A Progressive Continuum: Paying it Forward

by Cecil Bothwell

Thanks to support from readers of this blog, and Glen Greenwald's endorsement, I was able to wage a credible primary campaign against our former Blue Dog Rep. Heath Shuler.

Heath dropped out, we think in part because polls suggested we might win. But big money won the primary for Heath's deputy, who then went on to lose the General.

That loss was due in at least some measure to NC redistricting that tilted this district to the right.

Far beyond what that gerrymander did to Tar Heel representation in Washington, it bent the election for our General Assembly. Tea Partiers are now shoving this state back toward the 19th Century as fast as they can cast their "ayes." If I tried to describe all that they have dismantled you would be here all day. But it is breathtaking.

Banning city councils from banning "Big Slurp" drinks is one of the more laughable. Banning metropolitan governments from adopting Sharia law is one of the most outlandish. Stealing airports from Asheville and Charlotte one of the most heinous. Eliminating regulation of private landfills one of the most scary. Shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor (sharply cutting income taxes and raising sales taxes, including a new tax on food) is GOP-as-usual.

But, here in Asheville we're pushing back. We've filed a lawsuit to prevent theft of the municipal water system and we're taking the fight to Raleigh.

You may have read of the Moral Monday protests that have been staged at the state capital for a couple of months. This week my City Council re-election campaign has hired a bus to take protesters from Asheville to join the demonstration.

Meanwhile, we have a great young campaign intern, a rising high school senior, who needs some help to attend progressive political training sessions in Washington, DC next week.

Any contribution would be welcome. Justin deserves our support!

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North Carolina Republicans Ramp Up The GOP War Against Women

Above, Rachel Maddow reports on the anti-Choice sneak attack in North Carolina this week. The Republicans in the legislature don't like seeing Texas and Ohio Republicans getting ahead of them in the right-wing anti-women jihad. Most interesting though (at the 4:55 point in the video) was a clip from an election debate when now-Governor Pat McCrory publicly pledged to sign no new abortion restrictions if he were elected. "None," he responded when Laura Leslie, the WRAL Capitol Bureau Chief, asked him point blank, "If you're elected governor what further restrictions on abortion would you agree to sign?" He didn't hem or haw... he just said "none" and set his jaw in place. I guess we can start parsing words like "further," "restrictions," "agree" and "none." After all, Obamabots are trying to redefine the meaning of the word "coup" now that their military puppets have kicked out the legitimately elected president of Egypt, legally obligating Obama to cut off military aid.

Meanwhile, North Carolina singer-songwriter Kitschy de Coeur explains she "wrote this little song today after sitting in the debates for HB 695, which was slipped in to a bill last minute and will severely limit womens' access to reproductive health clinics." Very eloquent:

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Authoritarianism And The Nature Of Government: Voting Rights In North Carolina, Obama's Persecution Of Ed Snowden

Governments by nature tend towards the authoritarian. Even when a liberalish type, like Obama, is elected, its almost inevitable that when something like Ed Snowden happens, the government errs on the side of repression. All governments. European governments are either flipping out or feigning flipping out over Snowden's revelations that the U.S. was relentlessly spying on all of our allies all the time. But have any of these any governments agreed to give Snowden political refuse from the American gulag which is looking to devour him? Françoise Hollande, the Socialist president of France has threatened the U.S-E.U. trade agreement over U.S. spying but has he offered Snowden refuge? Non... although he did bar the plane of Bolivia's President from flying over French airspace yesterday when the CIA claimed Snowden was aboard. Neither has the country founded on the principles of Mahatma Gandhi offered refuge. Wikileaks applied for political asylum for Snowden in 21 countries. So far they've all said NO, including Ecuador, Russia, Poland and liberal democracies like Austria, Finland, India, Brazil, Ireland, Norway, and Spain. Let's see if Bolivia, Cuba, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Venezuela or Switzerland comes through.

And then there's an even uglier kind of authoritarianism when we're not talking about liberals, but about conservatives. It seems that within moments of the very right wing, very partisan Supreme Court majority gutting the Voting Rights Act (because it had accomplished what it set out to do), right-wing state governments proved that it hadn't accomplished anything at all in their hearts; several moved swiftly and with determination to block minorities from being able to vote.

In order to fully understand what the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have been up to when they make decisions that affect our democracy, as they did last week on voting rights, you need to understand what the Republican Party has been up to.

The modern GOP is based on an unlikely coalition of wealthy business executives, small business owners, and struggling whites. Its durability depends on the latter two categories believing that the economic stresses they’ve experienced for decades have a lot to do with the government taking their money and giving it to the poor, who are disproportionately black and Latino.

