Sunday, June 4, 2023

Last Call For Press The Meat, Con't

Chuck Todd is leaving NBC panel show staple Meet The Press later this year, with NBC News White House correspondent Karen Welker replacing him.
 
Chuck Todd said on Sunday that he’ll be leaving “Meet the Press” after a tumultuous near-decade of moderating the NBC political panel show, to be replaced in the coming months by Kristen Welker.

Todd, 51, told viewers that “I’ve watched too many friends and family let work consume them before it was too late” and that he’d promised his family he wouldn’t do that.

Todd has often been an online punching bag for critics, including Donald Trump, during a polarized time, and there were rumors that his time at the show would be short when its executive producer was reassigned at the end of last summer, but NBC gave no indication this was anything other than Todd’s decision. It’s unclear when Todd’s last show will be, but he told viewers that this would be his final summer.

“I leave feeling concerned about this moment in history but reassured by the standards we’ve set here,” Todd said. “We didn’t tolerate propagandists, and this network and program never will.”

Welker, a former chief White House correspondent, has been at NBC News in Washington since 2011 and has been Todd’s chief fill-in for the past three years. She drew praise for moderating the final presidential debate between Trump, a Republican, and Joe Biden, a Democrat, in 2020.


Her “sharp questioning of lawmakers is a masterclass in political interviews,” said Rebecca Blumenstein, NBC News president of editorial, in a memo announcing Welker’s elevation on Sunday.

Now Welker, 46, will be thrust into what promises to be another contentious presidential election cycle.
 
Welker will be the first Black host of MTP, and has filled in for Todd a number of times already. She also moderated the second 2020 presidential debate between Biden and Trump and managed to keep a leash on The Donald...to an extent that anyone can.

We'll see how she fares.

Last Call For Greene Washing January 6th

Suddenly, GOP professional clown Marjorie Taylor Greene is extremely concerned about the release of thousands of hours of January 6th security footage to the media, claiming now that it's a security risk for the US Capitol building.
 
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has changed her position on the public release of the tapes documenting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, warning Friday that their release could “put the security of the Capitol at risk.”

Greene said in an interview on the right-wing channel Real America’s Voice that releasing the video footage publicly would jeopardize the Capitol’s security and endanger those who were present at the Capitol grounds but did not enter the Capitol nor commit crimes.

“And this is our real concern with the video tapes. If we released these video tapes just widely for the public — number one, we put the security of the Capitol at risk, because there’s over 1,700 video cameras,” she said.

“Number two, we also endanger many Americans that were simply standing on the Capitol grounds, maybe never even walked through the Capitol or committed any crimes, but they could have just walked further than where the barrier was simply because the barrier was torn down by the time they got there,” Greene continued.

She said she is concerned about left-wing groups that would use facial-recognition technology to identify those seen in the videos to “hand them over” to the FBI and Justice Department. She said that some people committed violence and broke the law and should be held accountable but many others did not commit crimes.

“Sedition Hunters would spend every second of every day analyzing the videos in order to hunt innocent people that just stood on Capitol grounds on J6,” Greene later tweeted.
 
Now, Greene had no problem with releasing the security footage to Tucker Carlson months ago when Kevin McCarthy did so. And groups like Sedition Hunters have been poring over J6 security footage and identifying uncharged January 6th criminals for years now.

But it's this week that Greene now has a major problem with both, far more worried about the footage being used to identify unprosecuted January 6th suspects.

Unprosecuted January 6th suspect like maybe Greene herself?

Just saying.

Timing is suspicious.

Sunday Long Read: Reading, Writing, Religion

In the wake of Roberts Court decisions like Hobby Lobby and Kennedy v Bremerton on religion in schools and in the workplace, and Texas allowing schools to dump mental health counselors for school chaplains and forcing schools to display the Ten Commandments, the crusade to put Christianity into all public schools is well on the way to becoming reality as this week's Sunday Long Read recounts.
 
After more than a decade living out of state, Jennifer Russell and her husband decided it was time to return home to northwest Louisiana. The couple, both in their early thirties at the time, wanted their two children to get to know their grandparents and to benefit from good public schools. In early 2015, lured by inexpensive rental housing on the Air Force base in the area, the family moved to a town in Bossier Parish, across the Red River from Shreveport, where they’d both grown up. Russell’s daughter started kindergarten that fall; her one-year-old son began day care. At first, her daughter adjusted well to the move and made friends. “It was what every parent wants,” Russell told me.

