The voters of Tennessee’s 9th District, whose checkered past includes decades of support for the corrupt Ford family, are to be congratulated for rejecting Nikki Tinker’s challenge to incumbent representative Steve Cohen. Tinker’s low-rent Cynthia McKinney impersonation, which included implying that Cohen (a Jew) was a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan, thankfully only commanded 19% of the vote in the Democratic party primary. Then again, maybe we should be disturbed that her share of the vote was that high.

Robert Lawson writes in passing:

Memphis’s Interstate BBQ is the best airport joint in America btw. It’s near gate B14—look for the long line of NWA pilots!

The real reason to fly through Memphis is the Lenny’s in the main part of the B concourse (near gate B3 I think). Either way, most of the guys in line in Memphis are probably Pinnacle pilots, not Northwest folks.

As for the “goner” status of the Memphis hub for Northwest, first Delta will have to figure out how to ditch all their regional jet contracts and find a way to continue Northwest’s tradition of soaking Memphis consumers without keeping the same availability of nonstop flights and rolling out the red carpet for Southwest—all those Shelby plates on cars at airport lots in LIT and BNA are just a hint of the level of business they could do out of Memphis against a retreating Delta.

I’ll just take it for granted that some idiot leftists will decide that John McCain’s presence in Memphis today on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King is a really deeply-coded appeal to racists. Your challenge: guess their rationale in the comments. Bonus points if you can work in the concept of James Earl Ray not being the lone gunman/involved in a conspiracy/also being the shooter in both Kennedy assassinations and making Ted run off the road at Chappaquiddick. Super bonus points if you can somehow tie Hillary Clinton’s simultaneous presence in the same city to a plan orchestrated by The Man to make Barack Obama look bad.

Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, the city’s first African-American mayor, subject of Marcus Pohlmann and Michael Kirby’s Racial Politics at the Crossroads, and the longest-serving city executive in Memphis history, will be resigning on July 31, according to the Commercial Appeal and WREG Channel 3. The reason for Herenton’s resignation is not yet clear, although the CA website indicates that ”[r]ecently a federal grand jury exploring Herenton’s ties to a city contractor has served subpoenas at the Memphis Area Transit Authority offices.”

I am finally on the return leg of the grand roadtrip—I have one more day in Memphis before I finally get back home to butt-numbingly cold St. Louis. I enjoyed my visit to New Orleans. Both of my SPSA panels went well, although they were, alas, lightly attended; I am certainly more confident about the publication prospects for the paper, although now it needs a blog nickname—perhaps “the damn measurement paper” will suffice.

I also enjoyed catching up with Steven, Dieter (the rock upon whom ICPSR is built), Andrew (all too briefly), and Kelly.

After a last-minute grading emergency, I finally escaped St. Louis and got to Memphis, a.k.a. stop one on the grand road trip.

Now, hopefully stop three won’t sink into the Gulf of Mexico between now and SPSA… (þ: BigJim).

After a brief respite at home, it’s back on the road again tomorrow; I’m going to Memphis for the weekend to watch Ole Miss get trounced by play Auburn down in Oxford with my mom and my step-dad.

But never fear, posting won’t be going away… for reasons that deeply annoy me (largely the intersection of Charter’s unreliable cable modem service and AT&T’s nonexistent DSL in my little corner of Clayton), my mother’s house actually has better high-speed Internet access than mine.

My former co-blogger Brock is having issues with the Commercial Appeal’s circulation department—this is the same division that managed to keep delivering the paper to my mother’s new house during her entire week-long honeymoon. If the circulation division is as slack-jawed as the motley collection of idiots/editors that have turned the paper into something I wouldn’t use as birdcage lining for fear of insulting the intelligence of parakeets, I don’t see Brock getting this mess straightened out any time soon.

At some level, it’s a shame that I don’t have more stuff on Southern machine politics in my southern politics seminar. Memphis’ latter-day Crumps, the Fords, remain masters of the art form, which is well-typified in the current dispute over Ophelia Ford’s apparently fraudulent election to replace brother John (whose own shenanigans were a Signifying Nothing staple from back when Signifying Nothing was a pathetic little website called MemphisWatch nearly a decade ago).

Anyway, a Ford chum sitting on the U.S. district court has now decided to grant (Ophelia) Ford’s request for a restraining order stopping the state legislature from refusing to seat her, pending a hearing next week, thereby vitiating the hopes of anyone wanting this mess resolved any time soon.

See Bob Krumm, Mike Hollihan, and Adam Groves for all the commentary and details you can shake a stick at. (þ: Instapundit)

It turns out that the Memphis neighborhood known as “New Chicago” isn’t the only way in which the Bluff City resembles the Windy City: at least one man who died August 6th voted on September 15th in a special election that, by sheer happenstance, replaced disgraced former State Sen. John Ford with his sister Ophelia. Ms. Ford won the hotly contested race by 13 votes; the dead man’s participation raises the number of illegally-cast ballots discovered to 5 thus far.