WaPo: “Both Carrington and Massey are among a legion of frustrated Democrats in North Carolina eager for a fresh approach after watching their party lose four consecutive U.S. Senate races in a purple state — including, most recently, former state senator Cal Cunningham’s two-point loss last year to incumbent GOP Sen. Thom Tillis. The two…

The Atlantic: “As he bids for a second term as Georgia’s top election administrator, however, Raffensperger is not so much standing in the gap as he is falling through it. A Trump loyalist in Congress, Representative Jody Hice, is challenging him in a primary with the former president’s enthusiastic endorsement, and the state Republican Party…

WaPo: “More than a third of Black-owned land in the South is passed down informally, rather than through deeds and wills, according to land use experts. It’s a custom that dates to the Jim Crow era, when Black people were excluded from the Southern legal system. When land is handed down like this, it becomes…

NY Times: “The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be one of their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P….

The Haitian Times: “James Solages, a Fort Lauderdale-based entrepreneur, is among the six suspects arrested so far in President Jovenel Moise’s assassination, according to Mathias Pierre, minister of elections and inner-party relationship said. Within moments of the name making news, scores of Haitians said on social media that Solages used to work as a security…

News & Observer: “One of the reasons Nikole Hannah-Jones turned down a professorship at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media could be a problem for its future. The prominent Black journalist said she couldn’t work at a place named for the man who told UNC leaders that he doubted her suitability. Hussman was bothered by Hannah-Jones’ connection to ”The 1619…

TX Observer: “Twenty-nine years ago, Montserrat Garibay left Mexico City for Texas with her mother and sister. They were undocumented. At a public middle school in Austin, Garibay learned English. Later, she and her sister founded one of the first organizations nationwide of so-called Dreamers, young immigrants pushing for U.S. citizenship. Garibay became a citizen herself in…

WaPo: “In Louisiana, a state notorious for colorful politicians, Edwin Edwards blazed for half a century, a near-perpetual neon rainbow. The former Louisiana governor and U.S. congressman, 93, who died July 12 of respiratory problems, was a brazen practitioner of the corrupt-politics-as-theatrics style mastered by the legendary Depression-era demagogue Huey Long. Mr. Edwards served three…

NPR: “The city of Charlottesville, Va., removed a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on Saturday, toppling a symbol that was at the center of the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017. The statue — along with another of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson that was also to be removed Saturday — will remain…

Bearing Drift: “Lee Atwater’s strategy in this quotation from Alexander Lamis’s 1984 book, The Two-Party South, is on full display in the current Republican apoplectic aneurysm over Critical Race Theory (CRT). As Sir Winston Churchill is credited with saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”  Apparently, if there isn’t a crisis to use, the modern…