Frank Cagle

Trustee John Duncan III ought to send Gloria Ray flowers. Her troubles with the Knoxville Tourism and Sports Corp. have kept him off the front page or the lead TV news items for a few days.

A special panel of the state Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s appellate justices are being properly elected to office by being appointed by the governor then one day facing a retention election. This in spite of the Tennessee ...

So how did Gloria Ray get to be Gloria Ray?

It’s an election year so expect the Legislature to at least talk about cutting taxes. This might seem odd in the middle of a recession (remember the crisis last year to pass a balanced budget?) but the state Legislature is ...

The Republicans are in control now and they are redrawing House district lines following the 2010 census and they are attempting to secure a filibuster proof majority. It is likely the Republican plan this time around will face a great ...

We had hoped to put the turmoil in county government behind us with the election of a new County Commission and a new-broom county mayor. But there is a mess looming out there and somebody needs to deal with it ...

The only thing we get from the Iowa caucus is ethanol subsidies.

We forget what it’s like when you are that age. There is so much to learn, so much to discover. There is so much you don’t know.

The oft repeated question around town the last couple of weeks is what did the Knoxville legal community know about Judge Richard Baumgartner’s drug problem and when did they know it? It is certainly an important question and some outside ...

I am not a sports expert, just an average Vol fan and an avid fan of college football. But there are a few things I don’t understand about the state of our university’s football operation.

Government payrolls are the backbone of the Knoxville economy, but those payrolls drive retail business and the other major driver of the Knoxville economy—the housing market. When I want to get depressed I call around to my list of experts ...

I still don’t know why my father insisted on buying his grandfather’s farm. He was an educator and we lived in town. The farm was on Snake Road, if that tells you anything, and isolated. In those pre-mechanical cotton-picker days ...

Madeline Rogero has become the first woman elected mayor of Knoxville and in fact, the first woman elected mayor of any of the state’s major cities. It is an important barrier to break through when you consider that in the ...

It probably angers both sides to suggest any commonality between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street protests. But that commonality is anger. Anger that results from feeling the country is in trouble and our leaders are being feckless ...

The pace and tone of the Knoxville mayoral race has changed, with the one-on-one choice between Madeline Rogero and Mark Padgett instead of a multi-candidate field.

Knoxville will have a new mayor soon and the city staff will have a new look, though depending on who gets elected some of the same faces will likely still occupy the sixth floor. Having someone with experience hanging around ...

Lest you think I’m slipping into an Old Fogey tirade against technology, let me say that I love my laptop and my cell phone. But I do wonder about our digital age 100 years from now. Will my great-grandchildren be ...

he thing about the media business is that what we in the profession think is important is not necessarily the things the reading and viewing public think are important. We want the scoop and the front page splash. The readers ...

As much as we love farmers, fresh food, and convenience, there are some things out there in agriculture that are worrisome. We need to pay attention, because our food supply is regulated largely by big farm-state congressmen and senators and ...

I think the quality of a thoughtful vote is more important than big numbers. Voter apathy is usually a symptom of contentment with the status quo. The people who will vote in this city election will be the people who ...

There is a much-needed debate about the ever-increasing power of the federal government at the expense of the states. Liberals and conservatives ought to be concerned, and given the behavior of Congress lately, perhaps there needs to be more state ...

Ronald Reagan’s “Big Tent” Republican Party is getting smaller every day. One wonders who the national Republican leaders expect to vote for them now and in the future.

Given the forces arrayed against him, Gov. Bill Haslam faces a major policy defeat during his first year in office. In addition to getting bad advice, his natural tendency to avoid confrontation and make everybody happy is putting him in ...

So what are all you college football fans going to do when the Southeastern Conference Championship game features Texas A&M and Virginia Tech? Oooh. Won’t that be exciting? If the game features A&M and Oklahoma State, will they still play ...

Having a good grasp of history is a useful thing in a presidential candidate, but they have to be careful. Smartasses in the media will be looking for mistakes. They don’t know these things either, but they have Google.

Madeline Rogero's poll suggests few people are mad or upset at city government. People still like the departed mayor and most people think things are swell in the city. In election terms, there aren’t a lot of angry voters out ...

