Betty Bean

November will mark the first presidential election since Harry S. Truman upset Thomas E. Dewey that there’ll be no ballots cast at Belle Morris Elementary School. The Knox County Election Commission, by a 3-2 party-line vote, voted this week to ...

In Tennessee, the two major political parties are the custodians of the voting process, and whichever party happens to be in power gets to dictate where, when, and how that process is organized. Theoretically, Republicans and Democrats create checks and ...

The sudden retirement of Lady Vols Sports Information Director Debby Jennings was announced last week in a terse, three-paragraph press release that shocked fans of the women’s program—they feared that Jennings’ retirement was not voluntary. A May 18 letter to ...

City Council voted unanimously, and without discussion, to approve an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin, disability, sexual orientation, and/or gender identity in hiring.

Over three decades, Julia Tucker has contributed and raised countless dollars for charity, served on scores of boards, and became the city’s most influential AIDS advocate. She is a historic preservationist and a political activist who has never been far ...

On November 30, 1979, millionaire grocer (that’s what reporters always called him) Cas Walker was stewing over the recent city elections. He was mad at Julia Tucker for refusing to support his candidate for City Council, so he dictated a ...

The University of Tennessee’s new athletic director, Dave Hart, will formally take over the Women’s Department of Intercollegiate Athletics in June. Actually, he pretty much already has, and devoted Lady Vol fans believe that the men’s side will undergo an ...

It’s usually unalloyed good news when Tennessee industrial recruiters sweet-talk a baron of industry into relocating to the Volunteer State, but it’s tough to find any Tennessean who’s ready to roll out the welcome mat for Don Blankenship. The former ...

The saga of Henry Granju’s death last year has been the subject of ongoing attention, due in no small part to the social-media skills of his mother (and former Metro Pulse contributor) Katie Granju. In the last few weeks, she ...

Eighth District school board politics can be brutal. There is finger-pointing and discontent in the wake of former school board member Bill Phillips, who was pressured into resigning earlier this year after pleading guilty to a domestic violence incident involving ...