Live from Music Row, Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Aaron Gulbransen in studio for the first edition of Aaron’s Analysis.
AARON GULBRANSEN:
I have a simple exhortation for the audience and a lot of you do this already, but I think it’s very important to note when it comes to news and politics. Always think and dig deeper. Pay attention. Most of the people talking in politics, speaking, messaging, and creating messaging are doing so with a specific aim and goal in mind and want you to act accordingly.
You, the audience, have your duty to always ask why and what they are aiming for. Because this message is very often self-serving and also deceptive. The motivation in politics is almost never what the stated purpose is. If you barely pay attention, you will get fooled and act and speak accordingly.
A perfect example of this is the failed Russia Gate and the accusations against Donald Trump. If you were to rely upon what the members of the left, the media, and former Obama administration officials were saying on TV, you would’ve believed that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin.
If you go went and read the congressional committees and paid attention and watched their testimony, you saw that they were lying on television and Trump did not collude with Putin. Even right now, in a slightly different way, you’re seeing a lot of self-serving messaging on the Trump indictment.
Obviously, coming from the left, they believe that Donald Trump should go to jail because their hatred is blinding them. But also because we are in the middle of a campaign contest for the presidency, you are seeing Trump’s supporters pile on and demand fielty from opponents of Donald Trump or potential opponents of Donald Trump in the Republican primary.
Another scenario where messaging has been deceptive is when you had a former candidate for the RNC chair which happened several months ago where Harmeet Dhillon was talking about how she was the conservative outsider and she was going to take the party back to grassroots. She made over $800,000 from the Republican National Committee as an attorney.
Deceptive. Even today, at the local level, you have candidates running for office and chairman in counties like Williamson, Sumner County, and several other places as well, where they talk about the various things that the party is going to do once they take over, take over the school board and take over this body and that party.
The role of the Republican party and this is not messaging, this is just very true, is to get Republican nominees elected. The same thing goes for the Democrat Party. These parties structure which is several different things than outside groups like mine and others. So when you’re hearing messaging very often, ask yourself, what’s the truth here?
Take things to their logical conclusion. Why is the messenger saying this? And what are they looking for? Are they looking to simply win an election and they’ll say anything to get there, or are they looking to make somebody else look bad?
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this analysis:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Thuan Vo.
Live from Music Row, Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Aaron Gulbransen in studio to discuss Tennessee Faith and Freedom Coalition goals and the expected swift passage of modified abortion trigger ban in Senate next week.
Leahy: We welcome in studio, the official guest host of The Tennessee Star Report and all-star panelist, Aaron Gulbransen and also the Tennessee state director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. How much longer do you anticipate the Tennessee General Assembly will remain in session?
Gulbransen: Everybody tells me probably the first week in May.
Leahy: We’ve got probably, what, five or six more weeks left, right?
Gulbransen: Yes.
Leahy: These sessions have an ebb and flow to them, right?
Gulbransen: They do, especially at the beginning, right? You’re, they’re not doing a lot on Mondays. Then, as of late, they do a lot on Mondays, but they’re typically not in session on Fridays. And they have their floor. This will expand as it goes on, but, they’ve typically had their floor sessions early in the morning on Thursdays in both Houses, and they get out of town.
Leahy: They did. I think they accomplished a lot early on with the prohibition of gender mutilation for those under the age of 18 and with the bill that prohibited sexually suggestive public shows where kids attended adult cabaret shows on public property.
Gulbransen: Adult cabaret shows on public property and also where children may be.
Leahy: They got that done.
Gulbransen: For those of you lefties in the audience, because there’s so many of you, I say sarcastically, listening to this show, the talking points on the left have been just so bizarre on SB 3.
Leahy: SB 3 being…
Gulbransen: The adult cabaret show ban on public property. And in front of kids they’ve tried to twist it and say, oh, you’re banning drag shows. You can’t do Shakespeare in the park anymore. And it’s just ridiculous empty rhetoric.
And of course, by revving up their people, the General Assembly got flooded based on that. And that, of course, was Senate Majority leader Jack Johnson’s bill. He’s had a great session. He was on the two bills we just mentioned; he was the Senate prime sponsor.
There is also legislation he sponsored passed that made some protections against government overreach on COVID, permanent. Which obviously is very important to me and most of us listening.
It was a good session for Leader Johnson. Of course, on the adult cabaret show ban, Chris Todd in the House deserves a lot of credit too.
Leahy: Chris has emerged as quite a leader there. There are a couple of other bills out there, though. There’s this controversial bill but it shouldn’t be controversial, but the proposal to make the Duck River a scenic river.
Apparently, there is a group that wants to turn parts near the Duck River in Maury County into a landfill. That’s turned out to be fairly contentious. I don’t know if you’ve tracked that particular one.
Gulbransen: No, because unfortunately, the Tennessee Faith and Freedom have nothing to do with that, those sorts of issues.
Leahy: Good point. So here’s my take on the Tennessee General Assembly right now. I think it started off very strongly. And now in part because of the controversy surrounding Lieutenant Governor McNally, it seems to be bogging down toward the end. Your thoughts?
Gulbransen: I think so. I think they were so hot and heavy and got a lot accomplished very quickly that it’s at the point where, okay, where do we go? Or a lot of the very important issues they’re working on, they’re not getting a lot of media attention.
Last night the House passed with 83 votes in favor of the modification of the state’s abortion trigger ban. Ultimately after a lot of public pressure and a lot of work by a lot of different people, a very narrow modification was made. They removed the affirmative defense clause in there. For those of you who don’t know what that means…
Leahy: Add me to that list. (Chuckles)
Gulbransen: You’ll see this in a lot of legislation and laws on the books in the state, especially on gun carry laws. It’s basically as some would say, an arcane way of saying you can’t do this except X, Y, and Z. And if you find yourself being charged this is your affirmative defense. I’m trying to think of an analogy that isn’t inflammatory here, but, if you are…
Leahy: Oh, you can be inflammatory.
Gulbransen: If for some reason you have to go speed really quickly because you’re in fear for your life and you get pulled over and you get a ticket and you can go to court and explain affirmatively. Yes, sir. Yes, I was speeding. But it’s because such and such was chasing after me with a gun. That’s affirmative. That’s an affirmative defense.
Leahy: That bill has passed the House now pretty resoundingly.
Gulbransen: Yes.
Leahy: Where is it on the state Senate side?
Gulbransen: I think you’ll see action next week.
Leahy: And you anticipate that bill will pass in the state Senate?
Gulbransen: I think it will. It’s on the Senate judiciary calendar today. It’ll probably sail through that and then you’ll see probably a floor vote next week.
Leahy: What’s the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s view on that bill?
Gulbransen: We are far happier with it than the original intent of it.
Leahy: That is a very qualified answer.
Gulbransen: In the beginning, it was far broader and it was all over the place. But we’re much happier with what it is now.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Background Photo “Tennessee Senate” by Tennessee General Assembly.
Live from Music Row, Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Tea Party Patriots Action Chairman Jenny Beth Martin to the newsmaker line to talk about the unfair treatment against former President Donald Trump.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line, our very good friend Jenny Beth Martin, honorary chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action. Good morning, Jenny.
Martin: Good morning. It’s so good to be with you, Michael!
Leahy: Jenny Beth, we wake up this morning and there’s a possibility that former President Donald Trump, he said, may be arrested today on literally trumped-up charges by the Soros-funded district attorney in Manhattan. He’s under attack in Fulton County with a kind of similar trumped upset of charges, and there is a special prosecutor going after him. What’s going on here?
Martin: What’s going on in New York has to do with Stormy Daniels. Remember that her own attorney wound up going to jail when the Mueller investigation looked into Stormy Daniels, and the Department of Justice did. They never brought charges against President Trump.
They did not think that there were grounds to bring charges against him. They dropped us back in 2019, and yet a district attorney, a Soros district attorney in New York, continued to press and press and may very well wind up with an indictment from the grand jury in New York against President Trump.
Over the weekend, it seemed likely to happen based on the posts at Truth Social that Trump made. And yesterday, we heard that the grand jury is still hearing from witnesses, and there’s not an indictment coming just yet.
