By ERICA DAVIS | Nashville Voice

Residents have noticed that Nashville is growing fast. Businesses are booming in the music city but when it comes to minority and women-owned businesses, Nashville will need some improvement. In fact, the recent release of a city-funded disparity study conducted by Griffin and Strong Law Firm from 2013-2017, shows that Nashville is lacking in the range of business owners that it conducts business.

According to the Nashville Business Journal, the study found that of the nearly $3 billion worth of Metro prime contracts reviewed, 16.54 percent of those taxpayer dollars went to minority and women-owned businesses. That amounts to roughly $480 million out of $2.9 billion pool. To read the full study, click here.

Nashville Mayor David Briley acknowledge the findings of the study back in September, saying: “The (study), which is being presented to Council today, confirms there are disparities in the participation of those firms in the city’s procurement process. These results, while not surprising, are unacceptable,” he said. “As I talk about often, my administration is committed to ensuring all Nashvillians can equitably participate in our city’s success and growth. … I have directed my administration to work with community, business and Metro stakeholders to take these steps.”

On Thursday, Nov. 1, Briley, members of his administration and community leaders all converged at Swett’s Restaurant in North Nashville for the creation of the Nashville Business Alliance, a new political action committee called together to help increase the number of women-owned and minority-owned businesses who work with local government.

The committee is currently being spearheaded by Michael Carter, a co-founder of Pinnacle Construction Partners; Jacky Akbari, board chairwoman of the National Organization for Workforce Diversity; Lee Molette, CEO of Molette Investment Services; Turner Nashe, senior vice president of education services at Innertainment Delivery Systems/Global Tel*Link; Jerry Maynard, CEO of The Maynard Group; and Harvey Hoskins, co-founder of Hoskins and Co. PC.

At the event, Mayor Briley both acknowledged the city’s explosive growth within the past seven years and reaffirmed his commitment to doing his part to helping women-owned and minority-owned businesses in the city thrive.

Ashford Hughes, who serves as the Mayor’s chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer for Metropolitan Davidson Government, echoed the importance of having the disparity study conducted and weighed in on how Metro Government plans to use its findings.

“Conducting studies like this one are important to see if Metro Government’s programs are in good faith effort,” says Hughes. “This study gives us the specific numbers available.”

Maynard, owner of The Maynard Group and former city councilman, said he believes the support and leadership from Briley is going to be helpful in pushing forward the mission to increase women and minority-owned businesses.

“The mayor is critical; if the Mayor does not show strong leadership as the leader of our city none of this would get done,” Maynard said. “ So Mayor Briley has shown strong leadership now it is important for our community to rally not only behind him but alongside him to make sure that these initiatives of inclusion and equity not only has passed as far as legislation but make sure it happens in real life.”

“This disparity study shows that 6.8 percent of contracts went to women and minority-owned businesses,” he added. “We created the (Nashville Business Alliance) to support the Mayor’s equity and inclusion initiative. We are not going to just stop there, then we are going to go to the private sector and we are going to fight to make sure the private sector that they reflect inclusion and diversity because the private sector is doing worse than Metro Government.”

By Aaron Kessler and Annie Grayer | CNN News

Early voting continues to be explosive one day before Election Day, as an energized American electorate weighs in on its government.

As of Monday morning, at least 31 million people have voted early nationwide, according to data collected by Catalist, a data company that works with Democrats and others, to compile counts of ballots cast before Election Day, either early in-person or by mail.

That’s far more than the 19 million who voted early at this point during the 2014 midterms. In fact, it’s more than the 22 million early votes cast in the entire 2014 election.

The data suggests an electorate deeply engaged in voters’ first real opportunity to offer a verdict on the presidency of Donald Trump, who has actively tried to turn the election into a referendum on himself.

Encouraging signs for Democrats include a clear surge in young and first-time voters in the early voting data and a larger percentage of women voters, who have appeared supportive of Democrats in recent national polls. Also, in states where party identification is available, Democrats are a larger portion of the early voting electorate than they were in 2014.

It’s important not to draw conclusions from the data. The country has been moving toward a more robust use of early voting for years. It’s also not clear if the early vote in key states is showing up to support Trump and Republicans or Democrats.

But it is certainly true that 33 states have eclipsed their early voting totals from this point in 2014, according to Catalist.

Age

The Catalist records show the share of early voters under the age of 30 has increased substantially this year in many states, compared to the previous cycles.

