I'm a partisan Democrat. Never tried to deny it. My druthers are totally out in the open. But I hope I'm not a "partisan hack" -- one of those robotic hatchet-men who can always be depended on to cheerlead the Party, no matter how wack, and attack the other side, no matter how sensible and sane. Partisan as I am, I know a really good bi-partisan deed when I see one.
The best recent example: The agreement between the Watauga County Commission and the Boone Town Council to build a bridge at Brookshire Park to link the county's walking path with the Town's 30 acres of public land, which will have trails and plantings along the South Fork of the New River. A good idea, well executed.
Chair Braxton Eggers led the initiative on the County Commission, and Boone Mayor Pro Tem Dalton George led the Town Council. This proposed new infrastructure will benefit the wide population who enjoy the outdoors at Brookshire Park and the adjacent soccer fields.
Back in April, Democrat Nathan Sage beat everybody to the punch by announcing his candidacy first in what might end up being a crowded Democratic primary to take on veteran Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst in '26. I've kinda had a thing for Iowa Democratic candidates on this site for years now. (Don't believe me -- use the search engine, upper left.) Nathan Sage catches my attention for this: "He said his campaign will be about repairing the party’s connection to working-class voters" (Iowa Public Radio).
Sage's introductory video is both a vindication of working-class as a valuable designator and a sort of bitch-slapping of establishment Democratic attitudes -- a direct challenge to a ruling class that looks down on blue-collar grunts. "We built the damn table," Sage says. "We need a seat at it!"
Sage doesn't talk like an establishment Dem, doesn't look like an establishment Democrat. He projects a smart, bullshit-detecting analytical understanding of exactly how the deck has been stacked against workers. And Sage's video production reminds us what a little early campaign money can buy (money, which is often the hurdle for any brilliant working-class candidate, like for example Darren Staley who ran as a Democrat for the NC Senate down in Wilkes last fall -- Senate Dist. 36, one of the most heavily Republican districts in the state. If Darren had only had the early money like Nathan Sage clearly does!)
President Donald Trump kicks off the first major international trip of his second term Tuesday in a region where his family business has grown significantly in recent months, presenting his administration with more potential conflicts of interest than ever.
The president’s sons, who head the Trump Organization, have spent the past few weeks crisscrossing the Middle East, laying the groundwork for deals that will benefit the company and, in some instances, Trump himself. Government watchdogs, presidential historians and other critics say it is an escalation of unethical and even unconstitutional conflicts between the interests of the United States and its president.
Interesting intel in a series of posts on BSky by @altnps, an anonymous Federal worker in the National Park Service:
Elon Musk’s regulatory troubles [with Federal regulators]? Vanishing fast. Since Trump returned to the White House, federal agencies that once scrutinized Musk’s empire are being gutted or redirected. At the USDA, Trump fired the official investigating Neuralink.
At the CFPB [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] and beyond, Trump and Musk allies are slashing staff weakening regulators that once held Tesla and X accountable. In recent months, Trump’s DOJ dropped a case against SpaceX. Labor Department canceled a civil rights review of Tesla.
And a separate SpaceX case is quietly moving into settlement talks with the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board]. Meanwhile, more than 40 other federal investigations into Musk have gone silent with no public updates in months. It’s starting to look less like oversight and more like a cover-up.
On January 25, 2021, the Supreme Court put an end to lawsuits alleging that President Donald Trump violated a constitutional anti-corruption prohibition by profiting from his business empire while in office -- particularly from that big luxury hotel in DeeCee a few steps from the White House where foreign governments rented very expensive blocks of rooms, drank over-priced cocktails in the lounge, and ate not very good but super-dear food in the restaurant. The Supreme Court declined to answer whether Trump's private profit amounted to a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, declaring the issues moot because Trump had been thrown out of office. In other words, the stupid Supremes opened the door to massive new corruption. Plus they thoughtfully decided that a second coming of Trump could never be charged with crimes.
Anyone, including foreign actors, can enrich the Trumps by buying up shares in Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social, or through any of the family’s several cryptocurrency schemes.
I have no appetite for the shit being dished by that man, and I'll be damned and split hell wide open if even sizable parts of MAGA also have a sensible big problem with public corruption, particularly when it's so spectacularly open.
The breath-taking, totally-out-in-the-open grift and graft of Trump 2.0 has not yet come into focus for far too many low-info voters. So I'm especially grateful for compilations like this one by Heather Digby Parton:
Politics was immensely lucrative for the Trump family during the first term, but that looks like chicken feed compared to what they're doing now. This time it's no holds barred, straight-up grift and corruption in the billions, featuring foreign governments, sleazy scam artists and a big play in the arcane world of cryptocurrency.
Mind you, some things don't change: Trump is still promoting his properties every chance he gets. This time he's also involved in LIV Golf, which is also funded by the Saudis and holds several of its tournaments at Trump's golf resorts. Trump makes money from the tournaments coming and going, both as an investor and as the host. It's a sweet little grift that gives the Saudi sponsors an easy way to stuff more money into Trump's pockets. But honestly, that's nothing compared to the rest of Trump's ongoing involvement in the Middle East....
