The Empty Suit Loses More Buttons

Gov. Squishy got pinned by a classroom full of private school fourth graders yesterday in Raleigh, proving that he isn't even up to the challenge of facing questions from 10-year-olds.

The cost of cleaning up Duke Energy's coal ash spill into the Dan River is "the big issue," McCrory said but wouldn't take a position on whether Duke should get away with passing the costs on to the consumers. He passed the buck to the NC Utilities Commission, a majority of whom are now Squishy's appointees. Are they prepared to carry the governor's waffling into action and allow the corporation to stick the public with the costs?

Did you know, O my brethren, that "all forms of energy have a downside"? That's what McCrory told the students. Coal ash is just a "downside." No big thang!

"McCrory seemed miffed that he is receiving a good bit of the scrutiny because of his three-decade tenure at Duke Energy."

That's our governor ... always "miffed" because people notice that he's a paper tiger, a complete cypher, a creature of smarter and tougher minds, someone who can't even look strong to a bunch of fourth graders.

Big Boob(s) in Ashvegas

The District 3 County Commissioner race in Buncombe County is an all-Republican circus, with two extremely conservative challengers (until yesterday) trying to oust a Republican incumbent. Whoever wins the primary takes the seat.

Until yesterday, a prime Tea Party candidate, Lewis Clay, was in the race to win, but then it came to light that Mr. Clay had "likes" on his Facebook page of "Bored and Available" and "Big Boobs."

Oops.

The "Big Boobs" site is apparently not a tribute page for extremely conservative politicians who can't keep their appetites under wraps, though that would be appropriate.

To Prove He's Macho, Rep Pittenger Proves He's an Idiot

Poor Robert Pittinger, the Charlotte freshman Congressman who replaced Sue Myrick in Washington!  He voted to raise the debt ceiling, immediately got a Tea Party challenger in May's primary, and to save his own precious hide, he's calling President Obama "Enemy Number One" in a fundraising letter to his conservative base.

Profile in courage not.

This would be funny if it weren't so remarkably pathetic.

Especially pathetic in what it says about the Republican base and what their elected leaders think of them ... that they're too stupid for school and easily manipulated by labeling The Black Man with some outlandish charge.

The Systematic Dismantling of Environmental Protections in North Carolina

Come on down, fracking! North Carolina is preparing the way for you.

Since the Party of Corporate Greed took control of our state, they've eliminated 225 jobs at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), including another 51 jobs in the division that protects the state's water resources last week.

If there's one thing DENR learned from the gigantic coal ash spill on the Dan River, it's that we can do with a lot less people monitoring water pollution!

If this is what you wanted, North Carolina, you got it in spades!

And thanks, Governor Squishy, for being such an accommodating doormat.

IT'S TIME FOR PITCHFORKS & TORCHES!
Duke Energy sez that consumers must pay for its incompetence / callous disregard for the public health / criminal malfeasance.

Fuck you, Duke Energy, and the politicians you rode in on!

Greed

Bill Aceto, Luke Eggers, Kathleen Campbell last night.
Photo Lonnie Webster

Watauga Republicans just can't help themselves. As evidenced by the 2-1 vote last night by the Watauga County Board of Elections, it's never enough for the Republican overlords to advantage their rural voters unless they can also disadvantage Boone and its suburbs. Republican BOE majority members Luke Eggers and Bill Aceto voted to establish one Early Voting site for two-thirds of the voters and a total of four Early Voting sites for the other one-third.

Republican Party Chair Anne Marie Yates said in her public comment that 60+ percent of Watauga voters were rural voters, which is just exactly the opposite of the truth. Her statement was so inaccurate that even the word "lie" doesn't quite cover it. Here are the actual numbers of registered voters in the rural precincts (from smallest to largest):

North Fork 151
Beech Mountain 388
Bald Mountain 449
Elk 501
Shawneehaw 604
Beaver Dam 990
Laurel Creek 1,085
Stony Fork 1,755
Cove Creek 2,280
Meat Camp 2,324
Watauga, 2,923

That's 13,450 out of a total of 41,902 registered voters in Watauga County, or a little over 32%. Add in a few more rural voters in the mainly suburban precincts of Blue Ridge, Brushy Fork, the New Rivers, and you might get as high as 37%.

Aceto and Eggers (we need to start naming them in that order, since it's clear that Bill Aceto has seized control of the board from Eggers -- and his shadow brother -- because Eggers doesn't want to be there) voted to place Early Voting sites in Blowing Rock, Deep Gap Fire Department, Meat Camp Fire Department, and the Western Watauga Community Center -- all of which we applaud -- and one site in Boone at the Administration Building on the corner of King and Water streets, which we do not applaud.

