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General
Gary Pearce posted on March 08, 2013 11:30
Governor McCrory and Republican legislators were against incentives before they were for them.
McCrory is clearly for them when he can bask in the announcement of 2,600 new jobs by MetLife. (Hello, Snoopy!)
Or maybe he’s for them when they are negotiated by Moore & Van Allen, his old law firm.
But his spokeswoman assures us, “There was a complete firewall and no interaction.”
And a Moore & Van Allen’s spokesman chimes in that the Gov’s old job was “not part in any way, shape or form” with the firm’s economic development team.
Conveniently enough, that spokesman is Brian Nick, identified by the N&O as “a former top McCrory campaign adviser.”
Does that mean the Governor deserves no credit whatsoever for what apparently was an eight-month courtship? He just showed up for the cameras?
Senator Phil Berger, who once questioned the Perdue administration’s $45 million incentive package for Continental Tire, “dismissed questions” about this one, which has an eye-popping price tag of $94 million.
Berger says, “I think it’s a whole different circumstance.”
Like how, exactly?
Give Rep. Skip Stam credit for consistency. He said of the MetLife deal, “I oppose picking one company over another company.”
The N&O noted: “The state GOP platform calls incentives “contrary to the free enterprise system.”
Expect, apparently, when Republicans can claim credit for creating jobs. That’s called incentive.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 07, 2013 09:46
While Governor McCrory prepares a “very, very tight budget” and blocks Medicaid expansion, the Republican governor of another purple Southern state is going in the opposite direction.
Governor Rick Scott of Florida was a Tea Party poster boy when he got elected in 2010. Now a Miami Tea Party leader has sent the governor a “breakup note.”
Scott signed off on Medicaid expansion in his state. He proposed a $2,500 across-the-board pay increase for teachers. The New York Times says he “has crisscrossed the state advertising his enthusiasm for education, state workers, highways, commuter rails, early voting, the disabled, environmental protection and jobs.”
Democrats ask: “Medicaid expansion, Obamacare, teacher bonuses — who is this guy?”
A Republican consultant explains: “If he is going to get re-elected, he needs to rebrand, reboot and repackage.”
In North Carolina, Governor McCrory has entrusted his immediate political fate to Art Pope, his budget director. For more than 20 years, Pope has spent, strived and struggled to get control of the budget. Now that he has it, he is going to put his ideological stamp on it.
The question is what the political impact will be of, say, deep cuts in education, the universities, community colleges and various economic development programs. All of them have constituents and supporters, including Republicans.
While Scott tacks to the center in Florida, McCrory is heading right in Raleigh. Soon he may hit high winds and rough waves. Then we’ll see if he follows Scott’s course.
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Carter Wrenn posted on March 06, 2013 12:27
Taking a deep breath, inhaling a lungful of the highly oxygenated Washington air, celebrity, intellectual, and poo-bah Newt Gingrich announced he, himself, personally, was about to deliver a ‘very-direct, no baloney’ manifesto on Republican politics – then lit into Karl Rove, saying Republican political consultants were arrogant idiots and that the country was better off in the old days when a candidate did his own thinking (rather than hiring a two-bit consultant to tell him what to think).
Then, just as he had landed on a serious idea, Newt changed directions and announced that anyone who wanted to see a real leader doing his own thinking ought to buy Gingrich Productions’ film, Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny – and I thought, I’ll be darned – the whole thing was the lead-in to a pitch to sell a movie.
Taking another breath, Newt lit into Rove again, saying he was absolutely ‘unalterably’ opposed to a bunch of billionaires giving Rove’s Super PAC millions so that a political boss (Rove) could handpick candidates he liked in Republican primaries and destroy candidates he didn’t like.
Rove, Newt added, had been dead wrong about the Presidential Race last year and dead wrong about the Senate races Republicans lost then he changed directions again and said anyone who really wanted to know why Republicans lost the 2012 election ought to sign up for Gingrich Productions’ ‘Lessons to be Learned Reports’ – and I thought, He did it twice.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 06, 2013 10:34
With Carter’s help, George Holding had a simple message last fall that boiled down the Republican mantra: “Cut spending now.”
