The Perils of Phileen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dennis Draughon is on Bluesky. 

 

Primarily (Dragging My Ass)

 

Keith Kidwell

 

 

My excuse for not being johnny-on-the-spot about what just happened in North Carolina and then Texas yesterday -- I couldn't research nor write anything about that amazing primary primarily because my laptop was in the hospital getting updates and add-ons.

The first thing of note locally came to my attention a couple of days ahead of E-Day, and this local trend turns out to have been true and steady throughout the state. This info goes under the heading, "Enthusiasm Gap":

Some more quick numbers: Watauga County compared to statewide in early voting through yesterday (Friday):

 

-- Statewide 42% cast a Republican ballot during early voting. In Watauga only 25% cast a Republican ballot.

-- Statewide 29% of voters were Republicans. In Watauga 17% were Republicans.

 

Youth vote (18-30) represents 19% of the early vote in this Primary election. That is a significant increase from 11% in 2022 Primary.  

The enthusiasm gap means different things to the two major parties. For the Democrats, enthusiasm seems particularly generational in its vision of the future -- young people are showing up as serious candidates and some of them outstandingly have prospered, and because the future looks both younger and more progressive, candidates out-of-step with the majority are no longer tolerated. Carla Cunningham, Nasif Majeed, Shelly Willingham -- those three Democrats had voted with the GOP to override Gov. Stein vetoes, and all went down to defeat in their primaries. Michael Wray, a former Dem House Member who made a habit of defying both Gov. Cooper and his caucus, lost his bid to take back the seat he lost in 2024 from the man who beat him.

What does the apparent lack of enthusiasm mean for Republicans? You tell me. The main connective thread I see is possibly just a sudden surge of hatred for encumbents of whatever stripe, for both mean-eyed old Keith Kidwell, head of the NC House Freedom Caucus; and a Phil Berger, a corporate establishmentarian if I've ever seen one, who's in it for himself and his brazen family. Somehow 2026 has turned into a dismal year for Republican honchos. Someone soon will have calculated just how much each vote cost Phil Berger and his web of big money. I see totals calculated above $10 million. Berger got just a third of the votes in his home county of Rockingham -- that's worse than what Virginia Foxx's home county thinks of her -- while it was the portion of gerrymandered Guilford in his newly drawn district that got him within two votes of actually tying Sam Page. Oh the humiliation.

Colin Campbell lists at least four more Republican incumbents, some with longish records, who didn't survive their primaries. Why? I would love to hear informed opinions.

And meanwhile, Texas was almost feverish with heat.

More later (but I have to tell you, Brethren, I'm outside in the garden most of the time).

 

Trump and Facebook, Sitting in a Tree

 

I've been reading an insider's book about the peculiar brand of selfishness and narcissism at Facebook -- Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and on down the ranks of upper management -- written by Sarah Wynn-Williams: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (published just last November). According to John Walters, Facebook management tried to suppress it, "which in fact only increased its sales."

No wonder Facebook felt a fit of censorship. Wynn-Williams's title for this takedown of a media monster -- Careless People -- comes from The Great Gatesby, a passage the author quotes as an epigraph: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

There's no doubt that Facebook had a huge hand in unleashing Donald Jethro Trump in the election of 2016. In fact, according to Wynn-Williams, Facebook staff worked collaboratively with Trump's campaign to mastermind the "single best digital ad campaign" that several experts in mass communications had ever seen. Wynn-Williams gets into some graphic detail:

A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages....

...Facebook and Parscale's combined team microtargeted users and tweaked ads for maximum engagement, using data tools we designed for commercial advertisers. The way I understand it, Trump's campaign had amassed a database, named Project Alamo, with profiles of over 220 million people in America. It charted all sorts of online and offline behavior, including gun registration, voter registration, credit card and shopping histories, what websites they visit, what car they drive, where they live, and the last time they voted. The campaign used Facebook's "Custom Audiences from Custom Lists" to match people in that database with their Facebook profiles. Then Facebook's "Lookalike Audiences" algorithm found people on Facebook with "common qualities" that "look like" those of known Trump supports. So if Trump supporters like, for example, a certain kind of pickup truck, the tool would find other people who liked pickup trucks but were not yet committed voters to show the ads to.

