The Behn-Van Epps Special Election in Tennessee

 

A special election for Tennessee's 7th Congressional District will happen on December 2nd, pitting Democrat Aftyn Behn against Trump-endorsed Matt Van Epps, in a district that Trump carried by 22 points last year. But things have happened in the meantime that seem to make the Republicans nervous. Like Trump's economy ain't been so nice to his MAGA base in the 7th CD. A Trump-aligned super PAC, MAGA Inc., spent more than $15,000 calling voters to shore up support for  Van Epps. The Cook Political Report moved the district from "solid Republican" to "lean Republican."

I haven't done any research on Behn, but I did see the 30-sec spot her campaign produced:

"Jackass" With a Cell Phone

 

I follow The Tennessee Holler ("Always Yell the Truth!"), which is the liveliest progressive citizen journalism anywhere and a great source on what's really happening in the corridors of power in Tennessee state government. That's just next door to Watauga County, and we ought to keep up with the neighbors. 

It's hard to imagine a more nakedly obvious bunch of control freaks than the Republican caucus in both NC House and Senate, but the Republicans in the Tennessee state legislature run a competitive race for "poster child of white dickishness," particularly in ousting two Black reps from their seats for being uppity, and more recently twiddling thumbs during the special session called by the governor to consider gun reforms in the wake of the Covenent School shooting, which happened almost exactly a year ago. The Holler has been there in the legislative building with iPhone and microphone to record some of the most galvanizing displays of conservative arrogance ever recorded anywhere.

The creator and pretty much sole reporter for The Holler, Justin Kanew, got the full press profile by NashvilleScene.com reporter Alejandro Ramirez. Kanew's background as a screenwriter in Los Angeles and a staffer for National Lampoon obviously conditioned him for the smart-aleckiness he has on display covering the legislature. He came back Tennessee from the West Coast in 2016 and almost immediately ran for a congressional seat in 2018 as a Democrat, galvanized by the first years of the Trump administration, but he got whipped for Congress. He then hatched the idea and started The Holler in 2019 as a platform where he could get his aggressions out and crusade for progressive causes. He has the reputation of confronting Republican lawmakers assertively, even rudely at times, shouting questions at their backs when they run away from him. "He's a jackass," one bigwig said (our jackass, I thought, and we need more).

Ramirez samples Kanew's reportorial style: During the special session this year called by the (also Republican) governor to pass gun reform measures to help preclude more school massacres, large crowds of gun reform advocates including parents of Covenant students, converged on Nashville to protest the inaction of the legislature. The Republican supermajority ordered State Troopers to block off access to one of the public galleries, and water fountains were turned off despite the summer heat, Kanew took himself to social media with a photo of state troopers blocking access to the House chamber with a bold caption: “Today at the Capitol is by far the most un-American fascistic day we have seen, by far.” That Instagram post went on to receive more than 2,800 likes in one hour.

Ramirez reports that The Holler had two major scoops in 2023: "The first — and more salacious — was exposing Republican Lt. Gov. Randy McNally’s flirty emojis on racy photos of a young gay man. The second was a leaked recording of a closed-door House Republican meeting following the expulsion hearings of the Tennessee Three, which was full of infighting."

He's a muck-raker, no doubt, but we need muck-rakers, especially in the current climate of authoritarian over-reach where more power is the only thing that satisfies their everlasting thirst to punish. "His confrontations can feel more performative than informative," writes Ramirez. So what? 'Tis the age of performance, and the truth has to go social to prove it exists.

Meanwhile, Next Door in Tennessee

 

What's happening in Tennessee right now makes me flash on what the same Tennessee House of Representatives did in 1925. It passed the Butler Act, a bill “prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals and all other public schools in Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof.” The text stated that it would be illegal “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”

That worked out okay, right? (Well, maybe earned them the moniker of "the Stoopid State.")

Follow The Tennessee Holler (motto: "Always Yell the Truth"), "an audience-supported progressive news site with a series of active social media feeds that seek to amplify voices throughout Tennessee and YELL THE TRUTH about what’s really happening in our state." Their main website: https://tnholler.com. I follow their very active Twitter feed: @TheTNHoller and their satellite operation, Tri-Cities Holler on Twitter.

We have nothing like this org in North Carolina, and we sorely need it, since we're moving into the Era of Cotham and the complete rule of The Stoopid Party.

Who's a Dick?

 

“It’s not the practice they hate— it’s the person. A guy in a dress must be kidding. A gay in a dress must be stopped.”

