The Clown Show and the Resistance

I want to meet the Republican political strategist who got all the important people in Washington together a few weeks ago and said okay everybody we're just going to send him out there to hallucinate in public, tell racist jokes, and talk about how hot he thinks certain guys are.

--Seth Abramson 

 

 

The greatest recent moment of self-owning came yesterday in the White House. With JD Vance sitting beside him, the president, found guilty 34 times of falsifying business records, announced that he was launching something called the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program. Mermaidmama had fun with that: 

 

 

Notable statistic from first days of early voting: Turnout among unaffiliated voters has risen even faster than their share of the electorate. In raw numbers, their votes increased 88%, from 133,683 in the first five days of 2022 early voting to 251,891 this year, according to the Center for NC Politics substack run by Catawba College political science professor Michael Bitzer. 

(That's wave material right there. That's what that is.)

 

Turnout for Early Voting in Watauga Remains Strong on Day 3

 

Some 1,229 votes were added yesterday, Monday, Oct. 19, to the Watauga County early vote total. Though a little below the turnout on opening day last Thursday, those high numbers have been holding steady since last Friday. 

Below -- Turnout in Watauga County by party on Monday, October 19 (from the John Locke Foundation vote tracker). Also valuable and brand new, the Carolina Forward Turnout Tracker, more inventive and insightful than John Locke.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Youth Are Voting in NC; So Are the Medicare Crowd

 

This is the John Locke Foundation's Vote Tracker chart for turnout by age during the first two days of early voting in Watauga County. I note the spike in the youth vote, the steady high numbers among the elderly -- with between them, the big depression of the 30- and 40-somethings:

 

1st Day of Early Voting

 

Huge turnout on the first day of early voting Thursday! More than 201,000 voters cast ballots statewide, up 47% from the same day in 2022. 

In Watauga, Democrats and Unaffiliateds tied on first-day turnout, 42% apiece. Republicans showed up as 15%, down almost 13 points over first-day EV 2022. Dead man walking.

This was the scene in Greensboro Thursday, as students from North Carolina A&T marched from campus to vote downtown. They marched an hour. Because the local elections board decided to remove their polling place from campus. 

It Seems to be Going Well

 

First day of early voting, Chatham County.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tanks for the Memories

 

This is brilliant satire, because Mermaidmamamaggie is using all the actual words spoken by DJT's new Press Secretary, Katie Zacharia. Plus Zacharia has also been outed for claiming (falsely) that she was an attorney.

The Romance and the Reality of This Vote

 

A recent survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that among those who say they are extremely motivated to vote, Democrats lead 59 percent to 35 percent. 

--WashPost, Oct. 12, 2026 

 

AppState's Student Union during early voting

 

Counting today, just three more days before I get to mark a ballot. Man, it's been a lonnnng time coming! A kind of dark night of the soul. Won't voting feel like a cleanse?

Haven't these two years exhausted all our emotional reserves? Our energy for being outraged -- angry at open corruption, at defiance of normal ethics, at the gleefulness of low-lifes while they loot our good faith along with the public purse -- it's drained our very juice. 

The fount of all that head-slapping graft and greed flows directly from DJT, who has enriched himself reportedly many times over in just these two years. His lessons in amoral taking of advantage are of course trickling down to mere pikers at pilfering. Like Don Junior's former girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle. Solicited a bribe. The intended bribee confessed everything. Kimberly may lose her ambassadorship but otherwise get away with it. Just watch. 

Every new revelation of self-dealing and cronyism is like ethical dark matter, sucking at our very will to scream into the wind. The two oldest Trump boys, Don Jr. and Eric, happen to have stakes in more than a dozen defense-technology companies that just happen to be getting very lucrative government contracts. That's fucking outrageous, but it gets by us now without a whimper. ProPublica documented another "investment" of Don Junior's in a North Carolina company, Vulcan Elements. Someone at the White House and in the name of the White House (whoever that may have been; looking at you, Peter Navarro) intervened to get Vulcan Elements to the front of the line and on a fast track for a $620 million Pentagon loan. 

Not that our vote on Thursday will punish, or even stop, the corruption of the public trust. You have to remember that John Roberts and those black-robed guys said DJT couldn't be prosecuted for crimes. And anyhow, the prez already has Todd Blanche running Justice, both another shield and a willing hit-man. Who's gonna charge the con-man, or any of his spawn, for the next two years? Maybe Congress, but only if Dems take the Senate too. There has to be a conviction in the Senate. 

