There are three possibilities that explain Donald Trump’s Saturday-morning Twitter tantrum, in which he accused – absent a shred of evidence beyond a rant from a talk-show host that was regurgitated in a Breitbard post – former president Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower during the campaign. None bodes particularly well for the ostensible leader […]
Jeffrey C. Billman
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Here’s How N.C. Politicians Are Responding to the Breaking Sessions Scandal
As we reported earlier this morning, last night The Washington Post broke a potentially blockbuster story that the attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, had lied under oath during his confirmation hearing in January when he said he’d had no contact with Russian officials during last year’s presidential campaign, when he was a top surrogate […]
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Breaking: Representative G.K. Butterfield Calls for Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s Recusal from Trump-Russia Investigation “At Minimum”
After news broke last evening that Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied under oath during his confirmation hearing in saying that he’d had no contact with Russian officials during last year’s presidential campaign, forty-seven Democrats and counting—most recently including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—have called for Sessions’s resignation. Just now, in a press release, Democratic U.S. […]
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Unlike Richard Burr, G.K. Butterfield Has Plenty of Time to Take Questions from His Constituents
Crowd got your tongue? As we noted last week, that seems to be the case for Republican senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis. Likely dissuaded by the raucous town halls taking place throughout the country, both have turned down repeated calls from constituents to hold their own meetings. Their inaction is all the more striking […]
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The Legislature’s Efforts to Repeal HB 2 Have Turned Into a Big, Dumb Soap Opera
Here is the one thing on which most people on Jones Street profess to agree: HB 2, the much-hated so-called bathroom law that has besmirched the state’s reputation, cost it hundreds of millions of dollars of economic activity and numerous sports championships, lost its governor his reelection, and, oh yeah, enshrined anti-LGBTQ bigotry into state […]
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The 18-Year-Old Who Owned Richard Burr in Sunday’s N&O
A clever, curious ad appeared on page 12A of Sunday’s News & Observer. Paid for by Evalyn Johnson of Cary, an eighteen-year-old biology major at N.C. State who raised more than $2,000 on GoFundMe toward the quarter-page effort, the ad carried U.S. Senator Richard Burr’s now-familiar picthat oddly thin, almost forced smile, those sharp blue […]
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In an Open Letter, 2,943 Fellow Duke Alumni Ask Trump Senior Adviser Stephen Miller How He Became Such a Horrible Person
We’re just going to let this thing speak for itself. To Stephen Miller, Duke University Class of 2007, Our class’s upcoming ten-year reunion serves as an occasion to reflect on how much has changed since we left campus. After graduation, some of us remained in Durham and some of us moved to Dar es Salaam. […]
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Burr, Tillis Vote to Gag Elizabeth Warren for Reading a Letter from MLK’s Widow About Trump’s Allegedly Racist Attorney General Nominee
Last night, during a debate over President Trump’s nomination of U.S. Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama—a man deemed, in a bipartisan vote of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to be too racist for the federal bench in 1986—to be attorney general, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren read a letter from Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther […]
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27 Reasons We Love the Triangle Right Now
There’s a lot that’s screwed up about the world right now. No getting around that. Our president, after all, is basically a YouTube comment in corporeal form. And there’s plenty amiss about this state, too. No getting around that, either. For example, HB 2 is still a thing. But that’s not what we want to […]
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Meet the Triangle Refugees Who Donald Trump Believes Pose a Threat to the United States
On a Sunday afternoon in June 2014, Lenny Ndayisaba finally got the call he’d been awaiting for so long. A longtime inhabitant of a refugee camp in Rwanda, the twenty-one-year-old Congolese native learned he’d be boarding a plane to North Carolina at one o’clock the next afternoon. He burst into tears. “It took so long,” […]