The real reason small business owners and struggling whites haven’t done better is the same most of the rest of America hasn’t done better: Although the output of Americans has continued to rise, almost all the gains have gone to the very top.

Government is implicated, but not in the way wealthy Republicans want the other members of their coalition to believe. Laws that the GOP itself championed (too often with the complicity of some Democrats) have trammeled unions, invited outsourcing abroad, slashed taxes on the rich, encouraged takeovers, allowed monopolization, reduced the real median wage, and deregulated Wall Street.

Four decades ago, the typical household’s income rose in tandem with output. But since the late 1970s, as these laws took hold, most Americans’ incomes have flattened. Had the real median household income continued to keep pace with economic growth it would now be almost $92,000 instead of $50,000.

Obviously, wealthy Republicans would rather other members of their coalition not know any of this-- including, especially, their role in making it happen. Their nightmare is small-business owners and struggling whites joining with the poor and the rest of the middle class to wrest economic power away. So they’ve created a convenient scapegoat in America’s minority underclass, along with a government that supposedly taxes hardworking whites to support them.

This is where the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have played, and continue to play, such an important role.

First, wealthy Republicans have to be able to spend as much money as possible to bribe lawmakers to do their bidding, tell their version of history, and promulgate several big lies (the poor are “takers not makers," government keeps them “dependent," the wealthy are “job-creators" so cutting their taxes creates more jobs, unions are bad, regulations reduce economic growth, and so on).

The five Republicans on the Supreme Court have obliged by eviscerating campaign finance laws. Their 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, along with the broad interpretations given it by several appellate judges (also Republican appointees), has opened the money floodgates.

Second, wealthy Republicans want to quietly reduce the impact of any laws that might limit their profits, even though they may help struggling whites as consumers or employees. The easiest way to execute this delicate maneuver is to make it harder to sue under such laws.

Here, too, the five Republicans on the Court have been eager to oblige by tightening requirements for class actions and limiting standing to sue. In their recent Comcast Corp. v. Behrend decision, for example, they threw out $875 million in damages that a group of Philadelphia-area subscribers had sought from the cable giant, reasoning that the subscriber plaintiffs hadn’t proven they constituted a “class" for the purpose of a class action.

Third and finally, wealthy Republicans want to minimize the votes of poor and minority citizens – and further propagate the myth that these people are responsible for the economic problems of struggling whites – through state redistricting and gerrymandering, voter-identification requirements at polling stations, and the use of almost any pretext to purge minority voters from voting lists.

The five Republicans on the Court obliged last week by striking down a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that sets the formula under which states with a long history of discrimination must ask the federal government or a judge for approval before changing their voting procedures.

The significance of Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder was made plain Thursday when the Court effectively nullified two cases involving Texas voter laws by sending them back to lower courts to reconsider in light of Shelby. One was a voter identification requirement, enacted in 2011, that a federal judge had rejected on grounds that it imposed a disproportionate burden on lower-income people, many of whom are minorities. The other was a redistricting plan, also rejected by a federal court, in part because it would block minorities from gaining a majority vote in almost all districts.

But now both are effectively reinstated, as are the efforts of several other states to suppress votes.

Supreme Court justices are appointed for life in order to ensure their independence from politics. But when it comes to the core political strategy of the Republican Party, the five Republican appointees are, in effect, an extension of the GOP. 

And no state has moved with greater malice towards implementing that Supreme Court's anti-democracy diktat than North Carolina. The right-wing GOP legislature and governor want to use the Supreme Court decision to disenfranchise young people, Hispanics, poor people and, most of all, African Americans. Still horrified that they have a Democratic senator and that Obama won in 2008, North Carolina Republicans are taking an ax to voting rights. They're instituting a voter ID law meant to discourage Democrats and they're ending Sunday voting, same day registration and early voting as much as they can get away with.

North Carolina NAACP President William J. Barber II, who has seen generations of black candidates elected thanks to the landmark civil rights-era law, objected to [state Senate Rules Committee Chairman Tom] Apodaca's dismissal of federal protections that had become part of the civil rights fabric of the South. "He refers to a law to undo 250 years of slavery and another 100 years or more of Jim Crow … as a headache," Barber said.

Rosanell Eaton, 92, remembers the humiliation for blacks who sought to cast ballots in North Carolina before the Voting Rights Act. In 1939, she said, she hitched a mule to a wagon and rode to the courthouse in Franklin County, N.C., to register. Three white men, probably illiterate, demanded that she recite the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

Eaton, the valedictorian at her rural high school, recited the preamble word for word.

