration, anti-abortion conservatism and it is an area more in tune with ...