Is Madison Cawthorn getting hung out to dry?
As far as I can tell, Madison Cawthorn has no redeeming qualities. He’s a grifter who will say anything for attention. He’s an anti-intellectual who appeals to the basest instincts of ignorant people. He’s been credibly accused of inappropriate sexual behavior. He...
Products of gerrymandering
The Supreme Court of North Carolina struck down the state’s heavily gerrymandered districts that would have given Republicans at least ten, and possibly eleven, of fourteen Congressional seats. The legislative redistricting might have given the GOP veto proof...
Democrats are out of sync with the country on the COVID response
Back in the early 1990s, my ex-wife was studying public health and I was working as a carpenter. I came home with some injury and called it an accident. She told me that her professor said that there are no such things as accidents, because every event has a cause and...
If you are a conservative now, you probably would have been a conservative then
Facebook serves me up a lot posts that are supposedly history. Often they’re false and a lot of them are about the Civil War and about Confederates in particular. They come from pages with names like “Defending the Heritage” or just “Confederates.” Facebook says they...
Aid and comfort
Last week more clearly defined the direction in which the Republican Party is moving. Even relatively moderate conservatives blasted Joe Biden for pledging to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court. They also went out of their way to defend the book-banning taking...
Countrypolitan voters and cultural Southerners
On Wednesday, Mac McCorkle and Rachel Salzberg released a study that show North Carolina’s “countrypolitan” counties hold the key to victory for Republicans in North Carolina. According the authors, Democrats need to cut into the GOP margin in these counties if they...
Race and deaths of despair
The star of the Trump era was the White working class. In particular, the media focused on the crisis of White working class men. They were dying at alarming rates, so much so that their life expectancy decreased. They were dying from what became dubbed “deaths of...
Propaganda and Republican hypocrisy
Republican Twitter pundits are all aghast at WRAL owner Jim Goodmon’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speech in Rocky Mount. Goodmon criticized Republicans for failing our schools, extreme gerrymandering, and leaving so many North Carolinians without medical coverage in...
Moving Primary target
Republicans in the Senate are voting today to delay the primary yet again. They’re making plans to ensure that they can redraw legislative and Congressional districts in the event that the Supreme Court finds their districts unconstitutional. The current schedule...
Just move on
On the eve of the Martin Luther King Holiday, Virginia’s new governor, Glenn Youngkin, signed an executive order banning schools from teaching Critical Race Theory. He told Fox News, "But to actually teach our children that one group is advantaged and the...
