High Rage Threshold, for a Monday

 

Gov. Stein signed the budget last week

 

 

Dylan Halper, an intern at The Assembly, went through all 634 pages of the new state budget (so I didn't have to) and highlighted some of the earmarks, many of which don't offend me, like 

$31 million to the North Carolina Museum of History

$4 million to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences 

$4.4 million to the North Carolina Museum of Art

$750,000 to the Museum of the Marine

$100,000 to the North Carolina Pottery Museum in Randolph County

I even smile about highly specific earmarks for very local gigs, like the $20,000 the budget gives to the tiny town of Fremont in Wayne County for its annual Daffodil Festival, which goes back to the late 1950s. I'm for supporting that because it's community-building and it spotlights flowers. This budget originated in the NC Senate. Buck Newton represents Fremont in the Senate. I can applaud Buck Newton if he funneled that measly $20k to the daffodils.

Intern Halper picked up on the tension between state-funded higher education and the GOP powers in the General Assembly and found in the budget what might be an anomaly: "The claws are not out for North Carolina State University. It will receive $20 million for its Commercial Leap Ahead for Wide Bandgap Semiconductors (CLAWS) Hub, which is researching a type of semiconductor technology that the university says could be more effective than traditional silicon." [italics added]

It's too bad that our Republican government continues to fund crisis pregnancy centers to the tune of $1.5 million. Those places are Christian propaganda mills that have been shown to push "inaccurate information" on desperate girls who don't know what to do. Another $3.3 million is going to a more interesting anti-abortion org with a "continuum of care," which pairs women experiencing unplanned pregnancies with a social worker to “help address the circumstances prompting her to seek an abortion.” On its face, that sounds helpful to me.

I like that there's a million dollars in the budget to protect the OBX wild horses and $50k to support the activities of a non-profit therapeutic horse-riding school. But the $100,000 going to UNC-Wilmington's all-female equestrian club gives me pause, especially after I spent some time on their Facebook page. It appears to be, in very frequent photo arrays, a mainly white sorority with one Black member. That 100k is for horse feed, I suspect -- the club actually owns 8 horses, according to Halper -- but that's still a lot of oats for a social club.

One budget entry that Halper found also stopped me cold: $90,000 for a pickleball court in the town of Godwin, population 128. Tom McInnis (R) represents Godwin in the NC Senate, where the budget bill originated. But Diane Wheatley represents Godwin in the House, and she might have had some influence. According to its demographics, Godwin is an aging, low-income, sedentary community of almost equal numbers of Black and white (over 45% Black), and any space for recreation can be a blessing.

It makes sense to spend $30 million on keeping the Greensboro Coliseum (which now goes under the name of First Horizon) up-to-date and up-to-grade, because of the general economic benefit of Atlantic Coast Conference tournaments held there once a year. 

And I can applaud the $109 million + that goes to expand the medical school at East Carolina State University (which I think probably accounts for the white coats you see arrayed behind the governor at the signing ceremony, photo above) and $15 million to the Methodist University Cape Fear Valley Health School of Medicine in Fayetteville.

You Think That Rearranging Furniture at the SBOE Absolves It of Corruption? Dallas Woodhouse Still Works There!

 

NC Voices

 

The cover story Dave Boliek put out in September 2025 about hiring Dallas Woodhouse as some sort of State Board of Elections (SBOE) "liaison," whose role, we would soon discover -- to absolutely no one's surprise -- was actually to lord it over county boards of elections and inhibit college-age and Black voters wherever possible. At the time of Woodhouse's hiring, Boliek announced him to county election officials: "[I hired] him to assist in your efforts to ensure election integrity while encouraging maximum participation in our elections." Hahahahaha

The best reporting I've seen on the Woodhouse "reassignment" at the SBOE, the piece below, is thorough and complete. I don't know who wrote it, but thank you!

And if you're a partisan like me and tempted to celebrate the mere rearrangement of furniture at the SBOE -- window-dressing for a corrupt and exposed operation -- I would advise you not to. Dallas Woodhouse is still there at the SBOE, along with his embedded philosophy of might-makes-right, and trailing all that heavy baggage of cut-throat politics. You think the people who hired Woodhouse and who now obviously depend on him to be there have changed their spots? This isn't a victory, but it exposed their corruption. 

RALEIGH -- By WRAL News  A North Carolina Republican operative who was hired by the state auditor to help shape the state’s election boards and early voting plans has been reassigned, and his election liaison position has been discontinued. 

State and county elections officials are beginning to ramp up preparations for the 2026 midterm elections. Mail-in ballots will go out in September, early voting starts in October and election day is Nov. 3.

