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After the volatile arguments about restrictions and mandates that dominated the pandemic, Kentucky Republicans were always going to make the 2023 gubernatorial race one big messy and emotional tirade against Gov. Andy Beshear.

But, when state Rep. Savannah Maddox from Dry Ridge officially entered the race on Monday, it became pretty clear a dominant Republican strategy is going to be straight-up crashing and burning every issue directly into fearmongering, buzzwords and opportunistic, divisive culture wars.

We remember Beshears lockdowns and mandates, Maddox says in her first campaign ad. We wonder how this could have happened in America. Its not leadership, its tyranny.

The ad accuses the governor of damaging the economy, keeping kids away from classrooms and infringing on the right to practice our Christian faith.

Theres no mention of the deadly virus that led to the shutdowns. Not one. Because, for her purpose, theres no sense in making people remember reason its just more effective to capitalize on fear, because thats the playbook.

Maddox, who sits at the far-right wing of state Republicans, groups herself into the liberty movement, one of the newest sprouts of the Tea Party tree that recently caused a few upsets of longterm Republican incumbents during the primary election in May in Northern Kentucky.

The liberty sect of the Republicans came into the limelight during the COVID shutdown, the same time when Maddox was at her most controversial. In May of 2020, Kentucky Democrats called on Republican leaders to censure Maddox after she riled up a crowd which included 3 Percenters who were angry with the governor in front of the Capitol. Democrats argued that Maddoxs actions intensified the actions of the protesters, who, on a later day, hung an effigy of Beshear from a tree. She also caught some heat after posing with a man who flashed a white supremacist hand gesture in their photo.

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, the other high-profile candidate on the early Republican ticket for governor, is set to bring the same sort of battle to Beshear, although in a more subtle way. In 2020, Cameron sued Beshear over COVID-19 measures and whether or not the governor overstepped his executive authority.

Andy Beshear is not uniting Kentucky, Cameron said in his first campaign ad. This governor does not reflect our values.

Cameron, a Mitch McConnell protege, comes from the school of being careful with your words and aggressive with your power plays.

Its an interesting juxtaposition, Cameron and Maddox, because it seems like the GOP is hedging its bets. The plan is to clearly paint Beshear as a power-hungry extremist, but theyre going to beta test in the primary who they want their artist to be, an unpredictable mad-dog candidate in Maddox that can inflame and distort, or a more smooth and manipulative candidate in Cameron, who has more poise and charm.

Either way, the attacks are incoming, but their information war is going to be uphill.

According to a Morning Consult poll in April, Beshear is the most popular Democratic governor in America, with 59% of registered voters in Kentucky approve of Beshears job performance while 36% disapprove.

Plus, its hard to think back on the early stages of the pandemic or the aftermath of the tornado damage in Western Kentucky, and not recall Beshears sincerity and dedication. On the economic front, theres the historic battery park investments and wildly low unemployment rate. And anyone calling a Beshear a radical liberal doesnt have their finger on the pulse of the political spectrum.

At this point, theyre just seeing what faulty narratives can stick.

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Savannah Maddox And The GOP Are Bringing Culture Wars To The Governor's Race - Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO Weekly)

TRANSGENDER cyclist Emily Bridges has become the latest person to attack the Prime Minister.

And, in doing so, may have shown him a route to winning the next General Election.

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Boris Johnson said biological men should not compete against women in sporting contests.

This, of course, upset Bridges, who was born a bloke and claims to have received death threats after Boriss intervention.

If so, that is horrible and to be utterly condemned.

This weird culture war over transgenderism often gets nastily personal. It should not.

Transgender people deserve as much love, respect and freedom from discrimination as everybody else in society.

But it still does not mean that a man who transitions actually is a woman.

That is a denial of scientific fact.

Its all there in the chromosomes and the muscles and the testosterone and the bone structure. Boris, for once, was right.

And I would bet at least 90 per cent of the population agree with him about that.

This demand to have men competing against women in sport, and transitioned men in womens prisons, is driven by a very loud, very shrill, tiny minority.

And I reckon the general public dont like it one bit.

They are on the side of Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who also gets death threats for suggesting such a thing as a woman exists.

The Conservatives have been spectacularly useless in standing up for common sense in this so-called culture war.

It was under the Conservatives that more and more children were subjected to life-changing transitional treatment at the Tavistock clinic, with the row over when young people can consent to this sort of thing going all the way to the Court of Appeal.

Its under the Conservatives that pro-trans propaganda gets fed to our kids in schools.

The Conservatives have done nothing to stop the ludicrous decolonising of university subjects and national institutions.

