On the Mark

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor, an arch-conservative MAGA man, was recently proven to have called himself a "black Nazi" and claimed to have watched live porn while eating a pizza and liked to peep into women's public gym showers as a teenager.

I'm sorry . . . what am I supposed to do with this?

I can't ridicule this scumbag over what he has claimed - proudly - to have done because he has effectively ridiculed himself.

I will say this much.  Robinson denied these charged, telling North Carolina voters, "You know my real words."  Yes, and that's just the trouble.  He once said that some people need killing. 

Some people need quaaludes.

How To Get Gun-Rights Activists To Support an Assault Weapons Ban

It's quite simple, really.

If you want to get a ban on assault weapons like the AR-15 pictured below passed, just tell anyone who supports legal assault weapons this.

Just tell them that they were likely the weapons used by extremists to shoot up a North Carolina power substation that knocked out the electricity for everyone in Moore County, North Carolina for five days.

And if that doesn't convince them, tell them that a militant black Marxist group could use them for a similar attack on the power grid.

They'll change their position so fast, they'll get whiplash!

Something to think about, 42 years to the day after John Lennon's murder.

DeJoy's Money Game

The controversy created by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy just gets bigger and bigger.  During his tenure at the Postal Service, he has diminished mail service all over the country, but it's his past as the CEO of a logistics company in his home state of North Carolina that has raised eyebrows.  The Washington Post recently reported that DeJoy forced employees to contribute money to Republican candidates for office, including Thom Tillis, North Carolina's junior U.S. Senator.  DeJoy would compensate for his strong-arming by reimbursing those employees with large bonuses. 

So what, you ask?  Well, even though the employees got their money back, the GOP candidates in North Carolina still got money they wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and the use of company funds to compensate the employees meant that it didn't cost DeJoy himself a cent.   

That's against the law. 

Plain and simple. 

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) has already called for action in response to the charges against DeJoy, which are not only highly credible but also highly unbecoming pf a Postmaster General.  "It demands a full and independent investigation, Schiff recently wrote.  "And [it] adds another compelling reason that Louis DeJoy should resign. Immediately."

And DeJoy might have to do just that.  North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, reacting to formal complaints regarding DeJoy's actions, may be  going ahead with an investigation very soon.

It's unclear whether DeJoy has perpetrated, or has attempted to perpetrate, a similar scheme in the Postal Service.  But this revelation should prove once and for all that the only place DeJoy belongs inside a post office is as a mug shot on the bulletin board.  

Power Failures

Not the sort I've been having for nine years and change.

In Wisconsin, the Republican-controlled legislature passed - and outgoing scumbag governor Scott Walker signed - legislation limiting the power of incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers, making it illegal for Evers' administration to rescind a state suit against the federal health care law, and limiting early voting in an attempt to help Trump win the state again in 2020.  Evers asked Walker - pretty please, with sugar on it - to veto the legislation.  Yeah, right.   Walker responded by saying no to Evers with a bottle of elderberry wine.  With a touch of arsenic.  And similar efforts are afoot to undermine incoming Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan as well.

And then there are the new Democratic attorneys general in those states having their power reduced . . .

No matter how many state legislative seats the Democrats won in the 2018 midterms - 336, by one count - they still don't control enough state legislatures, and the newly elected Democratic governors in this cycle are more often than not susceptible to being failures as many of them will have to deal with GOP legislatures that will seem them damned before helping them run their states.  The Republicans are hell-bent on negating elections and rigging the system to keep themselves in power, or at least give them the upper hand in perpetuity.  The Democrats have to get smarter in winning back power in the states (and this goes for Win Back Your State) if they want to control more state legislatures.  Yet, even as Democrats won seats of Republican-leaning U.S. House districts by nominating candidates far more moderate than the Democratic base, this strategy translated into far less success at the state level - if indeed it was consciously employed at the state level.  Perhaps they should have nominated more moderates who could compete in Republican-leaning state legislative districts.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, where the Republican legislature turned Democratic governor Roy Cooper into a virtual figurehead and restricted voting rights in the name of stopping voter fraud, Mark Harris may have gotten himself involved in a voter-fraud case concerning absentee ballots in his race against his opponent Dan McCready for the seat for North Carolina's Ninth U.S. House District.  The local election board has refused to certify the results showing a Harris win, and a new election may be ordered.

Harris is the Republican candidate. 

State of the States

New Jersey and North Carolina have gone totally ga-ga.

