Ex-Republican BLISTERS Madison Cawthorn and GOP: stupidity, narcissism

Madison Cawthorn leads stupidity, narcissism behavior for new GOP party

Stupidity, narcissism, contempt of science and/or facts, and unbridled self-centered behavior have emerged as the preferred behavior of the 'New Republican' Party (cult) or at least a vocal portion. The August 7 Citizen Times front page featured a story, 'Protesters attempt school board coup,' which turned my stomach and made me fearful of what kind of world my children and grandchildren will be inheriting.

The poster boy for both stupidity as an art form, and the New Republican Party, Madison Cawthorn was featured prominently in the story of protesters seizing control of a school board meeting, claimed to have recalled the existing school board and instated themselves as the new school board members (Buncombe County Schools attorney Dean Shatley said 'unequivocally' that the legal school board is still in office).

Hard to believe that one could find a single sane adult to participate in an illegal mob action that would directly lead to putting their children’s lives in jeopardy; but that is exactly what transpired. Our District 11, U.S. Representative Madison Cawthorn has sworn to uphold the Constitution and rule of law. This meeting did neither.

How people can flout their ignorance of the science that shows vaccines and masks beat COVID is unintelligible, and I will never understand it. The current figures show virtually all new hospitalizations and deaths are among the unvaccinated; and ALL students under 12 are unvaccinated. Why fight to expose your children to health hazards up to and including death? Our laws require other vaccinations to attend school, our laws require us to wear clothes to cover our genitalia, our laws require us to register/insure motor vehicles and have a drivers license to drive, etc. There are laws, regulations and restrictions across all walks of life that we adhere to, to build safe communities. Why pick on COVID vaccines to protest? Why not walk around naked to protest government’s right to impose 'arbitrary' regulation?
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Although I was a firm supporter of the Republican Party from 1972 through 1999, I changed my party registration to 'No Party' in 2000 and have remained an Independent since. At age 18 I was a 'Rockefeller Republican,' believing in a social safety net for my fellow citizens along with the fiscal responsibility to pay for it. Over the next 28 years, I witnessed the GOP gutting the social safety net and losing any sense of fiscal responsibility…..
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Excerpted

https://ashevillecitizentimes-nc-app.newsmemory.com/?publink=2ca2151c4_1345eb1&fbclid=IwAR2rv4XQ4dIyVE-ouSK2bW-1uCzq1I2gHS4Tw7mY_wSBnMQMBYGehkyKlRc

Howard Berkowitz is a retired senior executive with Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. He has lived in Candler for the past 7 years.


(Asheville Citizen-Times guest columnist)

JeffJackson (NC Dem for US Senate) on importance of passing infrastructure bill:

“Jeff, it’s about water.”

That’s what I love about mayors - they always cut to the chase.

People tell you what they want. Mayors tell you what they’ve *gotta* have.

We just finished eight town halls in counties east of I-95, and we heard a clear theme from the mayors who joined us: water, sewer, and broadband.

Yes roads, yes bridges - but water, sewer, and broadband. They’re overlooked because they’re underground, but they’re crucial to creating so many other opportunities.

You can lump them together and call them “subsurface infrastructure,” but it’s really about laying an economic foundation. And if you’re missing one piece, you’re not going to build much on top of it.

Example: People talk about the lack of affordable rental options. Then the mayor says, “We can’t build an apartment complex on a well and a septic tank. Gotta have water and sewer. That’s what’s holding us back.”

Then someone asks, “How can we keep young people from leaving?” Before I can answer, a mayor says, “Can’t keep ‘em here without broadband. Just not possible. Gotta have it.”

These things are expensive, and lots of our rural counties don’t have the tax base to really build out water and sewer on their own. They need state and federal partners to do it.

But here’s the thing: We spent $2 trillion in Afghanistan. And the vast majority of that was unnecessary.

If just 0.5% of those funds had found their way to the rural counties east of I-95 (or west of Asheville, for that matter), you’d have a brand new economic foundation across the entire region. Water, sewer, and broadband would be strong enough to support all kinds of business growth, from entrepreneurs to major industries.

