We thought of Cosmo Castorini in Moonstruck as City Council talked about the proposal to build a publicly-funded garage in Overton Square: “It costs money because it saves money.” City government may appear to be saving money if...
Read MoreThe “politics of destruction” practiced by elected officials seems tame when compared to public employees themselves. It’s hard to reach any other conclusion after watching AFSCME’s over-the-top slash and burn campaign...
Read MoreYes, we agree with Tea Partiers that government needs to return to its historical underpinnings. No, we don’t mean the historical fictions advanced by the Tea Party to justify policies that often seem un-American in a...
Read MoreMemphis City Council Budget Chairman Shea Flinn nailed it. And every Memphis taxpayer should remember it. “You can’t be against a tax increase and reductions in services,” he said. To his point, if you’re against a tax...
Read MoreIn light of conversations that seem to be occurring all over Memphis, we’re reprising this post from February of this year: Possibly the only thing more disconcerting than the self-loathing that is such a regular feature...
Read MoreThis is the second post about the issue of Memphis tax inequity. The first part was published in the previous post. Effectively addressing the serious issues facing Memphis is complicated by the absence of a coherent...
Read MoreSeveral years ago, Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin said “functional consolidation doesn’t work” and blew up several city-county law enforcement units. At the time, many suggested that he acted on deep political motivations,...
Read MoreCaught in a brutal vise of too many kids, too little density and a broken tax structure, the people who head up local government here may not need to be mayors, but alchemists. There are so many troubling trends taking place in...
Read MoreMemphis Mayor A C Wharton has an ambitious agenda that he laid out during his campaign, but the goal he set recently surpasses all of them for its audaciousness: To make Memphis one of the country’s best-run cities. That is of...
Read MoreMemphis city government has a chronic case of what political pundits call the John Kerry syndrome. It’s when the truth falls victim to an impenetrable conventional wisdom so engrained in the public psyche that anecdotes have...
Read MoreThe Memphis Poll — city government’s equivalent of the Consumer Confidence Index — said that 8 out of 10 Memphians are satisfied with city services. That’s the highest rating since 2001. Results of the poll never...
Read MoreSometimes, something takes on so much symbolic power that it comes to define something much broader. For Memphis city government, that something is auto inspection. The unconscionable waste of the only thing that really matters...
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by Bill Day. Memphian Bill Day is two-time winner of the RFK Journalism Award in Cartooning. His cartoons are syndicated internationally by Cagle Cartoons. Cartoons Archive →