Thursday, March 14, 2024

The Humiliations Continue To Pile Up on Mark Walker

 

Trump himself announced the news that he'd completely destroyed any self-respect that Mark Walker might still cling to. Walker lost to Trump's designated patsy Addison McDowell in the 6th CD Republican primary last week by only two points, and Walker had previously talked tough about continuing to fight against McDowell in a run-off. The deadline under NC law to request a runoff was today at noon, but there will be no runoff and McDowell will be going to Congress next January because there is no Democrat in the race.

Trump himself put out the announcement: “I’ve asked Congressman Mark Walker to join my campaign team to work with faith groups and minority communities, and he has agreed to immediately do so,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform.

According to Anderson Alerts, "Walker said in a statement that he spoke with Trump about the position Tuesday afternoon and plans to serve in the Trump administration if the former president wins in November.

“Yesterday afternoon, I was honored to hear from President Trump asking if I would take the lead position as the Director of Outreach for faith and minority communities effective immediately,” Walker wrote. “I’m delighted to accept this position and after the Biden administration is defeated in November, I’m grateful for the offer to continue our work with President Trump in the White House.”

What "work" will be involved in convincing the Christian Right to vote for Trump, since that group long ago started worshipping the golden ass.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

The NC Chamber of Commerce Fears Michele Morrow

 

On March 6th, the day after the primary that saw Republican incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt get kicked out by Republican voters (after one term) and replaced by an ideological wrecking ball named Michele Morrow, a home-schooler and very determined enemy of public education as it has evolved in the 21st Century. Morrow will be on your ballot come November to run the Department of Education, up against Democrat Mo Green.

On March 6th, the day after that thunderbolt of Truitt's defeat -- unexpected -- unimaginable, really, that a moderate professional like Catherine Truitt would get bumped off the ticket by someone considered a nut -- the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce put out an astounding official statement warning that the primary win of Michele Morrow was a threat to the state's "business climate" (and if you immediately flash on Dan Bishop and those people passing the Bathroom Bill in 2016 and costing the state billions in moola and years of bad press and worse memories, you would be right). Gov. Pat McCrory signed the Show Us Your Gender Act in March of 2016 and the stars fell on North Carolina in a media catastrophe that lasted until they repealed the law a quick year later in 2017.

The Chamber evidently thinks that Michele Morrow is another bathroom bill waiting to metastasize. 

"When both parties move to the opposite ends of the political spectrum," wrote the Chamber's political director, "it erodes the quiet, bipartisan work necessary to move our state forward. Moderating voices in each caucus will be replaced with partisan ideologues that cause division and create controversy."

Division and controversy -- very bad for business

Here's a video of Morrow interviewed by Bill O'Neil for WXII. She complicates the political equation by sounding reasonable (there has been indeed an explosion of gender fluidity, but whether you can blame the schools for that and not pop culture seems debatable). She scapegoats the teaching of history for daring to admit the historic evidence that white people have made some bad choices for owning Black people and squeezing Indians into the corner. And Morrow can get fairly giddy about sending more tax dollars to private academies and thus starving public education. And incidentally, she took some of her kids to the January 6th siege of the Capitol, though she says she never went into the building.




She says that in addition to banning books that lean too far into any kind of sexual awareness, she wants books about "traumatic experiences" also banned from school libraries. "But couldn't a book bring some comfort to you to know you're not alone?" asked O'Neil. "No," sez Morrow, decisively, as though the word "comfort" had triggered an odd antipathy.

Her persuasiveness coupled with her calm demeanor make her seem a kind of coherent culture analyst. She has noticed some blatant blunders by education bureaucrats that areactually blatant blunders. But it's how far backward you're willing to go to balance the scales that gives one plenty of pause about Morrow. There is on-line an extended video of her laying out her platform (and incidentally her personality) in a Zoom presentation to the Pasquotank PAC. (The Pasquotank PAC, named for the county, "promotes Republican and Unaffiliated Conservatives in Northeastern North Carolina." Lord help me but I find her persuasive, and I can see her appeal. She talks well and without visible notes and makes sense of things for the MAGA crowd who want everything razed to the ground.

