North Carolina Open Thread: NC-Sen, NC-11, Shady Republican Casino and a Lot of Whining in Raleigh

     NC            260,099  +1,807    4,157       13             218,541          37,401 

SC-based GOP mega-donor with shady past and ties to Burr, Tillis is behind controversial Catawba casino

Wallace Cheves, whose previous legal troubles include millions in civil fines, used this money to clear legal obstacles for the project

When the Catawba Indian Nation began a seven-year battle to open a new casino resort in Cleveland County, it faced long odds. The South Carolina tribe needed to change federal law and longstanding Indian gaming policy to move across the border, to a state friendlier to gaming.

But they had a secret weapon: a partnership with a well-connected Republican mega-donor.

Wallace Cheves, the South Carolina businessman developing the casino through his company Skyboat Gaming, brought serious political influence to the fight. In the last two years Cheves has given $160,000 to the Republican National Committee and hundreds of thousands more to campaigns and political action committees that supported politicians working to remove obstacles for the casino.

Cheves also brings to the project a checkered history in gaming that includes video poker, electronic bingo, sweepstakes games and riverboat gambling. It also includes legal troubles — both criminal and civil — in several states.

Western NC GOP House candidate sounds racist dog whistle in attack on journalist

Trip Gabriel, New York Times, & Laura Leslie, WRAL Capitol Bureau chief

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Madison Cawthorn, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House from western North Carolina, created an attack website accusing a journalist of leaving a job in academia “to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.”

The journalist, Tom Fiedler, who had written favorably about Cawthorn’s opponent, is a retired dean of the Boston University College of Communications. He volunteered for the 2020 presidential campaign of Booker, a Democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey. Fiedler has since written articles and fact-checks about Cawthorn for a nonprofit news website in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, where Cawthorn is facing Moe Davis, a former Air Force prosecutor. He isn't affiliated with Davis' campaign and hasn't donated to it. The attack on Fiedler was reported by The Bulwark, which called it “a despicable smear” echoing racist remarks by President Donald Trump.

"My initial reaction was to find it so ludicrous that it was hardly worth a response," said Fiedler, a Pulitzer Prize winner who was part of the team at the Miami Herald that exposed the extramarital affair of one-time presidential candidate Gary Hart. Cawthorn's campaign has complained about him before, he said, "accusing me of being biased against Mr. Cawthorn because Mr. Cawthorn is a white candidate."

Fiedler has written a series of investigative stories on Cawthorn, raising questions about how truthful the candidate has been about his past and his qualifications. "It’s basic journalism," he said. "When a candidate of any kind presents herself or himself to the public in a particular way, the role of a journalist is to actually check it out."

By late Thursday, the website’s language accusing Fiedler of seeking to ruin white male candidates had been deleted. It was changed to read that Fiedler had “become a political operative and is an unapologetic defender of left-wing identity politics.”

Trump and BergerMoore whine to Supreme Court about ballot extension 

They're just throwing shit against the wall to see what will stick:

President Donald Trump’s campaign and North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to return the state to a shorter deadline for accepting late-arriving absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day.

The legislative leaders argue in their appeal that the longer deadline, which was extended after early voting had begun, will result in unequal treatment of voters and dilute the value of ballots cast before the rule was changed.

What? Seriously, what? Even if those later ballots somehow did "dilute" the value of earlier votes cast, refusing to count the later ballots makes their value absolutely zero. But of course there is no dilution, this is just another "divide and conquer" tactic by Republicans. Trying to pit voters who mailed their ballots in early against those who didn't. Create a conflict where one doesn't exist, and then ask the court to settle that conflict. It's a variation of a strawman logical fallacy, but in this case, the strawman is the victim, not the antagonist. I agree with Josh Stein 100%:

But North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat whose office represents the state elections board in court, accused Republicans of trying to make it harder to vote.

“If voters comply with the statute and mail in their ballots on or before Election Day, they should not be penalized by slow mail delivery in a pandemic. The Republicans have lost this argument at every turn because they are trying to stop votes from being counted,” he said in a statement Thursday.

I actually asked this question on Twitter yesterday, but the platform seems to be down again. But as of late last night, no Republicans had tried to answer. Because there is no viable answer when you stifle somebody's Constitutional right to vote.