Impressive Dem Candidate in an Impossible R+9 House District

 

Mark Pless, disgruntled

The prospects for flipping the NC House Dist. 118 look pretty unlikely on paper, though one well qualified and impressive Democrat, former District Court Judge Danny Davis, is making the run anyway against Republican incumbent Mark Pless, who's already won reelection to this Madison/Haywood district twice. I wrote about Pless's being in hot water with his own party back in June:

NC House Rep. Mark Pless (Dist. 118, Haywood and Madison) has earned a reputation for putting his thumb in the eye of local government. He gets yelled at (but he could give a shit). Because he's safe (he assumes) in his heavily Republican district. He's never had a primary, and he never gets less than 60% of the vote against weak Democratic challengers. No primary until now.

Like Senator Ralph Hise, Pless likes to mess with "local bills" which can't be vetoed and which always represent some get-even move against local officials who have offended him or one of his buddies.

For example, last February, Pless filed a bill that would have stripped the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority of its ability to collect the county’s 4% room occupancy tax, effectively dismantling the organization. What actually passed upped the room tax to 6% and cut municipal officials out of membership on the board -- sticking it to Waynesville, Maggie Valley, and Lake Junaluska.

In April 2025 Pless introduced two bills that would eliminate county control of ambulance services statewide and change certification standards. Paramedics, medical technicians, and emergency service directors -- not to mention county commissioners -- got loud in their opposition. And Rep. Pless was photographed not taking the criticism gracefully.

Pless has particularly been at war with Waynesville town government. He tried back in 2022 to get a bill through that would make all town elections in Haywood County partisan, but that failed in the Senate. He later backed a trio of candidates to beat the incumbents and take control, but every last one of Pless's guys lost.

House Dist. 118 comes up on Civitas's "Partisan Index" for 2026 as R+9, "likely Republican," and Dave's Redistricting cites the partisan divide as 60% Republican, 37.8% Democratic, and only 2% "other." That's pretty dismal.

Judge Danny Davis

But Judge Davis seems undeterred, and he's got an impressive resume and an economics message. According to his press release, he's a gol-durned native of the district, graduated from Tuscola High School in Haywood and then Western Carolina University before earning a law degree from Campbell. Like many young lawyers, he served as an assistant district attorney before spending 27 years as a district court judge. According to his press release published in the Smoky Mountain News, "Since retiring from the bench — aside from brief stints as an emergency judge — he’s spent time serving as a court mediator and chairman of the Haywood County Board of Elections."

His campaign theme:

“[The] standard of living has been eroded over the last couple of decades because pro-wealth policies have led to stagnated wages while the cost of housing, healthcare, rent, child care and education have skyrocketed,” Davis said in the release. “Small businesses, which are the backbone of this country, are also struggling to pay their employees and provide good benefits for them. This has resulted in working men, women, couples and couples with children especially those under 50 having difficulty staying afloat to the point that they are angry and frustrated and don’t believe the system works for them.”

It may be an added liability (in what is already a long-shot campaign) that Davis has run for office twice before and lost, though he came "within a fraction of one percent" of winning the House district seat in 2012. Open question: Why did he wait 14 years to try again, after the voters almost gave it to him?

Can Trump's Flying Monkeys Conceal the Bad Parts in the Epstein Files?

Didn't you kind of assume -- as I did -- that if Trump was suddenly willing to sign on to the release of the Epstein files, he must have gotten assurances from Pam Bondi and others that those files would be scrubbed of the stuff about him? Didn't that thought cross your mind?

I was somewhat relieved of that particular creeping suspicion by something Jay Kuo published on his Substack column, The Status Kuo:

The “Epstein Files” isn’t some centralized database. They comprise a host of electronic and physical evidence collected by the FBI, held under seal by the courts, used in civil proceedings, and held by third parties. The core investigative files, gathered by the FBI, are subject to strict chain-of-custody controls, meaning they have electronic timestamps, evidentiary IDs, digital authentications and audit trails. That’s very hard to mess with, at least not without someone noticing.

The Epstein files are also not centrally located, but rather exist in multiple forms across multiple facilities, often sealed by court order. And there are working copies out there, as well as logs of who has what.

I very much doubt Kash Patel—who can’t even avoid headlines for using the FBI jet to visit his girlfriend—could tamper with gigabytes of cryptographically encoded, read-only data without triggering alarms and landing in prison. Anyone asked to assist in such an endeavor knows the chances of being caught are quite high, while the chance of succeeding is low.

So while it’s understandable for folks to raise the alarm about the Epstein files being messed with before they are produced, my real concern is over-redaction or withholding of key items, not actual evidence tampering.

