Legislation introduced in the Tennessee state legislature this month is raising alarms from the state’s police union and gun control advocates who say it could turn the streets into the “old West.”
Two bills in the state assembly and state senate, HB 254 and SB 2523, would amend Tennessee law and designate “a person who has been issued an enhanced handgun carry permit” as a member of law enforcement.
State Sen. Joey Hensley, who introduced the state Senate version of the bill, told ABC News that the goal of the bill was to allow enhanced gun permit carriers to carry their weapons into locations where off-duty law enforcement enter, such as a store or restaurant that prohibits guns inside their business.
Hensley last appeared on JMG three weeks ago when he introduced a bill that would ban “obscene” books from public school libraries.
He first appeared on JMG in 2019 when he introduced a bill to ban same-sex couples from adopting.
Four-times-married Hensley, a physician, returned to our attention the following year when he was accused of prescribing opioids to family members and his girlfriend. His girlfriend, not incidentally, was his married cousin.
Hensley was also the sponsor of Tennessee’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” public schools bill and he authored a bill which would have declared children conceived via artificial insemination to be illegitimate.
In 2017 he was accused of adultery in a local couple’s divorce filing. In 2015 one of his ex-wives took out an order of protection against him after she claimed he deliberately hit her twice with his car.
Two bills in the state assembly and state senate, HB 254 and SB 2523, would amend Tennessee law and designate "a person who has been issued an enhanced handgun carry permit" as a member of law enforcement. #tnleg
Patrick’s declarations come days after the UT-Austin Faculty Council approved a measure reaffirming instructors’ right to teach about racial justice and critical race theory in the classroom.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s announcement to eliminate faculty tenure tees up the next major fight at the Texas Capitol over how college students learn about the history of race and racism in the United States. Credit: Jordan Vonderhaar for The Texas Tribune
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Friday that he will push to end professor tenure for all new hires at Texas public universities and colleges in an effort to combat faculty members who he says “indoctrinate” students with teachings about critical race theory.
“Go to a private school, let them raise their own funds to teach, but we’re not going to fund them,” said Patrick, who is running for reelection. “I’m not going to pay for that nonsense.”
Patrick, whose position overseeing the Senate allows him to drive the state’s legislative agenda, also proposed a change to state law that could make teaching critical race theory grounds for revoking tenure for professors who already have it. His announcement tees up the next major fight at the Texas Capitol over how college students learn about the history of race and racism in the United States.
Conservatives over the past year have used “critical race theory” as a broad label to attack progressive teachings and books in college and K-12 schools that address race and gender.
Tenure is an indefinite appointment for university faculty that can only be terminated under extraordinary circumstances. Academics said Friday that tenure is intended to protect faculty and academic freedom from exactly the kind of politicization being waged by Patrick.
“This kind of attack is precisely why we have faculty tenure,” said Michael Harris, a professor at Southern Methodist University studying higher education, who likened tenure to lifetime appointments given to federal judges. “The political winds are going to blow at different times, and we want faculty to follow the best data and theory to try to understand what’s happening in our world.”
Patrick on Friday also proposed making tenure review an annual occurrence instead of something that takes place every six years. At the press conference, he said his proposals already have the support of state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who chairs the Senate Higher Education Committee.
Last legislative session, Creighton filed a bill that would have reduced tenure review periods to every four years and expanded the reasons universities could revoke tenure to include sexual harassment, fiscal malfeasance, plagiarism, conduct involving moral turpitude and “other good causes.” That bill never got out of committee. Nor did another bill that proposed revoking tenure for faculty members who file civil lawsuits against their students. Creighton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Patrick’s plan drew swift condemnation from the American Association of University Professors, the body that helped develop the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure that has been adopted by universities and colleges nationwide.
“There’s always been attempts to interfere in higher education, but I have never seen anything as egregious as this attack,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP. “This is an attempt to have government control of scholarship and teaching. That is a complete disaster. I’ve never seen anything this bad.”
Mulvey said Patrick had a “fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of tenure” and his definition of academic freedom was “misguided.”
The Texas Faculty Association also criticized the idea and argued it will undermine the state’s future.
“The lieutenant governor’s job is to give our public institutions of education the support they need for student success, and that means encouraging professors and students to discuss theories and issues that some people may find uncomfortable,” said TFA spokesperson Pat Heintzelman. “Patrick, instead, seems intent on ignoring the First Amendment rights of faculty members and their students.”
According to federal data, about 53% of full-time faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin are tenured. Around 40% of all full-time instructional staffers at all public universities and health-related institutions were tenured in 2020.
