North Carolina

In response to an innocuous joke Tagg Romney made on a radio show in North Carolina, Lawrence O'Donnell used the platform that is his late night talk show on MSNBC to taunt and threaten the oldest son of a presidential hopeful.  Seemingly as serious as a heart attack, the nearly 57 year-old O'Donnell challenged the 42 year-old to a fist fight "any time, any where". [ video and transcript…

While this will almost certainly remain unreported on the broadcast news networks, the Associated Press is reporting that the Democratic National Convention Committee accepted at least $5 million in corporate donations and borrowed another $8 million in order to reach its $36.7 million budgetary goal, according to the financial disclosure reports that were filed with the Federal Election…

New York Times Atlanta bureau chief Kim Severson on Friday committed her usual labeling bias describing prep work by the host city for the Democratic National Convention in "Charlotte Girds for Party And Array of Protesters." Severson found "radical evangelical groups" composed of "conservative Christians" as well as a "conservative country music concert," but the left-wing Occupy Movement…

*Corrected from earlier | WRAL, the CBS affiliate in Raleigh, N.C., recently published a searchable database of concealed carry licensees within the "WRAL viewing area, including Chatham, Cumberland, Durham, Edgecombe, Franklin, Granville, Halifax, Harnett, Hoke, Johnston, Lee, Moore, Orange, Nash, Northampton, Person, Sampson, Vance, Warren, Wayne, Wilson and Wake counties." Searches do not…

There aren't Greek columns tall or wide enough to camouflage Barack Obama's impending North Carolina catastrophe. In September, the campaigner-in-chief will travel to Charlotte for his party's presidential nominating convention. For once, the incurable jetsetter may wish he had stayed home. Obama's stage managers envision a triumphant, unifying coronation reminiscent of their 2008 DNC…

So the Democratic National Committee (DNC) gave a walk-through Wednesday for network journalists planning on covering the party's nominating convention this summer in Charlotte. But while the DNC is trumpeting the convention as "the most open and accessible in history," the Charlotte Observer's Mark Washburn complained that the briefing, attended by some 500 journalists, was kept strictly off…

Bill Randall is a candidate for Congress, running in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District.  Mr. Randall also happens to be an African-American.  In early October, Randall had a campaign billboard vandalized with a spray-painted, vulgar phallic symbol, accompanied by the letters "KKK”. It was the kind of message that would normally launch the media into full-blown racial apoplexy.  One…

UPDATE: John Frank responded to yours truly in an email. Go to the end of the post for the email and my reax. Yesterday, Raleigh News & Observer blog contributor jbfrank, who from all indications is also RN&O reporter John Frank, assured readers that North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue was joking when she suggested that "I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress…

Apparently there's no audio or video of North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue's Tuesday humdinger, namely that "I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover." -- yet. If none surfaces, that will be too bad, because the guess here is that the…

Bruce Siceloff at the Raleigh News & Observer had the task on Tuesday of writing up the results of his newspaper's follow-up investigation into the safety of bridges in the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina area after Barack Obama's visit there last week. In a speech there, the President asserted that "In North Carolina alone, there are 153 structurally deficient bridges that need to be…

In light of a new raft of abysmal polling data for President Obama, Martin Bashir this afternoon brought on Democratic National Convention committee CEO Steve Kerrigan to rally rank-and-file Democrats at home watching MSNBC. At one point, Kerrigan insisted that "at the president's direction, we're the first and only convention in history to eliminate corporate money, lobbyists' money, PAC…

The liberal blog Talking Points Memo is highlighting an academic study of the Tea Party that somehow finds that the Tea Party is both authoritarian and libertarian (in addition to being nativist and afraid of change). How does that make sense? Apparently, this means that Tea Party activists want a return to constitutional principles and also believe that children should listen to their…

On Friday I noted an AP report about some trouble within the Democratic Party coalition as some labor unions have threatened to boycott the 2012 nominating convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. I wondered if the major mainstream media outlets would report the news. Unfortunately it appears many haven't. A search of major newspapers published between August 12 and 15 and featuring the words…

It was a tiny item in the New York Times -- a brief at the bottom of page B14 of Tuesday's sports section, under Lacrosse: “Crystal Mangum, who falsely accused three Duke players of raping her in 2006, was charged with murder in the death of her boyfriend.” The man died two weeks after Mangum stabbed him, and Mangum has now been charged with murder. The Times may prefer to forget that name,…