"They were so ignorant they didn't know if I said it right or not-- but they registered me," she said.

Last week's Supreme Court decision "starts taking us right back to the old days," she said. "Now it's easier for these Republicans to do anything they want to us, without the controls we had."

The Voting Rights Act changed the South by expanding black voting and black officeholders. In 1965, the 11 Southern states of the Confederacy had three black state legislators. By 2009, the number was 321 of 628 nationwide, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

...The new moves by state officials to adopt ID requirements and other changes in the voting laws can have a critical impact on black voting strength, civil rights leaders say. Blacks represented 22% of North Carolina's registered voters in 2012 but accounted for 34% of voters without a driver's license or state-issued ID this year, according to Democracy North Carolina, a liberal advocacy group. The group says blacks in 2012 made up 29% of early voters and 34% of same-day registration voters.

Since taking control in North Carolina, Republicans have passed or proposed legislation that Democrats say discriminates against minorities. This month, Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, passed by a Democratic Legislature and governor. The act allowed death row inmates to be re-sentenced to life in prison without parole if they proved racial discrimination in jury selection or sentencing.

Other Republican-controlled states, from Florida to Alaska aren't even waiting to see if North Carolina can get away with it. They're already moving the same direction. Texas Republicans are petrified of Hispanic voters turning their red bastion blue. So they're coming up with plans to keep them from voting, since they've already figured out that that is a better fit for the party base than trying to win them over to vote for Republicans.

Ed Snowden: "In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised-- and it should be."

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What Happens When Voters Just Eliminate The Nihilist Republicans From Government?

Puppet Pat might want to call Jerry Brown and get a lesson in being a governor

California has no statewide Republicans in office. Many of the Democrats in the legislature are conservative corporate whores but at least the Republicans are relegated to the sidelines and can't even obstruct the smooth functioning of government any longer. In 2012, the Democrats won 2/3s majorities in each house of the legislature. They won 4 more seats in the state Senate, for a total of 29 to the GOP's 10. The Dems gained 3 Assembly seats, bringing the partisan split to 55 to 25. Republicans can no longer block anything in either body. Two years earlier the state elected Jerry Brown over big-spending Meg Whitman, who managed to get a mere 40.9% for the $140 million she spent out of her personal fortune.

So while in DC, anti-government ideologues on the far right-- particularly Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Marco Rubio (R-DL) and Rand Paul (R-KY)-- are working, with a great deal of success, to gum up the workings of government functionality and to prevent an economic recovery, in Sacramento, the shriveled nihilist faction can... talk darkly among themselves and watch the state move forward. I hope you read the collection of IMs last night by economist Umair Haque on the nature of conservatism. It helps explain why the federal government is such a mess while California is thriving. California is kind of the opposite of what's happening to the people in North Carolina, who elected an all-Republican government which is failing miserably and making the state unlivable and the legislature veers off the ideological cliff.

Haque's Sunday follow-up

The state’s hard turn to the right comes less than five years after people took to the streets here to celebrate the 2008 victory of Barack Obama, the first Democratic presidential candidate to capture the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976. The win prompted Obama’s supporters to crow about the growing influence of progressive and minority voters not only in North Carolina but across the South.

But that euphoria is now a distant memory. Since the recession hit, North Carolina has been saddled with one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates. The bad times helped prepare the way for a carefully executed strategy, with big financial support from a major conservative activist, that helped the GOP win control of both chambers of the state General Assembly in 2010.

Those victories were capped last year when Republican Pat McCrory was elected governor, giving the party control of all levers of state government for the first time since 1870.

The victories were aided by the strong financial support of Art Pope, a multimillionaire who spent heavily in support of the state’s GOP candidates. The Institute for Southern Studies, a North Carolina-based research organization, said Pope’s advocacy network spent $2.2 million on 22 legislative races, winning 18. Overall, conservative organizations largely supported by Pope accounted for three-fourths of the outside money spent in North Carolina legislative races in 2010, according to the institute.

One of McCrory’s first acts after being elected governor was to install Pope, a former legislator, as the state budget chief. (The governor’s office declined to make Pope available for an interview.) And now, GOP lawmakers are moving swiftly to enact a long list of legislation they say is largely aimed at limiting government debt and snapping the state’s economy out of a years-long malaise.

Legislators have slashed jobless benefits. They have also repealed a tax credit that supplemented the wages of low-income people, while moving to eliminate the estate tax. They have voted against expanding Medicaid to comply with the 2010 federal health-care law. The expansion would have added 500,000 poor North Carolinians to the Medicaid rolls.

