Hell Is Not Hot Enough for the NC Senate

The incredibly cynical Phil Berger, President Pro-Tem of the NC Senate, continues to brag how he's giving school teachers a raise, and if school teachers are indeed "bought off" by his blatant manipulation, then they deserve 'im!

This Senate budget short-changes school kids by taking hundreds of millions of dollars out our public schools and by firing 7,400 teacher assistants (TAs).

Senator Josh Stein of Wake County called the education budget "a shell game." "You all fired thousands of TAs last year," Stein said on the floor of the Senate to his Republican colleagues, "and of those you didn't fire, you're firing half of the remaining ones this year. This budget is not about paying teachers a salary that reflects the importance of their work. This budget is trying to cloak your political vulnerability at the expense of our school kids."

The "political vulnerability" that Stein referred to is the wave of anger that is still sweeping through the ranks of public school employees. Teachers better not let them get away with it.

Furthermore, the Senate budget strips 15,000 blind, disabled, and elderly North Carolinians of their health insurance, i.e., Medicaid. There's Christian charity for you! The brain staggers at the sheer cruelty of it.

The Republicans are making these cuts because of the choices they made last year that created a $500 million hole in this year's budget -- a choice to fund tax giveaways to the very wealthy and to large out-of-state corporations.

Fiscal management? Not so much.

The social contract? Shredded into confetti.

Senator Dan Soucek? The nodding "yes" boy who does as he's told.

The Frackers Will Gag You After They Poison Your Wells

On the day that the NC House passed the fracking bill, climaxing the absolute pell-mell rush to bring hydraulic fracturing to North Carolina and thus endanger the drinking water of generations for a bunch of money, I thought readers might like to know what's becoming the standard in civil judgments against fracking companies.

Frackers poison wells? Frackers have to pay off the landowners. But when crackers pay off the landowners, the landowners are being forced to sign a gag rule. They cannot talk about what the frackers did to them. Forever.

And now there's a new wrinkle: lest the children of damaged property owners might blurt out in school to other children what happened on their land, the children are gagged from speaking about fracking for the rest of their lives.

I shit you not:

When drilling company Range Resources offered the Hallowich family a $750,000 settlement to relocate from their fracking-polluted home in Washington County, Pennsylvania, it came with a common restriction. Chris and Stephanie Hallowich would be forbidden from ever speaking about fracking or the Marcellus Shale. But one element of the gag order was all new. The Hallowichs’ two young children, ages 7 and 10, would be subject to the same restrictions, banned from speaking about their family’s experience for the rest of their lives.

The Hallowich family’s gag order is only the most extreme example of a tactic that critics say effectively silences anyone hurt by fracking. It’s a choice between receiving compensation for damage done to one’s health and property, or publicizing the abuses that caused the harm. Virtually no one can forgo compensation, so their stories go untold.... (Think Progress)

That's what's ahead for us, North Carolina, or some facsimile of that. Does that sound like fairness to you? Does that sound like justice to you? Does that sound like Dan Soucek and Jonathan Jordan just mortgaged our futures for a few lousy bucks or a pat on their backs from their corporate overlords?

The Templetons Strike Back at Boone

Anne Marie Templeton Yates, Chair of the Watauga GOP,
trying to block video coverage at the Dan Soucek
forum on education, Dec. 5, 2013

Senator Dan Soucek has introduced a "local bill" in the General Assembly (S865) to strip the Town of Boone of its extraterritorial powers to control and regulate development. The bill contains one primary sentence: "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Town of Boone shall not exercise any powers of extraterritorial jurisdiction as provided in Article 19 of Chapter 160A of the General Statutes." Boom.

If the senator didn't introduce that pluton bomb at the behest of the Templeton family, the Templetons certainly stand to profit handsomely by the elimination of the "steep slope" regs, among other ordinances that keep them from doing exactly as they please. Let's call S865 what it is: "The Templeton Family Enablement Act of 2014."

(NOTE: Jonathan Jordan is a part of this, because the rules governing "local bills" in the "short session" of the General Assembly -- now underway -- is that no local bill can move forward without the support of both House and Senate representatives. Voters in the Town of Boone and in the ETJ need to know that both Soucek and Jordan, who are both also up for reelection this fall, have targeted Boone -- and only Boone -- for this particular abuse of power.)