She had no inkling that her family’s religious identity would prove to be a complication. Russell and her husband both grew up Southern Baptist, a conservative, evangelical Protestant denomination that dominates this area of the Bible Belt. They went to the same church, in fact, and had met because their parents became friends. But she’d abandoned the Baptist church as a young adult, after studying world religions in college and starting to doubt what her faith promoted. Following graduate school and during her first years working as a psychologist, her skepticism grew. It seemed to her, she told me, that believers felt they had a “monopoly on truth, that their way was the only way.” Her husband, too, wanted a more progressive form of Christianity. After moving from Wichita Falls, Texas, the family joined a Unitarian church in Shreveport, a progressive house of worship with Christian roots that incorporates the traditions of many religions.

The first signs of trouble began a few years after the family’s move. Russell’s daughter, who did not want her name used to maintain her privacy, came home from school one day with the report that some boys on the school bus had interrogated her and other children about their religion. They asked each student, “Are you a believer in God?” The girl, who liked attending her Unitarian church but did not believe in God, recalled that she told her questioners, “‘No.’ And they said, ‘You’re going to hell.’”

Russell was dismayed, but she wanted her daughter to respect others’ views. She told her, “There are kids who believe that…. You want to be respectful, but it doesn’t mean he’s necessarily right, either.” Russell and her husband, who did not want to be interviewed for fear of backlash in the workplace, advised their daughter that if someone started talking to her about her faith, to change the subject, put on headphones, or read.

Russell felt it was harder to ignore teachers. In fourth grade, at least twice a week, the girl’s teacher said a prayer aloud in class. Following their teacher’s lead, some children clasped their hands and bowed their heads. “It was a lot about Jesus and God and help us through the day and stuff like that,” said Russell’s daughter, who sat in the back of the class and tried to tune it out.

Increasingly incensed, Russell felt her daughter’s experiences were symptomatic of the school system’s extensive promotion of evangelical Christianity, also evident in routine prayers at school board meetings, graduations and sporting events. “Teachers, administrators, other staff of the schools — they set the temperature in terms of what was accepted,” she told me. Worried that her daughter would become more of a target for her peers, however, she did not complain directly to Bossier Parish schools. Instead, Russell and her husband began to contemplate moving away.

Other families, however, did complain. In 2018, four parents from three families, listed as Does 1–4, sued Bossier Parish schools for promoting religion and coercing students to participate in prayer. They argued that the prayer was a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which calls for a separation of church and state. The lawsuit listed more than 100 church/state violations, including teacher-led prayer in classrooms, prayer at sporting events and faculty- and administrator-led prayer at graduations. “It was all flatly unconstitutional,” said Richard Katskee, the former legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who represented the Bossier Parish plaintiffs.

The school system acknowledged most of the incidents, but denied that all of the schools’ actions were unlawful. The following year, a federal court in Louisiana sided with the plaintiffs, and ordered the nearly-23,000-student school district to stop promoting religion.

As Bossier Parish school district was ordered to change, however, the legal landscape was changing, too. A different lawsuit was winding its way through the courts, backed by organizations that had long supported school prayer, over the right of a high school football coach to pray on the field after games. Last June, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in favor of the coach, Joe Kennedy, who sued the Bremerton, Washington, school district after it disciplined him when he refused to end the practice of praying at the 50-yard line following games. The majority opinion in Kennedy v. Bremerton stated that the coach had a right to freely exercise his religion because he was praying outside his coaching duties. The decision described Kennedy’s prayer as a quiet, personal act. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent, noted that for years the coach had led students in locker-room prayers. Often, students from both teams joined him on the field in his prayers. Katskee, who represented the Bremerton school district, told me that students who declined to participate “got harassed and harangued.”

In Bossier Parish schools, parents, teachers, and students told me, the court order stalled, but didn’t entirely stop, Christian prayer. Now, with a Supreme Court friendly to school prayer, educators and state lawmakers around the country are testing the limits of the strict separation of church and state written into the Constitution. In a handful of states, including Kentucky, Montana and Texas, lawmakers have recently proposed or passed measures attempting to promote faith in schools. In Kentucky, for example, the legislature passed a law in March that would allow teachers to share their religious beliefs in school. A Kentucky lawmaker who sponsored the House bill told local television station Lex 18 that he hoped the measure would “embolden these Christian teachers” who may have been afraid to express themselves in public schools.

Meanwhile, attorneys from organizations that often handle complaints about school prayer told me they are receiving word that the Kennedy ruling is leading to more open proselytizing by teachers. In some states, one attorney said, teachers have set up prayer clubs for students and delivered sermons in class. In at least one case, a school district cited the Kennedy ruling as the reason for prayer at school board meetings.

 
What "personal religious freedom" is being used for of course is the camel's nose under the tent, to allow evangelical Christians to proselytize in schools with the goal of converting kids.

There's no reason to believe this Supreme Court isn't going to eventually decide that Christianity, or the dark, warped, hate-filled version we see many Republicans practicing today, will become not only allowed but encouraged and required in public schools in the very near future.

It's going to be a mess, but it's going to happen, almost certainly.