...Lawmakers are also considering proposals to reduce and flatten income tax rates while expanding the sales tax, perhaps to even include groceries and prescription drugs-- which some advocates see as a first step toward eliminating the state income tax.

North Carolina is in a hole and the GOP has shovels digging deeper, much, much deeper. Instead of looking to Art Pope's plans for plutocracy, it should be looking at the way California Democratic voters got rid of Schwarzenegger and taken the ability to block progress away from the Republicans and then went on to turn a $60 billion deficit into a $4 billion surplus.

The debate reflects uncertainty about whether the revenue is a one-time event, a result of state taxes on wealthy residents selling off investments at the end of last year to avoid increased costs as the Bush-era federal tax cuts expired. But it also illustrates philosophical differences about the role of government, about spending versus taxes and about the need, as Mr. Brown argued, to learn lessons from a decade in which many states saw the bottom fall out from their revenue collections.

“We’re seeing a change in conversation in state legislatures this year,” said Todd Haggerty, a policy analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures. “They’re not talking about how to close a budget gap anymore, which is a welcome relief after years of that during and after the Great Recession. Rather, states are having conversations about how to allocate increased revenues.”

Nowhere does that battle promise to play out with more force and intricacy than in California, the state that underwent perhaps the most severe retrenchments in the country.

[Governor] Brown, a Democrat who has always had a fiscally conservative streak, is leading the don’t-pop-any-Champagne-corks brigade, saying that he would oppose significant increases in new spending and that the money should go into a rainy-day fund. His administration put out the lower $1.2 billion estimate.

Voting nihilists and crazed ideologues out of government makes government more successful for the citizens. North Carolina would do well do defeat every Republican on the ballot next year and get back on the road to prosperity.

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Tesla-- I wonder What Libertarians Think Of The Authoritarians Who Run The North Carolina GOP

I'm in the middle of buying a Tesla. My neighbor swears by his and, to me, it seems like the car least likely to pollute the planet. I have solar energy in my house so it won't even cost me anything to charge up the battery a few times a week. But, I couldn't just walk into a dealership and buy one. I had to do the whole process online. Works for me... but I don't live in North Carolina. I'll come back to that in a second.

The big news about Tesla this week was two-fold; first, many auto magazines are calling it the best care ever.

The new all-electric Tesla S sedan is not just the favorite of car magazines, now Consumer Reports calls it the best car they’ve ever driven, scoring 99 points of 100 and beating out the Lexus LS460 that held the previous record back in 2007. What does this massive battery-powered EV have that no others do?

“It handles like a sports car, it rides like a luxury car, it has the energy efficiency that is twice as good as the best hybrids and is the quietest car we’ve ever tested,” said CR tester Gabe Shenhar. “It does so many things so right on so many levels that to us it wasn’t a surprise.”

Perhaps that’s why Tesla Motors has sold more cars during the first quarter of 2013 than luxury German automakers, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi, prompting the Palo Alto-based firm to declare its first-ever profit and raise expected sales for 2013 from 20,000 to 21,000.

And, second, there was the thing about paying the government back all the money... 9 years early. Wednesday Tesla wired in a $451.8 million payment and, coupled with two earlier payments, paid off a $465 million loan they got from the Department of Energy loan in 2010 to foster development of advanced-technology vehicles. As Steve Benen reminds us, Romney and Ryan attacked Obama consistently for loaning Tesla the money. As usual, they were wrong and trying to politicize sound economic policy for narrow partisan gain. Aside from helping build an all-Americaan car company specializing in a clean-energy approach, the loan netted something like $12,000,000 is profit for the American people.

And that brings us back to North Carolina and the ham-fisted corruption that defines the backward, Republican-controlled legislature there. Car dealerships spend millions on legalistic bribes in local races. And they don't want the competition from Tesla. So where better to turn than the crackpots who run the North Carolina legislature?

A legislative proposal, backed by the N.C. Automobile Dealers Association, would make it illegal for Tesla, or any other car maker, to bypass dealerships and sell directly in the state. The proposal cuts at the heart of Tesla’s business model.

...[T]he proposal was unanimously approved by the state Senate’s Commerce Committee on Thursday, despite concerns about the state dictating who should be allowed to sell an automobile. North Carolina is the latest forum for the clash as auto dealers around the country have mobilized, mostly without success, in legislatures and in the courts to block Tesla’s direct car sales.

