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:
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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.
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.
Live from Music Row Friday 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 Davidson County Republican Party Chairman Lonnie Spivak in studio to explain legislation that could give Republicans a chance at winning the Nashville mayoral race.
Leahy: We are having too much fun here. In studio with us, the chairman of the Davidson County Republican Party, Mr. Lonnie Spivak. There’s a possibility that everything you know about the Davidson County, Nashville Davidson County Mayor’s race, could change.
And that change agent is the Tennessee General Assembly. There is a bill there that would eliminate the runoff element of it. And now we’ve got eight or nine candidates that have declared. The election is scheduled for August 3rd.
The filing deadline is May 18th. And since the formation of the Metro government back in 1965 the mayor has always had to have won more than 50 percent of the vote. And the way it works is the first election is on August 3rd, the August election, if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, then the top two candidates meet in a runoff.
That’s been the way it’s been for a long time, and I think the past couple of races have had those runoffs. This year, however, that could change. Tell us what’s going on with the Tennessee General Assembly on that.
Spivak: The bill in the Senate is SB 1527 and the companion bill in the House is HB 1399. And what this bill will do is it’ll remove the runoff election element of local elections, and the winner would just have to win by a plurality vote.
Leahy: So for instance, let’s just say if this race, there are eight announced candidates right now. And let’s say the leading candidate gets 29 percent and the second candidate gets 27 percent and the third candidate gets 20 percent, and the rest are below that; in that scenario, in the current law, the 29 percent person and the 27 percent person will be the only two to make it to a runoff in September.
Spivak: Yes. That’s how it’s currently structured.
Leahy: But if this law passes the number one person in that scenario that got 29 percent, the plurality of the vote, that person would be the new mayor.
Spivak: And that this really. This bill, if it passes, will give Republicans are real shot at winning races in Davidson County and other large cities in Nashville, where the demographics currently work against us. It’s being slowed up in the Senate a little bit right now, so its passage is up in the air. It’s in the state and local government committees.
It was supposed to be brought up this week, but there were a couple of members of the committee out, so they deferred it to Monday. And so I really encourage people to contact the members of the state and local government committee and let them know that you would like for them to consider passing the runoff election bill. The language hasn’t been added to the bill yet.
It’s still just a caption, but we’ll need the committee to meet and add the language to the bill, so they consider it for passage. And in order for this to move forward, those steps need to happen. Or else we’re gonna be dead in the water and we’ll lose the best chance we’ve had in a hundred years of electing Republicans in the city of Nashville.
Leahy: Now we Republicans could probably get a candidate who gets 29 percent of the vote.
Spivak: Yes. Typically, we’re in the 23 to 27 percent of the vote, depending on how many candidates are in the race. If Republicans know that there’s a good conservative candidate in the race and they coalesce. There are enough Republicans in Nashville to get to the 35 percent mark. Donald Trump did very well in 2016 in Nashville. So we know the votes are here. We just need to get them to the polls.
Leahy: In this race now there are eight candidates. Five Democrats, two Republicans, one independent, I think, is what it looks like right now. Right now, yeah. Yeah. Sharon Hurt. She’s from the Council of Fred O’Connell from the council, Matt Wilshire, who’s been appointed. He’s a Democrat. Jeff Yarbro.
Spivak: Fran Bush.
Leahy: Oh, and then I guess Jim Gingrich. Carpetbagger.
Spivak: You like that word.
Leahy: I do. Because he is a carpetbagger, by any definition of the word. Jim, by the way, you’re welcome to come in. And then Fran Bush, a former member of the school board, a friend of ours who’s an independent, and then two Republicans, Natisha Brooks, who ran previously in the GOP primary and then Alice Rolli, Natisha and Fran have been.
Alice Rolli will be here a week from today. We’ll talk to her about it. But if you look at it either of those, let’s say of the conservatives, you might add or Republicans, you would add three candidates.