State Auditor Dave Boliek reassigned Dallas Woodhouse, a former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, NBC News reported Wednesday morning. Woodhouse had served in the role since September.

“Now that we are more than a year past appointments, and board chairs have settled into their roles having worked through a municipal election, primary election, and most of the local boards have passed early voting plans for the general election, the Auditor's Office has discontinued the elections liaison role,” a spokesman for the auditor’s office told WRAL in a statement Wednesday. “The elections liaison was established because the Auditor's Office gained new responsibilities. The position was not meant to be permanent.”

Woodhouse will work on strategic initiatives that relate to constituent services and communications, according to the spokesman.

Republican state lawmakers stripped responsibility for overseeing state and county election boards away from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein in 2024 and gave the power to Boliek, a Republican. Under Boliek and Woodhouse, the state board of elections and all 100 county election boards have switched to GOP majorities, and some have begun enacting longtime Republican priorities such as eliminating early voting options on Sundays — a popular day with Black voters and on college campuses. Black voters and students tend to vote Democratic.

According to reporting from WLOS and NC Local, Woodhouse and Boliek were involved in efforts to ensure the new Jackson County Board of Elections would shut down a polling place on campus at Western Carolina University. In the Triangle, the Wake County Board of Elections also recently voted to eliminate a longtime early voting site at N.C. State’s student union, and to move it to a remote part of campus, WRAL previously reported.

Woodhouse was reassigned on June 2, NBC News reported. Woodhouse earns $110,000, according to a database of state employee salaries.

In September, Boliek wrote to some county election officials that “to assist in your efforts to ensure election integrity while encouraging maximum participation in our elections, I have appointed Dallas Woodhouse as my liaison.”

Woodhouse referred a request for comment Wednesday to the auditor’s office.

 

Dallas Woodhouse Causes Embarrassment, But what Dallas Woodhouse Stood For Still Very Much the Philosophy at the State Board of Elections

Big news this afternoon: Dallas Woodhouse, who has a history of trying to knee-cap college students' voting and Sunday voting for African-Americans, has been "reassigned" in the State Board of Elections. Instead of his $110,000 per annum job of "advising" local county boards of elections -- principally, advising the Republican majorities to eliminate campus polling places where possible and stop Sunday voting in communities with large Black congregations, Woodhouse has been reassigned to a desk in another part of the SBOE.

But it's all window-dressing, and it means nothing. The attitude toward suppressing certain voters still reigns in Auditor's Dave Boliek's MAGA brain. Woodhouse had caused Mr. Boliek some very bad optics after he was revealed telling the chair of the Jackson County Board of Elections, "Don't let them have a vote," them being students at Western Carolina University who had become accumstomed to a student union early voting site. There's also evidence that he told the Pasquotank County Bd of Elections chair to eliminate Sunday voting.  Pasquotank County is 35% Black.

The leopards can white-wash their spots, but they're still going to be blood predators.

 

I Guess We're All Communists Now

 

Trump repeated the word Communist so many times yesterday -- with the four granite-faced Presidents above him, averting their eyes -- that you might have thought it was 1950. On February 9th of that fatal year, Sen. Joseph McCarthy held up some pieces of paper in front of the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, and whined in that reedy, unpleasant voice of his, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." Women cringed. One of them fainted. There were dropped salad forks all over the room.

The witch hunt was on!

The suspicion of Communism crept through the American bloodstream, or rather raced like a fulminating virus, fanned into white-hot intensity by the John Birch Society. Birchers were all over the Panhandle of Texas. By the time I was in the 7th and 8th grades in the late '50s, popular fright-sayings about Communists and Communism, preached relentlessly by members of the Society, had reached my level of pre-social-media gossip. The Birchers were particularly good at ferreting out school textbooks with "Communist propaganda." What in particular was Communist propaganda? Any acknowledgement of a struggle for civil rights among America's Blacks.

I was a very religious kid to boot, so I could fall prey to a pamphlet that appeared in 1960 warning of a likely "Catholic takeover" if John F. Kennedy became President. The anti-Catholic thing was closely allied with the anti-Communist thing -- Baptists predominated, and there ain't no Baptists like Texas Baptists. There were plenty of Texans who didn't mind saying out loud, and loudly, as Texans sometimes speak when provoked, that Kennedy was an N-word-loving goddamn Communist. That's why Texans of a gentler nature so rued the terrible event in Dallas. Why did it have to be Texas! Poor dumb, damn Texas.

