Tillis: "I Know Nothing!"

The new Republican majority in the NC General Assembly was against centralized government control when they were running last year. Now they're amazingly amenable to it.

A little-noticed provision in the NC House budget, newly passed, would centralize all policies regarding public school layoffs (of which there will be MANY, if the Republicans get their dream-come-true) ... would centralize those policies with the state Board of Education.

As soon as this provision began to be known, an outcry has gone up.

Chris Whitmire, Republican chairman of the Transylvania County Board of Commissioners, said the state measure goes against the Republican mantra of “more local control.”

NC Speaker of the House Thom Tillis revealed his own ignorance of what was in the bill he steamrolled through the House last week, saying "he wasn't familiar with that part of the budget bill and predicted it would be removed from the final budget."

Gen'l Assembly GOP: 'Beyond Indecent'

Strong editorial language from the Charlotte Observer about the Republican disdain for some 37,000 unemployed North Carolinians.

Economically stupid too. Whoever claimed that Republicans were good with money?

The unemployment benefits that the Republican grandees in the General Assembly are holding hostage, hoping to box Gov. Perdue into a corner over the budget, would boost the economy of the state. As a key staffer for a member of the Council of State explained it to us in Raleigh on Tuesday, those unemployment payments would go directly into economic circulation as desperate former-workers paid their rents, their utility bills, bought their groceries.

That money would go to Main Street mainly and would help boost the economy.

But what do those Republican dickheads care about the economy of the state when they have political points to score?

Nailing Jello to a Wall

David Barton is the fundamentalist preacher that Mike Huckabee and Michelle Bachmann think is the number one constitutional authority in the United States and the greatest "historian" of the supposedly incorrect notion of a wall between church and state. He's profiled in the NYTimes this a.m.

He was also Jon Stewart's guest on The Daily Show last night, and the entire, extended interview (several different clips -- it goes on for probably 15-20 minutes) is well worth watching. Personally, we haven't heard any man talk that fast and be that distractive and slippery since we were negotiating with a fellow in a shark-skin suit over a used Rambler with a rolled-back odometer.

Bottomline: Barton thinks the 90% Christian majority in this country is oppressed, and he wants explicitly Christian beliefs applied up and down the scale in government. Oh, he claims he only says stuff like this to pastors, but whatever. He has said that the Christian Bible mandates against deficit spending, against graduated income taxes, against the minimum wage, and against doing anything about global warming.

Jon Stewart remains the most incisive, and the most civil, interviewer on the planet.

The Republican War on Women

Women in North Carolina, and especially young women, are going to have to wake up and pay attention to the way the new Republican majority in the NC General Assembly intends to treat you with this new legislation.

Because you're immoral for getting pregnant, because you're too stupid for school, because you're making the wrong decision if it's not OUR decision (say these legislators), you'll have to subject yourself to intrusive, humiliating, insulting probing by the state before you can have an abortion.

I'm not going to lead you into the street over this, but I'll come with you. You're going to have to take up the banner. If you don't, you'll become nothing more than the complacent breeding stock that the Christian Right, and Senator Dan Soucek and Representative Jonathan Jordan, want you to be.

New Republican Majority in Raleigh: 'Landslides? We Couldn't Care Less!'

In their rush to cut anything and everything that smacks of progressive policies, the Republican NC House budget eliminates the Landslide Mapping Program. Watauga County, which has experienced catastrophic landslides with significant damage and loss to property (but so far no outright deaths, at least not since 1940), was mapped a few years ago, not that any local official will ever do squat with the warnings contained therein, other than throw the info up on the County's website for whoever has the time and patience to search it out.

Other western counties that have been completed are Macon (where five people died in 2004 in the Peeks Creek slide, during the same hurricane event that brought the house pictured here down a hillside in Watauga), Buncombe, and Henderson counties. Some of those counties has enacted county-wide steep-slope building regs to minimize the loss of property and lives.

But this is precisely the sort of "public good" that Republicans hate, because it might interfere with someone's profit margin.

Okay, last one.

Another pic from the One Voice Rally in Raleigh.

At the One Voice Rally in Raleigh

Some of the signs from yesterday's One Voice for public education rally in Raleigh.

Teachers were coming to the rally as soon as they got away from their schools, so the first on the legislative plaza were Wake County teachers. But by 4:30 buses were arriving from all counties, including Watauga.

Meanwhile, the new Republican majority in the NC House were passing their massive cuts to education and health care, including 15.5% axed from the University system.

Homerun for Education

Winston-Salem filmmaker Frank Eaton debuted his new 8-minute film, "The Promise of Public Education,"at the Jefferson Jackson Democratic fundraising dinner in Raleigh Saturday night. You can see this careful piece of work here.

Main message: the new Republican majority in the General Assembly is trying to dismantle a public institution that took more than a century to build. Major take-away: Spending for public education is economic development, perhaps in its purest form. To strangle it will hasten the next Big Depression.

This film is a nice way to kick off the work-week and good prep for the "One Voice" rally to support public education spending in Raleigh at the legislative building tomorrow at 4 p.m. We'll be there. Will you?