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ken martin
'Bloodless Coup': NC Supreme Court Partially Upholds GOP Vote-Tossing Effort
"It is no small thing to overturn the results of an election in a democracy by throwing out ballots that were legally cast consistent with all election laws in effect on the day of the election," one dissenting justice said.
Apr 12, 2025
In what North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein called a "dark day" for the state, the North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday delivered a partial victory to Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin, who is challenging some 65,000 votes in his bid to overturn the narrow win of his Democratic opponent and incumbent state Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs.
The Supreme Court, ruling 4-2, partially overturned an appeals court decision earlier this month that gave all the challenged voters 15 days to affirm their identities. Instead, the state's highest court ruled that around 60,000 ballots with registration inconsistencies would not be challenged, but approximately 5,000 overseas or military voters would have to verify their identities within 30 days. Riggs said she would challenge the ruling in federal court, and asked the court to temporarily block the order.
"I'm the proud daughter of a 30-year military veteran who was deployed overseas, and it is unacceptable that the court is choosing to selectively disenfranchise North Carolinians serving our country, here and overseas," Riggs said in a statement. "While I'm gratified to see the Court of Appeals reversed on the erroneous decision to potentially disenfranchise the more than 60,000 North Carolinians whose registration my opponent has recklessly challenged, I will not waiver in my fight to protect the fundamental freedoms for which our military service members and their families have sacrificed so much."
"This shocking decision abandons the judiciary's most basic role, to protect the rights of the people, and sanctions an outright attempt to steal an election."
Riggs won the November contest to remain on the state Supreme Court by 734 votes, but Griffin has challenged several thousand votes, predominantly on two grounds: Around 60,000 of the challenged votes are from in-state voters whose driver's license or social security numbers were missing from a state database of registered voters, while another approximately 2,000 to 7,000 are overseas or military voters who did not show ID when voting absentee. A significant number of the votes he challenged belonged to people living in Democratic-leaning counties.
The state Supreme Court on Friday ruled that the 60,000 in-state voters should not be challenged because their rights should not be denied due to “mistakes made by negligent election officials in registering citizens who are otherwise eligible to vote," as The New York Times reported.
However, the court allowed the challenge to the overseas votes to stand, even though overseas voters have never before been required to show ID since a state-voter ID law went into effect.
"Republicans are surgically targeting military voters from six counties and forcing them to re-prove themselves or be disenfranchised," Anderson Clayton, the chairwoman of the North Carolina Democratic Party, said in a statement reported by the Times.
Finally, the court also allowed the votes of nearly 300 voters who had never lived in North Carolina—often the children of North Carolina residents who turned 18 while living abroad—to be tossed.
If the state Supreme Court's ruling stands and the military and overseas votes are rejected, Griffin has said he expects it will be enough to tip the election in his favor, WRAL Newsreported.
The two dissenting justices vehemently condemned the majority decision.
"It is no small thing to overturn the results of an election in a democracy by throwing out ballots that were legally cast consistent with all election laws in effect on the day of the election," Democratic Justice Anita Earls wrote. "Some would call it stealing the election, others might call it a bloodless coup, but by whatever name, no amount of smoke and mirrors makes it legitimate."
Justice Richard Dietz, a Republican, broke with his party and agreed that the court should not alter election laws after the fact. He also criticized his colleagues for not hearing arguments before making their decision.
"By every measure, this is the most impactful election-related court decision our state has seen in decades," Dietz wrote. "It cries out for our full review and for a decisive rejection of this sort of post hoc judicial tampering in election results."
State and national Democratic Party leaders also spoke out against the court's decision.
"Today is a dark day for our courts and our state," North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein wrote on social media. "The North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that certain active duty military voters serving our nation must jump through hoops that other voters don't. All voters have a constitutional right to be treated equally under the law—it is foundational to our democracy. It's unconscionable, and this decision cannot stand."
Former Attorney General Eric Holder called the ruling "both a disgrace and legacy defining for those who put their names behind it."
"This shocking decision abandons the judiciary's most basic role, to protect the rights of the people, and sanctions an outright attempt to steal an election," he said in a statement. "The North Carolina Supreme Court's Republican majority has, for naked partisan reasons, cherrypicked whose votes count and whose do not. It is the height of political arrogance to tell military members who serve and sacrifice for our country, and other voters, that their votes and those of their family members are questionable."
Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Ken Martin said: "Jefferson Griffin doesn't get to pick and choose whose votes count in an election—no politician does. The men and women serving in our military will not allow their voices to be silenced by a desperate loser like Griffin."