But that's not where the real action is. The Trump sons are heavily involved in crypto and are using every bit of their access to make some serious bucks. Lipton and company have reported extensively on their play with the presidential memecoin called $TRUMP, which seems like a quick and dirty con that has resulted in thousands of ordinary people losing lots of money while Trump and a few other investors made a bundle. Now they've taken it to another level, holding an auction in which whoever buys the most craptastic coins gets to have dinner with Trump and a select few get to visit the White House. This could hardly be a more obvious way for rich people to siphon money directly into Trump's coffers, and so much more convenient than a paper bag full of cash.
And then there's the Trump-owned crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Its co-founders, alongside Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., include the son of real estate magnate Steve Witkoff, who happens to be Trump's designated envoy to Russia, Israel, Iran and almost everywhere else. These guys have their hands different areas of the crypto world, but World Liberty's primary goal is to get the type of cryptocurrency called a stablecoin officially recognized as a legitimate financial instrument.
Trump has called on Congress to pass something called the GENIUS Act, which would do just that. Immediately thereafter, World Liberty started selling its own stable coin known as USD1; its price went through the roof, netting the Trumps another bundle. At the time, it was widely assumed that Congress would going to pass the law, but after the reporting in the Times, Democrats who'd previously backed it balked (along with a couple of Republicans) and this week the bill failed in the Senate. Apparently the stench of Trump at both ends of this deal — as the regulator in chief and the financier being regulated — was just too pungent.
I just really need everybody to understand that everything that’s happening in and to the global economy now (and all the businesses and people in it) is the entirely predictable result of the intentional decisions of one guy who doesn’t understand how the global economy works.
Video surfaced of the grim closing moments of yesterday's meeting of the new State Board of Elections. "New" in the hair-raising sense that it's now and very suddenly dominated by a 3-2 Republican majority (counting Watauga's Four Eggers) -- all appointed by a newly elected Republican hack Council of State member, Auditor Dave Boliek, just because the Republicans in the General Assembly still have a lot of revenge flowing through their capillaries, and they love torturing our new Democratic governor.
The moment the video memorializes is immediately after the Republican majority has terminated the employment of SBOE Exec. Dir. Karen Brinson Bell, who has run the operation only since June 2019 and who has been attacked by right-wing election deniers as a partisan Democratic operator, which is absurd. By every metric Brinson Bell was even-handed and above-board, and I might remind the election deniers that it was under her six years directing elections that Republicans maintained and extended their hegemony in the General Assembly. (I realize the tit-for-tat history behind Brinson Bell's appointment in 2019: The Democratic majority summarily fired the Republican Exec. Dir. at the time, Kim Strach, who had also been a fair and even-handed administrator (IMO). So I get the revenge, even though I don't believe in it.
So ... teeing up the video ... Brinson Bell has just been fired. One of the Republicans quickly moves for adjournment, and Brinson Bell requests a minute of their time to make a comment on her tenure as executive director. Instead of saying a gentlemanly "sure you may speak!" Four Eggers quickly seconds the motion to adjourn, and the Republican members all stalk out, like milk cows going to stall, while Brinson Bell begins reading her statement.
Worried that blindly and maliciously partisan drones have taken over the administration of voting and of voters and of elections in North Carolina? You bet I'm worried. Here's a very serious open question involving the barest operation of any imagination: What would have happened in the Jefferson Griffin v. Allison Riggs case if the Four Eggers crowd had been in control the whole time? When Griffin first started his bizarre legal theorizing -- that elections can be overturned by rewriting the rules later -- he made his argument about throwing out 60,000+ ballots first to the State Board of Elections -- 3-2 Democratic at the time -- which quickly rejected Griffin's arguments as belonging in the "You've Got To Be Kidding Me!" bin.
Bryan Anderson just blasted out the news that sore loser Jefferson Griffin has conceded his misguided attempt to steal the NC Supreme Court race from Justice Allison Riggs.
No doubt, the sledgehammer opinion written by Fed Judge Richard Myers had a good deal to do with it.
J.W. Williamson was the founding editor in 1972 of the Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, which he edited until July of 2000. He has taught college classes in Appalachian history, cultural politics, and literature, and he has lectured widely on the pop-culture history of "Appalachia" in the American consciousness. His books include Interviewing Appalachia, Southern Mountaineers in Silent Films, and Hillbillyland: What the Mountains Did to the Movies and What the Movies Did to the Mountains. He has won the Thomas Wolfe Award given by the Western North Carolina Historical Society, the Laurel Leaves Award given by the Appalachian Consortium, a special Weatherford Award given by Berea College, and the Cratis Williams-James Brown Award given by the Appalachian Studies Association.
The views expressed on WataugaWatch are solely those of J.W. Williamson or individual contributors and are not necessarily shared nor endorsed by the Watauga County Democratic Party nor by any other adults of sound mind in this or any other universe.
