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Gary Pearce posted on April 01, 2013 10:00
Not once, not twice, but three times now, Governor McCrory has given money to charity that his campaign took from people facing criminal charges related to sweepstakes cafes.
Which raises the question: Why did he take all that money in the first place?
Surely his campaign knew what the donors wanted: to stop North Carolina from banning and shutting down the parlors.
It’s about as scummy as business as there is. The money was dirty, and McCrory’s campaign – as well as Republicans in the legislature and some Democrats – took it.
They shouldn’t have, and they should have to explain why they did.
● Chase E. Burns, owner of International Internet Technologies LLC of Anadarko, OK, is the single biggest individual donor to General Assembly candidates in the 2012 election cycle, giving a total of $172,500 to 63 current members of the legislature and four other legislative candidates who lost. In addition, Burns donated $30,000 to the NC Republican House Caucus and $25,000 to the NC Republican Senate Caucus committees within the NC Republican Party. The top legislative recipients of Burns’ donations are Senate leader Phil Berger ($8,000), House Speaker Thom Tillis ($6,500), and 21 legislators who each got $4,000 (19 Republicans and 2 Democrats).
● Several of the donations are identified as being delivered or otherwise tied to lobbyists with Moore & Van Allen, the law firm where Gov. Pat McCrory was employed throughout 2012 and the firm Burns retained to lobby for IIT. Burns and his wife, Kristin, each donated $4,000 to McCrory’s campaign, bringing their total donations to $235,500 for NC’s 2012 election.
● The variety of ways that Burn’s contributions are identified on disclosure reports by different candidates suggests they were written from a separate bank account which may have included company funds, not just the personal money of Burns or his wife. It is illegal in North Carolina for business funds to be used to make contributions to candidates or political parties.
Giving away the money – after the scandal broke – doesn’t make the stink go away.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 29, 2013 10:37
Governor McCrory desperately wants to look moderate. He wants to distance himself from the right-wing red-hots in the legislature. If he doesn’t, he’s on the road to one term.
“State employees, teachers, Democrats and others unnerved by the idea of Art Pope’s drawing up the state’s next spending plan for Gov. Pat McCrory…must have felt sheepish about dreading its contents. Rather than terrifying those who rely on or support state government spending and programs, the $20.6 billion budget maintains the status quo and makes changes around the edges.”
Hold the mayo.
Yes, he called for hiring 1,800 more full-time teachers. But he would slash 3,000 teacher assistants.
Some history here: Those teacher assistants were part of Governor Jim Hunt’s 1977 Primary Reading Program. Because too many kids weren’t learning to read, Hunt and the legislature put “reading aides” in every classroom in the first, second and third grades. They have been there since. Reading performance has gone up, up, up. Now McCrory wants to get rid of the aides. How does that help kids learn to read?
Plus, the UNC system would get another 5.4 percent cut. And maybe a campus gets closed. And the community colleges get whacked.
And that’s all before the Senate does its budget.
Jim Jenkins’ column in the N&O hit the nail on the head about Republicans in the legislature: “They’re more interested in destruction than in building.”
Maybe McCrory wants to leave the destruction to the Jones Street wrecking crew. But he can’t duck accountability. That’s what the veto is for.
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Carter Wrenn posted on March 28, 2013 12:08
With much fanfare just before she left office Governor Perdue announced she’d made a grand deal to lease Raleigh all of the land at Dix Hospital for 99 years. When the deal landed in the newspapers, a friend, who’s spent a good part of his life buying and selling real estate, called, laughed and said, 325 acres of land in downtown Raleigh is worth a lot more than $500,000 a year. Then he added, How on earth do you reckon they got around the requirement the state has to get competitive bids when it sells land?
There was much celebrating in Raleigh – about the only person who had a discouraging word to say was Senate Leader Phil Berger who allowed Perdue’s deal just didn’t pass the smell test.
For the next three months peace reigned then with its usual delicacy the State Senate charged out of its corner swinging – it was like a blitzkrieg: Boom, boom, boom – a Senator filed a bill to kill the deal, held a hearing and the bill passed.
The fur flew: A line of prominent Raleigh business leaders (who liked Perdue’s deal) proclaimed they were horrified, just horrified, the state would break its word and renege on a contract – no honorable person, they said, would do that.
Of course, being called dishonorable (by folks who’d just cut a sweetheart deal with the state) didn’t sit too well with the folks in the Senate. When business leader Jim Goodman testified at the Senate hearing he said breaking that contract was “not honorable” so many times it rubbed Senator Tom Apodaca the wrong way, so Apodaca let fly with a broadside of his own declaring he didn’t appreciate being threatened or intimidated.
Now, Jim Goodman, who owns several hundred million dollars worth of television stations, sure would intimidate me but the Senators didn’t even blink.
On paper, the Dix lease certainly looks like a sweetheart deal and John Hood over at the Locke Foundation reports the land’s worth five times more than Raleigh paid. And even the folks who like Perdue’s deal aren’t disagreeing – instead, they’re arguing it’s a fine deal because creating a 325 acre park in downtown Raleigh will be a great boost for the economy.
