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 ...

Auto plants are springing up all over the South, the latest the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. In Knoxville it is often pointed out that we don’t have a megasite, a tract in excess of the 1,200 acres necessary for a ...

The state has a website to promote Tennessee products; the idea being support for Tennessee producers promotes jobs and tax revenue. If it’s a good idea, then should the state and state institutions put its money where its website is?

The Knoxville business community looked high and low for a Republican candidate who could defeat Madeline Rogero’s bid for mayor. Given her background as a union organizer in her youth, her work with non-profits, and the fact that she is ...

It has long been a matter of conjecture whether the downtown Knoxville Convention Center has been a financial boon to downtown development. But what is not in question is that the success of downtown development has been a financial boon ...

There are at least three state House seats, one of them in Knoxville, that are at least possibilities.

In the next session of the state Legislature, there could be three political parties: the Democrats, the traditional Republicans, and a group of ultra-conservative members that can be grouped under the rubric of the Tea Party.

E-mail, tweets, text messages, Facebook messages... just what the hell constitutes a public record these days?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it the “willing suspension of disbelief.” I would like to suggest this concept for us Vol football fans as the season opens in a couple of weeks.

In business, time is money. That is especially true these days in real estate development, with shaky credit lines and up-and-down mortgage availability.