Chickens, Meet Your New Fox

Newly inaugurated Republican Governor Pat McCrory chose one Aldona Wos, a major campaign cash pipeline who used to be an appointed ambassador to Estonia under George W. Bush, to head up NC’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

She’s a medical doctor, so she should know something about health and human services. Plus she’s currently working for $1 a year. So far so good.

Dianna Lightfoot

But on Tuesday this week, Wos announced that a woman named Dianna Lightfoot had been appointed the state's new director of Child Development and Early Education. The post comes with a $110,000 annual salary.

Problems with Dianna Lightfoot emerged yesterday. The biggest problem is that she’s been a very public enemy of the very programs that she’s been hired to oversee.

The DHHS press release touting Ms. Lightfoot’s appointment prominently mentioned her presidency of an outfit called the National Physicians Center for Family Resources, a group that she herself founded in 2001. Digging into what the National Physicians Center actually advocates, Laura Leslie found some interesting language on the group’s website:

"There is great potential for early learning institutions to foster more dependency on the government (i.e. taxpayer) and more of an entitlement mentality .... Will institutions focus on character building and teaching strong values? If so, whose values will children be taught?"

So the woman put in charge of early childhood education in North Carolina is a standard-issue, radical government-hater who, under the guise of fearing institutional indoctrination, is willing to make children her own little clay puppets.

Minutes after reporters and other investigators starting looking at Dianna Lightfoot’s Twitter account and her Facebook page, those sources of evidence on her beliefs disappeared (though, of course, they live on in cyberspace). She’s revealed in her Twitter account, again, as a Central Casting ideological radical, a gay-hater, an Obama-despiser, a scenery-chewing, rigid conservative.

So much for Aldona Wos and her notion of human services in North Carolina.

BREAKING NEWS, 1 p.m.
RALEIGH, N.C. — McCrory administration appointee Dianna Lightfoot now says she will not take the job leading the state's pre-kindergarten program.