On the other hand, there’s also no doubt our friends over in the State Senate have a gift for bellicosity – they can crank up and get rolling faster than a panzer tank when sometimes, especially when they’re right, a little finesse might accomplish the same goal with a bit more gentility. Anyhow, now, we’ve got a brawl on our hands with Raleigh’s most prominent business leaders hollering cancelling a sweetheart deal is a rotten thing to do and it’s not a pretty spectacle.
Before it was shuttered Dorothea Dix was the state’s mental hospital – maybe they ought to reopen it for one day and hold a ‘pacification therapy’ session to calm everybody down – before the House votes.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 28, 2013 09:23
Has public opinion – and politicians – ever shifted so fast on an issue as on gay marriage?
A year ago, 60 percent of North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Yesterday, a U.S. Senator in a tough reelection fight endorsed gay marriage.
Yes, Kay Hagan is one of a lengthening list of moderate Democrats who recently changed her position. Like Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Jon Tester and Mark Warner. And one doubts they recently changed their minds; they probably had come to that conclusion long ago but were wrestling with when to go public.
In a way, they have no choice. A rising tide of young people is moving Democratic, attracted by President Obama and repelled by Republican meanness. For this generation, ending discrimination against gays is their version of Vietnam, civil rights and women’s rights. They know gay teens who were and are bullied. (We all did; we just kept quiet or joined in the harassment.) They believe it’s wrong, and they won’t stand for it. Good for them.
They, in turn, are moving their parents and grandparents. A lot of people who are coming around now long ago concluded the gay-bashing and discrimination is wrong, but they couldn’t get comfortable with gay marriage. What clinches them is a simple argument: You should be able to marry the person you love.
Just for the hell of it, why don’t Democrats in the North Carolina legislature put in a bill calling for another statewide vote on the constitutional amendment? It will go straight to the Republican trash can. And that’s the point.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 27, 2013 08:49
When President Gerald Ford nixed financial aid for New York City back in the 1970s, the front page of a brassy Big Apple tabloid blared: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
Which brings us to the Republican bill undoing the Dix deal. Which brings us to two GOP Senators from Wake County who cut and ran from their party.
Chad Barefoot and Neal Hunt got what Senator Josh Stein was getting at when he said Republicans are killing the park plan because Raleigh is “a city you don’t like.”
Barefoot and Hunt might look safe politically. They have good districts. They have a big money advantage.
But, to keep winning, they have to win moderate Independents. The kind of voters who don’t like partisanship. The kind of voters who might see the legislature as a bunch of rural Tea Party extremists who hate cities in general and Raleigh in particular. The kind of voters who see Republicans nationally as a gang of vengeful, angry old white men.
Barefoot and Hunt have to worry that a future opponent might figure out that there are a lot of well-heeled people in Raleigh who are mad enough to give big money to a Democrat – or to a super-PAC helping Democrats.
They also have to worry that, in 2014, President Obama’s OFA might pump a lot of money into North Carolina. Or that, in 2016, Hillary Clinton might set off a Democratic tidal wave among moderate Independent women in their districts.
Hunt and Barefoot have no control over a lot of that. They could control how they voted. So they voted with Raleigh and against their fellow Republicans.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 26, 2013 09:51
As if Senator Kay Hagan needed Michael Bloomberg sticking his Gotham billionaire gun-control nose in her race.
Hagan already has a tough reelection fight. She’s one of the Obama Class of 2008 Senators. And a President’s second mid-term election historically is bad for his party.
(Not always, though. Republicans thought they would be shooting fish in a barrel in Bill Clinton’s second mid-term in 1998. Especially after Monica-gate broke in January. But, thanks to then-Speaker and philanderer Newt Gingrich, they overplayed their hand. Democrats won big. In North Carolina, John Edwards upset Lauch Faircloth.)
Still, Bloomberg puts a target squarely on Hagan by targeting the state with his TV ads.
So she faces a choice. She could do what moderate North Carolina Democrats normally do: take cover in the middle and hope the NRA crowd doesn’t come at her with guns blazing. (This blog inevitably leads to an excess of gun metaphors.)
Or she could gamble that politics has changed. Maybe gun politics has changed after Newton and other school massacres. Maybe North Carolina politics has changed with Obama’s strong showing and the potential emergence of a new Democratic majority based in urban areas and appealing to women, minorities and young people – the very people who like Bloomberg’s ads. But will those votes be there without Obama on the ballot?
You can bet that Hagan’s advisers are puzzling over this now. All politicians and political operatives are control freaks; they hate anything they can’t control. And nobody can control Bloomberg and his billions.
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Carter Wrenn posted on March 25, 2013 10:36
There’s nothing political folks like better than a good Civil War – whether you happen to be a Republican or a Democrat it’s hard to find a pogrom more satisfying than purging the heretics in your own party, which is not necessarily an unproductive experience: After all, Reagan’s victory in 1980 was the result of a five year Republican Civil War.
