Right wing news

Gosh golly, it's been a while:
For starters, I'm glad to see that glad to see Rudy's getting the attention he deserves even around here. Someone explain why we can't just jump from fact checking and ad busting to some kind of 'here's how stupid they think you are' metric. This latest pegs the damn meter in my book.

The NCDP site has a blurb up about the incredible shrinking Republican Party in North Carolina hanging together to oppose the apology the General Assembly has approved for the 1898 racial hatred and violence in Wilmington.

Every single GOP Representative, with one exception, voted against the apology for a shameful episode in North Carolina's history. While the North Carolina Republican Party has not given any reason for its opposition, their unity in doing so betrays a calculated effort. Either the GOP does not believe that General Assembly has any reason to apologize, or they are willing to let partisan politics take precedence over doing what is right. Regardless, the GOP elected to oppose Democratic Representatives working for a more inclusive North Carolina.

On weekends, I often find myself trolling through the sludge of right-wing America, searching (usually in vain) for evidence of intelligent life. Today I thought I might have found it, but no such luck.

Fragmented Futures, the article that caught my attention on the American Conservative website, appeared at first glance to be an interesting analysis of the challenges facing a multicultural society. As North Carolina experiences dramatic growth and new challenges around diversity from all directions, the issue weighs heavily on my mind. I should have started at the end of the article where I eventually discovered that author Steve Sailer makes his living as a film critic.

The article purports to be a critical analysis of work by Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor and Nobel Prize winner who wrote Bowling Alone, a provocative book about the nature of multicultural societies. Sailer opens his commentary with this quote from Putnam.

In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.

After that, it's all downhill, as Sailer assumes he knows more about what Dr. Putnam meant to say in his book than Dr. Putnam himself.

There are probably some things more annoying than whining Republicans, but I can't think of any today. That's because I just got my very own copy of Citizen News, the bi-monthly newsletter from the John William Pope Civitas Institute. The lead story in this edition is by Puppet President Jack Hawke, entitled "Republicans Win the Vote, Lose the Election."

In the 2006 election, Republican candidates for the state House received 31,703 more votes than Democrat candidates. The Republicans also received a majority of 51 percent of the vote in state House races. Yet, in spite of receiving more than 31,000 more votes than the Democrats, the Republicans not only failed to gain the majority, they lost five seats.

One cool thing about BlueNC is the fact that lots of people send us lots of interesting stuff by anonymous email. Much of it never sees the light of day, either because we can't validate the claims, or because it's too obscene to report.

This week I got reports from people who said they attended the recent Civitas meeting in Raleigh. - which may very well qualify for the latter. And being someone who wouldn't set foot in a Civitas event, even under the threat of bodily harm, I can't vouch for the comments. If any of our readers were there, I'd love to hear if this stuff rings true.

1. John Davis apparently had a lot to say. He didn't seem to think that the Party of Torture and Greed will do very well in either NC House this November.