A Credit to His Species

State Sen. Jim Jacumin of Burke & Caldwell counties (pictured left, posing in his General Assembly office), only has the best interests of his constituents at heart, so his current raging case of queer fear is nothing more than a humanitarian's desire to save The People from The Gay.

In an article in today's Hickory Daily Record about the recent gay marriage in Iowa of a prominent Caldwell County furniture designer and manufacturer, Sen. Jacumin, who co-sponsored two recent bills proposing constitutional bans in NC on gay marriage, fiercely defended the freedom of heterosexual white men to run You Know Who out of the state:

Should same-sex marriage be allowed, "all of a sudden the building block of the family is destroyed," Jacumin said.

He thinks the measure would lead to more same-sex marriages and more homosexuals in the state, and says that would signal the end of the family since only a man and a woman can reproduce.

Apparently, though we have no proof, a man and a woman produced Sen. Jacumin.

Hmmm. A tsunami of Gay washing across North Carolina's borders! New BFFs for all those Baptist church organists! Sen. Jacumin has seen the future, and it has turned his heart to stone!

(This year there is a more than credible challenger for Sen. Jacumin's seat in the state senate, Beth Jones. The voters of Burke and Caldwell counties have an opportunity to put an actual human being into that General Assembly chair.)

100 Years Later, the Real Mark Twain Emerges

Big news in American letters ... the unexpurgated autobiography of Mark Twain is being published by the University of California Press in three volumes.

You know what "unexpurgated" means, right? All the naughty bits are back in.

In the case of Mark Twain's autobiography, the naughty bits are passionate political and social observations, which (bless his heart) Mark Twain's original editor thought too radical for tender, late-Victorian ears. Mark Twain's daughter Clara, who lived until 1962, also had a big hand in keeping the real man sanitized for public consumption.

Compare Mark Twain's opposition to the Spanish-American war to Ron Paul's opposition to the Iraqi/Afghanistan wars. From the NYTimes review of Volume 1:

Twain's opposition to incipient imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines ... were well known even in his own time. But the uncensored autobiography makes it clear that those feelings ran very deep and includes remarks that, if made today in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers.

In a passage removed by [the author's first editor], Twain excoriates "the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War" and Gen. Leonard Wood's "mephitic record" as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, Twain refers to American troops as "our uniformed assassins" [whoa] and describes their killing of "six hundred helpless and weaponless savages" as "a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory."

"Mephitic"? New word for me. It means "foul-smelling," which pretty much sums up a government and a culture that comes to depend on conquest for its economic well being and its self-image as only the bestest God-blessed people on earth.

Compare Mark Twain also to a progressive populist of 2010:

He is similarly unsparing about the plutocrats and Wall Street luminaries of his day, who he argued had destroyed the innate generosity of Americans and replaced it with greed and selfishness. "The world believes that the elder Rockefeller is worth a billion dollars," Twain observes. "He pays taxes on two million and a half."

This is stuff that was cut out of the original publication of the Autobiography in 1924 and in subsequent censored editions. Makes him sound like a contemporary of 2010, not a fossil from a century ago.

Mark Twain's "Letters from the Earth," a series of stories about the state of organized religion on earth purportedly written by Satan himself, was published in 1960 (with daughter Clara's reluctant blessing, incidentally), and Mark Twain's hilarious critique of the pious became my great secret reading while I was a freshman at Wayland Baptist College in West Texas. Subversion of the self-righteous was always Mark Twain's great contribution to our American literature.

Potentially, an Even Bigger Disaster for the American People

To wit ... the loss of journalism, the demise of the newspaper industry, the disappearance of investigative minds that ask sometimes obvious but oh-so-necessary questions: "What did you just decide behind those closed doors?" "Who gave you all that money?" "Who's been tickling your ribs and diddling your nether regions?"

Laura Leslie, who works the hallways of the NC State Capitol for lowly Public Radio and may be the best reporter on state government that we've got, just wrote on her blog a pretty devastating jeremiad about the current sorry state of journalism in our state. She says that when she started covering the General Assembly, there were 20 in the press corps, all jostling each other for the bragging rights of getting the story first of what was really going on. This year, at the wee-morning-hour adjournment of the General Assembly, there were only eight reporters present. That's not good for our democracy. It may be ever bit as bad as The Supremes' recent official unleashing of the Kraken of Corporate America.

The NC General Assembly bears watching. But so do all local governments in North Carolina, maybe even more desperately, because many small-town newspapers are much more into stroking local egos than they are into turning over rocks and seeing what scurries away. Somebody might get mad. It's been some years since we could depend on a blow-by-blow public accounting of what went down at every meeting of every governing body in Watauga, from the County Commission to town councils. When nobody watches -- and washes all that dirty linen in public -- then democracy suffers.

O Brave New World!

Happy times ahead for democracy in North Carolina! This, a baneful bellwether, from "Under the Dome":

One of the last bills the legislature may tackle this session is the state's response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case.

In that case, the court struck down federal prohibitions on election speech by corporations and labor unions. The state's election law currently bans election expenditures by corporations.

The bill would strike the lines in state law that prohibit election expenditures by corporations and establishes disclosure and reporting rules for fundraising and expenses in those cases.

Sample "disclosure" under the Supreme Court's unleashing of Big Business: "This government brought to you by MobilExxonUPSWalmart. Just lie back and relax!"

BWAA-HA-HA

A letter posted on-line at the Watauga Democrat today from Tommy Adams ("We Need Leadership") makes this claim about half-way through about the BP oil disaster in the Gulf:

"The White House sees this crisis as a political opportunity and is committed to exploiting it for all its worth."

