Davy Crockett Also Surrendered at the Alamo

 

Kate Rogers, The Alamo Trust

What happened to the Republican woman appointed to oversee the historic renovation of the Alamo in San Antonio:

Kate Rogers didn’t know it at the time, but Oct. 13 would mark the beginning of the end of her four-year tenure leading the $550 million renovation of the Alamo.

On that day, two posts appeared on the X account of the famous San Antonio historic site. One celebrated Columbus Day. The other, which has since been deleted, celebrated Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a holiday ​recognized by President Joe Biden in 2021 that honors Indigenous populations in the United States.

Yep. You saw it coming, right? Prominent Republicans immediately yelled "Woke!" -- parroting Donald Jethro Trump and his war on the Smithsonian for telling historical truth -- and started calling for Kate Rogers' head on a pike. The Texas Land Commissioner, a fellow Republican with jurisdiction over the Alamo, announced an investigation of her. Facing an emergency board meeting, Rogers admitted she didn't write nor post those tweets, but she offered to resign anyway. She was baffled and non-plussed by the uproar because those tweets were wholly innocent pro forma recognitions of national holidays -- probably posted by an intern. But to prove their trumpist brainwashing, the majority on her board needed to roll somebody's head out the door, so they chose to fire the Communications Director rather than accept Rogers' resignation.

According to the WashPost, eight days later Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a known bully, had gotten hold of Rogers' 2023 Ed.D. dissertation, which unpacked the ways that museums can influence how history is taught in schools. Lt. Gov. Patrick called Rogers directly, read aloud to her a short passage from page 80 of her dissertation, and demanded her immediate resignation. The passage Patrick read to her:

“Personally, I would love to see the Alamo become a beacon for historical reconciliation and a place that brings people together versus tearing them apart, but politically that may not be possible at this time.”

You see the blistering idiocy of Patrick for demanding that someone resign for speaking the actual stark truth: "politically may not be possible at this time." 

At first Rogers refused Patrick. The lieutenant governor, who loves to bully people he perceives as vulnerable, immediately went public on how crypto-liberal the woman boss at the Alamo really was, calling out the dogs to hound this woman out of office. And Rogers quickly caved. Now she's suing. Earlier this week she sued Patrick, the land commissioner, and the board of The Alamo Trust in federal court in the Western Dist. of Texas for wrongful termination.

I'd probably tag her as a country-club Republican, moderate and sensible and imminently practical, which makes her highly effective and also unwelcome in MAGAland. Her long history of executive management of corporate organizing and image-building gave her access to the highest circles of the Texas Republican establishment, and her treatment at the hands of Dan Patrick may become a rallying point for moderate conservatives. Her Linked In profile:

Motivated executive with experience in campaign development, change management, public relations, advertising and communications. Winner of multiple Addy and other industry awards. Established reputation as a change agent with consistent results, with a knack for building a high performance team focused on strong innovation.

There's That Familiar Smell, the Odor of Rank Opportunism

 

Apparently there's a discharge petition being pushed by Republican loose cannon Anna Paulina Luna of Florida to get a bill banning stock trading by members of Congress to the floor of the House for a vote, and it would surely pass. Freshman hustler Tim Moore is on a stock-manipulating spree (see details below for how his wealth has suddenly ballooned to almost $7 million). Moore's stock greediness is trailed not far behind by Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (also see below), whose own stock trades were formerly said to outpace your average Congressperson. But Moore has far exceeded her. (Moore, who an eye blink ago was the self-serving Speaker of the NC House, carved out for himself a congressional District 14 added by the last Census, a safe seat to launch him on DeeCee where he could become even richer, ever shadier.)

Editorial Board, in the Raleigh News & Observer:

It should be obvious why members of Congress shouldn’t be allowed to trade stocks, but if more evidence is needed, consider the investing gusto of U.S. Rep. Tim Moore, a Republican representing North Carolina’s 14th District.

Moore, the former North Carolina House speaker from 2015 to 2025, is a U.S. House freshman, but he’s already surpassed all other members of the state’s congressional delegation in buying and selling stocks. 

