Confederacy of Dunces
Ready, aim, fireEven 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 CCAIt 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 blotterIt’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.