You’d be looking at a dramatic upgrade in the economy of the region. Lives would be much better, and probably longer.

And that’s roughly the amount that we’re slated to get as a state if the bipartisan infrastructure bill passes. But here’s the thing: It’s going to be spread across the whole state.

(Incidentally, all three of our state’s GOP Senate candidates said they would have voted against it - because it’s too big of an investment.)

Bottom-line: If this infrastructure bill passes, we’re going to be able to make large investments in our state. That’s a good thing and it’s going to mean a lot for a lot of people. But we’re still going to have major unmet infrastructure needs, particularly in rural counties. Finding ways to help those counties invest in their economic foundations is going to remain a priority.

And that means mayors need to keep telling senators what they need, and we need senators who will listen.

- Jeff Jackson

Jackson just posted this on FB, probably Twitter, too.

Really solid post on Afghanistan from Jeff Jackson.

It’s been a hard week seeing what's happening in Afghanistan.
Like many of you all, I watched videos from the Kabul airport and saw pictures of military planes full of people fleeing. Gut wrenching stuff.

I served in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2006.

At that point, Al Qaeda in Afghanistan had been decimated and we were thoroughly into the nation-building part of the war.

I was stationed in a remote desert outpost north of Kandahar with a couple dozen soldiers. Poppies grew against the barricades of our little fort.

We had a company of Afghan soldiers that lived just outside our razor-wire fence in their own area. Part of our job involved training and running missions with them.
We’d do that a few times a week. We’d get into our Humvees with our weapons and head out to a very small village a few hours away.

Most of the missions were humanitarian. Coordinating construction for wells and schools (which we paid for). Veterinarian missions to de-worm goats and sheep. Handing out solar-powered radios (hugely popular, went fast).

Our little group of American soldiers tried hard to build goodwill everywhere we went. We were always handing stuff out, having tea with the local elders, kicking soccer balls around with the kids.

We were attacked by the Taliban several times. Usually with rockets, sometimes with small-arms fire. I remember once, at night, being outside and suddenly seeing small bright lights fly overhead and being confused for a second. Then the rockets started to land and I realized those small lights had been tracer rounds.

But IEDs were the biggest threat. We were constantly on the lookout for freshly turned dirt near the road and drove off-road as much as possible. I was usually the driver on our missions and I still remember what it felt like to drive across a narrow bridge or some other chokepoint where you knew an IED would be unavoidable if it detonated. We all just held our breath and I drove as fast as possible.

Soldiers were hurt and killed, including a close friend of mine the week we were set to leave.
And then I boarded a helicopter and went home.

After I left, I was never able to get a good sense of how things were actually going. We heard the same cautious optimism from our leaders for years, but it was hard to read much into that. There was visible progress and visible failure. President George Bush used to talk about an Afghanistan that could govern and defend itself. How close were we? How many more years would it take?

And now we know. Despite a massive effort, we never even came close.

Trump’s deal with the Taliban in 2018 created certainty that we would, in fact, be leaving. As a result, the Taliban largely stopped attacking our troops. They were waiting.

We proceeded with our exit because we had already given Afghanistan everything we could. We poured $90 billion into the Afghan military and stayed for an entire generation - at a loss of nearly 2,500 American servicemembers.

The Afghan army numbered close to 300,000, at least on paper. They had certainly shown a willingness to fight, having already lost 66,000 soldiers in the last 20 years.

Afghanistan has 34 provinces. On August 6th, the Taliban captured their first provincial capital. This wasn’t a huge shock because the province was nestled between Iran and Pakistan, farther from the national capital of Kabul than any other province. It was the lowest-hanging piece of fruit for the Taliban. That said, it was taken with virtually no resistance, which in retrospect was a sign of things to come.

In the next two days, the Taliban captured four more provincial capitals.
In the next five days, another 10 provincial capitals fell.
In the next three days, it was over. The national capital of Kabul fell, the president fled.
That’s nine days from the first province to the rest.

While a sizable number of elite Afghan soldiers put up a fight - and may now be regrouping in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul - what we saw from the army regulars was near-instant capitulation. The bulk of the Afghan army wasn’t defeated - it evaporated.