So we’re going to have to wait and see what happens. It seems to me this is just a continuation of the witch hunt from the people who have Trump Derangement Syndrome. They cannot stand him, and they’re doing everything that they can to discredit him and harm his reputation.
Leahy: Yes. That’s pretty much the case. When the former president came out on Saturday and said, I expect to be arrested on these trumped-up charges on Tuesday, that was probably a pretty good PR move on the part of the president. The reaction has been pretty negative towards Alvin Bragg, the DA in Manhattan.
And I saw that the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, has said he wants to have Bragg come in and testify before the Judiciary Committee. Do you think that Alvin Bragg will come and testify before the House Judiciary Committee on the reasons for this potential indictment of former President Trump?
Martin: I just don’t know if he will or not. I do see a situation in which the committee may call him, but whether he responds to that call and actually shows up, I’m not sure if that will happen or not. I’ve heard some people saying things about what Trump said might be more for publicity than not for publicity.
I suspect there’s more to it going on than that. And here’s why. It would be so complicated to arrest a former president who has secret service detail. I would imagine part of what’s going on right now is that his current attorneys are in touch with the DA’s office in New York, trying to figure out and negotiate the terms in which they would arrest President Trump and how that would happen logistically.
I don’t know that he’s really getting over his skis, and I don’t have any proof. I haven’t heard that directly from him or from anyone who worked for him. It’s just what I would imagine might be going on behind the scenes that we’re not seeing.
Leahy: Yes, exactly. Now you mentioned the secret service protection for the president. He has it because people are concerned about his personal safety. Typically, if somebody is arrested and booked, how could you have secret service protection for a former president if the former president is being arrested and booked?
Martin: Yes. I think that is a real concern. I would imagine they’d have to go sweep the police station or the sheriff’s office first and make sure that the entire place is safe and secure for a president to go inside of it. It just shows the whole world that this is a witch hunt, and it’s time for it to stop. It needs to stop.
Hillary Clinton never went to jail even though she had a problem that they deemed illegal. And how the Justice Department was going after President Trump over the documents that he still had in his possession, which were co-classified documents, in which case the president has the authority to unclassify to declassify.
And yet we now learned that the former vice presidents, both Pence and Biden, had documents in their possession for in, in Biden’s case, for years. It’s been double standards. We’re getting very close to a Banana Republic territory when it comes to the treatment of Donald Trump in this country.
And Michael, I would tell you that having been targeted by the IRS, seeing the weaponization of the government, and being a victim of the weaponization of the government firsthand, I said back then, it’s people who work for the government were not held accountable.
This could happen to other people, and the situation would get worse and worse. And I think that we have seen a worsening of the weaponization of government ever since the IRS targeting.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Jenny Beth Martin” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0. Background Photo “Donald Trump” by Trump White House Archived.
Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the founder of Nashville Publicity Group and the Nashville Elvis Festival to the newsmaker line to describe the world’s best tribute to Elvis.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line right now, Brian Mayes, the founder of the Nashville Publicity Group and the organizer of the Nashville Elvis Festival. Welcome, Brian Mayes.
Mayes: Hey Michael. How are you?
Leahy: The seventh annual Nashville Elvis Festival will be held next Thursday, March 30th to April 2nd at the factory in Franklin. Are you the fellow who came up with this idea of a national Elvis festival?
Mayes: Yes. My business partner and I, Tom Brown who for many years, 20 years was the vice president of Turner Classic Movies has also worked for decades as the face of Graceland. So if you check into the hotel, he is on your screen welcoming you to the hotel. If you’re on the tour, he’ll pop up all over the place.
He hosts a lot of events there. He and I have worked with Graceland in different capacities for years, and we said, why is there not a festival in Nashville? And seven years ago bit the bullet and did it ourselves and it has grown into a little bit of a monster.
Leahy: A little bit of a monster. That’s an interesting way to describe it. Why do you call it a little bit of a monster?
Mayes: I’ll tell you, we thought it would be a fun event for Elvis fans here in Nashville, but what we have learned over several years now is that we’ve got people coming in from all over the world to celebrate the music and the legacy of the king of rock and roll. We’ve got performers that are going to take our stage.