The one in-town site will serve all of Boone municipal, all of Appalachian State University (with over 17,000 students, not counting faculty & staff), and the suburban precincts of New River 1, New River 2, New River 3, most of Brushy Fork, and most of Blue Ridge -- a total of 29,808 voters.

Meanwhile, the Deep Gap Fire Department will serve Stony Fork and maybe Elk = total of 2,256 voters.

The Blowing Rock site will serve the Blowing Rock precinct = 2,559 voters.

The Meat Camp Fire Department will serve Meat Camp and Bald Mountain = 2,773 voters.

The Western Watauga Community Center will serve Cove Creek, Laurel Creek and Beaver Dam = 4,355 voters.

If Aceto and Eggers had exhibited anything other than the greediness of Anne Marie Yates, they could have placed an Early Voting site in the ASU Student Union for even three days, to serve some 17,000+ citizens who are on that campus every week, and thereby they could have quelled protest. Instead, they chose to blatantly and publicly proclaim their intention to fence off ASU and compact Boone and its suburbs into a single Early Voting site with little parking and congested streets.

During the meeting last night, acting chair Bill Aceto actually bragged that the board's Early Voting plan for the municipal elections last year increased voter turn-out. That drew laughter from the crowd in the room. Yes, the Aceto/Eggers implementation plan last fall to suppress students from voting made so many voters of both major parties so angry that they came out in droves to defeat the Anne Marie Yates slate of candidates. We don't expect that anger at Aceto & Eggers to evaporate in 2014.

And get this: Aceto and Eggers also mandated in their Early Voting plan for 2014 that all Early Voting sites will close their doors at 4 p.m. I'm not making this up. It's a bizarre decision that makes no sense, and especially makes no sense for their own Republican rural voters, because who gets off work before 4 p.m.? That's not just a stupid decision. It's evil.

Bottomline
Because the vote on Aceto's Early Voting plan was again not unanimous, it must go to Raleigh for a decision by the State Board of Elections, along with Kathleen Campbell's alternative plan, which calls for a site on the ASU campus. We expect no favors from the partisan Republicans on the State Board of Elections, but clearly, Aceto expects a rubber-stamp.

Will fair-minded Watauga voters rise up again to show their anger at this blatant discrimination?

Republican Primary Contests in Watauga County

Don't you just love it when Congresswoman Virginia Foxx brags! At a Republican banquet last Saturdaynight in Statesville, Foxx said, "There is no division in the Republican Party. I consider myself a member of the TEA party, and we are all members of the TEA party, Taxed Enough Already."

I believe that she also considers herself a member of the other Tea Party, the one that doesn't capitalize all the letters in "tea," but if she really believes there's no division in the Republican Party -- which she demonstrably does not, the old liar … oh never mind! It was an absurd statement on its face.

In Watauga, it looks very much like Tea v. Money, or in one case, maybe Tea v. Tea, but it certainly ain't kumbaya time around the old campfire. Even Virginia Foxx herself has a primary.

County Commissioner Race, Dist. 5

         Allen Trivette (R)

         Jimmy Hodges (R)

Former County Commissioner Allen Trivette is the very embodiment of Tea Party, while his primary opponent, former County Commissioner Jimmy Hodges, is the very embodiment of Chamber of Commerce money. The fact that Hodges was registered as a Democrat while he was on the County Commission years ago may play a role in this contest. The fact that Allen Trivette once actually suggested that the women parents of elementary school children could clean school buildings to save the county money may also play a role in this contest.

County Commissioner Race, Dist. 3

         Karen Lerch (R)

         Matt Klutz (R)

Karen Lerch is running with the apparent blessing of the local GOP. Matt Klutz, perhaps not so much. Judging from her Facebook posts, Karen Lerch is something of a "birther," believing that President Obama is a socialist from Kenya and needs to go back to Africa. Matt Klutz's father Tommy was a very conservative Blowing Rock Town Commissioner until the last election, but that doesn't necessarily define the son.

Watauga County Board of Education

Yes, there's a primary, and two of eight candidates will be eliminated. Five of the eight are either registered Republicans or have taken conservative stances on education, particularly on the subject of banning certain books from the classroom:

            Tiffany Christian

         Ron Henries

         Adam L. Trivette

         Jason Cornett

         Josh Kanoy

The best explanation for this piling on of conservative personnel is that the local GOP didn't do candidate recruitment, so someone is going to get thrown under the primary bus on May 6. Incumbert School Board member Ron Henries is the stand-out "moderate" in this group, comparatively so because of his recent vote not to ban Allende's House of the Spirits from sophomore Honors English classes. He may be in trouble if this primary attracts a plurality of far-right voters.