It’s the one message that unites Republicans as they splinter over immigration, gay marriage and guns in the wake of Mitt Romney’s loss.
Here’s the challenge for Democrats: What’s your alternative?
House Republicans’ fervent faith in cutting spending led to the much-ballyhooed “sequestration” budget cuts. First Republicans said those cuts are no big deal. But now Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler and Governor McCrory say the cuts could cause an “emergency” by shutting down North Carolina’s multibillion-dollar hog and poultry industry.
Thanks to the determination (or obstinacy) of the House GOP, cutting spending dominates the debate today. Speaker Boehner went so far as to call taxes “stealing” from the American people.
That was the philosophy underlining Romney’s “47 percent” comments, which cost him the election. He complains now it was distorted. No, Mitt, it was clear and it was what you and Republicans believe: A significant percentage of Americans are moochers who gang up on the producers to steal their money.
Carter has written before that the Founding Fathers foresaw that risk, and that it’s part of the risk of democracy. But, in fact, that hasn’t happened. Since the high-tax 1950s, we have cut taxes on people at the top.
But the issue is before us, and Democrats have to answer. They have to define what they believe constitutes the right level and the right kind of government spending – and taxing.
It’s an honest debate that America deserves.
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Carter Wrenn posted on March 05, 2013 11:06
After the bell rang ending the Second Round of the Obama versus Boehner Fiscal Cliff-Sequester match-up, Obama danced around the ring arms raised as John Boehner staggered back to his corner wobbly-kneed.
Just six weeks ago, at the start of round two, the prim and proper Speaker was popular – viewed favorably by 29% of the voters and unfavorably by 21%. At the end of the round, Boehner’s buttoned down fastidiousness – along with his popularity – had vanished. He had a 23% favorable and 41% unfavorable – a drop of 26 points.
Worse, for a Republican Congressman needing the votes of Independents to be reelected, after Obama’s pummeling, the leader of the Republican Party’s popularity with Independents nose-dived to 14% Favorable and 49% Unfavorable.
Now Round 3 begins.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 05, 2013 08:42
“I really don’t see it as an issue,” said Senator Buck Newton. “If it went from County A to County B, I’m not sure why County B would have a major objection to that.”
“It” is waste brines and toxins from fracking, which – John Murawski reports in the N&O – could end up being injected into deep wells in coastal North Carolina.
Believe me, Buck: “County B” will object. County B always objects when someone proposes dumping waste there from County A.
Ask Governor McCrory. Voters down east dumped him in 2008 when the Perdue campaign ran an ad that said he supported dumping New York City’s garbage in Eastern North Carolina.
Ask Governor Hunt. He caught hell in Halifax County when he pushed for a landfill to store PCB-contaminated soil.
Ask Governor Martin. He went radioactive in Northampton County when he proposed dumping low-level nuclear waste there.
Or just ask your Republican colleagues in the legislature. Like Rep. Rick Catlin, a Republican from Wilmington who is a hydrogeologist and environmental engineer. He said: “It’s going to be very controversial…You’re basically contaminating an aquifer forever. Please don’t inject any down here.”
Sounds like it’s an issue.
Tyler Clark, a former state geologist, warned: “Once you put it in the ground, it’s not going to stay there, it’s going to go somewhere. It would be hard to predict where it could travel.”
Of course, that may explain why the legislature threw the state geologist off the fracking commission.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 04, 2013 11:21
A TAPster says this legislature is like a 15-year-old boy whose parents leave him home alone for the weekend.
If a couple of friends come over and they drink a six-pack, he probably gets away with it.
If he invites the whole high school to a drunken bash that wrecks the house, wakes up the neighbors and attracts the police, he probably never gets trusted with the keys again.
This legislature is headed down the latter path.