All because these are sensitive subjects and the Tories dont want to get themselves into trouble.

But the voters know exactly what a woman is: An adult human female, with a cervix (and often a large collection of shoes).

Transgender people deserve as much love, respect and freedom from discrimination as everybody else in society. But it still does not mean that a man who transitions actually is a woman.

They dont like children being force-fed progressive idiocies by teachers echoing the awful Stonewall campaigning organisation.

They are proud of their country.

They believe in freedom of speech and the right to offend.

Voters in the Red Wall seats are especially hot on the subject. I know because I live in one of them. And at election time, I knock on doors asking them.

Labour and the pointless Lib Dems both sign up to all the progressive culture-war b****cks.

So this is Boriss chance to put clear blue water between his party and the rest.

Roll back the measures introduced that advance the case of transgendered people while discriminating against women.

Stick up for freedom of speech. Tell the race campaigners we are proud of our country and its history, even if we made mistakes in the past.

Take a stand on these issues.

And then maybe, just maybe, some of those deserting voters will come back into the Conservative fold.

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AND so Boris wants us to draw a line under everything and move on. With almost half of the parliamentary party against him.

I, for one, dont doubt the BBC and ITV, who hate Boris, overdid the Partygate stuff.

I dont doubt, either, a lot of the hatred towards him in his own party is because of Brexit.

But he should still have gone.

Apart from anything else, that would be about the only way the Tories can win the next election.

My suspicion is he will go sooner rather than later.

Something new will come out. It always does, with Boris.

FOR a long time Ive thought that once our Queen has gone, the monarchy will have had it.

And yet there was a magnificent turnout for Her Majs Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

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Thats the silent majority of this country, for once turning out and letting their voices be heard.So maybe theres some life left in the institution yet.

I just wish we could maybe skip a generation and move on to Prince William.

Hes a bit earnest and not exactly packed to the brim with charisma.

But there is something quietly likeable about the bloke, and he seems to take his duties seriously.

IF I had to make a list of people I really dont want to become Prime Minister of this country, Jeremy Hunt would definitely be in my top 20.

Somewhere between Nicola Sturgeon and Harry Maguire.

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What do I dislike about him? Well, first and foremost, his politics.

He was a devout Remainer over Brexit.

And hes a liberal. A liberal with the same arrogance as those other clapped-out old liberals, Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine.

Also, hes got one of those smiles which seems to say: Im smiling at you right now, but look away for a moment and Ill set fire to your puppy.

Hes the favourite of the Tory Remainer fringe.

Let us hope to hell he stands no chance of getting the job.

Should it ever become available.

IS the new series of Love Island being run by the old white government of South Africa? It was like apartheid.

The paired-off couples were strictly segregated by a viewer vote. Black with black, white with white.

It was like watching a scene from Alabama in the 1950s.

Maybe they should have separate areas for the black and white couples to dine in, too.

Utterly bizarre.

HERES a question for you.

If the presence of Sudan, Pakistan, Libya and China on the United Nations Human Rights Council has not persuaded you the UN is an absurd waste of time and money, what will?

How about the country that now has leadership of the UN-backed Conference On Disarmament?

Guess which one it is.

Go on.

I bet you can do it.

Yep, North Korea.

I GAVE up smoking last year without much of a problem.

Id been on almost 60 a day for the best part of 45 years, and giving up was nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be.

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But I dont regret having smoked for all that time even if it did sometimes mean weird black stuff came out of my lungs every so often.

I enjoyed it.

I knew it wasnt great for my health but I thought the risk was worth it.

So Ive got mixed feelings about this plan submitted to Health Secretary Sajid Javid to raise the age at which you can smoke to 21.

There are lots of ways we injure our health lack of exercise, eating family packs of Doritos, getting p***ed and so on.

And I still think it should be down to the individual to decide what he or she intends to do, not government.

ENGLAND manager Gareth Southgate got a lot of praise from his mates in the Press for his substitutions in the game against Germany.

Why? All he did was bring on a player Jack Grealish who should have been on right from the start.

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Im telling you right now: We will not win a tournament under that man.

And the knee-bending stuff has become utterly ridiculous.

Meanwhile, we had to endure Channel 4s awful coverage of the game.

It was woker than a newborn baby at three oclock in the morning.

The producers no longer care about what the on-screen pundits say and how useful they are to the audience just as long as its politically correct.

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Fight the culture wars, Boris, and you could win the next General Election... - The US Sun

Like clockwork, the NBA Finals TV numbers became culture war fodder this time before they were even widely released.

