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Cheers!
It's always a great day when one of our own throws a great party and changes her name. Our longtime art critic Heather Joyner married Dr. Mac Spica (and added his name to her byline) in a spirited ceremony and even more festive reception on Nov. 8. Spica, a neuropsychologist from Michigan, will be moving to K-town as soon as he gets certified to practice in Tennessee. Hurry up, Mac, we hear you're a guitarist!
—The Editor

Put TVA in Business

I would agree that TVA, beginning under Marvin Runyon, was on the way to becoming a business [Editor's Corner, Nov. 20], but as soon as Craven Crowell took over it became the playground of the Democrats in power.

The excesses of the Crowell term are well known if lamentably not prosecuted. (Take for instance the board library in the Nashville office covered with $345,000 in wood paneling. For three board members! Or the half-million dollars to Howard Baker's law firm to get Johnny Hayes reappointed.)

You point out that TVA is 70 years old. The depression is over, Roosevelt is gone, and the need for the government to run TVA as it exists today is long past. We would have been so much better positioned today in the industrial markets if Eisenhower had been able to sell TVA in the 1950s when it still had some value.

Today, TVA is bankrupt, and cannot be sold without the government eating a part of its $28 billion debt. No accounting firm outside of Arthur Andersen would certify TVA as a going concern if it were not a government entity. We pay for overpriced energy to support an ideal of the 1940s (Bristol Va. left TVA and reduced its energy cost from $24 million to something like $16 million the first year).

TVA is not run by knowledgeable utility executives sitting on the board, but rather by political appointees put in place to achieve a political agenda. You decry the current Republican agenda, and I decry the past Democratic agenda. We are both right and both wrong. We need a proper business-oriented agenda, which we will not have as long as TVA remains a government entity. At 70 the time has come.

John McPherson
Knoxville

Just Because You're Paranoid...

In "Not in the Library," Judy Loest may have put the Jayson Blair [scandal] out of reach for the rest of the Metro Pulse writers. If not for her bias, quickly laid out in the first sentence, when she refers to the FBI as "the dark forces," one might have been able to believe she is at least not a Blairesque liar. In the future, when she writes such a flawed article, please ask her to substantiate her claims with more evidence than one of her friends who obviously thinks all men in suits are FBI.

One more thing, tell Ms. Loest that when you reference the ACLU, NPR and Slate.com as supplying you with your views on the Patriot Act, you have just negated any serious analysis of your work.

The most telling statement in her article was the line, "Suddenly the terrorists seemed less threatening than the Bush administration." Perhaps her ignorance of how offensive this statement might be to actual survivors of a terrorist attack can be explained to her. You might send her to New York to interview a wife, child, or husband of an actual terrorism victim. Maybe then, she and her make believe friend would get a clearer picture of who the enemy really is.

David W. Gibson
Knoxville, TN