July 14, 2023

Friday, July 14, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.

Please feel free to share.

Invite at least one other person to subscribe today! buttondown.email/AnnettesNewsRoundup

_________________________

Joe is always busy.

Inflation falls to 3% in June, lowest since March 2021

The Consumer Price Index rose 3% in the 12 months through June — the smallest increase since March 2021 — while the gauge excluding fuel and food costs rose 4.8%, the government said Wednesday.

Why it matters: Overall inflation has plunged from a peak of 9% last summer, a relief for American consumers. The core measure, watched by economists, also showed notable signs of cooling in June.

Driving the news: The 12-month change in overall CPI cooled rapidly from the 4% registered in May. Core CPI also edged down from May's 5.3%.

On a monthly basis, overall CPI rose 0.2% compared to the 0.1% rise in May. The core measure that economic policymakers keep an eye on also rose 0.2%, a much slower pace than the 0.4% notched in the previous three months.

Details: Sharply lower energy prices continue to be a major factor pulling down overall inflation. Gasoline prices, for instance, are down 26.5% compared to a year ago.

Used cars and trucks, a category that helped lead the way as prices across the nation started to soar, are down 5.2% compared to a year ago. In June alone, prices fell 0.5%. (New vehicles, meanwhile, were flat.)

Of note: Rent price increases showed no sign of slowing— rising 0.5% in June, the same pace as the previous month. Shelter costs have put upward pressure on inflation.

Private data has suggested that nationwide rental prices have climbed at a more subdued pace.

Economists expect that development to be reflected in official government data and cool core inflation further down the line. (Axios)

_________________________

Kamala is always busy.

Kamala will be welcomed big time everywhere she goes, and she goes many places.

_________________________

Some gains we made this week.

Contraception

F.D.A. Approves First U.S. Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill.

The move could significantly expand access to contraception. The pill is expected to be available in early 2024.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a birth control pill to be sold without a prescription for the first time in the United States, a milestone that could significantly expand access to contraception.

The medication, called Opill, will become the most effective birth control method available over the counter — more effective at preventing pregnancy than condoms, spermicides and other nonprescription methods. Experts in reproductive health said its availability could be especially useful for young women, teenagers and those who have difficulty dealing with the time, costs or logistical hurdles involved in visiting a doctor to obtain a prescription.

The pill’s manufacturer, Perrigo Company, based in Dublin, said Opill would most likely become available from stores and online retailers in the United States in early 2024.

The company did not say how much the medication would cost — a key question that will help determine how many people will use the pill — but Frédérique Welgryn, Perrigo’s global vice president for women’s health, said in a statement that the company was committed to making the pill “accessible and affordable to women and people of all ages.” Ms. Welgryn has also said the company would have a consumer assistance program to provide the pill at no cost to some women.

“Today’s approval marks the first time a nonprescription daily oral contraceptive will be an available option for millions of people in the United States,” Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the F.D.A.’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement. “When used as directed, daily oral contraception is safe and is expected to be more effective than currently available nonprescription contraceptive methods in preventing unintended pregnancy.”

Since the Supreme Court overturned the national right to an abortion last year, the accessibility of contraception has become an increasingly urgent issue. But long before that, the move to make a nonprescription pill available for all ages had received widespread support from specialists in reproductive and adolescent health and groups like the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Family Physicians.

In a survey last year by the health care research organization KFF, more than three-quarters of women of reproductive age said they favored an over-the-counter pill, primarily because of convenience. Nearly 40 percent said they would be likely to use it. Those most likely to opt for the product included women already taking birth control pills, women without health insurance and Hispanic women, the survey found.

And strikingly, at a time of fierce divisions over abortion, many anti-abortion groups have declined to criticize over-the-counter birth control. Opposition appears to come primarily from some Catholic organizations and Students for Life Action.

In May, a panel of 17 independent scientific advisers to the F.D.A. — including obstetrician-gynecologists, adolescent medicine specialists, a breast cancer specialist and experts in consumer health behavior and health literacy — voted unanimously that the benefits of making a birth control pill available without a prescription vastly outweighed the risks.

The panel cited the long history of safety and efficacy of Opill, which was approved for prescription use 50 years ago. The over-the-counter pill will be identical to the prescription version, which is 93 percent effective at preventing pregnancy with typical use.

Several panelists said there was a pressing public health need for an over-the-counter option in a country where nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended.

“The evidence demonstrates that the benefits clearly exceed the risks,” said one advisory committee member, Kathryn Curtis, a health scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of reproductive health.

She added: “I think Opill has the potential to have a huge positive public health impact.”

For proponents of over-the-counter pills, the main issue is affordability.

“If available equitably — meaning that they are priced affordably and fully covered by insurance — over-the-counter birth control pills will be a game-changer for communities impacted by systemic health inequities,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, who has led research on over-the-counter contraception.

The Affordable Care Act requires heath insurance plans to pay for prescription contraception, but not over-the-counter methods. Some states have laws mandating coverage of over-the-counter birth control, but most states do not. The KFF survey found that 10 percent of women would not be able or willing to pay any out-of-pocket cost for contraception. About 40 percent would pay $10 or less per month, and about a third would pay $20 or less.

Under a recent executive order by President Biden, the federal government could soon take steps toward requiring insurers to cover over-the-counter birth control. And Senate Democrats have reintroduced legislation to require such coverage.

“We need to make it affordable and available,” Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington State and the lead sponsor of the bill, said in an interview in May. “Let’s provide women what they need and make sure it’s affordable so there’s equity, and women who are low-income, women who for whatever reason are struggling don’t have to be forced to not have any birth control simply because they can’t afford it today,” she added.

Opill is known as a “mini pill” because it contains only one hormone, progestin, in contrast to “combination” pills, which contain both progestin and estrogen. A company that makes a combination pill, Cadence Health, has also been in discussions with the F.D.A. about applying for over-the-counter status.

The F.D.A. analysts who evaluated the data Perrigo submitted in its application for a nonprescription Opill had raised concerns about whether women with medical conditions that should preclude them from taking birth control pills — primarily breast cancer and undiagnosed vaginal bleeding — would follow the warnings and avoid the product. The F.D.A. analysts also raised questions about whether younger adolescents and people with limited literacy could follow the directions.

But in a memo explaining the approval decision on Thursday, Karen Murry, deputy director of the F.D.A.’s office of nonprescription drugs, wrote, “For an individual consumer of the product, the risk is very low, and almost nonexistent if they read and follow the labeling.”

“Overall,” she continued, “the total public health impact of the potential harm related to incorrect use by people with progestin-sensitive cancer is likely outweighed by the probable larger public health impact of prevention of a large number of unintended pregnancies with all their attendant harms.”