Senator Soucek tried this same move almost exactly two years ago in the short session of 2012. He stirred up a hornet's nest of opposition, and his bill ultimately got shelved in the House, primarily because of the opposition of Rep. Ruth Samuelson of Charlotte. Samuelson is still in the House and still powerful (though she announced last year that she wouldn't be running for reelection in 2014. Perhaps some skullduggery has gone on out of sight down there, and Soucek thinks he'll slip this one through. At any rate, he seems perfectly willing to stick his tongue on that frozen lamp-pole again. Has he forgotten the significant backlash two years ago among voters living in the ETJ?

The Templetons have now lost two historic elections in their lust to take over the government in Boone. Their last trump card is Senator Bobblehead and his co-conspirator, Rep. Jordan. Toadying to the rich is not a good look for these lawmakers in an election year.

Citizens Seek a Meeting with Thom Tillis, End Up in Jail Instead

Some 14 people were arrested in NC House Speaker Thom Tillis's office about 1:30 a.m. this morning. They had been in the office since mid-day yesterday, requesting a meeting with the Speaker to discuss his legislative decisions and vowing to sit in his office until he granted them that meeting.

Why did the Speaker wait until after midnight to have them arrested? Because he dreaded the "optics" of having citizens hauled off to jail while he's in a race for the U.S. Senate?

He could have avoided it by simply meeting with the people, but Tillis doesn't meet with people. He meets with donors, preferably the big ones.

Heck of a Job, Dick!

Senator Richard Burr has sparked a backlash from veterans groups that threatens to reveal his dirty little secret: that he and other Republican lawmakers love a photo op with veterans saluting the flag but vote repeatedly -- or fail to vote at all -- to deny injured and wounded veterans the promised medical care, etc. that they were promised.

Those same veterans need to turn their wrath on Virginia Foxx too. She loves nothing better than wrapping herself in a flag in the presence of former service members while ignoring her own sorry voting record.

Thom Tillis: Waffling and Bullying While Also Dodging

We begin to see a pattern with Thom Tillis, how he's going to manage to still run the NC House while also running for the U.S. Senate.

Fellow House member Robert Brawley (R-Iredell) challenged Tillis on the issue of whether a North Carolina city should have the right to set up its own municipal broadband service, and for his uppityness, Brawley was primaried and will now lose his seat in the House. But that was apparently not sufficient punishment. The NC House Republican Caucus has kicked Brawley out of the Caucus, turning him into a ghost who wanders the ramparts, sighing "Remember me!"

None of this would have happened without Tillis's blessing, but does Thom Tillis publicly own his revenge. No, he hides. He wasn't even present at the Caucus meeting that expelled Rep. Brawley.

Meanwhile, on the waffle iron, Tillis is trying to avoid saying anything substantive about the Affordable Care Act:

“I look at any consideration for insurance mandates the same way I would look at an incentive,” Tillis told a National Federation of Independent Business luncheon. “I’m neither for all incentives nor against them. I’m neither for all mandates nor against them. Let’s take a look at the economic benefit.”

What? A stand-up guy, he is not.

Meanwhile, Phil Berger's NC Senate (with bobble head Dan Soucek bobbing right along) rushed through a fracking bill and sent it off to the House, where there's a good deal of hemming and hawing and clear uncertainty that Mr. Tillis wants to open that particular can o' worms, not with tensions already high over Duke Energy and coal ash pollution and the appearance that the GOP wants to poison the whole earth to make their corporate pals happy.

Stagnation ahead is our prediction, as Tillis avoids any appearance of extremism that might hamper his Senate bid. But dodging and weaving does not a winner make.

NC Senate Wants To Fast-Track Fracking

The North Carolina Senate Republicans, under the thumb of their powerful President Pro-Tem Phil Berger, have rushed through a pro-fracking bill that ought to scare every sentient being in our state, let alone those of us who depend upon well water.

One particularly lovely provision in the Senate bill: North Carolina would become the only state in the union that would get you charged with an effing felony if you disclosed the chemical composition of the witch's brew being pumped down into the bedrock to fracture it and thus release the natural gas for harvest.