We’ve got 30 of the best tribute artists in the world that are coming to perform. We’ve got guys coming from Brazil, Japan, all over Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and all over the United States. It really is one of the best. And it draws the fans as well.
Carmichael: What venues are included?
Mayes: We are at we were at the Franklin Theater for years. We’re now at the Factory of Franklin, in Liberty Hall. We’ve got 10 shows that all take place inside that venue. 11:00 am 3:00 pm and 7:00 pm each day. And the shows cover just about anything you could want as an Elvis fan.
We’ve got a 55th-anniversary recreation of the iconic ’68 Comeback special from NBC. We’ve got a career retrospective called Elvis through the years, which is a little more of a theatrical presentation. On Sunday morning, we’ve got Elvis Gospel Live which really is a throwback to all of the great gospel hits that Elvis recorded. And it’s the 50th anniversary this year of Aloha from Hawaii. So we’re recreating that on stage as well.
Leahy: Do you have to pay to have a contractual relationship with the Elvis estate or how does that all work?
Mayes: We do. We are a licensed event. Tom and I both work with Graceland in different capacities as well. So we’ve got a great relationship there and they’re really supportive of our festival each year.
Leahy: Has this been impacted at all by the death of Lisa Marie Presley and the conflict, shall we say, between Elvis’s wife Priscilla Presley, and her granddaughter, Riley Keough, the daughter of Lisa Marie?
Mayes: Yes. As you can imagine we’ve had a lot of conversations about that leading up to this year. Losing Lisa was a massive loss. She was an incredible talent and I think underrated. She never really had the opportunity to reach her potential because she was dealing with so many things throughout her life.
There’s a lot going on with the family, a fight over the estate and everything else, and we just came to the conclusion that we’re gonna let the family deal with the family stuff and we’re just gonna celebrate Elvis.
Leahy: Is the entity that licenses you, are they the ones that are involved in this dispute, or is that a separate situation?
Mayes: No. It’s just a family situation. It’s a fight over, as I understand it, the trust and Lisa’s final wishes for the estate. And so the Graceland as an entity, Elvis Presley Enterprises, the future there will end up being determined by the court.
Leahy: Are you licensed by the trust or is there a separate legal entity?
Mayes: No, it’s Elvis Presley Enterprises. We’re licensed through them.
Leahy: And that’s separate from the trust, is that right?
Mayes: It’s all in the trust, at the moment. But the work continues.
Leahy: This is an aside. I’ve been watching the series Daisy Jones and The Six which features Riley Keough the granddaughter of Elvis. She’s very good. Have you ever reached out to her about participating in some way in the now in the Elvis Festival?
Mayes: We have not. Riley has been acting and directing now for years. She’s been a little under the radar. I think she’s really coming into public awareness now with this series because of the series, the hit. It is a big show and it’s a great show.
It’ll be interesting as she becomes more involved with the Elvis world in the years to come as she now is, next in line how her relationship with Elvis starts to maybe grow a little bit. She hasn’t been part of the Elvis world up until now, but things are changing, I believe.
Leahy: Yes, exactly. It’s a little bit expensive to go to this event. Tell us why it’s worth the money.
Mayes: We’ve got a lot of options. We’ve got festival passes so that you can come to every show. We’ve got VIP festival passes, which give you a front row and a lot of extra perks. But we’ve got individual show tickets as well.
And tickets start at $49. So if you’re only in town for a day or you just want to and you really like the ’68 comeback special, and that’s what you want to see there’s something there for everybody.
You can come in and pick a show on its own, but you will not see a better collection of Elvis tribute artists on a single stage anywhere in the world. It is not the guy who shows up at the office party, he’s not the caricature of Elvis. These are guys who literally dedicated their lives and study every move, every ring is in place, every jump stick suit is coordinated, and every movement is right.
We’ve got guys on that stage that even the biggest Elvis fans will do a double-take without question. (Leahy chuckles) It’s the best of the best. We’ve got a lot of special guests too. Last year, Winona Judge showed up and surprised the audience on stage performed.