Several advisory committee members said patients with breast cancer, the main medical condition that precludes taking hormonal contraception, typically have doctors who would advise them to avoid birth control pills. They also said that Opill might actually be safest for adolescents because they are very unlikely to have breast cancer. And because young people often start off with contraception they can buy over-the-counter, it is especially important for them to have easy access to a method more effective than condoms and other birth control products available in retail stores, the panelists said.

Perrigo reported that participants in a study took Opill on 92.5 percent of the days they were supposed to take it. Most participants who missed a pill reported that they had followed the label’s directions to take mitigating steps, such as abstaining from sex or using a condom, Dr. Stephanie Sober, the company’s U.S. medical liaison, said at the advisory committee hearing. She said that among 955 participants, only six became pregnant while using Opill.

Most people who said they had missed doses attributed that to running out of pills before they could get to one of the study’s resupply sites, results that, Dr. Sober said, “illustrate precisely the barriers to adherence that could be lessened” by making the pill available over the counter. (New York Times).

Paid Family Leave

A lobster boat.

Maine Becomes Latest State to Offer Paid Family, Medical Leave.

• Maine is thirteenth state to require paid medical leave

• Employees and employers will split wage contribution

Maine is the next US state to require paid family and medical leave for employees under a new law signed by Gov. Janet Mills (D).

The legislation approved by Mills on Tuesday as part of the state’s budget bill passed both chambers of the state legislature earlier this month.

States continue to adopt new paid family and medical leave legislation as advocates push for these worker protections across the country. Maine is the 13th state in addition to Washington, D.C., to enact a universal paid leave program.

The law goes into effect in 2026 and will apply to businesses with 15 or more employees. Workers and employers would split a wage contribution to fund the program that amounts to 1% or less of an employee’s wage.

Once the employee reaches a designated contribution amount, they would be eligible for up to 12 weeks of paid leave per year for qualifying life events, such as the birth of a child or care for an aging family member.

“The really amazing thing about this bill is that it comes out of three years of research from the Bipartisan Commission which was made up of two Democratic legislators, two Republican legislators as well as a group of citizens from across the state,” State Sen. Mattie Daughtry (D), assistant Senate majority leader and lead co-sponsor on the bill, said shortly after the measure’s initial passage.

In an op-ed published in the Portland Press Herald last month, Mills said she would sign the bill. In spite of some reservations that it would create added costs, she wrote that the final legislation struck a balance viable for Maine residents and businesses.

The program is expected to cost the state of Maine $25 million in start-up expenses before becoming self-funding. (Bloomberg).

State Paid Family Leave Laws Across the U.S. | Bipartisan Policy Center.

This overview 👇 includes the names of states where Paid Family Leave is in place.

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted paid family leave (PFL) laws: Arkansas, California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington have laws in effect; Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota, and Oregon enacted laws not yet in effect.

Most of these state laws provide parental and family caregiving leave as well as temporary disability insurance to cover paid personal medical leave. Twelve laws utilize a social insurance policy design that funds these benefits through pooled payroll taxes on employees and/or employers.

However, some states are exploring the role of private insurance. Arkansas, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Virginia have enacted laws that provide paid family and medical leave through private insurance on a mandatory (New York) or voluntary (Arkansas, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Virginia) basis. In these systems, employers and/or employees pay premiums to private insurers that provide benefits for paid parental, family caregiving, and/or personal medical leave.1

The federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) guarantees most workers at companies with at least 50 employees access to unpaid, job-protected parental, family caregiver, personal medical, and military exigency leave. Some states expanded job protection as part of their PFL program while others left job protection for leave-takers as it is under FMLA. For a full list of state-level job protection laws, see the State Family and Medical Leave and Job-Protection Laws explainer.

The map [at the head of this post] …shows the status of state-level PFL policies and programs, and the table [in the post] outlines the basic features of the PFL programs that have been enacted. To see the whole coverage of this is issue, click here.

Without paid family leave, teachers stockpile sick days and aim for summer babies.

Teacher Karli Myers poses with her husband, Jordan Myers, and their seven-month-old, Luke. Karli spent years stockpiling sick leave in order to have time at home with Luke after he was born.

---

Karli Myers had her son, Luke, in November, while working as a high school English teacher outside Tulsa, Okla. Her district didn't offer parental leave, so she used sick leave to get more than two months at home with Luke – sick leave she spent years collecting, with a baby in mind.

"So we accrue 10 sick days a year, so I essentially never took a sick day in seven years of teaching to be able to account for all of this," Myers said.

According to a survey by the National Council on Teacher Quality, less than one fifth of the nation's largest school districts offer paid parental leave for teachers. And only a handful of states guarantee it, including Delaware, Oregon and Georgia.

In many places, that leaves a teacher who wants to have a baby with few options: take limited unpaid leave, save up sick leave, hope for colleagues to share their sick leave, pay for their own substitute teacher, or try to time the birth for summer break.

But timing a pregnancy isn't an exact science. Jennifer Williams taught high school English in northeast Oklahoma for several years. During that time, she and her husband decided to try for a second child. That meant getting pregnant in September, for a summer birth, or not at all.

We had a very narrow window, because we said, 'I need to have this baby as close to summer as we can,'" Williams explained.

When she didn't get pregnant after two Septembers came and went, they called it quits. She said the lack of a paid leave policy ultimately determined the size of her family.

Now, Oklahoma, where Williams and Myers live, has a new law that pays for six weeks of maternity leave for teachers. Maternity leave can only be used by the parent who gives birth, while parental leave can be used by either parent.

Oklahoma isn't the only state overhauling teacher leave policies. At least three other state legislatures – in South Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas – also adopted some form of paid maternity or parental leave this year.

The case for paid parental leave for teachers

In Newark, Del., middle school instructional coach Casey Montigney remembers the stress of having her first son, Emerson, in the middle of the school year with no guaranteed leave. She was determined to spend the first 12 weeks with her baby, so she scraped together her sick time and her short-term disability and FMLA leave — but that only added up to five weeks. Montigney said she ended up going without pay for seven weeks.
By the time she had her second son, Sullivan, Delaware had passed a 12-week paid parental leave policy. She said it was a game-changer.

"It just refocuses the attention on what the attention should be focused on — you're learning how to raise a human. Like, when you know you can pay your mortgage and, you know, you can go grocery shopping and not need to worry too much about that budget and everything else, it just makes a huge difference."

And the benefits of paid leave go beyond peace of mind.