Then they'd pair their targeting strategy with data from their message testing. People likely to respond to "build a wall" got that sort of message. Moms worried about childcare got ads explaining that Trump wanted "100% Tax Deductible Childcare." Then there was a whole operation to constantly tweak the copy and the images and the color of the buttons that say "donate," since slightly different messages resonate with different audiences. At any given moment, the campaign had tens of thousands of ads in play, millions of different ad variations by the time they were done. These ads were tested using Facebook's Brand Lift surveys, which measure whether users have absorbed the messages in the ads, and tweaked accordingly. Many of these ads contained inflammatory misinformation that drove up engagement and drove down the price of advertising. The more people engage with an ad, the less it costs. Facebook's tools and in-house white glove service created incredibly accurate targeting of both message and audience, which is the holy grail of advertising.

Trump heavily outspent [Hillary] Clinton on Facebook ads. In the weeks before the election, the Trump campaign was regularly one of the top advertisers on Facebook globally. His campaign could afford to do this because the data targeting enables it to raise millions each month in campaign contributions through Facebook. In fact, Facebook was the Trump campaign's largest source of cash.

 

DCCC Involves Itself in a North Carolina Primary

Jamie Ager
Photo Katie Linsky Shaw

On February 23rd (yesterday!) the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) added Jamie Ager and the NC 11th Dist. to its “Red to Blue” program, "a merit-based designation for Democratic challengers or open-seat candidates the DCCC believes have a real chance to flip a Republican-held district." In other words, an arm of the National Democratic Party is doing what has previously been frowned on -- endorsing a primary candidate, one of five in Ager's case, thus putting the Party's thumb on the scale in hopes of controlling the outcome. That is supposedly verboten for county Democratic parties and for state party officials, though you may have noticed that both Roy Cooper and Josh Stein have made primary endorsements.

The Jamie Ager case is interesting for several reasons. Five people are running. I read through the transcript of a very revealing candidate forum published by Asheville Watchdog. All five candidates were there and spoke. But the questioning was designed to disarm and reveal. Retired investigative reporter and questioner Tom Fiedler pulled some stunning honesty out of them, and several are frankly more interesting than front-runner Ager. A working-class woman named Zelda Briarwood, who admitted to a prior drug addiction and talked about her path to recovery. Paul Maddox, with a strong country accent, called himself a "hillbilly scientist" -- born in the hills but educated to the hilt, with advanced degrees in science that make him tough on bullshit: "I’m a cancer researcher and I solve problems, that’s what I do. And you take the hillbilly and the scientist and put them together, ain’t no problem we can’t solve." Richard Hudspeth, a medical doctor and a family physician who ran Blue Ridge Health Care, a very large community health center. Hudspeth is probably Ager's chief rival.

Jamie Ager comes from Democratic Party nobility in Buncombe County. He is the grandson of Jamie Clarke (James McClure Clarke), famous for trading the 11th CD seat back and forth with Republican Bill Hendon in the 1980s. Both Ager's father John and brother Eric either served in the past (John) or is now serving (Eric) in the NC House. Jamie runs Hickory Nut Gap Farm, the very large operation started by his grandfather. In other words, Jamie Ager comes from a family steeped in politics who seem to know how to do it, and he's got access to beaucoup money through his business and family associations.

He's a good old boy. He seems almost apolitical. But when you introduce yourself to a political audience as "fourth generation in these mountains," I wince. Pulling rank. What I hear, Mr. Fourth Generation, is "I'm entitled." So I find myself wondering what sort of congressman Jamie Ager will be, whether he's got actual philosophical principles about social justice and the power of great wealth, whether he's got a spine or is too accustomed to going-along-with, which can metastasize into damnable passivity. In one of Ager's responses to Fiedler's questions, he signals "moderate Democrat" ("just a country boy"), but the image of the straddle unnerves me a little:

...the political divide gets wider and wider and wider. I feel like I’ve been straddling this divide my entire life, since I’ve been involved in agriculture and I’ve been involved in the meat business, which turns out most of the people are not generally Democrat....

Ager will win the primary. But will he win the general? There's a good chance, according to the DCCC. And I wish him the best for becoming a well-informed and effective legislator. Not another Heath Schuler, please.

 

We Need To Think of Impeachments as Room Fresheners

 

"The first Attorney General to go to prison [John N. Mitchell] did so because he convinced himself that the ends justified the means and that the law was pliable in his hands. Pam Bondi should take that to heart, if she has a heart."