“They’re trying to insulate the dealer franchise model from any competition,” said Diarmuid O’Connell, Tesla’s vice president for corporate and business development, who traveled to Raleigh to make a presentation to the committee. “It’s a protectionist move to lock down the market so we have to go through the middleman-- the dealer-- to sell our cars.”

The 10-year-old California company is seeking to upend stodgy electric car design by creating the antithesis of the practical plug-in and an alternative to the complex hybrid. Tesla’s 416-horsepower Model S can cruise 265 miles on a single charge. Just this week Consumer Reports awarded the car a near-perfect score of 99 out of a possible 100 points, gushing about the S’s “world-class performance.” The cars start around $69,900.

...“We care about the franchise system,” said Robert Glaser, president of the N.C. Automobile Dealers Association. “The whole point of the retail system is to protect the consumer.”

Is that the funniest thing you ever heard?

As Will Oremus of Slate put it this week, the bill to ban Tesla from North Carolina "is being pushed by the North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association, a trade group representing the state’s franchised dealerships. Its sponsor is state Sen. Tom Apodaca, a Republican from Henderson, who has said the goal is to prevent unfair competition between manufacturers and dealers. What makes it "unfair competition” as opposed to plain-old “competition"-- something Republicans are typically inclined to favor-- is not entirely clear. After all, North Carolina doesn’t seem to have a problem with Apple selling its computers online or via its own Apple Stores.

Still, it’s easy to understand why some car dealers might feel a little threatened: Tesla’s Model S outsold the Mercedes S-Class, BMW 7 Series, and Audi A8 last quarter without any help from them. If its business model were to catch on, consumers might find that they don’t need the middle-men as much as they thought.

Incidentally-- not that he would be in any way swayed by this-- I couldn’t help but notice that Apodaca received $8,000 in campaign contributions from the North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association last year, the maximum amount allowed by state law. I’ve reached out to the senator for further comment and will update this post if he replies.

There's definitely a dangerous authoritarian streak in North Carolina Republicans and they have been coming up with one crackpot reactionary idea after another-- to restrict voting rights, to target college students, to set up a state religion. They demanded the ocean stop rising and now they're demanding cars not be sold online. North Carolina fancies itself the most progressive state in the Old South. They need to get themselves a new legislature; STAT.

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North Carolina Republicans' Move To Shut Down Student Voting Provokes Social Unrest

The video above is from Rachel Maddow's Monday MSNBC show. It's another story of how Republicans-gone-wild are trying to turn back history, this time the enfranchisement of college students in 1971. Many conservatives have fought that right from day one by putting obstacles in the way of students voting in the towns where their colleges were located. Republicans in control of legislatures across the country are doing it again.

In 2010, after the Tea Party takeover of the General Court of New Hampshire, which is what Granite Staters call their 400 member legislature, preventing college students from voting became a top legislative priority for Republicans. The state Senate wound up with 19 Republicans and only 5 Democrats and the GOP margin in the lower house was 298-104. They worked towards overturning marriage equality, reinstating the death penalty, cutting back on women's choice, putting up barriers to union organizing and taking away students' right to vote.

Are college students residents of the towns where they attend school, or are they interlopers, merely stopping in along the way with little vested interest in local affairs?

The controversial question has been posed in New Hampshire, where proposed legislation would take away students’ right to vote in their college town unless they lived there before enrolling and intended to stay-- a move that could have possible overtones for the first-in-the-nation primary.

Already, the weeks-old legislation is getting serious attention from Republicans and stirring angry responses from Democrats who say the bill is a thinly veiled effort to bar liberal-leaning students from casting ballots. Election law specialists in New Hampshire and beyond have offered criticism-- the proposal, they say, flouts court rulings on the question-- while college students are crossing party lines to protest the bill.

“We think that we are part of the communities where we are going to school and we think it’s wrong for the state to choose its voters,’’ said Jeremy Kaufmann, president of Dartmouth College Democrats, which is working with Dartmouth College Republicans to craft a retort to the bill at an as-yet unscheduled legislative hearing... [The] bill extends the same voting restrictions to members of the military and federal employees temporarily stationed in the state. Currently, military members and federal employees, like college students, are permitted to vote in New Hampshire while they are in the state.

...College student voting dramatically expanded in 1971, when the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 years of age to 18 in response to concerns that 18-year-olds could be drafted to serve in the Vietnam War but had no electoral say.

Questions quickly arose over whether students should vote at home or where they go to school. A 1972 US Supreme Court ruling that held that the town of Hanover could not bar a Dartmouth College student from voting because his parents lived in Hawaii and he planned to leave Hanover after graduation.

