Americans for Prosperity Working Overtime To Spark a Criminal Investigation

Americans for Prosperity, a Koch Bros. enterprise, sent out hundreds -- maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands ... because who knows but AFP? -- "official application forms" for voter registration that are riddled with misinformation. Raleigh N&O details all the mistakes.

The State Board of Elections says that "hundreds" of people have called to complain. The general rule of thumb: if one person calls, there are ten people who didn't call but who got the mailing.

Who was targeted? The answer to that question would answer the other burning question ... were the errors a deliberate attempt to thwart voter registration or just Head Office stupidity?

Naturally, Americans for Prosperity has clammed up. Billionaires aren't in the habit of answering questions from mere peons.

North Carolina Is Being Run By Stupid People

The North Carolina General Assembly -- bless their (tiny, desiccated) hearts and their (total lack of) vision -- ended the incentive program that had built the film industry in North Carolina to the third largest in the whole country.

They instead put in a puny, emasculated incentive that The Hollywood Reporter called "nearly useless." Turns out the NC GOP hearts polluting industries (coal ash, anyone? how about fracking?) far more than they heart a non-polluting, jobs-creating industry like motion pictures.

“It’s disappointing,” the Motion Picture Association of America said in a statement Thursday, “that the new grant program included in the budget agreement will prevent North Carolina from remaining competitive in attracting this prominent source of in-state economic activity.”

And then there's this:

Spokespeople for ABC, CBS and Fox could not confirm their plans, but one studio executive said: “It definitely doesn’t bode well for future new production there, or for the terrific infrastructure of production, personnel and vendors they’ve built up in the state.”

In North Carolina, the first term Gov. Pat McCrory and the Speaker of the House Thom Tillis — a candidate for Senate —had both been vocal backers of film incentives until recently. However, as the state has seen a number of conservatives, Libertarian and Tea Party candidates elected, they have shifted to either a neutral position (the governor) or opposition (the speaker).

One big reason the North Carolina incentive legislation failed is because the Koch Brothers-backed nonprofit Americans for Prosperity bought radio commercials as the debate was going on that slammed film incentives. The ads were part of a larger campaign to eliminate a range of state-funded development programs.

"The money coming in from the outside has hurt the North Carolina programs for business development," said Rep. Susi Hamilton, a Democrat who fought to retain incentives. "The Americans for Prosperity spent a lot of money to try and end the program and unfortunately they have the ear or our leadership and appear to be successful."

ADDENDUM
From BlueNC this morning:
‘CAROLINA COMBACK’ OR ‘NORTH STATE STAGNATION?’ -- There’s hardly a road-side vegetable stand or machine shop that opens in North Carolina these days that Gov. Pat McCrory and his Department of Commerce don’t seize the opportunity for a news release or ribbon-cutting to announce new job creations. It’s seemed McCrory announces new jobs in the 10s or 20s while South Carolina announces them by the thousands. In the two years that McCrory’s been in office, even with the tax cuts enacted specifically to attract more industry and jobs, the number of new jobs announced has dropped 17 percent; the new job project inquiries dropped 16 percent; new projects announced dropped 8 percent; and total capital investment in new and expanded businesses has dropped 56 percent. Many of those in the Commerce Department who’d been involved in business recruitment in the previous administrations have been dismissed and not taken on by the new private enterprise that has taken over the state’s job-hunting efforts. It appears to be a high hill for the new enterprise to climb, not only making up for the ground lost the last two years, but also dealing with making up for jobs, in a variety of sectors including new energy and films, that will be headed elsewhere because of the elimination of various tax incentives and state assistance.

Thank God There's a Memo

Every politico in the known universe is all a-Twitter this a.m. over The Memo. Haven't read it yet, but I will. In fact, I just printed out the entire thing to study, highlight, underline, and annotate.

Democrats in general and progressives especially are usually the last ones to catch on that there's a war and that they are in the crosshairs. Glad to see someone thinking strategically, which is what conservatives normally do over their Cream o' Wheat.

The fake shock of those same NC conservatives over this particular memo is not convincing. They've been reading their own memos for years. It's not as though the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Americans for Prosperity and the Civitas Whatsit haven't been producing central steering command documents for NC Republicans for a long time. And we see the results.

The results are the point, O my brethren, and if the Republican grandees in Raleigh think we're just going to sit back and mumble our Rosary as they enact their radical program, they're smokin' something with their Cream o' Wheat.

And it didn't take a memo from some consulting group for some of us to see what's going on in Raleigh.

ADDENDUM
Got home late today to discover that Gary Pearce also wrote about The Memo and made some of the same points, only better.

