Month: April 2026

Slow slide to irrelevance begins at The Cherokee Scout

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Brasstown resident Phil Mattox had his heart in the right place last week when he encouraged us in a letter to the editor of The Cherokee Scout to support our local newspaper, but I am afraid he is suffering under an illusion.

The Cherokee Scout is a “local” newspaper in the way that the Murphy McDonald’s is a local restaurant. Yes, the paper has a local address, and a few locals work there, but they have essentially the same jobs as the local crew at McDonald’s.

As for The Scout doing, “an excellent job keeping our community well informed” — well, I beg to differ.

They aren’t microwaving frozen food from a nationwide corporate menu but they might as well be.

I still have no idea why our last sheriff abruptly resigned and what, exactly, the local district attorney had on him to force that resignation.

I had no real idea of the full extent of the mess at the Social Services Department a few years back until it was so far along that the state was bringing criminal charges and our property taxes were going up to help pay for lawsuits against the county brought on by the appalling mismanagement and lack of oversight by the Cherokee County Commission.

But the painstaking business of local government newspaper coverage in the sense of watching the actual sausage being made — that didn’t happen in our local newspaper. Not at all. Oh, there may well have been a general sense that some of the local county commissioners were yahoos, MAGA dunderheads or little better, but the newspaper generally treated them as serious adults without ever drilling down into the muck and mire beneath their surface.

We have scarcely been told, even after the facts rooted their way to the surface, that, no, they were’t serious adults at all. Fat lot of good that after-the-fact reporting did us.

At least we know there was a six-figure payout to the former county attorney by the outgoing commissioners — a sweetheart deal if ever there was one. But if any of our local reporters or editors asked the outgoing commissioners what in blazes they were thinking and how and why the sweetheart payout happened I’ve yet to read about it in our “excellent” local newspaper.

Not even a no comment from the county-commission jokesters — if they have ever been approached by a reporter at all.

Heck, isn’t that what reporters do?

Way back in 2013, The Philadelphia Daily News labeled Murphy as a place “Where American Journalism Went to Die” after the Scout’s publisher — the same David Brown that leads the Scout today — published a controversial apology to the local sheriff.

The incident — shameful to most journalists but apparently not to Mr. Brown — involved a dispute over public records, privacy rights, and a potential boycott. The sad episode led to intense national criticism of The Scout, including from the esteemed Columbia Journalism Review.

The Scout was, to be blunt, caught in a clear case of disgraceful journalism malpractice.

Bottom line: we haven’t had a local paper in years, and we aren’t apt to ever have one again. What we are almost certainly witnessing now, under Paxton, is the early stage of a corporate squeeze on profits that will have the paper operating on even more stretched resources and thin, inexperienced staff than in years past. The only good news in all this — and this is somewhat counterintuitive — is that The Scout is certain to get much, much worse than today’s already subpar newspaper.

It’s alread begun. Readers can see that with every week’s woeful new edition.

And, yes, that’s probably the good news, because soon The Cherokee Scout will be so bad, so terribly, terribly bad that we will hardly notice its absence when it inevitably arrives, and may even be glad to see its merciful demise at the hands of inept management and unbridled corporate greed and stupidity.

When that day comes, we won’t have lost much.

Crowell will “Go Light a Candle”

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Texas singer and songwriter Rodney Crowell released “Go Light a Candle” featuring Emmylou Harris and Lera Lynn today via New West Records back in February, 2026. 

A protest song, Crowell originally released the single anonymously last year, but after the ICE raids in Minneapolis, decided to give the song a proper release with an accompanying video directed by Joshua Britt and Neilson Hubbard. 

Crowell said, “Although I expected the last presidential election to turn out exactly as it did, I wasn’t ready for what would come next. I shared with my good friend, Sam Baker, how I wanted to write a protest song that wasn’t strident or blatantly insulting anyone’s intelligence other than my own. Sam listened to what I had written and said, ‘Now go light a candle.’ From there, I knew what the song needed to say. Emmylou, Lera Lynn, and Dan Knobler helped me frame the music and, after releasing it anonymously a year ago, in response to the ICE raids in Minneapolis and other sanctuary cities, I decided to stand openly behind the song,” 

“Go Light a Candle” follows Crowell’s 2024 studio album, “Airline Highway.”

The release of “Go Light a Candle” arrives ahead of U.S. tour, which starts in Edmonds, Wash.. He will also launch his first headline shows in Europe in over a decade this April.

Popular Waterfront Road in Murphy to Remain Closed for up to a Month

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A popular waterfront access point and boat ramp in Murphy, North Carolina, is closed and will remain off limits to the public for another month, the Town Manager’s office said.

Payne Street runs from its intersection with Tennessee Street near the Valley River bridge to a public boat launch, where it becomes unpaved but continues on past the town’s wastewater treatment plant and follows the river for a mile or more — largely as a hiking trail for the more adventurous — though it is sometimes accessible to off-road vehicles.

