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.

 

Veto Overrides Never Tasted Sweeter

 

Purges are commonplace in politics. So is revenge.

Back in March, two Democratic NC House members, Carla Cunningham and Shelly Willingham, were primaried for being problems for the Party. Their local parties turned against them. The state Democratic Party punished them. The governor especially wanted Carla Cunningham gone and publicly endorsed her opponent. Thus were both Cunningham and Willingham (and two others) purged in the March primaries. Both Cunningham and Willingham quickly changed their registrations from Democrat to Unaffiliated, and they've begun to take blood.

They still had a whole legislative session yet to serve, and about the first thing put to the House was veto overrides of two more bills that had originated in Phil Berger's Senate:

Two combined  bills: S 227 bans efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion in the public school system. S 558 bans efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion in the university system.

S 153 requires that everybody, from local law enforcement to public school employees, must be nice to ICE, must participate in assisting the deportation of people that ICE picks, and any entities deemed not in compliance would lose their governmental immunity, allowing private citizens to sue them.

In the veto overrides yesterday in Raleigh, Cunningham and Willingham helped the Republican majority just by being absent. WRAL reported that although the two House members had been present for morning committee meetings, they were not present in the House chamber when the override votes happened, thus decreasing total attendance from 120 to 118. For the override, they need a three-fifths (60%) majority of those present and voting. Yesterday, the vote on each override was 71-47.  If everybody's there, they'd need 72 votes. Absence made the heart grow fonder.

Revenge tastes good hot or cold, but I wonder about the after-taste in this particular instance. Those laws belong to the 1950s, and I don't think either Cunningham or Willingham want to go back there. In this case, sweet revenge required it.

A Case of Nerves?

 

Dave Boliek

 

 

A week and a day ago, June 16th, Republicans in the NC House introduced H 958, "Election Law Changes," 37 pages of monkeying around with the way things have been. Under this bill, any resident of a county may challenge any other resident's ballot until five days after an election (oh, yes, there'll be mischief on this one!), and State Auditor Dave Boliek will get yet a new sweeping power -- "mandatory post-election audits" in counties of Dave Boliek's choosing (maybe particularly the ones that turn blue?). Dave Boliek used to be a registered Democrat. He became a Republican, won his election, and has proven himself extra loyal to the GOP. (Witness how he bullied Republicans on the Jackson County Board of Elections to reject early voting on the Western Carolina University campus.) H 958 would also make more State Board of Elections staff into political (partisan) appointees, and curiously the law would ban any members of county boards of elections from "encouraging" citizens to vote. Why? Because human flesh is frail? 

The backlash to this bill, which was being fast-tracked, turned pretty fierce fast and overwhelming -- there's still a portal available for public comment -- so the bill is stalled, stuck in the Rules Committee (where many a problematic piece of legislation has died of slow suffocation). Revisions to H 958 may be underway, but does it matter? The GOP has cemented its identity -- the burning need to keep as many people from voting as possible.

The fact that the House leadership flinched in the face of public uproar -- former Speaker Tim Moore would never have flinched -- may tell us something about the case of nerves right now in the Republican majority. Do they need a lot of negative attention right now over the right to vote?

 

Satisfaction

 

I began working in politics in 1968, canvassing for registered Democrats in Salt Lake City who would promise to attend their precinct meetings and help elect delegates to the state convention who supported the anti-war Eugene McCarthy for the presidential nomination. I was very much of draft age. And I was very unsuccessful. All 20 precincts I was assigned to organize went for Hubert Humphrey. It was my first taste of insurgent politics, with its sweet aftertaste of defeated idealism.

I did not go back to political organizing until 1990, when we helped carry our rural Western North Carolina county for Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte who was running to unseat Jesse Helms. I was a true believer for Gantt, and I had convinced myself that he would -- could -- win the whole state. Belief is a kind of drug. Gantt lost by 107,000 votes, a sobering number. 

You got to believe to do politics, but you also have to level up on reality. If you thrive on the hunt, you also know starvation. But when the big game is plentiful, fat, and slovenly, you're allowed a certain expectation that this time a big feast will follow.

If I were a young man again, I'd be knee-deep right now in some wholly improbable attempt to topple a Republican monument. The paint is peeling off the Republican Party, and the most improbable Democratic candidate could, in such a toxic watery environment, bring down the buffalo. I expect pleasant surprises.

Anything less will leave me unsatisfied.

W T [EVERLASTING ] F

 

The Wake County Board of Elections just voted unanimously to approve an early voting plan for November that cuts out the Talley Student Union on the North Carolina State University campus, where some 47,000 students, faculty, and staff go every day. The final vote was 5-0, with both Democratic reps voting with the Republicans. This final decision followed what appeared to be a gallant Democratic attempt to save Talley as an early voting site. The two Democrats made a motion to keep Talley in the early voting plan, which pleased the overflow crowd who attended yesterday to watch the action, many of them NCSU affiliated. The Democratic motion was defeated along partisan lines 3-2. Naturally.

The next step would have depended on the Democrats sticking to their high-minded guns. They should have voted against the final version -- the Dallas Woodhouse-branded solution for discouraging the youth vote by whatever means. (In Jackson County, where Republican members of the local BOE were highminded enough to recommend a campus early voting site for Western Carolina, they got threatened by higher ups. One of the Republicans resigned in protest.) Voting against the Republican majority on the board forces by law a punt to the State Board of Elections, where, yes, another negative outcome is assured. The three Republican majority on the SBOE are in on the fix. But Democrats who don't keep fighting, even in the face of insurmountable odds -- it's not a good look.

I would like this not to be the Democratic brand in North Carolina: Caving, like DeeCee Dems. Make motions and argue to keep a voting site for young people, like you truly believe in what you're saying, like a hero for the people, and then turn around and vote with the opposition so that there cannot be a test of the decision at the State Board of Elections.

I would love to hear the reasoning behind that final unanimous vote.

No, never mind. In fact, just STFU.

 

Propects As High As an Elephant's Eye

 

Introductory campaign videos from the wave of Democratic candidates who could make Iowa a hot news topic.

Josh Turek, running for U.S. Senate:

  

 

 

Rod Sand, running for Governor:

 

 

 

Lindsay James, running for Congress, Iowa 02:

 

 

 

Christina Bohannan, running for Congress, Iowa 01:

 

 

Sarah Garriott, running for Congress, Iowa 03: