I have two tattoos, both on my back, though I don’t show them off very much. The firsta weird sun-like thing to celebrate a waning freshman-year depressionI got in college. The second, a clef note to remind me to focus on what I want and not what a certain ex-girlfriend wanted of me, came after […]
Jeffrey C. Billman
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The Morning Roundup: Another Bad Day to be Pat McCrory. He Should Be Used to It by Now.
Happy Hump Day, everyone. Lots to get to this morning. Let’s do this. 1. Roy Cooper won’t defend the state’s voting law, and Pat McCrory is angry. Last week, of course, a panel of federal judges struck down the voting restrictions the state enacted in 2013—voter ID, less early voting, same-day registration, etc.—saying they had […]
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A Week at the DNC: In the Trenches of the Battle for the Democratic Party’s Soul
LAST Sunday, the day before the Democratic National Convention gaveled open in Philadelphia, I was standing in the courtyard of the city’s Municipal Services Building, an austere bureaucratic home base that forms an odd juxtaposition with the elegant, 145-year-old City Hall across the street. Even with the mercury reaching triple digits, there were thousands of […]
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The Democratic National Convention, Day Four: An Interview with the First Transgender Person to Address a National Party Convention
If HB 2 accomplished anything good, it was this: the legislature’s decision to target a marginalized population for political gain, and the lawsuits and White House directives and international ignominy that followed, put trans issues firmly in the spotlight. And the Democratic National Convention hasn’t shied away from LGBTQ issues or criticizing HB 2 directly […]
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The Democratic National Convention, Day Three: The Revolution Gets Televised
Inside—embedded with the choir being preached to—it’s easy to get swept away, caught up in the moment, in the cheering and crying and endless ocean of waving placards; in the history of the 102-year-old woman from Arizona, a woman older than women’s suffrage itself, who cast her state’s votes for the potential first woman president; […]
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The Democratic National Convention, Day Two: The Monster that Bernie Unleashed
“Philadelphia—it’s like New Orleans. Something’s always fucked up.” I was with a small gaggle of reporters crammed into a light-night subway last night, talking through some of the logistic hurdles we’d encountered. The concession lines at the Wells Fargo Center were, in some cases, more than an hour long. The arena floor was so crowded […]
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The Democratic National Convention, Day One: “If We Don’t Get It, Shut It Down!”
“The Crooked News Network! The Crooked News Network! The Crooked News Network!” You almost feel bad for the CNN reporter, who is trying to interview someone in the midst of hundreds of screaming Bernie or Bust enthusiasts. It’s Sunday afternoon, a little after two, and she’s here, like I am, to cover a rally staged […]
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The Morning Roundup: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
1. The Speech If you missed Trump’s RNC acceptance speech last night, you can find the text of the speech here; but really, to get the whole effect, you need to watch the video—seventy-six minutes (that’s six minutes longer than Bill Clinton in 1996 and the longest convention speech in modern history) of an angry […]
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Governor McCrory Doesn’t Want LGBTQ Equality Supporters in His House
Logan Smith always assumed the Garden Party Against Hate would never happen. He thought it would be canceled when Progress NCfor which he is communications directorsecured a $1,150 permit to rent out the bottom floor of the Executive Mansion. But it wasn’t. He thought it would be canceled last week, after news outlets reported on […]
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The Morning Roundup: Vive La France
Another day, another terrorist attack. This story is way too damn familiar. Last night, while a crowd of French people in Nice were watching fireworks on Bastille Day—a French holiday celebrating the day French peasants stormed the Bastille in 1790, a key event in the then-nascent French revolution—an as-yet-unnamed French-Tunisian man with a truck packed […]
