Swain County Agonistes

 

Lottie Barker

 

 

I've come to expect the Smoky Mountain Times (SMN) to produce the best local reporting in all of Western North Carolina. I've long followed the excellent work of reporter Cory Vaillancourt, and now it's reporter Lily Levin who's gotten my attention. She covers county government in Swain which means CoCommish meetings. 

Citizens in Swain County crowded the commission's boardroom on March 31st to warn of what was coming if a data center or crypto-mining facility were to put their fat thumb on the jurisdiction, suck up the water, drain the grid, and make a bunch of unnecessary noise. All five county commissioners voted for a year-long moratorium on "high-impact land uses" in April. 

Something happened at the May 5th meeting of the commish that County Manager Lottie Barker didn't want seen by the public. According to a county tech person, Barker requested a section be removed. The resulting gap is pretty lame-ass and therefore hilarious: Swain County’s official YouTube recording of May 5th begins mid-sentence in a resident's public comment. Then, what the resident said that was edited out was strong enough to get referred to repeatedly later in the meeting by both commissioners and audience members.

On May 20th, SMN filed a FOIA request with the county for the unedited tape.

June 4: SMN sends followup email wondering when compliance with FOIA might happen.

June 11: SMN sends another email to county government. It's already dawned on people that a pristine original tape maybe no longer exists.

June 11: SMN expands its documents probe to the Department of Social Services, requesting all correspondence regarding "the disposal of DSS records and hazardous materials at the stump dump." You couldn't make that sentence up if you were on drugs.

Lottie Barker's manager contract was up back in February, but the county extended it to allow a landing strip for a new manager. She's been accused of frequent absences from public meetings. A group of citizens, joined by a single commissioner, have alleged secret cover-ups and general malfeasance and put Lottie Barker at the center of it.

 

Veto Overrides Never Tasted Sweeter

 

Purges are commonplace in politics. So is revenge.

Back in March, two Democratic NC House members, Carla Cunningham and Shelly Willingham, were primaried for being problems for the Party. Their local parties turned against them. The state Democratic Party punished them. The governor especially wanted Carla Cunningham gone and publicly endorsed her opponent. Thus were both Cunningham and Willingham (and two others) purged in the March primaries. Both Cunningham and Willingham quickly changed their registrations from Democrat to Unaffiliated, and they've begun to take blood.

They still had a whole legislative session yet to serve, and about the first thing put to the House was veto overrides of two more bills that had originated in Phil Berger's Senate:

Two combined  bills: S 227 bans efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion in the public school system. S 558 bans efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion in the university system.

S 153 requires that everybody, from local law enforcement to public school employees, must be nice to ICE, must participate in assisting the deportation of people that ICE picks, and any entities deemed not in compliance would lose their governmental immunity, allowing private citizens to sue them.

In the veto overrides yesterday in Raleigh, Cunningham and Willingham helped the Republican majority just by being absent. WRAL reported that although the two House members had been present for morning committee meetings, they were not present in the House chamber when the override votes happened, thus decreasing total attendance from 120 to 118. For the override, they need a three-fifths (60%) majority of those present and voting. Yesterday, the vote on each override was 71-47.  If everybody's there, they'd need 72 votes. Absence made the heart grow fonder.

Revenge tastes good hot or cold, but I wonder about the after-taste in this particular instance. Those laws belong to the 1950s, and I don't think either Cunningham or Willingham want to go back there. In this case, sweet revenge required it.

A Case of Nerves?