"Postpartum, there is a lot going on with the mother's body, both physiologically and mentally," said Dr. Tamika Auguste, an OB-GYN in Washington, D.C., and chair of the foundation for the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

"Though childbirth is natural and it's been going on since the beginning of time, we also need to recognize the effect that it has on a woman's body."

Overall, the data on the benefits of paid maternity leave bear out: improvements in worker morale and retention, lower infant mortality rates and improved physical and mental health outcomes for mothers and children. Better mental health for mothers has also been tied to lower maternal mortality rates.

And with Black maternal mortality rates more than twice as high as white mortality rates, paid leave can make a real difference to teachers of color.

"We see a large number of maternal mortality in the postpartum period," Auguste explained. "And if these women don't have ... leave, we are contributing to the worsening of Black maternal mortality, brown mortality in this country."

The benefits even extend into the classroom.

"Certainly, teachers' mental health has a discernible impact on student learning and well-being," said Abigail Swisher, director of policy and programs at the National Council on Teacher Quality. "We know in classrooms where teachers show depressive symptoms, their students are impacted both in terms of their social-emotional wellbeing and their learning, actually. And I think that that's a powerful reason that we should be concerned about teachers who don't have access to paid leave."

And while paid leave is a benefit that won't necessarily impact all teachers, Swisher said research indicates it could be a major recruitment tool – especially for certain populations of educators.

"If you're thinking about shortages, particularly of teachers of color, who we know are so needed in our workforce given their positive impact on students, 65% of teachers of color ranked [family support, including maternity leave] as one of their top three financial incentives to recruit and retain teachers. And I think that's a powerful reason to consider this policy."

The logistical challenges aren't unsolvable

Kristin Dwyer lobbied for Delaware's teacher association in 2018, when the 12-week paid parental leave policy was being negotiated. She said it wasn't an easy win — she found herself educating lawmakers on basic biology to get her point across.

"We had one legislator that said — oh goodness — he said, 'Why can't women just plan their pregnancies around summer break?'" Dwyer recalled. "And I [respectfully] said, on the record, in a committee hearing, 'Because our bodies don't work that way.'"

While Dwyer champions guaranteed parental leave, she also acknowledges the big logistical problems it can create. For one, offering leave to non-birthing parents around the country means more teachers out of the classroom.

"If we offered it to dads, if we offered it to parents of adopted children, how many more teachers would be out on leave?" Dwyer said. "And how many more substitutes would we require? You know, how many more days of instruction would be impacted?"

Finding and paying for long-term substitutes is a concern not only for districts struggling to fill positions in the face of teacher shortages, but also for teachers, who worry their students will backslide without a consistent, experienced substitute.

Dwyer says these aren't problems without solutions. In Delaware, the state shares the cost of providing paid parental leave with districts. She also says it's time to change the thinking around how schools employ substitute teachers.

"Change the way we fund substitutes. Rather than per diem, you know, make it a category of employment and hire them like you would hire any other type of employee, right? You keep them on staff and deploy them when needed."

For one Oklahoma teacher, six weeks of leave is a start

Karli Myers, in Oklahoma, had her son, Luke, before her state passed its new paid leave policy for teachers. She said, at the time, the lack of a leave policy didn't make her feel valued as a professional by her state — rather, she felt dehumanized.

"It was really hard, leaving him and then going and spending the day with other people's kids," Myers explained. "You know, you're not supposed to take a puppy away from its mother before six weeks, yet so many moms are having to do just that."

Myers says six weeks of leave is a step in the right direction. But the Oklahoma bill started out at 12 weeks and was whittled down through the legislative process.

"The thought of that 12 weeks maternity leave — I can't even describe to you how much of a miracle that would feel like," Myers said.

She hopes the fight for more leave will continue. (NPR).

_________________________

The Right Wing is not asleep. They wage wars against everything we believe in whenever and wherever they can.

We must be equally vigilant and ready to resist.

Six Right-Wing Activists Filed 89,000 Georgia Voter Roll Challenges.

On March 15, 2022, an email appeared in the inbox of the election director of Forsyth County, Georgia, with the subject line “Challenge of Elector’s Eligibility.” A spreadsheet attached to the email identified 13 people allegedly registered to vote at P.O. boxes in Forsyth County, a wealthy Republican suburb north of Atlanta. Georgians are supposed to register at residential addresses, except in special circumstances. “Please consider this my request that a hearing be held to determine these voters’ eligibility to vote,” wrote the challenger, Frank Schneider.

Schneider is a former chief financial officer at multiple companies, including Jockey International, the underwear maker. His Instagram page includes pictures of him golfing at exclusive resorts and a dog peeing on a mailbox with the caption “Woody suspects mail-in voter fraud” and the hashtag “#maga.”

On Truth Social, the social media platform backed by former president Donald Trump, Schneider’s posts have questioned the 2020 election results in Forsyth County and spread content related to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds that the Democratic elite are cannibalistic pedophiles. In January 2023, he posted an open letter to his U.S. representative-elect encouraging “hearings to hold perpetrators accountable where evidence exists that election fraud took place in the 2020 and 2022 elections.”

The March 2022 voter challenges were the first of many from Schneider: As the year progressed, he submitted seven more batches of challenges, each one larger than the one previous, growing from 507 voters in April to nearly 15,800 in October, for a total of over 31,500 challenges.

Vetting Georgia’s voter rolls was once largely the domain of nonpartisan elections officials. But after the 2020 election, a change in the law enabled Schneider and other activists to take on a greater role. Senate Bill 202, which the state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed in 2021, transformed election laws in response to “many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud,” as the bill stated. Many states allow challenges, but officials in Georgia and experts say that in the past challengers have typically had relevant personal knowledge, such as someone submitting a challenge to remove a dead relative from the rolls.

Georgia, however, is unusual in explicitly allowing citizens unlimited challenges against anyone in their county.

At first, voting rights groups were vocal about other aspects of SB 202, such as restrictions on absentee ballots, paying less attention to the 98-page bill’s handful of sentence-length tweaks that addressed voter challenges. The change to the challenges rule was “the sleeper element of SB 202,” said Rahul Garabadu, a senior voting rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.

Media outlets have reported on the high number of challenges and numerous cases of voters feeling harassed, impeded or intimidated by being placed into “challenged” status. But the outsized role of the small group of people making the challenges was less clear.

ProPublica was able to determine that a vast majority of the challenges since SB 202 became law — about 89,000 of 100,000 — were submitted by just six right-wing activists, including Schneider. Another 12 people accounted for most of the rest.

(ProPublica obtained data for all challenges logged in 30 of the state’s 159 counties, including the 20 most populous.) Of those challenges, roughly 11,100 were successful — at least 2,350 voters were removed from the rolls and at least 8,700 were placed in a “challenged” or equivalent status, which can force people to vote with a provisional ballot that election officials later adjudicate.