In at least 10 states, voters under 30 make up a larger percentage of the early vote this cycle than they did in 2014.

In four states — Texas, Georgia, Nevada and New Jersey — the share of the youth vote under 30 this cycle has roughly doubled compared with 2014.

Check out what’s happened in Texas and Georgia, for instance:

First-timers

The records also allow for examining which early voters have registered to vote for the first time — at least for 2018 (previous years were not available).

In North Dakota and Nevada, 11 percent of the early voting electorate were first-time voters. By contrast, in Illinois, Kansas, New Jersey and West Virginia, first-time voters only comprise between 3 percent and 4 percent of early voting.

Gender

Women continue to outpace men in early voting in every state where Catalist provided data to CNN, with the exceptions of Montana, Nevada and Alaska.

In four states — Georgia, Florida, Kansas, and New Jersey — women comprise at least 10 percentage points more of the early vote than men.

Party registration

The records provided by Catalist to CNN includes party registration for early vote tallies in select states. (Those numbers reflect a count of the voter’s party affiliation, but do not indicate who a voter actually chose on the ballot.)

While most states are on par with the party breakdown of previous cycles, which generally favor Republicans, Democrats have made gains in several notable places since 2014.

In Nevada, Democrats have actually pulled ahead of Republicans as a share of the early vote this time, and in several other states have increased their share over 2014.

Some key states do not have party registration information at all — such as Texas and Georgia.

By Gregory Krieg, Donie O’Sullivan and Kaylee Hartung | CNN News

With the clock winding down before Tuesday’s vote, Georgia’s chief elections officer, who is also running for governor, turned a report of an alleged vulnerability in the election system he oversees into a political weapon in a race he is hoping to win.

Republican Brian Kemp on Monday stood by his decision to level claims of attempted hacking at Democrats, turning their objections — and the concerns of nonpartisan civil rights groups — into an election eve selling point.

“I’m not worried about how it looks. I’m doing my job,” he said during a campaign stop in DeKalb County that he had been stuck with two bad options. “This is how we would handle any investigation when something like this comes up. Because I can assure you if I hadn’t done anything and the story came out that something was going on, you’d be going ‘Why didn’t you act?'”

Kemp’s decision to directly accuse the opposing party of wrongdoing while running for the state’s highest office has further inflamed deep-seated worries over voting rights in Georgia at the height of a historic campaign by his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, to become the country’s black female governor.

Amid the furor over the purported hacking, Kemp announced Monday that the state had not only broken its 2014 record but has set a new, all-time record for early voting in a midterm election.

“The normal course of action would be that you investigate the vulnerability, fix it and then reassure the public. They seem to be doing it backwards,” Richard DeMillo, a Georgia Tech professor and one of the experts contacted by Georgia Democrats, told CNN on Monday. “Rather than addressing the substance of the vulnerability they’re assuming everything is fine and attacking the messenger.”

The last week of the campaign has included a robocall paid for by white supremacists crudely impersonating megastar Oprah Winfrey, who traveled last week to Georgia to campaign on Abrams’ behalf. Kemp denounced the robocall as “absolutely disgusting,” but has often trafficked in racial themes during the campaign, including a tweet late Monday tying Abrams to the Black Panthers.

His campaign has also falsely claimed Abrams encouraged undocumented immigrants to vote and dismissed as “outside agitators” critics alleging that he weaponized state law to suppress the minority vote.

Those charges escalated early last month after an Associated Press analysis of public records data found that Kemp’s office had put on hold more than 53,000 voter registrations — nearly 70 percent of them belonging to African Americans — because they failed to clear the state’s controversial “exact match” standard.

A subsequent lawsuit led a federal judge to issue an injunction blocking the state from rejecting absentee ballots without taking added steps to notify voters and sort out any signature discrepancies.

Kemp on Sunday lit another fuse when his office issued an early morning bulletin that claimed, vaguely and without any proof, that there had been “a failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system.” It added, with no further explanation, that the Democratic Party of Georgia had been placed under investigation the night before in connection with the failed breach.

In reality, a Georgia citizen had discovered what he believed was a flaw in the system and sought to bring it to the attention of authorities.

A series of emails, obtained by CNN, including an exchange between Georgia Democratic party operatives, refer to findings by an unaffiliated voter, Richard Wright, who said he had discovered potential vulnerabilities in the state’s voter information page and its online registration system.