Without naming names you can Google it a prominent right-wing news site published an editorial Friday trolling the NBA for horrible ratings and honking about how the wildly popular cable series Yellowstone on Paramount Network had better numbers.

Unsurprisingly, the numbers were wrong by about 3 million because it was incomplete early data. ESPN and the league warned reporters that the numbers being cited for Golden State-Boston viewership were not an accurate representation of how many people watched. And they were right.

Game 1 of the Celtics-Warriors finals averaged 11.9 million combined viewers on Thursday for ABC (11.4 million) and ESPN2 (501,000). Thats better than the opening finals games during the past two pandemic-roiled seasons but still the lowest since Game 1 of the Cavs-Spurs finals in 2007 averaged 9.21 million viewers.

Sundays Game 2 averaged 11.91 million viewers on the ABC-only broadcast. Thats the smallest Game 2 finals viewership since 8.55 million watched the San Antonio Spurs beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2007.

The peak average for this years Game 1 was 12.96 million at 10:45 p.m. for Bostons 120-108 win over the leagues TV ratings darlings. Sundays Game 2 hit 14.1 million at 9:45 p.m. for Golden States 107-88 rout to even the series.

This years Game 1 and Game 2 audience numbers include out-of-home (OOH) viewing, such as people watching at sports bars and other peoples homes. OOH wasnt baked into pre-2020 TV viewership metrics, which means those broadcasts could have had up to 10 percent more viewers than reported.

Its no secret the leagues audience numbers have declined for years, but so has the rest of television. Even the road-grading TV powerhouse that is the NFL saw some declines during the pandemic.

Not only are the leagues raw eyeball totals down, but so are the actual ratings the metric that expresses as a percentage how many households were tuned into the game. Game 1 this year had a 6.4 rating nationally, and Game 2 sat at 6.2. Those ratings topped the 2020-21 finals but are the lowest since the 2007 Spurs sweep of the Cavs (6.3 rating for Game 1 and 5.6 for Game 2, per Sports Media Watchs database).

As Ive written before, all of this probably requires a recalibration of expectations for audience totals while the TV industry sorts itself out. The viewership for games 1 and 2 was lower than most expected particularly after regular-season recovery and strong early-round playoff viewership but the league still won all the key advertiser demographics that ultimately matter.

They are excellent numbers by the diminished standards of TV today, said Jon Lewis, who has crunched ratings at Sports Media Watch since 2006.

While it might be hip in some quarters to bash the NBA and its players for public expressions against racism and inequality how many of those Twitter critics were regular NBA viewers, one has to wonder and for treading lightly around their lucrative business relationships with authoritarian China, but the reality is that sea changes in the TV industry itself are the primary culprit in eyeball declines.

Sure, some universal things always drive finals ratings: The teams and star players involved. Storylines. Tipoff times. Competition on other channels. Quality of play. Blowout versus nail-biter. Sweep versus seven games. Playing in traditional calendar slots. Full stands. All that stuff still matters, especially talent.

We have not really seen the kind of compelling basketball that would be overly attractive to someone who is busy and doesnt want to sit down and invest two hours of time when they can get the highlights after the fact, Lewis said.

On top of that, people are just not watching TV like they once did. The proliferation of TV options accounts for some of that, including the rise of streaming services. Cord-cutting already was siphoning 10s of millions of U.S. households from the pay-TV ecosystem. The pandemic accelerated that. We learned after about a month or two into the pandemic that people opted to do other things than sit in front of the television every night, and sports and major events moved out of their normal seasons saw huge declines.

There are about 80 million U.S. pay-TV subscribers today, which is roughly 14 million fewer than in pre-pandemic 2019, per information provided by the league, and the number of people using television (known as PUT in TV industry lingo) is down 26 percent versus the period for the 2019 finals.

Heres how COVID-19 and other factors affected finals viewership: Last years Bucks-Suns Game 1 averaged 8.56 million viewers, and 2020s Lakers-Heat Game 1 averaged 7.58 million.

The averages certainly are a big yikes, but theres no evidence that sharp declines were fueled by millions of fans pissed about LeBron James and others demanding equality amid police shootings and such.

Game 1 in 2019 (Raptors-Warriors) averaged 13.38 million viewers.

With the finals again in June instead of July (like last season) or September-October (2020), the NBA is back to its normal schedule. Thats led to some audience recovery. Well see if that continues or if these current numbers are something of a new normal.

Ultimately, the NBAs audience numbers exist for the networks to sell advertising and create a lineup schedule. Theyre not intended as a proxy for why people watch or dont watch and lack the rigor and intention of scientific polling.

