Destin Kisses the Godfather's Ring

 

Destin Hall, Republican Speaker of the NC House, who represents just one precinct out of 20 in Watauga County, because his district is actually Caldwell, just posted this abject surrender on Twitter:

"The NC Senate race is too important to be derailed by a messy, divisive primary .... We must unify behind whoever President Trump picks...."

Seriously, Dude? You're surrendering everything, starting but not ending with your manhood, to your new dictator, and you admit it publicly? In a freakin' tweet?

This is mob-level bending of the knee.

 

"Be Human"

 

I saw this post by John Pavlovitz:

We now have a concentration camp in Florida. 

Stop pretending any of this is normal. 

If you claim to be a good person and you're not outwardly opposing this regime, you're not a good person.

Be human.

Jethro's Big Beautiful Bullshit is destructive to the social safety net. Deliberate cruelty aimed at other peoples may be, evolutionarily, ingrained in our species, but thank gawd that the great majority of us struggled through our wars and now as a majority condemn deliberate cruelty (while ironically watching it motivate a hero in every action thriller in the history of the world).

These are the Times of the Bully. Isn't it obvious why? Jethro's a mean and hateful man, always self-serving and belittling of others (Zelenskyy in the Oval Office), and don't his adherents feel privileged now to let their own venom of resentment flow. Everybody wants to cuss everybody else OUT, all the time. "Karen" has virtually become a sub-species. Road rage, sometimes inflamed by bumpersticker spite, is mos def on the rise. The guys with all those stored up guns talk "civil war" with other jacked-up dudes, and violence often accompanies pride. You know which Pride.

MAGA has turned the videos of masked ICE-men and -women roughing up brown-skinned peoples into a kind of porn -- fantasies fulfilled of violent retribution, and oddly, proof of worth to xenophobes. They love ruthlessness in uniformed surrogates who manhandle the very people they have a particular reason to hate and resent and wish to eliminate from the landscape.

I'm not apart from these Times. I feel the steam off the crock of anger rising in myself, turning to full-on hatred that might involve some yelling at inanimate objects, like TVs, or some fully articulated epithets said out loud about other drivers. Not a good thing in me. Meanwhile, I get a huge kick out of being totally inconsistent, because I also applaud aggressiveness and the willingness to take it to the streets in some of the leaders on our side. We do have to stand up to the bullying, even at risk of harm. That also is being human.

 

The Ethos of the Tundra

 

Does the Libertarian mindset always say, "I got mine. You want yours? Go fuck yourself." That's what I think when I read about Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski's changing her vote for Jethro's One Big Beautiful Bill because she got bought off. David Dayen, reporting for Prospect.org:

Overnight, the Senate radically altered its Big Beautiful Bill, zeroing in on one state and one Senator in an attempt to buy her vote....

...the gifts to Alaska, designed to sway Murkowski, came fast and furious. The federal share of payment for Medicaid would be increased for “the state with the highest separate poverty guideline.” That happens to be Alaska. Their share would increase 25 percent above that of a typical state.

Other programs bundle together benefits for “noncontiguous states,” referring to Alaska and Hawaii. That includes an exemption from work requirements for SNAP, an increase in Medicare reimbursement rates to select health care providers, and a waiver from the cost-sharing provisions, whereby a state must contribute to SNAP funding. As long as the noncontiguous state is “actively implementing a corrective action plan” to reduce error rates in the program (meaning people given benefits who do not qualify), that cost share can be eliminated. Alaska has the highest error rates in the nation, but under this provision, by simply saying they’re trying to fix it, they can avoid the cost share.

 

Is Lara Trump House-Shopping in Wilmington?

 

Speculation is the oxygen of politics. So naturally I'm gonna breathe -- that is, read a list of potential Republican candidates for Thom Tillis's Senate seat. The NandO put Lara Trump in the first spot:

...the president’s daughter-in-law, a Fox News host, is “strongly considering jumping in the race,” NBC News reported. She is a native of Wilmington and formerly co-chaired the Republican National Committee. An unnamed source close to the Trump family told NBC News Sunday that if Lara Trump were to declare for Tillis’s seat, “The race will be over before it begins.”

