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North Carolina - Republicans
Gary Pearce posted on February 15, 2013 09:38
“We are being compassionate,” said state Rep. Mike Hager of Rutherfordton. “We have a mindset of pulling...government burden off these small businesses.”
Well, that sums it up. Republican compassion is for businesses and corporations, not people. Remember: People aren’t corporations, my friend.
First North Carolina Republicans slashed help for people who can’t find work. Then they slammed the door on people who can’t get insurance or health care. Now they’re raising income taxes on 900,000 taxpayers at the bottom of the pile.
You read it right: raising taxes. You see, tax cuts are reserved for those of us at the top – and corporations.
Rep. Julia Howard, chair of the House Finance Committee, defended it this way: “Our tax dollars are very sacred this year with a lot of things we need to do, and that is $105 million that we are literally writing checks for.”
You see, these taxes are “sacred.”
A businessman I know – no raving liberal – cornered me this week and demanded: “How can they go to church after cutting unemployment assistance by $200 a week?”
Apparently, it’s the gospel of “comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.”
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Gary Pearce posted on February 14, 2013 10:47
After receiving a typically enthusiastic introduction from former Governor Jim Hunt Tuesday, Governor McCrory said, “Note to staff: Never have me speak after Jim Hunt again.”
Here’s another note he should send them: Know my audience.
McCrory was speaking at N.C. State’s Emerging Issues Form on manufacturing. He seemed to think he was speaking to a group of business people and manufacturing executives. The speech was spot on for that audience. But not for this one, which was mostly policy wonks – lobbyists, lawyers, educators, association executives and the like.
I don’t fault McCrory. But he should fault his staff. The first rule of speechwriting is: write to the audience – and make sure the speaker knows who they are.
That quibble aside, it was the first time I had a chance to measure McCrory as a public speaker.
He has one great strength: He’s likeable. Don’t underestimate that in a politician. (See: Mike Easley.)
What I couldn’t figure from his speech is what he really is: An affable front man for a radical ideology, or the model of a moderate, pro-business Charlotte Republican.
Either out of instinct or calculation, he distanced himself from Republican red-hots and from some of his and his administration’s fumbles.
He praised the value of a liberal arts college education “like the one I got.” In a bow to Hunt, he talked about the importance of pre-K education.
After saying why he opposed Medicaid expansion and a state insurance exchange, he said, “one thing I have to tell the politicians” – who might that be? – is that health care reform is the law of the land.
Clearly, this is a hard man to pin down. But in today’s polarized politics, that might be a strength – one Democrats shouldn’t underestimate.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 12, 2013 10:35
Some Republicans seem determined to be “the stupid party,” in Bobby Jindal’s memorable phrase.
Like U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx.
The Sunday New York Times took a look at how some students today pay for college. The story focused on Steve Boedefeld, an Appalachian State University student who wants to avoid graduating with a big debt. So he is using “the money he earned fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and the money he now saves by eating what he grows or kills.”
Rep. Foxx, whose district includes Appalachian and who heads a House subcommittee on higher education and work force training, just didn’t get it: “I spent seven years getting my undergraduate degree and didn’t borrow a dime of money.”
The story added: “She was bewildered, given her own experience, by tales of woe she had heard from people with $80,000 in debt.”
Gee, maybe it’s because back in her day (and mine) tuition, room, board, etc. at a North Carolina university cost about $550 a year. With inflation, that would be $4,000 now. But today, a bachelor’s degree from Appalachian State can cost $80,000.
Two problems here for Republicans.
First, it’s another example of being oblivious to facts. Just like the federal budget, health care, climate change, evolution and how old the earth is.
Second, it sounds like either ignorance or callousness about getting a college education today.
Just last month, Governor McCrory got carried away on radio with Bill Bennett and questioned the value of a liberal arts education.
This may play well with the Republican red-hots. But North Carolina has a lot of people with college educations – and a lot more who want one for themselves or their kids. We’ve also become a hot location for college-educated people around the nation and the world.
The more Republicans dis these people and their values, the more they hasten the end of what could be a brief reign on top of the political heap.
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Carter Wrenn posted on February 12, 2013 09:54
War’s broken out in Raleigh.
The Republican County Commissioners launched a blitzkrieg, hiring a lobbyist (for $25,000) to get the Republican legislature to redraw the districts of the Democratic School Board members – then the Democratic School Board struck back (to keep their districts) by spending four times as much ($100,000) to hire their own lobbyist.
Politically, it’s an all-out war. But, so far, the only casualties are taxpayers.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 11, 2013 11:26
Jim Gardner almost changed political history twice – 20 years ago and 40 years ago.
In 1972, he was the fair-haired boy of the North Carolina Republican Party. Six years earlier, he had unexpectedly defeated a long-time Democratic congressman from the East, Harold Cooley. How big an upset was it? Cooley was chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, for Pete’s sake. Eastern North Carolina hadn’t elected a Republican congressman since Reconstruction. And Gardner was barely 30 years old.
Gardner had been one of the early founders of Hardee’s out of Rocky Mount. He was handsome and a hell of a speaker. He caught the early Republican wave in 1966 and rode it to Washington. Gardner was a fire-and-brimstone conservative. He knew all the racial code words, like “law and order,” “forced busing” and welfare.
He was Jesse Helms before Jesse Helms.
But one term in Congress was enough for Gardner. In 1968, he ran for Governor and nearly beat Bob Scott. He immediately started running for 1972.
