The Worms in the NC Higher Education Apple

Chris Fitzsimon actually attended the first meeting of the UNC Advisory Committee on Strategic Directions and wrote this report.

Nothing much happened yesterday, but I'm so glad that Chris Fitzsimon is on the case and will presumably be watch-dogging this particular bunch.

Q: Where Is Mitt Romney?

A: All over the map.

In Ohio, he muddles his tax message.

And now he's bragging about bringing socialized medicine to Massachusetts.

Joe Scarbrough: "O Sweet Jesus!"

I witnessed this moment on "Morning Joe" this a.m. and found Joe Scarbrough amazingly appropriate in his response.

The Outlook for Higher Education in NC

A group of 30 Big Heads with the portentous title "UNC Advisory Committee on Strategic Directions" is meeting for the first time today, and a student group has formed to protest the makeup of the committee, which is apparently charged with setting goals and directions for the 16-member University of North Carolina system.

The protesting student group, calling itself N.C. Student Power Union, is upset about the old, rich, white man  lack of diversity on the committee. There's only one student representative. There's only one faculty member representative. There's only one staff employee representative.

The N.C. Student Power Union didn't tell the half of what's wrong with that committee, seeing as how it also includes the power base of the NC Republican Party, particularly the ultra-right, Tea Party wing, the very people primarily responsible for the major, crippling budget cuts to the university system in the last two state budgets (both vetoed by Gov. Perdue, whose vetoes were overridden) and for the general weakening of all public education in the state.

Thom Tillis, Republican Speaker of the NC House, is on the committee.

Phil Berger, Republican NC Senate President Pro Tem, is on the committee.

Lew Ebert, President of the NC Chamber of Commerce, who is very actively supporting Tea Party darling Paul Newby for the NC Supreme Court, is on the committee.

Robert Ingram, former president & chief operating officer of GlaxoSmithKline, who according to OpenSecrets has given some $96,000 to Republican causes, is on the committee.

Fred Eshelman, a  Big Pharma mogul who principally funded RightChange in 2010 and who was therefore directly responsible for much of the sleaze that was directed at Cullie Tarleton and Steve Goss, is on the committee.

Art Pope, the prelate of predatory conservatism, the Death Star of the NC political universe, the Big Boss who bosses around Tillis and Berger (see above) and got his own puppets on the Tillis and Berger payroll, is on the committee.

The very people who have been most consistently and tenaciously critical of a Liberal Arts education in North Carolina are going to be setting priorities for our best institutions of higher education. Students ought to be organizing to call attention to the radical tilt of this crucial advisory committee.

And incidentally, ASU Chancellor Ken Peacock is also on the committee.

Wake County Schools Fires Its Superintendent

Remember this guy?

He ain't there no more.

Fired this afternoon by the new majority on the Wake County School Board.

Is This What REALLY Made Limbaugh's Penis Shrink?

I'm not about to cast any doubt on scientific studies coming out of Duke University, and if I were going to cast doubt on the work of a noted Duke neuroscientist, it certainly wouldn't be this particular study. The findings here were not the catalyst for Rush Limbaugh's emotional whining on the radio last week about his shrinking penis, for which condition he proclaimed "femi-Nazis" to be the proximate cause.

But this Duke study found that the election of Barack Obama had a decided testosterone-lowering impact on Republican men.

Really.

On election night in 2008, a Duke University neuroscientist took saliva samples from both men and women both before the declaration of Obama as the winner and at 20-minute intervals afterward. Participants in the study also filled out a questionnaire about political beliefs and about whom they had voted for in the election.

Dum dum dum!

"The results were clear-cut. Men who had voted for McCain -- or the libertarian candidate Robert Barr -- experienced a 28 per cent loss of testosterone almost as soon as the contest was over."

Oh my good Lord! Are Republican men tender wilting flowers, or what?

Civitas Poll Puts Obama Ahead in NC

OMG! Civitas poll (Civitas!) has Obama up over Romney in NC by four points.

In related news, it seems crystal clear that Mr. Romney manipulated his 2011 taxes, declining to take all the deductions he could have under the George W. Bush tax cuts for the filthy rich, so that he could show he paid 14%, rather than an incendiary 9%. Uh, 14% is incendiary enough, especially when Mr. Romney insists that it's perfectly fair for him to pay such a low rate on $20 million in income, while someone making $55,000 pays twice the rate.

Plus Mr. Romney wants roll-down windows on jet planes.

Perhaps the voters of North Carolina are catching on that in Mr. Romney's case, wealth breeds cluelessness. He's not just a rich jerk. He's a rich doofus.

More Proof (Once Again) That Photo ID Laws Are a Ploy To Disenfranchise Legitimate Voters

Associated Press reporting.

"Republican election officials who promised to root out voter fraud so far are finding little evidence of a widespread problem."

"State officials in presidential battleground states have found only a tiny fraction of the illegal voters they initially suspected existed. Searches in Colorado and Florida have yielded numbers that amount to less than 0.1 of 1 percent of all registered voters in either state."

"In North Carolina, the nonpartisan State Board of Elections .... did not find evidence of widespread fraud, noting there were only 12 instances in which a noncitizen had voted. North Carolina has 6.4 million voters."

First We Get Your Money, Then We Pray for Your Soul

Martin Luther

The German Catholic Church has a sweet deal with the German state tax collectors (along with Protestant churches, the Jewish faith, and pagans, we would guess): the German government tacks on a tax surcharge to every Catholic citizen's tax assessment, amounting to a windfall for the church of some $5.2 billion annually.

Can you imagine what would happen in this country if the Cardinal of Philadelphia, say, proposed that the IRS collect tithes for his church?

But get this: some German Catholics, unhappy over the policies of their hierarchy, are withholding their church tax assessments. The German bishops pitched a sizable fit over that and decided  that "believers who refuse to pay religious taxes won't be able to receive the sacrament, become godparents, or work in church institutions."

Well, thanks for making the nexus between salvation and profits for the church quite, quite explicit! Institutional avarice like this led another German several years ago to cause a bit of a break with the Catholic Church. (He also put a nail hole in a church door, we hear.)