Dan Soucek, Getting Nastier By the Day

A commenter on a thread somewhere below, after my denunciation of Dan Soucek for push-polling against Sen. Steve Goss, posted this:

"Anyone who has ever met Dan Soucek knows that he doesn't participate in smear campaigns."

Tonight, I get this e-mail from a resident of Deep Gap:

"I just thought I would let you know that I was the recipient of an ugly push poll from somebody against Steve Goss (I can only figure it was either the RNC or the Soucek campaign itself). You know how these things go. How do you feel about Obama, Hagen, Purdue, etc.? When I said I had no opinion on Steve Goss, then they asked whether I would be more or less likely to vote for Steve Goss if I had heard the following things -- and then the questions turned increasingly nasty. Would I be more or less likely to vote for him if I knew he supported wasteful spending in Washington, etc. After the second of these I told the woman, 'This is a push poll. You are not asking me legitimate questions. You're reciting Republican talking points!' She said, 'No, these are just statements.' After rehashing the Goss mileage thing [and see this] (in as derogatory language as possible) the next question was would I be more likely to support Steve Goss if I heard he had supported legislation to parole early rapists and murderers, I said, 'Ok, that's enough.' And hung up. I went to Soucek's campaign web site to complain and call on him to denounce these kinds of dirty tricks campaign tactics, but he
doesn't have a place to contact him or an email, so I left it in a comment (which I am sure will be deleted). Soucek should take a stand against these kinds of behaviors. That is, if he's not funding them himself."

Dear earlier Anonymous poster on WataugaWatch: He's either funding this push poll himself, which makes him a sleaze, or he's benefitting from someone else's funding of it, which makes him a lying sleaze. Take your pick.

He can claim he's the biggest Christian ever in this neck of the woods, but these actions proclaim him otherwise, and nakedly, to the world. He's an embarrassment to this county, to his church, and especially to his party.

There Is No End to Virginia Foxx's Heartlessness

Here's a congressional vote by Madam Foxx that we missed on July 29:

She's never more "Virginia Foxx-like" than when she's voting with an abject minority on an issue that even her own Republican caucus mainly supports. In this case, the "Senior Financial Empowerment Act," legislation aimed at protecting seniors targetted by fraudsters and financial criminals. According to the Federal Trade Commission, nearly one in five seniors are defrauded each year.

Too damn bad! sez Madam Foxx and 78 of her closest bosom buddies in the Republican caucus. A total of 79 Republicans (and two obscure Democrats) voted against the bill. Even that Oompa-Loompa Patrick McHenry from the NC-10 voted FOR it!

Virginia Foxx is famous in my household for having once said (while she was in the NC Senate), "The worst thing we can do is to get government involved in solving problems." That goes for providing information about companies with a track record of defrauding elderly people to those seniors' children or care givers. It's a modest fix for a crime wave that nets some $2.6 billion a year from unsuspecting and sometimes befuddled older citizens, and it involves zero government spending.

Who could be against such a thing ... except Madam Virginia Foxx, the New Queen of Mean.

Postscript
The reason we missed this vote is that it happened on the same day that Madam Foxx even more egregiously voted against the "James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act," which would have given free health care to the first responders and rescue workers at Ground Zero on 9/11. One more cruel vote in Congress distracts us from the first cruel vote.

What a peach of a human being this woman is!

Me and Patricia Neal

Paul Newman got to her first.

I was a senior in high school when they filmed "Hud" 50 miles from my home in the Panhandle of Texas. I didn't know who Patricia Neal was. She had made her name in Hollywood in the late 1940s and early '50s, while I was still playing with toy trucks, but we all knew who Paul Newman was. Two friends and I climbed in a car and got ourselves up to Claude, Texas, in the naive belief that we'd be able to walk right up to where they were filming and get Paul Newman's autograph. Never occurred to us that Patricia Neal was also a worthy target for fan boys.

We never did find the dusty location where they were filming on that particular day. We really didn't have a clue where to look. We drove around aimlessly for awhile, rubbernecking like crazy to see any vestige of Hollywood. Claude, Texas, was essentially a courthouse fronted on four sides by run-down stores, and bisected by a four-lane connecting Amarillo to the greener pastures of Dallas-Fort Worth. Nothing to see. Nothing to do but go get hamburgers and fries and malteds at the Lone Texan drive-in.

Many years later -- decades, actually -- I began to catch up with the early Patricia Neal in movies like "The Fountainhead" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "Bright Leaf," which was a thinly disguised depiction of the rapacious Duke family of North Carolina's tobacco industry.

Soon after filming "Hud" in 1962, Patricia Neal suffered a series of strokes that she struggled back from, learning to talk again and act on screen again. She gave us the indelible first Ma Walton on TV in the first incarnation of John Boy's mom, in "The Homecoming: A Christmas Story" in 1971, for my money her most powerful character ever.

Patricia Neal died yesterday at the ripe age of 84. She was a brave and accomplished woman.

Someone Should Ask Virginia Foxx

Madam Foxx will be speaking to the Yadkinville Rotary Club on the morning of August 24th. Some of those good people in the business community of Yadkin County might ask her why she was one of only 32 members of the House of Representatives to vote against H.R. 3854 ("Small Business Financing and Investment Act of 2009"), legislation designed to help small businesses obtain federal micro-loans, government contracts and export assistance. At the bill's center is a $30 billion program for community banks to extend loans to small businesses, since the Big Banks aren't doing it. The N.C. Bankers Assn., that notorious nest of socialists, supports the bill.

It passed the House last October, with Foxx voting NO. It's now stuck in the Senate, where Sen. Dick Burr and the rest of the Republicans are acting like the total dicks they are.

