Did You Get the Jonathan Jordan Mailer?

"Paid for by Carolina Leadership Coalition," a 501(c)(4), which means that the source(s) for its two reported contributions of $75,000 and $10,000 are secret and known only to the treasurer (Vic Edwards, see below) and undoubtedly to Jonathan Jordan.

According to this mailer, Jonathan Jordan was the big-hearted Daddy Warbucks in voting for an incredibly generous and beneficent state budget which has made teachers rich beyond their wildest dreams and fattened the wallets of every "little person" in the state.

Let's get real. The budget that Republicans passed over Governor Cooper's veto in January is more of the "austerity" boilerplate those guys have banged out since 2013. It does not keep up with inflation. It does not account for increasing population. Tax cuts? Yeah, if you're already rich: "The top 1 percent of income earners in the state (whose average income is $1 million) gets a permanent tax cut of nearly $22,000 on average. By contrast, middle-income taxpayers get a tax cut of $226 on average, while the lowest income earners in the state get a tax cut of only $16 on average" (Budget and Tax Center).

By the way, that photo of happy folks sending a cheery thumbs-up to Rep. Jordan for his sterling "leadership" at the top of the flyer ... that's Stock Photo 693807481, "leisure, holidays and people concept - happy family having festive dinner or summer garden party and showing thumbs up." Fits perfectly with the rest of this transparent fakery.

Vic Edwards

Now back to the 501(c)(4) that paid for this piece of smelly cheese. The Carolina Leadership Coalition registered with the State Board of Elections back last October and has recorded two contributions (no names attached) totaling $85,000. The treasurer for the "Coalition" is one D. Victor Edwards, a self-employed CPA in Raleigh, who was possibly chosen as the sole public face of this shadowy political fund because he's a tax consultant and doesn't otherwise have any discernible political history or involvement.

But we know you now, Vic.

Virginia Foxx Has A Republican Primary Opponent

Matthew Vera of Kernersville (link to his website), a former high school cross country/track and field coach in Forsyth County who works now as a Ralph Lauren warehouseman in Kernersville. His website paints a portrait of a good guy who's as earnest and innocent as newcomers to politics usually are.

He does not mention his political party, but he is registered Republican. He does not mention the current incumbent in the 5th District seat, but he makes a clear contrast to Madam Foxx:

"We have a responsibility to our society to promote tolerance and prevent discrimination on the basis of age, race, color, religion, sex, disability, national origin, ethnic group, sexual orientation, covered veteran or other legally protected status."

He lists as important policy issues teacher pay (over which federal office-holders don't have a lot of influence) and the minimum wage, about which he writes:

Living within your means is still tough when your means are barely enough to get you from paycheck to paycheck. No matter what background or circumstances brought you to the work week ahead, we all have felt or seen the struggle that exists regarding pay. Our time card now boasts more hours than ever before in search of that additional dollar that will allow the power to stay on, the daily meal on the table to be more than enough, the long needed vacation or family trip a little more doable and activity packed!

What contemporary Republican candidate for office talks like that? Certainly not The Madam, in whom the milk of human kindness curdled decades ago.

I like this guy, and I already don't want to see him hurt.

(He also has a candidate Facebook page.)

Trump Is Going to Texas, But Will He Learn Anything?

1. Scientists have been warning that climate change will produce more "rain bombs," catastrophic amounts of rainfall in short time-spans. Storms will get more severe. More rain will fall, and faster.

2. Ocean temperatures are warmer. Warmer oceans make for stronger hurricanes.

3. Warmer water also increases in volume. Warmer oceans are rising, without even factoring in the melting of glaciers and the disintegration of the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Coastal flooding in some areas is already a constant fact of life, even without hurricanes.

4. It's damn near impossible to get flood insurance for homes from private insurers. The US government stepped up, creating the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) to provide insurance to homeowners in areas prone to flooding. From 1978 to 2004, NFIP generally took in more in payments than it paid out in losses. But in 2005, Katrina hit. The NFIP was on the hook for $18 billion — an amount equal to all of the premiums paid into the program from 1991 through 2005. Then, in 2012, Sandy hit. Losses neared $10 billion.

5. Shoring up NFIP became a big political fight in Congress after Hurricane Sandy. Some 67 Republicans in Congress, including Speaker Paul Ryan and 5th District Madam Virginia Foxx, voted against a NFIP funding bill in January 2013. Screw those Northeastern Democrats!

6. The NFIP is currently $24.6 billion in debt.

7. The NFIP is underwater because it doesn't charge enough in flood insurance premiums to cover the costs of recovery. Rich people with expensive ocean-front properties don't want to pay more, and they have considerably more political influence over Congress. Funding for NFIP is basically a political football.

8. Then comes Hurricane Harvey, followed by a rubber-necking Trump who understands little, cares even less, and seems perfectly immune from deep knowledge. We know where he stands on science.

