In The Bitter Southerner, Brian Miller lives up to the title with his essay, “The South Is a Neolithic Fort of the Forgotten”.
Incumbent Senator Richard “Sockless Dick” Burr has agreed to a debate with NRA target face Deborah Ross, October 13. She wants three more. Burr prefers to let the NRA and a gaggle of PACS do his pandering to vets, old people and blacks for him. The ad where a black educator intones- in perfect RP- how much the senator cares about underachieving children- using stock footage from a school in Africa- will be a deathless classic of tone-deafness and the complacency of an incumbent.
The Carolina Mercury predicts that, if Governor McCrory loses the election, Job 1 for the General Assembly will be stripping away Governor Roy Cooper’s ability to make appointments.
Carolina Public Press is following the money in western NC legislative races.
In Chapelboro, Jeff Clayton recaps why HB2 is, as he puts it, “just dumb”:
The bathroom deal is a sideshow. The real deal is the fact that HB2 banned cities, towns, and counties in North Carolina from enacting laws that prevent discrimination against people in the LGBT community. Charlotte wanted to extend their discrimination ordinance to include protections for sexual orientation and gender identity. That’s a common goal among major cities in the United States. When the city passed their nondiscrimination ordinance, they joined New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Austin, Detroit, Seattle, Boston, Denver, and many more cities that protect people in the LGBT community from discrimination.
HB2 took Charlotte out of that group and prohibited them from trying to get back in it. The only reason you could possibly be in favor of a law that bans cities from protecting people in the LGBT community is that you don’t like people in the LGBT community.
That’s why you need laws to protect people in the LGBT community.
HB2 took Charlotte out of that group and prohibited them from trying to get back in it. The only reason you could possibly be in favor of a law that bans cities from protecting people in the LGBT community is that you don’t like people in the LGBT community.
That’s why you need laws to protect people in the LGBT community.
The always hard-hitting Charlotte Agenda has the latest on “5 Corn Mazes Within 30 MIles of Uptown Charlotte.”
HB2 will celebrate six months of spite-as-law September 23. Facing South’s Alex Kotch reckons the losses to date are over $200 million (Wired figures twice that). Another four years of Pat McCrory’s Carolina Comeback will, it seems, be offset by somewhere between one and two billion dollars.
Congressman Richard Hudson wants Congress to revoke the tax-exempt status of sports organizations whose insistence on not driving off potential ticket purchasers over things like HB2 displeases him. Indy Week’s Paul Blest eyes other sacred cows wandering the feedlot:
[C]hurches are also tax-exempt, and countless church leaders from all over the state have been outspoken in their support of the legislators and governor who made HB 2 happen. Wonder if Hudson will propose taking any religious organizations' tax-exempt status away anytime soon.
Hudson previously tried to block direct air flights between Havana and Charlotte. He worries Communists will buy cheap tickets on Air Che to fly up here and get Mahs Pawk matrons hooked on crack, thenrape and murder them.
Below the fold, NC Capitol Connection takes up the cause of House Speaker Tim Moore’s new sheepwrangler:
Bell says he can think of more new ways to rig elections, shift tax burdens, and throttle the gays than any sumbitch in Raleigh. You wanna step outside?
NC Justice Center says North Carolina is a leader in producing and maintaining people in poverty. NC Policy Watch finds any number of other metrics leading to the same conclusion.
Michael Bitzer, the NC politics guru, is tracking mail-in ballot returns.
At Talking About Politics, where Gary Pearce and Carter Wrenn play “Crossfire”, Pearce considers last week a bad innings for Team McCrory:
Pat McCrory just got slam-dunked by the ACC. His teammates are starting to switch sides. Tamara Barringer was the first legislator to undergo a deathbed conversion. More will surely follow.
But a long-time veteran of the legislative sausage-making machine doesn’t expect much from the Jones Street crowd:
“The latest HB2 shame on North Carolina will be apocalyptic for Republican legislative leaders, but they won’t act.
“They don’t care what the NCAA thinks, because nobody from the NCAA lives in a doublewide in their rural legislative districts or attends one of the local snake-handling tent revivals. The Greensboro Coliseum isn’t in the districts of Phil Berger or Tim Moore, so why should they care? The NBA is black. Entertainers are gay. That’s the apparent attitude of Berger and Moore.
“In a state of 10 million people, Berger got elected last time by 40,000 of them. Moore got 15,000 votes and only needed 1 because he had no opponent. Less than one half of one percent of the state’s population elected these guys. They are not statewide leaders. These are small-time, isolated bumpkins who have their heads so buried in the red clay of their districts’ dirt roads that they are incapable of leading a large sophisticated state.
“So, expect no action from these heroes, even though the state’s actual thought leaders are unanimous in their screams to fix the HB2 disgrace.
“There’s a bright side: the GOP brain trust’s inflexibility on HB2 will speed their demise and hasten their replacement with leaders who care about more than the dusty, dark corners of the backwoods where bigots fear enlightenment, tolerance and good sense.”
But a long-time veteran of the legislative sausage-making machine doesn’t expect much from the Jones Street crowd:
“The latest HB2 shame on North Carolina will be apocalyptic for Republican legislative leaders, but they won’t act.
“They don’t care what the NCAA thinks, because nobody from the NCAA lives in a doublewide in their rural legislative districts or attends one of the local snake-handling tent revivals. The Greensboro Coliseum isn’t in the districts of Phil Berger or Tim Moore, so why should they care? The NBA is black. Entertainers are gay. That’s the apparent attitude of Berger and Moore.
“In a state of 10 million people, Berger got elected last time by 40,000 of them. Moore got 15,000 votes and only needed 1 because he had no opponent. Less than one half of one percent of the state’s population elected these guys. They are not statewide leaders. These are small-time, isolated bumpkins who have their heads so buried in the red clay of their districts’ dirt roads that they are incapable of leading a large sophisticated state.
“So, expect no action from these heroes, even though the state’s actual thought leaders are unanimous in their screams to fix the HB2 disgrace.
“There’s a bright side: the GOP brain trust’s inflexibility on HB2 will speed their demise and hasten their replacement with leaders who care about more than the dusty, dark corners of the backwoods where bigots fear enlightenment, tolerance and good sense.”
Speaker Moore’s home turf- where he collects another government paycheck as county attorney- is Cleveland County, where I graduated high school and got the hell out in 1974.
Are there other politics/news blogs I’m missing? Let me know.
No comments:
Post a Comment