 

How To Confront ICE in North Carolina

 

Fantasyland for MAGA

 

The Behn-Van Epps Special Election in Tennessee

 

A special election for Tennessee's 7th Congressional District will happen on December 2nd, pitting Democrat Aftyn Behn against Trump-endorsed Matt Van Epps, in a district that Trump carried by 22 points last year. But things have happened in the meantime that seem to make the Republicans nervous. Like Trump's economy ain't been so nice to his MAGA base in the 7th CD. A Trump-aligned super PAC, MAGA Inc., spent more than $15,000 calling voters to shore up support for  Van Epps. The Cook Political Report moved the district from "solid Republican" to "lean Republican."

I haven't done any research on Behn, but I did see the 30-sec spot her campaign produced:

Operation Charlotte's Web

 

“Get the hell out of my yard, assholes.”

--Charlotte, NC, homeowner Rheba Hamilton, driving off Customs & Border Protection officers who had accosted two landscapers hanging Christmas lights on her property

Trump's goon squads descended on Charlotte's Hispanic neighborhoods on Saturday, and The Assembly has an early account of some of the confrontations and counter-demonstrations.

Also a partial political reason behind the invasion of masked, beefy men who seem to enjoy their work roughing up people, breaking car windows, and disrupting commercial life: The Sheriff of Mecklenburg County, Garry McFadden was "one of five sheriff candidates, all Black Democrats in urban North Carolina counties, who won office in 2018 after campaign pledges to end cooperation with federal immigration enforcement."

Add to that clear provocation for putting a Black sheriff in his place the grotesque, on-camera killing of Iryna Zarutska last August by a deranged Black man on the city’s light rail, and you've got the perfect set of symbols for armed racial profiling.

Stay strong, Charlotte.

Trump Found Another Way to Hurt North Carolina

 

Renewable energy is a growing industry in North Carolina’s economy. The state has over 7,300 jobs in the solar sector and ranks fifth in the U.S. for total installed solar capacity, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

--NandO Business News

Trump gives big love to oil and gas tycoons, and he parrots their attack lines against solar and wind. In the first month of his 2nd term, Trump's Department of the Interior suspended all clean energy development. Last August Trump called solar energy "THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY." His Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, at the same time Trump was mashing keys on Truth Social, announced that his department would rescind “all programs building solar panels on our farmland.” Yeah, we get the picture.

Trump has been told that somehow the generation of energy from direct sunlight and wind drives oil and gas prices up, along with electricity -- ridiculous notions that are easily disproven. Like with every other stupid notion that lodges inside his brainpan, Trump has been relentless. He deliberately placed high tariffs on almost all materials needed to build large-scale solar projects, and the Big Beautiful Turd passed last July by the Republicans in Congress eliminated all tax credits for wind and solar energy. 

Trump can nail the shriveled and bloody skin of Pine Gate Renewables in Asheville, a leading solar energy development firm, to his trophy wall (dammit!). Pine Gate Renewables is closing its Asheville plant and laying off more than 78% of its workforce, some 223 people in Buncombe, as it files for bankruptcy. According to the NandO, Pine Gate has 107 projects with three gigawatts of power capacity, which could power over 2.3 million homes. Pine Gate also has over 130 projects in development, which would have over 30 gigawatts of capacity if completed. If in this case means never. In paperwork filed with the state, Pine Gate blamed its dissolution on Trump.

“With respect to the renewable energy industry, legislative and regulatory challenges have significantly slowed solar power development,” the company's filing with the state said. “In combination, these forces have put extreme pressure on Pine Gate’s liquidity and overall financial position.”

Berger-Hall to Josh Stein: "Pound Sand"

 

Photo Galen Bacharier, NC Newsline

Reportedly, in its last enacted budget Republican state lawmakers shorted the Medicaid program by around $319 million for the current fiscal year. As a result, Josh Stein's Health and Human Services (HHS) has resorted to cutting Medicaid reimbursements 3% to most hospitals and clinics (and up to 10-12% to "specialty providers"). Primary care doctors, dentists, community care clinics, nursing homes are all dependent on Medicaid funding. 

On Nov. 6, Governor Stein called a special session of the General Assembly for Nov. 17 to deal with that funding crisis. The state constitution gives the governor the power to summon lawmakers back to Raleigh to deal with emergencies (and you see where parsing that word will end up in court, right?). At a news conference, Stein said legislators had “failed North Carolina and the people of North Carolina” by not addressing the Medicaid shortfall during their October session -- which was largely devoted to once again redrawing the state’s congressional districts to add an extra Republican to Trump's tote board.

Yesterday, in a joint letter to Stein, House Speaker Destin Hall and Senate boss Phil Berger said they would not convene a session on Nov. 17, and claimed that Stein’s call for a special session "is constitutionally invalid and politically motivated."

Politically motivated. I certainly hope so!

Both chambers of the General Assembly are controlled completely by the GOP. Same party, but two equally immovable factions, fighting over the lucre. Leaders in both chambers have acknowledged the underfunding of Medicaid, and both chambers have written their own budget solutions in separate versions of a bill that was supposed to be blended and amended into a single unified budget law months ago. That didn't happen. There is no budget. North Carolina is now alone among all the fifty other states in the absence of one.

Berger-Hall

Can Berger-Hall just refuse to convene? You know it'll be litigated, and it'll be nobody's surprise when the current NC Supreme Court under Chief Justice Paul Newby rules for the General Assembly. Newby's going to love Berger-Hall's argument that Governor Stein's HHS made premature cuts to reimbursements as a means of exerting political pressure on the General Assembly. 

Josh Stein fired back at Berger-Hall: "The Republican majority has made the time to damage our democracy with their gerrymander. But when it comes time to protect people’s health care? When it comes time to enact a comprehensive budget? They’re on vacation, and they’ll see us next year. All while North Carolina families pay the price."

As far as I'm concerned, of course it's political, and it gives Stein the upper-hand here, the high ground, the advantage, because he is taking extraordinary action to stave off major damage to health care in North Carolina, while Berger-Hall just look like jerks, self-serving and out of touch with reality. So rather than asking, "Can they do that-- just refuse to come when summoned?" I should be asking the other question, "Why would they want to do that?" Because refusing to deal with the shortage of money that goes to help a whole community of need just helps build the bad, bad Republican brand of failing its own struggling MAGA base. 

So Much Depends on the Recruiter

 

He’s a former Catholic who supports abortion rights; he has been a hunter since he was 12 but advocates gun-safety legislation. He’s a decorated warrior who’s wary of war; and perhaps most important, he sympathizes with some of Trump’s supporters but thinks the president threatens American democracy.

--Description of Rep. Jason Crow (Colo., 6th CD) 

Representative Crow makes a strong impression. He can flat-out stare down a camera. He projects granite -- integrity that ain't messing around, a high intelligence, a b.s. detection system unimpressed by status, wealth, or pure cussedness. Crow earned that mensch character growing up in a working-class family. His grandfather was a bricklayer. Jason himself did construction to afford college, joined the National Guard and ROTC programs for the same reason -- financial need. But we know, intelligence will out! 

His service in the National Guard moved to active duty as a private after 9/11. He quickly became an officer, a paratrooper, and a Ranger — "perhaps the pinnacle of the U.S. Army," said David Ignatius, who knows Crow well. Crow was deployed to Iraq in 2003 with the fabled 82nd Airborne Division. There's no denying the congressman's smarts, or his gumption. Ignatius:

After Iraq, Crow joined the Joint Special Operations Command, perhaps the nation’s most elite combat team, composed of Army Rangers and Delta Force operators and Navy SEALs. He deployed with JSOC twice to Afghanistan as a member of the Joint Strike Force assigned to capture or kill “high-value targets” in al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Much of his work involved intelligence missions against the Haqqani network along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

After his service in the Army, he went to law school in Denver, and was heavily recruited by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to run for Congress in Colorado's 6th Congressional District, a slice of real estate that had never before elected a Democrat. He rose to prominence in the House as quickly as he had in the Army. He was named a House manager for Trump's first impeachment, and I remember his manner on TV as riveting. Early this year Crow was named a co-chair of the DCCC's candidate recruitment, in charge of making the Blue Wave of 2026. I can't imagine a better man for that job.

Crow showed off his first class of recruits recently at a training session in Washington: "The gathering ... was a snapshot of how Crow thinks the party can return to its working-class, pro-defense roots — while also mobilizing young voters seeking change. The group ... included a farmer, a part-time waitress, an emergency room doctor and a half-dozen veterans." Crow stood before them dressed in jeans, boots, and an open-necked shirt. He urged them to campaign next year as if they were running for mayor: "Be local, be authentic, don’t listen too much to campaign consultants, and be ready to separate from an often-unpopular national Democratic Party brand." (We all have our own lists of shit we wish never to hear from another Democratic candidate. Fill in the blanks yosef.)

Crow told Ernest Luning at Colorado Politics how brutally honest he was when pitching a run to a possible candidate: "Listen, this is not going to be easy. This is going to be really hard. It might be one of the hardest things you’ve ever done. But you know, I’m not asking you to storm the beaches of Normandy for our country. I’m asking you to step up and throw your hat in the ring for a race. Your country needs you.”