--Trae Crowder

Gov. Bill Lee, who has said he will sign the anti-drag show bill in Tennessee, was outed for cross-dressing when he was a youngster, with pictures, and then lashed out at a reporter for asking if he felt any hypocrisy. Gov. Bill Lee erupted: "Ridiculous question!" It's wrong to "conflate," he practically shouted, a harmless bit of white male fun with "sexualized entertainment." It's sexualized entertainment for Bill Lee because he can't help himself thinking about dick.

Authoritarianism Blooming Like Skunk Cabbage in Tennessee

 

I have occasional reasons to cross the state line into Tennessee. Lotsa North Carolinians do business in Johnson County. But after catching up on the craziness right now out our back door, I'm thinking of going cold turkey on the entire Volunteer State. Their leaders are currently volunteering to be the worst public dicks in the nation. Economic reaction is the only pressure that works. (See how NC suffered after the "Bathroom Bill" passed.)

Two days ago, on Thursday, February 23, Tennessee lawmakers officially passed joint legislation to create a new felony offense for anyone engaging in an "adult cabaret performance" on public property or in any location where the performance "could be viewed by a person who is not an adult." The criminalization of these "performances" would presumably extend to costumed dancers in Pride parades and to off-color jokes told by a trans comedian (there are plenty such professionals; check Netflix).

On the very same day, Thursday, February 23, Tennessee House Republicans also overwhelmingly passed a ban on gender-transition health care, including hormone therapy and surgery, for anyone under the age of 18. That's telling those "confused" teenagers! "You're going to be what I say you are. And you're grounded."

The Drag Show Bill (H6/S3), "An Act to Amend Tennessee Code," lists its favorite erotic fantasies -- topless, go-go, and all "exotic" dancers, plus strippers and "male or female impersonators who provide entertainment." That capaciousness for criminalizing sexy displays actually deploys the adjective pruient, a little used relic from an earlier era of shocked Victorian prudery. Any of the "entertainers" listed above who arouse pruient thoughts will be subject to prosecution. 

Pruient comes from Latin pruiens, originally meaning an itching (no lie!). For Roman soldiers, beset by fleas and lice and armor-rash, pruiens meant a physical itching but quickly took on a metaphorical meaning, itching for sex. In other words, it's ancient and obscure enough to become the standard for criminal intent in a new felony class in the State of Tennessee. 

The Tennessee legislators worry about the itch because they by God have the itch, feel the itch, and by-'n'-by scratch the itch (like all God's creatures). Their denial is a confession but also a power play. The Puritan tyrant is always covering for his own sin. Accounts for the obsession:

"Republicans are troubled by homosexuality and can't figure out how not to think about it."

--Garrison Keillor

Pruient.

Democrats hold a dismissible minority of seats in the two chambers of the Tennessee legislature. Republicans have a veto-proof majority in both houses and a Republican governor to boot, willing to sign whatever they want. One of the minority Democrats in the House, Rep. Justin Jones (who goes under the handle @BrotherJones on Twitter) stood up during the debate on the Drag Show Bill and delivered one blistering takedown of Republican hypocrisy (video can be seen here). “If we want to address the issue of obscenity and what’s harmful to minors, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don’t need a bill — they need a MIRROR.”

If there's still a shred of justice at any level of power in this country, the Courts will see that the State of Tennessee is legally persecuting an identifiable group, and you simply cannot do that in our Republic.

"Anybody Can Do It" (Teach), and Anybody Will, If These People Have Their Way

 

What's the opposite of "woke"? Asleep.

 

Larry Arnn

The right-wing movement to keep everybody unconscious throughout their schooling --that's happening in Watauga County. It's happening in Transylvania County (see the last post down-column). It's happening all over North Carolina. It's really been happening in Tennessee next door, gangbusters! And it's presumably happening just about everywhere across the continent -- insurgency campaigns with know-nothing school board candidates who intend to take public schooling back to pious praise for the heroism and virtue of white male Europeans of the 17th and 18th centuries, and leave all that sensitivity and "diversity" out of it.

 

Guilt is magical, but in the case of what these people like to label "critical race theory," the magic is dark arts, as the historic facts about the subjugation of brown and black people provoke shame in some people who then feel the need to smash the faces of those who made them feel guilty. 

 

"I was comfortable not knowing. Now I'm pissed off. And anyway, it didn't happen like that."

