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2 county officials make shift to GOP By Kurt Allen/Assistant Managing Editor When Robyn Flowers and Barbara Hale were trying to find their place in the world of politics, it was almost a given it would be the Democratic Party. Growing up in the South, Democrats ruled the region, and there was little thought given to being Republican. "I think probably, like most people my age, if you were born and raised in Texas, you've been a Democrat because that's what your family did," said Hale, Walker County's court-at-law judge. How the times do change. Now the South, and Texas...

While they fight it out, a long-time Democratic commissioner in Hamilton County, Tennessee announced Monday that he's switching parties. A release from the State Republican Party pegged Curtis Adams' move to Dean, but a spokesman for the state party tells us that "local party officials have left the option open for Commissioner Adams to join the Republican Party for some time, and I think he has been watching the direction that his party has been taking and decided that now was the right time." Said Adams yesterday: "For almost 18 years in office as a Democrat I believed in what...

JACKSON, Miss., Feb. 14 (UPI) -- Mayor Rusty Quave of D'Iberville, Miss., switched his party affiliation Monday to Republican. With Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour at his side, Quave said he was honored to have found a proper home for his views. "I have served the citizens of D'Iberville as mayor for the past 12 years with a conservative attitude and strong emphasis on economic development and quality of life," Quave said. Quave's decision comes just days after members of the Democratic National Committee elected former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean to be the party's national chairman. The number of Mississippi's Republican...

DURHAM, N.C.--The hundred or so Democratic activists gathered in an auditorium at North Carolina Central University on a January weeknight to meet with state party bigwigs have each been given two paper flags--one green, one red. When someone says something they agree with, attendees are supposed to wave green flags; if they disagree, they wave the red. Plenty of the proposals elicit green flags, like withdrawing from Iraq. Then a member of the state party's executive committee suggests reaching out to NASCAR dads. "We have churches and values," she says, "and we have to make that clear." A wave of...

Raleigh – Jan. 26. As has been reported in the Charlotte Observer, and elsewhere, changes made in the Rules governing the state Senate, upon the opening of the 2005 Session, have raised some eyebrows. Democrat leaders appear to be providing cover for their embattled conservative Senators without causing a revolt among liberals. Maintaining a ban on laptop computers and banning smoking in the Senate Chamber grabbed more attention as Democrat leaders changed the way the Senate does business in fundamental ways. Even greater power over the Senate agenda has been placed in the hands of Rules Committee chairman Sen. Tony...

The biggest political news, at least locally, last week was that Jackson County Tax Assessor Benny Goff switched parties, joining the GOP. Also last week, in faraway Washington, D.C., Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., was speaking to the National Press Club on how to revive the Democratic Party. The two events, as you could easily surmise, were quite different. But there was one word common to both: Values. Goff said the reason for his switch is that his "beliefs and values closely align with the Republican Party's beliefs and values." Kennedy, too, mentioned the "V" word in his speech, saying Democrats...

Trap-shooting rarely qualifies a candidate for public office, but, in 2002, it helped decide the Tennessee governor's race. Sometime that summer, a range owner in eastern Tennessee got wind that both candidates--former Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, and Representative Van Hilleary, a Republican--were avid hunters. As a way to bring his range a little publicity, he challenged the candidates to what he called the Great Tennessee Trap Shoot, to be held over the Labor Day weekend. A souped-up version of skeet, trap involves shotgunning clay pigeons from a variety of positions as they hurtle through the air. In other...

TALLAHASSEE — Pro-guns, pro-business, pro-family and patriotic — sound like the GOP? Nope, it's the Mainstream Democrats, a group of Florida lawmakers touting personal responsibility, morals, patriotism and efficient government to woo back voters in a state where Republicans dominate politics on all but the local levels. "The Republicans started this campaign that the Democrats were liberal, left-wing wackos, and we ignored it because it was so ridiculous," said Sen. Steve Geller of Hallandale Beach, who formed the Florida Mainstream Democratic Alliance last year with a handful of Senate colleagues. "We thought nobody would believe it," Geller said. "We were...

Democrat chairman resigns after disappointing fall elections By The Associated Press After a series of stinging disappointments in this fall's congressional elections, the head of the Louisiana Democratic Party said Monday that he is stepping down from his leadership post. Party chairman Mike Skinner said his resignation would become effective at the next meeting of the Democratic State Central Committee early next year. Skinner, a former U.S. attorney in Louisiana, was elected chairman in March 2003, and that year the Democrats regained the Governor's Mansion with the election of Kathleen Blanco and held onto nearly every statewide elected position. But...

Mississippi's Republican elected officials are robustly promoting their party's presidential ticket, but voters shouldn't expect the same level of partisan enthusiasm from most of the state's top Democrats. At the Neshoba County Fair last week, Mississippi's longest-serving Democratic statewide official, Insurance Commissioner George Dale, surprised some listeners by declaring that he supports Republican President Bush because he doesn't like the Democratic ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards. Dale said Edwards' tough questioning of Judge Charles Pickering during a Senate confirmation hearing was "a slap in the face of every American" - a line that, coincidentally or not, echoed GOP...