It’s hard to put ourselves in the shoes of those Afghan soldiers and to understand their calculations - but it isn’t hard to see what their ultimate decision was, and that was essentially to walk off the battlefield en masse.

Now the mission is evacuation. Americans still in Afghanistan, interpreters and their families, and others who are at extreme risk - like 250 female judges who were still serving until this week - must be flown out of the country immediately.

Here are three major mistakes that have hindered the evacuation mission:
The first was the previous administration’s decision to sharply reduce the processing of Special Immigrant Visas. That’s a program that was created specifically for Afghans and Iraqis who helped us and it’s supposed to be an expedited process to get them safely out of the country. It involves an administrative review that is arduous and bureaucratic even when it’s functioning - but Trump blocked almost all requests.

When Biden took over, the wait-list had 17,000 Afghans on it. That wasn’t an oversight, that was Trump lumping these people in with his broader anti-immigration message and not caring about the consequences. (Incidentally, after seeing recent events, he put out a statement saying that Afghans who assisted the U.S. “should be allowed to seek refuge.”)

That said, fixing the SIV process should have been a much higher priority for the current administration. That was our second mistake. Yes, the evaporation of the Afghan army was a shock. But we plan for unlikely contingencies all the time. That should have been one. There was no reason not to expedite the process by bringing the applicants to a U.S. territory, like Guam, and allowing the rest of the application process to occur there. That’s exactly what we did in 1975 when we left Vietnam. The governor of Guam even indicated that the island was prepared to accept them.

That should have happened back in April, but it absolutely should have happened once we saw the Taliban making swift gains across the country in early July. We’ve hit the gas on the process now and we’re evacuating several thousand people per day. That’s progress, but it shows we could have sped things up much sooner.

Third, we should not have given away the Bagram airfield before the evacuation mission was complete. If we were going to need to conduct a rapid, large-scale evacuation, we were going to need Bagram, which was our largest base and the most fortified airfield. We left it in early July, and now we have to rely on the airport in Kabul to conduct evacuation operations. It’s much harder to defend and more limited in terms of air traffic given that it only has one runway while the airfield at Bagram has two.

Now we have no choice but to conduct our evacuation mission under extreme pressure. That’s a bad situation to be in and a tough mission, but it’s a mission that we have an obligation to carry out. We don’t get to call it a day and walk away from these people who helped us, many of whom will surely die if we don’t make the decision to save them.

We owe them as a nation - but I owe them personally. Every time we ran a mission, I was putting my life in the hands of my interpreter. Our interpreter was at greater risk than any of us because the Taliban knew that if you take out the interpreter, it makes the whole unit ineffective.

And he never, ever let me down. Every mission, every moment, he was always by my side. I moved, he moved. When we were in a village and a group of men suddenly started walking towards our team, he would step forward and start speaking as quickly and calmly as he could. And this is the guy we’re going to cut loose? Unacceptable.

The same goes for that interpreter’s family. My interpreter’s wife and children became targets as soon as he ran his first mission with us. They took that risk together, as a family, so our obligation extends to them as a family.

Getting those folks out is the right thing to do, but it’s also in our national interest. If we don’t get them out, what’s going to happen the next time we need to ask locals in a foreign country to help us? How are those locals going to look at our soldiers when we ask them to trust us?
And to the 16 House Republicans who voted against the bill to speed up the visa applications, there is no possible defense for that. To do that deliberately - knowing what it could lead to for those who helped us - is unconscionable.

We're already hearing some generic anti-refugee sentiment from some of these folks. I'd remind them of our history with respect to Vietnam.

After we left Vietnam, we had a policy geared specifically to Vietnamese refugees. We helped people who otherwise would have been killed.

We don't regret that decision - we're proud of it.

One of those people who we saved became my next-door neighbor when I was a kid. He was a former officer for the South Vietnamese Army - who probably would have been killed if he hadn’t gotten out - and by some amazing act of grace he and his wife landed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

His son became one of my best friends. We grew up together. I never fully appreciated his family’s story until I was in college. He had the opportunity to live a wonderful life because our country decided to keep its commitments to those who had fought with us.