Them Monuments!

A friend (DS) sent me the speech made by Julian Carr at the dedication of Silent Sam, the Civil War monument on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill, on June 2, 1913. The speech is preserved in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC as part of the Julian Carr Papers. He was a well educated graduate of the university, a Civil War veteran, an important post-war tobacco businessman, and a fluid, florid writer.

I just read that speech straight through with keen interest, thinking of the current controversy down there in Chapel Hill between the citizens who want that statue of Silent Sam removed, and the citizens who don't. Carr's speech illuminates the context for Silent Sam's placement on campus, at least insofar as Mr. Carr saw it. His speech was epic, flowery, decorated with high-flown allusions to mythology and ancient history, with frequent slabs of quoted poetry, and plenty of flattery for the Daughters of the Confederacy who had raised the money for the statue. The Daughters of the Confederacy were direct descendants of the Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome, said Carr, and added (I'm not making this up!), "God's name be praised!"

All those war dead, which the statue represented, got transported in Carr's speech from the actual slaughter on actual bloody battlegrounds, to this: "I know where they [the war dead] are, -- just over the narrow-river, camped in silken tents, on the green sward, under the shade of the trees, on the banks of the crystal stream of life" ... meaning, O my brethren, that even though those dead boys are all living it up in heaven, they're also still very much present for us and our Sacred Cause. (Boy! Would I like this guy to preach my funeral, and all funerals!)

The statue thus dedicated depicted a very much alive common Confederate foot soldier, clutching his rifle to his chest, and facing north, obviously, because the Union was the North, but also for another reason -- as a demonstration of that 1913 crowd's resistance to northern economic and political power. (The Union's military occupation of the South following the war was called "reconstruction" by Yankees, but among Southern white elites it was known as tribulation of the righteous.)

Facing north, also, as a symbol of resistance to what had happened in North Carolina very recently, and could happen again! Just 20 years before the arrival of Silent Sam, the Fusion Party -- made up of a coalition of Republicans and Negroes -- had swept the North Carolina elections of 1894 and 1896. Newly elected Fusion Party officials, some white and some black, immediately installed literally thousands of Negroes in low-level political and patronage jobs, further inflaming the hatred of white Democrats.

You know what happened. White Democrats fought back in the elections of 1898 with pure race war language and tactics and took back the government. Not incidentally, a cabal of Democrats in Wilmington, NC, in that same year staged an armed insurrection against their Negro city government, executing at least 20 Negroes (and possibly as many as 60), and torching Negro properties -- all for the race crime of being duly elected to office.

Julian Carr, 1905

Near the end of his speech, Carr got around to gingerly mentioning the race war context. He started off by wringing his hands rhetorically that current college students in 1913 didn't take seriously the Negro threat:

The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South. When "the bottom rail was on top" all over the Southern states, and to-day, as a consequence, the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States -- Praise God.

When "the bottom rail was on top." There it is, his gingerly way of mentioning Reconstruction, when bottom blacks got on top. Carr continued with the most startling thing he said that day -- because it's personal and apparently true:

I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomatox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.

Don't you wonder about his telling that story of beating a "negro wench" on that occasion, in front of that elite and pious crowd, and without apparent embarrassment? After all, he was bragging about beating that woman, to an audience he must have assumed would smile rather than wince.

With that crowd and at that time, it was perfectly okay, and perhaps even expected from an old soldier, to demonstrate that you'd never give an inch on race.

Storm Saturday: ICYMI

Palatucci

1. Yesterday the Republican National Committee, meeting in Nashville, declared that there are no "very fine people" marching with racists, in an official resolution. But the resolution's author quickly added that denouncing white supremacists has nothing whatsoever to do with Big T in the White House, who had said that there were "very fine people on both sides" in Charlottesville.

“This has nothing to do with the president,” said Bill Palatucci, an RNC committeeman from New Jersey who wrote the resolution. “This is the RNC saying that racism and bigotry have no place in America” (therefore evidently making the White House an island unto itself, and not a part of America as a continent at all).

"Mr. Palatucci served as General Counsel to the Presidential Transition Committee of President Donald J. Trump. In this role, he was responsible for all legal matters related to ethics compliance and contracts and agreements between such agencies as the U.S. Department of Justice, General Services Administration, and the White House." (Gibbonslaw)

2. While a Cat 4 hurricane was bearing down on Texas, Trump granted a full and unconditional pardon to fellow Birther and Hispanic tormentor, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County.

Message received! (There's a whole lot more being pardoned beside just Joe Arpaio.)

Question: Why didn't Trump pardon Arpaio at his rally in Phoenix, mere hours ago?

Reportedly, some White House aides convinced him it would create a storm of controversy. But he swished around and previewed the pardon anyway in front of that crowd, like a perfect little slut.