Patrick said his latest priority is in response to the UT-Austin Faculty Council after it passed a nonbinding resolution Monday to reaffirm instructors’ academic freedom to teach on issues of racial justice and critical race theory.
“Legislative proposals and enactments seek to prohibit academic discussions of racism and related issues if the discussion would be ‘divisive’ or suggest ‘blame’ or cause ‘psychological distress,’” the resolution stated. “But fail to recognize that these criteria … chill the capacity of educators to exercise their academic freedom and use their expertise to make determinations regarding content and discussions that will serve educational purposes.”
One day after the resolution passed, Patrick signaled on Twitter that he would continue the fight against teaching the discipline in the next legislative session.
“I will not stand by and let looney Marxist UT professors poison the minds of young students with Critical Race Theory,” Patrick wrote on Twitter. “We banned it in publicly funded K-12 and we will ban it in publicly funded higher ed. That’s why we created the Liberty Institute at UT.”
Patrick’s mention of publicly funded Liberty Institute, a new center that is still in the planning stages at UT-Austin, also drew criticism from UT-Austin professors. They said his comments suggesting lawmakers are behind the new center contradict previous statements by university officials. On Friday, Patrick said he meant that the resolution passed by the faculty council is an example of why the university needed such an institute.
The proposal to end tenure would fundamentally change the way Texas universities operate in terms of hiring, teaching and research. Faculty members warn it’s likely to impose major challenges for Texas universities to recruit and retain researchers and scholars from across the country.
“Your top-tier talent has lots of options,” Harris said. “And if you hurt your ability to hire the best, you’re not going to do that. … I guarantee you there are university leaders across the country that are making a shopping list of who they’re going to try to steal from the University of Texas if this goes through.”
Harris said even the headlines to propose ending tenure could hurt Texas universities that are hiring faculty members for next year who might think twice about whether to take a job at a public university.
In a statement, the first vice chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus slammed the plan.
“Our public universities are the keystone of Texas’ economic prowess,” said state Rep. Toni Rose, D-Dallas. “As Republicans like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick make it their mission to undermine public trust in our education system, they will chase away the best and brightest students and educators our state needs to remain great.”
UT-Austin pharmacy professor Andrea Gore, chair of UT’s Committee of Counsel on Academic Freedom and Responsibility, brought the initial resolution forward to the UT Faculty Council. She told the Tribune she was shocked that a nonbinding resolution passed by the council would elicit such a reaction.
“Those resolutions are important because they allow us to assert our opinions and rights as faculty members, but they normally do not elicit any responses. In fact, they typically gather dust in the faculty council archives,” Gore wrote in an email to the Tribune. “What the [lieutenant governor’s] actions and words tell me is that not only has he been waiting for an opportunity to ban ideas that are counter to his own, he has been preparing to attack tenure as well.”
UT-Austin President Jay Hartzell has remained quiet on the issue. University spokesperson J.B. Bird did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Tribune after Patrick’s press conference Friday.
Domino Perez, president of the Faculty Council, said the council had no official comment but she awaits a response from Hartzell on the plan.
Patrick crusaded last summer against critical race theory in K-12 schools. He said it teaches that “one race is better than another and that someone, by virtue of their race or sex, is innately racist, oppressive or sexist.” Academic experts have said that interpretation is a misrepresentation of critical race theory.
Last year, Gov. Greg Abbott signed two laws that dictate how teachers can discuss race in the classroom. While neither used the phrase “critical race theory,” lawmakers who supported the measures characterized the legislation as anti-critical race theory.
Senate Bill 3 states a “teacher may not be compelled to discuss a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” The law doesn’t define what a controversial issue is. If teachers discuss these topics, they must “explore that topic objectively and in a manner free from political bias.”
The law also has provisions for teaching about the history of slavery in America, including that slavery cannot be taught as contributing to the “true founding of the United States” and that “with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.”
Disclosure: Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Capitalism would rather create a trillionaire than pay labor thriving wages.
Shareholder economics is destroying everything in its way. People and the planet.
That’s correct…median income went down for the first time and this was before COVID. Sorry to inform you, #BrokenCapitalism won’t fix itself. #Activism https://ift.tt/MRCO206
Scoop: At a mandatory anti-union meeting today in NYC, an Amazon union buster told warehouse workers they could see their wages reduced to the minimum wage if they unionize.
The US government should be able to do more than one thing at a time. So the government can address gun violence at home and address Russian aggression abroad. The fact is every time the Democrats try to do common sense gun regulations the Republican party at the request of the NRA has stopped them. Not even closing gun show loop holes for back ground checks could get past the Republicans that were blocking it. Now that the NRA has self destructed I wonder if there can be sensible gun rules / regulations enacted.
