There’s a new parlor game in your nation’s capital, played by reporters and pundits who begin with a single question: Is the Tea Party dead? Endlessly entertaining to ponder, it’s a question whose answer depends on your definition of the Tea Party movement.Are you talking about the 900 grassroots Tea Party groups in 2010 whose numbers have now dwindled to 600? Or the popularity of the movement among most Americans?Or do you measure the “Tea Party” as a marketing plan by the right wing in its 50-year quest to bend the Republican Party to its will and bring the nation to its knees?Miss UncongenialityThe new year kicked off with a poll that brought a smile to progressive faces: Rasmussen Reports, the Republican-tilting polling firm, found membership in the Tea Party movement among likely voters to have plummeted to a mere 8 percent. That’s a steep drop from 2010 when, just after the passage of the healthcare reform law, Rasmussen reported 24 percent of respondents calling themselves Tea Party members.Continue Reading… … Read More
Restaurant owner gives lesbian couple anti-LGBT letter ‘out of love’
A lesbian couple in New Bern, North Carolina said that the owner of the Stingray Cafe passed them an anti-gay letter as they left the eatery recently, which he says was “out of love.” Restaurant owner Ed McGovern gave the letter to Ariel and Shawnee McPhail on December 4, according to…
North Carolinians rescue cow from frozen pool
A group of neighbors in North Carolina managed to rescue an 800-pound cow from a frozen backyard pool this week after the cow wandered from its pasture several miles away. The emergency call came in Monday afternoon in Rutherford County, when Linda Lewis discovered the cow “drowning in my…
North Carolina’s Democratic governor pardons ‘Wilmington 10′ civil rights activists
North Carolina’s outgoing governor pardoned on Monday the Wilmington 10, a group of civil rights activists convicted of firebombing a white-owned grocery store in a black neighborhood 40 years ago. Governor Beverly Perdue’s pardons for the Wilmington 10, five days before she leaves…
Maybe Jeffrey MacDonald was innocent after all
Remember the perceptual illusion where you look at a picture and you’re certain that you see the bust of a young woman? Then, if someone draws your attention to certain details, suddenly the picture transforms into the profile of an old woman. It’s a disorienting trick. You think you know what you’re seeing, but then you aren’t so sure.The Jeffrey MacDonald murder case is one of the most disturbing in living memory. There are only two possible pictures, both nightmares.Picture #1. Jeffrey MacDonald, a Princeton-educated Green Beret doctor with no history of violence and a sterling record, butchered his pregnant wife and two young daughters using a knife, ice pick and club. Then he injured himself and set up the scene to make the crimes appear to be the work of intruders. He claimed they chanted, “Kill the pigs!…Acid is groovy!” and scrawled the word “PIG” on the wall in his wife’s blood.Continue Reading… … Read More
Did Obama reset the electoral map?
Mitt Romney visited President Obama for lunch at the White House today, and the final congressional recount ended in North Carolina. It’s safe to say that the 2012 election is officially in the books. With the numbers official, it’s time to revisit Salon’s version of the electoral map, and see how the reds and blues have shifted.As you may recall, we calibrate our state colors by taking into account not just presidential election results, but also senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial elections. We give each equal weight and generate a color from pure blue (see Massachusetts) to pure red (see Kansas). This gives a far more nuanced picture of how each state votes, and not just what they decide every four years.Click the image below to see how the map changed as a result of the 2012 election. You may want to keep an eye on North Carolina and Virginia. Continue Reading… … Read More
14 rescued, 2 missing from ship off NC
ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. (AP) — A replica tall ship caught in Hurricane Sandy’s wrath began taking on water, forcing the crew to abandon the boat in rough seas off the North Carolina coast. The Coast Guard rescued 14 crew members by helicopter Monday but two people were still missing.The HMS Bounty, which has been featured in Hollywood films such as “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” had left Connecticut last week, en route to St. Petersburg, Fla.”They were staying in constant contact with the National Hurricane Center,” said Tracie Simonin, the director of the HMS Bounty Organization. “They were trying to make it around the storm.”The Coast Guard initially received a call from the owner of the 180-foot, three-mast ship late Sunday evening, saying communication had been lost with the vessel’s crew. The Coast Guard in Portsmouth, Va., later received an emergency distress call from the Bounty, confirming its position.Coast Guard Vice Adm. Robert Parker, Operational Commander for the Atlantic Area, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that at the time of the distress call, the ship was taking on two feet of water an hour. It had about 10 feet of water when the crew abandoned the ship.Continue Reading… … Read More