In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie attempted to get passed in the legislature a bill that would have ended the print newspapers' monopoly on legal notices, their last reliable source of revenue, in an act of revenge against all of the nasty things new Jersey newspapers have said about him.  Through controlled by the Democrats, the legislature was ready to go along with the governor, thanks to some deals he made with the Democratic leadership (the details and contents of which were never revealed.  The Democratic rank and file in both the Assembly and the Senate rebelled, though, and the bill was tabled. Defeated outright was a bill that would have allowed Christie to profit from a book deal while still in office.

Did I happen to mention that has-been comedian Joe Piscopo may run for governor of New Jersey next year?    

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, the Republican legislature stripped incoming Democratic governor Roy Cooper of his powers, such as reducing the number of appointments he can make by two-thirds, moving some authority to the incoming Republican state schools superintendent, stopping him from appointing trustees to the state university system.  The legislature pretty much made Cooper even weaker than North Carolina governors, including outgoing Republican governor Pat McCrory, already are. Cooper may sue.

And if that weren't enough, the legislature has been attempting to repeal the law forcing transgender people to use the public bathrooms of their birth sex rather than the won hey identify with, provided the city of Charlotte repeal its ordinance affirming the right of transgender people to use public bathrooms of the sex they identify with.  Charlotte stuck to its part of the deal, and so the legislators would have to stick to theirs especially if they wanted to end the economic boycotts against the state.

The statewide repeal failed.

The year is stumbling to an embarrassing close politically in the United States, but the politics will carry on into 2017. 

Strange Politics

For Donald Trump's Cabinet . . . Dr. Who?

Not the TV character - a question.

Dr. Carson - Ben Carson - for Housing and Urban Development Secretary?

Because he grew up in Detroit?

Then why don't we just make him Transportation Secretary because he grew up in a town where they make Chevrolets?

Maybe I'm the wrong person to criticize this choice, because I voted for an M.D. for President, but what does a neurosurgeon know about housing and urban development?  And, apart from neurosurgery, what does Ben Carson know about anything?

Apparently, Trump thinks Carson is qualified in urban affairs because Carson is black. You can't blame Trump, really. The United States is pretty much the only English-speaking country where "urban" is a synonym for "black."  A black circus bills itself as "urban family entertainment."  Black radio stations are called "urban" radio stations.  We have a black-oriented public-affairs organization called the National Urban League, once known as the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes; maybe a name like the National League on Black Urban Issues would have been a better name.  We've become acclimated to thinking of black America as urban America, and white America as rural and suburban America, thanks to transportation policies and housing policies that encouraged the white middle class to leave the cities - and blacks - behind.  But not all blacks live in cities, and not all whites live in the country or the suburbs.  Dr. Carson himself lived in semi-rural Maryland while at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore - where a white guy (Martin O'Malley) served as mayor in the two thousand zeroes.    

Meanwhile, the ordeal in North Carolina is finally over.  Pat McCrory, the Republican governor who made defending the civil rights of people afraid of transgendered individuals by preserving the sanctity of bathrooms and making girls who were born guys use the men's room and guys who were born girls use the women's room (I don't get it either), formally conceded to Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper in the general election.  Cooper is a light in an otherwise dark tunnel for the Democrats, the second Democrat elected governor in a state south of the 36' 30" parallel line since 2008.  Maybe Democrat Foster Campbell will win the Louisiana U.S. Senate general election this Saturday.  

And while all this has been going on, Al Gore stopped by Trump Tower to talk to the presumptive President-elect about climate change at Ivanka Trump's invitation.  This is getting really weird . . ..

Like a Hurricane

Hurricane Earl did damage and caused flooding in North Carolina's Outer Banks and should graze southeastern New England. In the greater New York area, it's been a mixed bag. Earl has brought heavy rain to Long Island -a show at the Jones Beach amphitheater was canceled as a result - but much of the metropolitan area was spared. A tropical storm watch was actually in effect for inland northern New Jersey and a tropical storm warning was issued for the entire New Jersey coastline. I can't speak for the Jersey Shore, but in Essex County, twenty miles west of New York City, we were supposed to get showers or possibly a heavy and consistent rainfall.

We haven't gotten a single drop.

Even the wind was light. I forgot to take in some plastic lawn chairs, but it turns out I need never have bothered.

So, my mother and I were spared a sixteenth power outage for the year. Of course, on our block, the power can go out without warning on a calm, clear day.

In fact the power in my house could just as easily be out by the time you read this.

