Everything You Need To Know About the Watauga GOP, in One Convenient Package

The High Country Press got hold of the texts of the resolutions passed at the Watauga County Republican Convention last Saturday.

A fine collection of special interest plumping, self-congratulatory back-patting, revenge fantasy paybacks, and selective memory.

The resolution on education alone is jaw-dropping in its complete failure to recognize the destruction done to public education in North Carolina under two successive Republican state budgets. It actually praises Rep. Jonathan Jordan and Senator Dan Soucek for their votes on education, but in Republican World those votes don't seem to include making North Carolina 46th out of 50 states in teacher pay and the firing of hundreds of teachers and teacher assistants across the state.

But, wait! No praise therein for book-banning? There's an oversight!

Wonder if County Commission Chair Nathan Miller wrote the resolution praising the County Commission? Wonder if Virginia Foxx wrote the resolution praising Virginia Foxx? Wonder if some member of the Templeton family wrote the resolution condemning the steep slope regs in the town of Boone? Wonder if Four Eggers wrote the resolution praising the disenfranchisement of ASU student voters?

The document properties of the originals would possibly reveal much about who really runs that party.

North Carolina, First in Job Losses

So there was Governor Squishy yesterday, beside himself about North Carolina's supposedly improved unemployment rate, bragging that it was all his doing.

What The Guv ignores, naturally, is that unemployment numbers have improved partly because tens of thousands of the state's unemployed have simply stopped looking for work. As the Wall Street Journal helpfully pointed out, North Carolina led the nation in February in job losses, "a sign of stress for a state scaling back its support for its jobless residents." (Hattip: BlueNC)

That used car that our grinning Gladhander-in-Chief is peddling has no engine.

Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant

A federal judge ordered NC state lawmakers yesterday to hand over emails and other documents related to the enactment of the controversial and comprehensive new ballot-access law passed last year which requires voters to show photo identification at the polls, limits early voting times, ends out-of-precinct voting and same-day registration, among other provisions. Republicans called this new law "the voter integrity act." We call it voter suppression.

Republicans in the General Assembly have been hiding their thinking behind this new law and refusing to turn over documents, claiming absolute legislative immunity from "discovery."

U.S. Magistrate Judge Joi Elizabeth Peake wrote in the decision that legislative immunity must be evaluated "under a flexible approach" that balances the public's right to know and the legislative process.

"The Court concludes that, while the judicially-created doctrine of 'legislative immunity' provides individual legislators with absolute immunity from liability for their legislative acts, that immunity does not preclude all discovery in the context of this case," Peake wrote.

The Child Is Father of the Man

Great portrait of what Gov. Pat McCrory was like as an up-and-coming politico at Catawba College in the late '70s, by Billy Ingram, from which I am quoting liberally:

Without a serious course correction, many feared Catawba College was on the verge of becoming a hippie enclave. The college Republicans — pretty much everyone who wasn’t in the drama or music departments — were especially alarmed.

Who better to turn back the liberal tide than third-year poli-sci major Pat McCrory, the only arch-conservative serving on the student senate in 1977? As leading member of the Grievance Committee his focus had been on trying to get the literary magazine defunded and synchronizing the clocks on campus.

I became acquainted with Pat three years earlier, when we were both freshmen. Looking for a ride home for the weekend, he scoured the student directory for anyone from Greensboro who had a car. I guess I was the first to say yes, despite never having met the guy. I can’t recall what was discussed during that or the two or three subsequent trips down Interstate 85; we had practically nothing in common. In high school he was class president; I was class clown. He played tennis in the afternoons; I drew comic strips for the paper.

I had to admire his brash confidence and dead certainty, a natural politician if ever there was one, with that unnerving, used-car-salesman smile, like someone with the summer sun in their eyes unable to see past the glare and compensating for it, and a Cheshire grin highlighted by eyes that, depending on his mood, could flash bright or go dim in an instant: Elvis has left the building.

