The urge to speak no ill of the dead is a powerful one.  And it was on full display this week as former Senator Jesse Helms was laid to rest.  

The media glossed over almost all of Helms' ugly history as the last unapologetically racist politician of the segregation era.  Largely ignored was how Helms stirred the pot of bigotry and hatred to win elections and further his political goals.  The people Helms hurt throughout his career deserve better.

More after the jump.

Jesse Helms’ death comes as no surprise, since his health had rapidly declined after he retired from the U.S. Senate in 2002. Yet it’s fitting that he died on the Fourth of July.

Helms was a disgrace to North Carolina and the nation, and what better time to celebrate our independence from the bigoted, hate-filled politics he stood for.

During Helms’ heyday, the question on many people’s minds about North Carolina was how could its citizens keep re-electing an extreme right wing, unrepentant segregationist, self-proclaimed "redneck" like Helms? The perception was that the state was filled with racists, or that Helms’ voters were ignorant and uneducated. The reality is more complex.

More below the fold.

Last month, California gave its stamp of approval to same-sex marriage, becoming only the second state after Massachusetts to do so.  Fear of gay marriage has long been exploited by right-wingers as the ultimate homophobic weapon to scare up bigotry and votes. Predictably, a parade of anti-gay idiots came out of the woodwork, howling in protest.

But they're on the wrong side of history. And to fully understand recent events, it's important to remember a tragedy that happened thirty-five years ago, and how much things have changed for gay Americans since then.

On the last Sunday in June, 1973, a gay bar in New Orleans called the UpStairs Lounge was firebombed. The resulting blaze killed 32 people. The death toll was the worst in New Orleans history up to that time. It was almost assuredly the largest mass murder of gays and lesbians to ever occur in the United States.

More below the fold.

Voters for Obama is a coalition of voters calling for Democratic elected officials and other superdelegates to support Barack Obama.

Maybe because we’ve been regularly flogging it on DailyKos over the past couple weeks, you’ve visited our website – www.votersforobama.com.

And you’ve used the tools on the site to call or e-mail a superdelegate elected official in your state, asking them to back Obama.  What now?

How much do you want Obama to be the Democratic nominee?  Because if we wanted to badly enough, we could wrap this nomination battle up.  Oh, sure, you say.  Whatever.  Skeptics and cynics, come one, come all – take the superdelegate challenge.

After the jump.

Will John Edwards endorse?  People have been left wondering since he dropped out of the presidential race in late January.

Now influential voices in N.C. are calling for Edwards and others to get off the fence.

From yesterday's (3/26) Raleigh News & Observer:

This is Easter Sunday. I decided in church an hour or so ago that I can no longer be silent on the race between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama...I regret what appears to be the cagey, waiting-to-be-seduced silence of my friends, our governor and our worthy former presidential candidate, John Edwards.

Paul Hardin
Chapel Hill

(The writer is a former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

More after the jump.

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed in response to the diary we posted on Monday ("Voters petitioning superdelegates for Obama in 4 states").

Voters for Obama is a coalition of voters calling for Democratic elected officials and other superdelegates to support Barack Obama.

Our website, www.votersforobama.com, has sparked petition drives to superdelegates in four states including North Carolina, where we first organized.  The site contains everything voters need to contact superdelegates in their states.

Take five minutes and use the tools on our site to call or e-mail an undecided superdelegate near you.

More info after the jump.

Barack did exactly what he needed to do – tackled the Jeremiah Wright flap head-on in a serious, substantive speech.  

He dismissed Wright's comments as "not only wrong, but divisive," and in a way that rejected spin and political positioning and called the episode out as a distraction.  Obama turned things around by speaking truthfully about race and ways to unify the country.  What’s next, probing the political views of his barber?

Use this moment to take action.

Voters for Obama is a coalition of voters calling for Democratic elected officials and other superdelegates to support Barack Obama.

Our website, www.votersforobama.com, has sparked petition drives to superdelegates in four states including North Carolina, where we first organized.  The site contains everything voters need to contact superdelegates near them.

Take five minutes and use the tools on our site to call or e-mail an undecided superdelegate in your state.

More info after the jump.

From the Raleigh News & Observer:

Since President's Day, a coalition of voters has been calling for Democratic elected officials and other superdelegates to support Barack Obama.

Our website, www.votersforobama.com, has drawn nationwide traffic and sparked petition drives to superdelegates in four states including North Carolina, where we first organized.

Drawing on the work done by independent researchers like Democratic Convention Watch and the Superdelegate Transparency Project, the site contains everything voters need to contact superdelegates in their states.

Voters rejected the politics of division in historic Democratic turnout

Facing a loss in South Carolina, the Clintons did their best to spring a trap on Barack Obama. Their game plan was to lower expectations for Hillary, while making an Obama victory appear meaningless. As an unnamed top Clinton adviser admitted to the Associated Press, they would paint Obama as "the black candidate" in a state where African-American voters were 47% of the Democratic primary electorate in 2004.

Until the polls closed, it looked like things were going according to schedule. Hillary signaled South Carolina wasn’t a priority by campaigning elsewhere for most of the week leading up to the primary, leaving Bill to tour the state on her behalf.

Teno Figuero, national outreach director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, had one question for the crowd of nearly 4,000 who turned out at a North Carolina Central University rally in Durham, N.C. for Obama in early November. "How far is South Carolina?" he asked, while warming up the crowd before the candidate took the stage. "Not far enough," hollered back one supporter. But the gameplan was clear.

The Obama campaign was already thinking ahead, and touching down at NCCU was as much about rounding up volunteers for South Carolina’s Jan. 26 primary as winning votes in North Carolina. Supporters who added themselves to the Obama campaign’s text message network at the rally were soon contacted and asked to make the journey south of the border. Which is how we ended up in Columbia, S.C. one weekend in December, canvassing and phonebanking likely Obama voters.

CHAPEL HILL - With every year that passes, September 11, 2001 recedes further into history.  But this year marks the fifth anniversary of another dark time for our country.  The first time we memorialized the victims of 9/11, our (fraudulently) elected leaders were hard at work exploiting this national tragedy by conning us into an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq.

Also on September 11, 2002, citizens in communities across the nation, including Chapel Hill, were speaking out against the rush to war. Sensible voices cautioned not to let the urge to strike back against those responsible for 9/11 blind us to the fact that  Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

John Edwards' campaign wanted to be Dean 2.0, counting on netroots support to power him to victory. But his online momentum has stalled.

From the moment Edwards launched his 2008 campaign by posting a video of his announcement speech on YouTube, he seemed poised to win the title of most internet-savvy presidential candidate. His slick-looking website, his wife Elizabeth's regular posts to the top-rated political blog DailyKos, and his hiring of high profile veterans of Howard Dean's 2004 internet-fueled run like Joe Trippi and Matthew Gross all signaled that Edwards would be making a strong play for netroots support. In the campaign's early days, the media breathlessly covered the campaign's online know-how and swallowed the hype that Edwards '08 would be Dean version 2.0 - bigger, smarter, and better at using the internet to harvest money, volunteers, and votes.

Things haven't quite turned out that way for Edwards.