Hell-lo, Harvey! Just in time to provide cover! Not just for pardoning the whole concept of racial-profiling but also cover for this: 

3. WH Chief of Staff fires Sebastian Gorka.  Put a Marine in charge, you get ass-whippings. Gorka was a Steve Bannon creature (he also came from Brietbart), who had no defined job and lurked about in the alt-right, Islamophobic, Trump nimbus all through the Trump campaign, and looks like a Twilight Zone villain. Has an accent to go with it.

Retired Marine General John Kelly, recently put in charge of running the White House, revoked Gorka's security clearance while Gorka was on a two-week vacation, which essentially also eliminated his "job." Boom! Death by drone.

Gorka did not go quietly. The Federalist published his written "resignation" letter: “[G]iven recent events, it is clear to me that forces that do not support the [MakeAmericaGreatAgain] promise are – for now – ascendant within the White House. As a result, the best and most effective way I can support you, Mr. President, is from outside the People’s House.”

So, Bannon and Gorka will be together again, back at Breitbart? If not America, they'll make Trump great again if it takes destroying the Republican Party.

4. Trump signs "memorandum" banning transgender troops from serving in the US Armed Forces. Remember he had tweeted on July 26 that he was banning preverts in the military, because he needed a distraction in the press from the catastrophic failure of the GOP to repeal and replace Obamacare.

The military essentially rebuffed the tweet and said (either in effect or literally), "Show us the beef in a signed order," which by the way would be stupid and offensive). 

But Trump finally signed what passes as an order (but was labeled "Memorandum") to the Pentagon, because he thought he couldn't afford to look weak ever, on any stupid topic, and with Harvey roaring on the Texas coast for distractive cover, he returned the military's pre-2016 policy under which no transgender individuals are allowed to serve openly in the armed forces. But with the memorandum Trump also simultaneously telegraphed the weakness of his case, leaving it totally up to General Mattis at the Defense Dept. and Whoever's Left at Homeland Security to decide what to do about transgender soldiers currently serving. "You guys decide," said the for sure entirely not weak Commander in Chief.

SNAFU, Trump-style. Shifting into Reverse while going downhill.

5.  Actual Harvey News: The Department of Homeland Security is currently without a permanent head. Two deputy director nominees at FEMA still await confirmation (either because Congressional Democrats have bogged down the process or because they're all going slow on nominations by a man who wanted his son's wedding planner as the director of New York Federal Housing). Trump has not even nominated someone to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center.

Trump, in his proposed budget released in May, recommended slashing FEMA programs and grants that help cities and states prepare for natural disasters (to the tune of $667 million), and he proposed cuts to the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program. Trump recommended a 16 percent cut to the overall NOAA budget and a 32 percent cut to the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the agency’s main ocean, weather, and climate research office.

Because knowing science never pays off.

I Used to Think That "Idiocracy" Was the Future

Jim Bakker interviewing televangelist Paula White, who is reportedly one of President Trump’s key spiritual advisers, while also (ahem) raising money "to stay on the air."

Eventually, White showed Bakker the pen that Trump gave to her after he signed his executive order on “religious liberty” earlier this year, which White described as having “felt like the heavens had opened.” Clasping the pen in his hand, Bakker declared that “He signed with this pen! Can you see the pen? He signed with this pen!”

Monty Python prophesied the religious right.

Hello, Mr. President, My Name Is Harvey

Maybe he'll tweet about it.

Leader of the Free World

A picture is worth a thousand words.

This one pretty much sums up the Trump presidency.

"Ignore the warnings. Look directly at the sun."

And Then You Destroy Yourself

Mitch McConnell has reportedly had it with Trump. He's now openly speculating that Trump won't be president for long.

According to Burns and Martin, "Angry phone calls and private badmouthing have devolved into open conflict, with the president threatening to oppose Republican senators who cross him, and Mr. McConnell mobilizing to their defense."

"In a series of tweets this month, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. McConnell publicly, and berated him in a phone call that quickly devolved into a profane shouting match."

What came next out of Trump's mouth, according to White House leakers, might be of interest to Robert Mueller. (Rachel Maddow highlighted it last night on her show.) "[Trump] was even more animated about what he intimated was the Senate leader’s refusal to protect him from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election."

Some people think that line of argument, directed at the Senate Leader, might be part of a pattern of obstruction of justice.

Last night, Trump upped his ante against McConnell. He badmouthed both Republican Arizona senators while standing on a stage in Phoenix. "Take that, Turtle Boy!"

Also last night in Phoenix, Trump found a new way to threaten McConnell. He said he "might" -- which means he just that second thought of it -- might shut down the government over funding for his border wall.

Which drew this response from Republican Judd Gregg of New Hampshire: If Mr. Trump “can’t participate constructively,” the House and Senate will have to govern on their own -- “Failure to do things like keeping the government open and passing a tax bill is the functional equivalent of playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded,” Sen. Gregg quipped.

Al Hoffman, a former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, said of Trump, “I think he’s going to blow up, self-implode.”

Bill Aceto Once Again Says "No!" to ASU Early Voting, But the Republican Majority Cracks

Owen and Aceto

It was 2-0 on the Watauga Board of Elections just minutes ago on a motion to place an Early Voting polling site at the ASU Student Union during the municipal elections, but Chair Bill Aceto voted no. No, no, a thousand times no! The vote had to be unanimous. The majority of 2 in this case -- which included Republican member Nancy Owen -- was defeated.

Owen had just said, "We have to give a little and take a little" in agreeing to a compromise Early Voting plan with Democratic member Stella Anderson. Owen and Anderson had agreed that the ASU site could be approved for reduced days and reduced hours. While Early Voting at the BOE site downtown would go on for 12 1/2 days from 8 to 5, the ASU Student Union site was proposed for only 7 days, 10 to 5.

Anderson

But Bill Aceto, proving himself the lamest of lame ducks but as always acidly partisan, was not having it. He said he couldn't justify Early Voting at ASU for a municipal election because of projected low vote totals. Stella Anderson pointed out that in the four years Aceto has served on the BOE, he has never approved Early Voting at ASU, not even when thousands were expected there in the presidential election last fall.

Plus the Town of Boone, in requesting the ASU site, had agreed to bear all costs. "It's what the people want," Anderson pointed out, and in the interests of serving the public in a non-partisan way, we should grant the request.

No one has ever accused Bill Aceto of being non-partisan.

Weather Forecast: Continued Cloudy with a Chance of Drain

"It seems unlikely Trump is going to win over his opponents any time soon, but his base support has softened somewhat and there’s reason to think that whatever his exact floor is, he hasn’t hit it yet."

--Ariel Edwards-Levy, director of polling at HuffPost, assessing what Trump's poor polling numbers mean

ASU Targeted by White Supremacists

Unknown persons hung this white nationalist banner overnight on the Appalachian State campus, from the covered walkway over Rivers Street in Boone.

And then proudly tweeted out this photo.

"Identity Evropa" is a new white supremacist group that particularly targets college campuses.

Sen. Deanna Ballard Has Been Double-Bunked

Proposed new NC Senate maps were released late yesterday, and indeed -- as predicted -- Watauga's 45th Senatorial District has been redrawn to include all of Wilkes County and has as a consequence pitted two incumbent Republicans against each other.

Here is the new map.

Sen. Shirley Randleman will presumably face Ballard in next year's Republican primary, unless one of the two drops out.

Talk Is Cheap

"Five armed services chiefs — of the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines and the National Guard Bureau — posted statements on social media condemning neo-Nazis and racism in uncompromising terms. They did not mention Mr. Trump by name...."

"Republicans, too, issued new denunciations of the hatred on display in Charlottesville, although some remained vague about Mr. Trump’s remarks."

Fox News host Shepard Smith "said that he had been unable to find a single Republican to come on-air to defend Mr. Trump’s remarks."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell denounced “hate and bigotry” in a statement on Wednesday but made no mention of Mr. Trump.

"The president’s top advisers described themselves as stunned, despondent and numb. Several said they were unable to see how Mr. Trump’s presidency would recover, and others expressed doubts about his capacity to do the job." (Reporting by Michael D. Shear, Glenn Thrush, and Maggie Haberman)

But Some People Acted

The CEO's of Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum, titans of business who were brought on during the transition as high profile backers of the president's agenda, decided yesterday to disband in order to "condemn" -- that was their word -- Trump's equivocation that anti-fascists were just as bad as white nationalists.

"There really was nothing to debate," said one member of the Strategic and Policy Forum who described the president's fiery Tuesday news conference as a "tripwire." (CNBC)

CNBC broke the news that the CEOs were jumping ship, so Trump rushed to Twitter to fire them all before they could quit.

Jonathan Jordan Will Once Again Face a Primary Opponent

Robert Block, a student at Appalachian State University, has announced a bid to unseat NC House Rep. Jonathan Jordan in next year's Republican primary. Block is 19 years old.

He has a website and a platform that heavily stresses support for public education (as did Lew Hendricks, Jordan's Republican opponent in 2016).

"Very Fine People on Both Sides!" Trump's Clear Signal to White Supremacists

Following Trump's third, angry statement about the spectacle in Charlottesville yesterday, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke whipped out his smart phone and tweeted, "Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth.”

The truth, as someone suggested, had set him free.

Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush reported that "members of the president’s staff, stunned and disheartened, said they never expected to hear such a voluble articulation of opinions that the president had long expressed in private."

