Tennessee
Gloria Johnson of the ‘Tennessee 3’ Is Coming for Marsha Blackburn’s Senate Seat
Tennessee State Rep. Gloria Johnson (D), one of the “Tennessee Three” who led chants for gun reform on the floor of the State House in March, has launched an exploratory committee to run for Senate in 2024. It’s the seat held by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a shrieking embodiment of conservative victimhood and persistent reminder that women also uphold the patriarchy.
Johnson, 61, is a retired special education teacher who joined State Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson to call for gun reform in March, following a deadly mass shooting at a Nashville elementary school. Johnson, Jones, and Pearson approached the House podium between bills without being recognized to speak in order to lead the chant as protestors packed the galleries. And for this grave sin, Tennessee Republicans moved to expel all three.
The legislature spared Johnson by a single vote but voted to expel Jones and Pearson, who are both Black. According to leaked audio, Republicans were worried about looking racist but did it anyway. (Jones and Pearson were reinstated on an interim basis and they officially won their seats back in a special election last week.)
When CNN asked Johnson about why she thought the legislature treated her differently, she didn’t mince words. “I think it’s pretty clear. I’m a 60-year-old white woman, and they’re two young Black men,” she said.
Johnson appears to use her status as a white woman for good. Meanwhile, Blackburn, the first woman U.S. senator from the state, uses her white womanhood to attack the right to birth control, defend Neanderthals, and ask the first Black woman Supreme Court nominee to define what a woman is.
Johnson filed her exploratory paperwork last week, according to the Associated Press, a step that usually comes just before a campaign launch and allows a potential candidate to begin raising money. No Democrat has won a statewide office in Tennessee since 2006.
In a statement about launching the exploratory committee, Johnson said, “Tennessee has a Senator that stands with bullies, I have a reputation for standing up to bullies. I’m taking a serious look at this race and having great conversations with folks who are hungry for better leadership in Washington.”
Get her ass, Gloria.
Tennessee
Mississippi State’s Defense Faces Major Size Disadvantage Against Tennessee’s Offensive Line
Mississippi State football has been at a disadvantage for most of its game this season and that won’t change Saturday at Neyland Stadium.
The Bulldogs’ defense line will face a Tennessee offensive line that has a significant size advantage. The average weight of the Volunteers’ starting offensive line is 325 pounds. The average weight for Mississippi State’s defensive line is 293. Extending that to include backup linemen, drops the average weight to 247.
Arizona State had a similar size advantage earlier this season and ran for 364 yards against Mississippi State. Nobody has topped that mark, but Arkansas came close with 359 yards and UMass had 199 yards. Through nine games, the Bulldogs have allowed an average of 211.7 yards per game. That ranks 123rd out of 133 FBS teams.
The size disadvantage is a problem that can’t be cured in 2024, but it’s one that can be avoided in future seasons.
It’s too soon to say what coach Jeff Lebby and defensive coordinator Coleman Hutzler are trying to accomplish on defense won’t work. A defensive scheme with three defensive linemen can work, but it needs the right personnel. Right now, the Bulldogs don’t have the right personnel.
Mississippi State has made adjustments to its scheme over the season – adding a fourth defensive lineman or having multiple linebackers line up along the line of scrimmage – but those changes aren’t producing positive results.
Adding larger linemen to the defense should be a priority for in Mississippi State’s recruiting efforts. However, none of the current defensive linemen in the 2025 recruiting class are larger than 280 lbs. Sure, there’s talented players, but none that make you think the Bulldogs’ won’t lose the battle in the trenches.
Again, it’s soon to say what Mississippi State’s defense is trying to do won’t work. But if the personnel doesn’t change soon and the scheme doesn’t change either, what’s stopping fans from expecting a similar 2025 season?
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Tennessee
Fisk University in Nashville on ‘high alert’ after ‘disturbing and offensive’ messages • Tennessee Lookout
This story has been updated with additional information from a Fisk University spokesperson.
Fisk University campus safety officials are on “high alert” following “disturbing and offensive” messages targeting members of its community, a spokesperson said Thursday.
The messages “suggest threats of violence and intimidation, and are deeply unsettling,” a campus-wide alert issued late Wednesday said.
The alert said that university officials believe the messages are “likely the work of an automated bot or malicious actors with no real intentions or credibility.”
Fisk is a historically Black campus located near downtown Nashville.
Maya Brown, executive director of Fisk’s Office of Marketing and Communications, described the messages as similar to those multiple news outlets have reported are circulating at campuses across the country: racist messages that appear to target Black students that tell them to report to vans or other transportation that will deliver them to plantations to pick cotton.