 

I've been listening a little to a guy from Michigan named Larry Arnn. He's the president of strictly Christian Hillsdale College and the intellectual juice behind the nation-wide school-board takeover. Arnn recently hosted an invitation-only private confab at a Cool Springs, Tenn., conference center. Don't know exactly who attended, but the governor of Tennesse was there, Bill Lee, who shared the stage with Arnn and fawned on him as "the champion of American exceptionalism." 

 

A hidden camera caught Arnn's keynote address at Cool Springs about American education and how he intends to reform it, based on his understanding that the American Republic actually began to get weird after the Civil War and go on the wrong path that led inevitably to all the racial and gender sensitivities and political correctness imposed on American public school teaching at this present hour.

On the Black struggle for equality, Arnn teaches that "the civil rights movement was almost immediately turned into programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders." On federal laws opening up lunch counters and outlawing discrimination in restaurants, hotels, and theaters, Arnn says, "This was where the line between private conscience and government coercion began to blur." He doesn't like that, and the big money that backs him doesn't either.

Salon reported in a three-part investigative series in March about "how Hillsdale quietly became one of the most influential forces in conservative politics. The school's 1,500-student campus in southern Michigan draws leading right-wing intellectuals, politicians and even Supreme Court justices. Its Washington, D.C., branch hosts a rotating cast of conservative pundits and Republican staffers as guest faculty." 

Arnn sparked controversy nearly a decade ago with a sarcastic reference to minorities as "dark ones": "And the administrators you hire are all diversity people — and that helps you, by the way, with your federal requirements that you have a certain number by color," he continued. "Now, because they are appointing all these diversity officers, what are their degrees in? Education. It's easy. You don't have to know anything." (I know I have former colleagues shaking their heads up and down at that, which might go under the heading of Arts and Sciences snobbery. But note: Congresswoman Virginia Foxx's doctorate is in Education. So there's that.)

Watch the hidden Cool Springs video (provided to the Nashville reporter by an attendee). Arnn's thin, high voice and careful enunciation reminds me strongly of an actor playing a Nazi. Arnn says that modern education is akin to "enslavement" and has become "the plague that destroys generations of people." He says that he aims to prove "that you don't have to be an expert to educate a child. Because basically anybody can do it." The current crop of public school teachers come from "the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country." He's talking about students of color.

 

He said that and a lot more about the teaching profession, with the governor of Tennessee sitting beside him with his own unused mike in his hand, and Gov. Bill Lee disagreed with nary a thing that Arnn said. In fact, he praised him as the guiding national voice for conservative school reform. Lee had already endosed Hillsdale as the owner/operators of 50 new Charter schools in Tennessee. 

 

That hidden video, which got aired as a special investigatory piece by reporter Phil Williams of News Channel 5 in Nashville, has caused a good deal of heartburn in Tennessee, with Gov. Lee beginning to hum "Arnn who?" and Arnn himself saying he never meant what he said. He meant something general and abstract and rather poetic.

Meanwhile, Next Door in Tennessee

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn

The US Senate race in Tennessee could be the sleeper upset in 2018 that tilts the Senate to the Democrats. Presumptive Republican nominee and Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (her primary will be August 2) will likely face Democratic former governor Phil Bredesen for the Bob Corker seat.

Bredesen was and remains popular, and Republicans have got a good case of nerves. Big names and big money are sweeping into Nashville to shore up Blackburn, who looks weak. Tomorrow, Corporal Bonespurs will headline for Blackburn at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium (after a private fundraising event), and the Koch Bros. are funding 6-figure advertising that praises Blackburn for voting against the $1.3 trillion spending bill in March. Virginia Foxx voted for it, incidentally.

Trump's rally tomorrow will be about his own aggrandizement more than Blackburn's election, but he is helping her raise big bucks at a private reception. Ready to barf? Admission options include a private round-table with Trump for $44,300 a couple; a private photo reception with Trump for $10,800 per couple; or just the general reception, at $2,700 per couple.

Later, at the rally, Trump will be joined on-stage by country music star and Celebrity Apprentice alum Trace Adkins. Adkins has publicly urged Trump to "stay off Twitter" and supports the president conditionally: “I think we ought to try a businessman running the show for awhile. I mean, nothing else has worked. The whole thing has just gotten — I mean, it’s just really hard to take any of it seriously right now. It’s just so crazy, just the way this whole campaign in all respects has just gotten a little silly from time to time.”

