House Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) baselessly claimed that the Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol was “made up” when asked whether he supported giving federal payouts to people who had assaulted police.

“Look, January 6 is an issue that was made up in the first place,” Norman said. “That was a staged thing from day one.”
...
Norman was among those who condemned the insurrection at the time, releasing a statement saying, "This is utterly unacceptable. This is NOT who we are, and I condemn in the STRONGEST possible terms the actions of rioters who have breached the Capitol Building."

Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R) took the Senate floor Thursday to lie repeatedly about what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, amplifying the wild claims of conspiracy theorists who willfully distort the truth.

Sad but funny. Funny but sad. What is wrong with these people? They keep getting elected. Whatta ya gonna do?

I was with my walking group the other day and someone said his wife got a free ticket to Savannah Bananas. We all looked at him and I asked, what is the Savannah Bananas. He actually did not know if it was a band or what. Then the next day it starts coming out in the local news. The Savannah Bananas are the Harlem Globetrotters to baseball.

Wow! Pretty cool.

The line stretched around the Dairy Queen on West Broadway in Maryville as Savannah Bananas fans from near and far traveled to meet their favorite team.

“We have over 7,500 people for the Thursday game at Covenant Health Park, which will be the largest attendance at that venue since it opened,” said Kim Bumpass, the President of Visit Knoxville. “And then we’ve sold over 110,000 tickets at Neyland on Saturday.”

David Byrne on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The Knox County Commission voted to approve a proposed resolution aimed at regulating data centers, impacting their location, design and operational requirements.

There are already "three data centers, two in Knox County... a smaller one located in Downtown Knoxville on Summit Hill"... A "larger center has a contracted demand of around 70 megawatts as compared to one of the KUB's big users, UT Medical Center, which uses 12 to 15 megawatts."

From TDOT,

Beginning at 9 a.m. on Monday, June 1, crews will close Woodson Drive and Wye Way at the intersection with Alcoa Highway while crews place fill material, install storm drain and utilities, and construct the new roundabout and curbs.

As part of the improvements to Alcoa Highway from Woodson Drive to Cherokee Trail, TDOT is building a new roundabout at Woodson Drive to make the intersection of this essential roadway with the collector road and Wye Way safe and efficient. This location is close to where Woodson Drive connects to Alcoa Highway.

The detour will take drivers to Cherokee Trail and the UT Hospital entrance. It's bad enough they are directing people to Cherokee trail, a skinny, dangerous, steep road, but then they are putting more traffic at the entrance to UT Hospital. Being a local, I'd probably go to Maloney Road. It is a little out of the way, but a much better road. Although, that underpass at Mount Olive School would probably slow down traffic.

With no more Front Page Follies, I need some outlet for song parodies that come to me. Roger Daltry originally sang these Pete Townshend lyrics, but imagine Cameron Sexton trying to defend the legislature's racist redistricting:

[Verse 1]
No one knows what it's like
To be the bad man, to be the sad man
Behind our lies
No one knows what it's like
To be hated, to be fated
To telling only lies

[Chorus]
And my maps, they are as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I will punish those who object
I do Trump’s vengeance; that's never free

Tennessee has had a longstanding law requiring state board approval before opening a health care facility.

The Tennessee Hospital Association has fought against certificate of need reform for years because many hospitals it represents work under a model where they use money-making procedures such as heart and knee surgeries to offset the cost of providing charity care to those they’re required to treat like a patient who comes to an emergency room but can’t afford to pay.

“Certificate of need helps level the playing field by preventing providers who are not subject to the same federal regulations as hospitals – such as the requirement to provide care to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay – from cherry picking only the most profitable patients and services,” the state’s hospital association said...

Those against Hospital's Certificate of Need include, "conservative interest groups like the Beacon Center and Center for Individual Freedom, and HCA Healthcare, the largest for-profit hospital company in the nation."

Starting in July 2028, new acute care hospitals will no longer be required to go before the state’s healthcare facility commission to receive a certificate of need, CON, before opening.
...
This year’s effort was boosted by a demand from President Donald Trump’s administration, tying the repeal of the state’s CON law to receiving a portion of Tennessee’s $1 billion rural health transformation grant.

The organizations/businesses that want to open new hospitals will not be doing it in the rural areas that have the most need. They want to take away from the urban areas. This will hurt the hospitals we have that do good work.

Lamar Alexander Wants Republicans to Stand Up to Trump.

In a new memoir, the former senator, governor and cabinet member says President Trump committed an impeachable offense on Jan. 6 and calls on Congress to assert its power.
...
writes with disgust about how the president exhorted the crowd that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and penetrated the Senate chamber in an effort to block certification of the election.

The former senator thinks the current occupants of the Senate could do with a constitutional refresh...

If only... For some reason I cannot fathom why the Republican establishment prefers Trump over the American people.

And love.

"Under the careful watch of a surgeon, and with the machine disconnected, [Health and Human Services Secretary R.F. ]Kennedy Jr. briefly tested the teaching console of the renowned Cleveland Clinic’s robotic hands with a live patient splayed open for heart surgery in the room.”