Challenges from right-wing activists have proliferated in Georgia despite strict federal laws governing how voters can be removed from rolls. That’s in part because state and local election officials have struggled to figure out how to reconcile SB 202 with federal protections. This has resulted in counties handling challenges inconsistently, sometimes in ways that experts warn may have violated federal law, something they say may have been the case with Schneider’s March challenges.

In the run-up to the 2022 election, voting rights advocates warned that some challenges might create insurmountable barriers to people casting a ballot, such as by removing them from the rolls. But there were no published accounts of Georgians who ultimately did not cast a ballot as a result of being challenged. Schneider’s March challenges did lead to this kind of harm in at least one instance: An unhoused voter found his removal from the rolls too high a barrier to allow him to re-register in time to vote.

Schneider would not agree to an interview and did not respond directly to ProPublica’s written questions. In emails, he stated that challenges “only are acted upon” if the elections board approves them and wrote, “I have not been made aware of anyone that couldn’t vote based on anything submitted, if true.”

Even some voters who managed to remain on the rolls were still forced by challenges to fight to remain registered. In Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, an immunosuppressed cancer patient had to drive nearly two hours round-trip to a crowded hearing to defend his right to vote. At the same proceeding, a Black woman likened her challenge to voter intimidation.

“There is a clear imbalance of power between the individual bringing the challenges and the county and voters,” said Esosa Osa, the deputy executive director of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy organization. Elections officials and voters, she said, “currently have very little recourse once challenged, regardless of the merits of the challenge.”

Some activists have justified their efforts by claiming that people might exploit flaws in the voter rolls to commit fraud — for example, by voting under the name of a deceased person still on the rolls. Officials in multiple counties told ProPublica that they did not know of any instances of challenges resulting in a successfully prosecuted case of voter fraud. A spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state’s office said it does not track this data.

ProPublica did find that challenges sometimes identified errors in the voter rolls, which are dauntingly complex databases that are forever evolving as people register, move, die or otherwise change their statuses. Many of these corrections would have happened anyway in the routine maintenance process, officials said and records showed, though sometimes at a pace slower than if activists submitted challenges.

“If all these challengers are finding is inconsequential errors that do not affect election results on the whole, but they’re placing real and harmful burdens on voters, then you have to wonder why they’re really doing this,” said Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “It’s doing more harm than good.”

In 2018, Joseph Riggs, a longtime Forsyth County resident who identifies as a Democrat, became homeless after struggling with depression and other mental health challenges and began using a P.O. box as his permanent mailing address during what would be years of instability. Still, he made sure to vote in the 2020 presidential election and wanted to vote in the hotly contested 2022 Georgia senate race because he viewed its outcome as affecting social policy that would impact him.

But that spring Riggs received at his P.O. box a two-page letter from the Forsyth County elections office informing him of Schneider’s March challenge and asking him either to appear at a board hearing at 9 a.m. on a workday in June or to send in paperwork justifying his registration at a P.O. box, changing his registration or removing himself from the rolls. Around the time of the hearing, Riggs was living in a tent in the woods, within walking distance of the part-time jobs he was juggling at McDonald’s, Dollar Tree and a gas station. He worried that attending the hearing would require an expensive Uber ride and force him to take unpaid time off work. In the months beforehand, a state election official had also called Riggs to question him about his registration, he said, making him think fearfully of news reports of people being arrested for violating voting laws. And he said he did not remember seeing the option to send in paperwork. Ultimately, he did not contest his removal from the rolls.

Riggs said that after the county elections board removed him, he doubted that he could re-register because the letter and phone call led him to believe he now had no valid address. (According to the secretary of state’s office, unhoused individuals can solve this challenge by giving a residential address that is the “closest approximation” of the location they shelter at, such as a street corner, and then listing a separate mailing address, such as P.O. box. But Riggs was not provided with this information.)

“I was really angry,” he said. “When you’re homeless, your vote is the only voice you’ve got.”

Barbara Helm, who identifies as a Democrat, said she did not see the letter in her P.O. box notifying her of Schneider’s March 2022 challenge against her, as she had been struggling with addiction and homelessness. Nor did she know at first that she had been removed at the same June hearing as Riggs was called to, though election workers sent her another letter announcing her removal. It wasn’t until she contacted election officials during the in-person early voting period in October that she learned that she’d been removed from the rolls and that the window to re-register had closed.

“A lot of people have fought and died for voting rights,” said Helm. “I didn’t even know” the challengers and board “could do that to you.”

Helm contacted the local Democratic Party about her plight, and its officials took up her case — she was mentioned as an example of voter suppression by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in a debate, though not by name, and her voting difficulties were covered in several news reports. Helm was eventually allowed to vote with a provisional ballot, which she believed only happened because of the attention to her case. (A lawyer for the Forsyth County board, Karen Pachuta, wrote to ProPublica that “the receipt of a provisional ballot in Forsyth County is not dependent on any particular person or circumstance receiving media or political attention.”)

A week after the election, Helm showed up to a board meeting to defend her provisional ballot and beg for her vote to count. “It kind of brought tears to my eyes when they approved my ballot,” she said.

Two other voters challenged by Schneider in March 2022 returned residency affirmations, obtained by ProPublica through records requests, in which they explained that they traveled throughout the year as engineers on projects around the nation and used the P.O. box as their residency address in lieu of a permanent one. The board rejected the challenges, allowing them to maintain their prior registrations.

Of Schneider’s initial thirteen challenges from March 2022, eleven were heard at the hearing that June, with the county election board upholding five and dismissing six.

In the lead-up to the 2022 election, the Forsyth County board ruled on about 31,500 challenges from Schneider and another 1,100 from two other challengers. In total, the board approved over 200 of the most serious type of challenge that immediately removes a voter from the rolls, known as “229s” for their section of Georgia code. The board also approved around 900 “230” challenges, which place voters into “challenged” status.

Of the 30 counties for which ProPublica reviewed voter challenges, Forsyth County was the most aggressive in approving them — in ways that voting rights lawyers warned may violate the National Voter Registration Act, a federal law regulating how voters can be removed from voting rolls.

When Joel Natt, the Republican vice chair of the board, sought to approve Schneider’s challenges against Helm and Riggs at the June 2022 hearing, Democratic board member Anita Tucker asked, “Madam Chair and Legal, does that violate the NVRA?”

Tucker expressed a number of concerns, according to an audio recording of the hearing obtained through open records requests. The concerns centered on whether the removals of Helm and Riggs violated the NVRA’s prohibition against removing voters in a systematic manner in the 90 days before a federal election.