Phil Bredesen

Congresswoman Blackburn is a former beauty pageant contestant who turned managing her image into a bankable business managing other people's images. According to Wikipedia, "In 1975 she was named Director of Retail Fashion and Special Events of the Castner Knott Division of Mercantile Stores, Inc. She held this position until 1978, when she became the owner of Marketing Strategies, a promotion-event management and image consulting firm. She continues to run this business." She's also been in Congress since 2002, the same year Phil Bredesen was first elected governor.

Bredesen currently chairs a firm that develops and operates solar power stations. He founded the health insurance company HealthAmerica, and he served two terms as mayor of Nashville. The worst thing Blackburn can say about him -- and she will -- is "he ain't from around here." He arrived in Tennessee in 1975 from Massachusetts, but he seems to have fit in pretty well with the home folks.

Isn't he what Trace Adkins thought a good idea in 2015, "a businessman running the show"?

Alabama Republicans Go Retro

Alabama Republican voters picked Roy Moore last night. The man who holds a gun funny, wears a cowboy hat as a helmet, and wants to make his religion the law of the land. Note: his religion is not exactly the loving kind. They call him "Judge," and he does.

Can things get any worse for Mitch McConnell? It was pile-on-Mitch all day yesterday. Another repeal&replace bill sunk like an anvil in his own caucus. Another of his most influential lieutenants and committee chair, Bob Corker of Tennessee, announced he'd had enough and would not run for reelection in 2018, setting the stage for another potential circus of a Republican primary in 2018 in which the name "McConnell" will mean approximately shit. Mitch became the Nancy Pelosi of the Republican Party yesterday.

(Meanwhile -- and by the way -- who's the Tennessee Democrat for that race? More about that below.)

And the cherry on the top of yesterday for Ole Mitch ... Roy Moore, ascendant, coming at him with the lash of retarded righteousness. Everyone expects Moore to win the general. It'll be Moore v. Doug Jones, the Democrat who won his own primary on August 15 (see below). But the actual election isn't until December 12, and that's more than adequate time for a well-funded alternative to Moore to build a case. A Democratic candidate who "fits the state" and is firm to the touch has every opportunity for upsetting Judge Moore (especially in an age when anything can happen politically, and does).

Doug Jones

Nobody thinks Jones can win. Except maybe Jones himself. He's the underdog, no doubt. But he's also no coward (the cases he prosecuted as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama produces evidence of moral conviction and courage). Asked how in the world he thought he could overcome the Republican advantage in Alabama, Jones said, "At the end of the day, they [the voters of Alabama] are worried about their children, they are worried about their elderly parents, like I am. They're concerned about where their jobs are going to come and what's going to come into this state."

Nothing wrong with that, but needs some cooking on some fire. Can he translate that (populist) message into a movement in his direction? Dunno. Experts say, Proly not.

Probably.

The worst set of numbers for Democrat Jones, IMO, come from the Aug. 15 primary: "Moore received 162,570 total votes, which was more than the entire Democratic field. Jones won his primary with 104,549 votes, or 65.6 percent of the 154,481 votes cast by Democrats" (al.com). Jones has to build Democratic energy in a state where Democrats have been defeatists for more than a decade. A Democrat hasn't won a statewide election since 2008 and hasn't won a U.S. Senate race since 1992.

So ... back to the sudden opening in Tennessee: Who's the Democrat to run for Corker's seat against whatever candidate survives the Republican primary? Will the Tennessee GOP be weaker after the Trumpists tear the establishment apart? Might the Democrats nominate Nashville Mayor Megan Barry? Or US Congressman Jim Cooper? Who then? The only Democrat who's actually declared his candidacy is a virtual unknown, James Mackler, a Nashville attorney and Iraq war veteran.

Tennessee Poll: We Like Obama, We Don't Like Obstructionist Republicans

Students in the College of Mass Communications at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro polled 629 randomly selected residents of the state and found that, even though Tennessee gave its electoral votes to John McCain/PomPom Palin, some 53 percent of those polled said they approve of President Obama's job performance, while only 24 percent say that Republicans are doing enough to compromise with the president.

The polling sample breakdown is pretty interesting, especially if you're suspicious that the MTSU students over-weighted for age, gender, or race:

Those polled were 50% male, 50% female

White 84.7%
Black 10.4%
Other 4.9%

Age
18-34 ... 29.8%
35-49 ... 28.8%
50-64 ... 24.4%
65+ ... 17%

Three-fourths of those polled said they'd heard at least one racial joke about Obama, while almost 1 in 6 admitted telling such a joke. But some 57% in the poll (the great majority of whom were white) said they considered such jokes unfunny.