"The nation is watching North Carolina," Martin continued. "Meanwhile, the DNC and Democrats across this country stand ready to marshal resources and manpower to ensure every vote cast in this election is counted. The people's voices will be heard, and Justice Allison Riggs will take her rightful place on the North Carolina Supreme Court."
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Under Trump, Egg Prices Smash Record for Third Straight Month
"The only egg prices Donald Trump is lowering," quipped the DNC chair, "is our nest eggs."
Apr 10, 2025
For the third straight month, U.S retail egg prices have hit a record high, despite falling wholesale prices, no bird flu outbreaks, and President Donald Trump's campaign promises—and recent misleading claims.
On Thursday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index (CPI) reported the average retail cost of a dozen eggs rose from $5.90 in February to $6.23 last month.
Egg prices continue to increase despite bird flu outbreak slowing finance.yahoo.com/news/egg-pri...
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— Yahoo Finance (@yahoofinance.com) April 10, 2025 at 6:22 AM
Earlier this week, Trump claimed that "eggs are down 79%" due to his administration's work, a possible reference to the wholesale price, which does not reflect retail cost due to the role that profit-hungry industrial producers and grocery cartels play in inflating prices.
Trump also said that egg prices "are going down more," a statement that contradicts not only recent trends but also his own administration's Food Price Outlook, which forecasts a 57.6% increase in egg prices for 2025, with a prediction interval of 31.1%-91.5%.
Recent record egg prices have largely been driven by an avian flu epidemic that has forced farmers to cull over 166 million birds, most of them egg-laying hens. However, no farms are currently reporting any bird flu outbreaks.
On Tuesday, Cal-Maine Foods, the nation's largest egg producer, announced quarterly profits of $509 million, more than triple its gains from a year ago. The Mississippi-based company, which produces around 20% of U.S. eggs, also enjoyed a more than 600% increase in gross profits between fiscal years 2021-23, according to the consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch (FWW).
Yet even as its profits soared, Cal-Maine still took $42 million in federal compensation for losses due to bird flu.
The top five egg producers own roughly half of all U.S. laying hens. The biggest of those corporations is Cal-Maine, which just announced quarterly profits of $509 million — more than 3x what it made a year ago. Corporate concentration + bird flu = a price-hiking free for all.
— Robert Reich (@rbreich.bsky.social) April 9, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Last month, the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust division launched an investigation of alleged price-fixing by the nation's largest egg producers, including Cal-Maine, which isn't even the largest recipient of avian flu-related government assistance. Versova, which operates farms in Iowa and Ohio, has been allotted more than $107 million in federal bird flu relief, The Washington Postreported Wednesday. Hillandale Farms, a Pennsylvania-based company sold last month to Global Eggs, received $53 million in avian flu-related subsidies.
"For those companies to be bailed out and then turn around and set exploitative prices, it just adds insult to injury for consumers," Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, told the Post. "Absolutely, it's unfair."
FWW research director Amanda Starbuck took aim at the corporate food system, saying Thursday that "the industry is proving itself effective at extracting enormous profits out of American consumers."
"We are all paying for it—at the store, with food shortages, and with the growing threat of the next pandemic," she continued.
"Restoring sanity to the grocery aisle will require immediate action to transform our food system," Starbuck added. "To lower egg prices, the Trump administration must take on the food monopolies, hasten and prioritize its investigation into corporate price fixing, and stop the spread of factory farms."
The fresh CPI figures weren't all bad news, as the index saw its first decline in five years, falling 0.1% mainly on the strength of lower oil prices. The 12-month increase in consumer prices also slowed from 2.8% to 2.4%.
However, the mildly positive CPI news was overshadowed by the economic uncertainty caused by Trump's mercurial global trade war, including a ramped-up 145% tariff on imports from China, one of the top U.S. trading partners, and ongoing stock market chaos.
"The only egg prices Donald Trump is lowering," Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin quipped earlier this week, "is our nest eggs."
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What Can Be Done About the Left’s Diminished DNC Presence?
The recent race for DNC chair raises questions about how the progressive wing of the party can and should move forward toward 2028.
Feb 09, 2025
Just before starting to write my lament about what a dramatic step backward the recent campaign for Democratic National Committee chair had been, I opened an Our Revolution email that told me, “We beat back the party establishment at the DNC.”
Now Our Revolution being a direct organizational descendent of the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and me having been a 2016 Sanders convention delegate, I feel pretty confident that our ideas of who “we” means are pretty much the same. So what accounts for the widely divergent takes?
