Apparently "focusing on comms" means just making shit up:

Speaking on the House floor on Thursday to criticize the Biden administration's handling of the economy, Cawthorn said, "It was Thomas Jefferson that said, 'Facts are stubborn things. And whatever may be our wishes, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.' "

This is a famous quote from John Adams, not Jefferson. (Cawthorn omitted two of Adams' words in the quote.) Adams uttered it in 1770 while serving as defense lawyer for British soldiers who had been charged with murder in the Boston Massacre.

Using my Jeff Foxworthy voice: "If you go to the trouble to memorize almost an entire quote, but you get the author of the quote wrong, you just might be an idiot." It's also noteworthy that Adams did not rely on facts in his defense of the British soldiers, he used racism and hyperbole to attack the character of the people who were shot by those soldiers. But back to Maddy and his tortured history:

A number that is both good and bad:

The number of people stopped from buying guns through the U.S. background check system hit an all-time high of more than 300,000 last year amid a surge of firearm sales, according to new records obtained by the group Everytown for Gun Safety.

The FBI numbers provided to The Associated Press show the background checks blocked nearly twice as many gun sales in 2020 as in the year before. About 42% of those denials were because the would-be buyers had felony convictions on their records.

The bad part: They won't stop trying, and will eventually succeed through private gun sales. Which means, among many other things, that law enforcement won't have a record of the purchase if they need to serve a warrant, or respond to a domestic disturbance. Pretty soon every encounter will be assumed "armed and dangerous," even if there's no record or evidence a gun is present. And you can expect to see this more often:

Because doing the job has never been a top priority for either:

Sen. Richard Burr praised North Carolina's former GOP governor, Pat McCrory, as “the only one in the race that can win the general election" for the seat Burr is vacating. “Pat McCrory has a commanding advantage," Burr added.

Behind the scenes, Burr is even less subtle about next year's Senate battle. One Republican senator said Burr is “telling everyone that McCrory is the only one that has a chance to win.”

McCrory was nothing more than a rubber stamp for Legislative Republicans, and his former Budget Director Art Pope. The boldest thing he did was sign bills as a lame duck that stripped Roy Cooper's powers after the 2016 Election. Half of McCrory's short gubernatorial career was dedicated to cheerleading the ConnectNC Bond, but when BergerMoore stripped out the actual connect part (roads & broadband), McCrory folded like somebody holding a pair of threes. Here's more, if you can stomach it: