The 2008 Boner Awards: Lowlights from Music City's year of clumsy crooks, posturing politicians and all-around bad news

Sister Act.
This was the year U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn emerged as a new feminist hero—and in a related story, Bernard Madoff just posed for a new $3 bill. Still, give the Brentwood image consultant turned conservative firebrand credit for the fastest consciousness-raising since Jane Fonda wrapped Barbarella. Before the national GOP convention in September, Blackburn's feminist sensibility had been so underdeveloped that she wanted to be called "congressman." Then John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his VP, and voila! Blackburn morphed into Gloria Steinem and popped up on all the cable gabfests as a proud defender of hockey moms everywhere. The kicker? Only six weeks earlier, she voted against legislation to help stop sex discrimination in job pay.

The Odor of Odom.
A true workingman's friend, state Rep. Gary Odom killed the governor's attempt to close a loophole that would have made fat-cat developers pay their fair share of taxes. Lawmakers quickly turned elsewhere to plug the $15 million state budget hole, and within no time they found a convenient ATM: a piggy bank of land acquisition funds. So what if they're meant to protect fragile wetlands and other natural areas from pavement-happy developers? Ducks don't make campaign contributions. But developers do—and Odom later raked in cash from them. So, a quick recap: Odom saves developers millions in taxes, fills the subsequent budget hole with money meant to protect us from overdevelopment, then gets money from developers. The system works.

English Only: The Boner That Wouldn't Die.
Harder to kill than a George A. Romero zombie—yet possessing half the IQ points—the shameful English Only bill survived to plague yet another year. Unfazed by a legal maneuver that would have kept it off the ballot, its chief proponent, council member Eric Crafton, rallied enough signatures to demand a special election. That's right, folks: Thanks to Crafton, at a time when people are losing jobs in this cash-strapped city, Nashville will have to spend an estimated half-million taxpayer dollars to answer whether all municipal business should be conducted in English. The best part? If ratified (shudder), the bill wouldn't even save the city money, since the services it would eliminate aren't even offered.

Mayday!
Take the county's last swath of undeveloped green space, add a Napoleonic proposal for 40,000 relocated workers to trample it underfoot, mix thoroughly with anguished residents, hot-shot lobbyists and opinion-swayers on both sides, and whaddaya get? The year's most closely watched Drama in Real Life. Wealthy developer Jack May proposed a ginormous $4 billion retail, residential and office complex called May Town Center just northwest of Nashville that would rival Cool Springs for sprawling yuppified fabulousness. Trouble was, he wanted to plonk this 500-acre Starbucks in the middle of Bells Bend, the last green corner of Davidson County. It was a colossally dumb idea that would not only sully the countryside, but suck the life out of Nashville's reviving inner city. Nevertheless, the ensuing Battle of Bells Bend was a squeaker, with opponents, a small army of sympathetic flacks and defiant council member Mike Jameson barely managing to stave off a pro-May PR juggernaut that included hired-gun newspaper "opinion pieces" disguised as neighborhood support. Thankfully, the Planning Commission refused to sign off—for now. But if history tells us anything, especially where deep-pocketed development is concerned, it's that you can't keep a good Boner down.

AND THE AWARD FOR POLITICAL BONER OF THE YEAR GOES TO...
Juvenile Court Clerk Vic Lineweaver, who managed one of the most egg-faced public humiliations in the nearly two-decade history of this contest with help from WSMV reporter Jeremy Finley. Looking into rumors that Lineweaver was loafing on the taxpayer's dime—he was actually arrested last year for repeated failure to produce crucial court documents—Finley and a camera crew tailed the court clerk. They found the work-averse Lineweaver at home during office hours. When Finley dialed up his cell phone and asked what he was doing, the unsuspecting Lineweaver said he was "meeting about a grant"—unaware he was caught on camera in his bathrobe, checking his mail in his driveway.

Boners Don't Pay
A woman fed her ex-boyfriend's $200 bongos to her dog—and not even she could crack this illustrious list of screw-ups from the world of law enforcement and comical criminality.

Stupor Troopers.
In a less-than-stellar year for state law enforcement, the Tennessee Highway Patrol made headlines throughout 2008 for all the wrong reasons. OK—deep breath—there was the trooper who got probation for letting a porn star off the hook, in exchange for a little caught-on-tape nightstick polishing; the sexual harassment allegedly inflicted upon the THP's sexual-harassment trainer; the captain who resigned just before getting charged with forging a divorce decree; the lawsuit settled over a 2003 incident in which a motorist's dog was gunned down during a traffic stop. Those were minor offenses, however, compared to the snowballing "Troopergate" scandal—which rolled right on into 2008 with the news that Lt. Ronnie Shirley, the trooper who was caught years ago trying to fix a speeding ticket for Bredesen's then right-hand man Dave Cooley, was under investigation for making unauthorized database checks on 182 people. Among those getting the virtual frisk: Brad Schrade, the Tennessean reporter who opened the can of worms—and who got a boost in cred worth its weight in Get Out of Jail Free cards.