Guest Column – By House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer – Originally written for Roll Call – In 2018, House Democrats won the majority on a promise that we would refocus the chamber on delivering “For the People.” The centerpiece of that effort was HR 1, the For the People Act, comprehensive legislation to root…
By Glynn Wilson – The public will get another chance to hear from Defense Department, intelligence agency and law enforcement officials this week in another Congressional hearing called to investigate the violent insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6. It was a historic tragedy for American democracy incited by the former president and…
Editor’s Note: This news comes with no personal regrets, since I didn’t know either of the deceased. But I knew Jack Neely some when writing for Metro Pulse myself, one of the most interesting alternative weeklies in the country in print and online in the late 20th century. It’s a sad day when anyone dies,…
Staff Report – As the nation continues to commemorate Black History Month, the National Park Service has added 11 new places to its growing system of sites and programs that chronicle the African American Civil Rights Movement. In the continuing struggle for racial equality, as told through a collection of powerful historical resources that commemorate,…
Sunday Reader – By Glynn Wilson – KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The east-facing window in this humble abode was enshrouded in fog the first thing Sunday morning, not the famous smoke you sometimes see in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. Since it’s National Public Sleeping Day and the weather was not conducive to…
By Glynn Wilson – After working late into the night on Friday, the House passed a $1.9 trillion pandemic stimulus bill called the American Rescue Plan advocated by President Joe Biden by a party-line vote of 219 to 212, including an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025. The bill…
By Glynn Wilson – After a year of federal confusion over the coronavirus pandemic and 500,000 deaths in the United States in large part because of the lack of a plan by the Trump administration, it’s only taken the Biden administration a month in office to come up with a national website to help Americans…
By Glynn Wilson – The public will get its first chance to hear from the Congressional security officials this week who resigned in the wake of the violent insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6 incited by the former president and commander-in-chief that disrupted the peaceful transfer of power as Electoral College votes…
By Glynn Wilson – A half a million dead. So far, more Americans perished from COVID-19 than on all the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined. And before it’s all over, maybe near the end of summer, the number will most likely surpass the number of dead in…
The Big Picture -Â By Glynn Wilson -Â GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK, Tenn. — Are you suffering from cabin fever from the COVID winter? Take a drive in nature in a park near you. When the forecast showed sunny weather and a high of 54 for Sunday, Feb. 21, I just had to get…
Hold Fast Reader Dear How to hold you reader dear: Regale you with comforting stories of barefoot summer mud puddles past? Excite you with salacious tales of sex scandals and conspiracies holding you aghast? Bore you with straight prose and fifth grade level blurbs of fair and balanced contrast? Or write the flame out of…
By Lord Byron (a.k.a. George Gordon) Titan! to whose immortal eyes The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity’s recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they…
By Glynn Wilson – Six more members of the right-wing domestic militia organization known as the Oath Keepers were arrested and charged Friday by the U.S. Department of Justice for conspiracy to obstruct Congress from certifying the Electoral College presidential election results on January 6 by planning a violent insurrection and engaging in a wide…
Six Officers Suspended – By Glynn Wilson – In more evidence that some Capitol Police officers were in on the stand down order and inside job we reported first to allow Trump supporters to enter the building during the insurrection on January 6, it has been announced that six officers have been suspended and at…
Editor’s Note: We are happy to report that the new Biden administration has begun to restore factual email announcements from federal agencies to allow news organizations to once again provide reliable information to readers. For four years under the previous administration, all the public relations functions of federal agencies had been coopted by Trump loyalists…
By Glynn Wilson – The American public is gradually turning against the big California technology companies and is coming around to the view that more government regulation of big tech and the internet is warranted, according to the latest Gallup poll on the subject. A large majority of 57 percent of Americans now say the…
Staff Report – A federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday in Los Angeles charges three North Korean computer programmers and a Canadian-American citizen with participating in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy to conduct a series of destructive cyberattacks and financial crimes that make them the world’s most wanted bank robbers. According to a press release from the…
Editor’s Note: We are happy to report that the new Biden administration has begun to restore factual email announcements from federal agencies to allow news organizations to once again provide reliable information to readers. For four years under the previous administration, all the public relations functions of federal agencies had been coopted by Trump loyalists…
By Glynn Wilson – A prominent Congressman from Mississippi and the NAACP filed a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday under a historic law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act charging the 45th president and his lawyer with conspiring to incite the violent Capitol insurrection to prevent the official certification of election results. The…
By Glynn Wilson – An independent commission will be established by Congress to investigate the Capitol insurrection on January 6 and the interference with the peaceful transfer power, according to a letter sent out Monday to Democrats in the House and posted online by House Speaker Nanci Pelosi. “Security is the order of the day:…