...Richard Sunderland, president of Dartmouth College Republicans, said the measure should be defeated, despite any advantage that might give to Democrats. The answer to that issue lies not in restricting the votes of college students, he said, but in broadening the appeal of the GOP to college students.

“Attacking the right to vote is attacking a symptom, not the problem itself,’’ he said.

The Republican efforts failed in New Hampshire because the state had a Democratic governor. North Carolina doesn't; they have puppet Pat... and a demented, anti-democracy General Assembly determined to keep students from voting. And that's led to protests and dozens of arrests in Raleigh.

Many of those arrested last week, including the Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, were among the more than 80 people who crowded into the Legislative Building rotunda leading to the Senate chambers to observe and join in chants of protest.

...The group arrested Monday included Barber's 20-year-old son, William Joseph Barber III, a student at North Carolina Central University; William Chafe, former dean of Arts and Sciences at Duke University; Robert Korstad, a professor of public policy and history at Duke; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, an historian at the University of North Carolina; Charles van der Horst, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and members of the social justice group Raging Grannies.

"I started in 1954 at the Youth March for Integrated Schools in New York," said Vicki Ryder of Raging Grannies. "I've been doing this for a long time."

She and her fellow protestors directed their anger at the GOP-controlled legislature, which has refused to accept federal dollars to expand Medicaid to provide health insurance to more poor people, cut unemployment benefits, ended the earned income tax credit and passed new voting restrictions. Republicans have controlled the Legislature since 2011.

Van der Horst said those policies, in addition to efforts to restrict access to abortion, expose hypocrisy within the GOP ranks.

"These people don't believe in the sanctity of life," he said. "They believe in protecting their own wealth and their own power."

Even before the demonstrations and arrests started, this is how the University of North Carolina's student paper, the Daily Tar Heel was covering the Republican Party War On Education.

Proposals in the N.C. General Assembly ranging from tuition hikes to student group functions have brought a bedrock issue to the fore: the degree to which UNC-system campuses will continue to be granted autonomy from the state.

And they have drawn the ire of UNC administrators and students.

University administrators lobbied against the 12.3 percent tuition increase for out-of-state students at six schools, including UNC-CH, proposed in Gov. Pat McCrory’s budget.

Drew Moretz, vice president for government relations for the UNC system, met with McCrory’s team while his budget was being drafted to discuss concerns.

He said the tuition increase could result in fewer students enrolling at system schools, which could discourage businesses from staying in the state.

...Bruce Carney, provost for UNC-CH, said the money from tuition increases would funnel into the state’s general fund rather than universities.

“Increasing the tuition and keeping the money is the legislature’s prerogative, but morally it’s indefensible,” he said.

“The revenues from tuition increases should be going to support students, the faculties, the libraries and the University operations.”

UNC, Chapel Hill senior Zaina Alsous, who was arrested Wednesday at a protest along with students from UNC campuses at Charlotte and Greensboro, pointed out that "we’re even seeing public education, normally a bedrock of our state, under devastating attack from those in power” and called for mass resistance. Puppet Pat seems oblivious and won't talk about anything but his plans for offshore drilling and fracking.

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Does Anyone Think The Republican Party Is The Same As A Garden Variety Fascist Party? Consider North Carolina

Just how the GOP, financed by wealthy fascist Art Pope, took over the entire North Carolina state government and immediately turned to subverting democracy and cementing their own power, is a well-known story, at least in circles where people care about such things. And barely a day passes without the Republican extremists in the legislature and the Republican extremist governor working their asses off-- on behalf of consolidating and retaining power. This week, for example, the House, largely along party-lines, passed a controversial voter ID law meant to disenfranchise African-Americans, poor people and students. Most North Carolina voters oppose it, but ALEC and Pope insist. In fact, ALEC and Pope insist on a lot of things-- and the North Carolina Republican Party is delivering for them:

With no remaining checks to Republican rule in North Carolina, the state has now become a haven for some of the most ideological-- and ill-considered-- tea party fantasies dressed up as legislation. Here are just a few of the bills being pushed in the house (and the senate) that Art Pope built:

• Voter Suppression : It’s a sad commentary on the state of American politics that once Republicans take over a state, they almost immediately begin enacting laws to make it harder for Democratic-leaning groups to cast a ballot. North Carolina Republicans, however, have embraced voter suppression with unusual enthusiasm. They’ve introduced voter ID, a common GOP method of reducing turnout among minorities, low-income voters and students. They’ve introduced Florida-like restrictions on early voting, cutting early voting hours and eliminating voting the Sunday before election day in order to thwart voting drives at African-American churches. And they want to punish parents whose children vote from their college addresses.