See ... here's how it works: You pump a bunch of shit mixed with water down into a hole you've drilled in bedrock, and the shit splits the rock, and the shit also runs through those cracks and impregnates all the water it can reach, which -- hey! -- is just the cost of doing business, so get over it, you effing tree-huggers!

And that scenario doesn't even begin to address another major issue: The Senate bill will mandate that a gas-drilling company can come under your land and extract the gas there without your effing permission. So much for those Sacred Property Rights that Republicans are always supposedly upholding. They're currently (and forever) upholding The Almighty Dollar.

Yes, Senator Dan Soucek is right there, voting as he's told, voting against the health and safety of his peeps.

But in advance of getting charged with a felony, here's a list of the most common and the most toxic, not to mention the most carcinogenic chemicals used in fracking:

Lead
Uranium
Formaldehyde
Hydrochloric Acid
Quaternary Ammonium Chloride
Tetrakis Hydroxymethyl-Phosphonium Sulfate
Ammonium Persulfate
Sodium Chloride
Magnesium Peroxide
Magnesium Oxide
Calcium Chloride
Tetramethyl ammonium chloride
Sodium Chloride
Isopropanol
Methanol
Formic Acid
Acetaldehyde
Petroleum Distillate
Hydrotreated Light Petroleum Distillate
Potassium Metaborate
Triethanolamine Zirconate
Sodium Tetraborate
Boric Acid
Zirconium Complex
Borate Salts
Ethylene Glycol
Polyacrylamide
Guar Gum
Polysaccharide Blend
Citric Acid
Acetic Acid
Thioglycolic Acid
Sodium Erythorbate
Lauryl Sulfate
Sodium Hydroxide
Potassium Hydroxide
Sodium Carbonate
Potassium Carbonate
Copolymer of Acrylamide
Sodium Acrylate
Sodium Polycarboxylate
Naphthalene
2-Butoxyethanol

Commissioner David Blust Called Out at Public Hearing

Watauga County Commissioner David Blust's comments about Hospitality House during county budget work sessions last week, hurtful comments that were quoted by Jesse Wood in the High Country Press, became temporarily the topic last night.

What Blust said:

Blust said that it [Hospitality House] has brought crime to that part of Watauga County and that the Hospitality House is an invitation to people all over the state that “this is a place that will take care of me.”

Translation: Bunch-a free-loadin' criminals!

Blust claims to be a devoted follower of Jesus. We feel obliged to remind Mr. Blust that Jesus would have gone to Hospitality House to break bread with those folks, something Mr. Blust certainly has not done. Once again, Blust's pharisaical attitudes are glaringly obvious.

But ... crime? As speakers pointed out last night during the public hearing, there are no reports of criminal activity emanating from Hospitality House, and for an elected County Commissioner to make such a wild, unsubstantiated claim is irresponsible at best.

For the record, David Blust was absent from his seat during the public hearing last night.

The Stone Face with the Heart of a Stone

Q In defunding the valuable -- nay, indispensable -- work done by the many non-profits in our mountain community, Watauga County Commission Republicans saved how much taxpayer money?

A .015% of the budget

Watching Commission Chair Nathan Miller's face, as appeal after appeal piled up tonight in the public hearing over the new county budget, I wondered if his heart turned to stone well before his face did, because he certainly showed a stone face tonight. Say anything, he didn't. He didn't need to. His face said it all.

Hospitality House? Nathan Miller doesn't care.

Full-time library staff living on $17,796 a year? Nathan Miller doesn't care.

Children's Playhouse, which supplies valuable programs for growing children, zeroed out in this year's proposed budget? Nathan Miller doesn't care.

The Mountain Alliance? Nathan Miller doesn't care.

The new Appalachian Theater, which has received Town of Boone support but not county support? Nathan Miller doesn't care.

Community Care Clinic? Nathan Miller doesn't care.

High Country Crimestoppers? Nathan Miller doesn't care.

What does he care about? He cares about his ideology, which demands that he care zilch about the pain in the world around him.

May 20, public hearing over the budget. Photo by Lonnie Webster