Republicans want to break education in order to protect white supremacy. They can’t defend their position[s], so they look to cancel the conversation/debate/dialog.
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
‘Enslaved people’ in America is a white construct.
Breaks her heart? What heart?
She is upset that kids, in theory, could be taught that different colors of skin have different experiences, and she clearly identifies with the racists in history and feels the shame.
This shows that it is not what is in your heart or how you live that their god cares about, but it is the rituals that are important to that deity. Being a good person not needed, the correct words for a a man made ritual ceremony is necessary.
Religion spreads by violence, not truth.
Not sure where this one is going?
Make no mistake. If Germany follows through with shutting down the gas pipeline, that is 40% of the Russian economy. I think that would hurt Putin.
Again very few police departments have had funding decreases and almost all police departments have gotten increases or demanded them. Police are organized gangs now shaking down the public for money.
The right wing media is going crazy to push back on something that not only is collaborated but that is something tRump has done all his life in his businesses. One right wing guy keeps telling me to prove it, when I mention eye witnesses he claims that is not proof.
Biden doesn’t set the price of gasoline. The US is a net oil exporter. Biden has pushed energy independence from the beginning but the GOP stands in his way. Coal is dead.
Every time the Republicans need to hide some bad news story about them, they trot out Hillary. The right has been demonizing her for 30 years. Okay, now that all conserve cartoonist have played the same false accusations, we await the next ranting points from Fox Spews.
The Durham report doesn’t say that. The right needs to shift the focus away from Trump’s many scandals. Trump is in trouble for tax fraud, tried to get people to overthrow the government, he tried to replace real electors with phony electors, he wants Hillary Clinton killed, and has connections to Russia. Smart people know the right is just generating a smoke screen and are ignoring the phony scandals involving Hillary Clinton. President Biden will be running for re-election in 2024 so Hillary Clinton won’t be running.
The right wing has become energized and are trying to take over the school boards all across the country. Then they will remove anything they dislike, stop the kids from learning crititcal thinking, and install indoctrination propaganda.
In an election marked by unusually high turnout among Asian-American voters, where the most heavily rejected candidate was called out for her history of offensive anti-Asian tweets, where a principal issue was the Vincent’s efforts to reduce Asian-American representation in elite programs, where the incumbents were criticized for disproportionately appointing white women to boards and commissions, where white mothers make up an unusually low share of the electorate, Lisa Benson declares the victory belongs to . . . white women like herself.
All this shows is that people want to get things done. The principle sin of the Board Members who were kicked out was that instead of making sure the children of SF were back in school during a pandemic, they were more interested in changing the names of schools. Republicans should take note. If your only policy is to make liberals cry, sooner or later your voters are going to wonder when you’re going to get things taken care of.
That was the seed of the recall in San Francisco, where two parents launched the effort in January 2021 after the school board kept schools closed. San Francisco public schools took longer to reopen than most in the country, and almost all of the district’s 50,000 students stayed in distance learning until the fall.
Meanwhile, the school board spent its time on what many critics called misplaced priorities, including a months-long effort to rename 44 schools instead of focusing on reopening them.
Parents and other residents of San Francisco, one of the most liberal cities in America, do not dispute the need to reexamine the historical figures schools are named for, but the effort was criticized for poor research, historical inaccuracies and bad timing. It became one of several examples critics cited of the board putting progressive politics over the needs of children.
The political tracking website Ballotpedia identified 96 school districts in more than a dozen states where race in education and masks were part of the debate in 2021.
Many see that as a prelude for this November’s midterm elections, pointing to the example of San Francisco, a famously tolerant city that lost its patience when progressive politics took priority over pandemic needs.
Carter managed to get things on the right track. He got derailed by the hostage crisis and got outdone by an b movie actor, the same way Hillary was outdone by a third rate tv personality. It would be a big help if more members of Congress would put on their big girl/boy pants and stand up for the country and Constitution.
A new Johns Hopkins University study finds lockdowns only prevented 0.2% of Covid-19 deaths and were “not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic.” I can only wonder about the reason for lockdowns and those people who advocate for these measures. Especially because of the negative impact on the young.
@HskrPhanBut the study is not definitive. The research represents a non-peer-reviewed “working paper” by three economists affiliated with Johns Hopkins University. The institution did not endorse the study.
“The university hasn’t taken a position on this and typically wouldn’t in such a situation,” university spokesperson Jill Rosen wrote in an email.
“The working paper is not a peer-reviewed scientific study, and its authors are not medical or public health researchers,” Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told PolitiFact in an emailed statement. “To reach their conclusion that ‘lockdowns’ had a small effect on mortality, the authors redefined the term ‘lockdown’ and disregarded many peer-reviewed studies. The working paper did not include new data, and serious questions have already been raised about its methodology.”