The Secretary of State received the chain of emails from a representative of a cybersecurity expert who the Georgia Democratic Party asked to evaluate the potential vulnerabilities.

“If Richard Wright had never contacted the Democratic Party on Saturday morning,” his lawyer, David Cross, told CNN, “no one would be talking about the Democratic Party. It’s only because Wright alerted them that Kemp draws it back to them.”

But it had an immediate impact. Before most voters had gotten out of bed, word of a newly launched probe into election security, already a pressure point for many Americans, had spread across the state and country.

That meant added work for Abrams, who kept up her planned bus tour schedule while also calling into radio stations and appearing on national television — for a second day running — to both push back against Kemp’s claims and cast them as new evidence against his candidacy.

“Even if he weren’t a candidate in this election, what he is doing is proving to voters that he cannot be trusted to do his job,” said Abigail Collazo, Abrams’ director of strategic communication on Monday. “So when you add on the layer of him also being a candidate, it becomes more clear than ever that voters cannot trust Brian Kemp. And that is a message that we have been continually sharing with voters since Day One.”

Shortly after the secretary of state’s office went public, Abrams told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” she was unaware of any probe and said Kemp was simply “desperate to turn the conversation away from his failures.”

As Abrams and Georgia Democrats were sorting out what exactly they had been accused of, Kemp’s campaign issued a statement on the matter, further politicizing the episode. “Thanks to the systems and protocols established by Secretary of State Brian Kemp,” Kemp campaign spokesman said, “no personal information was breached.”

It was an audacious one-two, with Kemp’s office effectively setting the predicate and his campaign following up with more direct, but legally immaterial, suggestions of criminal behavior.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation added a statement Monday that its Georgia Cyber Crime Center had opened a criminal investigation at the request of Kemp’s office.

“It’s wrong to call it an investigation,” Abrams had told CNN’s John Berman on “New Day” hours before. “It’s a witch hunt that was created by someone who is abusing his power.”

As Kemp defended the steps taken by the office and after it had assured voters that there were no breaches in the system, a ProPublica report alleged that state officials were tinkering — as late as Sunday night — with code on the website in question.

In a statement to CNN, Candice Broce, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office, denied the report.

“There is no such vulnerability in the system as alleged by the ProPublica article,” Broce said. “We immediately reviewed claims of such vulnerabilities once we received them, and our cybersecurity team — which includes top-notch, private sector cybersecurity vendors — could not substantiate any of them.”

CNN’s Curt Devine contributed to this report.

By Kate Sullivan and Ryan Browne | CNN

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford said Monday that the US military will not be “involved in the actual mission of denying people entry to the United States.”

When asked about the border mission for active-duty troops, Dunford said the military will not be coming into contact with migrants traveling toward the border.

“There is no plan for US military forces to be involved in the actual mission of denying people entry to the United States,” Dunford said, speaking at an event at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “There is no plan for soldiers to come in contact with immigrants or to reinforce Department of Homeland Security as they’re conducting their mission.

“We are providing enabling capabilities,” Dunford said, explaining they were tasked with supporting the DHS.

Just before the midterm elections, President Donald Trump ordered thousands of troops to the southern border to guard against what he has called an “invasion” by a group of migrants heading north through Mexico to the United States.

Despite Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that the group of Central American migrants includes “gang members and some very bad people,” most of the migrants reportedly plan to apply for asylum once they arrive at the border, following legal procedures.

Dunford said the DHS requested logistical support, “so you’ll see some soldiers down there right now that are putting up concertina wire and reinforcing the points of entry,” and that the military is providing “both trucks and helicopter support and then also some medical support.”

Pentagon spokesman Col. Rob Manning said Monday, “There are currently more than 4,800 personnel deployed in support of this mission. This continues to be a dynamic situation with more units and personnel deploying to the operating area, and we expect to reach 5,200 deployed personnel as early as today.“

“DoD anticipates more than 7,000 active-duty troops will be supporting DHS soon,” Manning said. The breakdown of personnel includes “1,100 in California, 1,100 in (Arizona) and 2,600 in Texas,” according to Manning.

In response to criticism of himself and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, who signed off on the request for assistance, Dunford said the President gave them a legal order and it is not his job to “assess the appropriateness of the mission.“

“The President gave us a legal order: Support the Department of Homeland Security,” Dunford said.

“It’s not my job to assess the appropriateness of the mission,” Dunford said. “It’s my job to accept the legality of the mission and, again, the capability of our forces to perform that mission. So others outside the ring can make a subjective assessment as to what … we’re doing but I’m not going to comment on that.”