The prestigious Cleveland Clinic should apologize to the Countty for allowing this to happen. It's disgusting to find they let this person in a surgery room with an ongoing surgery. It doesn't matter if he wasn't playing with a connected console. It matters that he was there at all. I would think patients might think twice about the Clevend Clinic's ethics. Will the patient sue?

Higher energy costs are also spreading through the economy, driving up the price of airfares and goods that move by truck, including groceries. On Wednesday, the government said wholesale prices rose in April at their fastest pace in more than three years.
...
His tariffs make industrial metals like aluminum and copper more expensive. His immigration crackdown means employers are having a hard time finding workers. Even his enthusiasm for a lightly regulated buildout of artificial intelligence is driving up electronics prices and electricity bills.
...
he told supporters that the affordability issue was “a line of bullshit” pushed by Democrats for partisan advantage.
...
this month, 77 percent of Americans surveyed said Trump’s policies had increased the cost of living

We're in for a bumpy ride. Heh.

Louisiana resident speaks up.
Your party is in a death spiral. That's why you have to redistrict.
...
The MAGA party is the last breath of the confederacy.
.
The suffering that he caused to everybody in this Country and Worldwide.

Bluesky post.

Feeling overwhelmed with all of this. LISTEN. Another Louisiana resident (Marshawn is the only name we have) testifies against the state’s racial gerrymander, speaking truth to power up and down the hearing room and predicts how this story will end.
Speak your truth, fight and believe.

[image or embed]

— Sherrilyn Ifill (@sifill.bsky.social) May 13, 2026 at 9:02 PM

Bloomberg
Electricity prices jumped 6.1% last month compared to a year earlier
Consumer price index rose 3.8% last month compared to a year earlier
NBC
Inflation surged to 3.8% in April, its highest level in nearly three
years
The pace of wage gains has been slowing over the past two years.

Washington Post
Water costs are rising faster than inflation — and sending bills soaring

Administration flailing after discontinuing Iran Nuclear deal initiated by the Obama Administration. The president says he’s not thinking about Americans’ finances ‘even a little bit’ in Iran talks the presidentsaid the “only thing” that matters is Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon.”

There is validity to Iran not having a nuclear weapon. However, with the Obama Administration Nuclear deal there was no nuclear weapon in Iran. So what has the current Administration done to encourage Iran to want nuclear weapons again?

Everything has gotten through the looking glass. It's all so shocking and sad.

Whatta ya gonna do?

In campaigns, Republicans are bragging on new funding from the Rural Health Transformation Program. They are omitting the loss of much more health care funding when the GOP passed the One Big Beautiful Bill.

For example, Blackburn Applauds $206 Million for Tennessee from Rural Health Transformation Program. This is a one time funding.

Blackburn fails to mention the loss of approximately $2 billion in health care funding for Tennessee when she helped pass the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Misleading?

COLBERT: How dumb do you think it is for people to say that I should run for president?

OBAMA: Well, you know, the bar has changed. I think you would perform significantly better than some folks we've seen.

COLBERT: Is that an endorsement?

OBAMA: It was not

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 6, 2026 at 8:30 AM

Oh No The Capital Allocation System Allocated Capital Badly Again

Large banks including JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and SMBC are looking to offload risks linked to a glut of debt related to AI data centres, as they reach financing limits, the Financial Times reported.
...
Banks are reportedly approaching risk limits that restrict their exposure to individual borrowers or sectors, and are seeking to free up their balance sheets for further lending.

Brings back fond memories of the 1980s savings and loan crisis and the 2008 financial crisis.

Yeehaw!

Tennessee Valley lake levels low as drought continues.

"the region has only received about 69% of the rainfall it normally gets. Even worse, the runoff water, which is what fills up the reservoirs, is at just 45% of normal"

We're joining the Nashville area with low rainfall.

TVA has a website where you can select a lake to see lake levels with a chart that shows the previous year's lake levels. Fort Loudon is down almost 2 feet. That's a lot of water for a 14,000 acre lake. This not only affects usable water it also affects power generation.

Five major publishers — Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage — and the best-selling novelist Scott Turow have filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

The lawsuit asserts that Meta’s engineers relied on pirated books and journal articles to train the program by downloading unlicensed copies through websites like Anna’s Archive, an open source search engine for piracy sites including LibGen and Sci-Hub. The suit also claims that “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”
...
The plaintiffs argue that Meta’s A.I. program poses a threat to the livelihoods of writers and publishers because the technology can be used to quickly produce A.I.-generated copycat books and to summarize the plot and themes of copyrighted books in such great detail that readers don’t have to buy them.

Be careful out there. Be ethical and respectful.

In the six months since a cychlorphine death in Oct. 2025 in South Knoxville, at least 50 fatal overdoses involving cychlorphine have been confirmed in the greater Knoxville area. The largely unknown compound is on track to be the third-most-common drug involved in the region’s fatal overdoses this year, after fentanyl and methamphetamine.

Over that period, Knoxville became a national hot spot for cychlorphine. But if it were not for Dr. Mileusnic’s [chief medical examiner for the greater Knoxville area] tenacity, the community would most likely not even know the drug was circulating.