At This Hour in Raleigh

Posted on the door to the public gallery at the NC Senate, following the ouster of the public along with all the press corps. Banana republic doings, O my brethren!

The public was thrown out, according to a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who was there, for making hand gestures, not for yelling (they had expressed their displeasure orally before but were quiet at the time of their ouster).

Hand gestures? I got a couple more of them right here with me now. Saving them for Sen. Deanna Ballard (oh, and I'll manufacture new ones for Rep. Jonathan Jordan).

Can't wait for these Members of the Coup to show their faces back in Boone!

Republicans Move To Keep Elections Under Their Control

Forget what was rumored yesterday that was afoot in Raleigh. The bills that were actually filed -- over 20 of them -- contain more mischief than rumor could breed.

See, when McCrory said he was going to call a special session to deal with disaster relief, the Republican honchos said, "Sure, we need an excuse to come to Raleigh." Taking care of the penny-ante disaster relief bill took no time at all, but the Republicans needed to deal with a much greater disaster, the election of Democrat Roy Cooper as governor.

Short version: they're stripping Roy Cooper of executive power, and they're making sure that every board of election in the state will be stalemated. Turns out if you're an effing Republican in the General Assembly, there's more than one way to destroy early voting.

If you can't win an election, you simply overturn the results legislatively. It's the Republican way. Let's go ahead and call it what it is: nullification.

From coverage in the N&O:

Lawmakers want to hobble the incoming Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, before he takes office Jan. 1 by making his Cabinet appointments subject to approval by the state Senate and cutting his ability to appoint members to UNC schools’ boards of trustees and the state Board of Education.

Another proposal in the mix would equally divide election boards between the two major political parties, ending control by the governor’s party.

Yet another provision would cut the number of employees who serve at the governor’s pleasure from 1,500 to 300, reversing an expansion approved for Republican Gov. Pat McCrory at the start of his term.

Here's the text of Senate Bill 4 which contains the changes to boards of elections. Bottomline: a new eight-member board with equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, with the Republican leaders in the two houses of the General Assembly getting to appoint as many members as the governor. Local boards of elections also composed of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats for a total of four members.

In other words, we've been under the thumb of Republicans at all levels of voting access in North Carolina for the last four years, and we're going to continue to be under their thumb.

And that, my friends, is how you nullify an election.

BREAKING NEWS: Another Damn Power-Grab in Raleigh

Having ended the special session, called to render flood aid to various eastern Carolina localities, the

Tim Moore and Phil Berger

NC General Assembly adjourned and immediately reconvened for yet another special session, which is what the Republican bandits in charge of that place had planned all along.

Unable to win a second term for McCrory, the General Assembly -- principally Phil Berger and Tim Moore, leading their respective houses of the GA -- are now proposing to overturn the results of the election by depriving our new governor of executive power.

Namely, from reports of observers in Raleigh, they are proposing to...

1. Remove Medicaid from control of the governor, moving it under the new Treasurer, who is Republican.

2. Remove the office of human resources from the governor and give it to the lieutenant governor, who is Republican.

3. Remove control of the boards of elections -- all of them -- from the governor and give it to the lieutenant governor.

4. Reclassify approximately 1,000 state jobs from "political" (subject to appointment by the governor) to non-political. These were jobs that had been reclassified "political" for McCrory's benefit when he took office.

5. Give McCrory lifetime coverage under the state health-care plan.

Your usurpers-of-power at work.

Meanwhile, In the Department of Wounded Platypuses

Apparently, The Donald can stand Pat McCrory.

Even with the whining.

This headline in today's News&Observer -- "Pat McCrory ‘definitely’ has place in Trump administration" -- might reassure you of several things at once:

1. The Peter Principle is alive and well in the Trump administration.

2. God takes care of idiots and drunk men.

3. "Failing Upward, Bee-yotches!" will be on his tombstone.

No Hiding Trump's Hostility Toward Government

Okay, we get it, Mr. Trump. You're expressing your perfect contempt for the various departments of government to which you're appointing people with either (a) no qualifications for managing those departments or (b) open hostility toward the departments they are being appointed to manage.

Like this fool.

That's really a funny joke. Hahahahaha. Can't wait to see how it all turns out, if the good people who voted for you will be laughing too.

The scorecard, so far:

Steven Mnuchin at Treasury wants to do away with Dodd-Frank

Andrew Puzder at Labor is a vocal critic of increasing the minimum wage and an opponent of rules that would make more workers eligible for overtime pay

Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency is a primary architect of legal challenges on President Barack Obama’s environmental regulations

Tom Price at the Department of Health and Human Services wants to phase out Medicare

Ben Carson at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who believes that the pyramids were grain storage bins

Jeff Sessions at Justice is no friend of either civil rights or voting rights

Betsy DeVos at the Education Department who intends to cut "the public" out of public education

This bunch has tilted radically to the 1% and decidedly away from "those forgotten people" Trump said he wanted to help. Yeah, these guys are really gonna help!

A Dozen Adjectives

You may need these in the year ahead.

unprincipled: not acting in accordance with moral principles 

erratic: unpredictable

bullying: using superior strength or influence to intimidate; to force someone to do what one wants

vulgar: crudely indecent; deficient in taste, delicacy, or refinement; uncouth

bombastic: high-sounding but with little meaning; inflated 

egotistical: excessively conceited or absorbed in oneself; self-centered 

reckless: without thinking or caring about the consequences of an action 

narcissistic: having an excessive or erotic interest in oneself and one's physical appearance

arrogant: having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one's own importance or abilities

shameless: characterized by or showing a lack of shame

heedless: showing a reckless lack of care or attention

privileged: not subject to the usual rules or penalties because of some special circumstance like wealth 

The Memes of December

Dickishness

We've heard it before: he's really proud of his penis.

Moscow on the Potomac, Times Two

The Look of Love: Rex Tillerson with
Vladimir Putin. PHOTO: RIA NOVOSTI/REUTERS

So word has leaked that after weeks of considering his options, Vladimir Putin has chosen Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as the next Secretary of State.

After economic sanctions were imposed on Russia following its invasion of the Crimea and its "shadow war" in eastern Ukraine, Tillerson spoke up against the sanctions: “We always encourage the people who are making those decisions to consider the very broad collateral damage of who are they really harming with sanctions,” he said. Apparently, sanctions against the aggressor state were harming Exxon in particular.

Well, yes, they were. The sanctions on Russia ended up blocking the implementation of a deal that Tillerson and Putin struck in 2011 which would have given Exxon access to Russia's Arctic oil resources while allowing Russia’s state oil company, OAO Rosneft, to invest in Exxon concessions all over the world. The following year, the Kremlin bestowed the country’s Order of Friendship decoration on Tillerson.

Oh, they're close, Putin and Tillerson.

Tillerson's Exxon stock (he owns $151 million of it) would increase in value when Russia gets its way -- that is, gets those sanctions lifted. Hacking an election and installing your guy as Secretary of State has its profits!

Senator John McCain said yesterday that Tillerson’s ties to Putin were “a matter of concern to me.” “I’d have to examine it,” he said on Fox News, adding that “Vladimir Putin is a thug, bully and a murderer, and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying.”

A thug, a bully, and a murderer -- that about sums him up. Putin's also a pussy-grabber. He grabbed Donald Trump a long time ago, but when you're famous and powerful, you get away with shit like that. And he's running the U.S. government now.