While Mayor Karl Dean continues his unabated bid for a second term, a Twitter cartoonist known as The County Seat has been taking some comedic shots at the mayor.

The latest one has Dean as Elvis crooning to mesmerize the local media. News2 was left out of the cartoon for whatever reason but The Tennessean and the City Paper are prominently displayed.

County Seat’s profile claim: “The World’s First Twitter Based Editorial Cartoon. Tennessee’s Cultural Barometer……It’s like listening to your Uncle Billy.” The cartoonist also has made some fun of Metro Council members as well. Outgoing Councilman Jamie Hollin was one target after his, um, interaction with Councilman Jim Gotto. The drubbing the Republicans dished out to the Democrats last year got a cartoon as well.

Note in the latest shot at Dean the red thong underwear being tossed (more…)

IQT Solutions, the company Mayor Karl Dean’s administration courted to downtown, filed bankruptcy in Canada before laying off 1,200 employees there and is blowing up in the mayor’s face.

The New York-based company announced in early June it would bring 900 jobs to downtown office space south of Broadway for a call center. Dean’s administration had offered the revamped tax incentive to lure the company here. Now it is looking as if the deal may not happen at all,  becoming an embarrassment to the Dean administration and the city, observers said.

News has been coming out of Canada all day with IQT abruptly shutting down three call centers there. City officials are asking IQT more questions. How well they are answered may not matter. Metro Council and others may be unwilling to take a company with the track record it has shown. If Nashville takes the company, the city could look like (more…)

Davidson County Republicans have stepped up their efforts to support the referendum on the Tennessee State Fairgrounds.

The party put out a release Tuesday about a straw poll at the Republican summer picnic showing 93 percent of the attendees supported the referendum. Mind you, there were 250 attendees there and doesn’t necessarily represent the thinking of all Republicans. Still, the party clearly is behind the referendum while everyone else involved is attempting to keep the issue from being a partisan one.

Meanwhile, the GOP is endorsing candidates for Metro Council who support the fairgrounds. Some of the candidates stand a chance of winning because they are incumbents. But there are others who simply won’t win. Ken Jakes, for example, who is running for at-large isn’t given much of a chance. Isaac Okoreeh-Baah in District 29, the guy who had the run in with the Metro Election Commission not long ago, is getting the GOP plug as well. And he’s not an odds on favorite.

Metro Councilman Jamie Hollin, who isn’t running again but has been pushing the referendum, has produced a radio spot that will air on WAMB 1200 am. He’s been doing a lot of TV lately as well. The radio spot can be listened to at this link — Hollin’s radio spot.

For the past two weeks or so, I’ve been working on two issues: A story for the Chattanooga Times Free Press and getting a virus problem fixed on the server hosting this site that was infecting this web site.

A few weeks ago, I managed to snag an exclusive in-person interview with Ginger Lee, whose real name is Candice Raines. She was the last woman in former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner’s cyber scandal that ended his career in Congress. Raines has an interesting back story that has ties to Nashville since she lives in the area and once worked as a stripper at a club here. The story in the Chattanooga paper is long and I couldn’t get some of that perspective in the story. I’ll be posting the rest of her story here. I have to do some rewriting/editing of what I had originally written so as to not overlap too much with the Chattanooga story. Here’s the Chattanooga story: http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2011/jul/03/stripper-and-congressmaninside-story/

As for the virus, we believe we have finally fixed the malware issue that has kept cropping up on the site. The issue had nothing to do with the site itself. But apparently a hacker had tapped into the server and infected a bunch of web sites. Moving servers in this case wasn’t an easy solution. I had someone working on the site and server for more than a week figuring out what had happened. The site has been scanned and rescanned and shown clean. If anyone gets a warning, please email me.

Click through for more on Ginger Lee and her path to the through a Nashville strip club to porn to being dropped from TennCare. (more…)