And one of the authors is a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, known to be critical of all things governmental.
Have you noticed that despite all this ‘alleged’ “socialism and social welfare”, the billionaires and top 1% have never been wealthier? Do you not notice
Biden is expected to ask Congress for another $770 billion+ for next year's Pentagon budget. That’s more than 4x the size of the Build Back Better bill. So where’s the reporting on the effects of this spending on the national debt, or on inflation, or whether it’s even necessary?
I not only don’t watch the Olympics I couldn’t care less about them.
1939 again?
A great reason to get off fossil fuels as soon as possible.
China wont destroy Taiwan per say. They will blockade it and take it over destroying the democratic government. China wants control over the entire area and all those in it. Ideally they want control over the entire world, but so does the US. The question becomes does the US and the world care about democracy as they use to say they did or not? We can see with the situation in Ukraine which is a democracy being threatened by a dictatorship that presents itself as a pretend democracy that the world really is not as forceful on the subject as they once were.
What is really funny is the idea that tRump would know what was a server and what was a copier. This goes back to the filing by Durham which was nothing new but is an attempt to investigate the investigators thing to find something to negate the findings in the Russia / tRump probe.
This is pure bull. The truckers were allowed to interrupt the economy and society for two weeks and some. I am all for a protest, but not for shutting down peoples lives and stopping normal activities of a large portion of the city for weeks, disrupting the home life and families of people not even involved.
The GOP’s Durham ‘bombshell’ is a bust
Even though Durham never directly said in his motion that Clinton coordinated a campaign to “spy” on Trump through Joffe, The New York Times noted, conservatives have been quick to draw such conclusions, accusing liberal media of being biased for not covering the alleged scandal.
Fox News on Tuesday also noted the amount of media coverage the alleged scandal had thus far received by ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, and MSNBC. According to Fox News Research, all of these channels have respectively dedicated “0 minutes.”
The researchers were not “spying” on the Trump campaign in 2016 but were instead working at the request of federal officials to investigate Russian malware attacks that had targeted the U.S. government and the White House, said Jody Westby, a lawyer for one of the research scientists involved, David Dagon of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The U.S. was on high alert at the time after the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails by Russian operatives. The data at issue was from the time Obama, not Trump, was in the White House, according to Westby.
“They were simply doing … research of Russian attacks against U.S. entities, including the federal government,” Westby said, adding, “The motion is unfortunate because it offers a lot of confusing information that is not factually accurate.”
The statistics show that the returns on investments by people in congress is much higher than the general public’s returns. Now that implies that congress uses their knowledge and regulatory ability to create personal gain. It sure seems that for a lot of elected officials, they see the office as a golden lotto ticket to personal wealth. The days of public service and helping the people seems to be long gone. Their should be some sacrifice to serving the public, it should be for the country, not for enriching oneself or personal power.
So anyone who wins an elected office should have to place all stocks in blind trusts managed by a reputable company and no office holder may direct the purchase of sale of any individual stock. That goes for family members in the same household. I would also deal with the legalized bribe system called lobbying. The system has become a way for the well off to bribe the office holders and shut out the voices of the public.
The only complaint I have about the cartoon is it is bias and misleading. It makes it seem as if only one party is doing the stock trading. In fact both parties are and both parties have people ignoring the legalities of filing required forms about their finances and stocks. The majority of elected offices have been filled by wealthy people seeking to increase their own wealth at the expense of the people and the needs of the country.
Another cartoon with the smorgasbord of old failed hits. Just keep throwing everything at the wall hoping something will stick. The misleading right wing media is having to make things up now that the President is an adult who doesn’t have temper tantrums while openly breaking the laws and insulting everyone he can.
The idea that Biden is conducting his anti-war effort in the open is stupid. He and his team have to work behind the scenes out of the view of cameras. To expect some big displays is not reasonable. But then the right never is.
They also demanded that the US remove all military equipment from central and eastern Europe, and threatened a “military-technical response” if demands aren’t met.
Oh, and Putin wants a pet dragon and some fairy dust.
MOSCOW (AP) — Russia has expelled the deputy chief of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Moscow amid escalating tensions over Ukraine.
Pro-Russian forces are desperately trying to draw fire from Ukraine — they’re clearly trying to elicit a response that would give them a “reason” to invade.