The Rogues in Charge of Protecting NC's Water

Gov. McCrory has now bragged, with reference to the third largest coal ash spill in U.S. history, that "I know infrastructure [at Duke Energy] and I know management and I know engineering. Somewhere along the way there has been a breakdown in ensuring that site [on the Dan River] was properly maintained."

Does anyone within the sound of McCrory's mis-firing synapses really believe that he knows squat about engineering, or about anything else beyond smiling for the camera?

And now the New York Times has uncovered this eye-witness account from last June, when water pollution regulators at the NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources, were given new marching orders "on behalf of North Carolina’s new Republican governor and conservative lawmakers" (courtesy of "The Morning Memo" at the N&O):

“The General Assembly doesn’t like you,” an official in the Department of Environment and Natural Resources told supervisors called to a drab meeting room here. “They cut your budget, but you didn’t get the message. And they cut your budget again, and you still didn’t get the message.”

From now on, regulators were told, they must focus on customer service, meaning issuing environmental permits for businesses as quickly as possible. Big changes are coming, the official said, according to three people in the meeting, two of whom took notes. “If you don’t like change, you’ll be gone.”

"Customer service" = kowtowing to corporate polluters.

Yep, North Carolina, your air and water is in good hands! That "expert" in infrastructure, engineering, and management is running everything!

This Smells To High Heaven

This man, Joe Hauck, was hired last year by the NC Department of Health and Human Services at $125 an hour, was paid a total of $310,000 for exactly three double-spaced pages of "work product," according to a public records request by the Associated Press which produced those three pages and nothing else to show that Hauck ever did anything at DHHS.

That's roughly $100,000 per page for government work.

Best part? Hauck regularly works as an executive for DHHS Secretary Aldona Wos's husband, Louis DeJoy (DeLovely!), and returned to that job as soon as he finished dictating those three measly pages.

The DHHS flack told the News&Observer that Hauck did a lot more, particularly coming up with ways to make the knife slip in easily between the shoulder blades when it came to draconian budget cuts enacted by The Clown College down on Jones Street.

Aldona Wos: "Give me a minute while this butter doesn't melt in my mouth."

Evidence That Parts of the NC DemsParty Are Comatose

Get this: Democratic members of county boards of election in some 32 counties have joined with their Republican majorities in requesting an exemption from the State BOE to have fewer Early Voting hours during the May primaries, hours that were mandated by the monster voting law (Voter I.D., etc.) enacted by the Republican majority.

The quirk in the law: As Pat McCrory so memorably said, Early Voting has been "compacted." Though the number of days of Early Voting has been reduced from 17 to 10, the total number of hours that polls were open during Early Voting in 2012 must be duplicated in the shortened Early Voting period of 2014, unless an individual county board of elections unanimously requests an exemption from the rule. Got that?

Apparently, when the law was originally passed and in order to get some Democratic support, Republican bosses had to add that particular provision (to maintain the same number of total hours while reducing the total number of days). The rationale used to sell the law to Democrats was that county election boards would henceforth be forced to extend Early Voting hours to 8 or 9 p.m., for example, and add more sites to help more people find time to vote.

Unless an individual county board of elections unanimously requests an exemption from the rule.

And that's exactly what 32 NC counties have done (complete list below). Which means that in 32 NC counties, the Democratic member of those boards of elections saw no problem whatsoever in reducing Early Voting even more than the cutting off of a full week of ballot access. Republican majorities on those boards proposed seeking the exemption, and Democratic members, in an excess of wanting to be nice or just plain stupid, went along with the further squeezing of North Carolina democracy into a box that will fit very neatly on Art Pope's desk.

We can understand the presence of some counties on this list, where no viable Democratic Party even exists, but ... Buncombe?!?

Alleghany

Bladen

Brunswick

Buncombe

Caldwell

Camden

Cherokee

Chowan

Clay

Craven

Currituck

Duplin

Graham

Granville

Greene

Henderson

Martin

McDowell

Mitchell

Onslow

Pamlico

Pasquotank

Perquimans

Sampson

Stokes

Surry

Tyrrell

Warren

Washington

Wilkes

Yadkin

Yancey

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/02/28/3661081/nc-counties-allowed-to-reduce.html#storylink=cpy