Eric Cantor, the former Republican congressman and Very Big Deal from Virginia, who's also Jewish, said Trump's efforts to equate the actions of counterprotesters with the neo-Nazis were “unacceptable.” “There’s no moral equivalence,” Cantor said.

Trump's rant yesterday sparked instant condemnation, especially from fellow Republicans (who are watching the intellectual underpinnings of their ideology turn to ca-ca, along with their electoral prospects):

Speaker Paul D. Ryan called white supremacy “repulsive” and said “there can be no moral ambiguity.” 

Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Republican of Florida, tweeted: “Blaming ‘both sides’ for #Charlottesville?! No.” 

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said white nationalists in Charlottesville were “100% to blame” and continued in a subsequent tweet: “The #WhiteSupremacy groups will see being assigned only 50% of blame as a win. We can not allow this old evil to be resurrected.”

Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a freshman Republican, wrote: “This is simple: we must condemn and marginalize white supremacist groups, not encourage and embolden them.”

Yesterday, Trump was in an emboldening frame of mind, which is obviously his native (pure white) and habitual condition.

Newly hired White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly
studies the floor (and his future) during Trump's
impromptu tantrum yesterday.
Photo by Al Drago, New York Times

The Durham Civil War Soldier Statue

WRAL

I agree with Gov. Roy Cooper: There's probably a better way to do this.

Like getting these Civil War symbols off public land and into museums or private venues.

But this particular metal statue -- which stood there in front of the Durham County Courthouse since 1924, looking as solid as the Confederate dollar -- turned out to be a cheap (zinc?) hollow casting, part of a mass-production made during the first two decades of the 20th century to satisfy the politics of that time. The politics of that time have not aged all that well into the 21st Century.

Work of art or commercialized pop culture from the Jim Crow South?

These statues, or others like them, went up all over and by the hundreds in the first two decades of the 20th Century. (The McNeel Marble Works in Marietta, Ga., did most of the marble ones, the famous "Standing Soldiers" and other icons, but this statue in Durham was cheap pot metal.) At the turn of the Century, these statues were prideful reactions to Northern industrial superiority and reassertions of segregationist ideology -- "Jim Crow." The money was often raised by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, but sometimes local governments wanted to jump on board for obvious reasons.

In North Carolina particularly, that era followed the brief power of the Fusion Party, a coalition of populists and black and white Republicans who swept state elections in 1894, including putting approximately 1,000 black officials into office. US Congressman George H. White was one of them. The Democratic Party of that day was suddenly, conspicuously, and pretty much totally out of power everywhere in North Carolina. There's usually been a strong reactionary white wave against any conspicuous advancement of colored people (and those waves right up to the present often include traditional "Democrats" in the reactionary voting bloc). The Civil Rights movement in the '60s produced a Jesse Helms. The election of Barack Obama brought the Tea Party sweep of 2010. So can't you guess what happened at the turn of the 20th Century? Following two virtual landslides for Fusionists in the elections of 1894 and 1896, the Fusion Party was swept into oblivion in the election of 1898. Boom! Gone! And the broom used in the sweep was overt white racism:

In the 1898 “White Supremacy Campaign,” led by future U.S. Senator Furnifold M. Simmons (1854-1940), chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee, the Democratic Party used identity politics to regain power. “Negro rule” and “Negro domination” became the catchphrases of the campaign. Josephus Daniels (1862-1948), editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, was the unabashed press spokesman for white supremacy. Red Shirts, reminiscent of the Klan, intimidated blacks and thereby limited the number of Republican votes. (North Carolina History Project)

Okay, motivation is one thing, but a God-fearing and church-going populace that didn't have anything to do with putting up those statues is allowed to view them as an honored and important part of their history, speaking to sacrifice and pain and loss and not the rest of it. I certainly see the statues as part of history, too, and I haven't been inclined to bash history or attempt to erase it. The psychic juice released by the fantasy of "the lost cause" is powerful ju-ju and lives today for the Alt-Right too -- "You will not replace us!" The pious matrons of the United Daughters of the Confederacy lacked the wherewithal to question the true ingredients of that "cause," its antecedents, and its effects. I just don't know how much history the Alt-Right understands. (Well, it takes time to see yourself. We've all got our bubbles.)

The ideology of the white Democratic Party of 1900 and 1910 and 1920 has been spectacularly replaced in North Carolina politics by the Republican Party of 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016, busying itself at knocking down and doing it like a raiding party of Vikings. Ta-Nehisi Coates captured very nicely the hidden agenda behind the "heritage not hate" argument: "The heritage of white supremacy was not so much birthed by hate as by the impulse toward plunder."

Trump and History

To cut to the chase: Trump knows as much about history as a dog knows his father.