The finals easily dominate whats on TV, and the network and brands know that. The broadcast landscape, thanks to the aforementioned consumer viewing habit changes, has evolved for everything on TV. Many younger fans dont consume games by sitting in front of a two-hour-plus linear TV broadcast, which is why you see sports leagues getting into fantasy, NFTs, gambling, video games, social media and anywhere else they think they can find and monetize fandom.

This isnt meant as a defense of the NBA and its TV audiences. The league and its billionaire owners and millionaire players can carry their own water. But the recreational bad-faith regurgitation of preliminary data in the name of ideological trolling is worth calling out. Lewis called out use of the preliminary raw data and said anyone using such numbers to make a wider political point does not know what theyre talking about and should not be viewed as an authority in any fashion.

The sports rating culture war is a tremendous waste of time for people that dont think or breathe politics 24/7, Lewis said. The reality for the NBA is if it was all culture war stuff, it would be fixable as never touching on social issues ever again.

Though some fans might be turned off by such displays, and there arent that many since the Bubble era of 2020, it was never a significant number, Lewis said.

The league has bigger problems. It needs fresh blood, he said. Elite talent tends to occur in cyclical waves in the NBA, and were seeing the tail end of the LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant era.

There is clearly Warriors fatigue. The interest in LeBron is not what it was now that hes on the Lakers, Lewis said. Those names still draw, just not like they used to. The NBA has experienced this before, such as when Michael Jordans career wound down and he retired with the Washington Wizards in 2003, he added.

In the end, the audience figures, while of interest to fans, partisans and media reporters, are ultimately the concern of those spending the huge sums around the games. The NBA is shopping for a new set of TV deals for after the 2024 season and expects to get a significant bump from the $24 billion its getting now in total from Disney (the owner of ABC and ESPN) and Turner with $75 billion the reported goal for the next round of deals.

No one knows whether the league will get that much, but it will get a substantial raise, probably much to the ire of the committed get woke, go broke and shut up and dribblecrowds that cannot seem to stick to sports.

There is a silent majority with no interest in any of this. Theyre too busy for the culture war nonsense. They might be too busy for sports, too, Lewis said.

This is the dumb tribalized world we live in. Feel free to call me a hack in the comments.

Anyway, Game 3 airs at 9 p.m. ET Wednesday, and Game 4 follows at 9 p.m. Friday. All the finals telecasts are on ABC. After taking the weekend off, the finals return Monday for a 9 p.m. Game 5 tipoff, with Game 6, if necessary, next Thursday.

If the series reaches a Game 7, and the network and league certainly want exactly that, it would be an 8 p.m. game on June 19, which is a Sunday and Fathers Day.

(Photo: Jim Davis / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Original post:
Sports on TV: NBA Finals viewership unimpressive, but culture wars arent the culprit - The Athletic

When Louisiana's 2022 legislative session began in March, culture wars and other hot-button issues loomed large in Baton Rouge. But as the session moved along, something interesting happened: legislators sidelined or killed a majority of the harshest, most retrograde bills that had been proposed.

To be sure, writes Political Editor Clancy DuBos, lawmakers passed some truly awful bills, but Louisiana remains just barely outside the ranks of some of our knuckle-dragging neighbors in the South.

In this week's Gambit, Clancy counts the victors and the vanquished and, in a first, the stalemates in his annual legislative recap,"Da Winnas and Da Loozas." Flip through the digital edition below for more.

Cant see the e-edition above? Click here.

Also in this week's Gambit: The NOLA Project opens "School Girls, Or the African Mean Girls Play" at Loyola; Blake Pontchartrain tells readers about the posters at the 1984 World's Fair; Bar Pomona and Jamboree Jams serves small-batch jams, wine and more on St. Claude Avenue; Mason Hereford releases his first cookbook; Jason Berry's "City of a Million Dreams" documentary opens at The Broad Theater plus news and more.

If you can't find a Gambit in your usual spot, we've got you covered. Our e-edition is available to download at bestofneworleans.com/current and read at your leisure.

If you enjoy this weeks issue, please share this digital edition on social media.

And as always, New Orleans, thank you for your support.

The Gambit staff

Clancy DuBos counts da winnas and da loozas of the 2022 legislative session.