In other words, she has to be stopped.


Maurice "Mo" Green, Democrat

Mo trails behind him a distinguished career in education: Executive Director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation from 2016-2023. More than seven years as superintendent of Guilford County Schools. Before that, general counsel of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, then chief operating officer and then deputy superintendent. He began his career as a lawyer in private practice after doing two United States judicial clerkships. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics and a law degree, both from Duke University. (Indebted to PamsPicks for the details.)

He's about as establishment as you can get. And Morrow is a disestablishmentarian. The clash alone ought to give you the willies when it comes to deciding if our public education will teach inclusiveness as part of the fabric of our Republic.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

BREAKING: 3-Judge Panel Strikes Down Law To Remake the Boards of Election

 

S 749, the Republican grand scheme to take away the governor's power to control the Boards of Elections in every county and replace what we have now with 50-50 splits guaranteed to produce grid-lock and dysfunction -- that law was just stuck down as unconstitutional by a three-judge panel of Superior Court judges, two Republicans and one Democrat.

Unanimously struck it down.

"In a seven-page order released Tuesday [today], the judges wrote that the Republican effort to remove Cooper’s power to appoint members of state and county elections boards clearly “infringes upon” the governor’s constitutional duties, and marked “the most stark and blatant removal of appointment power” since previous cases over appointment powers like McCrory v. Berger and Cooper v. Berger." (NandO)

It's likely that Republican leaders will appeal to their BFF, the state's Supreme Court, which is guaranteed to be far more receptive to allowing the General Assembly anything it wants.

Monday, March 11, 2024

For Czar of NC Agriculture, It's Good Ole Boy vs. Brainiac Innovater


Sarah Taber, Insurgent Democrat

The most popular campaign photo of Sarah Taber is the one copied here, which is a studied pose, yes, but she looks to me like someone who knows farm work and heavy work at that. The look is especially crucial when you're a woman running with the boys, not to mention against a very popular incumbent Commissioner of Agriculture.

Did I say "running with the boys"? 

The boys should be so lucky to keep up with this woman, or any farm woman for that matter. Taber published an amazing little essay in The Nation in January of this year and did some woman'splaining to the men about the importance of her gender on farms: 

"We’re the ones who balance the family books, take outside jobs, handle invoicing, and turn raw crops and livestock into goods ready for people to buy. We are the business backbone that makes farm country work." 

Her personal background sounds raw enough to trust and real as dirt: "I grew up working on farms. I got good at chores, sure — but I also got good at the livelihood part of agriculture." She built a business being expert in aquaculture and aquaponics and greenhouses. She started her consultancy in 2006 to help farms and farmers transition away from traditional crops like tobacco and toward non-traditional but highly lucrative forms of agriculture -- growing food under glass or in water. She has a justifiable brag: 

...growing vegetables in greenhouses [is] a great livelihood if you get it right—but if you get one detail wrong, you’ll lose your shirt. I’m proud to say every single one of my farm clients is still in business. Altogether, they’re now worth $4 billion. [The Nation]

She alludes to a cascade of bad practices and bad decisions that some big (and a few small) farmers have engaged in, struggling to make lucrative what often has not been lucative: "Rural poverty causes radicalization. So does pollution from farms. Farm radicalization isn’t just a local problem. Farm outfits that hire undocumented workers put serious money behind hard-right legislators and sheriffs who pledge to collaborate with ICE. That means local country politics can get ugly. And those ugly politics don’t stay local. They can undermine democracy for the whole state." 

Taber holds a doctorate in plant medicine from the University of Florida. In her case, education has sparked an imagination for big agricultural projects that could actually save the planet, like the idea of turning abandoned oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico into seaweed-growing operations that could cleanse Gulf waters of their pollution.

