north carolina

Chris Knight's avatar

So North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Bev Perdue has sworn to stop running negative ads against fellow Democrat primary opponent Richard Moore.

Perdue should have never run any negative ads, period.

Notice how she’s only promising to do this for the primary. Perdue is saying nothing about abstaining from negative campaigning during the lead-up to the November general election. If she had done that, and stuck with it throughout the campaign season, I might be tempted to consider her.

But as it is, I’m still sticking with the policy that I announced last week: any candidate who runs even a single negative campaign commercial or pulls some other “dirty trick” that is easily attributable to his or her campaign, will not get my vote. Because doing such a thing proves beyond all doubt that said candidate does not sincerely want to serve the people. It means that they ...

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Tomorrow night at 9 p.m. EST, MSNBC will broadcast the documentary Meeting David Wilson. It’s a film by David Wilson, a journalist of African descent from New Jersey who spent some time researching his family’s history. In the course of his investigation he traced his lineage to a tobacco plantation in Caswell County, North Carolina. And that led him to an encounter with another David Wilson – this one a white man from Reidsville (where I live) – whose great-great grandfather had owned the great-great grandfather of New Jersey’s David Wilson in the years before the Civil War.

Since posting about it a few days ago I have heard nothing but astounding things about Meeting David Wilson. One person who has seen the film has told me that it is “INCREDIBLY powerful!” Having known Reidsville, North Carolina’s David Wilson for many years, I am certainly looking forward to ...

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This coming Friday night, on April 11th, MSNBC will be premiering the new documentary Meeting David Wilson. It was written and directed by David A. Wilson, a black journalist from New Jersey who took time off from his career to research his family’s history. His quest eventually led him to the plantation in Caswell County, North Carolina where his great-great grandfather was once a slave before the Civil War.

And then David A. Wilson of Newark, New Jersey wound up meeting David B. Wilson of nearby Reidsville, whose great-great grandfather had owned David A. Wilson’s ancestor.

The film is already getting rave reviews. I’ll certainly be tuning in because I’ve known Reidsville’s David Wilson for a long time. He owns Short Sugars Drive-In in Reidsville, a place famous across the country for its barbecue (and where we shot the final scene of Forcery a few years ago).

Click ...

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“Trees will tap dance, elephants will ride in the Indianapolis 500, and Orson Wells will skip breakfast, lunch, and dinner before State finds a way to beat Houston.”

— Dave Kindred
writer for The Washington Post
April 4th, 1983

It became, and remains to this day, the defining sports moment of the modern era.

It was twenty-five years ago tonight, on April 4th, 1983, that North Carolina State won the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship, in what has become regarded by many as the single greatest basketball game ever played and one of the biggest upsets in the history of athletics.

It also produced some of the most memorable sports images to be ever televised or photographed.

What can be said about that game that hasn’t already over a quarter-century? Nobody was expecting the Wolfpack of NC State to take down Houston. Guy Lewis’s Cougars – dubbed “Phi Slamma ...

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World-renowned moonshiner Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton (shown here with an “outlaw” of another sort, country legend Willie Nelson) is facing a possible 15-year prison sentence and a fine of a half-million dollars after pleading guilty in federal court in Tennessee today for practicing the fine art of “makin’ likker”.

A few weeks ago the revenuers busted Popcorn’s “white lightning” operation in Tennessee’s Cooke County. The Feds and Tennessee “citizen harassment authorities” (that’s what I’m going to call ’em) captured three 1,000-gallon stills, almost a thousand gallons of finished moonshine and several hundreds of gallons of corn mash in the raid on Popcorn’s premises. They also found some firearms, which Popcorn wasn’t supposed to have since he’s already a convicted felon from previous moonshining charges.

Which if you ask me, the government should have just left him alone back then, too. What Popcorn is doing is not an act of evil. ...

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EDIT 9:50 p.m. EST 04/01/2008: Click here for a MAJOR BREAKING UPDATE regarding this news story!

Details about this will soon be released to the press via regular channels, but here is what The Knight Shift has learned…

Rockingham County, North Carolina – the #1 tobacco-producing region in the entire country – will soon become the first 100% tobacco-free area in the United States.

What this means is: no smoking anywhere in public, no smoking in private homes, and no cultivation of tobacco on the many farms throughout the county.

It’s part of a deal between county officials and the U.S. Department of Public Health. In exchange for “willingly” giving up tobacco, the federal government will disburse $120 million to assist Rockingham County’s medical and preventative health infrastructure.

If all goes according to plan, there won’t be a cigarette, cigar, pouch of chewing tobacco, or can of tobacco seed ...

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Although to be fair, a lot of other Christians don’t get it either…

(Yes, I admit that I’m watching Robertson’s show tonight on WGSR, ‘cuz more than a few people suggested that after the video I posted in response to last week’s show, that he might use it tonight. So far I haven’t seen it.)

Mr. Robertson, God does not care which “church” we belong to! God is not interested one bit whether we are “Church of Christ” (I’m going to start calling the bunch that broadcasts on WGSR Star 39 as “Church Of Christ In Name Only” or “COCINO” for short to differentiate it from the real Church of Christ, the independent congregations sincerely trying to serve God that most people have heard of) or Baptist or Pentecostal or Catholic or Methodist, or any other denomination…

God does care about whether or not we are seeking for Him, ...

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Marvin Sutton, known far and wide throughout the country (and the world?) as Popcorn Sutton, has been released from jail after posting $20,000 bond, two weeks after a raid by federal revenuers on his moonshine operation in east Tennessee.

I’m assuming that Popcorn has a second home or some other accommodations in Tennessee, because in addition to the bond he also cannot leave the state until at least a hearing next month … that could send him to jail once more. He also must wear an electronic monitoring bracelet, submit to drug testing (and cannot imbibe of his or anyone else’s “likker”), and agree to have his property searched at any time by federal agents.

I’ll say again: Popcorn made a bad move by running a still across state lines in Tennessee, when if he had stayed home in Maggie Valley he could have remained in business. The ...

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Earlier this week this blog reported the arrest of Popcorn Sutton: perhaps the very last of the original Appalachian moonshiners and an American living legend. As of this writing Popcorn is still in jail in east Tennessee after a raid that caught him with almost a thousand gallons of still-brewed booze and many hundreds of pounds of unfinished mash.

Since his arrest, Popcorn Sutton is gradually gaining support for his cause. I’ve heard that a legal defense fund has been established, and I’m trying to find out more details about that. Someone is even selling “Free Popcorn” shirts on CafePress. And now a couple of musicians have done a short song in honor of Popcorn. Enjoy!

...

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You see, this is part of the reason why I absolutely hate what America has turned into. It used to be that government in America was “of the people, by the people and for the people”. Today government in America is “do what we tell you to do or we will kill you!”

And now, said government is more interested in destroying the life of a bona-fide original American character than it is in stopping an invasion by millions of illegals who are entering this country (not to mention that our politicians are way too fixated on one baseball player to care about how their little war with no purpose has just notched its four-thousandth American fatality) …

“Weird” Ed sent me a clipping of this story from the Asheville Citizen-Times about how Popcorn Sutton – Maggie Valley, North Carolina’s resident moonshiner/bootlegger/subject of numerous documentaries/author of Me and My Likker...

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