Sen. James Forrester, who represents Gaston, Iredell, and Lincoln counties in the NC General Assembly and who was a prime sponsor of the anti-gay marriage amendment proposed for the NC Constitution and who is (supposedly) some kind of medical doctor, falsified his credentials on his own campaign website and on the Gaston County Republican Party website ... claiming that he is a "Fellow of the American College of Preventative Medicine" (ACPM).The quick answer to your questions is that Dr. Forrester is not, and never has been, a member of ACPM (much less a Fellow, which is our highest designation of membership) .... However, this is troubling to us, too, that he’s apparently claiming to be a Fellow of ACPM, and we would like to know where Dr. Forrester is making these proclamations so that we can approach him and demand that he cease falsely using ACPM credentials in his campaign or wherever else he’s using it. If you can point us to some places where he’s using those credentials, we’d be most appreciative.
And here we were thinking that "Tea Party" was a proud label worn by politicians like Virginia Foxx as certifiable evidence that they were patriots bent on saving America.
When? When Republicans are in control of the NC General Assembly.
It's not recent, the corporate takeover of the Known Universe. It began in the "Gilded Age," the decades immediately following the Civil War, when a tiny minority of men...harnessed America's vast mineral resources and tapped its long-stored capital to create needed industrial growth but who, to turn that growth into personal wealth, had stationed themselves at the "narrows" of production, the key points of production and distribution, and exacted tribute from the nation. They were the men who had blackmailed state legislatures and city councils by threatening to build their railroad lines elsewhere unless they received tax exemptions, outright gifts of cash -- and land grants so vast that, by 1920, the elected representatives of America had turned over to the railroad barons an area the size of Texas. They were the men who had bribed and corrupted legislators -- the Standard Oil Company, one historian said, did everything possible to the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it -- to let them loot the nation's oil and ore, the men who, building their empires on the toil of millions of immigrant laborers, had kept wages low, hours long, and had crushed the unions. Their creed was summed up in two quotes: Commodore Vanderbilt's "Law? What do I care for law? Hain't I got the power?" and J.P. Morgan's "I owe the public nothing."
Thom Tillis, the new Republican Speaker of the NC House, has been going around the state, holding town hall meetings, and when he hears from laid-off public school employees, he uniformly expresses shock and even bewilderment. "How could that be?" he sez. "The Republicans in the General Assembly did not cut any teaching jobs."
I happened to be watching last night when yet another Republican crowd at a Republican presidential debate showed their true colors ... booing an active duty soldier in Iraq because he's gay.Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of deadmen's bones, and of all uncleanness.
Republican Christy Jones, a Davidson County elementary school teacher, is blasting the budget passed by the new Republican majority in the General Assembly in her primary run against incumbent Republican Jerry Dockham in state House Dist. 80.
Do they even believe it themselves?Middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires. That’s pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against that. Warren Buffett’s secretary shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. There is no justification for it.It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million. Anybody who says we can’t change the tax code to correct that, anyone who has signed some pledge to protect every single tax loophole so long as they live, they should be called out. They should have to defend that unfairness -- explain why somebody who's making $50 million a year in the financial markets should be paying 15 percent on their taxes, when a teacher making $50,000 a year is paying more than that -- paying a higher rate. They ought to have to answer for it. And if they’re pledged to keep that kind of unfairness in place, they should remember, the last time I checked the only pledge that really matters is the pledge we take to uphold the Constitution.
College students are not always alert to or even aware of political shenanigans in our state's General Assembly -- because (hey!) they've got their own difficult fish to fry -- but it's reassuring to see that they're quite aware of Sen. Dan Soucek's pet project of writing discrimination against gays into the state's constitution....This legislation is a bigoted attack on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, as well as an ill-conceived attempt to stop the tide of acceptance and tolerance of sexual diversity in this state and around the country. If certified into law, the amendment places North Carolina, again, on the wrong side of history....The Appalachian believes it is ... reprehensible that this measure be brought to vote during a primary election.Rather than “letting the people decide,” as many of the bill’s proponents tout as a fair way to get the amendment passed, The Appalachian believes that the lower turnout overall in primary elections, in particular the historically low turnout of young voters, is a ploy to skew the results.If “the people” were to decide, a vote would occur during a November general election in which a significantly higher percentage of voters come out to the polls.One of the central critiques of the bill is that it puts a minority rights issue before the voters....
Occupy Wall Street, yesterday.
"I think there is a real fundamental difference between the civil rights of African Americans and the gay and lesbian community," he said. "You can't choose the color of your skin, but you can choose your sexual behavior." --Sen. Dan Soucek, during debate over the anti-gay marriage Constitutional amendment, this week in the NC General Assembly.
What a mensch isn't Pat McCrory!
