North Carolina

The Republican Establishment and Kay Hagan both are rooting for the same candidate to win the Republican senate primary in North Carolina: House Speaker Thom Tillis.

For the past several years, we've been pointing out how Buck McKeon has a bunch of worthless relatives who work as lobbyists, where they can trade on his name for their personal enrichment. This week Legistorm.com released a list of congressmembers whose direct relatives are also lobbyists-- and McKeon was only the second worst.

Yesterday, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post used North Carolina's hapless Republican Senate primary frontrunner, immensely unpopular Speaker Thom Tillis, to demonstrate the conundrum Republican candidates find themselves in when trying to deal with repealing the Affordable Care Act-- at least when they talk with non-Foxified normal voters.

Lately, I've been railing a lot about Steve Israel recruiting Republicans to run for Congress as Democrats. That usually works out very badly-- at least for people, unlike Steve Israel, who give a damn about Democratic values. But not every Republican-turned-fake-Democratic is an opportunistic shill.

It may be hard for normal people to understand that there are actually candidates to the right of Thom Tillis running for Senate in North Carolina and that he's playing the role of the Establishment (Art Pope) shill. Tillis was first elected to the North Carolina legislature by beating a more mainstream Republican, John Rhodes, in a primary in 2006 and 4 years later was elected by the far right as Speaker.

North Carolina's second congressional district was carefully drawn to skirt Fayetteville in the south and Greensboro in the north and to stay clear of Chapel Hill and Raleigh. Democrats live in those cities and Art Pope's bought and paid for legislature was determined to make sure this Piedmont swing district would be safe territory for a conservative Republican who could vote for any unpopular, crackpot legislation Pope deemed important without worrying about reelection.

As I confirmed during my December visit, there is evidence of backlash against North Carolina oligarchist "Puppet Master" Art Pope's way-far-right agenda.by NoahThere are two Popes in the news lately. Both represent organizations that claim to speak for Jesus Christ. One's name is Pope Francis, leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Francis is the better-known of the two, and his actions befuddle and anger U.S. Republicans. The other's name is Art Pope.

I suspect Sammy Alito, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy don't read The Nation.

The other day a friend in southeast Wisconsin sent me a reply to a letter he had written to his congressman about Social Security. His congressman is Paul Ryan.

Jason Thigpen is running for Congress in eastern North Carolina (the Outer Banks, most of the coastal plain, from the outskirts of New Bern, down the 17 to Jacksonville and on past Camp Lejeune into Wilmington. The district has been trending Republican in recent years but Democrats have a 12% voter registration edge and Jason is just the kind of guy who can appeal across the partisan divide without abandoning his progressive values. He penned this guest post.