 

Dave Boliek

 

 

A week and a day ago, June 16th, Republicans in the NC House introduced H 958, "Election Law Changes," 37 pages of monkeying around with the way things have been. Under this bill, any resident of a county may challenge any other resident's ballot until five days after an election (oh, yes, there'll be mischief on this one!), and State Auditor Dave Boliek will get yet a new sweeping power -- "mandatory post-election audits" in counties of Dave Boliek's choosing (maybe particularly the ones that turn blue?). Dave Boliek used to be a registered Democrat. He became a Republican, won his election, and has proven himself extra loyal to the GOP. (Witness how he bullied Republicans on the Jackson County Board of Elections to reject early voting on the Western Carolina University campus.) H 958 would also make more State Board of Elections staff into political (partisan) appointees, and curiously the law would ban any members of county boards of elections from "encouraging" citizens to vote. Why? Because human flesh is frail? 

The backlash to this bill, which was being fast-tracked, turned pretty fierce fast and overwhelming -- there's still a portal available for public comment -- so the bill is stalled, stuck in the Rules Committee (where many a problematic piece of legislation has died of slow suffocation). Revisions to H 958 may be underway, but does it matter? The GOP has cemented its identity -- the burning need to keep as many people from voting as possible.

The fact that the House leadership flinched in the face of public uproar -- former Speaker Tim Moore would never have flinched -- may tell us something about the case of nerves right now in the Republican majority. Do they need a lot of negative attention right now over the right to vote?

 

Satisfaction

 

I began working in politics in 1968, canvassing for registered Democrats in Salt Lake City who would promise to attend their precinct meetings and help elect delegates to the state convention who supported the anti-war Eugene McCarthy for the presidential nomination. I was very much of draft age. And I was very unsuccessful. All 20 precincts I was assigned to organize went for Hubert Humphrey. It was my first taste of insurgent politics, with its sweet aftertaste of defeated idealism.

I did not go back to political organizing until 1990, when we helped carry our rural Western North Carolina county for Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte who was running to unseat Jesse Helms. I was a true believer for Gantt, and I had convinced myself that he would -- could -- win the whole state. Belief is a kind of drug. Gantt lost by 107,000 votes, a sobering number. 

You got to believe to do politics, but you also have to level up on reality. If you thrive on the hunt, you also know starvation. But when the big game is plentiful, fat, and slovenly, you're allowed a certain expectation that this time a big feast will follow.

If I were a young man again, I'd be knee-deep right now in some wholly improbable attempt to topple a Republican monument. The paint is peeling off the Republican Party, and the most improbable Democratic candidate could, in such a toxic watery environment, bring down the buffalo. I expect pleasant surprises.

Anything less will leave me unsatisfied.

W T [EVERLASTING ] F

 

The Wake County Board of Elections just voted unanimously to approve an early voting plan for November that cuts out the Talley Student Union on the North Carolina State University campus, where some 47,000 students, faculty, and staff go every day. The final vote was 5-0, with both Democratic reps voting with the Republicans. This final decision followed what appeared to be a gallant Democratic attempt to save Talley as an early voting site. The two Democrats made a motion to keep Talley in the early voting plan, which pleased the overflow crowd who attended yesterday to watch the action, many of them NCSU affiliated. The Democratic motion was defeated along partisan lines 3-2. Naturally.

The next step would have depended on the Democrats sticking to their high-minded guns. They should have voted against the final version -- the Dallas Woodhouse-branded solution for discouraging the youth vote by whatever means. (In Jackson County, where Republican members of the local BOE were highminded enough to recommend a campus early voting site for Western Carolina, they got threatened by higher ups. One of the Republicans resigned in protest.) Voting against the Republican majority on the board forces by law a punt to the State Board of Elections, where, yes, another negative outcome is assured. The three Republican majority on the SBOE are in on the fix. But Democrats who don't keep fighting, even in the face of insurmountable odds -- it's not a good look.

I would like this not to be the Democratic brand in North Carolina: Caving, like DeeCee Dems. Make motions and argue to keep a voting site for young people, like you truly believe in what you're saying, like a hero for the people, and then turn around and vote with the opposition so that there cannot be a test of the decision at the State Board of Elections.

I would love to hear the reasoning behind that final unanimous vote.

No, never mind. In fact, just STFU.