On sarahtaber.com, her professional consultancy site that's disappeared from the Web in favor of taberforNC.com, she self-identified as "crop scientist and writer." Regrettably (for me at least), she decided to highlight in her campaign lit her academic credentials a little more than I think can help her with a population used to good ole boys who are careful not to act too smart. Very first words of autobiography on her website: "Dr. Sarah Taber." Because I R also an overeducated "Doctor" and happened to have been close to lots of farmers growing up and heard their jibes, I tend to wince when I hear someone describe themselves as Doctor So-and-So. Might as well go ahead and parody yourself as "Perfesser So-and-So" for the country folks, cause that's what they're thinking. When is the flashing of higher education ever not off-putting as a social class marker?

Nevertheless, for her obvious smarts and practical wisdom, not to mention her vision for expanding and improving vegetable production in North Carolina, Taber is revolutionary as a candidate, but she'll have to be more than that to pull anywhere near even with the popular Republican incumbent.


Steve Troxler, Incumbent Commissioner of Agriculture (since 2004)

Photo Joseph Bradley, for The Assembly















Here's Troxler's history of election margins, making him often the most popular Republican on the ballot below President:

2004 -- his 1st election, he won by 2,287 votes or 50.3%

2008 -- won with 52% of the vote

2012 -- won with 53% of the vote

2016 -- won with 55.56% of the vote

2020 -- won with 53.86% against an unconventional woman, Jenna Wadsworth

His popularity rose steadily after his first election but dipped noticeably in 2020 and possibly because his Democratic opponent came at him from a novel direction. Sarah Taber will be his second time up against an accomplished, out-of-her-traditional-womanly-lane candidate who may come off a little more electable than Wadsworth was.

Plus Taber is going squarely at Troxler as corrupt, the single biggest factor -- if it's true -- known by political science to motivate significant shifts in the vote. Sarah Taber herself summed up the Troxler era in her piece for The Nation, "Why I'm Running for Commissioner of Agriculture":

We’ve had the same commissioner of agriculture for 20 years, despite a series of fumbles and corruption scandals on his watch. He presided over the largest crop insurance fraud ring in US history. His department tipped off meat plants suspected of animal abuse before a “surprise” inspection. His greatest success was encouraging China to buy North Carolina-grown tobacco—only for Trump, for whom the incumbent helped raise funds and votes, to destroy that market with a trade war

Meanwhile, Taber claims, Troxler and his aides "misspent taxpayer dollars on high-end lodgings and dining."

So why is ole tobacco-farmer Troxler so popular? Says Taber, he's actually quite unpopular with an increasing number of farmers. Her evidence is partly anecdotal: 

I’m struck by how eager North Carolina’s farmers are for change. It’s not hard to see why. After you account for inflation and population growth, North Carolina’s farm economy has shrunk by 19 percent in the last 20 years. Our farmers and ranchers feel it. And they know what the problem is: corrupt leadership. One hog farmer put it to me this way: “Politicians are a bit like piggies. They’re frisky when they’re little. But then they discover corn and become hogs.” He paused and went on. “Maybe it’s time to put this one in the smokehouse.”

But her best evidence that Troxler's popularity may be illusory is numbers:

In 2020 several North Carolina farm counties voted for the Democratic candidate for commissioner of agriculture [Jenna Wadsworth], and not by a little: Anson. Bertie. Northampton. Hertford. Vance. Hoke. Chatham. Watauga. Halifax. Warren. Edgecombe. Our incumbent doesn’t win because of the farmer vote .... In 2020, hundreds of thousands of suburban North Carolinians voted for both Joe Biden and a Republican commissioner of agriculture who’s wildly unpopular in much of our actual rural farm country.

Why would our suburban brethren, who only look at meat when it's under cellophane, stick with Troxler? Explains Taber, "Because he looks and sounds like what suburbanites think a farmer should look like."

Looks are important, O my brethren, especially in politics. If this is the year the progressive resistance rises up against the corruption of Trump and the extremism of Mark Robinson, Michele Morrow, Dan Bishop, at al. then constant pounding of the message of Troxler's corruption might wilt that big bushy mustache.