As it turns out, we couldn’t bring democracy to Afghanistan - but we can decide to keep our commitments to those who fought for it with us.

That is now the mission, and we must not fail.
- Jeff Jackson

Reality-based overview of Afghanistan by next Dem Senator from NC.

It’s been a hard week seeing what's happening in Afghanistan.
Like many of you all, I watched videos from the Kabul airport and saw pictures of military planes full of people fleeing. Gut wrenching stuff.

I served in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2006.

At that point, Al Qaeda in Afghanistan had been decimated and we were thoroughly into the nation-building part of the war.

I was stationed in a remote desert outpost north of Kandahar with a couple dozen soldiers. Poppies grew against the barricades of our little fort.

We had a company of Afghan soldiers that lived just outside our razor-wire fence in their own area. Part of our job involved training and running missions with them.
We’d do that a few times a week. We’d get into our Humvees with our weapons and head out to a very small village a few hours away.

Most of the missions were humanitarian. Coordinating construction for wells and schools (which we paid for). Veterinarian missions to de-worm goats and sheep. Handing out solar-powered radios (hugely popular, went fast).

Our little group of American soldiers tried hard to build goodwill everywhere we went. We were always handing stuff out, having tea with the local elders, kicking soccer balls around with the kids.

We were attacked by the Taliban several times. Usually with rockets, sometimes with small-arms fire. I remember once, at night, being outside and suddenly seeing small bright lights fly overhead and being confused for a second. Then the rockets started to land and I realized those small lights had been tracer rounds.

But IEDs were the biggest threat. We were constantly on the lookout for freshly turned dirt near the road and drove off-road as much as possible. I was usually the driver on our missions and I still remember what it felt like to drive across a narrow bridge or some other chokepoint where you knew an IED would be unavoidable if it detonated. We all just held our breath and I drove as fast as possible.

Soldiers were hurt and killed, including a close friend of mine the week we were set to leave.
And then I boarded a helicopter and went home.

After I left, I was never able to get a good sense of how things were actually going. We heard the same cautious optimism from our leaders for years, but it was hard to read much into that. There was visible progress and visible failure. President George Bush used to talk about an Afghanistan that could govern and defend itself. How close were we? How many more years would it take?

And now we know. Despite a massive effort, we never even came close.

Trump’s deal with the Taliban in 2018 created certainty that we would, in fact, be leaving. As a result, the Taliban largely stopped attacking our troops. They were waiting.

We proceeded with our exit because we had already given Afghanistan everything we could. We poured $90 billion into the Afghan military and stayed for an entire generation - at a loss of nearly 2,500 American servicemembers.

The Afghan army numbered close to 300,000, at least on paper. They had certainly shown a willingness to fight, having already lost 66,000 soldiers in the last 20 years.

Afghanistan has 34 provinces. On August 6th, the Taliban captured their first provincial capital. This wasn’t a huge shock because the province was nestled between Iran and Pakistan, farther from the national capital of Kabul than any other province. It was the lowest-hanging piece of fruit for the Taliban. That said, it was taken with virtually no resistance, which in retrospect was a sign of things to come.

In the next two days, the Taliban captured four more provincial capitals.
In the next five days, another 10 provincial capitals fell.
In the next three days, it was over. The national capital of Kabul fell, the president fled.
That’s nine days from the first province to the rest.

While a sizable number of elite Afghan soldiers put up a fight - and may now be regrouping in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul - what we saw from the army regulars was near-instant capitulation. The bulk of the Afghan army wasn’t defeated - it evaporated.

It’s hard to put ourselves in the shoes of those Afghan soldiers and to understand their calculations - but it isn’t hard to see what their ultimate decision was, and that was essentially to walk off the battlefield en masse.

Now the mission is evacuation. Americans still in Afghanistan, interpreters and their families, and others who are at extreme risk - like 250 female judges who were still serving until this week - must be flown out of the country immediately.

Here are three major mistakes that have hindered the evacuation mission:
The first was the previous administration’s decision to sharply reduce the processing of Special Immigrant Visas. That’s a program that was created specifically for Afghans and Iraqis who helped us and it’s supposed to be an expedited process to get them safely out of the country. It involves an administrative review that is arduous and bureaucratic even when it’s functioning - but Trump blocked almost all requests.

