Lonna Rae Atkeson’s seminal paper “Moving Toward Unity” in American Politics Quarterly found that supporters of losing primary candidates revert to the eventual nominee at predictable rates as the general election approaches. Jeffrey Lazarus, writing in Legislative Studies Quarterly, established that the apparent correlation between divisive primaries and weaker general-election performance is not causal at all, but a joint product of candidate quality and pre-primary expectations. Fouirnaies and Hall at Stanford in confirmed that in base-state seats with partisan leans above 7 points, the measurable divisive-primary penalty is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Texas leans R+10 to R+13. It is the cleanest possible case for the proposition that the primary will leave no footprint on the general election. But the historical record is where this argument lives or dies. The frame is simple. The runner-up’s coalition comes home. It has always come home. The mechanism is what political scientists call partisan reversion, and it has been visible in every contested base-state primary of the modern era.
For the Sake of a Single Poem, by Rainer Maria Rilke
… Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else-); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, – and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
The project to repair the eastbound lanes of I-40 washed away in Haywood County during Hurricane Helene is progressing on-time, but the heavy lift has really just begun. When Helene tore through Western North Carolina in 2024, it inundated the embankment supporting the highway so vital to interstate commerce, washing away about a million cubic yards of rock and dropping the eastbound lanes into the water below....state officials and project supervisors said the project is scheduled to be completed — or at least close enough to fully open both the eastbound and westbound lanes — by fall 2028.
That's a solid four years of construction; it's another three-hour crawl through the gorge if you want to go that way.
We came back through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which can also be quite slow especially when sightseers spot a bear. It's shady and cool, though, especially once you come up towards Newfound Gap.
In a letter addressed to the County Sheriff shared with 29News, Powhatan Commonwealth’s Attorney Rob Cerullo said “significant” parts of that law are “facially” unconstitutional, citing, in part, the famous Heller ruling.“The provisions mentioned above place both my office and yours in an untenable position,” Cerullo wrote. “We can either honor our oath to preserve the Constitution, or enforce statutes which are clearly unconstitutional.”In a public letter, Pulaski Commonwealth’s Attorney Justin Griffith wrote that he will not take “law abiding citizens as of June 30 and criminalize that same behavior on July 1.”“The General Assembly just really overstepped,” van Cleave said. “What they passed in one year, other places would have probably taken a decade to do all of that. But they just crammed it down everybody’s throats.”
The state government says they expect prosecutors to enforce the laws whether they agree that the laws are constitutional or not.
UPDATE: Virginia State Police announce they have reinstated mandatory background checks on private sales of firearms, despite a court order requiring them to desist. GOA is suing them for contempt of court.
When Jackson commissioners on May 5 reviewed a draft document outlining the framework of a new county library board upon departure from Fontana Regional Library system, Commissioner Jenny Lynn Hooper, clad in a Turning Point USA T-shirt, was quick to express her central grievance: “I don’t think [a board member] ought to have a library card.”Bitter laughter erupted from the audience.“I feel like that’s kind of a prerequisite to knowing what’s happening in the library, is to have a library card and be active,” responded Chair Mark Letson.But Hooper wasn’t backing down.“Well to me, it’s like, do you make people that’s going to be on the ABC Board know all about liquor?” she asked.Hooper’s comment analogized two independent bodies not typically ripe for comparison. ABC boards in North Carolina are responsible for “controlling the sale of spirituous liquor.” Library boards do not exist to “control” public access to literature nor are members intended to reflect the will of elected leaders.
This is a news piece, not an opinion piece, by the way.
While serving FRL and JCPL, Richards supported a “juvenile card program” for children ages 15 and younger, requiring “parental consent for use of the library by a minor.” She also proposed a policy to ban “banned book” displays in system libraries. Her motivation to join the board was stated in just three words — “to provide oversight.”
Martinez also backed the juvenile card program and introduced a motion to curtail librarian reports....Blaine is an anti-LGBTQ+ activist. He backed JCPL’s withdrawal, routinely expressing misinformation in the process. His reasoning for wanting to join the board came in a list of handwritten bullet points: “provide oversight, evaluate budgets, evaluate policies, evaluate programs, perform book challenge reviews.”
The thing is, the journalists have a point this time even if it's disabling their ability to report dispassionately. It is definitely true that the Republicans locally view the library as a disagreeable phenomenon similar to a liquor store, one that -- if it must be allowed to exist at all -- needs careful regulation and oversight to prevent harm to young people from exposure to toxic contents. Censorship is the whole reason they have been waging this battle, exactly as their opponents contend. There are stark First Amendment issues in the power play they are attempting.
It is also true, as the Republicans contend, that the prior library governance was running the public library as a platform from which to wage cultural civil war against the values of the local community. That's also definitely the truth, and indeed explicitly in accordance with the American Library Association's published intent for such libraries in rural communities. They are indeed actively pursuing the charge that got Socrates put to death by an earlier revolt: 'corrupting the youth,' i.e. intentionally exposing the youth to ideas that their parents would find horrifying and subversive.
There doesn't seem to be a compromise position on offer, one that respects the First Amendment and also allows the community to enjoy an undisrupted common peace according to local values and traditions. Both of the sides are, in a way, speaking the truth and correct in their assertions; neither side is promoting an acceptable way forward. Even if they didn't despise each other, it's not clear how they could move forward.
The most likely outcome will be that the library system collapses locally, because both sides seem to prefer that it be destroyed than ceded to the other side.
