North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper speaking at a Biden-Harris campaign rally earlier this year. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

The New York Times and CNN were the first to report on Monday evening that North Carolina’s Gov. Roy Cooper has withdrawn from consideration to be the running mate for the all-but-certain Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.

The reporting by the two national outlets — both of which cited unnamed sources — confirmed a story posted this morning by Bloomberg that Harris’s team had narrowed its focus to three potential candidates: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona U.S. Senator Mark Kelly.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear also has been mentioned as a possible running mate to Harris and appeared on her behalf at a rally n Forsyth County, Georgia, on Sunday.

It has long been common for potential candidates seeking to be selected for high governmental posts to withdraw ahead of time when they receive word that they will not get the nod.

In a post on the social media platform X later in the evening, Cooper confirmed the news:

Cooper did not directly address the vice-presidential pick Monday evening as he took part in a virtual fundraiser hosted by the group “White Dudes for Harris.” Cooper used his four minutes in the national spotlight to tell supporters that disrespect of women permeates Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans.

Cooper then turned his attention to a series of remarks attributed to Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, who’s running for governor.

“Here are some of the horrible things that Mark Robinson has said, which I think he’s saying the not so quiet part out loud for MAGA Republicans.?He has said that men should lead not women. He has said that once women get pregnant, that it’s not their body anymore. He has said that women who aren’t responsible enough to keep their skirts down are having abortions. That’s the kind of disrespect of women that we see with MAGA Republicans and particularly in their leaders,” said Cooper.

Cooper called Harris a strong woman, who cares about the pocketbook issues. “So, here’s what I tell you guys, be unafraid, be unafraid to go and talk with your friends about the importance of this race, the importance of electing Kamala Harris’s president and the importance to our country. I know we all love our country and now we can show it by getting to work,” Cooper said.

As NC Newsline previously reported, Cooper was considered a strong contender for the running mate slot given his status as a popular Democratic governor in a toss-up state that has almost always voted Republican in recent presidential elections. That he is nearing the end of his second term, cannot run again this fall, and has a longstanding relationship with Harris dating back to their years as North Carolina and California attorneys general were also considered strong selling points.

Some observers, however, have noted that at 67, Cooper is the oldest of the potential candidates and is not known as an especially gifted orator. The fact that North Carolina law makes the state’s Lt. Governor the “acting governor” when the real governor is out of the state was also seen by some as a potential liability, given that Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is the Republican nominee for the state’s highest office in the fall.

This story is republished from?NC Newsline,?a sister publication of the Kentucky Lantern and part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.?

(Photo by Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)

What in the world could they have been thinking?

That’s one of the questions (or, at least, one hopes it is) that most white Americans ask themselves periodically when contemplating the evil of human slavery – the institution that undergirds so much of their modern privilege and wealth. How could any human being ever think themselves entitled to own another human because of their skin color?

But, of course, as many Native Americans regularly remind us, the brutal enslavement of millions of Africans and people of African descent is far from the nation’s only original sin. And it’s also far from the only example from American history that readily gives rise to that question – “What in the world could they have been thinking?”

What in the world could white people have been thinking when they denied even the most rudimentary of civil rights to Black Americans and enforced racist miscegenation laws for another century after the end of slavery?

What in the world could American men have been thinking when they denied women the right to vote for nearly a century-and-a-half, along with an array of basic property rights, for another half-century-plus after that?

What in the world could the nation’s factory owners have been thinking at the turn of the last century when they employed thousands of preadolescents in virtual peonage?

What in the world could the nation’s political leaders have been thinking when they imprisoned 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment/concentration camps during World War II?

What in the world could leaders of all parties and races have been thinking when they made LGBTQ+ people criminals and denied them the most basic of human rights – like the right to marry – right up until 2015?

And, as even a moment’s honest contemplation reveals, new entries continue to emerge (and hopefully always will) in the list of “what in the world could they have been thinking?” questions.

Even comfortable progressives who now smugly contemplate their own relative enlightenment will (one suspects and hopes, anyway) continue to learn and progress and look back years from now on their own blind spots and prejudices and ask, “what in the world were we thinking?”

Of course, the encouraging flipside to this phenomenon is that many people – even some of the chief architects of the nation’s top “what in the world could they have been thinking? moments – i.e., the old, white and privileged men who make up roughly 10% of the population – can and do learn, see the errors of their and their forebears’ past ways, and find paths to growth and progress.

For a classic example, consider the man who signed into law this week’s Juneteenth national holiday into law three years ago.

As anyone old enough to remember the treatment of Prof. Anita Hill during the U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas will attest, President – then Senator — Joe Biden was and is no saint. Rather, he was and is an imperfect human being with plenty of foibles and prejudices who was and is capable of having his own “what in the world was he thinking?” moments.

But there’s another thing that this week’s holiday serves to remind us about the president – one that distinguishes him from a large percentage of his peers in the political world: Biden is also a man who can see the past clearly and honestly and who learns and progresses.

Fifty years ago, as a young and “moderate” border state senator, the notion that Biden would ultimately become a champion of civil and human rights, a partner to the nation’s only Black president and vice president, and the proud signatory of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act – something he called “one of the greatest honors I have had as president” – would have seemed absurd.

But today, thanks to his willingness and ability to think and learn and grow and confront the nation’s “what in the world were they thinking?” moments, Biden has become one of the nation’s most impactful presidents when it comes to civil and human rights and an important bridge figure in the nation’s history.

And this, of course, represents a sharp and admirable break with his predecessor – a president who devoted his term in office looking to return to the nation’s past and who never acknowledged, much less admitted and apologized for, numerous direct acts of racial and gender prejudice and discrimination for which he was personally responsible (be it the false and racist “birther” attacks on President Barack Obama, his pre-political career record as a discriminatory landlord, his embrace of white nationalist groups while in office, or his sexual misconduct toward women).

What in the world could they have been they thinking?

This week is a good one to contemplate that question with respect to a lot of moments in American history – even the 146-year delay in recognizing the Juneteenth holiday itself. But it’s also a fine week to think honestly about our modern politics and whether our present-day leaders will have the courage and honesty to keep asking it.

This commentary is republished from NC Newsline, a sister publication of Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.

Cutting power plant emissions and weaning ourselves off carbon fuels will be costly but not as costly as the disastrous consequences of climate change. (Photo by Michigan Advance)

If the five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, Americans can be found at all points along the continuum when it comes to global climate change and the environmental crisis that accompanies it.

Like many who’ve contemplated a grim health-care diagnosis that seems to belie of how they feel in the moment, millions of people — even, at times, those who know better — still cling to the notion that this is all some kind of big mistake.

After all, the leaves continue to change. Stories of Rocky Mountain blizzards still populate TV weather reports. Football fans still bundle up during late season games. “Maybe things aren’t really that bad,” goes the thinking.

And anger? One need only glance at any of the oversized, gas guzzling trucks and SUV’s barreling down our highways sporting “MAGA” and “Climate Change is BULLCRAP!” bumper stickers to see it in action. (Never mind, of course, that insurance giants, the U.S. military and even giant oil companies have all long since acknowledged the reality of human-driven global warming.)

Meanwhile, though they acknowledge the situation, aspiring bargainers look for cheap, pain-free ways out of the fix we’re in – think of those too-good-to-be-true clickbait ads found on Facebook feeds and in the bowels of webpages promising miraculous energy “solutions.”

And sadly, as journalist Josh Kurtz of news outlet Maryland Matters recently reported, climate anxiety and depression have become a boom industry for the nation’s therapists.

But what of “acceptance”? What does that mean and how is it relevant in this context?

Thankfully, as science continues to demonstrate, it doesn’t have to be merely about resigning ourselves to a grim and hopeless future.

Yes, the situation is serious – even dire. And even in a best-case scenario, things like sea-level rise, severe weather, drought, wildfires, crop failures, species extinction and forced mass human migration are going to get appreciably worse.

But as a recent report authored by States Newsroom national energy reporter Robert Zullo detailed last week, we still confront hugely important policy decisions that will make an enormous difference in determining the habitability of the world we’ll hand to our children and grandchildren in the decades to come.

And as seems so often to be the case these days, a lot of these decisions will come down to whether we will embrace intentional public solutions, and are willing to foot the bill, and perhaps endure some sacrifices.

At issue is a federal EPA plan to dramatically reduce carbon emissions from electric power plants. These plants spew about a quarter of all climate change inducing greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

And in this case, it truly is a “pay a lot now” or “pay even more later” moment.

As Zullo reports, EPA’s draft rule creates new emissions targets for gas and coal plants in the coming years that depend on their planned retirement dates and capacity factors – a measure of how much power a plant produces over time relative to how much it could have produced at full operation. The basic idea is to require coal and gas units that don’t plan to retire in the near term and are operating at higher capacity factors to undertake more rigorous carbon reductions.

Not surprisingly, however, some power industry officials and electric grid regulators complain that it will involve huge costs, require difficult technology advances and impose big challenges on the grid – especially at a time when we’re moving to power even more things – our cars, our furnaces – with electricity.

According to Jim Robb, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the U.S. “is a country that hasn’t proven its ability to develop infrastructure to support” ambitious changes of this kind. He and some other experts – though not all – worry that getting the grid up to speed and effectively integrating big new infusions of wind, solar and stored battery power will be hugely expensive and technically challenging and could lead to reliability problems.

And you know what? Both sides — the EPA architects of the plan and their critics — are undoubtedly right.

Yes, slashing power plant emissions and weaning ourselves from carbon fuels right away are utterly essential.

And yes, to do so will require big new infrastructure investments and ambitious technological advances and, almost certainly, cost billions upon billions of dollars in taxes and rate hikes.

But it’s also true we simply have no other choice. If we don’t rapidly end our addiction to carbon fuels by, among other things, constructing a sustainable electric grid, we’ll soon be paying trillions of dollars to deal with the disastrous consequences and rapidly spiraling costs of climate change – in everything from food prices to storm recovery to defense spending.

The bottom line: Yes, the climate crisis is massive and daunting. Humanity has never before faced — much less successfully tackled — a challenge of such magnitude and importance. The grounds for grief are plentiful.

But the sooner we get over the denial, anger, bargaining, and depression and resign ourselves to facing up to (and dealing with) the facts, by far the better off we’ll be.

This commentary is republished from NC Newsline, a sister publication of Kentucky Lantern and part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.?