Alice Rolli, Fran Bush, and Natisha. Fran and Natisha, I think are gonna struggle to raise money. I think Al’s gonna raise some money. I don’t know exactly how much we’ll find out when she’s in, on Friday, but really right now it doesn’t look like to me, any of those three are in a position to win. Certainly in the runoff.
Maybe if they have this new law, and of course as the Davidson County Republican Party Chairman, you’re limited in what you can do in this race. Tell us about what Davidson County Republican Party can and cannot do in this mayoral race.
Spivak: I asked the state chairman Scott Golden on what the rules were in non-partisan races. There’s still a lot of ambiguity about how to handle nonpartisan races. From my aspect, there are, there is more than one Republican in the race, and it should be our position as the county party to pick between Republicans.
And so what I’m gonna be proposing to the board on the 28th is that we treat it as a partisan race that we use our PAC to run ads against candidates and ideas that we are against but really treat it as a partisan race. The ultimate decision will be up to the board, but that is how I hope to present things to the board.
It really puts us in an awkward position, and I don’t want the county party to be in a position and have a history of supporting one Republican when multiple Republicans are running.
Leahy: Yes. And that’s the situation here. And that is a very measured approach to it, and it makes a lot of sense. However, I will say that if you look at it, the opportunity here for if one single Republican candidate came out and everybody focused on that candidate and that candidate had money and was credible, I think that candidate would be able to, get up to 35 percent of the vote. And then if this law were to pass, Democrats’ heads would explode.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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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.
Photo “Lonnie Spivak” by Lonnie Spivak. Background Photo “Davidson County Courthouse” by euthman. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Saturday morning on WarRoom: Battleground, Stephen K. Bannon welcomed The Star News Network’s National Political Editor, Matt Kittle the program to discuss the Iowa caucus, Kari Lake’s reception, and the newly launched Iowa Star digital newspaper.
Bannon: Matt Kittle, Michael Patrick Leahy had this vision of doing the battleground states and doing these new sites, and it’s just been incredible what you guys have accomplished. Tell me about Iowa.
You’re launching a new site. I guess you launched it a little earlier this morning, but you’re launching a new site in the very important first state to kick off Iowa caucuses next January. Tell us about your new site, sir.
Kittle: You bet. Thank you, Steve. Iowa is still critical to the political map, whether the Democrats want to acknowledge that or not. As you well know, the DNC has basically turned its back on Iowa, which has long been traditionally the first state to enter the fray. And it’s Hawkeye cauceye, if you will.
The Republicans here will still hold the first in the nation caucuses, but the DNC, as I said, has turned its back in Iowa. The Democrats here want to continue to be the first in the nation to hold those caucuses. They have to by Iowa state law. The issue is the DNC has gone in a different direction.
They don’t think Iowa is diverse enough. But Iowa, Steve, as you well know, as we just saw in the last segment, is very much, in many ways, Trump country. And Kari Lake last night in the Quad Cities, and I think today in suburban Des Moines will bring that full message and bring out the kind of crowd that we saw last night.
Bannon: Look, here’s what Iowa provides, and it is Trump’s MAGA country, and that’s Trump wins. It is now big, and that’s one of the reasons the Democrats don’t like it. What’s the importance of Iowa? It’s discernment. Iowa, New Hampshire, those flinty Yankees up in New Hampshire, and this common sense heartland of America in Iowa weigh and measure you, right?
They weigh and measure you. And this is very important. It’s important for the country. Retail politics. You got to go into those small rooms. You got to have small gatherings. Now President Trump ran it a little differently, but still, the Hawkeyes have a discernment that the nation depends upon. I think it’s great that it starts in Iowa, and it’s going to be very important. Leahy is always ahead of the curve. Tell me about the site and tell me about your thoughts on Kari Lake.
Kittle: You bet. As you said, we just launched last night. You’ll find all kinds of information on our site, theiowastar.com. It includes the meeting last night that Kari Lake had with so many good Iowans. We will continue with our special Iowa caucus edition 2024.
We will continue the blanket coverage on Iowa, Iowa politics, all this stuff, particularly the kind of inside stuff we have here in the Des Moines area that no other publications can offer in many ways.
And frankly, as you know, the mainstream media refuses to offer. It’s interesting about Kari Lake. Every story you see here in Iowa, the mainstream press, as you see in The New York Times or The Washington Post, they can’t begin a lead without saying Kari Lake has made all kinds of charges that aren’t true.
They put this stuff in their lead when we know that the election integrity problems in Arizona, just as we’ve seen in the major states during the Zuckerbucks era of 2020, are very real and they’re very troubling. And what they hate is Kari Lake is shining a big spotlight on it all.
Bannon: Big time. Matt, how did they get to the site? How did they get to you guys on social media? What are the coordinates for The Star News Network and all the work you’re doing? The Tennessee Star has broken I think the most important thing about this Memphis situation with Mr. Nichols, about it being a targeted hit about everything, and with the whole thing about the text messages and the relationship of the police officer’s female acquaintance with Mr. Nichols and all this. You’re doing great reporting. How do people get there?
Kittle: Thank you so much. Yes, that’s a big story. We’ll continue to follow up. But in terms of Iowa, the new site again launching is theiowastar.com. And as I said, we’ll be at the Kari Lake session later on this afternoon in Ankeny, Iowa.
Bannon: Thank you very much, sir. Appreciate it. Matt Kittle from The Star News Network. Head reporter, head political editor.
Listen to the interview:
[rumble]https://rumble.com/embed/v26j2ki/?pub=4[/rumble]
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Live from Music Row, Thursday 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 Columbia, Tennessee mayoral candidate Debbie Matthews in-studio to describe the race for mayor of the 40,000-person town.
Leahy: In the studio, our guest, our good friend from Maury County, a candidate for mayor of the city of Columbia, Debbie Matthews. Good morning, Debbie.
Matthews: Good morning, everybody. So good to be here.
Leahy: We’re delighted to have you here. Well, the clock is ticking.
Matthews: One week from yesterday, early voting starts and Republicans have got to get out. There will be no division in the ranks. Republicans have to show up.
Leahy: So it is now three weeks and five days until Election Day.
Matthews: That’s right.
Leahy: November 8th. And tell us a little bit about the race for mayor. You are one of two candidates.
Matthews: I’m one of two candidates. Columbia – I call it our little jewel box – it’s a 40,000-person town that is a very, very conservative city.
Leahy: Very conservative city. It’s the home, of course, of James Polk. James Polk, the 10th President of the United States of America.
Matthews: That’s correct. The 11th.
Leahy: Eleventh.
Matthews: Eleventh. My brain snapped.
Leahy: I stand corrected.
Matthews: I think it is the 11th. But he said, I’m going to serve one term, I’m going to do everything I promise to do, and then I’m out. And that’s the greatest thing I think any politician can do, is don’t overstay your welcome. So we love James Polk. But Columbia, Tennessee, I do call it our little jewel box.
If you have not been to Columbia, you have to come. It is one of the most special places on earth. And we do currently have a mayor’s race going on. And, you know, like most municipalities, you know, there’s a charter that they have to be nonpartisan races.
Leahy: Yes, in the charter of the city. Now, that is a little bizarre …
Matthews: So in 2018, the Republicans – which I’m the chair of the Maury County Republican Party, now – but in 2018, as a member, we said we have to have some sort of touchstone that we know where people are sort of starting.
And so we said we’re making our county executive a partisan race, which is the county mayor, and we’re going to move to get our county commissioners, move them into partisan races. And we did that.
And then this last year, of course, we were like, we have got to have our school board members run partisan, because right now everything coming out of the school board situation, you have to be able to see who you’re dealing with and where their thoughts are. So we got that through.
Leahy: And that’s in for the county, for Maury County. But there are 12 members of the Maury County board.
Matthews: It is.
Leahy: And by the way, just for our listeners, just a reminder, that the 2020 National Constitution Bee champion … [Jackson Carter] is now a member of the Maury County Board of Education. He’s a sophomore at the University of Alabama.