To the Communist-baiting Texans in the Panhandle, one of the worst things the Catholic President Kennedy did in his short presidency was the diplomatic breakthrough called "the Chamizal Conventions," a land-exchange between the U.S. and Mexico that Kennedy successfully negotiated. The Chamizal "situation" had been a sore point since 1864, when a particularly severe flood changed the course of the Rio Grande and stranded over 600 acres of Mexico on the north side of the river. This led to a history of incursions and takings and dyspeptic relations between countries. Kennedy resolved it quickly, agreeing to give back to Mexico some 366 acres of the original Chamizal tract and an additional 264 acres near the adjacent Cordova Island, while taking for the U.S. the other 193 acres of Cordova Island. That international boundary still stands today.

Kennedy negotiated the agreement, but it fell to President Johnson to carry it out in stages, and those stages included some Texans' getting mighty exercised that their land was being unfairly, unconstitutionally, and communistically taken from them. I remember reading up on the history at the time and writing a letter to the editor of the Plainview Herald supporting the Mexican position. I was being a very fair-minded little Christian and budding historian to reach that conclusion. I was told later by a classmate of mine who also worked as part-time receptionist for an insurance agent that her boss had a file folder labeled "Suspected Communists" and that he had instructed her to put my letter to the editor -- which he had patiently clipped from the Herald -- into that file. Apparently, I've been a Communist since I was 18.

We label what we fear, and so does Trump. He doesn't fear Communists. That's just the scare-word he remembers from his own childhood -- he and I are the same age, give or take. What Trump fears and chooses to label with an old insult is the surge of voting enthusiasm for the men and women who have been winning elections on the Democratic side and sometimes upending apple carts of more conservative members of their Party -- the brave and outspoken "progressives," the sometimes self-described "socialist Democrats." That's what he fears, being charged and tried by new politicians who have power because they have followings.

 

NC House Pumps the Brakes on NC Senate's Rush to Harsh Your Vibe

 

Today a bill, H 328, "Regulate Hemp-Derived Consumables," got fast-tracked and passed the same day in the NC Senate, with some 14 of the 20 Democrats in the Senate voting for it. The House's original H 328, which the Senate hijacked and wrote its own substitute, would have required public schools to adopt policies prohibiting hemp-derived consumable products in school buildings, on school grounds, and at school-sponsored events. Okay. We all can support limiting easy access to intoxicating hemp products for minors, but the North Carolina Healthy Alternatives Association (NCHAA) sez the new Senate rewrite is a bad bill for the future of the billion-dollar state hemp industry. 

The House adjourned without taking up the the Senate's substitute H 328, and Speaker Destin Hall appeared resistant to it: “It’s up to the [House] caucus, at the end of the day,” Hall said. “It was a complicated bill, and so folks are going to have probably a month to digest it and see if they approve of it,” he told reporters. The General Assembly plans to reconvene on July 27th.

"Complicated," Destin Hall said, which sounds like a warning to me.

The NCHAA thinks it will overnight send North Carolina's booming hemp industry into the crapper: 

• Cannabinoid Ban: HB 328 bans all cannabinoids except for Delta-9 THC, even non-psychoactive compounds like CBD. This is a direct contradiction of the federal definition of hemp and would eliminate many therapeutic products that consumers depend on.

• Potency Caps: The bill caps edibles at just 10mg of Delta-9 THC per serving. For comparison, most popular hemp-derived gummies on the national market range from 25 to 50mg per serving. These caps would force companies to reformulate or exit the North Carolina market entirely.

• Vape Restrictions: It also limits vape cartridges to 3ml total Delta-9 THC—an unrealistic threshold that, from a manufacturing standpoint, is virtually unworkable.

• Exorbitant Licensing Fees: HB 328 requires a $25,000 license fee for manufacturers and $500 per retail location with no cap. These costs are far beyond the reach of small operators and would create massive entry barriers that favor large out-of-state corporations.

• Criminal Penalties: The bill authorizes criminal charges—including Class H felonies—for unlicensed sales. It also imposes escalating fines and empowers the Alcohol Law Enforcement Division (ALE) to revoke licenses and issue penalties of up to $7,500 per violation.

NCHAA concludes: "These are not minor adjustments. These are measures designed to constrict the industry, cut out competition, and centralize the hemp market into the hands of a few."

 

How I Fell Upstairs and Found God

 

I got super-annoyed by C.G.I. at the movies -- computer-generated-images -- back around the time super heroes were pretty much it, everywhere. Super heroes and tiresome fantasy. Supernatural hoo haw. Pop culture became lousy with C.G.I. gimmicks, imitations, wild flights of illogic and cheap, cheap story-telling (even though C.G.I. is super-expensive to produce). So I turned up my nose at the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) when it was new and fresh. I wanted real human stories told about real, flawed human characters in adult situations. I'm no longer new and fresh myself, but I have Disney streaming anew, and no way was I not going to induce my second adolescence watching the MCU timeline unfold. Little did I know what I missed because of Pecksniffian snobbery.

