Phil Berger Sends a Panicked Message to NC's Chief Justice

 

First reporter who got this out appears to have been Bryan Anderson (whose Anderson Alerts on Substack is required reading). 

Mr. Chief Justice

Looks like Phil Berger knows just how destructive to Republican rule, going forward, and to the entire North Carolina judicial system, how utterly destructive a Paul Newby Supreme Court ruling in Jefferson Griffin's favor would be, giving him that lusted-for seat on the Court in the most cynical way imaginable. So, speaking to the press two days ago, Phil Berger sent a message to our Rumplestiltskin Chief Justice: Don't do it, you dolt! Even though his comment singled out Jefferson Griffin and not Newby, any fool can see that Berger's real concern is the naked and crazy partisanship of the little man at the top of the Court who has already said publicly that he likes Griffin's chances.

In a rare public rebuke of a fellow Republican, GOP Senate leader Phil Berger on Tuesday suggested Griffin’s effort to remove voters over clerical issues was a bridge too far.

“The equities are with the voters there,” Berger told reporters on Tuesday. “I don’t think that they had a way of knowing that that was a deficiency as far as their registration is concerned."

Question remains: Will Newby get the message? Certainly, Jefferson Griffin has already shown he's not letting up, so it falls on the conservative super-majority on the NC Supremes to save the NCGOP from itself.

 

Sen. Tillis: Hooked Fish Flopping on the Riverbank

 

To recap the disgrace, Donald Jackoff Trump said in recent days that Ukraine is to blame for the start of the war. He reporters from his Mar-a-Lago estate that Ukrainian leaders “could have made a deal.” Yesterday, he sharpened his criticism, calling Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections.”

Enter Thom Tillis, timidly clearing his throat (according to the NYTimes):

Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, who recently returned from a trip to Kyiv where he and two other senators reaffirmed their support for Ukraine, balked at the “dictator” remark.

“It’s not a word I would use,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

“There is no moral equivalency between Vladimir Putin and President Zelensky,” Mr. Tillis said of the comments Mr. Trump made in a post on his social media site.

But Mr. Tillis, who recently considered and then retreated from a confrontation with Mr. Trump over his defense secretary, was also careful to avoid directly criticizing the president’s approach. Mr. Tillis said he believed Mr. Trump would ultimately listen to his advisers and take note of the discomfort from Republicans on Capitol Hill, who may be privately urging him to avoid appeasing Mr. Putin.

Got new for you, Senator Bucko: Jackoff takes no notice of anyone's discomfort, especially yours and other members of his purported party in Congress.

Phil Berger: "You'll Not Hear Any More About Gambling Casinos Out of Me"

 

Phil Berger -- who tried to sneak four new private industry gambling casinos into rural North Carolina, while his own son who's chair of the Rockingham County Commission was rushing through a rezoning of some prime property already picked out for the Rockingham casino -- Berger got his ears pinned back on that deal. A hardcore group of Puritans in the NC House said no way, and the popular sheriff of Rockingham, Sam Page, led a protest of hometown Rockingham Republicans to Raleigh to denounce Berger's scheme in front of the legislative building. Page is now running against Berger in next March's Republican primary.

What's the saying? Once bitten, twice shy.

When News and Observer reporter Avi Bajpai asked Berger if casino legislation could be revisited this year, "Berger said he isn’t working on it, nor is he aware of any other lawmakers planning to introduce legislation on it." “I don’t think it’s something that will see the light of day as far as the legislative session we’re in,” Berger said.

Just a week ago Berger was telling the NandO's Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan that he saw no reason to talk yet about his plans for 2026 -- “I don't want to prejudge any decision that really doesn’t have to be made until later in the year,” he said -- but then Sam Page made a splash with his announcement that he intended to take out Phil Berger in the next election. Suddenly Phil Berger was announcing his plans to run for reelection. 

“My intent has been, all along, to run again, and I felt that the appropriate thing would be to make the announcement of that closer to the filing period [December],” Berger told reporters. “But, you know, I intend to run, I intend to continue to be the senator from the 26th district.”

Sounds nervous to me.

History Will Condemn Him, But We Must Defeat Him

 

Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago this month, bombing, killing, maiming, torturing, kidnapping a formerly free people. Yesterday in his gaudy bunker in Florida, Donald Jethro Trump blamed Ukraine. "You should never have started it," he said.

I have hate in my heart for that appalling man. I feel rage for the fate of the Ukrainians. I want to start, or at least participate in a shitstorm of protest and resistance.

Trump is delivering Ukraine into the hands of a killer and a tyrant, He is betraying every fiber of what "Americanism" used to mean.

The other bullshit Jethro spouted at Mar-a-Lago -- Zelenskyy's approval rating at 4%, etc. -- came directly from a Russian disinformation handout. Putin dictated it; Jethro repeated it. Plus he's out to extort Ukraine's rare earth minerals as part of his betrayal. There is no Hell hot enough.

Best Tactical Suggestion of the Day

 

Excellent idea! And you know who could make it happen? Ken Martin, the new chair of the DNC. He could do it. If he had any imagination at all.

Golden Calf Worship (cont.)

 

Claudia Tenney

On Feb. 14, Valentine's Day (ahem), Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) introduced the Trump’s Birthday and Flag Day Holiday Establishment Act which seeks to saddle June 14th with two honorees, the second of which is the largely ignored old Flag Day which recognized June 14th as the day in 1777 when the national flag design got approval from the Continental Congress. 

Something the Continental Congress did in 1777 ... boring. Who cares?

A big personality, morally unmoored ... exciting (and proof of cult)

Tenney really loves Trump. Must be that, rather than any need to curry favor with a large MAGA majority, because Rep. Tenney's 24th District in New York (largest city: Syracuse) gave her a 65% majority vote against her Democratic challenger in 2024, despite the district's partisan makeup (according to Dave's): 52.9% Democratic, 45.6% Republican. Trump won the district in 2020 with 54.7% of the vote. Interesting footnote: Tenney also doesn't live in the district.

Marco in Charge

 

"Vladimir Putin's being invited to the United States is the equivalent of Franklin Roosevelt receiving Adolf Hitler in Hyde Park sometime after Hitler marched into the Sudetenland."

--Bret Stephens, NYTimes conservative columnist, 2/17/25

If you don't fully understand by now that Donald Jethro Trump will sell Ukraine down the river to please his BFF Putin -- it was always gonna happen -- then how on earth did you find your way to this URL?

Marco Rubio is Jethro's bagman for this project. Rubio used to be a hawk on Russia and Putin's expansionist invasion of a neighboring and sovereign nation. According to researchers at the Davis Center, Rubio never missed a chance to "co-sponsor punitive measures against Russia" over its unlawful aggression. Rubio also repeatedly co-sponsored bills to "strengthen U.S. entanglement in the NATO alliance," emphasizing that any US exit from NATO should require congressional approval.

Just what did Trump tell Rubio when he arrived at Mar-a-Lago for his job interview? More to the point, how abjectly did Rubio bend every knee to get the job? The churning of his stomach can be heard in an elevator and must discomfort young Rubio all the Riyadh day. Will he have a breaking point?

Rubio, popping Tums, sitting down with that wily old fox Lavrov across the table, armed with nothing more than Trump's druthers, which happen also to be Lavrov's druthers -- it's an effing betrayal of every democratic value.

2/18/25 ... Rubio as nervous as a probationary sophomore
summoned to Vice-Principal Lavrov's office

The 2025 Resistance Movement

 

I've been touring the photos from all across the nation documenting the turnout at protest marches yesterday against Trump 2.0. It was clearly an impressive President's Day out-pouring of disgust and determination, including the packed house at the Boone Town Council chambers (not a 50501-affiliated event but rather a town-hall teach-in by Common Cause NC about the attempted steal of an NC Supreme Court seat by Jefferson Griffin -- the same defiant spirit reigned there as in the big cities).

You can connect with this movement online: https://www.fiftyfifty.one/

The NewSpeak of Trump 2.0

 

The following lifted wholesale from Aaron Blake in the Bezos WashPost:

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to disrupt the U.S. government and hamstring federal agencies are increasingly predicated on the idea that they’re combating fraud. Trump and Musk used that word more than a dozen times in the Oval Office on [Feb. 11th], and the Trump administration keeps citing fraud in defending itself in court.

“We have massive amounts of fraud that we’ve caught,” Trump said.

Except they seem to be having trouble locating the actual fraud.

They keep saying they’ve uncovered fraud. But when pressed for evidence, they don’t seem to have much or any.

They instead often point to programs that might sound wasteful to some but were congressionally authorized. They have also repeatedly pointed to things that have been known about for years, acting as if they had just uncovered them.