North Carolina – Republicans
Movin’ On Up
Ricky Diaz’s work here is done. Clearly it is time for him to work his magic for Republicans all across America. He gave North Carolina a year’s worth of scandals, stumbles and PR disasters. Starting with his hiring: a 24-year-old getting a DHHS job paying $85,000 a year, while teachers and state employees got…
Read MoreSnow Geese
The surprise wasn’t Governor McCrory’s Cabinet Secretaries ripping into the liberals over at the Southern Environmental Law Center, calling them ‘do-gooders sitting in ivory towers in air-conditioned offices in Chapel Hill sipping lattes’;— the surprise was the cost of the two bridges the Governor’s camp and the environmentalists were battling over. The Governor’s folks…
Read MoreThe Teacher Pay Shuffle
Governor McCrory is in a box on teacher pay, and Democrats can’t let him wriggle out. You don’t need to be a political genius to predict what’s coming. McCrory will try to make a big splash by proposing a pay raise for teachers this year. He has to. He and the Republican legislature have…
Read MoreMitt Tillis
Thom Tillis’ campaign paid too much attention to what he said and not enough to what you see in his new TV ad. It’s a perfect set-up for his opponents, whether Republicans or Kay Hagan. Tillis looks and sounds like the Mitt Romney that people hated in 2012: a wealthy corporate boardroom guy surrounded…
Read MoreThe Old Two-Step
Like a lot of politicians, Governor McCrory wants to blame somebody else for all things bad and claim credit for all things good. Yesterday, he set a land speed record by doing both within a matter of minutes. First, speaking to a business group, he claimed credit for North Carolina’s unemployment rate dropping 2…
Read More2014
Millions of dollars will be spent and billions of words spilled, but only one thing will decide this election: Will voters be madder at President Obama or at Republicans in the legislature? On today’s market, the outlook for Democrats is as chilling as a New Year’s Day Polar Bear Plunge. For two months, the…
Read MoreA Symbol
The newspaper headline read: Dome, full of cracks. And the newspaper reported: The aging iron dome ‘is slowly crumbling…riddled with hundreds of cracks and rust.’ The dome is the Capitol Dome. But the newspaper could just as easily have been writing about Congress itself.
Read MorePossums
Up in Brasstown deep in the Smoky Mountains, on every New Years Eve a local merchant holds a ‘Possum Drop’ – a western North Carolina version of the Yankees’ ball drop in Times Square. What the mountain folks hadn’t counted on was PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) taking umbrage at the…
Read MoreA Great Success
Years behind schedule, millions of dollars over budget, and riddled with 3,200 computer programming errors NC Tracks – the state’s new $486 million computer system for processing Medicaid checks – landed in the newspaper again. The News & Observer reported the Department of Health and Human Services still has no plan to right the ship and clean…
Read More2014: Another 2010?
Maybe I should apologize. But would Bob Rucho apologize? No sir! So I’ll double down, as they say. My blog yesterday – warning that the next Congress might be run by people who think like Rucho – apparently ruined the Christmas spirit for some Democrats. My friend Jerry Wayne Williamson of Boone (follow…
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