I appreciate morally compromised characters, but I usually associate them with realistic interpretations of human life, not space-and-time epics. Don't we all actually prefer the self-involved to saints? I'm elated to find frequent divided minds among the super-heroes who gather under the rubric of "The Avengers." Bruce Banner is my living notion of ambiguity, always teetering between unchecked power and unchecked rage. Tony Stark can be a prancing egotist, but he also knows guilt intimately and unrelenting. Thor can't get over himself; he's as self-centered as Tony without the wit or god help us finesse. Captain America, Steve Rogers, is the most saint-like of the Avengers but sparks a civil war when he refuses to subordinate his power to the state by signing the Sokovia Accords. He's standing up for what he believes as a principled person, that big government has no business holding a super-hero's leash. We have to applaud that righteous puritan.

The best example of moral complication is the great MCU villain Thanos, played by Josh Brolin through a trio of films culminating in Avengers: Endgame. Brolin, despite the heavy masking required to make Thanos appear other-worldly, plays a towering, powerful villain and a character full of regret on how the world is destroying itself with runaway consumption. He's kind of a soured environmentalist. Thanos believes as sincerely in his own moral mission as Captain America believes in his. Both are prepared to sacrifice life to be true to themselves. Thanos quite righteously sacrifices his adopted daughter Gamora on the desolate planet Vormir, because to obtain the Soul Stone he's instructed to sacrifice someone he loves. Gamora is handy. In The Infinity War, Thanos snaps out the lives of half of all living creatures -- not just humans, but animals too (visually the filmmakers make people turn to blowing dust before our eyes. The disappearance of Peter Parker who's cradled wounded in Iron Man's lap is truly one of those scenes that'll sneak up on you at the movies and make your eyes water). Thanos becomes a mass murderer not out of hatred, not for conquest, but because he wants the blessed world to be sustainable. He sees overpopulation and greed as the only defining features of this world, and those greedy traits offend him deeply. Thanos dies believing in his own heroism. His death is melancholy for that very reason. We hate to see any soul, even a misguided one, face his own colossal failure.

The writers of the MCU universe explore all sorts of topics, like the wholly arbitrary and spiteful nature of divinity, particularly the god Odin who brooks no stubbornness. (Any resemblance to the angry God Jehovah of Christian nationalists would appear to be purely coincidental.) Thor is my least favorite Avenger, except when he gets dissolute. In the long run getting banished to Earth improved his character. Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow (played by the sparkling but-seriously-don't-mess-with-her Scarlett Johansson) is my favorite, and her self-sacrifice (again on that awful planet Vormir) to save Clint Barton (Hawkeye) is another moment of terrible moral consequences derived from doing what's right.

Heroes are necessary bearers of culture -- every culture, every sub-culture, living now and in every time. Heroes transmit principles, sometimes the local gospel, often the illustrated moral decisions that keep societies and civilizations cohering. We need them. I fall back on something my friend Dalton George wrote on Substack:

"I'm of the mind that we have a biological inclination towards heroes. Our longest-surviving stories, art, and songs detail heroes. An individual is up against something much great than themselves, someone using their agency to benefit the community, country, and place. There's a reason Marvel movies are the cash cow they are. Brighter minds than mine have observed that our society is largely starved for heroes." 

I relish the idea that heroes arose from our very evolution through danger. We have to have heroes, and we'll create one on the spot if need be. But the Sokovia Accords were all about keeping unchecked power under scrutiny. Because otherwise giant ballrooms arise where once there was the law and duty and honesty and the good of the body politic. Heroes are not self-centered pricks.

 

Alaska, Knocking and Rising

 

Mary Peltola

 

 

Amazing Number: 70,000. The total number of registered Democrats in all of Alaska -- which represents just 12% of the 574,000 total registered voters. About 65% of Alaskans are registered Independent, but the state as a whole has been solidly red. 

Which is why Mary Peltola, the first Alaska Native elected to Congress who is now the Democratic candidate for one of Alaska's Senate seats, has discovered a new (well, no, "new to her") secret weapon for winning an otherwise improbable campaign: Door-knocking with a new purpose (and not just knocking up the Democrats but going strong after the Republican-leaning-but-persuadable Independents, the vast majority). Rather than repeating by rote a "Vote for Mary" message, the "Ground Truth technique" is called "deep listening." (This kind of canvassing, based on good data, is old-hat in my neighborhood of Southern political organizing. But I understand why any brand of door-knocking in Alaska, where there's sometimes -- often? -- great distances between residences and pootie weather to boot, has probably never been pursued as a standard political activity by party organizers.)

