Moe Davis for Western North Carolina

05/25/2026

Republican Congressman Mike Lawler defended the settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit over the leak of his tax returns saying “I think when it comes to any agreements that the president has made with the IRS, from my vantage point, you know, I think looking back at what the Biden administration did, they certainly weaponized the government and were targeting the president.”

In 2024, the Biden Justice Department successfully prosecuted Charles Edward Littlejohn, who was sentenced to 5 years in prison — the maximum punishment — for leaking Trump’s tax returns to ProPublica and the New York Times. Littlejohn, who had been a contractor working for the IRS, admitted that he stole the returns and that he acted alone.

Trump’s tax returns were stolen and leaked between 2018 and 2020. Joe Biden didn’t become the president until 2021. Donald Trump was the president and responsible for the IRS when his tax returns were stolen and leaked.

Congressman Lawler is a typical MAGA Republican who will do anything and everything to defend Donald Trump, including lying to the American people. America deserves better. Make Corruption Wrong Again!

05/24/2026

Today’s op-ed by fellow Air Force Veteran Brad Gutierrez will generate a lively discussion.

He reinforces the argument I’ve been making: the fact that the Democratic Party remains so repugnant despite the abysmal state the country is in under Trump and his Republican sycophants is an indictment of the Democratic Party.

Here’s an excerpt from the op-ed:

“The Washington Post recently featured a profile of our own Jamie Ager, the Democratic challenger for the NC-11 Congressional district. The article also looked at other candidates across the country running in non-urban areas. The consistent thread is that these candidates recognize and distance themselves from the toxic Democratic Party brand. . . While it is a shame that Ager does not feel comfortable embracing the Democratic label, they have done little to earn that honor.”

This is the definition of a paradox: the Democratic Party establishment chose Ager and stacked the deck for him in the primary and now he has to pretend like they’re Jeffrey Epstein and he’s Donald Trump and he barely knows them despite the clear incestuous relationship.

Bob Orr, former Republican and former member of the State Supreme Court, lost a challenge to North Carolina’s gerrymandered electoral map this week. Afterwards, he said, “It isn’t about Democrats or Republicans or who wins. It’s about the voters being able to participate in a fair electoral system where the government hasn’t stacked the deck in favor of one side or the other.”

The same applies to primaries where parties shouldn’t stack the deck rather than conducting fair elections where voters choose their candidates: you don’t sustain democracy when you subvert democracy.

Finally, Adam Kinzinger wrote about Thomas Massie and Bill Cassidy losing their primaries because they weren’t sufficiently obedient to Trump. In it, he said:

“We need a big tent. We are not going to defeat authoritarianism with a coalition of people who agree on everything. . . The coalition we need is built on what people will do when it costs them everything, not on what they did when it cost them nothing. . . The work ahead is to build a coalition that holds when it’s hard. That means welcoming the imperfect allies — and being clear-eyed about exactly how imperfect they are. A big tent, yes. But pitch it on solid ground.”

We live in perilous times and I hope we make it through okay. And I hope when we get there we’ve established a broad yet imperfect coalition that believes in fairness and democracy, fostered a system that’s responsive to the people not to a party, and created a coalition we can proudly embrace rather than distance ourselves from.

Democrats have become a party of coastal elites who forget vast electorate being forgotten by the government in Washington and in their states.

05/24/2026

The term is “dog walked”

05/23/2026

I’ve always assumed that the subtitle to this photo was either “damn those bean burritos!” or “it wasn’t me, it was the dog … bad dog!”

I could be wrong.

05/23/2026

All In The Family!

Don Jr. got married (again) yesterday to Bettina Anderson, a Palm Beach socialite. Her father, Harry Loy Anderson, was president of Palm Beach National Bank & Trust Company. He wrote a character reference for Jeffrey Epstein saying — “Mr. Epstein enjoys an excellent reputation in our community. . . Jeffrey is a gentleman of the highest integrity . . .”

Many people are saying that being a poor judge of character seems to be hereditary.

05/23/2026

From today’s Washington Post —

The Democrats’ complacency might not matter much in the short term. Trump’s unpopularity and the outrage of his opponents may lead them to victories in this year’s midterm elections. But the electorate of 2028 will be larger, and different, from the electorate this coming fall, and voters approach presidential elections differently from midterms: It’s tapping the brakes versus giving someone the wheel.

Democrats let midterm wins mislead them just four years ago. They outperformed expectations in 2022 because Republicans ran many candidates voters found unacceptable. That muffled Democratic concerns about Biden’s age and about the damage uncontrolled inflation and immigration were doing to the party’s reputation. Winning the midterms this year could have a similar effect, weakening any remaining reformist impulse.

The Democrats aren’t just failing to learn from what happened in 2024, in other words. They’re taking the wrong lessons from what’s happening right now.

05/22/2026

Every month beginning in 1952, the Consumer Sentiment Index has surveyed how American consumers feel about their personal finances and the state of the economy. This month, the rating fell to its lowest level in the 74 years history of the survey. Consumer sentiment is lower now than it was during the recession caused by the Arab oil embargo in the 70s, the dot.com and housing bubble bursts in the early 2000s, and the COVID crisis.