Then he ran into a quiet, more traditional Republican from the mountains, state Rep. Jim Holshouser. Holshouser edged Gardner in the Republican primary. So it was Holshouser, not Gardner, who rode the Nixon landslide into the Governor’s office in 1972 – the same year Helms was elected to the Senate.
Gardner went back to the business world, full of high-flying plans. But they crashed in the Nixon recession and gas shortages of the 1970s. He fell into a string of bankruptcies, bad debts and business failures that would plague him later.
He stayed out of politics until 1988, when Republicans recruited him to run for Lieutenant Governor. Governor Jim Martin was sweeping to reelection that year, and once again Gardner was at the right place and the right time. He destroyed Tony Rand, his Democratic opponent, in a debate. And he began planning another run for governor in 1992.
Then he ran into Jim Hunt. Hunt was coming back into politics in large part because Democrats feared Gardner. They fought a bruising campaign. We (I was working with Hunt’s campaign) pounded Gardner with his business record. Hunt asked him in a debate: “If that’s how you run your business, I’d hate to see how you’d run the state.” Hunt won big.
Now Gardner is back. He was front and center when Governor McCrory named his transition team. Gardner’s old strategist, Jack Hawke, played the same role with McCrory. And now McCrory has picked Gardner to be ABC Chairman.
You wouldn’t think it’s possible to bankrupt the state’s liquor system. But Gardner has quite a track record.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 08, 2013 11:32
George Washington supposedly said the Founding Fathers created the Senate to cool House legislation just as a saucer cools hot tea.
In North Carolina, it looks like the House and Art Pope are cooling the Senate’s hot tea.
The House promised to take a long second look at the Senate’s boards and commissions bill. The House says it, unlike the Senate, will hear Governor McCrory’s concerns about the Medicaid/health care reform bill.
And in the most interesting story I found from when I was gone, Pope threw cold water on the Senate’s blazing hot tax-reform tea.
One-party rule notwithstanding, institutional imperatives will prevail. Houses and Senates are born to fight. So are legislatures and Governors.
And you can’t separate the institutions from their leaders’ ambitions. Speaker Tillis wants to run for Senate next year. So does Senator Berger, maybe. Their calculation: How do they position themselves for both a conservative Republican primary electorate and a moderate general election electorate? And how do they draw a contrast with each other?
McCrory has his own separate calculation: how to maintain the broad appeal that got him into the Governor’s office.
It’s instructive that Pope, not McCrory, raised doubts about replacing the income tax with a broad sales tax on services. That gave McCrory some distance from the fight. Plus, Pope can claim credit for Republicans taking control of the legislature.
Not that they’ll give him credit. When politicians win an election, as Carter once noted, they are firmly convinced they got there because of their own moral goodness.
That noise you hear is the sound of four egos and ambitions colliding.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 07, 2013 14:28
Pre-K foe Diana Lightfoot has hot-footed it out of the pre-K job. (See blog below.)
Give the McCrory administration points here. There’s only one way to fix a disaster: fast.
Now maybe Ms. Lightfoot can get to the bottom of these ultrasonic waves from China and North Korea.
And here’s two words of advice about picking people for jobs like this: Google search.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 07, 2013 12:59
The way things are going, Pat McCrory may end up as the Uneducation Governor.
First he questioned a liberal arts college education. Even Carter had trouble swallowing that.
Now his administration appoints an early-childhood director who opposes early-childhood education programs.
Democrats should welcome the chance to take this one to the voters.
When Governor Hunt launched Smart Start 20 years ago, we did a lot of polling. We knew the right-wingers would attack it as “government interfering with families.” We tested that with voters.
They laughed at the criticism. Given the number of working parents, single parents and broken families, they thought government needed to more for early-childhood, not less.
A side note: WRAL reported that the director, Dianna Lightfoot, had a noteworthy Twitter account that she suddenly deleted:
“In postings on her ‘ChinaLight44’ Twitter account, Lightfoot calls Hillary Clinton one of Obama's ‘Butch bunch’ and apparently suggests that the massive Japan earthquake of March 11, 2011, may have been caused by ultrasonic waves from neighboring China or North Korea.”
Really, I’m not making this stuff up.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 06, 2013 15:23
The N&O headline said “Bill would give McCrory, legislature control of some state boards.” Democrats and environmentalists howled “power grab.”
But Governor McCrory might not be so happy with the bill. Because the legislature is taking appointments away from him and increasing its own.
Exhibit A: the bill cuts the Coastal Resources Commission from 15 to 11 members. But the Governor used to appoint all the members. Now he would appoint seven and the legislature four.
Exhibit B: The Environmental Management Commission is cut from 19 to 13. The Governor’s appointments go from 13 to seven. The legislature keeps the other six.
Exhibit C: The bill takes two appointments away from the Governor and gives them to the legislature.
Republicans in the legislature may be glad to have a Republican governor. But they’re also glad to show him who’s boss.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 06, 2013 09:15
Finally the State Department of Health and Human Services is cracking down on a crisis. What’s that, you ask? Mental health? Rising Medicaid costs? Funding for adult-care homes? The uninsured?
No. The dress code.
I especially like this: “Daily grooming and bathing are required. Clothing should be clean, pressed and in good condition (i.e., no holes, frays, tears, dangling threads, etc.).”
And, I presume, no exposed nipples.
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