A recent report by The News & Observer’s Washington correspondent Danielle Battaglia detailed Moore’s frequent trades. Between his taking office in January and mid-September, Moore made more than 150 trades. That was five times the trading activity of the next closest member in the delegation, Rep. Virginia Foxx, a Republican from Banner Elk, who made just over 30 trades in the same period. 

Good-government advocates have long called for a ban on members of Congress from owning or trading stocks. The members have security clearances, receive confidential briefings and have contacts in financial circles that create a situation ripe for insider trading. 

There was nothing about Moore’s trades that showed he acted on information unavailable to the public. However, his trades included investments in companies that could be affected by government actions on health care and tariffs. Even if a member’s trades are above board, the ownership of stock itself can affect how or whether the member votes.

Fortune magazine reported in June that Moore made hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of personal stock purchases shortly before and after President Donald Trump’s announcement of worldwide tariffs rattled the stock market in April. Moore failed to disclose the trades by a deadline required under the federal Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, but he did submit a report within a 30-day grace period....

It stinks, doesn't it? That odor of opportunism running amok under the guise of public service.

'Principled' Crankiness About Universal Health Care

 

Republican Senate Majority Leader
John Thune

Alexander H. Jones, at New Branchhead gives us a good read on the state of North Carolina politics one day after the opening of candidate-filing. Among other things, he predicts that the sitting Republican US Senate will not extend the expiring Obamacare subsidies, which will be an act of auto-asphyxiation for Republican prospects next year. Why would they set themselves up like that? Because "Republicans deeply, fervently, and genuinely despise the Affordable Care Act and the concept of universal healthcare."

Republicans have a principled, bedrock opposition to universal healthcare. They viscerally resent the idea of providing care to people who can’t access it because they think that would mean rewarding slothful and gluttonous people who refuse to take care of themselves. If you have, say, severe OCD and did nothing to deserve it…sorry. They believe that healthcare is a consumer commodity that must be earned by remunerative work and good lifestyle decisions. It just viscerally rankles them to provide coverage to the uninsured.

And it goes beyond their angry and cranky fixation on personal responsibility. (“If you want something, work for it!”) Most American conservatives take deep pride in the fact that the United States does not have a universal healthcare system like the programs that people in every other advanced industrialized country, especially Western Europe, take for granted. They see it as American Exceptionalism, a tribute to the country’s pioneer legacy of individual freedom. “Barack Obama wants to make us more like the rest of the world,” complained Marco Rubio. Cutting your medications and giving blood to make the money you need for a doctor’s appointment are the American way.

That seems fair. How Jones characterizes the GOP matches what I consistently hear from trolling conservatives on WataugaWatch -- the ones who express a cold-blooded meanness about class and race. That's become standard rhetoric under the pall of Trump. It's possibly quite lethal for their future prospects. If Jones's conclusion is right, then there really may be such a thing as a suicide impulse, powerful and irresistible. Failing to extend Obamacare subsidies will have immeasurable impact on the prospects of Republican rule going forward:

...I do not think Republicans are likely to, after 15 years of bitter and often histrionic opposition, give a man -- some of their constituents accused of being the Anti-Christ -- the satisfaction of seeing the core of his greatest accomplishment survive another Republican majority.

If he's right, well then, they're cooked.

Virginia Foxx Always Draws a Primary

 

Don't know what it is about Congresswoman Virginia Foxx that so displeases other Republicans, but there are always obscure members of her own party looking to oust her. None of them ever come close. This year (so far) it's a guy named Steve Girard, who lives in Jefferson in Ashe County. He has a website placeholder, https://stevegirardforcongress.com/, but there's no information on it (also uses a photo of an anonymous city which I don't think is anywhere in the 5th Congressional District). He has a bit more, including photos of himself, on a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61579207871401. Foxx has actually not filed for reelection yet, but she will.

Democrats in Watauga County will have a primary for County Commission in District 2 between Ray Russell and newcomer David Luther. No Republican has filed yet in that district.