Trump and his sycophants can talk all day long about the Golden Age of America, the roaring economy, and the soaring stock market, but the overwhelming majority of Americans live in the real world and know that’s bu****it for all but the oligarchs. When Trump said he’s not thinking about Americans financial situation there’s objective data that shows he’s telling the truth for a change.

05/22/2026

Happy Memorial Day weekend!

Gas up 42%
Ground beef up 14.5%
Tomatoes up 39.7%
Hotdogs up 10.7%
Lettuce up 38.6%
Wine up 11%
Fireworks up 47%

It’s the Golden Shower Age for ordinary Americans!

05/21/2026

The Democratic Party’s autopsy following the 2024 election, which was released today, is as big an inept clusterf*ck as you’d expect from the Democratic Party. As Pogo said, we have met the enemy and he is us.

A segment of the report focuses on North Carolina, specifically Josh Stein outperforming Kamala Harris and Jeff Jackson. That segment was a waste of paper and ink.

The reason why Josh Stein did better than Jeff Jackson in North Carolina is simple ... Josh Stein ran against the most noxious candidate (Mark Robinson) in the country. Robinson was obese, black, and offensive in addition to using the online handle "the black n**i" and expressing his affinity for transgender p**n ... he was so bad that even Trump refused to support him. Like it or not, those factors are fatal with a Republican electorate like North Carolina's.

Jackson's performance was consistent with other Democratic statewide winners (Lt Gov, Sec State, and Public Ed Supe). Stein ran a good campaign, but what set his race apart from the other NC races was Mark Robinson. Unfortunately, Dems can't count on Republicans to run candidates as bad as Mark Robinson (although Ken Paxton may prove to be an exception).

People have lost faith in the Democratic Party. I first voted in 1976. Back then, nearly 8 out of 10 North Carolinians were registered Democrats. Today, it’s less than 3 in 10.

When Obama won in 2008, 45.7% of NC’s registered voters were Democrats and 22.3% were registered as Unaffiliated. Today, Unaffiliated is the largest voting block at 39.6% and Democrats at 29.8% are now in third place. (Republicans in NC have held steady for decades at just over 30%).

There are myriad reasons why people abandoned the Democratic Party. Among them are party elites picking primary candidates for the voters and squashing competition, and reliance on out-of-state Epstein class billionaire donor money. It has created the perception (or maybe the reality) that this isn't a party of the people, it's a party of an elite few and billionaire donors who believe they alone know what's best for ordinary people.

There’s a lot to loathe about Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party, but there’s also a lot to loathe about the Democratic Party and its precipitous decline.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Thursday released its contentious postmortem of the party’s 2024 losses, a report it had intended to keep under wraps to avoid di…

05/21/2026

Today, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour will get you a pound of ground beef or a gallon and a half of gas.

When the federal minimum wage was last raised in 2009, $7.25 would get you 2.5 pounds of ground beef or nearly 3 gallons of gas.

There were 357 billionaires in the U.S. when the minimum wage was last raised. Now there are 989 billionaires.

A Golden Age for a few — A Golden Shower for the rest

05/21/2026

A couple of things from today’s New York Times.

A poll conducted by the Times shows that the majority of Democrats and Democratic leaning Independents are dissatisfied with the Democratic Party. The sole thing holding Dems and Dem leaners together is their anger towards Trump and his feeble Republican sycophants, but beyond that they’re fractured, frustrated, and adrift.

This isn’t a recent revelation; the party’s decline has been a slow moving and unabated train wreck. When Barack Obama won in 2008, 45.7 percent of voters in North Carolina were registered Democrats and 22.3 percent were Unaffiliated. Today, Unaffiliateds are 39.6 percent of registered voters and Democrats are in third place at 29.8 percent. (Republican registrations have remained stable over the same period at just over 30 percent.)

Trump backlash may be enough for Dems to do well in the midterms, but then what? Without strong leadership, a coherent strategy, and effective messaging it’s more fracture, frustration, and drift. Given the abysmal state the country is in, the fact that significant majorities of Americans aren’t jumping on the Democratic Party bandwagon is a clear indication that the party is a problem rather than a solution.

And that leads to an op-ed by former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes entitled “This Is How a Party Ends Up Looking Like a Clown Car.” I’ll leave you with a couple of paragraphs from Rhodes’s piece.

________

We live in a cynical time, surrounded by forces that feel beyond our control. The world spirals into chaos, the algorithm shapes what we see, the oligarchy profits while people are impoverished, and our kids make friends with chatbots. Corruption, as Franklin worried, abounds.

Through it all, Democrats have failed to tell a coherent story about what is happening to America, why it matters and how we can get out of this spiral. In times like this, we need leaders who tell us hard truths while insisting that the present state of our politics is not permanent. The people don’t need despotic government, but they do need someone to tell them how to get out from under it.

We are getting close to the despotism Franklin feared. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better. We’ll get through this only if we have leaders who call on us to believe in something bigger than ourselves.