Mayor of a few of the people
How would you like to have your city run by someone who got the support of just over a quarter of voters and whose support by a percentage of all eligible voters was much, much smaller?
That’s where Memphis is today. Beginning Jan. 1, Paul Young, who garnered 27.7% of the vote in the election earlier this month, will be the city’s mayor.
Young, who is a lobbyist and president of the city’s housing and community development agency, topped the field of 17 in the nonpartisan race, which has no runoff. He triumphed over a field that included Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton and local NAACP chapter president and Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner. Karen Camper, a state House member, was also in the race.
In contrast, the 2021 Chattanooga mayoral race had 15 competitors, with former car dealer Tim Kelly topping the heap with 30.15% of the vote, followed by former River City President Kim White with 29.17%, 476 fewer votes out of nearly 28,500 cast. Had that been the end, with Kelly getting 8,566 votes out of an eligible 114,217 voters, he would have won with the support of 7.5% of the electorate.
As it was, Kelly was the decisive winner of a runoff with White, garnering 59.9% of the vote.
The business of Biden
President Joe Biden has repeatedly said he put a strict wall between himself and his brother and son regarding business — especially foreign business — when he became vice president in 2009 and would continue that wall as president, beginning in 2021.
“I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses. Period,” he said.
Well, America First Legal sought to fact-check that statement by filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Archives for Biden’s emails as vice president.
Turns out, according to the findings, he exchanged 19,335 emails with Rosemont Seneca, which is an investment firm of which Biden’s son, Hunter, was a co-founder and CEO. He also had 4,243 with Hunter, 3,738 with The Lion Hall Group, the company of Biden’s brother, Jim, and 1,751 with Jim.
The contents of the emails were not released — a few could have been birthday greetings to his son and brother or who was going to bring what to the family Thanksgiving, after all — but the total number of them to the four recipients was enough to convince America First Legal.
“These damning numbers further confirm that there was never a wall separating the Office of the Vice President and Hunter Biden’s business endeavors,” the organization wrote in a statement posted to X (formerly Twitter). “In fact, there was extensive commingling between them.”
Terminator vs. Democrats
Pundits suggest Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t exactly knock people’s socks off with his conservative credentials when he was governor of California from 2003 to 2011, but more than a decade later he’s still willing to speak as one.
While discussing what Democrats and Republicans are all about on the podcast “Literally! With Rob Lowe” recently, the once and current actor said being a Democrat is about “ruin[ing] your cities.”
Asked to elaborate, he said, “That’s what the Democrats would say. We are about ruining the cities. We want to f—- up every city in America. That seems to be the theme right now.”
When Lowe asked why, Schwarzenegger replied that he had “no idea.”
The response came after Lowe, citing a former California congressman, said Republicans are about, “in no particular order, strong military, low taxes, less government, more personal freedoms.”
“Strong law enforcement,” Schwarzenegger added.
Democrats do, in fact, govern almost all major U.S. cities, and have governed most of them for many years. To the former governor’s point, using crime as one example, each of the top 10 cities with the most overall violent crime, as of 2019, were governed by Democrats.
The senator from Carhartt
John Fetterman, a freshman Democratic United States senator from Pennsylvania, sounded more like a high school freshman when he was a recent guest on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
The former Keystone State small-town mayor, whose athletic wear couture has made him a laughingstock across the globe, riffed with the host about his mental health challenges and his impressions of Washington, where Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, recently relaxed the Senate dress code on the freshman’s behalf and then changed his mind when the public was horrified.
“You all need to know that America is not sending their best and brightest to Washington, D.C.,” said Fetterman, who appeared on the show in a hoodie, shorts and sneakers, showing a remarkable lack of self-awareness.
“Sometimes you literally just can’t believe, like, you know, these people are making the decisions that are, you know, determining the, the government here,” he said. “It’s actually scary.”
Indeed it is.