When Biden took over, the wait-list had 17,000 Afghans on it. That wasn’t an oversight, that was Trump lumping these people in with his broader anti-immigration message and not caring about the consequences. (Incidentally, after seeing recent events, he put out a statement saying that Afghans who assisted the U.S. “should be allowed to seek refuge.”)

That said, fixing the SIV process should have been a much higher priority for the current administration. That was our second mistake. Yes, the evaporation of the Afghan army was a shock. But we plan for unlikely contingencies all the time. That should have been one. There was no reason not to expedite the process by bringing the applicants to a U.S. territory, like Guam, and allowing the rest of the application process to occur there. That’s exactly what we did in 1975 when we left Vietnam. The governor of Guam even indicated that the island was prepared to accept them.

That should have happened back in April, but it absolutely should have happened once we saw the Taliban making swift gains across the country in early July. We’ve hit the gas on the process now and we’re evacuating several thousand people per day. That’s progress, but it shows we could have sped things up much sooner.

Third, we should not have given away the Bagram airfield before the evacuation mission was complete. If we were going to need to conduct a rapid, large-scale evacuation, we were going to need Bagram, which was our largest base and the most fortified airfield. We left it in early July, and now we have to rely on the airport in Kabul to conduct evacuation operations. It’s much harder to defend and more limited in terms of air traffic given that it only has one runway while the airfield at Bagram has two.

Now we have no choice but to conduct our evacuation mission under extreme pressure. That’s a bad situation to be in and a tough mission, but it’s a mission that we have an obligation to carry out. We don’t get to call it a day and walk away from these people who helped us, many of whom will surely die if we don’t make the decision to save them.

We owe them as a nation - but I owe them personally. Every time we ran a mission, I was putting my life in the hands of my interpreter. Our interpreter was at greater risk than any of us because the Taliban knew that if you take out the interpreter, it makes the whole unit ineffective.

And he never, ever let me down. Every mission, every moment, he was always by my side. I moved, he moved. When we were in a village and a group of men suddenly started walking towards our team, he would step forward and start speaking as quickly and calmly as he could. And this is the guy we’re going to cut loose? Unacceptable.

The same goes for that interpreter’s family. My interpreter’s wife and children became targets as soon as he ran his first mission with us. They took that risk together, as a family, so our obligation extends to them as a family.

Getting those folks out is the right thing to do, but it’s also in our national interest. If we don’t get them out, what’s going to happen the next time we need to ask locals in a foreign country to help us? How are those locals going to look at our soldiers when we ask them to trust us?
And to the 16 House Republicans who voted against the bill to speed up the visa applications, there is no possible defense for that. To do that deliberately - knowing what it could lead to for those who helped us - is unconscionable.

We're already hearing some generic anti-refugee sentiment from some of these folks. I'd remind them of our history with respect to Vietnam.

After we left Vietnam, we had a policy geared specifically to Vietnamese refugees. We helped people who otherwise would have been killed.

We don't regret that decision - we're proud of it.

One of those people who we saved became my next-door neighbor when I was a kid. He was a former officer for the South Vietnamese Army - who probably would have been killed if he hadn’t gotten out - and by some amazing act of grace he and his wife landed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

His son became one of my best friends. We grew up together. I never fully appreciated his family’s story until I was in college. He had the opportunity to live a wonderful life because our country decided to keep its commitments to those who had fought with us.

As it turns out, we couldn’t bring democracy to Afghanistan - but we can decide to keep our commitments to those who fought for it with us.

That is now the mission, and we must not fail.
- Jeff Jackson

Teen brother guitarists absolutely killin this Buck's Polka.

Henderson County Dems: Jeff Jackson will be at East Flat Rock Park

tomorrow at 5:30pm.

I think he’ll be in Buncombe earlier that same day as well.

Jeff Jackson: Bottom-up approach to military suicides is needed

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine from the National Guard died by suicide.
He was a great Soldier and a great father. He’s not a statistic - he’s a person.
But he joins a tragic group of service members who have taken their lives since September 11th, 2001.