In the hearing, Tucker argued that rather than immediately removing Helm and Riggs, “the best right procedure” was the NVRA’s process for voters whose residency is in doubt, which allows voters to remain on the rolls for around four years and protects them against being unable to re-register in time to vote. Tucker also questioned whether the batches of challenges — which had grown to encompass hundreds or thousands of voters, along with PDFs of alleged evidence of their ineligibility to vote, such as documents matching names to addresses outside the county — qualified as systematic challenges, and therefore shouldn’t have been allowed to proceed.

In response to Tucker’s questions, Pachuta, the board’s lawyer, warned, “There’s not clear case law on that. It could very well end up in litigation.” The lawyer explained that “there’s different opinions” on whether the challenges would fall under state code or the NVRA. She then advised that “because it is so close to the election, you have to review these items on an individualized basis.” (The NVRA allows consideration of individualized challenges during the 90-day protected window.)

Natt had originally motioned to remove Helm, Riggs and another voter as a block, until the lawyer advised that this could be construed as systematically processing a mass challenge. So Natt and the conservative board chair, Barbara Luth, reintroduced them one by one. Then the conservative board members outvoted Tucker to remove them from the rolls. Recordings show that the majority continued outvoting the Democratic minority while approving challenges one by one during many meetings. The board did summarily dismiss around 28,500 challenges, all from Schneider, because they were made using a fallible database-matching technique comparing Georgia voter rolls with the National Change of Address system, which a federal court had disallowed as systematic.

“I want to be clear that breaking down the challenges” to do them one by one “is still systematic and likely violating the NVRA,” said Andrew Garber, a counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, who had concerns with the quality of evidence presented and the depth of evaluation.

“The Forsyth board certainly violated the spirit of the NVRA and likely its letter as well,” said Garabadu, the attorney with the ACLU of Georgia, which sent a letter to the board warning that its decision at a September meeting to remove voters within the 90-day window “was made in violation of state and federal law and we urge you to reverse it.”

Pachuta wrote to ProPublica that “I respectfully disagree with the suggestion that considering challenges ‘one by one’ is a violation of the NVRA. Rather, I believe established authority provides that the NVRA allows removals based on individualized information at any time.” She noted that the board spent “hours during its meetings conducting individualized reviews of various data sets to make the best collective decision(s) it could.”

After a ProPublica reporter described Riggs’ experience, Luth, the board chair, said that in the future the board might refrain from removing voters from the registration rolls within the 90-day window and just put voters under a challenged status, though she emphasized it would remain a case-by-case decision. “That’s better than taking them off the rolls,” she said. “That would be where my vote would go.”

Natt, who had argued forcefully at the hearing to remove Helm and Riggs from the rolls, called the removals “a mistake” and said, “We learned from it.” He expressed remorse to ProPublica over their difficulties voting. “I don’t want voters to feel burdened,” he said. “It pained me personally.” He emphasized that the board had been operating with limited guidance from state election officials and that they had no legal choice but to rule on the challenges. “We have to respect the challenger,” said Natt, and “we have to respect the challengee.”

South of the conservative, wealthy suburbs of Forsyth County, in the county that encompasses the liberal center of Atlanta, challenges were handled differently by the left-leaning elections board — but still caused problems for election officials and voters.

By the time Chris Ramsey received a letter requesting him to appear before the Fulton County board and “defend why the challenge to your right to vote should not be sustained,” he was six months into a cancer treatment that had suppressed his immune system. On his doctor’s advice, he had stopped teaching elementary school and had people bring him groceries rather than risk interacting with crowds. But Ramsey felt he had to defend his right to vote. So on a Thursday morning in March 2023, he braved rush-hour traffic from his home on the outskirts of Atlanta to downtown, drove in circles looking for parking, paid $20, trudged three blocks to the meeting and arrived “extremely exhausted,” he recalled. Still, he was angry enough to wait nearly two hours so that he could get his turn at the microphone.

“I’m sorry, excuse my voice, I’m battling cancer,” he said hoarsely. He then proceeded to criticize the Fulton board for summoning him over a clerical error in his address that he’d previously tried to fix. But once he more fully understood that the board had just been following the law that the challenger had invoked, he suspected the challenger of having political motives. Ramsey, who identifies as a Democrat, told ProPublica, “I felt that it was a conservative person trying to make it easier for their politician to get where they need to be.”

Ramsey had been challenged by Jason Frazier, a member of the planning commission for the city of Roswell and urban farmer, who has filed almost 10,000 voter challenges in Fulton County. On a conservative podcast, Frazier described introducing other activists outside of Fulton County to the basics of voter roll analysis. He is also a prominent participant in frequent private conference calls about policing voter rolls hosted by the Election Integrity Network, a conservative organization focused on transforming election laws. During several calls, Frazier gave advice to more than 100 activists from at least 15 states, according to minutes provided by the watchdog group Documented.

The vast majority of the challenges handled in the March hearing that Ramsey attended had been submitted by Frazier, who had challenged about 1,000 people registered at nonresidential addresses, such as P.O. boxes or businesses, and another 4,000 people who he claimed lived at invalid addresses (including one member of the county elections board), most because they had the wrong directional component at the end of their street name — e.g., “SE” instead of “NE.” About a dozen people at the three-hour hearing spoke out against the challengers and Fulton officials’ handling of the challenge process. A woman who introduced herself as a survivor of domestic violence explained her use of a P.O. box as part of her “extraordinary lengths to try to protect myself and not keep my address public.” A mother complained about how addressing the challenge was taking her away from caring for her children.

“I don’t appreciate being collateral damage in this mission to clean up the voter rolls,” Sara Ketchum said to the board. Ketchum, who is Black and identifies as liberal, had temporarily moved for work from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., where she registered for a mailing address, but then returned to Georgia in time to vote. That D.C. mailing address became the basis for the challenge against her, submitted not by Frazier but by another prolific challenger. According to Georgia law, many people, such as university students, military personnel and traveling workers, may be legally registered to vote in one place but have a temporary mailing address while living in another.

Ketchum told ProPublica that she felt the challenge was a type of intimidation, given Georgia’s history of white citizens using voter challenges to suppress the Black vote. “It put in perspective that voter suppression is real and it’s actually happening,” she said.

At the meeting, Frazier defended his challenges. “I’m free labor trying to help the system to make sure everyone can vote,” he said. “I’m not trying to suppress anyone. I just want clean voter rolls for a multitude of reasons,” including to make sure absentee ballots go to the right address. He insisted that challenges needed to be processed in a way that “doesn’t hassle anyone” and blamed election officials for not making it clear that people could have responded to the challenges in ways that did not include coming to the hearing in person.

