Everyone complains about politicians, but no one does anything about them. The Knoxville city elections going on right now are the perfect opportunity to do something. It is a non-partisan election for the least powerful seats around, so the politicians ...

Attendance at a sustainable development task force meeting was sparse. The Small Assembly Room was an order of magnitude too large for an exchange between MPC presenters Mark Donaldson and Trey Benefield and stalwart environmental defenders like Jamie Rowe and ...

County Commissioner Greg “Lumpy” Lambert’s outburst at a recent meeting was disturbing in several ways. At a task force presentation on proposed ridge and slope zoning, Lambert predicted a shooting in the City County Building. He also said “we’ll deserve ...

Nowhere in the Constitution of Tennessee or the United States are political parties mentioned, yet the two major parties wield considerable power. The Tennessee Constitution provides that every citizen over 18, duly registered, be allowed to participate in all federal, ...

To accommodate Charter changes voters approved last fall, the county must be divided into nine equal populations. Presently the fifth district is 50 percent larger and has three commissioners, but the next commission will have only one representative per district. ...

Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey last week accused the Chief Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court of unethical conduct; at a Kiwanis Club meeting in Memphis, Justice Janice Holder had spoken in favor of renewing current judicial-selection methods.

Whining from the insured about how long they will have to wait to see a doctor if everyone gets insured rings with dark irony in the ears of the uninsured, who may die waiting for medicine or a procedure. Fortunately, ...

The state is once again thinking about a new road between Knoxville and Seymour to relieve congestion on Chapman Highway. People die each year on that road, and as long as that is true, transportation planners will keep returning to ...

If you hear a sound in the night, are you content to chalk it up as unknown? You hope to hear it again, and you speculate on where it came from and what it was. Our minds do not like ...

When the Development Corporation of Knox County (TDC) presented its newer, greener version of the Midway Business Park in a meeting at Carter High School in January, they faced a tough audience. Residents of East Knox County thought their sector ...

The eastern corner of Knox County is sleepy but not asleep. In fact, they have been busy and need you to notice. Their right to self-determination may depend on it.

The coal industry spent $35 million this year trying to convince Americans that coal is clean. “Coal can do that” is the new slogan, explicitly linked to Obama’s “yes we can” in recent ads. On the industry website, they piggyback ...

An interesting thing happened while gas prices hovered around $3 per gallon: Motorcycles proliferated. The climb over $2 per gallon idled a lot of Hummers and shiny work trucks, but it wasn’t enough to get many people to give up ...

Still, Tom Kilgore, head of TVA, faces similar scrutiny, and he is in charge of nuclear reactors, flood control along hundreds of river miles, a major electric grid, protecting natural resources, and improving air quality—responsibilities much more dire than winning ...

Tennessee diverged from the nation during the recent elections, turning its state Legislature over to Republicans for the first time in more than a century. Meanwhile, Democrats won the presidency and expanded control of Congress, triggering talk among Republicans about ...