In the statement Trump read aloud on Saturday about the violence in Charlottesville (a part of it not usually replayed on TV news), he said "We must ... cherish our history." That's an interesting line, as it shows up all the time as camouflage on the Web and elsewhere: "We're just celebrating white heritage. We're just honoring history." Well, particularly, the specific history of pain and loss of property by Civil War Americans defending their right to own and sweat human beings for a profit. 

L to R: Trump, Bannon, Gorka, Miller

Josh Marshall asked a crucial question yesterday: Who wrote that statement about "cherishing history" for Trump. He didn't write it himself. He can't write. He can barely read.

Was it White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, who reportedly has Trump's ear as some kind of international sage. Very recent headline about Gorka: "White House Aide Says People Should Stop Criticizing White Supremacists So Much."

Or was it NortoriousSB, Stephen Bannon? Everybody knows his fondness and nurturing care for the "Alt-Right."

Or was the author the other Stephen? Stephen Miller, the man who wrote Trump's Inauguration speech ("Darkness Falls") and the subsequent Trump Anti-Immigration Presidential Order that crashed. This Steve hung out at Duke University not long ago with Richard B. Spencer, the now-president of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank. Richard Spencer's big media moment came soon after the election of Trump and in a Washington venue to boot: "At a National Policy Institute conference, [Spencer] quoted from Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews. In response to his cry "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!", a number of his supporters gave the Nazi salute and chanted in a similar fashion to the Sieg heil chant used at the Nazis' Nuremberg rallies. Spencer has also refused to denounce Adolf Hitler."

Jeffrey C. Billman, in The Independent Weekly, threw down the gauntlet to a major political party that is now left holding the coats of resurgent white supremacists:

At minimum, every decent Republican—looking at you, Tillis and Burr—should be demanding that Trump immediately fire Gorka, Miller, and Bannon .... In any normal administration, Republican or Democrat, [people] half that repugnant would have been prevented from getting anywhere near the Oval Office. In Trump’s, they’re top advisers.

History, who hasn't been introduced yet to Mr. Trump, will not be kind in telling this tale of a bad seed moving into the White House.

Keep Your Friends Close and Your Racists Closer

“I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency"

--White supremacist David Duke, responding on Twitter to Donald Trump's pansy-ass rejection of violence yesterday

The Daily Stormer, a leading neo-Nazi website, reacted to Trump's "everybody's at fault but don't let the words white supremacists escape my lips" response to the events in Charlottesville, published the following:

Trump has emboldened, if not empowered, a native nastiness that we fought a European war to defeat.

Deanna Ballard May Have a Tough Row to Hoe

Deanna Ballard

Shirley Randleman

The Mount Airy News reported that some preliminary redistricting maps (still kept quite secret from the voting public) may indeed redraw a Watauga County district and cause a good deal of angst for Sen. Deanna Ballard.

The beans were spilled by Republican Rep. Sarah Stevens, who represents Surry and part of Wilkes Co. and who also serves on the closeted group of General Assembly members who are redrawing NC House and Senate districts to comply with an order from the federal courts. In other words, Rep. Sarah Stevens ought to know what she's talking about.

'Pears that it's likely that the redrawing will force incumbent Sen. Deanna Ballard of Watauga into the same senate district as incumbent Sen. Shirley Randleman of Wilkes County. It's called "double-bunking," and in the past the Republican map drawers used it effectively against Democrats. If what Rep. Stevens suggests comes to pass, Ballard and Randleman will have to duke it out in a Republican primary next year.

Not guessing how that primary contest might turn out. Randleman has a good deal more seniority than Ballard and a higher profile in the General Assembly.

Blessed Be the Peacemakers

Certainly is instructive to our Christian faith to find out -- via a Texas Baptist, no less! -- that God has given express permission to Trump to nuke North Korea.

Can the rapture be far behind?

Mueller Means Business

Happened a couple of weeks ago, but news is just now emerging:

FBI agents raided the Alexandria home of President Trump’s former campaign chairman late last month, using a search warrant to seize documents and other materials, according to people familiar with the special counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Federal agents appeared at Paul Manafort’s home without advance warning in the predawn hours of July 26, the day after he met voluntarily with the staff for the Senate Intelligence Committee....

...The search warrant indicates investigators may have argued to a federal judge they had reason to believe Manafort could not be trusted to turn over all records in response to a grand jury subpoena.

NC House Republicans Are Successfully Strangling the Craft Beer Industry

This will be an issue in the 2018 General Assembly elections. Or it should be.

The NC Beer and Wine Wholesalers is a powerful lobby in Raleigh. They represent the big national brewers, the swill-makers that are most threatened by the growth of small, local "craft" brewers like Olde Mecklenburg brewery in Charlotte. Potentially like Appalachian Mountain Brewery and Lost Province Brewery in Boone, if they wanted to grow and get state-wide distribution.