We’ve had a ton of people, John Schneider, Brenda Lee, Collin Ray, T.G. Sheppard, and our mutual friend Gary Chapman, who is a regular at the festival. And we’ve got a lot of people that have worked with Elvis and that have lived with Elvis’s best friend. This year we’ve got Sam Thompson, his bodyguarded and friend, and we’ve got Terry Blackwood, who toured with him for years and sang background vocals for him.
Legendary Blackwood Quartet. We’ve got Sloane Avery, who’s starring on Amazon in The Consultants right now. She’s coming in as a special guest, so we’ve got a lot of things. We’ve got stuff for everybody.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Elvis Festival” by The Nashville Elvis Festival
Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, we are living in almost a giant Saturday Night Live skit. You have crime across the country going through the roof. You have over a hundred thousand people, mostly young people under age 40 who are dying from fentanyl poisoning and you have homelessness that is going crazy.
You have just a degradation of social and societal values and you have a financial mess at the federal level in that the deficits are ridiculously high, and the regulations are forcing businesses and institutions to waste money complying with regulations.
And then you have the banks, which now we see a report over the weekend that up to 200 banks have similar problems to SVB and are at risk of a similar fate. You have JP Morgan and 10 other banks essentially extending a low-interest line of credit to First Republican.
You have Janet Yellen ridiculously saying, this is, I’m quoting here. “Administration officials maintained that the move to say First Republic was done at the initiative of the private sector.” But multiple outlets reported that Janet Yellen leaned on Jamie Diamond to get the deal done. I believe the second comment is more accurate than the first.
I don’t think a bunch of CEOs from 11 of the biggest banks all called each other and got on a conference call and said, hey, let’s all pony up a total of $30 billion. I think they were strong-armed to do it. And that in itself is telling. But you have all of that and you have many problems.
You have the tremendous stories out there now about the level of corruption between all these entities in China giving money to various Biden family interests, and then you have an indictment from New York over an issue that is seven years old. And it has to do with some hush money that Donald Trump paid to Stormy Daniels, as if that’s news.
It’s not news.
And then you have from The Epoch Times they’re now investigating gifts that were given by foreign dignitaries to Trump claiming that he didn’t properly register the foreign gifts when they came in. As I say, it’s like a Saturday Night Live skit.
You have Jonathan Turley who has said that the biggest initial hurdle that Alvin Bragg is gonna have to overcome is the statute of limitations on the use of a particular section of the code that that they’re trying to leverage to indict Trump. But the code says that there’s a statute of limitations of two years, but then if you can tie that particular offense to some federal offense, then it extends to five years.
The problem is that the document in question is more than six years old. And that doesn’t even matter when you think of what it really means is there’s zero question in my mind, zero question in my mind that the people in Washington signed off on Alvin Braggs, if he indicts Trump that this is a political prosecution that was approved by the powers in Washington.
And you have this expression, what goes around comes around. I’ve had discussions with people about what if Republicans get power. What if they treat Democrats the same way? And most of my response was, oh, that would not be good. That would not be good.
And then I asked him, I said how do you stop a bully from being a bully? Well, you punch ’em in the face.
And if they recognize it, that every time they’re a bully, they’re gonna get punched in the face. They’ll quit being a bully. I said, okay. I agree with that. And so now the question is if Republicans do regain power, and that’s an open question, and Republicans believe that the way the Democrats, the two-tiered system of justice that we have is akin to a bully on the playground. The question is how should Republicans respond. Historically, how Republicans have responded has not yielded a change in the direction of the country.
And that’s the great question here. No matter who is president, if Republicans are president we don’t go in the wrong direction at as a rapid speed as when Democrats are in power, but we still go in the wrong direction. We have an opportunity here to see what bullies do and we’ll see how we react.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Janet Yellen” by Janet Yellen. Photo “Donald Trump” by Trump White House Archived. Photo “Alvin Bragg” by Alvin Bragg. Photo “Jonathan Turley” by MSNBC. CC BY 3.0. Background Photo “Silicon Valley Ban” by Coolcaesar. CC BY-SA 4.0.