Even after he's out of the White House (but probably not out of our consciousness -- he'll be like a brain-worm, painful and insistent), it will take years -- some wise people predict decades -- to rebuild what has been lost from the modern American social contract. My vote on Thursday will be a hobbling step toward stopping the momentum. I'll be satisfied with stopping the momentum.

 

Jennifer Balkcom and Old Mountain Democrats

 

The Spectrum TV interview with newly minted congressional candidate Jennifer Balkcom in the 11th District of NC will go down as one of the most amazing political face-plants I've ever seen. The interview was filmed in September, shortly after Congressman Chuck Edwards got censured in the House and resigned. Balkcom had just been picked for the ballot in his place. She was clearly unprepared. And she's been widely mocked for her performance. But I'm not interested in mocking her.  

The interviewer asks her, Didn't you use to be a Democrat? Yes, she readily admits. Her grandfather was a big influence, and her whole family were Democrats. "But why did you change?" Here she stumbles a moment and comes up with a parable her grandfather taught her. I'm paraphrasing: "My grandfather always said Democrats were like the donkey that pulled the plow, did the hard work to help others, and I believed all my life that Democrats were people who helped other people. But that changed." What? She leaves us hanging. When did Democrats stop trying to help others? In fact, aren't they usually accused of spending too much on the poor?

She was deflecting. And who knows what really changed her positive evaluation of Democrats as the-donkeys-pulling-the-plow? For a lot of old mountain Democrats, the national party got caricatured as crazy for gays, snooty to God, and conspiring about guns. If the old bloodlines of mountain Democrats go all the way back to the Civil War, you might expect some echoes of racism. She admits that it was in 2016 that she started studying various topics hard and decided that she wanted to become a Republican -- without noticing that was coincidentally the same year as the advent of DJT.

She was careful to say that her particular family was middle-class mountain and that she had always believed it her duty to help people in need. On two obviously favorite topics, Hurricane Helene relief and the need for better health-care services in Western NC, she sounded like a cautious Democrat. More money, more aid, more help. She admits that the Federal response -- that would be the Federal response under DJT -- had not been good, and that the state government, which she's been a part of for two terms in the NC House, had done "more than it was required to do" -- though much more had to be done, more money had to be spent. Rural hospitals were closing, and she well knows the pain and the panic of being an hour or more from medical help. She's not a deep thinker. She would never connect DJT's Big Beautiful Bill with the crisis in North Carolina's rural health care, nor notice that his administration has put FEMA in shut-down mode and is forcing more of the expenses of national disaster-recovery onto individual states.

But the DNA is still in her to pull the plow, I think. She's just aligned herself with the wrong horses.

She deflects through the entire interview. When asked what she would do to ease the prices of everything, she quickly punted: "I have a couple of ideas, but I'm not ready to say which one I like best." There were a whole host of things she wasn't prepared to talk about. "It depends" became a kind of hilarious, repeated dodge. Along with "I'm kind of a details-oriented girl, and until I know all the details I can't tell you if I'm in favor of a policy position or not" -- said in an interview that is almost completely devoid of details.

 

NCGOP Puts Out Halloween Candy for a Sugar High

 

Burger/Hall made sure that three sugary treats would be at the bottom of the North Carolina ballot this November 3rd, three proposed constitutional amendments: 

1. Voter ID Requirement

2. State's Maximum Income Tax Rate, lowered to 3.5%

3. Changes to Property Tax Laws (specific details still being "worked out"). This one really is a pig in a poke.

"Those should stir up our base," thought Burger/Hall. And maybe they're right. Maybe all Republicans, plus any number of Unaffiliateds and some Democrats, will fall right in line with the march off the blind bluff of amendments 2 and 3. Those items have a hidden stinger in their tails, because when you continue to make life as cushy as possible for the wealthy by starving state services, you just make local counties and cities shoulder the burden of taking care of the public's welfare. And the education of their children. And that is probably the ultimate point of the three amendments: The more the weight of government bears down on mainly Democratic cities and a few Democratic counties -- the better! Let the liberals who cluster together pay more taxes, not us.