Meanwhile, Earl is going by so quickly, they call it Speedo. ;-)

Forgetting Elaine Marshall

At the beginning of the year, political pundits suggested that while 2010 would be a tough year for Democrats in which they were expected to lose seats in Congress due to the economy and the fact that the party not holding the White House does better in midterm elections, all incumbents regardless of party affiliation would have a tough time this year. Now these same pundits are suggesting that Republican incumbents are in much better shape because of all the momentum on their side. No one has come out and said so, but the punditocracy seems to expect a year like 1994, in which the Republicans not only took over the House but took over the Senate with every incumbent Republican senator being re-elected and every open seat going Republican, with two incumbent Democrats going down to defeat.

And so, it must seem silly to cover Senate races with incumbent Republicans this year. Maybe that's why you haven't heard much of this year's U.S. Senate campaign in North Carolina - except here on this blog, of course.

You remember North Carolina, a state with an incumbent Republican senator - Richard Burr - so well favored that Chuck Todd at MSNBC couldn't be bothered to talk a lot about it? You probably haven't heard all that much about the Democratic challenger, Elaine Marshall. She is North Carolina's Secretary of State, and has a distinguished record of accomplishment including the recovery of $340 million from Wall Street banks. Well, I don't mean to laugh at Chuck Todd - HA HA HA HA HA HA HA - but despite national disinterest in this race, she's moved up to two points behind Burr in one poll and moved ahead, also by two points, in a poll taken by WWAY-TV in Wilimington.

Burr is so unpopular in the Tar Heel State and is so connected with politics as usual in Washington he could lose his election running unopposed. Fortunately for him, though, he has a Democratic opponent whom he can define as too radical and too out of the mainstream for this very conservative state. Not if Elaine Marshall defines herself first. She doesn't have as much money, but she has a spirited group of progressive backers who are willing to contribute to and work for her campaign. Marshall also has free media at her disposal, and if she does enough interviews and hits the right notes, she can overcome Burr's financial advantage very easily. Most importantly, she, as a progressive, gives voters reasons to vote for her, not merely against Burr. This is how she defeated a White House-backed candidate for the Democratic Senate nomination, and this is why she is in a better position to win in North Carolina than Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, who's down by twenty points in her race.

Most pundits made note of Bill Halter's loss to Lincoln in the Arkansas Senate primary runoff and decided that it's not such a good idea for progressives to cast their lots with and spend their time and money on candidates not backed by the Democratic establishment. The likeliest reason they ignored Marshall's Senate primary runoff victory in North Carolina is because, while she defeated White House-supported candidate Cal Cunningham, Cunningham wasn't an incumbent senator like Blanche Lincoln is, and Marshall still has to defeat Burr. (And they act as if Joe Sestak's Senate primary victory in Pennsylvania, where he took out incumbent Democratic senator Arlen Specter, never happened.) But the passion is clearly on Marshall's side in North Carolina. She's surging in the polls, and it looks like a possible pickup that could offset Democratic losses elsewhere (like Arkansas). If I were Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey - who currently chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee - this year, I'd be getting ready to pout more money into this race. It looks competitive now.

Only solid support from Menendez's committee and grass-roots Democrats and progressives can help Elaine Marshall. If she wins, no one will forget about her then.

Carolina In My Mind

History was made in South Carolina yesterday as the Republicans nominated Indian-American state representative Nikki Haley to run for governor and voters in the palmetto State's First Congressional District nominated Tim Scott, who is black, to be the Republican candidate for that seat in the fall. Scott would be the first black Republican congressman from South Carolina since Reconstruction and the first black Republican congressman since 2003. Both are likely to win in November.

As much as I want to praise South Carolina Republicans for looking beyond race, gender, and ethnicity in these primary elections, I choose to damn them instead. Haley and Scott won largely out of right-wing anger with Washington and the Obama administration. Haley, a wealthy businesswoman, and Scott, who had the backing of the anti-tax, Wall Street-friendly Club For Growth, both represent a philosophy that promotes an unfettered market and a limited role for government - the same ideology that got this country in trouble in the first place. To give you an idea of how toxic Haley and Scott could be, both were endorsed by noted book-banning wolf killer Sarah Palin. The end.

The Republican party in South Carolina has been redeemed by the star quality of its nominees, though, after the embarrassing revelations of last year involving Mark Sanford. It's now the state Democratic party - which somehow nominated a loser named Alvin Greene to take on the horrible incumbent Republican senator Jim DeMint and has less than zero chance of unseating him - that's the joke, and the less said about that, the better.

