Lawsuit Is Filed To Stop New Valle Crucis Elementary School

Henri Deschamps, owner of the Mast Farm Inn in Valle Crucis, has filed for an injunction to stop the Watauga County School Board from buying the Hodges property adjacent to his business for a new elementary school. The proposed new school was the subject of a large joint public hearing before the school board and the Watauga County Commission on September 3 and has generated both heated opposition and support in the community.

Deschamps is represented by Robert N. (Bob) Hunter of the Higgins Benjamin law firm in Greensboro and by "Four" Eggers (Stacy Eggers IV) of Boone. Bob Hunter was appointed to the NC Supreme Court by Gov. Pat McCrory but was defeated by Sam Ervin IV in the election of 2014.

The Watauga County Commission will meet this evening at 5:30 and will take public comment on a proposal to change the Valle Crucis Historic District Ordinance to allow the building of the school on the Hodges property.

Have No Fear -- Jared Is Here!

With son-in-law Kushner in charge of protecting Twitterman from impeachment, Trumpists can sleep soundly, no?

The little known role of Jared Kushner in the smooth-as-silk defense of his father-in-law gets revealed in the final paragraph of Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni's behind-the-scenes write-up, "Inside Trump's Botched Attempt to Hire Trey Gowdy":

"Mr. Kushner, who aides said had been spending many hours on impeachment as part of his broader portfolio of defending the president, has told some people he is running the inquiry response and played down that idea with others."

Sometimes Jared is just sooo modest!

What Democrat Will Step Forward To Run for NC Senate District 31?

Democrat John Motsinger challenged incumbent Republican state Senator Joyce Krawiec in 2018 for the NC Senate District 31 seat, which includes part of Forsyth and all of Davie counties. Krawiec buried Motsinger in that election, beating him by 20,000 votes. But the district has been redrawn under court order. It still includes all of Davie County -- one of the most dependably Republican counties in North Carolina -- but its portion of Forsyth has been seriously realigned, eliminating all of the western Winston-Salem suburbs but including more of the Winston-Salem urban core. This new map has yet to receive judicial approval.

I noticed on Facebook that John Motsinger announced on September 25 that he would not be running for that Senate seat again -- he is incidentally the son of Forsyth County School Board member Elisabeth Motsinger, she who also ran against Virginia Foxx for Congress in 2012 -- but that he knows of "a few people who have expressed an interest" in running next year. With the opening of candidate filing approaching rapidly -- the first week in December -- we're mightily interested in seeing a strong Democrat step into that race.

Michael Bitzer recently listed the new map as "Competitive, Republican Favored," perhaps because Republicans lost some 8.4% of its predicted vote share in the remapping. And Real Facts NC also recently named the 31st Senate District as a 2020 race to watch.

I'm watching, avidly, to see what characters may enter, stage left. The flipping of the entire NC Senate to Democrat has always seemed like a bridge too far, but with the volatility of impeachment drama and the breeding bughouse in Mugstomp-on-the-Potomac, just about anything can happen. And if other more informed commentators say the 31st Senate District is flippable, who am I to suggest otherwise?

The Body Count -- Kevin McAleenan

A Reoccurring Feature on Who's Jumping Off Luxury Liner Trump

Kevin K. McAleenan, who was until yesterday the acting secretary for the Department of Homeland Security. He had only been in the job for six months. Trump naturally announced the resignation via Twitter and actually wrote that McAleenan "wants to spend more time with his family" (not making that up). 

The lack of self-awareness in this president would be much funnier if it were not such a staggering self-parody.

According to a trio of reporters at the NYTimes, 

Mr. McAleenan’s departure from the White House came after he tried to embrace the president's increasingly aggressive assault on legal and illegal immigration publicly even as he privately resisted some of Mr. Trump’s most extreme ideas.

A former deputy commissioner for the nation’s border security agency under President Barack Obama, Mr. McAleenan watched in recent months as the White House surrounded him with Fox News contributors to key positions in the agency....