30,177 service members have died by suicide since September 11th.
That’s quadruple the number of deaths due to military operations in the same period.

I’ve been in the military for 18 years. He’s not the first one of my friends I’ve lost to suicide. And while suicide remains a major problem for all of our military components, the National Guard has the highest rate.

Over the years, I can’t tell you how many suicide prevention PowerPoint briefings I’ve been required to sit through with the rest of the platoon. It’s check-the-box training that we all receive.

The numbers speak for themselves: Slideshow training isn’t enough.

In North Carolina, we’ve got over 700,000 veterans, so this hits us hard. The VA estimates that as many as 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In our town halls across the state, it comes up repeatedly. Suicide prevention - and mental health services more generally - for our service members deserves to be part of any agenda focused on solving problems in our state.

Here are some steps we should take:
1) Mandate the VA develop and implement suicide prevention training that ditches the PowerPoint approach and takes a skills-based approach.

Too often, the military approaches suicide prevention the same way it approaches teaching new recruits about their chain of command: They show some slides and ask if anyone has any questions. Instead, we should approach it the same way we approach learning how to treat a casualty or learning to assemble your rifle: it’s a skill you’re expected to practice.

With suicide prevention, spotting indicators among your buddies, knowing how to talk to them, and knowing what steps to take when those indicators persist are all skills that need training - not a simple slideshow that lets command check the box.
This will be harder. It will take more time on the training schedule. But when it comes to suicide prevention we are currently operating in a state of failure and we need to acknowledge that and let it motivate us to build an effective solution.

2) Invest in high-quality tele-health
Only half of our veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who need mental health service actually get it. More of them would seek care if it were made easier. Once a service member realizes they may need help, they should be able to quickly and easily schedule a phone or digital meeting with a Suicide Prevention Counselor at the VA.

3) Increase the number of Suicide Prevention Coordinators at the VA
The Government Accountability Office recently found that the VA simply doesn’t know how heavy the workload is and doesn’t have a clear sense of what staffing changes need to be made to meet the demand.

This aligns with a broad-based understaffing at the VA, which was recently reported to have approximately 50,000 staff vacancies. This is an issue of underfunding and every politician that gives lip service to supporting the troops must prioritize their health when veterans return home.

4) Support medical cannabis
I support a transition from our current criminal approach to cannabis to a legalized and regulatory approach.
Right now in the General Assembly there is a bill to consider taking the small (and overdue) step of allowing cannabis for medicinal purposes.

That the bill is making progress is a surprise, given that the majority party has resisted any movement in this direction for years. In committee, however, they heard very compelling testimony from former military service members about how access to medical cannabis (supplied by other states) had profoundly positive effects on their PTSD.
We should take their testimony seriously and - at a minimum - allow for the medicinal use of cannabis.

5) Address veteran homelessness by fully funding Housing Choice Vouchers
This is addressed more broadly in our section on affordable housing, but Housing Choice Vouchers - formerly known as Section 8 vouchers - are the main way we assist very low income individuals in obtaining housing. But we dramatically underfund the program. If we fully funded the program, it would significantly reduce homelessness and previous expansions have been particularly effective at reducing veteran homelessness.

The connection between mental health and homelessness is direct. Before you can provide sustained and effective mental health treatment, you have to provide housing security. That’s how we take people out of “survival mode” and create the possibility for effective treatment, but it’s also how we solve logistical problems associated with providing treatment, like case workers knowing where they can meet with their clients.
***

Just to be candid - these aren’t all the answers. No one has all the answers on this. But there are some pretty important things we aren’t doing that would make a real difference - and they don’t involve a new task force or new red tape.

We need a bottom-up approach that starts with the service member and imagines what an effective solution would look like from that perspective.

- Sen. Jeff Jackson

Hi. Anyone here in Boone area? Need guidance.

Looking to rent room in house or an apartment for school year and need some leads.

Baby BLM is starting her senior year in August and prefers to stay away from the party scenes at most of the apartment complexes around App State.

"a lonely soldier. Away from home, through no wish of my own." (Mr. Lonely)

Adding to the Southern Rock mission: Mother's Finest