My instinct is to agree with that. She would sweep the primary and could very possibly win the seat. Unless she turns out to run a bad campaign, a smug campaign, an inept campaign, or come across on the stump as all hat, no cattle. The whole Donald Jethro Trump extended family will descend on us, with lots of moolah.

Which Democrat could beat her? Roy Cooper? His silence over the last few months suggests disengagement, not the massive in-take of wind for bursting forth as a candidate for US Senate. Thomas Mills thinks he's out for 2026. Mills wants Jeff Jackson to step in.

Jeff Jackson could beat Lara Trump (though his strategists better start thinking out of the box!). I would hate like hell to lose Jackson as our Attorney General and would dread a Dan Bishop clone getting his hands on the reins of NC law (like that corrupted blond lawyer who took over the Department of Justice for Jethro). So losing Jackson carries both potential reward and consequential risk.

BREAKING: Thom Tillis Admits Defeat to Trump

 

The Associated Press reports Republican Sen. Thom Tillis won't seek reelection after opposing President Donald Trump's major new tax and spending bill, which advanced in the Republican-controlled Senate Saturday night.

Buck Fever

Alexander H. Jones, writing for "New Branchhead" on Substack, very recently called NC Sen. Buck Newton "the worst of the South," meaning Newton is a walking PowerPoint of the worst traits of bigoted Southern politicians. Newton ran for Attorney General against the then-incumbent Josh Stein in 2016, and he came perilously close to beating Stein. Newton, a lawyer in Goldsboro, is a graduate of AppState. One of his former classmates posted a now-famous take-down of Buck's character during his student days in Boone, a post which Pam'sPicks found and published before the 2016 elections (reprinted below).

Here's NC Newsline's blow-by-blow of Buck Newton's most recent hijacking of legitimate legislation to continue his crusade against queer people: 

Democrats serving on the North Carolina Senate Judiciary Committee asked Republican Sen. Buck Newton (R-Greene, Wayne and Wilson) a week ago to reconsider his efforts to amend House Bill 805 — a noncontroversial measure designed to prevent sexual exploitation of women and minors that won unanimous support in the House — into a vehicle to advance the conservative social agenda on issues of gender identity and sexuality.

On Wednesday, Newton gave his answer: “No.”

As Newsline reported last week, when the bill was first considered by the Senate Committee, Newton — a committee co-chair — put forth a proposed amended version that defined the state’s recognition of two biological sexes: male and female. Newton also proposed the state maintain the vital records of anyone seeking to change the sex on their birth certificate.

At Wednesday’s committee hearing, Newton went a step further by introducing new language aimed at transgender individuals and school libraries....

...Newton’s new version of the legislation would also provide parents with access to a searchable list of library books available at each public school.

Local boards of education would be required to adopt policies to allow a student or their parent to request that the student be excused from specific classroom discussions or assigned readings if they believe it “imposes a substantial burden on the student’s religious beliefs” or invades the student’s privacy by calling attention to the student’s religion.

 

Pam'sPicks, Oct. 2016:

Newton graduated from Appalachian State University (sorry about that) with a political science degree and went immediately to work for Jesse Helms. Newton got his seat in the NC Senate during the 2010 Tea Party wave and has held onto it until announcing in late 2015 that he'd be leaving to run for Attorney General.

He made headlines in 2016 by loudly proclaiming his support ("keep our state straight!" he shouted to a rally in Raleigh) for HB2, the "bathroom bill" which has so tarnished the state in more ways than one, and for helping get it passed in a special session of the NC General Assembly.