As a military leader, Dunford said, the questions he asks are: Is the order legal, is the order unambiguous and do the troops have the capability to perform the task. “And the answer is yes in all three cases,” he said.

Trump’s decision to deploy active-duty US troops and the earlier deployment of National Guard forces to the southern border could cost between $200 million and $300 million, according to an independent analysis and Department of Defense figures on guard deployments.

Asked about criticism of the decision by his predecessor and other retired senior officers, Dunford said, “To be honest with you, I wish they wouldn’t do that, but they certainly can do that if they want to.”

Retired Gen. Martin Dempsey, who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2011 to 2015, tweeted Friday that “our men and women in uniform are better trained, better equipped, and better led so they meet any threat with confidence. A wasteful deployment of over-stretched soldiers and Marines would be made much worse if they use force disproportional to the threat they face. They won’t.”

By Stephen Collinson | CNN Newsource

With one day to go before the midterm elections, Americans face a choice that could shape the nation for years after a campaign that left it politically torn, at war with itself over race and mourning tragedy.

Voters must decide on Tuesday whether to constrain President Donald Trump and his compliant Republicans after the first two years of a demagogic presidency that widened national divides and unfolded in a torrent of scandal. Trump also tested constitutional norms and engineered a sharp shift in the country’s attitude toward the rest of the world.

But as they face their first chance to judge Trump’s performance, they could also register satisfaction with a historically primed economy and a President who has kept many of his election promises, however controversial and is running an undeniably consequential administration that has managed to engineer a generational conservative shift to the Supreme Court.

The first result would represent a rebuke to Trump’s entire political approach: His failure to tame his volatile instincts in the interests of national unity and his unwillingness to embrace the presidency itself as a national trust.

The second would convey acquiescence for the President’s scorched-earth tactics, indefatigable and domineering personality, fear-mongering warnings that the nation is under assault from an invading immigrant tide of dark-skinned criminals and approval of his creed of “America First” nationalism.

“You saw that barbed wire going up. That barbed wire — yes sir, we have barbed wire going up. Because you know what? We’re not letting these people invade our country,” Trump said at a rally in Georgia on Sunday, defending his decision to dispatch troops to the border in what critics have branded a political “stunt.”

While the campaign has seen intense skirmishes over health care, immigration, education and the best way to share the dividends of high growth, low unemployment and rising wages, Trump has, as he does all the time about everything else, made the campaign about himself.

In the most inflammatory closing argument of any campaign in modern memory, Trump seized on a group of migrants heading toward the southern US border from hundreds of miles away in Mexico as a metaphor for his hardline and racially insulting rhetoric on immigration.

His searing nationalist rhetoric and tearing of cultural fault lines drew criticism that he had crossed a dangerous line after a gunman killed 11 people in a synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh and a Trump supporter mailed bombs to the President’s top targets in politics and the media, including two former Presidents.

But it is a measure of the country’s volatile political climate and the lessons of Trump’s logic-defying win in 2016 that no one can say for sure how Tuesday night will unfold.

Trump v. Obama

At times on Sunday, it almost felt like Trump was running a campaign against the man whom he has defined himself against, his predecessor in the Oval Office, Barack Obama.

The 44th president is making the most direct assault on Trump yet attempted by any prominent Democrat.

Ten years to the day after he delivered his soaring victory speech in Grant Park, Chicago, Obama doubled down on hope, painting it as the antidote to what he said were the dark impulses exemplified by his successor, and warned America was at a crossroads.

“In the closing weeks of this election, we’ve seen repeated attempts to divide us with rhetoric, to try to turn us on one another,” Obama said in Gary, Indiana, revisiting, a city familiar from his 2008 campaign.”The good news is, Indiana, when you vote, you can reject that kind of politics,” he said. “When you vote you can be a check on bad behavior. When you vote you can choose hope over fear.”

Tuesday’s election represents another clash between Trump’s capacity to subvert political norms and the weight of history and electoral logic.

Omens look poor for Republicans, since Trump’s approval rating sits between 40% and 45% in most polls and history suggests that first-term presidents who are that unpopular typically lead their parties to heavy losses.
\Democrats are increasingly confident they can recapture the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years and are banking on a backlash against the President from voters who stayed home in 2016. Their path to power lies through more diverse, suburban and affluent districts where Trump’s cultural warfare plays poorly.