--Rick Wilson

And the way you consolidate and perpetuate power is by so thoroughly demonizing opponents — by blasting so much contempt at them — that your own failures, corruption and cruelty become irrelevant. You needn’t answer for your fatal thuggery in Minneapolis if you can render its casualties sufficiently contemptible. You needn’t answer questions from a “washed-up, loser lawyer” or a “failed politician” at all....

Pam Bondi opted for contempt. It’s the Trumpian way. But is it the American one? Has the country sunk quite this far? I don’t think so. She and her fellow insult mongers aren’t owning the libs; they’re beclowning themselves. And it’s a repellent circus.

--Frank Bruni 

“I don’t think Pam Bondi has confidence in Pam Bondi. She wasn’t confident enough to engage in anything but name-calling in a hearing. And so no, I don’t have confidence in her.”

--Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky 

From where I was sitting, it looked like the attorney general pretty much invited the United States Congress to impeach her.

--John Stoehr, Raw Story

 

Joey Osborne Goes Foxx-Hunting

I've paid little attention to Congresswoman Virginia Foxx's primary opponents. She always has 'em. She always beats 'em. They're like the mayflies of politics, so I don't invest much time in them. But I may have missed the boat with Joey Osborne, a millionaire entrepreneur running in the 5th District Republican primary with two others, Roman H. Chad Williams II and Steve Girard, all three diluting each other's potential solo strength against Foxx if, say, Joey Osborne had the Foxx opposition to himself. 

Joseph "Joey" Osborne got his start as an entrepreneur growing a family business in mosquito control into the largest mosquito control company in the US, headquartered in Hickory, with some 500 locations across the nation. He says on his Linked-In page, "I've created more than 50 business models for myself and others. Businesses that I've founded have generated more than half a billion dollars in revenue, creating more than 100 millionaires in the process." Some of those businesses: BizLab, 10X Innovations, Mainline Brands.

He's a very rich entrepreneur conservative who tells us he's conservative in the Calvin Coolidge mold, and I believe him. Old Cal was an honest man. There was not one ounce of greed in him, none of the me-first ethos of later times. Osborne talks intelligently about Coolidge in a 5-minute video titled "What My Conservatism Actually Looks Like," in which he makes the implicit comparison to trumpist politicians who grab and grow rich in office rather than actually practicing conservative values. "I don’t believe leadership should enrich the officeholder. I believe it should serve the public." Who has enriched herself the most in office if not Virginia Anne Foxx? She's known as one of the most high-volume stock traders in Congress, and it makes you wonder. (I can't copy Osborne's 5-min video here but you might want to watch it here.)

I looked deeper into Mosquito Authority and was pleased to read this about the ingredients in his spray: "We utilize all-natural, plant-based mosquito solutions with alternative botanical ingredients. The ingredients in our essential oil blend have been used for centuries to keep mosquitoes away." "Alternative botanical ingredients" sound delicious, but I'd like to know more. I'm naive about what else may be in his spray that I wouldn't brag about, but I take note that Osborne developed it to protect his three little girls who liked to be in the yard past dark on summer nights, and it doesn't seem likely to me that he would expose his daughters to toxins. He's not a greed-ass.

He seems more than merely intelligent -- actually downright bright (you can see it in his eyes) -- and calm and reasonable (even if I'm going to disagree with him on everything else, from abortion to well fare), with the inherent good sense of a practical man looking to make things work. He hinted in a most cryptic way that he was a solution-seeking moderate back in 2020 when he and 10 others ran in the Republican primary for the NC-11 seat. Osborne came in seventh. Lynda Bennett and Madison Cawthorn went to a run-off, which Cawthorn-of-Blessed-Memory won. Anyway, in 2020 Osborne said this to a reporter from the Asheville Citizen-Times: "I would never say that I would compromise my principles, but I think there always is a space between the divides.” I like the way he thinks, if I understand what "space between the divides" means.

The Berger/Page Meet-Up

 

I found the time to watch the Phil Berger vs. Sam Page "town hall." The event was hosted by the Rockingham Co. Republican Party on Feb. 5th and featured an odd format: the two candidates had been given four questions -- some of them pretty sharp and specific about negative advertising -- and both Berger and Page got to read aloud what they had written -- essentially, canned talking points (and Berger's much better at that than Page) -- so there was nothing alive or spontaneous about their "joint appearance" -- except my getting to witness Phil Berger, seated not two feet from his nemesis and looking like death, hear without wincing Sam Page blame him for the repeal of the Bathroom Bill. The repeal. So Sam Page wants to bring back the Bathroom Bill.