For those who haven’t been following this, Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin was just elected to lead the DNC for the next four years, defeating Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler by a 246.5–134.5 vote margin. There was no contested election four years ago, because by tradition a just-elected president selects the new chair; contested elections generally follow defeats. In the last one, in 2017, former Obama administration Secretary of Labor Tom Perez won the job, beating Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison in a second round of voting, 235--200.
At the moment there is no one obviously positioned to take up the Sanders’ mantle in the 2028 presidential campaign.
Ellison’s candidacy came in the wake of his having been just the second member of Congress to support Sanders in the prior year’s presidential primaries, and the fact that Sanders people harbored serious grievances with the DNC over its perceived favoritism for the ultimate nominee, Hillary Clinton, lent a distinct edge to the election, bringing it considerably more buzz than the one that just occurred. At the time, former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, a vociferous opponent of Sanders’ run—who had once declared, “The most effective thing liberals and progressives can do to advance our public policy goals... is to help Clinton win our nomination early in the year”—now thought there was “a great deal to be said for putting an active Sanders supporter in there,” so as to clear the air “of suspicions and paranoia.” But Clinton and Barack Obama apparently didn’t think so, and Clinton’s past Obama cabinet colleague, Perez, took up the torch in a race that produced a level of grassroots involvement seldom if ever before seen in this contest.
Although the office is traditionally considered organizational rather than ideological and the 2017 candidates did run on those issues, the underlying political differences were obvious to all. This time around, the race was generally understood to involve little if any political disagreement on the issues. By way of explaining its support for new party chair Martin, Our Revolution characterized runner-up Wikler, as “an establishment candidate backed by Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer, and bankrolled by the billionaire class.” We understand that election campaigns are about sharpening the perception of differences between the candidates, but still this seems a rather thin, flimsy basis for hailing the vote as an anti-establishment triumph, given that Martin has publicly stated that he doesn’t want the party to take money from "those bad billionaires" only from "good billionaires;”and one of the two billionaires who gave a quarter million dollars to Wikler’s campaign was George Soros—probably the DNC’s model “good billionaire.” Besides Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg probably aren’t thinking of donating anyhow. Oh, and Chuck Schumer actually supported Ellison eight years ago.
Actually, “we” did have a horse in the race—2020 Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir. Shakir, who has been running a nonprofit news organization called More Perfect Union, dedicated to “building power for the working class,” argued that Democrats needed a pitch for building a pro-worker economy to go with their criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump’s policy proposals. His viewpoint presented a serious alternative to that of Martin, who told a candidates forum that “we’ve got the right message... What we need to do is connect it back with the voters,”—seemingly a tough position to maintain following an election in which NBC’s 20-state exit polling showed the majority of voters with annual household incomes under $100,000 voting Republican, while the majority of those from over-$100,000 households voted Democrat. But even though Shakir was a DNC member and thereby able to get the 40 signatures of committee members needed to run, he entered the race far too late to be taken for a serious contender and ultimately received but two votes.
Mind you, none of this critique comes as a criticism of the work of the two state party chairs who were the principal contenders. Martin touts the fact that Democrats have won every statewide election in Minnesota in the 14 years that he has chaired the party, and anyone who understands the effort that goes into political campaign work can only admire that achievement. Nor is Our Revolution to be criticized for taking the time to discern what they thought would be the best possible option in a not terribly exciting race that was nevertheless of some importance.
At the same time it’s hard not to regret the diminished DNC presence of the “we” that Our Revolution spoke of, after “we” legitimately contended for power in the last contested election. Certainly this lack of interest was in no small part a consequence of the extraordinary circumstances that produced a presidential nominee who had not gone before the voters in a single primary—for the first time since Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
More importantly, it raises a serious question for those of us who believe that the structure and history of the American political system require the left’s engagement in the Democratic Party—uncomfortable and unpleasant as that may be at times. As the social scientists like to say, politics abhors a vacuum, and absent a national Democratic Party presence for the perspective that motivated the Sanders campaigns, people seeking action on the big questions on the big stage may start to look elsewhere. And elsewhere always looms the possibility of the cul-de-sac of yet of another third party candidacy that holds interesting conventions and debates, but ultimately receives only a small share of the vote, but a large share of the blame for the election of a Republican president.
At the moment there is no one obviously positioned to take up the Sanders’ mantle in the 2028 presidential campaign. But we may have to make it our business to find one.
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