Frazier did not respond to requests for comment or to a list of detailed questions.

When Frazier himself was challenged in 2022 for being registered to vote at a business address — he sells vegetables from his farm at his house — he decried it as a “frivolous retaliatory challenge” from someone he himself had challenged. The Fulton board did not approve the challenge against Frazier.

Recently, Fulton’s Republican Party has twice nominated Frazier to become a member of the county board of elections, which would give him oversight of its employees and data. But each time the county commission voted to reject him, with one commissioner criticizing him for undermining confidence in the election’s office’s work and calling him “not a serious nomination.” At the end of June, the county GOP sued the board of commissioners, seeking to have a judge force the commissioners to appoint Frazier to the elections board.

A ProPublica analysis suggests that Frazier disproportionately challenged Democrats. Georgia election data does not track party affiliation, so officials use primary voting histories as a proxy. Of the roughly 8,000 challenges by Frazier that ProPublica obtained, about 800 voters had most recently voted in a Fulton County primary. Of those, 78% voted in the Democratic race, compared to 67% of voters across the county. Several other challengers in Fulton County, including the person who filed the challenge against Ketchum, challenged more than 90% Democratic primary voters. (In Forsyth County, the challenges submitted by Schneider show a smaller disparity: 28% Democratic primary voters, relative to 22% for the county as a whole.)

Five of the six most prolific challengers identified by ProPublica, including Frazier, have assisted or been assisted by right-wing organizations, some leaders of which were involved in efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Frazier has been a prominent participant in frequent private conference calls hosted by the Election Integrity Network, dispensing advice about how to police voter rolls to more than a hundred activists from Georgia and other states. In Gwinnett County, the state’s most populous, a trio of challengers associated with VoterGA, an organization with a stated mission of “working to restore election integrity,” needed dollies to wheel eight cardboard boxes loaded with tens of thousands of affidavits into the election office. Another Gwinnett County challenger targeted about 10,500 registrations using data provided by Look Ahead America, a conservative organization that offered data and guides for a “Ballot Challenge Program” in battleground states.

In response to questions, Look Ahead America released a statement describing how it “provided thousands of volunteers across ten states” with guidance on how to properly submit voter challenges. It also described itself as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit foundation.” Garland Favorito, the co-founder of VoterGA, did not answer ProPublica’s questions about Georgians working with the organization on their challenges and its leadership’s involvement in disputing the 2020 presidential election results. When pressed for comment, he only responded, “Yes it is a provably false blatant lie.” He declined to elaborate. The Election Integrity Network did not respond to detailed questions.

Fulton County removed the most voters from its rolls of any county that ProPublica examined — roughly 1,700 — but did so mostly during the first half of 2022 when the challenges began, before switching course. Cathy Woolard, the board chair at the time, explained to ProPublica that it had made the removals while taking advice from a county lawyer and that removals were “compliant with the law.” After hiring a special counsel with more experience, however, the board switched to placing voters in “challenged” status rather than removing them, in order to “minimally impact the voter” during the 90-day protected window. (The challenges were then resolved after the election.) If Forsyth County’s board had handled challenges in this way, Helm and Riggs would not have had their difficulties voting. “Fulton County’s objective is to make certain that anyone who is able to vote gets an opportunity to vote,” said Patrise Perkins-Hooker, the special counsel who became board chair on July 1. “We prioritized the right to vote for each of our citizens and protected that through the challenge process.”

Nadine Williams, the elections director for Fulton County, said in an email to ProPublica that the challenges had “significantly” impacted her workers “due to the short turnaround time to complete the challenge process.” (SB 202 requires that challenges that place voters in “challenged status” be considered “immediately” by the board and that hearings for challenges that remove people from the rolls be held within roughly a month of being filed.) Officials from multiple counties described processing the challenges as not just time consuming but also expensive, due to the extra demands on staff and the need to hold additional public hearings and send thousands of mailers, plus hire lawyers and technology consultants.

“If this was actually fixing something or finding criminal activity, it might be worth it. But it’s harassing other citizens, distracting us from important work and not achieving the desired result,” Woolard said. Challenges, she said, have “supplanted our priorities with the priorities of a very small group of people who did these challenges.”

Despite requests from some counties for clearer direction, state officials have issued limited guidance for how counties should handle challenges, mostly advising them to rely on their attorneys.

Zach Manifold, the head of elections for Gwinnett County, said that “counties are out there on their own trying to figure out” the potential discrepancies between state and federal law regarding voter challenges. Gwinnett is Georgia’s second most populous county and had the most challenges of any of the 30 counties ProPublica examined. Almost all of them were dismissed for inadequate evidence.

The lack of direction, the overwhelming volume of challenges and the complicated intersection between SB 202 and the National Voter Registration Act have resulted in boards handling challenges in divergent ways and with different impacts on voters — as evidenced by Forsyth and Fulton counties.

Among Georgia election officials, a sense has been growing that something needs to be done about the challenges. About a week before the 2022 election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that “we need some reform” on the challenge provision to “tighten that up” due to impacts on election officials, and he suggested that the legislature could change the law in 2023. (In the subsequent session, the Georgia legislature enacted no such measure, though it did pass another election-related bill.) In the February meeting of the State Elections Board, which can issue rules for interpreting election law, its chair, William Duffey, briefly noted that “we have already identified” challenges “as an issue that we need to address,” after a voting rights advocate raised concerns about how they were being handled disparately.

“If you have two different counties handling” analogous “challenges differently, we have an issue,” Edward Lindsey, a Republican member of Georgia’s State Election Board, told ProPublica, emphasizing that county and state election boards need to work together to solve the problem. “It’s incumbent on us to have a consistent system in determining who is and isn’t eligible to vote. That needs to be consistent across 159 counties.”

When ProPublica asked the secretary of state’s office about the inconsistent ways in which counties were handling the challenges, Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson, said: “We’re going to try to get the State Elections Board to issue guidance of some kind to answer all these questions that you have.” He said that county elections board members, who receive a small stipend for their part-time work, “are having to make these decisions affecting people’s franchise” and that the secretary of state’s office was going to encourage the state board to “give them some rules to go by.

Asked if the inconsistencies ProPublica identified had led to internal discussions about how to update guidance around challenges, Hassinger answered, “Oh, hell yeah. Absolutely.” The secretary of state’s office subsequently issued a statement to ProPublica saying that the office had already been working on creating “uniform standards for voter challenges,” adding, “It is not ProPublica’s findings that prompted us to do so.” In another statement, the office said that it is “thankful” for “ProPublica’s additional information, and have asked the state election board to provide rules.”