The Boycott of Chuck Edwards' Fast Food

 

According to reporting by George Fabe Russell for the Hendersonville Times-News, a coalition of activist groups are so upset with Congressman Chuck Edwards (CD11) over his vote for the Big Beautiful Bill and his subsequent shrugging off of the pain of thousands thrown off SNAP food benefits -- so upset that they're taking aim at his solar plexus, his profit from seven McDonald's he owns in Hendersonville, Brevard, and Canton. A coalition called the Asheville Fights Back Network plans picketing and boycott of the McDonald’s on 4 Seasons Boulevard in Hendersonville today and again on Sunday, according to a Nov. 24 news release. The Asheville Fights Back Network is made up of Indivisible Asheville, the Western Circle of the NC Poor People’s Campaign, Good Trouble WNC, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and a marching protest band called Brass Your Heart. This coalition has a sound and a flavor!

“He’s making money off of us while he’s withholding food stamps. He voted to cut SNAP, he voted to cut the health insurance subsidies, he voted to spend so much money on chasing down immigrants,” NC Poor People’s Campaign leader Leslie Boyd said, announcing the economic boycott. Another rep from the Poor People's Campaign pointed out that the cuts to SNAP and the ending of Affordable Care Act subsidies would affect 40% of Edwards’ constituents, in a district still recovering from Helene. “We see what’s happening in Washington right now as an emergency. People are going to go hungry. People are going to go without healthcare. It's a crisis in the making,” said an organizer of the boycott. 

Reps of Asheville Fights Back have met with Edwards and have come away concluding that a well-to-do businessman just can't wrap his head around the realities of poverty and helplessness -- the real impact of cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill. (According to one of the leaders of the protest, “One thing about Chuck Edwards, he does keep his doors open.” He's also held some town halls that got contentious. That's brave and admirable of a Rep.) The economic boycott of his business is meant to hurt, to get his mind a little more focused on the human cost of his partisanship in blindly following the party line.

Fake News

 

In Thomas Mills's piece today, "The Republican Dumpster Fire," he composes an excellent cataloguing on the trumpists best recent dummkopf moves I especially took note of this one:

"X, formerly known as Twitter, released a new version with a location feature that shows where accounts are located and, low and behold, some of the largest MAGA influencers are actually in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Russia. Some accounts have as many as 1 million followers." 

To which Max Berger on BSky commented:

“If I’m understanding this correctly, X is owned by a white nationalist who pays poor people of color in developing countries to pretend to be working class white Americans to scare other white Americans into being afraid poor people of color from developing countries are going to ruin America?”

The trail of influence-peddling and civil war agitation began with a big infusion of cash. But they're outed every which way from Sunday! If people are even paying attention. Surely some are.

Michael Behrent's Burnt Sugar

I recently read on an Art Pope-sponsored website a long essay by AppState history professor Michael Behrent, who also until recently served as the Democratic Chair of the Watauga County Board of Elections. (He says he's no longer a registered Democrat.) Behrent begins his essay hypothesizing about something that only a bonehead first-year teacher would try, "overt campaigning in the classroom." While I certainly agree that overt political campaigning in the classroom is wrong, Behrent makes a dark and sinister suggestion that "some political organizations have found workarounds to avoid these prohibitions, allowing them to promote their interests in taxpayer-funded educational contexts."

That's the heart of Behrent's argument -- nefarious "workarounds" are subverting the will of the General Assembly.

"Workarounds"

That word needs unpacking. Behrent seems to be implying that "overt campaigning" is in fact happening regularly, especially on the campus of AppState. His main piece of evidence ... well, I'll let him tell it:

On Wednesday, August 27, I received an email that seemed to have been blind copied to other Appalachian State faculty, as well. It was sent from an App State email address to my App State email address. The sender identified himself as a student “volunteer” for the Watauga County Voting Rights Task Force, which he described as “a local nonpartisan organization fighting for every person’s ability and right to vote” (italics in original). The student noted, “We do not engage with candidates or political issues.” He requested permission to visit my class—and those of other faculty to whom the email was sent—to discuss how to register to vote. The email said: “We understand your time is limited, so we only ask for five minutes at the beginning or end of your class. If you would like to invite one of our representatives for a brief presentation, please respond with the location, and preferred date and time for our visit.”

