Thom Tillis: "You Selfish Teachers!"

Over the weekend, I read the opinion of some North Carolina Republican operative -- can't remember at the moment who nor where -- who was gloating a tiny bit because the new Republican majority in the General Assembly was going to get away with their brand of murder (thousands of teachers fired or laid off), because (words to this effect) no one knows who Thom Tillis (Republican Speaker of the House) and Phil Berger (Majority Leader in the Senate) are. Everyone knows the governor, this Republican was saying, so the governor will get the blame.

Maybe that's working, and maybe that's the explanation for why Thom Tillis feels he can be a total dick, especially to public workers in education. It's fashionable these days, if not de rigeur, to bash teachers, and Tillis added his own flourishes to the practice at the state's GOP state convention on Saturday, to great applause:

"They [public school teachers] don’t care about kids. They don’t care about classrooms. They only care about their jobs and their pensions."

It doesn't get any more brazen than that.

Voter Suppression

The effort at suppressing the black vote in North Carolina (not to mention the college-age vote) got the attention of the NYTimes yesterday in an editorial that pointed out that early voting in our state, particularly among blacks supporting Barack Obama, shot up substantially in 2008. Which is all you need to know about the motivation of the new Republican majority in the General Assembly:

Mr. Obama won North Carolina ... by less than 15,000 votes. That state has had early voting since 2000, and in 2008, more ballots were cast before Election Day than on it. Mr. Obama won those early votes by a comfortable margin. So it is no coincidence that the North Carolina House passed a measure — along party lines — that would cut the early voting period by a week, reducing it to a week and a half before the election. The Senate is preparing a similar bill, which we hope Gov. Beverly Perdue, a Democrat, will veto if it reaches her.

The veto is the only weapon Bev Perdue has, and she's already proven that she's prepared to use it. After that, everything will depend on the Five Goobers from Demsville on whether the veto is overridden.

Beware of the Man Who Can't Be Embarrassed

Mere minutes after he discovered that his Republican caucus meeting had been broadcast to the press corps through an open mike, Republican Speaker Thom Tillis betrayed no sense of awkwardness but more of a "So what, bitch?"

The provision slipped into the budget -- which supposedly five Goobers from Demsville will betray the governor and vote to override her veto -- is an end-run for redistricting meant to guarantee that Attorney General Roy Cooper is cut out of the process along with the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Republicans intend to submit their redistricting plans directly to the D.C. Circuit Court, considered the most conservative in the country, rather than follow usual procedure and go through the DOJ. Sure, gloated the unembarrassable Thom Tillis: "Clearly, we’d rather take it through the channel that we think best benefits us in terms of getting the plans through. I generally have a high degree of confidence in the courts."

That last sentence is particularly entertaining, considering the GOP's perennial need to bash "activist" judges. It's different when the judges belong to them.

The Clown College and the Five Goobers From Demsville

No one knows how exactly a secret meeting of the Republican House caucus this afternoon got "piped into every audio outlet in the Legislative Complex," but I'll maintain right here and now that it was God.

The Republicans were revealing (among other things) their true contempt for the five Democratic House members they say will vote to override the governor's veto of the Republican budget, a.k.a., "Act To Take NC Back to the Nineteenth Century."

Democratic Turkeys! Turkeys helping to sharpen the axe intended for their own throats.

Like we said, among other things.

Gov. Perdue: "Take That, Dickheads!"

The news broke while we were driving a Meals-on-Wheels route this morning, but we got home to find this e-mail from David Parker in our in-box:

Bev Perdue stunned the GOP leadership today by issuing an Executive Order for the immediate release of federal unemployment benefits to 47,000 out of work North Carolinians.

The order ends nearly two months of deadlock during which Republican legislators employed the jobless as pawns in budget negotiations with her office. Finally, these unemployed – our friends, family and neighbors – will have help paying bills, mortgages and putting food on their tables.

In a statement moments ago, the Governor explained that she had finally had enough of the GOP's petty political games and the very real suffering they were causing:

"Just yesterday, they voted down a measure to separate this issue from their budget. Enough is enough. They continue to use desperate people as leverage to extort my support for an ideologically-driven budget that needlessly cuts millions from our public schools and inflicts millions of dollars more in damage to our universities, pre-school programs, community colleges, job creation efforts and vital health care services. I will not stand for it and I will not sit by idly as the legislature continues to play these games and deny the jobless the unemployment benefits they need."

There will be howls from the offices of the Republican leadership over the next few days, but I think that what our Governor did today is nothing short of heroic....

Couldn't agree more with that "heroic" adjective used in this context. I would have added "gutsy."

What no one talks about is what the unemployed do with those federal jobless benefits. They pay their rent. They pay their bills. They put food on the table. The Republican dickishness in withholding their benefits, in a game of ideological one-upmanship, was actually hurting the economy of North Carolina.

Macon County Looking at Steep-Slope Building Regs

Macon County, NC, where five people were killed in 2004 in a slope failure, is moving forward on adopting steep-slope building regulations. (The infamous Peeks Creek landslide is pictures to the left.)

Haywood, Jackson, and Buncombe counties have already implemented such regs, despite the howls of developers that the world would end.

Not only has the world not ended, but the chair of the Macon County planning commission, who also happens to be a grading contractor, real estate agent, and golf course developer, recently received information that the lack of steep-slope regs in Macon was driving away potential investors.

Lack of. (Read the article linked above for the source of that counter-intuitive conclusion.)

"Some of the naysayers say it's going to stop development,” this gentleman said. “But we can't find any examples of an ordinance that has.”

Shouldn't We At Least TRY a Bomb?

In an article in The Daily Tar Heel about college students trying to lobby Republican members of the General Assembly in a (vain?) effort to divert them from their foolhardy goal of crippling public education in this state ... Rep. Bill Faison (D-Caswell) ruefully commented on the intractability of this new crop of Republicans like Sen. Dan Soucek:

“In terms of changing them, I’m not sure if you had a nuclear bomb over there you could change them.”

Soucek, in fact, was interviewed for the article and was making all those gurgling sounds that are meant to indicate empathy with those about to be bludgeoned to death for ideology. Yada yada yada. Whining about how haaaarrrd it is to be a state senator does not cover the facts of how you vote, Senator.

Wearing Socks with Sandals

Meet the NC House Democrat who 'fessed up today that he had already cut a budget deal with the Republicans ... behind Gov. Perdue's back.

What a prince!

Mr. Bill Owens of Pasquotank. Sez he thinks his fellow DINOs who currently seem to LUV themselves some Republican budgeting will vote along with him to override the expected veto of what the new Republican majority in the General Assembly have brewed up to take the state back a few decades.

We will know whom to thank, you bet!

Perdue Ready to Fight

The Republican grandees in the NC General Assembly were bragging that they have a budget "compromise" ready to unveil that will win Democratic support enough to be veto proof.

Gov. Perdue swept away this buffalo dust with a single swipe.

She sure sounds like she's up for a little street brawl:

"...She called the compromise budget plan a ‘charade.’ 'There is nothing else left for them to cut but warm bodies and teacher, educators, teacher's assistants, so don't let them fool you. They are not protecting public classrooms. The thing that irritates me so much, it just makes me so angry is that they don't have to do this,' said Perdue.

"She contends that the budget just moves money around, leaving it to local school districts to make tough choices."