His support for HB2 prompted this post on a Facebook thread:

I knew Buck Newton when he was in college. He was always very opinionated, angry, looked down on others, always saw things in simple terms, always quick to jump to conclusions, always claimed things were "common sense". He was always very judgmental and used bully tactics on others to make his opinion appear correct. He was always full of confidence based on simple, black and white views of the world. Several of us thought he was an idiot because of his lack of ability to see and understand what was beneath the surface of issues. This bill/law [HB2] sounds exactly like something college-kid Buck would do. Apparently, he has not grown much. There are many smart and wise people in North Carolina who see God's creation as it truly is - a very complicated marvel, so it is absolutely shocking that such a person of low understanding could rise to such power based on such a superficial foundation. Shocking. At one point in time, the earth being flat was "common sense", blacks being inferior was "common sense"... And, here we are... again.

Not for nothing did Buck Newton receive his perfect score from the American Conservative Union. He has voted to prohibit wind farms, to repeal the state's recycling program, to increase sales taxes on working families, and he has a 100% rating from the NRA (among many other things).

 

 

The Man Is Weak

 

May 28th: White House assistant Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trump’s immigration policy, pushes ICE officials to dramatically ramp up the arrests — calling for 3,000 illegal migrants to be picked up per day. (Trump had campaigned on the promise to deport 1,000,000 illegals a year.)

June 11th: Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested more than 70 people at a meatpacking plant in Omaha, Neb., and other federal agents targeted farms north of Los Angeles.

June 12th: Clearly feeling heat from big farmers and meat processors and the hospitality industries -- who were complaining loudly to the White House about the disruptions to their operations, Trump stumbled into a change of policy based on favoritism: "We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have, maybe not," Trump said. The New York Times reported that a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official quickly ordered a pause to immigration raids at agricultural businesses, meat packing plants, restaurants, and hotels. 

June 14th: President Donald Trump directed federal immigration officials to prioritize instead deportations from Democratic-run cities.

June 15th: President Donald Trump said on social media that he is willing to exempt the agriculture and hotel industries from his nationwide immigration crackdown. The surprise move came after executives in both industries complained to Trump about losing reliable, longtime immigrant workers in immigration raids and struggling to replace them. Plus there had been pushback from some farm-owners -- some had slammed their gates shuts and wouldn't let ICE in without a warrant. 

Also June 15th: ICE and HSI field office supervisors began learning about a likely reversal of the exemption policy, after hearing from DHS leadership that the White House did not support it, according to one person with knowledge of the reversal. During a morning field call, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told leaders representing field offices across the country that they must continue to conduct raids at worksite locations, "a reversal from guidance issued days earlier under pressure from certain industries that rely on migrant workers."

June 16th: The Department of Homeland Security told staff that it was reversing guidance issued last week that agents were not to conduct immigration raids at farms, hotels, and restaurants. Agents are ordered to continue conducting immigration raids at agricultural businesses, hotels, and restaurants. The new instructions were shared in an 11 a.m. call to representatives from 30 field offices across the country.

"No Endorsement" in NYC Mayor's Race, Sez NYTimes

 

Mamdani

I've been just recently reading about the New York mayor race and the two apparent front-runners, former Guv Andrew Cuomo and sudden rising star of the Left, Zohran Mamdani. Today comes the extraordinary announcement that the New York Times will not be endorsing in the mayor's race. What they said about Mamdani is pretty arresting:

Zohran Mamdani, a state legislator who represents a Queens district. Mr. Mamdani, a charismatic 33-year-old, is running a joyful campaign full of viral videos in which he talks with voters. He offers the kind of fresh political style for which many people are hungry during the angry era of President Trump.

Unfortunately, Mr. Mamdani is running on an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges. He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance. He favors rent freezes that could restrict housing supply and make it harder for younger New Yorkers and new arrivals to afford housing. He wants the government to operate grocery stores, as if customer service and retail sales were strengths of the public sector. He minimizes the importance of policing.

Most worrisome, he shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade, even though its costs have fallen hardest on the city’s working-class and poor residents. Mr. Mamdani, who has called Mr. de Blasio the best New York mayor of his lifetime, offers an agenda that remains alluring among elite progressives but has proved damaging to city life.

The editorial board's estimation of the disastrous Bill de Blasio's term is worth reading in the same long statement -- if you want to understand "the typical Left agenda that's alluring among elite progressives."