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Carter Wrenn posted on March 01, 2013 17:06
It’s a fault of human nature: When you spend your own money you look at it one way but when you spend someone else’s money it’s a different story.
Once, years ago, I served on a church-school board with a half dozen tight-fisted, hard-eyed businessmen who could squeeze a dollar out of a turnip. But whenever we’d start discussing raises for principals or teachers those tight fisted businessmen would turn to soft-hearted marshmallows.
Now in government no one spends their own money. And in state government, sometimes, they don’t even spend state government’s money – they spend Washington’s money. The State Medicaid Department is an example: It spends billions of dollars that come down from Washington each year.
Angie Sligh who heads the Department’s massive computer system that processes Medicaid claims has a tough job and a decade ago, when the department set out to replace its old computers, it got tougher. The conversion fell flat on its face. The state had to go back to the drawing board and start over. Then, a few years, later Mrs. Sligh found herself in another tough spot: She had to go over to the General Assembly and explain to a committee of irate legislators why the department’s new $250 million dollar computer system was $200 million dollars over budget and two years behind schedule. During the hearing, one irate legislator asked Mrs. Sligh how she’d rate her job performance and she explained why she’d give herself an ‘A’ – the legislators were skeptical but her bosses in the Perdue Administration agreed. The state auditor reports over the last three years they paid her $237,000 for working overtime and, just before Governor Perdue left office, gave her a 25% raise.
Now the department says the new computer system will be up and running by July 1st but the newspapers have reported another odd fact: The state’s new computer system runs on a thirty-year-old technology called COBOL.
It’s a classic example of how government works: Would someone spend $450 million of their own money to build a state-of-the-art computer system that runs on technology that was invented before the Internet?
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Gary Pearce posted on March 01, 2013 10:24
What did we learn during the Republican legislature’s “Education Week”? That North Carolina ranks 48th in education spending.
Legislative leaders bragged that this was the first time all school superintendents were invited to tell the legislature their concerns. The superintendents promptly warned against taking more money from the public schools and giving it to private schools. Which the legislature is going to do anyway.
What will the quintessential swing voter – a moderate woman and mother living in the suburbs of North Raleigh – think?
She doesn’t like Governor McCrory raising his Cabinet’s salaries while cutting assistance for people who can’t find jobs. She doesn’t like raising taxes on working people at the bottom while cutting taxes for people at the top. She doesn’t like blocking half a million people from getting Medicaid and health care.
Now she sees the public schools at risk.
Rep. John Blust, R-Guilford, warned his party about hubris Thursday, although he was talking about another bill – the Great Boards and Commissions Power Grab.
Blust said: “I don’t like this idea, 'Well, we have the power, let’s go ahead and do it.’ Just because we have power we need to be judicious with it. I wish we would be more careful with it. The people have the right to yank us in two years and put someone else in."
The question is whether Democrats have the will and the wherewithal to exploit this rush to the right.
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Carter Wrenn posted on February 27, 2013 12:01
Two years ago, Republicans controlled the County Commissioners and the School Board and were happy.
Then Democrats won the next School Board election – so they were happy and the Republican County Commissioners were unhappy.
Next the Republican Commissioners decided to redraw the Democratic School Board members’ Districts to get them out of office – which made the Democrats unhappy.
Then the Republican County Commissioners hired a lobbyist to lobby the General Assembly to pass their plan and the Democratic School Board members hired a lobbyist to stop them. Between them, the two boards spent $60,000 on lobbyists – which made taxpayers unhappy.
Next the two boards met to try to stop fighting long enough to agree to pass a $1 billion bond referendum. That made the Chamber of Commerce happy – until, in the middle of the meeting, a School Board member said the Republican Commissioners had ‘disrespected’ the School Board. Then Republican Commissioner Tony Gurley responded, I’m getting sick and tired of having this person whispering words like calling me a jerk into my ear as I’m trying to speak. And School Board member Susan Evans said, I didn’t say that. You told me 'tough luck' or something else.
Then they adjourned.
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