The first sign that the everyday normal bumps and grinds of Republican politics might break into open warfare came when John McCain branded Rand Paul and Ted Cruz ‘Wacko Birds.’ That set the stage for Round 2 when the ‘Wacko Birds’ met the ‘Old Birds’ eye-to-eye at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
At forty-one Senator Marco Rubio is a pretty unusual standard bearer for the Old Birds. A Cuban immigrant’s son who needed an opportunity and got one, Senator Rubio pulled himself up by his bootstraps. At twenty-eight, he ran for the Florida Legislature and quickly became a ‘rising star.’ He walked onto the stage at CPAC and gave an earnest, smooth, passionate speech about American exceptionalism. He was articulate. But cautious. He crossed swords with no one.
Next a tousle-haired fifty-year-old wearing a dark blue jacket and blue jeans, looking like a college professor, walked onto the stage and he wasn’t smooth at all. Or cautious. With wry humor Rand Paul poked fun at Obama for saying he had to cancel White House tours for schoolchildren due to a lack of money but, then, three days later, sending $250 million to Egypt in foreign aid. After quoting Lincoln, Montesquieu and Lewis Carroll’s ‘White Queen,’ Paul turned his wit on the Old Birds, saying the Republican Establishment ‘has grown stale and covered with moss.’
Paul went on to win the straw poll at CPAC.
Now, that’s not a sure sign the Wacko Birds will pluck the Old Birds.
But it is a sure sign the Civil War has started.
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Carter Wrenn posted on March 22, 2013 10:38
A pair of ‘grassroots organizers,’ Jessica Laurenz and Sean Kosofsky, took a poll, found three issues, and wrote a plan. Neither had ever run a major statewide campaign and they lacked money and a voice but they had passion and zeal and sailed into uncharted waters to breathe life back into the moribund Democratic Party – then some malevolent genie leaked their ‘secret plan’ to the Charlotte Observer and all hell broke loose.
Sean Kosofsky took the first hit – the newspapers reported his plan, then they said his group (Blueprint NC) could not legally spend money to elect Democrats, then a foundation (headed by a former Democratic legislator) that had given his group $400,000 blasted Kosofsky, then the State Republican Party filed complaints against Kosofsky with the IRS and the State Board of Elections for violating election laws.
Kosofsky was in hot water up to his chin when Jennifer Laurenz stepped in and saved him. She, she told the newspapers, had written the plan – she was to blame.
Then Laurenz fell prey to unforgiving politics too.
A longtime Democratic State Representative whose son works for Laurenz at America Votes NC, walked into a press conference and when a reporter asked him about Laurenz’s plan he could have said Laurenz was a well-meaning but inexperienced young woman. Or that young people sometimes get carried away by their passions and that’s unfortunate but it’s understandable. Instead, before the cock crowed thrice, he threw Laurenz under the bus – he said he knew nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing but what he’d read in the newspapers. It was like he’d never heard of the young woman his son works with.
Young Sean Kosofsky and Jessica Laurenz sailed into unchartered waters with more passion than prudence then the newspapers descended on them, then the Republicans descended on them, then their friends – the people they meant to help – abandoned them.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 22, 2013 08:36
The vote is a powerful thing. In less than a year, it has taken immigrants from pariah to power in American politics.
This week, Tea Party centerfold Rand Paul softened his position on immigration. (Remember when Mitt Romney called for “self-deportation”?) Paul’s 2016 rival Marco Rubio – and other Republicans – had already beat a retreat.
And one of the legislature’s red-hots who wants to take a big stick to immigrants talked a bit more softly. Rep. Mark Brody of Monroe said: “I know the Hispanic community was pretty upset. Everybody needs to be treated with respect.”
Especially when they vote.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 21, 2013 10:02
Bowater, as his friends call him, is a local Democrat – and an incurable optimist. While Republican preen and strut with power and Democrats wring their hands with worry, Bowater remain serenely sanguine.
One friend finally reached his limit – with the Republicans and with Bowater’s rosy view. He demanded, “What makes you so happy? Don’t you read the news?”
“Yep,” said Bowater, “every day. Just yesterday, I read on the front page that Republicans are looking to put a sales tax on 130 services. Then I read that Phil Berger’s education plan is to pay teachers less and bash them more. Today I read that Governor McCrory is going to lay off teachers’ assistants, cut the universities and community colleges and raise tuition.
By now Bowater’s friend was beside himself: “That’s my point! Look at what they’re doing! How can you be happy about that?”
Bowater calmly replied, “Because every day the Republicans move one day closer to total rejection by the voters. Keep up the good work, I say.”
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Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
The Charlotte Observer says: “Carter Wrenn and Gary Pearce don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues. But they both love North Carolina and know its politics inside and out.”
Carter is a Republican.
Gary is a Democrat.
They met in 1984, during the epic U.S. Senate battle between Jesse Helms and Jim Hunt. Carter worked for Helms and Gary, for Hunt.
Years later, they became friends. They even worked together on some nonpolitical clients.
They enjoy talking about politics. So they started this blog in 2005.
They’re still talking. And they invite you to join the conversation.
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