North Carolina – Republicans
King, Trump and Helms
My blog “President Shithead” irked a TAPster who worked for Jesse Helms (not Carter): “I don’t mind when you pick on my old boss, but saying he’s part of a string of Trumps… that’s hitting below the belt.” That is pretty low. But is it justified? Well, Martin Luther King Day is an appropriate day…
Read MoreAfter Six Years of Howling…
The politicians are hollering, again, about redistricting – about the new State House and Senate district maps drawn by the federal judges ‘Special Mapmaker.’ But look beneath the surface: What’s surprising is how few districts changed. And how little those districts changed. The News and Observer analyzed the new maps: One district changed from .4%…
Read MoreA Simple Fact
There’re a lot of reasons for blindness: Fear, Innocence and hard whiskey are three. For former UNC Law School Dean Gene Nichol, when he sat down to read exit polls in the Washington Post, I suspect the problem may have been Ideology. He’s Politically Correct – for example, when he was President of William and…
Read MoreYou Won’t Believe Who’s Not a Good Democrat
Well, Gary, I never dreamed I’d see it: I opened the newspaper and Democrats were saying Jim Hunt is not a good Democrat. The Democratic Party endorsed Nancy McFarlane, an Independent, in her previous races for Mayor but this time the party switched and endorsed Charles Francis – but Governor Hunt stayed with McFarlane, so…
Read MoreThe Island
Gene Nichol, who’s the former Dean of the UNC Law School, and who may be the most politically correct man in North Carolina, tore into the new UNC Board of Governors saying right wing politics is taking over the university and the Board is to blame. It’s difficult to tell whether Dean Nichol’s broadside…
Read MoreThe anti-democratic (small d) party
Some Republicans have the annoying habit of calling us “the Democrat Party.” It’s an old slur, dating back to the 1940s and 1950s. Maybe “slur” is too strong a word. “Democrat Party” is more an insulting, annoying, derisive epithet. It conjures up “autocrat” or “bureaucrat” or just plain “rat.” When he was Speaker of the…
Read MoreA Chess Game
When a politician takes a poll most folks figure he means to figure out how he can bamboozle people and there’s truth in that but a poll’s also a picture of the powers – like fear, revenge, blindness and rage – shaking the political world and even through a poll won’t show you angels and…
Read MoreReading Signs
If you’re a Republican with an eye on the next election you’re searching for signs and reading tea leaves, wondering, What are the chances we’ll lose? The signs that measure President Trump’s strength – his Favorable rating and his Job Approval – are all troubling: Swing voters dislike the President by two to one. Compounding…
Read MoreOne Question
Listening to him as he stood on the floor of the State Senate speaking, I wondered whether he believed what he was saying or whether he’d simply decided to spin a tale. He sounded like a history professor giving a lecture, talking about the new Senate maps, explaining meticulously why those maps were not a…
Read MoreGerrymandering games
How bad are the new Republican legislative maps? An analysis by the Campaign Legal Center says Republicans would give themselves a “large and durable” advantage in the districts” “Assuming a statewide uniform swing in the vote, in order for there to be a Republican majority in the House, Republicans will only need a statewide vote…
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