Russia-backed forces shelled the music room of a kindergarten in far-eastern Stanytsia Luhanska, Luhansk region, at 9am this morning, according to local reports, local city admin, & NGO Proliska. Children were present but unharmed. Two teachers said to have suffered concussions. pic.twitter.com/8zjX2OvatV
Oh, so the Ukrainian Army just happened to start mortaring pro-separatists *right* as the Russian Army got into their final firing positions and desperately needed a casus belli?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see an attack begin tonight — or at least in the next couple of days.
I’d still love to be wrong, but I don’t think I am.
The Kremlin’s claims this week that it had begun to remove troops from Ukraine’s borders were false, senior U.S. administration officials told reporters tonight. Instead, Russia has added as many as 7,000 troops to those already encircling its neighbor, a Biden official said.
It’s like everyone expected Kyiv to be this rundown shithole and can’t comprehend the fact that it’s actually a beautiful, modern city. https://t.co/6hYffgTxRn
Guess who is churning out the most coverage of the Canadian trucker protests? If you guessed #Russia's state media outlet RT, you're correct. pic.twitter.com/AK1KZvQQZd
China wont destroy Taiwan per say. They will blockade it and take it over destroying the democratic government. China wants control over the entire area and all those in it. Ideally they want control over the entire world, but so does the US. The question becomes does the US and the world care about democracy as they use to say they did or not? We can see with the situation in Ukraine which is a democracy being threatened by a dictatorship that presents itself as a pretend democracy that the world really is not as forceful on the subject as they once were
The Ukrainian democracy was ended by Obama in 2014 when a group whose ancestors welcomed the Wehrmacht as liberators in 1917 and 1941 were given money and weapons and overthrew the democratically elected government. They are a minority who now have full control of what used to be an independent Ukraine that let everyone speak whatever language they liked and go to whatever church they liked. The new government banned all things Russian throughout the Ukraine: it is illegal to speak Russian or to have a Russian Orthodox Church, all of which should be Lutheran or Roman churches, with a few Ukrainian Orthodox Churches (recognised by the Patriarch in Istanbul in 2018). The Donbass declared itself independent of the Ukraine, and the Crimea voted to return to Russia from which they’d been given to the Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954. Both the Donbass declaration and the Crimean vote are illegal under Ukrainian/US/NATO law. Russia does not recognise the Donbass declaration of independence, but says the Donbass must remain an autonomous region in the Ukraine where the Russian language and the Russian Orthodox Church remain legal, and Russia also recognise the Crimean vote to return to Russia. The US has given the new and greatly improved Ukrainian government $billions of weapons and money, and demands that the Ukrainian military force the Donbass to obey Ukrainian law against all things Russian and re-annex the Crimea. The Ukraine keep promising to do so, but later, since they know that attacking either the Donbass or the Crimea will bring the Russian military back into the Ukraine where they will demolish the Ukrainian military as they did in 2015. This, of course, is what the us wants since it will force Germany to finally cancel Nord Stream 2 and will justify harsh third party sanctions on Russia prohibiting all other countries from trading with Russia (back before 1930, third party sanctions were considered an act of war, but then the US, with what was believed to be the 2nd strongest military, imposed such sanctions on Japan and no one except Japan objected, and that Japanese objection caused the US to deploy its entire nuclear arsenal against Japan, so the US thereby earned the right to impose such sanctions whenever they wish).
I am busy and do not have a lot of time so I posted this in reply.
Misleading propaganda. Totally Russian misinformation. Ukraine today is a democracy and before it was under the control of a Putin puppet like Chechenia is. Have we learned nothing from Manafort’s history? Where do you think he came from? It makes me wonder about a Disqus profile that pushes such disinformation. IMO.
The same account posted this.
The US and the PRC play a game called “strategic ambiguity”. The PRC keep saying they intend to force a peaceful reunification, where by “peaceful” they mean, as long as Taiwan does not declare itself an independent country, they will not use their military or drastic sanctions or any other act of war. And the US keep SAYING Taiwan is just another province of the PRC while treating it as an independent nation. If the US or Taiwan ever SAY Taiwan is an independent nation, then and only then will the PRC use its military to force complete reunification.
It seems to me I identified the first Russian troll farm account I identified on my own. There are a couple I suspect such as DEN who is a died in the wool cult member who defends any Republican police, is a tRump cult member defender, and hates on all Democrats. He is a slippery one where when you catch him out in a falsehood simply changes the subject, moves the goalposts, or attacks a Democrat.
What do you guys think? I put the link in the post and you can go there and go to their profiles if you want. michaelwne takes the Russian line on the Olympic and other topics. But I could be wrong.
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A new Johns Hopkins University study finds lockdowns only prevented 0.2% of Covid-19 deaths and were “not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic.” I can only wonder about the reason for lockdowns and those people who advocate for these measures. Especially because of the negative impact on the young.