Excuse me? Who is trying to exploit this disaster as "a political opportunity"?

Could it be Tommy Adams, listed currently on the North Carolina Republican Party website as "Assistant Secretary" of the statewide GOP?

There seems to be a lot of LUV for this disaster from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who suggested that maybe President Obama had the BP well blown-up deliberately; or from Texas Congressman Joe Barton, who said he was "ashamed" of the White House, lamenting that the Prez was "shaking down" BP; or from Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who called the $20-billion compensation escrow fund agreed to by BP a "redistribution-of-wealth" socialist plot; or from failed Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who demanded that the feds call in the Dutch to build a dike; or from Republican Minority Leader in the House John Boehner, who first said that U.S. taxpayers should pay for the clean-up but retracted that in favor of saying that BP must pay all the costs but will not allow his Republican troops in the House to vote on lifting the federal liability cap.

Who's playing politics, Mr. Adams?

And what would Republicans support so far as action goes, anyway? Effective regulation and oversight? Noooo. They hate government.

But they sure as hell are enjoying the benefits of this particular disaster. Hope it brings down this president, if possible, if the massive unemployment and their refusal to lift a hand to help the unemployed doesn't do it first.

The (New) Scream

Foxx Reacts: Eek, The Gay!

At the Boone Independence Day Parade on Saturday. Photo by Lauren Ohnesorge, for the Watauga Democrat.

Goss Answers the Soucek Smear

Via e-mail on Friday, while we were out of pocket, from the Reelect Senator Steve Goss campaign, responding to this:

Just the Truth!
We sometime find that when a candidate runs for office and has no good ideas of his own, he turns to a tactic of using smears and innuendo, in the hope that voters will believe at least some of it. That's what is happening in 2010 in a June fundraising letter sent out by the Finance Director of the NC Republican Party on behalf of my opponent. While I realize that my opponent was running a deficit in his campaign as of last quarter's election finance report (a spending pattern I adamantly oppose in Raleigh), I do not believe his debt justifies this kind of underhanded politicking.

My Opponent has charged:
"Goss has voted for over $1 billion in new taxes."

The Truth:
He is referring to a temporary increase in revenues that helped keep tens of thousands of teachers, Teacher Assistants, and state employees working in North Carolina. Does this mean my opponent wanted these working people fired? In fact, I am working with the legislative Finance Team on a plan that will modernize NC's antiquated tax system so it is more fair for everyone.

My Opponent has charged:
"[Goss] refused to sponsor a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in North Carolina even after promising to do so."

The Truth:
The truth is I have sponsored every bill that I have promised to sponsor. And in fact, I was honored to receive the Legislative Award for protecting families and marriages. Most voters know that gay marriage is already illegal in North Carolina; perhaps it's because he moved here from New Jersey, but it's unfortunate that my opponent does not know North Carolina Law.

My Opponent has charged:
"[And] after getting caught billing his campaign $19,000 for mileage -- enough to drive around the world at the equator -- over four months he had the gall to sponsor an 'Ethics Reform' bill."

The Truth:
I was actually obeying the letter of the law in reporting in detail expenses incurred meeting constituents throughout the district. The amount reimbursed was for 35,000-miles dating from 2006 to 2009. The 45th District includes Alexander, Ashe, Watauga and Wilkes counties -- and that involves a fair amount of driving. I kept a detailed log of my mileage, which is public record. According to the state elections office, I could have reported the mileage in each quarter as a loan to my campaign, but I waited and reported it when the campaign had the money to pay me back. Gary Bartlett, the executive director of the State Board of Elections, said publicly that "there is no question it [the reimbursement] is allowed under the law." Bartlett also explained, "This [reporting errors among candidates] happens a lot. This involves a lot of money because it covers a longer period of time" (Wilkes Journal Patriot, September 28, 2009). Truth is, I have traveled over 75,000 miles (and I can prove it), and won the Sunshine Award for having one of the most open campaigns in the legislature.

With Logic Like This

The Tea Party is a congregation of confusion. The gathering in the Food Lion parking lot yesterday in Boone (as documented in 91 photos by Lauren K. Ohnesorge) was big on dissatisfaction with all government and thick with Social Security recipients and people benefitting pretty directly from Medicare. Take it all away, they were saying. Take every last vestige of it away.

No they weren't. They weren't saying that at all. They were saying stop all spending that doesn't directly benefit me and my immediate family. Ah, human nature, you wiggly little worm!

Favorite documented illogic: Said a Tea Partier to Ms. Ohnesorge:

I truly believe that if [deep-water oil drilling] weren't a political football, maybe most of that wouldn't have been spilled out already .... I think there are means available to us internationally that we just haven't utilized and it's just horrible, horrible. That spill could happen anywhere ... but now to take away the ability of those people down there to make a living by putting the moratorium on drilling, why? First order of business, stop the doggone leak.

1. It's debate that leads to disastrous oil blow-outs. Has nothing to do with corporate mismanagement or colluding corruption in the regulatory agency charged with overseeing the management. But Tea Partiers are opposed to all government regulation, so...?

2. Ah, the phantom foreign fix for this leak, the unseen but knowable solution that Sarah Palin said was out there. Because Tea Partiers love to rely on foreigners.

3. Damn a moratorium on more deep-water drilling! Just because we've recently proved that the worst can happen and that there is no easy fix for it, and perhaps no fix at all, we should keep allowing deep-water drilling. That's freedom, baby!

4. The government can't do anything right. The government should stop the leak immediately. It's easy. And hardly contradictory at all.

Let's give the government to people who hate the government! Yeah, that's the ticket!