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Read the latest Gambit: Clancy DuBos recaps the 2022 legislative session - NOLA.com

Seven months ago, Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe in a closely watched gubernatorial race in Virginia. The story coming out of Virginia was the outsized role of education issuesspecifically, critical race theory (CRT) and parents rights. But Virginia left a big question unanswered: Was education uniquely potent in that racefueled by a debate gaffe that portrayed McAuliffe as unsympathetic to stressed-out parentsor would it linger and resurface for the 2022 midterms?

If the answer to that question wasnt clear then, it certainly is now. Schools will feature in many races this November. And Democrats should embrace that. For all their reticence to engage on education over the last few years, its hard to imagine friendlier terrain for Democrats in the 2022 midterms than K-12 schools.

Since Youngkins win, Republican governors and legislators have run wild on culture war issues in schools. Florida alone has seen the passage of a Parental Rights in Education law (also referred to by many as the Dont Say Gay bill) that limits discussion on gender and sexuality in schools, a Stop WOKE law that limits discussion on race in schools, state guidelines that withhold medical treatment from transgender children, and book bans premised on the idea that even math textbooks are infused with CRT. Nationally, school-board meetings remain contentious, with implications for who serves on those boards and what decisions they make. And now, tragically, schools are front and center again in the aftermath of the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

This isnt the first time that schools have featured prominently in American politics. Politicians have long seized on culture war issues in schools, from the teaching of evolution to busing for racial desegregation. And K-12 education routinely ranks among the most pressing issues to voters in state and local elections. Parents care enormously about their kidsand a lot of parents voteso we shouldnt be surprised that education matters in U.S. politics.

But there is something unusual about todays politics of education.

First, theres the breadth and pace of policy activity, largely from Republicans, that derives more from political opportunism than real challenges in schools. At a time when wed expect policymakers to be preoccupied with COVID-19 recovery efforts, weve seen a dizzying stream of anti-CRT and anti-trans initiatives instead. Even advocates of more conventional conservative ideas in education, like private school choice, are calling for Republicans to attach those causes to culture war battles.

Second, and related, at a time when Republicans have been assertive in K-12 education, Democrats have been astoundingly timid. On issue after issue, Democrats have stood by as Republicans nurtured extreme ideas into politically advantageous issuesand, often, actions that negatively affect students. Maybe Democrats motivation has been to keep from elevating or dignifying bad ideas with a response, but it hasnt worked. Many of those bad ideas festered and then found their way into education policy and practiceand many still could, like ludicrous proposals to equip teachers with guns to prevent school violence.

Frustratingly, Democrats have repeatedly ceded the opportunity to frame these issues for the public even though most Americans would have been sympathetic to their position if they had. For example, Democrats allowed mask mandates to become a touchstone about government overreach (the Republican framing) rather than a whatever-it-takes push to keep schools open. Then theres gun violence in schools, which in reality has always been a problem of gun violence, not schools, despite the focus on hardening the places were kids learn and play. There are transgender student issuesreal ones, about reducing suicides, bullying, and mental health problems for an extremely vulnerable group of childrenthat Republicans made about a few kids playing sports. And thats just the beginning. Do most Americans really support book bans and burnings, a both sides treatment of the Holocaust, or bounties for teachers who mention systemic racism? I cant imagine they do.

If Democrats lean into these issues, theyll find that most voters agree with them. In fact, when Politico asked Youngkins advisors about McAuliffes mistakes, they pointed to disbelief that McAuliffes team let Youngkin off so easy on education.

More than leaning into any single issue, though, Democrats need an overarching message on K-12 education. Republicans have deployed parents rights to great effect politically because its simple, emotive, rooted in concerns that many Americans have about the country today, and vague enough to justify an array of policy arguments. (Ill dig into the emptiness of parents rights as a policy framework in an upcoming post.)

I am not a political strategistand wont even try to come up with a catchy sloganbut I suspect theres a message available to Democrats that satisfies those criteria and would, to some extent, co-opt the parents rights message. Its about sparing kids from our ugly, broken politics. If theres one point of bipartisan agreement in recent polling, its that Americans are sick of politics and polarization. A CNN/SRSS poll from May 2022 indicates that more Americans are burned out than fired up about politicsand thats true for every single subgroup reported (by gender, race, age, income, education, party identification, and political ideology).

Id like to see Democrats actively make the case, now and in November, that we owe it to kids to keep grown-ups messes from spilling into their livesand that its Republicans who are using schools to wage culture wars. Whether that means doing whatever it takes to keep guns out of schools or, as one Democratic strategist put it, fighting back against Republicans who want to check your kids genitalia, its long past time for Democrats to stop tiptoeing and start engaging forcefully on K-12 education.

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Democrats should engage in education politics so kids dont have to - Brookings Institution