Stuart Egan teaches in North Carolina and blogs about the state’s politics. North Carolina has a Democratic Governor, Roy Cooper, but Republicans control both houses of the General Assembly. In the State Senate, they were one vote shy of a super-majority. And then—BOOM—a Democratic legislator switched parties, giving Republicans a super-majority, meaning they can override any vetoes by Governor Cooper.

Egan writes about the defector, Tricia Cotham, here and here.

Cotham was a teacher of the year. Her family was long involved in Democratic politics. She campaigned as a Democrat. She said she supported abortion rights. She said she was a strong supporter of public schools.

Yet now she has joined a party that is determined to ban abortion. That has spent the past dozen years attacking public schools, demonizing teachers, and introducing charter schools and vouchers.

Egan wrote in his open letter to Cotham:

Five previous terms in…

“Future Shock is a 1970 book by American futuristAlvin Toffler, written together with his spouse Adelaide Farrell, in which the authors define the term ‘future shock’ as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies. The shortest definition for the term in the book is a personal perception of ‘too much change in too short a period of time’. The book, which became an international bestseller, has sold over 6 million copies and has been widely translated. … Alvin Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a ‘super-industrial society‘. This change overwhelms people. He argues that the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from ‘shattering stress and disorientation’—future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock. In his discussion of the components…

The Indiana legislature is considering a bill that would empower parents to censor books they find objectionable and to criminalize librarians who allow such books in libraries. The story was originally reported on WYFI, the NPR station in Indiana.

Chalkbeat reported:

The House Education Committee heard hours of testimony Wednesday from school employees, librarians, and others across Indiana who expressed opposition to a proposed amendment to a bill that would strip these employees of a legal defense against charges they distributed material harmful to minors.

The hearing was the latest evolution in a months-long legislative process driven by concerns among some parents that pornography is rampant in schools. While lawmakers have drafted legislation to address these concerns, they’ve presented little evidence to suggest it’s a widespread problem. The latest iteration of the legislation also targets public libraries.

Rep. Becky Cash (R-Zionsville), who crafted the amendment, said she’s heard from “thousands”…

“Bob Dylan’s classic album Highway 61 Revisited was released in August 1965. The first song on the album, ‘Like A Rolling Stone,’ reached number two on the Billboard charts. It was kept from the top spot only by The Beatles and their demand for ‘Help!’ The second track on Dylan’s album, ‘Tombstone Blues,’ features more than a dozen named characters, including one who might be William S. Burroughs.

Now I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill
I would set him in chains at the top of a hill
Then send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille
He could die happily ever after.

Iggy Pop thinks ‘Brother Bill’ is a reference to Burroughs. At least he said as much in a 2014 BBC radio documentary on Burroughs’ life and influence. However, as with most things Dylan has touched and said, written and lived, there are competing…

Heather Cox Richardson writes that the Republican Party has tied itself to unpopular issues—like banning abortion—and their only strategy now is to suppress the vote, not only the Black vote but the youth vote. The fact that they are defending other unpopular issues—like vouchers, tearing down the wall of separation between church and state, and eliminating any kind of gun control—also explains why they are blowing up “culture war” issues of litttle consequence, like their demonizing of trans youth and their faux outrage about drag queens. It’s all a smoke screen for their real agenda.

Yesterday’s vote in Wisconsin reinforces the polling numbers that show how overwhelmingly popular abortion rights and fair voting are, and it seems likely to throw the Republican push to suppress voting into hyperdrive before the 2024 election.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have pushed the idea of “ballot integrity” or, later, “voter fraud” to justify…

Jan Resseger nails the central issue in the Chicago mayoral race: school reform. Pail Vallas tried to make the race about crime and his promise to control it. But the deciding issue was education, and their very different visions for improving it.

How do we know? Vallas has no record as a crime-fighter. He has a long resume as a school superintendent, starting in Chicago. He was the ultimate technocrat, who ruthlessly imposed his test-and-punish and school closing-choice ideology, regardless of how parents, students, and teachers felt about it.

Brandon Johnson was a social studies teacher and then a community organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union. He was the antithesis of Vallas. He knew that the root of school problems was not in the schools but in the social and economic conditions in which children were growing up.

Brandon is the heir of the late, great Karen Lewis. She changed…

I like small paperbacks for reading on airplanes. Recently I got a new kindle, which is good for making sure I never run out of books and don’t have to pack extra weight, but I prefer paperbacks for ease of page turning and marking (I read so fast I’m continually poking the side of the kindle for the next page and I like to dog-ear my book when I find something I want to comment on later). On my last trip I finished the last of the Dresden Files series books by Jim Butcher, always reliably entertaining no matter what kind of narrow seat I’m squished into or what’s going on with connections and airports. So now I have to widen my choices for airplane books.

During one recent flight I read Madeline Miller’s Circe, since it’s out in paperback. It was all right; not as entertaining as I…

Original six members of the Black Panther Party (November, 1966) Top left to right: Elbert “Big Man” Howard; Huey P. Newton (Defense Minister), Sherman Forte, Bobby Seale (Chairman). Bottom: Reggie Forte and Little Bobby Hutton (Treasurer).

“The Ten-Point Program or The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense Ten-Point Platform and Program is a party platform written by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966 for the Black Panther Party. The Ten-Point Program is a set of guidelines to the Black Panther Party and states their ideals and ways of operation, a ‘combination of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.’ The document was created in 1966 by the founders of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, whose political thoughts lay within the realm of Marxism and Black Nationalism. Each one of the statements were put in place for all of the Black…

The Koch brothers funded the Republican takeover of Wisconsin in 2010 and the election of Scott Walker as governor. Walker quickly cracked down on unions and stripped them of their rights. He pushed vouchers. He attacked Wisconsin’s great public university system. Meanwhile, the Republican legislature gerrymandered the state to guarantee control of the legislature. The state is evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, but Republicans control both houses of the legislature.

That is why many observers considered the election of a new State Supreme Court to be the most important election in the nation. After the retirement of a Republican justice, the Court was split 3-3.

A liberal—Janet Protasiewicz—ran against a conservative—Dan Kelly. The liberal won. This means that the Court will have a Democratic majority.

The two biggest issues likely to be resolved by the Court are abortion rights and gerrymandering. The new Court now has the votes to…