Matthews: He’s a freshman. And we wanted Jackson Carter. He’s just the most terrific kid who is the president of our Young Republicans, and he’s doing a fantastic job. But, you know, we looked at our state reps, and our meetings, and we said, this year we want our partisan school board races to take it to the legislature and get this done.
That started in Maury County. We have to have partisan school board races because all the craziness that everyone’s trying to push. We know that liberals, or progressive socialists, whatever you want to call them, basically had a full-court press.
They said we’re going to take everything over at local levels. We are seeping into every area. And, you know, Republicans were asleep on that, just thinking …
Leahy: Well, that’s happened around the country. Thank you, George Soros, for that. That is happening in Maury County and the city of Columbia.
Matthews: Everywhere. And so you go, why is this person running for DA?
Leahy: And that is a daunting thought.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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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.
Photo “Debbie Matthews” by Debbie Matthews. Background Photo “Columbia, Tennessee” by Matt Locke. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Live from Music Row Wednesday 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 to discuss Joe Biden’s right to rule as a Marxist with hopes that Republicans will exert their power once the tables are turned in 2024.
Leahy: We are joined in studio by the original all-star panelist, Crom Carmichael. Good morning, Crom.
Carmichael: Good morning, Michael. Yesterday afternoon, the legal but not legitimate current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Joe Biden, gave what I thought was one of the most divisive and ignorant, dishonest speeches by a modern American president in some time. I don’t know if you saw it all. Did you see it?
Carmichael: I saw sound bites.
Leahy: He claimed that January 6 rioters are worse than slave-owning Confederates in the Civil War because they breached the U.S. Capitol.
He also said that basically everybody who supports Donald Trump is an awful person because they actually want to have election integrity laws that make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat. It was extraordinarily divisive and mean.
Carmichael: Let me just ask, Michael. Of the sound bites I saw, not one of them surprised me. Are you actually surprised?
Leahy: Well, not that he believes this crime, but that it is his overt strategy to be so dishonest and divisive at a time when supposedly can’t we all get together.
Carmichael: But he’s always been like that.
Leahy: I agree. He has.
Carmichael: I think it’s instructive. And actually, I take a little bit different position than you do. I agree that it was reprehensible what he said, but the American people need to have a choice.
And Joe Biden, if you want the biggest, most oppressive, most regulatory, high-taxing government, perhaps since FDR – and let’s remember when FDR left office, the top marginal tax rate was 94 percent – and Biden wants to be what he considers to be greater than FDR.
I suppose in Biden’s perfect world, we’d be a Marxist state, that Washington, D.C. would control all the means of production. I have some friends who were anti-Trumpers, and they wouldn’t discuss the possibility of a Marxist Democrat party.
They wouldn’t discuss it because if they discussed it, they had to agree that Trump was better than that. And it’s a really interesting thing when you discuss things with people.
If they are uncomfortable talking about the alternative, then they’re not willing to think through the choices that we have.
And what Biden is doing both by what he says in this case – not all of the things, a lot of things he says are distractions – but his deeds calling for a whole-of-government approach.
Now, we’re going to talk a little bit later in the show.
In fact, we could talk about it right now. There was a guy that Trump appointed to be head of the Social Security system. That’s no big deal except that you’re appointed for a term.
Leahy: Right.
Carmichael: Biden has fired him.
Leahy: I didn’t know that. On what grounds?
Carmichael: Because he can. And I’m okay with that. Let me say why. When Trump was president, the media believed that he didn’t have the authority to fire people.
I hope that the next president, assuming that when Republicans take charge again and have control of the executive branch, it’s my hope that the next president takes Biden’s approach where he will use the whole of government, he or she, to rein in the government and to fire people who do not carry out in the executive branch.
Every employee in the executive branch is under the chief executive. There are people who disagree with that. There are people who say that the union contracts say that the President cannot fire somebody who’s a civil servant.
And my argument is I don’t think that’s been constitutionally tested if somebody will not carry out the policies of the administration and whether or not they can be fired.