 

Propects As High As an Elephant's Eye

 

Introductory campaign videos from the wave of Democratic candidates who could make Iowa a hot news topic.

Josh Turek, running for U.S. Senate:

  

 

 

Rod Sand, running for Governor:

 

 

 

Lindsay James, running for Congress, Iowa 02:

 

 

 

Christina Bohannan, running for Congress, Iowa 01:

 

 

Sarah Garriott, running for Congress, Iowa 03:

 

 

 

Jackson Co. Board of Elections Member Blows the Whistle on Republican Collusion To Squelch the Youth Vote

 

Dave Boliek

 

 

We've known since the bosses in the General Assembly put Republican Auditor Dave Boliek in charge of the State Board of Elections that the GOP had drawn a cross-hatch on the youth vote. That became crystal clear when Boliek appointed Republican operative Dallas Woodhouse to "coordinate" voting plans with county parties. What Woodhouse apparently did was issue "kill" orders for university early voting sites in several county BOEs, one of which was Jackson County, home to Western Carolina University. WCU had enjoyed an early voting site on its campus since 2016. 

We don't know how Woodhouse may have delivered the message about squelching the youth vote, but the Republican majority in Jackson Co. got the message for the primary. The board voted 3-2 along partisan lines to deny WCU its usual site, and because the vote was not unanimous -- as required by state law -- the primary early voting plan had to go to the State Board of Elections with its 3-2 Republican majority. The Republicans on the SBOE naturally found it quite easy to sanction the closing of the site at WCU.

That was the primary. Now early voting plans for the General Elections are once again issues for county BOEs. Two of the three Republican members in Jackson let it be known that they supported returning early voting to the WCU campus for this fall. Those two members were promptly summoned to a secret dressing-down by the Jackson County Republican Executive Committee, which according to the member who blew the whistle, threatened the two men with expulsion from the board:

“When we made it clear what we were going to vote, we were asked to come before the Executive Committee of the Republican Party” to justify it, the whistleblower told an open meeting of the Jackson BOE Monday. “And we presented them evidence, we presented them numbers, we presented them everything,” the whistle-blower said. “And all I heard was, ‘Well, we just don’t want it on campus. We just don’t want it on campus.’ ”

One of those two renegade Republican members promptly resigned from the board in April, leaving a 2-2 split of voting members. Only one remaining Republican, the Chair of the Board, voted against the WCU site for the Fall elections. The whistle-blower and the two Democrats voted for the WCU site. The board chair was apologetic and somewhat chagrined. According to reporting by NCNewsline, he admitted during Monday's meeting that he had been pressured "from above" and that he was sorry to be the one vote that kept the plan from being unanimous. The final decision will now fall again to the SBOE, and we've seen this movie before. 

What they're doing to suppress the youth vote in the upcoming election is as plain as the large partisan nose on Dave Boliek's fat face.

Censorship in Real Time

 

Watch Clayton High School senior and valedictorian of the class of 2026 get the microphone snatched from her when she began to say what she really felt about the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the treatment of immigrants by ICE in our own country. Leen Hijaz had just said the following, veering away from the text that was approved by school officials beforehand:

“Whether it’s the millions suffering in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan and so many other countries around the world, or the families being torn apart by ICE,” Hijaz said over the cheers of her classmates. “These are not distant issues, they are happening as I speak.”

Here's the video of that moment:

 

Not only did the school principal snatch away her free speech rights along with the microphone but then followed up the wrong by denying Hijaz her own diploma. Did I mention that Leen is valedictorian of her class?

Adding insult to the injury, the school put out this lie: “School administrators intervened in order to maintain the integrity and focus of the program in real time. This action was not about limiting a student’s voice, but about ensuring that a school-sponsored event remained consistent with its intended purpose.”

"Not about limiting a student's voice"? It's all about limiting any voice that goes against whatever MAGA is told to think on any given day. 

Proud of the courage of Gen Z! Such bravery may be the only thing that can repair the freedoms in our Constitution.