Behrent makes a big deal out of that email and its student author, but I don't see any "overt campaigning" in it. The Watauga County Voting Rights Task Force (WCVRTF) has always presented voter registrations as a strictly non-partisan, informational activity to ensure proper registrations that will count on E-Day. The Task Force registers everyone, of whatever party. The greater bulk of their registrations are "Unaffiliated," with a few Democrats, a few Republicans, and some Libertarians. What's wrong with that? And what's wrong with that student's emailed and open request, to legally and ethically and according to IRS rules do non-partisan voter registration in a classroom? Show me the "overt campaigning." To equate voter registration efforts with partisan campaigning is ridiculous on its face.

Behrent takes a leap of several furlongs, alleging that the "workarounds" are discoverable in that poor student's associations with other people. It's quite the Easter egg of guilt -- that the several people who started the WCVRTF are -- or were -- also active in the Democratic Party. And Behrent is right about that, but so what? The Voting Rights Task Force was originally a committee in the Party, focused on voter registration. The committee eventually spun itself off from the Party as a separate non-profit, barred by IRS rules from "overt campaigning." The Task Force promotes ballot-access for every voter and defends the provisional ballot, and has gone to bat for the rights of legally registered voters who go to the wrong precinct on election day. The Task Force won a lawsuit restoring the polling place in the AppState Student Union. More recently it went to court again and won a case to give due process to voters whose legitimate voter registration forms had clerical errors which disenfranchised them. The Task Force is also a co-plaintiff with NC Common Cause, seeking to overturn the Ralph Hise gerrymander of Watauga's CoCommish and school board districts.

Bottomline: A person can be legally, ethically, morally involved in more than one org at a time (or else the world is going to be short a lot of the volunteers who actually make things happen). Nowhere does Behrent offer a single instance of a classroom breach, when "overt campaigning" occurred, or of any actual breaking of the rules. Not one. It's all innuendo and those suspicious associations. Democrats doing democratic things while wearing different hats and following different rules. Behrent build a straw horse, imagining a bunch of political activists who (he says) give away their game on the WCVRTF website by quoting liberal icon Lyndon Johnson on the supreme importance of the vote, while editing the original quote to eliminate the word man. (The Pope universe loves this kind of "outing" of liberal stupidities, and Behrent makes hay out of it.)

Behrent's guilt-by-association tour eventually gets to my own household, to PamsPicks.net, and the whole progressive nest of plugged-in citizens who sometimes do voter registration for the WCVRTF and then sometimes do activities for the Democratic Party and who know how to keep things separate. For the record, PamsPicks.net is not published as an arm of the Task Force nor of the Democratic Party. It's an independent source of information and candidate endorsements that often infuriates Democrats as much as Republicans. Behrent gets this right: 

“Pam’s Picks” is the brainchild of a Watauga County activist, who for years has regularly provided extensive information about local, state, and national candidates in addition to making endorsements in most races. “Pam’s Picks” typically includes a marked-up sample ballot with her endorsements noted, which voters may take with them to the polls. A January 2023 article from The Appalachian, the App State student newspaper, quotes the author of “Pam’s Picks”: “I am a progressive Watauga resident and have long held interest in local politics and issues.” The same article notes that, in the 2020 Democratic primary, a candidate who received less than 10 percent statewide called the author of “Pam’s Picks,” puzzled that he had won Watauga. “Pam” explained: “Well, I got your story out.”

So what's Behrent's beef? That an independent woman -- not ever a Democratic Party officer but a self-starting volunteer who has quite separately built a following for her "Picks," because she does thorough research on every candidate of whatever party, offering background facts and social media links, and endorses according to her admittedly "progressive" political values. What's his problem with that?

His essay smells like burnt sugar.

Impressive Dem Candidate in an Impossible R+9 House District

 

Mark Pless, disgruntled

The prospects for flipping the NC House Dist. 118 look pretty unlikely on paper, though one well qualified and impressive Democrat, former District Court Judge Danny Davis, is making the run anyway against Republican incumbent Mark Pless, who's already won reelection to this Madison/Haywood district twice. I wrote about Pless's being in hot water with his own party back in June:

NC House Rep. Mark Pless (Dist. 118, Haywood and Madison) has earned a reputation for putting his thumb in the eye of local government. He gets yelled at (but he could give a shit). Because he's safe (he assumes) in his heavily Republican district. He's never had a primary, and he never gets less than 60% of the vote against weak Democratic challengers. No primary until now.