Sunday, March 10, 2024

Michael Whatley Selected To Be the Doormat

 

Photo Robert Willett, News & Observer


Last Friday, Trump's hand-picked yes-man Michael Whatley got installed as the new chair of the Republican National Committee, replacing Ronna McDaniel who had ceased to please Trump. During the "Stop the Steal" furor following the 2020 election, McDaniel had been wary of joining Trump's 65 lawsuits aimed at overturning the election, plus she appears to have pushed back about emptying Republican bank accounts to pay Trump's legal bills.

Whatley will be joined as co-chair by Trump's own daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who's made it clear that anyone not sufficiently loyal to her father-in-law will be purged from the party, and she's guaranteed to ensure that Trump will get all the money he wants to pay for his chaos.

Whatley will be handmaiden, pregnant with every Trump whim. And he'd better carry them to term!

Trump has been impressed with Whatley's own PR campaign to convince the boss that he is a true believer that the election was stolen and that the only reason North Carolina didn't go for Biden in 2020 was Whatley's own "election integrity" plan to "guard the vote" against imaginary hoards of illegal immigrants and Black felons and Deep State election officials. Whatley was full of shit then, and it'll fairly squeeze out of him now like toothpaste.

Whatley has no apparent personal integrity beyond pleasing the big man, which makes him singularly suited to lead the GOP in the Trump era and provide a square space for Trump to wipe his shoes.


Thursday, March 07, 2024

Democrat Braxton Winston Now Has a Republican Opponent for Secretary of Labor

 























BRAXTON WINSTON

I've been following Winston's trajectory into politics since he won his seat on the Charlotte City Council in 2017. He promises to be a Democratic star attraction on the fall ballot. Winston was born in North Carolina into a military family, was recruited by Davidson College to play football, earned a degree in anthropology, coaches football part time at Providence Day School, and became an accidental but powerful symbol for Black Lives Matter in Charlotte following the September 20, 2016, police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott. That killing prompted several days of street protests. A chance photograph of Winston by the Charlotte Observer’s Jeff Siner went viral (see below) and catapulted Winston into local fame. He's 40 years old.

On September 20, 2016, Winston was on his way home after coaching a middle school football game. He was driving Old Concord Road past the Village at College Downs apartments, where a ruction was going on. An angry crowd was gathering the way a crowd gathers after a shooting, and Winston pulled over to find out what it was.

Winston actually makes his living as a cameraman -- videographer -- who films home games for the Charlotte Hornets as an independent contractor. He began live-streaming the aftermath of the Keith Lamont Scott shooting to his Facebook page.

A Charlotte cop on the scene told Winston to leave. Winston didn't, and the cop left him alone. The cop already knew Winston as a good man from a previous incident. In November 2015, Winston called the cops to help a Hispanic woman being severely beaten by her husband. There was a big commotion, involving neighbors and a little boy running around crying. Winston grabbed up and hugged the boy to him. With his mother going to the hospital and his father to jail, the little boy didn’t want to leave Braxton's arms, "so Braxton went with us to the hospital. He stayed the whole night, trying to make sure the little boy was OK as he clung onto Braxton...” (according to CharlotteMeck PD Officer Shannon Finis). A year later the same cop allowed Braxton to stay on the scene at College Downs apartments.

Student reporters for The Davidsonian, after several interviews, concluded this: "Winston had never been involved in any protest movement. He thought of tear-gas or potential injury as 'the price I got to pay to speak up on behalf of my children, [on] behalf of myself, and [on] behalf of what I believe in and what the world should look like.' ”

According to Olivia Daniels and AJ Naddaff, "tension between police and civilians escalated. Winston removed his shirt to cover his mouth from tear gas. He approached a line of police in riot gear and thrust his fist in the air in an act of civil disobedience." Jeff Siner took his picture.





