Whaaa? McCrory Going All Squishily Moderate

Gov.-Elect Pat McCrory, in Raleigh to measure the curtains, held a press conference today and pointedly took a very different tone about the newly created Dix Park. NC Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger and what Rob Schofield calls "the conservative shock troops at Americans for Prosperity" had lambasted Bev Perdue for striking the deal with the City of Raleigh for the Dorothea Dix acreage to become a public park, which Berger and Americans for Prosperity had labeled a travesty of Everything Holy = private profit off public lands. Changing his tune considerably from last week, when he was singing from the same free market hymnal with Berger and the Rich Guys, McCrory said he was "all for" the park.

He didn't mean it, probably, but he said it, and these days that gets marked down in the "moderation" column.

Schofield summed up what was striking about the whole scene:

No silly name-calling or manufactured outrage; nothing akin to Berger’s absurd and inflammatory statement on Twitter that "Having failed for years to advance her agenda, Gov Perdue is desperately trying to craft a last-minute legacy at NC taxpayers’ expense” or AFP’s claim that the deal is “a billion-dollar giveaway of taxpayer resources.” 

So, Republicans, how ya gonna handle your RINO governor?

The Rich Are Driving a Billboard Around North Carolina. No Kiddin'!

Photo, Donnie Roberts for the Lexington Dispatch

We have to reprint Rob Schofield here to get the context:

For several days now, Americans for Prosperity NC and the Pope-Civitas Institute have been promoting “a major new effort” entitled the “Real Solutions Road Tour” in which their advocates would "criss-cross North Carolina" to promote their defense of the conservative General Assembly and its extreme policy decisions. 

To read the various tweets and website posts, you’d have thought there was going to be a long series of well-attended campaign-style rallies with tea partying conservatives coming out of the woodwork at stops throughout the state. 

Here’s essentially what actually happened on Day One of the tour today: Nothing. Zilch. Bupkis.
AFP-NC Director Dallas Woodhouse and “Real Solutions” TV spokesperson Donna King drove a billboard around a handful of cities. In a couple of places they parked and got out, took a picture and went into the local newspaper for a few minutes. In Winston-Salem they parked in front of the building that houses the progressive Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation for a few minutes. That’ll show those liberals! 

There was no evident news coverage. There were no rallies. There were no crowds. In most places, most people on the street didn’t even appear to notice the billboard truck driving by....

Well, since Rob wrote that report, there has been one local newspaper article in the Lexington Dispatch. It featured a photograph of the billboard-truck (the photo reproduced above), with a group of five people waving. But the caption on the photo makes clear that these folks were waving "sarcastically," because they sure 'nuff don't support the new Republican majority in the General Assembly.

What if you drove a Rich People Rule! billboard around the state and no one saluted?

Got Our First Pope-Machine Mailer!

The Pope Boyz have somehow decided that Yours Truly is a good candidate for marching on the Right Side into "Battleground North Carolina." The Pope Civitas Institute has invited Little Ole Me to a two-day boot camp at the Crabtree Marriott in Raleigh to learn how to strip the paint off the hide of any liberal. But let the mailer speak for itself:

"The liberals will do whatever it takes to win in 2012, but North Carolina conservative can stop them.

"North Carolina will be a battleground state like never before -- you owe it to yourself and your state to be organized and ready to win.

"Battleground North Carolina is designed to energize, train, and equip citizens in our state to defeat liberal policies and liberal 'community organizers.' "

Yeah, when you're organizing, there's nothing more demon-izable than community organizers!

Participating in the training will be pooh-bahs from Americans for the Prosperous, The Heritage Foundation, and the many tentacles of Art Pope's empire. A good hyperbolic immersion will be had by all.

Has the Worm Turned?

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.

But in Wake County right now, in the heat of a new Wake County School Board race, "Tea Party" constitutes fighting words.

Just because Republican candidates for the Board spoke at Tea Party rallies, and just because they've benefited from electioneering by Americans for Prosperity and Art Pope, nationally recognized funders of the Tea Party, and just because they've been attending to the agenda of resegregating Raleigh's schools ... why, hell's bells! That doesn't make them, gulp, Tea Partiers.

Prevarication, noun

"Americans for Prosperity is a nonpartisan, issue-based policy organization and does not support or oppose candidates for public office."

--Dallas Woodhouse, NC State Dir., Americans for Prosperity

Hattip: Greg Flynn

For an outfit that had a fat finger in the effort to defeat both Sen. Steve Goss and Rep. Cullie Tarleton last year, that's a hell of a whopper.

Greg Flynn lays out the documentable $$. Both Jonathan Jordan and Dan Soucek are on that list ... twice.

When the Rich Don't Turn Out

Photo today (via Chris Fitzsimon) of the pitiful turn-out at the "veto override" rally staged in Raleigh by Americans for the Prosperous ... despite a robocall to their troops from Pat McCrory, who implied that he would be there but who himself didn't even bother to show up.

The red thingie in the middle is the inflatable oil derrick meant to symbolize this crowd's lust for off-shore oil drilling.

Long on lust, short on a crowd.