News
Ready, aim, fire
Even
many Republicans think state Rep. Stacey Campfield is a goofball. Bills
by the grandstanding homophobe almost always die quietly in
subcommittees. That’s what happened this week to his idea to ban the
teaching of homosexuality in public schools after a puzzled education
official pointed out that no one had any plans to teach homosexuality
in public schools. Campfield is also pushing a bill this session to let
college faculty and staff go armed on Tennessee campuses. He’d like to
let students go strapped too, but he’s trying to be reasonable here,
OK? After last week’s shootings at Northern Illinois University, the
Knoxville Republican yapped to the TV cameras about how campuses would
be safer if students and professors were able to start blasting away
with their own firearms. “You’re just advertising to the crazies where
they can go for the easy pickings, where they are going to face no
resistance, where it’s going to be taking sheep and leading them to the
slaughter,” he says. We get this tingling Twilight Zone feeling when
Campfield refers to “the crazies.”
Hide and seek with CCA
It reads like the comic sequel to The Shawshank Redemption.
On Sunday, Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America actually
lost an inmate when a two-bit con named Terrell Watson was discovered
missing from his cell at CCA’s Metro Detention Facility during an early
morning roll call. CCA’s henchmen had a rather delightful story to
share: Watson had probably not escaped but instead was lurking
somewhere in the building. But company officials, who have long boasted
that they can manage prisons far more efficiently than lowly government
employees, didn’t know exactly where he was. On Monday, the
suits at CCA’s corporate office in Burton Hills weren’t answering phone
calls and an official wouldn’t even say if Watson had been found. (He
hadn’t.) Too bad CCA didn’t operate Shawshank: Andy Dufresne could have
escaped 20 years earlier.
The UT blotter
It’s
time to talk about the latest Volunteer jock to get cuffed: punter
Britton Colquitt, who last week slammed into a parked car at around 2
a.m. and then took off. When police caught up to him, they found him
visibly intoxicated and unable to complete a sobriety test. Colquitt
comes from a family of punters, but these days he seems to be following
a different family tradition. The 22-year-old junior is now the eighth
UT player to break the law (and team rules) in just the last six weeks.
He now has five alcohol-related offenses on his transcript, which makes
you wonder what it takes to get kicked off the Big Orange football
team. Coach Phil Fulmer, of all people, should be tougher on his
starting punter, considering that two of his former players have been
involved in vehicular homicides. In 1998, Leonard Little killed a mom
while driving drunk, and in 2003 Dwayne Goodrich, after returning home
from a strip club, struck and killed two people who had stopped to pull
a man from a burning car.
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|