The NC Beer and Wine Wholesalers control distribution, and their big industry members have no interest in helping small local businesses sell their product. So an attempt to change the ABC laws in North Carolina this year met a stone wall manned by Republican members of the General Assembly who were receiving, collectively, some $90,000 in campaign contributions from the NC Beer and Wine Wholesalers PAC.

Call it "campaign contributions" if you like. I call it bribes.

The recipients of this large money did what the wholesalers wanted: they stripped a provision from the ABC omnibus bill that would have raised the legal cap on how much beer local craft breweries can "self-distribute" and thus stay out of the iron grip of the distribution monopoly maintained by the Beer and Wine Wholesalers.

Legal bribery and an absolute crime against North Carolina small businesses.

Congrats, America! You Withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords, and Here's Your Reward

Unprecedented droughts. Worse and worser heat waves. Rain "bombs" and fiercer storms slashing the landscape. The average temperature in the United States "has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years," according to a comprehensive climate report paid for, researched, and written by the U.S. government -- "Climate Science Special Report."

That report was just leaked to the NYTimes because some of the scientists involved in its writing are fearful that the current administration with suppress it. Or "edit" it for content to please the Koch Bros.

With no interest in science at the highest levels of our leadership, and with no chance of changing that head-in-the-sand status quo for the foreseeable future, we are so thoroughly f***ed. To paraphrase the coroner in "The Wizard of Oz," we're not only merely f***ed. We're really most sincerely f***ed.

"Shadow Candidates": Republican Long Knives

Mike Pence is running for president. So is John Kasich. U.N. Ambassador Niki Haley has hired a pollster. Senators Tom Cotton (who's a polite young man) and Ben Sasse (who's openly defiant of Trump) have both been to Iowa Republican Party events. William Kristol, editor at large of The Weekly Standard, said he had begun informal conversations about creating a “Committee Not to Renominate the President”

(Hattip: Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, for their reporting based on "interviews with more than 75 Republicans at every level of the party, elected officials, donors and strategists.")

“They see weakness in this president,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. “Look, it’s not a nice business we’re in.”

Pence is Trump's vice president and shouldn't be visibly running just six months into a first term. So he's not visibly running, but make no mistake: He's doing political calisthenics to be in shape should Trump not be able to continue. He's "party-building,"ostensibly, but also raising money for himself and displaying a grounded, adult, and credible alternative to Trump.

Meanwhile, John Kasich

... has been more defiant: The Ohio governor, who ran unsuccessfully in 2016, has declined to rule out a 2020 campaign in multiple television interviews, and has indicated to associates that he may run again, even if Mr. Trump seeks another term.

Mr. Kasich, who was a sharp critic of the Republicans’ failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act with deep Medicaid cuts, intends to step up his advocacy by convening a series of policy forums, in Ohio and around the country.

"It may get worse," said Jay Bergman, leading Republican donor. "Grievous setbacks" in the midterm elections of 2018 "could bolster challengers" in the party.

"The Shadow Candidates," Martin and Burns dubbed 'em. Long may they thole, and toughly!

Mob Action

Last night at his triumphalist rally in West Virginia, Trump opened up a new counter-strike against the Mueller investigation;

"They [Democrats] can't beat us at the voting booths so they are trying to cheat you out of the ... future that you want. They are trying to cheat you out of the leadership you want with a fake story that is demeaning to all of us and most importantly demeaning to our country and demeaning to our Constitution."

We well know that some 60 percent of West Virginia is part of the 36 percent of the American voters who still support Trump, so that rallying cry -- "they're trying to cheat you out of the leadership you want" -- is calculated to get the cheers that Trump craves in a state where the majority still support him. He needs constant flattery to feel validated, and he doesn't travel anywhere that validation isn't guaranteed.

But that line also suggests that he's perfectly willing to stir up the mob to defend him. How far is he willing to go? God only knows, but we'll find out.

Because the Mueller noose is tightening. He's empaneled his own grand jury in the District of Columbia, and he's apparently deep into Trump's tangled finances. Furthermore, the Republicans in the Senate at least -- who all have to run state-wide and not in gerrymandered safe havens -- are clearly done with his shenanigans. They are not adjourning the Senate during August so that Trump can't do any "recess appointments." Ouch. That's a direct slap at the leader of their party.

Thom Tillis

Two different bipartisan pairs of senators have drafted two separate pieces of legislation to prevent Trump from premptorily firing Robert Mueller. One of those bipartisan pairs includes an unlikely senator -- Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who hasn't heretofore shown much of a pulse. Both versions of a Stop Trump From Firing Mueller Act of 2017 would end the executive branch’s ability to fire a special counsel, by putting the question to a three-judge panel from the federal courts. Ouch again. That Tillis is willing to raise his hand in this manner against Trump suggests that he no longer fears retaliation.