One of the Good Guys -- Marie Yovanovitch

Photo Mikhail Palinchak--AP

A career State Department diplomat with 30+ years of experience under six different presidents. She was ambassador to Ukraine whose term was supposed to end this past August, but she was asked in May by Trump's State Department to extend her ambassadorship through August of 2020. That request was suddenly reversed less than two months later in July when Trump recalled her and exiled her to a desk in the Department of State.

Why?

Trump was about to call new Ukrainian President Zelensky about a little "favor" he wanted, and Yovanovitch might get in the way.

She had become inconvenient to the scheme that Trump and Guiliani had hatched to make dirt in Ukraine. Her personal honesty and integrity apparently did not mesh well with the business and political ambitions of not only Trump and Guiliani but of other guys like these two below, Parnas and Fruman, two Guiliani henchmen whose previous prospecting in Ukraine did not meet with Yovanovitch's approbation. (Why Parnas and Fruman had it in for her is outlined here. It was all about gas.)

“Although I understand that I served at the pleasure of the president, I was nevertheless incredulous that the U.S. government chose to remove an ambassador based, as best as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives,” she wrote in a statement she prepared for the impeachment joint committees.

She chose to testify despite Mike Pompeo's directive, at the direction of the president, that no State Department officials should cooperate with the impeachment inquiry because the Congressional Democrats wisely subpoenaed her early yesterday morning. Yovanovitch's welfare had already been implicitly threatened by Trump himself in his famous phone call with Zelensky: “She’s going to go through some things.” How chilling is that? Yet Yovanovitch is a model for bravery at a time when hundreds of otherwise powerful men have become cowards.

The Body Count -- Michael McKinley

A Reoccurring Feature on Who's Jumping Off Luxury Liner Trump

Thanks to Karen DeYoung:

Michael McKinley, a career diplomat and senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has resigned his position amid rising dissatisfaction and plummeting morale inside the State Department over what is seen as Pompeo’s failure to support personnel ensnared in the Ukraine controversy.

A senior officer who has held a range of diplomatic posts, including ambassador to Afghanistan, Colombia and Peru, McKinley was serving as ambassador to Brazil last year when Pompeo recruited him as a policy adviser and a conduit between his office and the career service....

What Was Mark Meadows Thinking?

Maybe he was thinking: "I wish I was not standing directly behind this man and in full view of the cameras, while he condemns thousands of our loyal Kurdish allies to a Turkish genocide because they weren't at the Normandy invasion in 1944."

Naw. He wasn't thinking that. He was thinking: "How much farther up this great man's ass can I crawl?"

A great man who says these things, out loud, and in public:

Trump downplayed the alliance with the Kurds, 11,000 of whom died fighting to help the US mission against ISIS. "They didn't help us in the second World War, they didn't help us with Normandy for example," Trump said. "They're there to help us with their land, and that's a different thing." Normandy is an area of France, not the US.

He shrugged off the likely escape of ISIS fighters from Kurdish prisons, essentially saying it is Europe's problem, not his. "Well, they're going to be escaping to Europe, that's where they want to go," Trump said. He added that "we have no soldiers in the area."

Some Fox News Headlines Are More Divinely Inspired Than Others

This is Fox News' own headline:

Fox News Poll: Record support for Trump impeachment

The details are stark:

Just over half of voters want President Trump impeached and removed from office, according to a Fox News Poll released Wednesday.

And this is what Twitterman tweets:

Only 25 percent want the President Impeached, which is pretty low considering the volume of Fake News coverage, but pretty high considering the fact that I did NOTHING wrong. It is all just a continuation of the greatest Scam and Witch Hunt in the history of our Country!

12:27 PM · Oct 9, 2019·Twitter for iPhone

Render Unto Caesar, Good Christians, Or Else Go Straight to Hell

Ralph Reed, evergreen

Oh, Ralph Reed, you make spiritual people want to ralph.*


*ralph, verb: to puke, throw up, pray at the porcelain throne