Leahy: The whole point of having an election and having a president to head the executive department is the people are saying we support the policies of this president. And he should be able to fire people who don’t implement his policy.
Carmichael: Right.
Leahy: I agree with you on that principle.
Carmichael: And so what Biden is saying and making it clear to everybody, that he wants Washington to be the end-all and the be-all of government.
He doesn’t want people in Tennessee to have the right to live the way people and, under the laws, that the people of Tennessee want to live.
That’s what he is saying. I’m glad he is saying that because it shows there’s no obfuscation at all. My word of the day. Obfuscation.
There’s no obfuscation at all as to what the Democrat Party stands for. I have said over and over again, the Democrat Party is the party of government.
Leahy: Absolutely. And, in fact, Crom, if I could just add to that point, Mark Levin has a new book out called American Marxist.
Carmichael: I have ordered it. I don’t think it’s in print yet. Maybe it is.
Leahy: Here is what we ought to do, because we know Mark Levin and Mark Levin is a friend of ours. I’m going to invite them to come to Nashville.
And maybe the three of us could have, like, an evening that – with Mark Levin. An evening with Mark Levin, Crom Carmichael, and Michael Patrick Leahy.
And we’ll talk about American Marxism. Because let us be honest about the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It is American Marxism.
Carmichael: Yes.
Leahy: That is exactly what it is. And Mark Levin is totally on point.
Carmichael: Let me say this. You’ve heard the old expression. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and whatever else it is, it’s probably a duck. It’s a duck.
And so just because Democrats claim that they are not Marxists doesn’t mean that they’re not Marxists. If it walks like a Marxist, if it governs like a Marxist, if it talks like a Marxist, it’s a Marxist.
Leahy: Now, that’s very good, Crom. That’s very good.
Carmichael: Thank you. You’re having low standards today.
Leahy: No, no, no. I don’t think anybody’s quite taken that twist on it. But it’s good.
Carmichael: Well, thank you. What Biden is doing, the question is, is whether or not it is legal and whether or not the president has a right to place people in positions of power to carry out their policies and to remove people who resist their policies.
And I believe that the President of the United States has that authority. You also have Neil Gorsuch who talks about how we need to be very concerned about the bureaucratic state.
Well, under Biden, the bureaucratic state will control everything including elections, by the way.
Leahy: Oh, yeah. The national bureaucratic state.
Carmichael: Yes. He would like to control everything. And when you look at the industries that the FTC is now trying to regulate.
In fact, I would challenge somebody to name a large industry that Biden doesn’t want to regulate from Washington. I would challenge them to pick a single large industry.
Not a company, but a large industry that Biden does not want to regulate. And so we’re seeing what Biden wants and what the Democrats want.
Therefore, when Republicans retake power and if the Democrats are unsuccessful at changing the election process and making it so that there’s a permanent party.
Leahy: The permanent cheat. Because, that’s what the Democrats – that’s what they want to do. They want to codify cheating for Democrats.
Carmichael: So if they’re unable to do that…
Leahy: We hope they are unable to do that.
Carmichael: I said if they’re unable to do that, Republicans retake the House in 2022 and control the Senate and the presidency after the 2024 election, then it’s my great hope that the next president – be it Trump or some other Republicans – uses the power of the executive state to shrink government.
Another thing Biden has done is the Congress appropriated and Trump signed a bill that allocated two billion dollars to complete the wall. Biden chose not to spend that money.
Leahy: He’s violating the law.
Carmichael: No, he chose not to spend that money. If he were violating the law, he would be impeached, or there would be a lawsuit or something.
There would be criminal activity, which shows you that if Biden has the right as president to not spend money appropriated by Congress, then that means that a Republican president would have that same right.
And so I think it’s a fascinating thing to think about all the different things that Biden is doing. And then the next president can simply say: Biden did it. I didn’t think that what he did was right, but I think he had the right to do it. Therefore, I’m doing it my way.
Leahy: A very interesting point.
Listen to the second hour here:
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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.