Lawmakers and county and city mayors need to pay attention. If the Amazon ruling stands, it strikes at the heart of the state tax structure. In the last decade we killed a state income tax for a generation. The sales ...

To paraphrase Howard Baker’s famous line, what do we want to know about the Knoxville mayor’s race and when will we know it?

Never mind the technological challenges of transporting people who eat and breathe over millions of miles, can you conceive of a Congress that will provide the funds to make it possible?

Rather than worry about the politics of the science, can’t we all just agree that pollution is not a good thing, that wasting energy is stupid and expensive, and that we ought not damage the environment?

City races are nonpartisan, though one wonders if any election in Knox County can be run without party allegiances coming into play.

In the face of budget deficits, food price inflation in this country and food riots in Mexico over the price of corn, the U.S. Senate has voted to stop paying agribusiness interests a subsidy to burn food.

When picking a replacement for former University of Tennessee Athletics Director Mike Hamilton, it might be wise to figure out why he ultimately failed in the job. I asked the question a few weeks back: How can the man who ...

TVA’s first nuclear plant was at Browns Ferry, in North Alabama. It was the experience of building that plant that made TVA realize they cost much more than planned, they are much more complicated than dams and coal-fired plants, and ...

County Commission Chairman Mike Hammond may be positioning himself for a 2014 run against Mayor Tim Burchett.

With the influx of conservative Republicans and the overwhelming majority the Republicans achieved, there was a lot of discussion about the passage of a number of bills some would consider extreme. But the hand-wringing was for naught.

Last summer I suggested that the doom and gloom about the state budget was overstated. Gov. Phil Bredesen resented candidate Bill Haslam’s constant assertions of looming disaster, and the governor denied that the state budget was about to run off ...

As regular readers know, I have long been an advocate for elections. Electing school superintendents. Electing the state attorney general. Electing Supreme Court justices as the constitution stipulates. But I confess my eyes have been opened by the opponents of ...

As newspaper circulations decline and computer use increases, some politicians have proposed legislation to allow legal notices to be posted on the Internet rather than in agate type purchased in dead-tree products. As someone who loves dead-tree products, I don’t ...

The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand’s credo, argues that when people like Bill Gates and Paul Allen created a software company that runs most of the PCs in the world and get obscenely rich it also benefits society and the ...

So money is tight for the upcoming Knox County budget and there is even a move to get the County Commission more involved in budgets administered by other elected officials. What if you discovered there are millions of dollars owed ...

A Tea Party leader might view Republican Gov. Bill Haslam, part owner of Pilot Corp., as a “socialist” but so far he looks like a typical chief executive.

The biggest problem we have is the adversarial nature of our legal system. When a lawyer sues a doctor or a hospital, everyone goes into lockdown. It is a matter of months or years until the records, depositions, and testimony ...

Everyone agrees an intermodal facility makes sense from an environmental standpoint, getting trailer trucks off the interstate and onto rail cars. But there are brownfields up and down the rail lines, there are sites along the interstate, there are sites ...

It is tragic, but necessary, that everyone involved in NCAA violations—in football, basketball, and in the Athletics Department administration—has to be removed from the university. It is extreme surgery, but the department has been infected from top to bottom.

Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett won his office with an overwhelming popular vote that was also Duncan-esque. In the 80 percent range. He remains popular with the public at large. But at six months into office he is also accumulating ...

Gov. Bill Haslam is trying to reassure teachers that the Republicans are not at war with them, just determined to reward good teachers and encourage the not-good teachers to find another line of work. But the flurry of Republican education ...

Hunting and fishing in Tennessee is largely non-commercial. The state regulates what’s hunted and hunters find places to hunt, depending on the kindness of landowners or leasing tracts for a hunting season. What we have to ask ourselves is whether ...

The confusion between “taxing the Internet” and taxing goods sold online has allowed companies like Amazon to use the government in order to provide themselves with a competitive advantage. They have an advantage of almost 10 percent of the purchase ...

Well, it’s finally official that scattered-site housing for Knoxville’s homeless has been suspended. As a practical matter it has been moribund for some time. Trying to find a site for a new housing unit during the city mayoral campaign this ...