Like Senator Ralph Hise, Pless likes to mess with "local bills" which can't be vetoed and which always represent some get-even move against local officials who have offended him or one of his buddies.

For example, last February, Pless filed a bill that would have stripped the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority of its ability to collect the county’s 4% room occupancy tax, effectively dismantling the organization. What actually passed upped the room tax to 6% and cut municipal officials out of membership on the board -- sticking it to Waynesville, Maggie Valley, and Lake Junaluska.

In April 2025 Pless introduced two bills that would eliminate county control of ambulance services statewide and change certification standards. Paramedics, medical technicians, and emergency service directors -- not to mention county commissioners -- got loud in their opposition. And Rep. Pless was photographed not taking the criticism gracefully.

Pless has particularly been at war with Waynesville town government. He tried back in 2022 to get a bill through that would make all town elections in Haywood County partisan, but that failed in the Senate. He later backed a trio of candidates to beat the incumbents and take control, but every last one of Pless's guys lost.

House Dist. 118 comes up on Civitas's "Partisan Index" for 2026 as R+9, "likely Republican," and Dave's Redistricting cites the partisan divide as 60% Republican, 37.8% Democratic, and only 2% "other." That's pretty dismal.

Judge Danny Davis

But Judge Davis seems undeterred, and he's got an impressive resume and an economics message. According to his press release, he's a gol-durned native of the district, graduated from Tuscola High School in Haywood and then Western Carolina University before earning a law degree from Campbell. Like many young lawyers, he served as an assistant district attorney before spending 27 years as a district court judge. According to his press release published in the Smoky Mountain News, "Since retiring from the bench — aside from brief stints as an emergency judge — he’s spent time serving as a court mediator and chairman of the Haywood County Board of Elections."

His campaign theme:

“[The] standard of living has been eroded over the last couple of decades because pro-wealth policies have led to stagnated wages while the cost of housing, healthcare, rent, child care and education have skyrocketed,” Davis said in the release. “Small businesses, which are the backbone of this country, are also struggling to pay their employees and provide good benefits for them. This has resulted in working men, women, couples and couples with children especially those under 50 having difficulty staying afloat to the point that they are angry and frustrated and don’t believe the system works for them.”

It may be an added liability (in what is already a long-shot campaign) that Davis has run for office twice before and lost, though he came "within a fraction of one percent" of winning the House district seat in 2012. Open question: Why did he wait 14 years to try again, after the voters almost gave it to him?

Can Trump's Flying Monkeys Conceal the Bad Parts in the Epstein Files?

Didn't you kind of assume -- as I did -- that if Trump was suddenly willing to sign on to the release of the Epstein files, he must have gotten assurances from Pam Bondi and others that those files would be scrubbed of the stuff about him? Didn't that thought cross your mind?

I was somewhat relieved of that particular creeping suspicion by something Jay Kuo published on his Substack column, The Status Kuo:

The “Epstein Files” isn’t some centralized database. They comprise a host of electronic and physical evidence collected by the FBI, held under seal by the courts, used in civil proceedings, and held by third parties. The core investigative files, gathered by the FBI, are subject to strict chain-of-custody controls, meaning they have electronic timestamps, evidentiary IDs, digital authentications and audit trails. That’s very hard to mess with, at least not without someone noticing.

The Epstein files are also not centrally located, but rather exist in multiple forms across multiple facilities, often sealed by court order. And there are working copies out there, as well as logs of who has what.

I very much doubt Kash Patel—who can’t even avoid headlines for using the FBI jet to visit his girlfriend—could tamper with gigabytes of cryptographically encoded, read-only data without triggering alarms and landing in prison. Anyone asked to assist in such an endeavor knows the chances of being caught are quite high, while the chance of succeeding is low.

So while it’s understandable for folks to raise the alarm about the Epstein files being messed with before they are produced, my real concern is over-redaction or withholding of key items, not actual evidence tampering.