Hanging with the Easleys

The costs of cozying up to former Gov. Mike Easley and his wife Mary just keep going up. Even the costs of resigning because you were so cozy with them.

Take former North Carolina State University Provost Larry Nielsen for example, he who hired Mary Easley for a high-profile, cobbled-together position at NC State and then upped her salary by 88 percent last summer. He recently resigned when the whole deal began to get the attention of the federal prosecutor and a grand jury.

The N&O has now unearthed a deal that the NC State Chancellor made with Nielsen hours before his resignation to pay Nielsen $310,255 in extra pay above his faculty salary. And then the Chancellor set about covering that up.

Gosh, is anyone else thinking hush money?

The N&O is also digging into what exactly Mary Easley was doing for that 88 percent raise. So far ... doesn't look like much. But when you're hired because you're married to someone powerful, sometimes your main job is carting around that big name.

The Pitfalls of Ambition

We don't have a dog in that fight, but we had to wonder why 11th Dist. Congressman Heath Shuler waded so confidently into the rebellion in Sri Lanka. What little we know about that mess doesn't make us want to embrace the Sri Lankan government more, nor the rebel Tamil Tigers for that matter, but there was Heath congratulating the Sri Lankan government for defeating "terrorists," as though that would be the final word on the matter. And doing it on the Sri Lankans' dime, which looks so much like becoming a propaganda tool for hire.

Just on the face of it.

Now, according to the Citizen-Times, others a good deal more knowledgeable are saying Shuler was had.

The question remains: why did he dive into this murky pool in the first place? Scrutiny Hooligans in Asheville think he was trying to manufacture some "foreign relations credentials" so that he can seem weighty when he reverses himself and decides to run against Dick Burr for the U.S. Senate.

The only "weight" we see in this is the ham-fisted decision to rah-rah for a government with a lot of blood on its hands.

Cal Cunningham

We've been hearing his name come up RE a potential Democratic candidate to challenge Dick Burr's reelection.

Every time we see the name, we ask, "Cal who?"

Today, Cunningham gets a nod from former state Democratic Party Chair Jerry Meek, in Roll Call. "He's got an excellent profile in terms of his biography," Meek said. "He's perceived as being a little bit more liberal than, say, Mike McIntyre and Heath Shuler."

O-kaaay. You have our attention.

Thumbnail biography: Cunningham's a lawyer and former state senator who served in the Iraq War and is currently part of the Army Reserve Judge Advocate General Corps.

Longer take: "From 2007 to 2008, he was on active duty in Iraq, where he worked as a military prosecutor as part of a team that prosecuted U.S. Department of Defense contractors on such charges as assault and illegal gun shipments. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his work in Iraq and in 2009 received the Gen. Douglas MacArthur award for leadership. While still in law school, he campaigned for the state senate, winning an open seat in November of 2000. He served on all three Senate committees on education and as vice chairman of the Senate judiciary committee. After redistricting in 2002, Cunningham declined to run for re-election after he found himself in a mostly Republican district. In 2004, he joined the Winston-Salem office of 'white-shoe law firm' Kilpatrick Stockton, handling commercial litigation."

"White-shoe law firm"? ... Wikipedia sez it's "a phrase used to describe the leading professional services firms in America, particularly firms that have been in existence for more than a century and represent Fortune 500 companies."

Cal Cunningham ... a potential rising star in North Carolina, with a striking personal resume. We're all ears: "I'm having conversations with friends and fellow Democrats," Cunningham said on Wednesday. "We're taking a very close and very serious look at this race."

All of this above set off by "Under the Dome."

Graham County Needs a New School Board

In 2006 the Graham County School Board passed a rule mandating random drug-testing of its 250 school employees, including teachers, administrators, secretaries, and school lunch ladies. Any employee found to have a "detectable amount" of an illegal drug or alcohol in his or her body would receive a reprimand and a one-time chance to enter and successfully complete a rehabilitation program.

A teacher, along with the North Carolina Association of Educators, sued the Graham County School Board over the testing policy, contending it violated the state constitution's guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. A Graham County Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the school board.

Yesterday, however, a three-judge panel of the N.C. Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the drug-testing violated the state constitution, reversing the lower court.

Today Doug Clark delves into the background of this case, particularly the depositions of Graham County School Board members that were submitted to the Appeals Court.

Oy.

They should've buried the whole idea out behind the school board building by the light of the moon, rather than receive this public spanking.

At least one other N.C. county has a random drug-testing policy (for school athletes), which this commentator thinks is equally unconstitutional.

Tom Fetzer, Still Not Gay

Definitely.

Legal precedent, not on his side: "The N.C. Court of Appeals ruled in 1994 that falsely claiming someone is gay or bisexual is not libelous on its face."

If We Worked for the Madam, We'd Want to Stay Drunk Too

Hat tip to Betsy Muse for catching this bit of behavior among Virginia Foxx's House staff last week, originally reported by Politico:

...But it seems the gaffe-prone Foxx may be rubbing off on her scheduler, Courtney Coble.

It's no secret that CapHill staff members drink beer in their offices occasionally -- holding office parties and hall happy hours, depending. Fine. And last week was recess, so, in essence, it was a slow week for staffers stuck in D.C. Fine again. But Coble inexplicably took to her Gmail account and curiously posted this brazen update, bragging: "Office beers. on taxpayer time. you're welcome, fightin 5th district."

The rest of Betsy's post includes other samples of Courtney Coble's twittering insipidness. She certainly seems well fitted to the congress critter she serves. As does Aaron Whitener, the new (ghost-writing?) head of the Watauga County Republican Party.

The American Taliban

Not just in Afghanistan are people judged sinners by fanatics and brutally executed with the approval of the mullahs.

Mullah Randall Terry of Operation Rescue, the fringe lunatics who not only want to ban abortion as an option for any woman under any circumstances but also don't countenance birth control either, could scarcely contain his glee that one of his unstable followers assassinated Dr. George Tiller at the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, on Sunday.

Wichita, Kansas, also happens to be the national HDQs of Operation Rescue.

Not only in Kansas, of course, is the Gospel of Christ twisted into a nasty, hard little knot of hatred and violence. But currently Kansas has a lot of 'splaining to do.

Watauga GOP Swallows Own Tongue

The question of the fictitious authorship ("G. Oliver Parsons") of a now-notorious Watauga Democrat column submitted by the local Republican Party is addressed by the editor of that newspaper in today's edition:

Concerning the existence of recent Watauga County Republican Party column writer G. Oliver Parsons, two attempts were made to contact local party chairman Aaron Whitener to confirm Parsons’ identity. Whitener did not respond to either attempt....

Silence breeds.

The editor further explains that although the identities of writers of letters to the editor are always checked by newspaper staff, they did not feel they needed to confirm the existence of a writer whose work was being submitted by one of the two major political parties.

Live and learn.

The Foxx-dominated era of the local GOP is now well underway.

Joe the Plumber

Coffee spurted out my nose this morning when I heard Joe Scarborough say, in all seriousness:

Conservatives have always loathed ideology.

Joe wants desperately these days to be an intellectual, and Lesson One appears to be "Rewrite History." We should take up a collection and send this child to camp.