Monte Mitchell has a veeery interesting article in this a.m.'s Winston-Salem Journal about the auctioning off yesterday of the former Heavenly Mountain property (a.k.a., "Laurelmor"). It was finally gaveled down for $10.5 million, "more than four times the reserve price of $2.48 million."...Marvin Salt, publisher and editor of the Cambridge Christian Press, in Cleveland, was the agent representing the buyer, whom he identified as Ohio International Alliance Missions Trust.The trust is affiliated with One In Christ Church and Norwalk Bible College."It's now owned by a trust that has a church on the title, and our college will be here within the year," Salt said as he hurried off to sign documents with Chartwell Auctions, the Cleveland-based auction company that conducted the sale.But there's still a bit of mystery as to who the winning bidder is.The websites for both Cambridge Christian Press — www.cambridgechristianpress.com — and Ohio International Alliance Mission Trust — www.ohiam.info — are incomplete and apparently still being developed. A voicemail left at the offices of Ohio International Alliance Missions Trust was not returned Wednesday. Norwalk Bible College has a Facebook page with six "likes" and no apparent website.The bidder spells his name as Marvin Salt on his business cards, but websites list a Dr. Marvin Sault as executive director of Ohio International Alliance Mission Trust. No one answered calls to the number on his business card....
NC House "Democratic" Rep. James Crawford, one of the Five Goobers who voted for both the Republican budget plan and for the constitutional amendment to write discrimination against gays into our governing document, has been appointed by Republican Speaker of the House Thom Tillis to be the only "Democrat" among the five chief budget-writers in the NC House.William Brisson of DublinJim Crawford of OxfordEllmer Floyd of FayettevilleKen Goodman of RockinghamCharles Graham of LumbertonDewey Hill of Lake WaccamawFrank McGuirt of WingateBill Owens of Elizabeth CityGarland Pierce of WagramTim Spear of Creswell
Senator Dan Soucek was one of the chief sponsors of the original Senate bill that will write official discrimination against gay people into the state's constitution. Soucek's name has disappeared from the newest iteration of that proposed amendment, and Soucek himself has been invisible, as various members of the Republican Clown College have been out publicly warning the Brethren about The Gay Menace. It's almost as though Soucek has enough sense of be embarrassed.This is a misguided cause, mean and vindictive and discriminatory, motivated by a cold-blooded extremism. At a time when Republicans should be trying to prove themselves as leaders, they are doing just the opposite.
[Is this] The start of WWIV? Too strong? Maybe just the “Second American Revolution?” Too dramatic? Either way, this is a new D-Day, the invasion of Wall Street. And a global game-changer.On Sept. 17, the Arab Spring becomes the new American Fall, with 20,000 revolutionaries in a tent city. Plus “solidarity” occupations in major financial centers worldwide, all ready for a long siege, vowing not to leave till they get their “one simple demand.”Occupy Wall Street is a “leaderless resistance movement” spearheaded by the edgy Adbusters magazine, which in July issued a call for the Sept. 17 occupation of Wall Street.Their allies have names like “CultureJammers,” “USDayofRage.org,” “People of the NYC General Assembly,” “TaketheSquare.net,” and recently they were joined by the noted civil disobedience anarchists, “Anonymous” and many others worldwide. This movement reminds us of the historic rag-tag armies General Washington commanded from 13 Colonies for the first American Revolution.The new ones are also united in the spirit of the Tahrir Square revolutionaries: “One thing we all have in common is that we are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” according to posts on the Occupy Wall Street website . Leaderless, yes. But now their real power comes in a new strategy: “one big swarm of people” challenging authority. They want their democracy back: “One citizen. One dollar. One vote.” Get the corrupting influence of money out of elections.Bottom line: They want to eliminate “the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.”
General (and don't you forgit, boy!) Tony Tata, Superintendent of the Wake County Public School System, is attending a Republican campaign event in Raleigh alongside Republican mayoral and Republican school board candidates.
Ron Paul, that madcap fella who seems to be channeling the crazy perfesser character from the "Back to the Future" movies, doubled down last night on his call to abolish FEMA. Just let good ole ordinary red-blooded American folks who've been flattened by a hurricane get up out of the debris and start cleaning up things themselves. Snap to it, your sluggards who've become dependent on government!
It's clearly Rick Perry's nomination to lose. It's also clearly the Tea Party's party now. That was nowhere more obvious than when spontaneous cheering erupted in the Reagan Library when Perry's death penalty record in Texas was reviewed -- 234 people put to death. Damn right! The bloody-minded have their candidate!...by any honest assessment, what really went on in the General Assembly yesterday and what, sadly, appears destined to happen next week, is but the latest in a long and desultory list of historical events in which American conservatives (and, indeed, backward-looking people all over the planet) have taken their own uninformed, troubled, and repressed obsession with sexual behavior and attempted to elevate it into some kind of divine command.
A Republican staffer on Capitol Hill (he served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees) sees quite clearly what the Corporate Coup has done to both political parties. He retired in June after 28 total years as a Congressional staffer, and he goes on the record about what he has seen in an important piece of writing. Virginia Foxx gets a mention, along with Patrick McHenry.[Lifted from Lori Montgomery, who covers U.S. economic policy and the federal budget for the WashPost, focusing on efforts to tame the national debt. She has written extensively about every major piece of legislation to pass Congress since 2008, including the TARP bank bailout, the Obama stimulus package and the Democratic overhaul of the health care system. Hattip: K&BM]
Some might call the war on our state's teachers, waged this year by the new Republican majority in the NC General Assembly, "piling on."