Trump's mob actions notwithstanding, it appears that Republican senators intend to see the Mueller investigation through to its end, whatever that may entail. I think they'd probably prefer to have Mike Pence in the Oval Office. Maybe all of us would. Or maybe it isn't even a matter of preference but a matter of the life or death of our republic.

"As Any Father Would"

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

--John 8:44 

Trump lies out of habit and out of need. Because he's always lied all his life, it comes easy. He lied to clinch deals, to wow and charm potential marks. He lied to pump up his own magnificence. But right now he lies to deflect the investigations into what he did with the Russians leading up to the election and the inauguration.

August 1, 2017: Sarah Huckleberry Sanders admitted yesterday that indeed her boss Trump had participated in the drafting of Junior Trump's original statement about the meeting with the Russian lawyer (and, with, as it turned out, former present Russian agents):

July 8, 2017, Donald Trump Jr. said: It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up. I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.

That statement was issued shortly after the New York Times broke the story that a month earlier, back in June, Junior and the Russian lawyer met in Trump Tower. It had been a secret.

As Huckleberry Sanders said yesterday, very sentence in the statement is technically a true statement (sorta, except for one -- see below), yet those sentences were carefully composed to deceive. Trump Senior has now admitted that he helped draft the statement, "as any father would."

July 9, 2017: Statement above becomes inoperative. New York Times has followed up with evidence that the third sentence was deceptive. The real subject of the meeting was dirt on Hillary. Following the Times scoop, Junior issues a new statement, admitting only that he took a Russian meeting because he was promised "information helpful to the campaign." ("I snapped at the Putin bait," Junior admitted.)

July 10, 2017: Times scoops again: emails exist between Junior and a go-between who was setting up the meeting. Junior has now lawyered up, and his lawyer issues a statement: Yes, there are emails, but they're inconsequential, and the president didn't know a thing about any of this.

July 11, 2017: Junior releases the secret email (first heard about the day before) to pre-empt the Times, which was just minutes away from publishing the texts. The truth about the Russian lawyer meeting is now several blocks south of the "true" sentences in the original statement above.


The Father of Lies
The problem for this presidency is that the lies are being exposed and debunked with amazing ease, not to mention digital speed. Trump's credibility was never good. It's totally in the toilet now, and where it's hurting him the worst is in Congress. Republican senators don't fear him, and Republican House members are beginning to fear him less.

Sean Sullivan yesterday detailed the open opposition to Trump among some Republican senators, a defiant attitude which appears to be spreading. For example, there's growing bipartisan activity in both Senate and House to bypass Trump's rhetoric for "repeal and replace" and find ways to fix the problems with Obamacare. That's hopeful.

If you're caught lying repeatedly and you're also putatively the Leader of the Free World, the consequences -- reactions, interactions, retractions -- weigh far more than if you're the lying drunk at end of the bar. One might say that a president caught repeatedly lying has begun already to quack like a lame duck.

NCGA Redistricting Case: Judges Not Amused by Gen'l Assembly Foot-Dragging

There'll be no special NC House and Senate elections in 2017, but yesterday the three-judge panel overseeing the illegal racial gerrymander of House and Senate voting districts scolded the Republican leaders of the General Assembly for not "being serious" about correcting the unconstitutional abuses of their power. The judges ordered new district maps by September 1.

To recap:

In August 2016 -- almost a year ago -- the same three-judge panel ruled 28 NC House and Senate districts illegally gerrymandered 

By November 2016, the General Assembly had taken no action to redraw the districts, so the three judges ordered new maps and a special election for March 2017. GA leaders appealed to the US Supreme Court

In June 2017, the US Supremes unanimously affirmed the ruling of the three judges that the districts were illegal racial gerrymanders, but they stayed the order for special elections in March.

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice and others sued to force the GA to draw new districts, while the GA asked for an extension until November 15 to produce the maps.

Yesterday the three judges said no to the GA's request and demanded new maps by September 1. The estimate on the number of districts that will have to be redrawn to accommodate the 28 specific gerrymanders ranges as high as 116. “We agree with Plaintiffs that the General Assembly already has had ample time to enact a remedial redistricting plan,” the judges said in their unanimous ruling. “We also agree that constitutionally adequate districts should be enacted as quickly as possible to protect the rights of North Carolina citizens and to minimize any chilling effect on political participation attributable to the continued absence of a districting plan in the face of a finding of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.”

The court also ruled that the GA must submit the new maps to the judges within a week following September 1 and that plaintiffs will have until September 15 to object to any problems and submit their own alternative maps.

The fact that the Republican leaders in the GA have hired the same gerrymandering expert that they used the first time for drawing the illegal districts does not suggest that we'll see fair districts this time, but the judges have warned that the new maps will be under special scrutiny.