Meanwhile, next door in North Carolina, U.S. Senate hopeful Elaine Marshall, a favorite among progressives, defeated establishment candidate Cal Cunningham for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination. This should be a big deal. Marshall did what Bill Halter couldn't do in Arkansas - defeat a Senate candidate backed by the White House. She's running in November against Richard Burr, a rather unpopular fellow, though probably not as unlikable as Jim DeMint, and one who holds a Senate seat that is a political graveyard for those who have held it in the past thirty-five years.

No one cares. No liberal commentators at MSNBC are celebrating this victory over establishment Democrats within the party. Even Ed Schultz hasn't mentioned it. As noted, Chuck Todd considers it such a long shot for the Democrats he'd rather not talk about it. But it proves that progressives are getting energized and are ready to put forward more of their own candidates. They've not only nominated Marshall to run for the Senate, in North Carolina, they've nominated Joe Sestak to do so in Pennsylvania. Two out of three ain't bad. And they pulled off their latest coup in a state where voters lean Republican but have shown a willingness to hear out Democrats. Ask Kay Hagan, North Carolina's Democratic senator. If this primary is any indication, the left is not going to let Tea Partiers suck up all the political oxygen.

Burr In the Saddle

The race in Massachusetts to fill the unexpired U.S. Senate term of Ted Kennedy is almost over. Thank God for that. But there are still the regular midterm Senate elections and other special races ahead. Despite their diminished standing in the polls, Democrats think they have a realistic shot of winning one or more of the open Senate seats being vacated by Republicans, namely in New Hampshire, Ohio, Florida and possibly Kentucky (yeah, right). They're even eyeing the seat of Republican Richard Burr in North Carolina, who is not retiring but whose poll numbers are weak - in Harry Reid territory - and has kept a low profile.

But Burr is also in jeopardy due to what I like to call Sam Ervin's curse. The curse goes like this: No incumbent senator has won re-election to this seat since Sam Ervin, the folksy Democrat who chaired the Senate committee investigating the Watergate affair, was re-elected to the seat in . . . 1968. To give you some perspective, that was the year Ervin's fellow North Carolinian Andy Griffith's namesake sitcom aired its last episode. And "Matlock" has come and gone since then.

A history of elections to the seat since then goes like this:

Ervin chose not to run for re-election in 1974, the year President Nixon resigned over Watergate. North Carolina's state attorney general, Robert Burren Morgan, was elected to the Senate that year with 63 percent of the vote. In the Senate, Morgan established himself as moderate-conservative in the Jimmy Carter mold. But dissatisfaction with Carter in North Carolina in 1980 allowed Ronald Reagan to carry the state in that year's presidential election and allowed Republican John East to narrowly defeat Morgan in his bid for a second term. East exploited Morgan's involvement in the Panama Canal Treaty that eventually gave control of the canal to the Panamanian government.

East, a rabid social conservative like his colleague Jesse Helms, chose not to run for a second term in 1986, citing his failing health; he was a paraplegic from polio and had hypothyroidism. In June 1986, he committed suicide, and the Republican governor named Republican Representative James Broyhill, a scion of a North Carolina furniture manufacturing family, as an interim senator. Broyhill ran for the remaining two months of East's term and for a full term in his own right but was defeated by Democrat Terry Sanford in both elections, both held on November 4, 1986.

Sanford, a former governor and president of Duke University, served a full term in the Senate, where he had a record for supporting policies for economic development for Central America. In 1992 he lost his bid for a second full term to the ridiculously named Republican Lauch Faircloth, an ex-Democrat and a former highway commissioner in Sanford's gubernatorial administration and onetime Sanford "friend." Sanford himself was so dissatisfied with the Senate, he almost retired voluntarily.

Faircloth, another Helms manqué like John East, lost his bid for re-election in 1998 to John Edwards, who became a superstar for his star quality and his aw-shucks Mayberry style. Edwards didn't run for re-election in 2004, choosing instead to run for President that year; some say he would have lost that year, citing his falling standing in North Carolina polls. As it turned out, the seat changed parties once again, with Republican Richard Burr defeating former Clinton White House Chief of Staff (and current University of North Carolina system) Erskine Bowles in that November's election.

Fast forward to 2010. Richard Burr is a Republican incumbent in an election year that favors Republicans but not incumbents. And Burr is currently seen more as the latter than the former.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter Sam Ervin's Senate seat.

Forget Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania or Harry Reid in Nevada. Richard Burr's bid for re-election to the Senate from North Carolina is the race I want to watch.