Cross posted on Amplify

The Healthy Youth Act (HB 88) will go to a vote on the house floor tomorrow, and if it passes it will be the most important reproductive rights victory in NC in over 15 years (since the NC legislature introduced abstinence-only in the mid 1990’s.)  The Healthy Youth act has passed three committees (Education, Health, and Appropriations), and this is the FINAL STEP in passing in the state House before it moves to the state senate. 

I am interested in what OP folks think about the disruption Tuesday evening at the University of the planned talk by Tom Tancredo, preventing him from speaking. I hope we don't see this as a campus issue isolated from the rest of local progressive politics, because it raises fundamental questions about freedom of speech and liberalism.

To me this seems very simple. Tancredo's views on immigration may be loathsome, but he had a right to speak. I am repeatedly appalled, I have to add, at the lack of appreciation of this basic point among some of my fellow progressives and liberals. Free speech applies even to people who are wrong.

At a time when partisans seem to be cherishing antagonisms and keeping wounds open, it's nice to have a reason to celebrate a town treasure in common.  

Rudy Tempesta, our 83-year-old letter-carrier on the Estes-West Coker Hills route (I think we're all the 2413 part of the zipcode), was honored yesterday for not one but two million miles without an accident over 63 years of service to the US Postal Service. 

That's remarkable enough, but as "Rudy's people" have come to learn, there's a lot more to him than putting catalogues and bills in our mailboxes.  At yesterday's ceremony amid the sorting stations at the Estes Dr. post office, Rudy showed off one of the five medals he got for flying missions in WW2, when he was part of the group covering the Tuskegee airmen, and he pointed out the other veterans he now works with.