Duffey, the chair of the State Election Board, said that he had not received recommendations regarding new rules from the secretary of state’s office and that he had been independently drafting a memorandum that would provide “an analytical process” to allow counties to discern if a challenge should be considered under state or federal law. He explained that past news coverage of voter challenges and complaints from election officials prompted him to ask himself during the 2022 election: “How can a county deal with that? And the fact is, they can’t. There was nobody out there that was trying to help them make the determination of how they ought to process these.”

He went on to say: “As a practical matter, they probably didn't have enough time to do it differently. But we do now. And now that the election is over, we intend to do that.” (ProPublica).

_________________________

Texas A&M recruited a UT journalism professor, then watered down the offer after ‘DEI hysteria.’

The university celebrated its decision to hire Kathleen McElroy to revive its journalism program. She says she’s staying at UT after she felt judged because of her gender.

When Texas A&M University announced last month that it had hired a director to revive its journalism school, it included the kind of fanfare usually reserved for college coaches and athletes.

The university set up maroon, silver and white balloons around a table outside its Academic Building for an official signing ceremony. It was there that Kathleen O. McElroy, a respected journalist with a long career, officially accepted the position to run the new program and teach as a tenured professor, pending approval from the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents.

McElroy, a 1981 Texas A&M graduate, was the director of the University of Texas at Austin's School of Journalism between 2016 and 2022, where she is a tenured professor. Before that, she spent 20 years in various editing roles at The New York Times until heading to UT Austin to pursue her doctorate.

She has studied news media and race, with a focus on how to improve diversity and inclusion within newsrooms, and spent her career covering other areas like sports and obituaries. Her master’s thesis focused on the obituaries of civil rights leaders. Now, she was excited to head back to her alma mater to build a brand new program there.

But in the last several weeks, McElroy told The Texas Tribune, the deal with Texas A&M fell apart.

In the days after the signing ceremony, she said, A&M employees told her an increasingly vocal network of constituents within the system were expressing issues with her experience at the Times and with her work on race and diversity in newsrooms, McElroy said.

Behind the scenes, A&M spent weeks altering the terms of her job. After hearing about the concerns, McElroy agreed to a five-year contract position without tenure, which would have avoided a review by regents. On Friday, she received a third offer, this time with a one-year contract and emphasizing that the appointment was at will and that she could be terminated at any time. She has rejected the offer and shared all of the offer letters with the Tribune.

The situation comes at a fraught time at Texas public universities. Schools are preparing for a new state law to go into effect in January that bans offices, programs and training that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Recently, the Texas A&M System started a systemwide audit of all DEI offices in response to the new law.

Conservative Texans — from locally elected public school trustees to top state officials — have labeled several books and schools of thought that center the perspectives of people of color as "woke" ideologies that make white children feel guilty for the country's history of racism. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the consideration of race in college admissions, effectively ending affirmative action in American higher education.

McElroy said she was told that her appointment was caught up in "DEI hysteria" as Texas university leaders try to figure out what type of work involving race is allowed.

"I feel damaged by this entire process," said McElroy, who is a Black woman and a native of Houston's Third Ward, and whose father, George A. McElroy, was a pioneering Black journalist. "I'm being judged by race, maybe gender. And I don't think other folks would face the same bars or challenges. And it seems that my being an Aggie, wanting to lead an Aggie program to what I thought would be prosperity, wasn't enough."

A Texas A&M University spokesperson did not immediately respond to a list of emailed questions about the issue.

On Friday, McElroy said, she got a call from A&M's interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, José Luis Bermúdez, warning her that there were people who could force leadership to fire her and he could not protect her.

The call came one day after the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents met and discussed personnel matters in executive session, according to a posted agenda. The board discussed McElroy's hiring with Texas A&M President M. Katherine Banks, according to a person familiar with the situation.

According to McElroy, Bermúdez told her that her hiring had "stirred up a hornet's nest," that there were people against her and that, "even if he hired me, these people could make him fire me ... that the president and the chancellor, no one can stop that from happening," she said.

Ultimately, he advised her to stay in her tenured role at UT-Austin.

On Sunday, she received the latest iteration of an offer letter, which was different from the one she publicly signed on campus. Texas A&M was now offering her a one-year contract as a professor without tenure, and a three-year appointment as the director of the journalism program, though it noted that she could be fired at any time, she said.

"This offer letter on Sunday really makes it clear that they don't want me there," she said. "But in no shape, form or fashion would I give up a tenured position at UT for a one-year contract that emphasizes that you can be let go at any point."

Weeks after the public celebration about the new A&M position, she has rescinded her resignation at UT and will stay in Austin, according to an email sent to that school's journalism department Tuesday morning and obtained by the Tribune.

In a statement, Bermúdez said Texas A&M policy does not allow him to comment on personnel deliberations.

"However, we can confirm that Dr. McElroy has an offer in hand and that we have not been notified her plans have changed — we hope that's not the case. We certainly regret any misunderstanding that may have taken place," he said in a statement.

Reviving a defunct program

When Banks announced that the university would bring back its journalism program in 2021, it was an exciting moment for many students, faculty and alumni.

Texas A&M had dropped its journalism program in 2004 after 55 years, though it continued to offer it as a minor and then as a liberal arts degree.

The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents, which oversees the university, approved the new major in February. It is still waiting for final approval from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

McElroy said the university started to woo her last summer, at first as a consultant as it relaunched the program and then to possibly run it.

According to the original offer letter that she signed during the June 13 ceremony, McElroy was hired as a tenured professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism and as the journalism program's director, without an end date to her appointment. Still, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents, whose members are appointed by the governor, would have to approve her tenure position.

McElroy's responsibilities had little to do specifically with diversity or equity, she said. She was hired to help build a curriculum that specifically addresses delivering news to underserved audiences across the state, as well as growing the program, hiring faculty and helping expand its internship program for future student journalists.

That's the kind of work that McElroy is known for, journalism experts said.

"She's always constantly trying to improve opportunities for journalism students so they can enter the career and continue building out great storytelling," said Judy Oskam, director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University. "That's what I always think of when I think of Kathleen."

When A&M suggested that it announce McElroy's hiring with a signing day, McElroy said she didn't want the attention.

"But I was willing to go along with it because if A&M wanted to celebrate journalism, then I want to be a part of that," she said.

Backlash

The signing ceremony got a huge positive response on social media, according to an email sent to McElroy by the university's social media coordinator.

"This is one of the most positively received stories we have shared during my time at [marketing and communications]," wrote Jacob Alan Svetz, a social media coordinator at Texas A&M, in an email to McElroy. "Of the hundreds of posts congratulating Texas A&M, Arts and Sciences, and Kathleen, I saw two negative posts— pretty unheard-of levels of positivity for today's internet."

