North Carolina – Republicans
Back to the Dark Ages
It’s a bleak landscape. A nightmare vision of a counter-revolution roaring down the tracks, turning back the hands of the clock, rolling back progress to the days before indoor plumbing, air-conditioning, and daylight savings time. Republicans, Reverend William Barber howls, are turning back the clock to the days of Jim Crow. Republican tax…
Read MoreThe ‘Voting Rights’ Foo-Fa
This isn’t a story of sin begetting sin but of foolishness begetting foolishness. Years ago, somewhere, some Democratic political guru sat in a room with reams of demographics of people who never had voted and when he finished studying those pages of statistics one fact was clear as a bell: If those folks started…
Read MoreA Major League Blunder
Governor McCrory increasingly looks like a modest Triple-A ballplayer who is befuddled by big league pitching. His latest whiff is defending the DHHS salary debacle. McCrory should have put as much distance as possible between himself and the decision to give 24-year-olds who worked in his campaign senior jobs paying $85,000 and $87,500 in…
Read MoreWar on Teachers Update
Governor McCrory believes it’s OK to pay a beginning teacher $25,000, but $65,000 isn’t enough for a 24-year-old state government appointee who worked in McCrory’s campaign. So he got a raise to $87,500. That’s three times what a starting teacher gets in North Carolina. Another campaign staffer got a $23,000 raise to $85,000,…
Read MoreVotes and Power
Let’s be honest: The voter ID law that Governor McCrory signed is about political power, not fraud. A letter-writer to the N&O got it right where the Governor got it wrong. McCrory said: “Common practices like boarding an airplane and purchasing Sudafed require photo ID, and we should expect nothing less for the protection…
Read MoreDissing Teachers
Republicans are turning mathematical somersaults denying they did what they did in this legislature: take a chainsaw to public education in North Carolina. Clearly, they don’t have the courage of their convictions. They ran for office saying they’ll cut government. Now they deny they did it, and they run for cover. They say:…
Read MoreWill Pope Denounce Goolsby?
Now that Senator Thom Goolsby has compared educators and the media to Vladimir Lenin, I presume that State GOP Chair Claude Pope will denounce him for an “inexcusable, disgusting and shameful” attack. Goolsby wrote on his blog: “Vladimir Lenin said, ‘A lie told often enough becomes the truth.’ Professional educrats (education bureaucrats) and their…
Read MoreSizing Up Pat
I’m obviously not a big fan of Governor McCrory, but I want an accurate read on him. It doesn’t do Democrats any good to underestimate him. Two in cases in point: (1) Democrats who dismissed Ronald Reagan as an “amiable dunce” and (2) all of Barack Obama’s opponents, Democrats and Republicans, who dismissed him in…
Read MoreThe Smell Test
All I can say about Gary’s column on D.G. Martin is – “Amen.” In the fourteen years I’ve known D.G., I’ve never heard him say an unkind word about anyone – so Claude Pope claiming he’d called Republicans Nazis just didn’t pass the smell test. Here’s the column D.G. wrote. Take a look…
Read MoreHow Berger Won
Carter has done a couple of insightful (as always) blogs about Senator Phil Berger: that he’s a true-believer conservative and a small-town product, in contrast to the big-city moderates who are the second- and third-most powerful Republicans in North Carolina (respectively, Thom Tillis and Pat McCrory). It also looks like Berger was a lot…
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