Opinions of the Rich and Pious

Franklin Graham is in the newspapers this morning, giving an interview in which he said that he's just been mouthing his father's opinions on gays and Vladimir Putin and that he's merely trying to help people get to heaven, that's all.

I knew preachermen like Franklin Graham all my life growing up in West Texas, slick hucksters who sold repentance while wearing tailored suits and driving great big new cars. None of them that I remember also had multiple private jets at their disposal, so Franklin Graham has shown 'em all up. What a role model!

I also knew pharisees, men who liked to stand in the center of church and proclaim their own knowledge of God's will. They wafted their own righteousness among the pews like over-cologned car salesmen. They pointed their fingers at sinners in their midst and always said they weren't criticizing, just trying to insure that those sinners made it to heaven (along with them, naturally!).

Franklin Graham is such a one. That he would now lay his hateful utterances at the feet of his dying father is not only cowardly. It's also reminiscent of the religious leaders that Jesus preached against: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness."

If Franklin Graham was not directly responsible for the recent uproar over banning books at Watauga High School, he certainly was standing by holding the coats for those who were fanning those flames. Rather than the Gospel, he preaches division. Rather than love, he inspires resentment and back-biting. He seems far more interested in building a center of power for himself in Republican circles than in advancing the Kingdom of Heaven.

Franklin Graham has a form of godliness all too popular these days, from Pakistan to Deer Valley. St. Paul advised, "From such, turn away."

NC State Board of Elections: Fine By Us If You Want to Suppress the Votes of College Students!

Andrew Cox, in The Appalachian

The Republican-dominated State Board of Elections (SBOE) totally gets it: Their job is to enable and rubber-stamp whatever the Republican-dominated local boards of elections in all 100 counties do to block ballot-access, because they all understand that their electeds don't continue to stay in office without voter suppression.

One of the groups targeted for suppression: college students, of which Watauga County has a bunch.

The campus of Appalachian State University has had an Early Voting station in the Student Union since 2008 for every election cycle -- up until last fall. Thousands of voters, including voters registered in every precinct in the county have voted there. Faculty and staff, who live all over the county, have found it very convenient to vote where they work. But not any more.

Yesterday, at the Embassy Suites in Cary, the majority members of the State Board of Elections brushed aside all the arguments against Republican Bill Aceto's plan to put one Early Voting station at the county admin bldg in downtown Boone, to serve over 60% of the voters, and to place several other sites remote from Boone. The SBOE interrupted Kathleen Campbell's presentation repeatedly and would not let her finish. All they wanted her to talk about were the hours of operation for Early Voting. It was as clear as a Carolina blue sky that the fix was already in before the meeting started: the SBOE intended to change Aceto's plan only so far as the hours of operation. And they even messed that up.

Aceto wanted all sites -- both in Boone and the remote sites -- to open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day for the entire Early Voting period. What was decided yesterday extended evening hours -- good! -- but mucked up the starting hours: For the first two weekdays of early voting, one-stop sites will now be open from 8 to 4 in the county and 8 to 5 in downtown Boone. The following week, all sites will be open from 11 am to 7 pm Monday through Friday, and 8 am to 1pm on the final Saturday. That means, if you're loitering around the Courthouse during early morning in the second week of Early Voting, you'll have to wait until 11 a.m. to cast that ballot. Early birds need not show up!

Where was Luke Eggers?
Chair of the Watauga County Board of Elections has become a disappeared person. He didn't bother to show up in Cary yesterday, and he's become a virtually invisible public official. He's ceded everything to BOE Secretary Bill Aceto.

Aceto said yesterday that he wouldn't consider a polling site in the ASU Student Union because it was impossible to control electioneering. He mentioned the "intimidation" of voters. He actually said that. Handing out voter guides and candidate material is now officially "intimidation." Wonder if he intended to include former Republican candidate Tommy Adams in that smear? Adams was running in 2012 for County Commission and was in the hallways of the Student Union every day and virtually every hour of Early Voting, and he was not shy about button-holing students. Other Republican candidates were also working those halls. If the students weren't buying what Adams et al. were peddling, I think we've found the real reason Aceto won't consider Early Voting in the Student Union. College voters actually can recognize creepiness when they encounter it, and they don't like the Republican vision of "All for Me, None for You!"