Other provisions in the law would increase amounts of Small Business Administration loans, leverage $1 billion in export capital, offer tax breaks for investments and startup costs, and give temporary funding for rural exports.

These are all things that would help small businesses in North Carolina, where the unemployment rates are still over 10 percent. But Foxx is much more interested in seeing small business turn to dust for the sake of partisanship.

It's virtually guaranteed that no one at the Rotary Club meeting in Yadkinville later this month will (1) know anything about her actual voting record or (2) get their puckered lips off the Madam's dainty ass long enough to challenge her abyssmal record.

Robeson County Passes Quarter-Cent Sales Tax Increase

On Tuesday of this week.

The vote was marred by the public utterance of one of the Robeson County Commissioners afterward. Commissioner Oxendine (a Democrat, incidentally) said he was proud of the vote because it shifted part of the tax burden onto illegal immigrants. We're not making that up. His actual quote: "I'm really happy it passed. I think it will also move some of the tax burden onto immigrants in our county. They come in and use our services and don't pay anything. [Raising the sales tax] is a way for them to pay us back."

Good Gawd, man! You might think such things, but saying them out loud is just ... gross.

Also factually inaccurate. Immigrants, whether legal or illegal, already pay the exact same sales and consumption taxes that the rest of us do. The U.S. Social Security Administration has estimated that three quarters of undocumented immigrants pay payroll taxes. They contribute $6-7 billion in Social Security funds that they will never be able to claim.

But never mind such facts when a petty local politician can score gratuitous political points by scapegoating them.

Party Like It's 2002!

Deborah Greene was last heard from in this county in a major way as a leader of the R.I.D. group (as in RID Ourselves of a New High School), who tried every body block they could think of to prevent the building of the new high school (officially opened by The Guv in a ribbon-cutting ceremony last Friday, despite Ms. Greene's best efforts). Before that, in her "No Zoning" crusade of 2001-2002, she rocked another hobby horse that lent itself to creative scare tactics.

She's baaack!

And going ballistic like it was 2002. What's got her all het up is the proposed quarter-cent hike in the sales tax. Un-shy in her opportunism, she's grabbed the "Tea Party" label to promote herself as our savior from unfair taxation. She's started her own Political Action Committee (PAC) and is soliciting money for print ads, bumperstickers -- the whole hyped-up, morally outraged, politically indignant schmeer.

All over 1/4 of a single cent more in sales tax.

It's the principle of the thing, though. Clearly.

If you give her PAC $50 or more to help memorialize her anti-tax crusade, you'll also have to divulge your name, address, employer, etc. for Ms. Greene's PAC filing reports. Just for comparison's sake, if the quarter-cent hike in sales taxes passes, you'll have to spend some $20,000 in retail purchases to add up $50 more in local sales tax.

Me? It'll take me many moons of frenzied retail buying to pay out that extra $50 in increased sales taxes, and I think I'd prefer it go to infrastructure improvements in Watauga County than to Ms. Greene's PAC.

"Ragtime" at Lees-McRae Summer Theatre

If you don't know this already, the Lees-McRae College Summer Theatre is one of our greatest cultural resources in these here mountains, a professional operation run by Janet Speer since the mid-1980s to the great delight and edification of anyone fortunate enough to see one of her genius productions.

We saw her mounting of "Ragtime" last night, which was quite the condensed history lesson of America in the first decades of the 20th century, told by a sterling cast with music supplied by a really hot combo of piano, clarinet, bassoon, violin, and percussion. It ain't your typical junior high history lesson, either, dealing frankly with race, immigration, class privilege, and radical labor organizing. Not many musicals give you both the socialist firebrand Emma Goldman and the racial accommodationist Booker T. Washington in the same cast of characters!

The production runs through Friday (for tickets, phone 828-898-8709). If you manage to grab tickets, get yourself there early, as there are no reserved seats. Last night, it was pretty much standing room only in that auditorium.

The Summer Theatre usually runs three (and occasionally four) shows every summer, but this year "Ragtime" is the only production. A sign of these economic times. Lees-McRae College appears unable to subsidize the theater this year as in years past, and next summer's schedule depends entirely on how well "Ragtime" does this week.

It would be a pluperfect shame to lose this bright and shining resource.

Watauga GOP Shows How It's the Party of the "Little People"

The Watauga County Republican Party will host former legitimate journalist and now born-again Fox propagandist Bernard (Bernie) Goldberg at the outrageously over-priced Broyhill Inn for a ritual seance during which Goldberg will see "liberal elites" in all the Broyhill woodwork, busily munching the oak and taking over America, and Congresswoman Virginia Foxx will bring news that allowing the Bush tax cuts on the 2% of America’s richest to expire will lead to homosexual nuptials and the gnashing of gold-filled teeth and the probable selling off of 3rd and 4th vacation homes just to make payments on the 2nd yacht, and how can the "real" America withstand such blood-sucking socialism? Huh? How can it ever?

Kissell, Shuler, and McIntyre Get a Warm Reception

The main action yesterday at the state Democratic convention in Fayetteville -- or at least the most interesting -- swirled around a resolution put forward on the convention floor "to condemn" U.S. Reps. Mike McIntyre of Lumberton, Larry Kissell of Biscoe, and Heath Shuler of Haywood County "for their votes against health care reform."

Ouch.

The leadership of the state party were apparently fit to be tied.

Following heated debate, the resolution got watered down to asking the three congressmen to please please please don't vote with the Republicans in the future to repeal the health care reform. Andrew Whalen, the executive director of the state party, put on his best game face: "I think the fact that the resolution was amended and then passed shows the party is to work together to get Democrats elected. It demonstrates we are the big-tent party...." Blah, blah, blah.

Wish we had us a few Anthony Weiners in North Carolina ... instead of what we have.