Traffic cones and an out-of-service police car restrict traffic at the entrance to Payne Street at its intersection with Tennessee Street near the Roscoe W. Hall Bridge below the Texana Community, a largely minority residential community in Murphy. Authorities say the closure will be in force for another month.

Payne provides a popular river-view and sight-seeing spot for locals as well as a road that offers easy access for bank fishermen to the Hiwassee River, just above its junction with the Valley River. Low water often leaves the boat ramp unusable, but it can be used when conditions are favorable.

City crews closed the road around the first of April, apparently related to work with a pumping station located on the riverbank at the head of Payne Street.

An out-of-service police car and traffic cones warn traffic away from the road, though the road remains open to local septic businesses who dump their product at the Wastewater Treatment Station.

Payne is just above the 1899 railway trestle that crosses the Valley River at the Murphy River Walk, though Payne itself is not part of the popular local trail network.

Map image showing Payne Street as it runs along the Hiwassee River in Murphy, North Carolina.

Orban drags down Trump and Vance to a defeat of their own

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The overwhelming defeat Sunday of Hungray’s Victor Orban was a huge loss for the already unpopular U.S. President and his second in command.

Vance had travel to Hungary to campaign for Orban, but it did no good — in fact, it more than likely hurt. Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist and the leader of the main opposition party, will now take over as Hungary’s prime minister once the newly elected Parliament meets.

With 66 percent of votes counted, Magyar’s opposition party was on course to win 137 seats — more than a two-thirds majority. Mr. Orban’s party, Fidesz, was expected to win just 55.

Hungary’s Victor Orban (center), an enemy of Democratic governance, concedes defeat in Sunday’s elections.

Shortly before polls closed, the electoral authorities said that more than 77 percent of registered voters had cast ballots, the highest turnout in a Hungarian election since the collapse of Communism in 1989 and the start of democracy.

The implications of the outcome extend far beyond Hungary’s borders. The next prime minister may help alter the course of the war in Ukraine, a neighbor that Mr. Orban has cast as an enemy of Hungary, and affect European security. And the results will be looked at by populists around the world who view the Hungarian leader as a model of success and of pugnacious defiance of the mainstream.

After the results, large crowds of mostly young people thronged the banks of the River Danube in front of the Parliament Building, cheering and waving Hungarian flags. Many were stunned by the speed and scale of the defeat of Mr. Orban, whose party won the four previous elections easily.

— From The New York Times and other news services

White Trash White House

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Posted on 

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Thus spoke U.S. President Donald Trump on his Truth Social social media on Easter Sunday.

You don’t even need to let that sink in. It will of its own accord: Easter Sunday.

So, yes, it really has come to this: Our nation’s foreign affairs are being conducted by the equivalent of inebriated Uncle Rufus from his seat at the American Legion bar outside Toad Suck, Arkansas.

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What a crazy old bastard.

What’s especially unnerving and odious is that my generation elected this potty-mouthed ignoramus, serial liar, draft-dodger, narcissist, convicted rapist, and an overseer of six bankrupt businesses. Six.

And not once have we elected him, but twice — to the highest office in the land.

It should be clear to everyone by now that my generation has woefully failed in its civic duties, and a depressingly large percentage of my group is either too dumb, too deluded, too self-centered or too altogether out of touch to have an inkling of the damage they have done to themselves, their children, their grandchildren and the nation.

We’ve screwed up.

And the thing is, as far as I know, there’s still no rehab for stupidity.

We gotta live with this shit and I’ve no clue how to do it. So I hope you haven’t come here looking for advice. I got nothing but despair.

But even I know that despair is a loser’s game.

“No society can expect its children to engage with a world they think has already given up on them.”

Robert Pondiscio, a former public school teacher who is now at the American Enterprise Institute, made that remark several months back while urging teachers to avoid adopting “an unbearable bleakness” in their classrooms.

Optimism, he argued, is an essential civic virtue.

Yet optimism is something in this day and age that seems to be its own category of rare earth mineral, but it’s out there, and it must be dug from the soil and championed.

Perhaps the only streak of optimism to be found in Trump’s disgraceful Easter Sunday post is that it opens yet another window to his soul that should make it easy to see through for all but the most deranged of his supporters: This is a man off his meds and off his rocker.

This is a man woefully unfit to lead, a man so morally and mentally stunted that questions about his sanity are not only apt they are essential.

Wherever you are on this spectrum of certainty and doubt, it’s okay to start small.

Let’s not join our old high school friends in re-posting ICE-friendly AI smut films; let’s not lean into that pot-like buzz of indulging in quick anger on our social media feeds.

When they go low, we go high really wasn’t bad advice. The air is cleaner and clearer above the clouds.

The view is better, different. It’s true, of course, that our technologies have made it easier for so many of us to see so much more of the world, but never before have so many of us seen so much without understanding what we are seeing.

Take time to understand the world. At the very least, take time to try.

Time may well be running out for there’s no dodging the fact that the USA has become a rouge nation where war crimes and the delight of bombing another nation “back to the stone age” are dangerously close to being normalized.

But there’s nothing normal about insanity.