For the record, Bill Aceto himself voted at the Early Voting site in the Student Union well before he began "fighting on the front lines" of voter suppression, as Watauga Republican Party Chair Anne Marie Yates memorably praised him at the Republican County Convention on Saturday.

"Start a War or Build a Community"
The lone Democrat on the SBOE, Maya Kricker, was the member who asked Aceto why he wouldn't consider Early Voting in the Student Union, after having it there for so many election cycles and after Boone residents and ASU employees had grown accustomed to having it there.  "I don't see a compelling public interest in eliminating an early voting site that has served so many voters. The perception of fairness cannot be overstated .... We can create a war zone or we can build a community."

Zing! A war zone is exactly what Bill Aceto and Four Luke Eggers began to create in August 2013, when they rammed through a series of new resolutions written by the Republican County Attorney Four Eggers to block ballot-access for college students and incidentally try to force Elections Director Jane Anne Hodges out of her job. Citizens rose up against this agenda. With this new regime in control, Republicans thought they'd have a cake-walk taking over Boone Town Council last fall. Didn't work because voters got super-angry at the obvious, corrupt manipulation.

Bill Aceto is still ironically bragging that he and Four Luke have increased voter turnout since they took over the local BOE. He said that same line again yesterday in Cary. People from Boone laughed.

"The Lone Democrat on the SBOE"
Maya Kricker was the only member of the SBOE to show any interest in the constitutional problems of fencing off a class of voters and imposing undue ballot-access burdens on them.

SBOE members Foley (R), Amoroso (R), Howard (R),
Kricker (D), and Malcolm (?)

There is another nominal Democrat on the SBOE -- Joshua Malcolm -- but he's settled comfortably into his role as Klingon warrior for the dark empire. At one point yesterday, Malcolm held up a 3-inch-high stack of communications from Watauga County voters asking for an Early Voting site in the Student Union. Malcolm actually asked Kathleen Campbell, "These are from citizens and not students?"

"Citizens, not students." Last any of us checked, college students are also citizens of the Republic, Mr. Malcolm. That brand of thinking will get memorialized in a federal lawsuit near you one day, as it certainly got you appointed to the SBOE by the Dark Empire.

One very interesting side note about "maps with circles": The previous bedazzlement expressed by SBOE members for county maps with big, equal-sized circles on them totally evaporated yesterday (because none of those circles established any data on population density). Malcolm could not let it go, however, without defensively claiming that it was never just circles on maps that had motivated his preference for majority Republican Early Voting plans all across the state.

No, perhaps it was oxygen deprivation, living in the Republican pocket.

Headline of the Week

This will become iconic:

Thom Tillis says where he went to college shouldn’t matter

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/03/21/3722164/thom-tillis-says-where-he-went.html#storylink=cpy

Only matters when you lie about it, repeatedly, in print and in interviews.

The Threat, Duly Noted

NC House Speaker and faker of educational credentials Thom Tillis, running in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, told the Henderson County Republican Convention on Saturday that, should the Republicans win a majority in the U.S. Senate, "it would enable the party to do for the country what it has done for North Carolina."

The Good Hands People

Governor McCrory's former boss and current Sugar Daddy, Duke Energy, deliberately pumped, over several months, 61 million gallons of coal ash water into a tributary of the Cape Fear River, an intentional "spill" which is more than twice the size of the Feb. 2 Dan River accidental spill.

McCrory's Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), which absolutely no one with at least two working brain cells trusts any more, notified Duke yesterday -- several days after DENR became aware of the pumping -- that putting 61 million gallons of coal ash toxins into the Cape Fear River, uh, violates the law (cough).

DENR also thoughtfully notified officials down-river of the pumping, in Sanford, Dunn, and Fayetteville, to be on alert for carcinogens in their drinking water. Gee, thanks!

With Duke Energy and DENR in charge of our future, what possibly could ever go wrong?