But within days, the conservative website Texas Scorecard wrote a piece emphasizing McElroy's work at UT Austin and elsewhere regarding diversity, equity and inclusion and her research on race, labeling her a "DEI proponent."

That website is the reporting arm of Empower Texans, a Tea Party-aligned group formed with millions in oil money that holds considerable influence over Texas officials. Empower Texans and its affiliated groups blur the lines between newsroom, lobbying firm and political action committee. It has aimed to upend Texas politics with pricey primary challenges to replace moderate Republicans with hard-line conservatives.

In a statement, Texas A&M defended McElroy to Texas Scorecard, calling her a "superb professor, veteran journalist and proven leader."

"She has worked for newsrooms for 30 years, and has led journalism programs at two Tier 1 research institutions," the university told Texas Scorecard. "Her track record of building a successful curriculum — coupled with her deep understanding of the media landscape — positions her uniquely to lead the new program."

But McElroy said she had a conversation with Bermúdez, the interim arts and sciences dean, on June 19 that struck a different tone.

According to written notes McElroy took during the calls and provided to the Tribune, Bermúdez said he wanted her to "go into this with eyes open" and that Texas A&M is different from UT Austin in terms of its politics and culture. McElroy said she was told that she had a big target on her back.

Bermúdez said there were concerns about McElroy going through the tenure process, which requires the approval of the board of regents.

McElroy said that Bermúdez told her that "it might be wise to consider all the ways the wheels might come off." In that conversation, McElroy said they alluded to what happened to journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones when the University of North Carolina's board of trustees denied her a tenured position a few years ago because of her Pulitzer Prize-winning work covering on race in America, despite a recommendation for tenure from the university's journalism department. Texas lawmakers have banned Texas public schools from requiring students to read work spearheaded by Hannah-Jones.

Ultimately, McElroy said, Bermúdez convinced her not to go for tenure. Instead, she agreed to be a professor of practice with a five-year contract.

A few days later, they had another conversation in which Bermúdez suggested McElroy give a presentation to the board of regents at its August meeting about her vision for the program, she said.

McElroy was further told there was "noise in the [university] system" about her, though he did not give specifics and told her that in some conservative circles, The New York Times is akin to Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union in the early 1900s.

On June 26, McElroy met with Bermúdez and Susan Ballabina, chief external affairs officer and senior vice president for academic and strategic collaborations, to walk through the presentation to the board of regents in August. She was told to see the presentation as an opportunity to tell the regents who she is and how she fits within Aggie core values.

McElroy said she left that conversation feeling positive.

"I'm gonna wow them, I'm looking forward to this and I'm hoping I can even get money from these folks," she remembered thinking. (Houston Public Media)

But then she got a call from Bermúdez on Friday afternoon that quickly erased those good feelings when he told her people outside the university could force the school to find a new director and no one could stop it.

On Sunday, the new offer came in for a one-year contract to teach and a three-year appointment as director.

Ultimately, McElroy said she was surprised by the backlash. She said as reality set in during these talks, she remarked that she was so disappointed that not much had changed about the culture at Texas A&M since she was a student in the '70s and '80s. She said the university insisted it was different. It was better.

"Well, it doesn't feel that way," she said. (Houston Public Media.)

They are coming after Obergefell, which made same-sex marriage the law of the land.👇

_________________________

The Actors Union is now on Strike too, joining the Writers Union.

President Drescher Outlined the Issues.

It’s the spotlight Fran Drescher turned out, unexpectedly, to be born for. 

Speaking at a press conference announcing the actors strike Thursday, the SAG-AFTRA president, still known best for her winsome and haphazardly charming protagonist of the sitcom “The Nanny,” looked stricken. Speaking at first deliberately and then with increasing passion, Drescher narrated her union’s attempt, initially, to avoid a strike, and then what she cast as the dawning realization that action was required. 

It was a performance with build and emotional heft, culminating in an appeal to labor across the world: “This is a moment of history that is a moment of truth,” she declared — and if that reads a bit awkwardly on the page, well, you should have heard how she delivered it. She continued to excoriate “big business, who care more about Wall Street than you and your family.” On “you,” she gestured out into the audience; on “your family,” she gazed directly into camera, to the unseen viewers out there at home, proletariat and executive alike. 

This was a speech to rally actors, to marshal public sympathy, and to shame the C-suite. To the first point, it seemed plainly a success (Drescher’s righteously annoyed claim that “everybody else tinkers around our artistry” elegantly and firmly distinguished the actors’ cause and claim from the ongoing WGA strike even while standing in solidarity.) To the second point, time will tell, although Drescher’s ability to trade against her Nanny-named-Fran image, to modulate that famous honking accent toward genuine feelings of disappointment and anger, is certainly getting attention. To the third — if not ashamed, exactly, as they too feel in the right, the AMPTP must feel on at least one front in this PR battle outgunned. 

In the ongoing labor dispute between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP, the thespians have a certain structural advantage, at least in terms of winning public sympathy. Actors have been trained in using the spotlight to perform and, in the case of successful actors, to hone sympathetic personae. Executives need only impress the street and the boardroom, but actors have the responsibility, and the privilege, of speaking to us all.

And Drescher — like past SAG presidents including Patty Duke, Melissa Gilbert, and Gabrielle Carteris, a familiar and recognizable figure who’s unafraid to trade on her image — is making the most of her moment, after some stumbles in the public eye to this point. Drescher walked a fine line, not always with aplomb, in trying to clarify her union’s stance on vaccine requirements; her appearance at a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show in Italy this past week, while a work commitment for a performer who needs to keep money coming in, made for unfortunate timing. 

But now Drescher’s giving the performance of her life, and she’s right on time. “The Nanny” was a performance defined both by the type of charisma that looks so easy you know it’s hard work and by pinpoint precision with language and gesture. Drescher used both of these qualities in her moment on camera, and notched the first notable PR win for the strike only moments into it. Drescher’s name and reputation as a famous-for-life sitcom star may make this issue break through to the public many months before they start noticing that the movie and TV pipeline has dried up; her leveraging audience sympathies is a sign she’s not merely resting on reputation. Time will tell how many months this strike will last, and how well Drescher will continue to use her megaphone; she’s certainly erred before. But her performance today called to mind the leader of the actors’ union, a washed-up movie star with a tactical way with words, at the moment of the last simultaneous SAG and WGA strike. His name was Ronald Reagan, and it wasn’t his last moment in the national spotlight.  (Variety)

Watch President Drescher here. 👇

_________________________