Later, after things died down, Winston became a community spokesman, first calling for the resignation of CharlotteMeckPD Chief Kerr Putney and then meeting face-to-face with him and apparently reaching an understanding that there had to be a change in methods for interacting with segments of Charlotte that feel over-policed and under-served. When eventually the police officer who killed Keith Lamont Scott was exonerated because department policy leans way over backward to absolve the government from responsibility when the police kill people without due process, Braxton Winston acknowledged that police followed policy in letting the cop off. But after he was elected to the Charlotte City Council, he worked to reform procedures.

Braxton announced he was planning to run for Secretary of Labor in April 2023 after six years on the Charlotte council (and attaining the distinction of Mayor Pro Tem). He is also a labor activist -- a professional videographer but also, as a stagehand and grip, a union member, in "our region’s robust sports television and entertainment production community" (Winston website).


LUKE FARLEY

On Tuesday this week, Farley bested three other Republican candidates for the nomination to run in this race, taking over 30% of the vote and thus avoiding a runoff. 

His website makes him seem like a deeply unserious person. A white-on-red banner on his homepage proclaims "Make Elevators Great Again," an allusion to the former Republican holder of this office, Cherie Berry (no friend of labor), who has endorsed him (that endorsement also loudly proclaimed on his home page). I have my instant doubts about any candidate who begins his introduction, "I am a Christian...." That tells me everything and also precisely nothing about this guy's character.

His main policy obsession appears to be mandated COVID vaccine shots, which he naturally opposes.

He's a lawyer in private practice, specializing in OSHA rules, which on the face of it, in my view, makes him also instinctively anti-labor.

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Primary Results -- Other Races

 

Allison Riggs


Supreme Court Associate Justice, Seat 6

Democrat Allison Riggs took over 69% of the vote statewide, running for reelection to her seat against Judge Lora Cubbage.


NC House Dist. 60

Frequent Democratic defector from Democratic policy, incumbent Cecil Brockman squeaked past his insurgent opponent James Adams by a mere 83 votes (according to the NCSBE website). There will surely be a recount. Brockman had been marked for elimination by fellow Democrats because of his frequent votes with the Republican super-majority. (Contest profiled here.)


NC House Dist. 82

The Republican primary featured first-termer Kevin Crutchfield trying to hang on to the seat he just won in 2022 against man-about-town Brian Echevarria, a camera hog who may think he's awfully cute. This race was called the most competitive Republican primary for the General Assembly -- and was coincidentally also the meanest -- and indeed Echevarria took out the incumbent by a very close margin, 171 votes.


NC House Dist. 27

Conservative Democrat Michael Wray, who often voted with the Republicans to override Cooper vetoes, finally may have been picked off (if the current vote totals hold through the counting of provisionals and the inevitable recount). Wray appears to have lost to Rodney Pierce by 42 votes.


NC House Dist. 105

Nicole Sidman slid to victory in a three-way race where she took over 57% of the vote. She is the winner to take on the tall quest to unseat turncoat Tricia Cotham in November. I've experienced nervous exhaustion worrying about the outcome here.


NC House Dist. 62

Former legislator and often thorn in the Republican majority's side, John Blust won a 5-way contest with 34% of the vote, thus avoiding a runoff. I wrote about "The Return of John Blust" back in February.


NC Senate Dist. 13

Scott Lassiter, who became "Famous for the Wrong Reason," beat his Republican competitor in that side's primary. Lassiter will face Democrat Lisa Grafstein in November. He tried once to get her barred from the ballot.


Primary Results, Watauga Board of Education

Adam Hege
Very right race for the top five finishers. A total of six candidates will go through to the November ballot:

Marshall Ashcraft 4,765 
Adam Hege 4,347 
Chad Cole 4,208 
Charlotte Mizelle Lloyd 4,204 
Alison Carroll Idol 4,128 

Tom Ross 2,039

Ashcraft, Hege, and Lloyd are Democrats. Cole, Idol, and Ross are Republicans. Anything can happen, come November. All these candidates were researched and written up by PamsPicks. Appears that the two most radical candidates were eliminated.