Tennessee
Tennessee governor offers teachers pay boost with private-school voucher plan • Tennessee Lookout
One day after the 2024 election, Gov. Bill Lee and lawmakers rolled out a recycled “universal” private-school voucher program designed to gain support from teachers and school districts with extra spending.
The measure doesn’t have a funding estimate attached, but lawmakers placed $144 million in this year’s budget for a plan that failed to pass, and the new proposal could cost another $275 million, plus funds to give teachers a one-time $2,000 bonus. In addition, 80% of all sports wagering money is to be dedicated to building and maintaining K-12 public schools.
Lee’s plan would provide 20,000 “scholarships” worth $7,075 for students to enroll in private schools in 2025-26 with 10,000 of those for students from families at or below 300% of the maximum income to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches — which is estimated to be nearly $175,000 per household income. Students with disabilities and those in the state’s education savings account program would be eligible too.
Giving parents the ability to choose for their child will provide more opportunities and reduce poverty throughout our state.
– House Speaker Cameron Sexton
Some 350 private schools would be eligible to participate in the program and would be required to administer the state’s standardized test or one that fits their curriculum, but the bill says they would maintain educational freedom.
The state would add 5,000 “scholarships” each year once 75% of them are provided to students.
In introducing the bill, Lee and key lawmakers said they want to offer students a chance at educational success “regardless of their ZIP code.”
“Giving parents the ability to choose for their child will provide more opportunities and reduce poverty throughout our state,” said House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who opposed the school voucher program in 2019. “Increased competition for a student’s enrollment will make schools, school systems and administrators meet the need for a higher quality of education.”
Lawmakers failed to pass a similar bill proposed by the governor earlier this year when the Senate and House couldn’t agree to widely disparate versions. The House bill contained funding to give teachers more money for insurance as well as for districts to maintain school buildings. The Senate version allowed students to transfer to any public district in the state.
Lee told reporters Wednesday this is the legislation’s “next step” and said he believes lawmakers are “moving in that direction” to pass the bill. General Assembly leaders have tried to address members’ concerns in writing the bill, he said.
House Majority Leader William Lamberth said in a statement the bill “leaves no stone unturned when it comes to providing the very best educational path to set the next generation up for success.” He said the measure will allow public schools to remain the foundation for Tennessee’s education system while enabling parents instead of the governor to determine which route helps their children the most.
The press release also says the bill “ensures state funding to school districts will never decrease due to disenrollment,” and the governor backed that up Wednesday.
One of opponents’ biggest complaints has been that private-school vouchers will drain money from public schools.
Yet the bill says a school district’s funding “shall not decrease from one year to the next year due to the disenrollment of students.” If districts lose students, the state would have to pay additional funds to those districts to cover those transfers for just one year.
In addition, the bill denies “scholarships” to undocumented students, even though a 1982 Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe, prohibits states from denying students a free public education based on immigration status.
Democratic Sen. Jeff Yarbro of Nashville said it is clear the governor is trying to buy teachers’ support with bonus pay.
“It’s offensive that this voucher con job, which quite clearly will make it nearly impossible for Tennessee to keep paying teachers what they deserve, is being accompanied by this one-time token money,” Yarbro said.
The new proposal isn’t much different from the one that failed this year, Yarbro said, except that more data is available showing it won’t work.
Similar plans in states such as Kentucky, Colorado and Nebraska were defeated in the form of constitutional amendments at the polls Tuesday.
When a comparable plan was adopted in Arkansas, more than 95% of students using vouchers were enrolled in private schools already, Yarbro said.
Democratic Sen. London Lamar of Memphis criticized the plan by saying it is designed only to divert public money to private schools that are “unaccountable” and don’t have to serve all children.
Universal voucher programs also lead to “runaway spending,” Lamar said. In Arizona, a private-school voucher program, in part, caused a $1.4 billion shortfall, according to a ProPublica report.
Dark money flooded the 2024 election, especially during primaries, in an effort to elect pro-voucher lawmakers. The governor took the unusual step of endorsing pro-voucher candidates, but it is unclear whether he gained enough votes to pass a plan next session.
Republican state Rep. Todd Warner of Chapel Hill, an ardent opponent of private-school vouchers, said Wednesday he would rather see the governor lobby President-elect Donald Trump to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and get rid of federal regulations than to try to pass another voucher program.
“I honestly think that would eliminate many of the concerns that our public has with our public education system,” Warner said.
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