A high point for me was when Berger read his accusation that the Democratic Party was actively meddling in the primary. "They want Sam Page to win because I'm so effective in the Senate." That's a paraphrase. And it's the absolute truth. I don't know a Democratic operative who wouldn't applaud a Berger loss. If Berger collapses ... is grist for fantasy.

But Sheriff Sam Page? He presents as kind of a clown to be honest. With Berger beside him in "business casual" (no tie), Page shows up like he's playing an 1890s Utah sheriff, in red plaid shirt overlaid by a grey outdoorsman vest, the ensemble topped by a big black Western hat. Page takes himself very seriously. His white handlebar mustache added just the right splash of light under the dark brim of that cowboy hat.

They both touted their devotion to Trump and their closeness to trumpism, though Sam Page actually implicated the president for offering a bribe. The President called me, Page said, and I was very appreciative of the call. He actually offered me a high level job in his administration. 

Give the sheriff credit for not taking the bribe.

Josh Stein Still Fighting for Control of SBOE. Bless Him!

 

Dallas Woodhouse

Gov. Josh Stein is suing the GOP-controlled General Assembly over its last-minute seizure of the State Board of Elections, which they gave lock-stock-and-barrel to their new bestie, Dave Boliek, the brand new State Auditor and conservative fan boy. ("There's no fanatic like a new convert.") The General Assembly pulled off the blatant power grab between Josh Stein's landslide victory over Mark Robinson on November 5th, 2024, and the swearing in of Josh Stein as our 76th governor on January 1st, 2025. Now that's hustling for any deliberative body (maybe not so much for one in lockstep like the Berger/Moore congregation was).

Very shortly after Stein whupped Robinson, GOP lawmakers introduced Senate Bill 382, cleverly attaching Hurricane Helene relief to their plan to sneak in provisions stripping the governor's control of the State Board of Elections, among other things. (They also took powers from Attorney General Jeff Jackson and other members of the Council of State.) Gov. Cooper, still in office, vetoed S 382. Republicans overrode. Immediately, the new czar of elections, Dave Boliek, hires extreme partisan Republican hit-man Dallas Woodhouse to "teach" local county boards of election how best to suppress the vote. The very recent elimination of three university polling sites testifies to Woodhouse's malign presence. 

Of course Stein took it to court, and he won at the trial court level. A panel of three superior court judges agreed that the section of S 382 taking powers from the executive was unconstitutional. The Court of Appeals -- dominated 12-3 by Republicans -- quickly stepped in and blocked that ruling, allowing the law to take effect on May 1st.

Stein is right now back in court asking a new panel of Appeals Court judges to overturn previous court orders that allowed Boliek to take over elections board appointments last spring.

Kyle Ingram was there in court February 10th -- yesterday -- to hear the arguments, and he captured the essential gist:

Attorneys for Stein argued that the power shift — which transferred appointments to Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek — sets a dangerous precedent for separation of powers, wherein the legislature can consistently reassign responsibilities to whichever executive office holder agrees with their policy preferences.

“The legislative position is that there are no limits on their power to assign executive duties on the Council of State,” Eric Fletcher, a lawyer for Stein, said. “They say that they can assign, tomorrow, election administration to the Commissioner of Agriculture. That they can send agricultural policy to the Commissioner of Insurance. And they can assign road-building to the Superintendent of Public Instruction.” 

Attorneys for legislative leaders argued that it was within the General Assembly’s duty to reassign executive powers as they please, so long as the powers in question are not explicitly assigned in the constitution.

The three judges hearing the arguments: John Arrowood (D), Valerie Zachary (R), and April Wood (R). Wanna guess how invested in partisanship those two Republican judges are?

Fire Sale

 

“In a country that amended the Constitution to ban beer… then fixed it when we realized it was dumb… surely we can amend it again to say corporations aren’t people and money isn’t speech.” 

--Pete Buttigieg, 16 January 2025, LaCross, Wisconsin town hall

Analyst Brian Allen said Amen! 

"We corrected Prohibition. We can correct Citizens United. Democracy shouldn’t be for sale."