Peltola has engaged Swing Left to implement the Ground Truth canvassing program, which is a great move, so long as two other things are true:

1. That Peltola has sufficient volunteers to mount that kind of painstaking and time-consuming voter outreach.

2. That those volunteers are thoroughly trained in listening techniques and can operate a phone to record data.

The Senate seat is currently occupied by carpet-bagger Republican Dan Sullivan, an ex-Marine who moved up from Ohio as an adult and who wouldn't dare deviate from MAGA. Pundits heavily favor Sullivan to hold onto his seat. The Cook Political Report has rated the race "Solid Republican," but more recently Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia moved it to "Toss-Up." Peltola has to overcome the loser label: she only served one term in the House before losing reelection in 2024. True, she had beaten Sarah Palin in 2022, but that was politically "in the Long Ago." Peltola has been "moderate," which in her case means practical and rarely ideological, with the interests of Alaska uppermost. She's been one of the most independent Democrats, and she might just ride the wave into the Senate, especially if she can get a sizable chunk of the independent electorate engaged by simply listening at their doors.

I'm for Requiring the King James Version in Schools. No Other Translation Will Do

 

I just love Texans for their eternally stubborn naivety. Members of the Texas state board of education just decided that five million Texas school kids, from first grade to seniors in high school, will be required to read selected Bible stories in school. Last year, the same board decided to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Naive and bossy. The 15-member board are all elected to staggered terms from distinct geographical districts. Currently, the board consists of 10 Republicans and five Democrats. 

I got a.i. to assemble the approved list of required readings:

Old Testament

• Genesis
  • Noah's Ark
  • Tower of Babel
• 1 Samuel
  • David and Goliath
• Book of Jonah
• Psalms (including Psalm 23)
• Ecclesiastes (Chapter 3, "To everything there is a season")
• Job
• Lamentations

New Testament

• Gospel of Luke
  • The Parable of the Prodigal Son
  • Luke 14:7–11 (the teaching on humility)
• Gospel of Matthew
  • The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1–12)
  • Matthew 6:25–34 ("Do Not Be Anxious")
• Acts of the Apostles
  • The Road to Damascus (conversion of Paul the Apostle)
• First Epistle to the Corinthians
  • Chapter 13 ("Love is patient, love is kind")

 

I have no problem pushing the early 17th-century prose of the King James Bible on every student as one important ingredient of being truly educated. I'm not so sure about modern translations. The much simplified New International Reader's Version that Texas prescribes for the youngest kids takes away all the magic language of the King James, and so what's the point? The simplified language means you're no longer teaching language arts; you're teaching bullets of cultural mandates and signaling virtue. For me and for the sake of the children, it has to be the King James or nothing. I consider that translation's Book of Isaiah a towering masterpiece of elite philosophy. I go to the Book of Amos for bug-eyed intensity. I can certainly settle down for an hour or two with Psalms, and I recently reread the Four Gospels to see if I could detect any traits in Jesus that would attract the likes of Samuel Alito. 

What we now refer to as the Holy Bible was the literature of a specific monotheistic religion and the culture of a place that arose along the Jordan River. That literature became dogma all over Europe and spread from there all over the world, including to America. How the book has evolved most recently in the hands of political preachers and grifting presidents should and does ignite an opposition to the Texas Bible requirements. The selections favor an evangelical Protestant approach to the biblical text rather than a broadly ecumenical or academic one.

The devil in me wants to make fun of the Texas school board for its attempt to bring all the children to obedience through the Book of Job, but I won't. I think I'd like to be one of those Texas teachers that got to build a lesson plan around what happened to Job and why. There's no Isaiah on the reading list, nor Amos, but yes the Book of Job. Glad to see First Corinthians, but no Revelations? Who would miss that druggie trip!

I was in the 5th Grade in a small, rural Texas public school in the mid-'50s when all the classrooms got wired up for a new P.A. system, and we began to hear from the principal at the start of every day, followed by Bible readings and little sentence prayers, the last two offered by students selected for their good behavior. I was never asked. But, then, I already knew the Bible better than most of my classmates, because of my Pentecostal background. We read the Bible. The King James Bible.

The language gets in your head, becomes a muscle for the way you see the world, see yourself in the world and how you order the universe. Yes, it's culturally specific especially for Anglo Texans, and I air one of those. Which makes me actually sympathetic to the sweet idiocy of the Texas School Board.

 

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.