• Reverse Robin Hood: A GOP bill in the North Carolina Senate would eliminate all individual and corporate income taxes, and largely replace it with higher sales taxes. Sales taxes disproportionately burden lower-income taxpayers, because they spend a larger percentage of their income on basic needs. It is also far more difficult to create a progressive sales tax than to enact a progressive income tax code that places a lesser tax burden on those who can least afford it. As a result, a similar tax plan in Louisiana would raise taxes on 80 percent of residents, while giving Louisianans in the top 1 percent of income earners an average tax cut of $25,423.

• Shutting Down Abortion Clinics: Another bill in the state senate would add new restrictions to abortion clinics in an attempt to force them to close their doors. Among other things, the bill requires doctors to have admitting privileges in a hospital located within 30 miles of the clinic, an unnecessary restriction that serves little purpose other than to limit the pool of doctors available to clinics.

• Anti-Worker Constitutional Amendment: A so-called “right-to-work” law, which depresses worker wages by cutting back unions’ ability to collectively bargain for wages and benefits, is already the law in North Carolina, effectively cutting both union and non-union wages by $1,500 a year. Nevertheless, 34 Republican lawmakers (and one Democrat) sponsored a state constitutional amendment that would lock this anti-worker policy into the state Constitution. The same amendment would strip public sector workers of their right to collectively bargain, and lock in policies making it easier for companies to pressure their workers against unionizing to boot.

• Subsidizing Home Schooling: Eight Republican lawmakers sponsored a bill giving families a $1,250 per semester tax subsidy if they home school their children.

• Judges For Sale: A pair of bills in the state senate would eliminate the state’s successful public financing system for judicial elections. Prior to this system’s enactment in 2004, “73 percent of campaign funds for judicial candidates came from attorneys and special interest groups,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice’s Alicia Bannon. Now, it’s 14 percent. So public financing was successful in rolling back moneyed interest groups’ ability to buy and sell judges through campaign donations, and these GOP bills would throw judicial elections back to the old ways.

• State Sponsored Religion: Eleven Republicans, including the state’s House Majority Leader, backed a resolution proclaiming that the Constitution “does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional,” and then decreeing that North Carolina could establish its own state religion. On the bright side, state house Speaker Thom Tillis announced that he would not advance this resolution after it was widely panned.

Back to that polling for a moment, though:

• Only 6% of voters support allowing legislators to start receiving gifts from lobbyists again, while 88% are opposed. There's pretty strong bipartisan agreement that that's a bad idea with independents (4/93), Democrats (5/87), and Republicans (8/86) all firmly against it.

• Only 25% of voters support a proposal to forbid parents from claiming college students registered to vote away from home as dependents on their state taxes, compared to 57% who are opposed. This is another one where the Republican legislators supporting the measure are out of touch with actual Republican voters- only 26% support it with 56% opposed, not that different from the numbers among Democrats which are 22% supportive and 61% opposed.

• Just 33% of voters support cutting the early voting period by a week, while 59% are opposed. Republicans do narrowly support this idea (51/42), but Democrats (22/70) and independents (28/62) are heavily opposed to it.

• Only 22% of voters support eliminating the state's renewable energy standards, while 39% are against that idea. Republican voters (29/25) only narrowly support eliminating the standard while Democrats (13/47) and independents (28/41) are pretty firmly against it.

• Only 28% of voters support a proposal to make it a crime for law enforcement officers to enforce federal gun laws on North Carolina manufactured fire arms, while 42% are opposed. Democrats (33/41), Republicans (24/41), and independents (26/46) all think that one's a bad idea.

• The only high profile Republican initiative we polled that has much traction with voters is the one to make Christianity the official state religion. 42% support that to 45% who are opposed and while much of that support is because a majority of Republicans favor it (53/33) it actually has 41% support from Democrats too, much more appeal across party lines than any of these other proposals. Despite the decent level of support for Christianity as the state religion, only 16% of voters agree with the state legislator who labeled a prayer to Allah as an act of terrorism last week, although that does go up to 25% among Republicans.

The GOP is becoming increasingly unpopular as a governing party in the state. The Democratic Party is in complete turmoil, riven with dissension, and nearly moribund as a functional organization-- which allows McCrory to keep goin' for the gold. Friday evening, just as the State Board of Elections was investigating how he and other Republicans were able to subvert democracy to seize power last year, he announced he had fired the whole Board and his replacements-- 3 Republicans and 2 Democrats-- would take over this week.

The move puts the progress of the board’s investigation into campaign contributions from an indicted sweepstakes software company owner in question.

Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, last week asked the board to investigate more than 60 campaign contributions totaling more than $230,000. Some of the contributions went to McCrory, House Speaker Thom Tillis and Senate leader Phil Berger.

A majority of sitting board members said they were interested in investigating, according to an Associated Press story. But on Friday night, Chairman Larry Leake said it would be inappropriate for members on their last day in office to talk about the investigation or give staff any direction. The board has a meeting scheduled for Tuesday.

“It might be presumptuous for us to attempt to do anything with a new board coming on May 1,” Leake said. “It makes no sense for our board to attempt to direct the conduct of our office when we are in fact exiting out the door.”

...Two of the governor’s GOP appointees said they didn’t know how the board would proceed with the sweepstakes inquiry.

...Charles Winfree, a Republican who has served on the board for 12 years, said he would encourage the new members to pursue the investigation. “Based on what I’ve been told by the staff, it appears to me that there is enough to warrant an investigation,” he said. “Certainly the practice of the contributors needs to be examined.”

Hall said he was “nervous” about the 100 percent turnover on the elections board, but hoped the new members would approach the questions objectively.

“I think there were veterans, both Republicans and Democrats, on the Board of Elections that have been objective in reviewing complaints against both parties and I’ve admired their ability to get the facts even when they don’t agree with my personal opinions,” he said. “I hope the new group will also be very professional and fulfill the responsibilities to be above partisan biases and search for the truth.”

Hall asked the board to investigate three issues related to contributions from Chase Burns, the Oklahoma-based owner of International Internet Technologies, as well as other donations connected to the sweepstakes industry. Burns’ company supplies the software that Internet sweepstakes cafes use to run their games.

Checks for Burns’ contributions were written from a trust account that Florida investigators said received millions in illegal proceeds from Burns’ business customers. Hall wants to know whether Burns used a business account or an account that was part of an illegal business operation to make campaign contributions.

Campaign disclosure reports erroneously list Burns as an attorney with Moore & Van Allen, according to Hall’s complaint. Moore & Van Allen is a legal and lobbying firm that represented Burns’ company and also employed McCrory until days before he took office.

The five-member State Board of Elections, which for years has had three Democrats and two Republicans, has been aggressive in recent years in investigating campaign finance law violations. It investigated former House Speaker Jim Black, and former state Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps, among others. Both were Democrats who ended up sentenced to federal prison. But Republicans were critical of the board for limiting the inquiry into Perdue’s undisclosed campaign flights.

The North Carolina Pope

SUNDAY CLASSICS SCHEDULE NOTE FROM KEN

Today's post, "My dark history with the rollicking opening of Act II of Donizetti's Elixir of Love," follows at 5pm ET/2pm PT.

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What Can We Learn From What The GOP Is Doing To North Carolina's Education System?

Last year, one of our favorite Blue America candidates was North Carolina state Rep. Patsy Keever, who was running against reactionary Republican closet case Patrick McHenry. Although Patsy kicked his ass where she was best known, Buncombe County-- where she rolled up a 46,240 (66%) to 23,740 (34%) victory-- the DCCC, angry that Patsy beat some conservative shill of theirs in the primary, refused to help her run in the general. In the end, the huge disparity in spending-- McHenry spent $1,127,555 and Patsy spent $419,465-- helped McHenry win big enough margins in Gaston, Cleveland and Catawba counties to beat her districtwide 57- 43%. Thanks for nothing, Steve Israel!

We were happy to see Patsy elected chairman of the Buncombe County Democratic Party Saturday. A lifelong school teacher, whose first priority has always been education, Patsy has been hard at work fighting the Republicans in the state legislature working to undermine North Carolina's public education system. This is an article she wrote last week for Diane Ravitch's blog:

To Educate Or Not To Educate In NC
by Patsy Keever

Our rulers in Raleigh are answering that question for us with bills that they could vote into law to change everything from how Carolina and State are funded, to whether tax money ought to be used for church schools, to whether or not Hamlet needs to be taught to “tech” kids. If our local legislators do not hear from us, they will vote on these bills in a vacuum-- which is contrary to representative democracy.

We have two education commandments in North Carolina. The first was spoken a century ago by Gov. Charles B. Aycock, our first education governor, “You cannot do the best for your child unless you also do the best for my child.”

The second is from our state Constitution, which mandates that “The General Assembly shall provide by taxation and otherwise for a general and uniform system of free public schools, which shall be maintained at least nine months in every year, and wherein equal opportunities shall be provided for all students.”

Pretty simple. Education for all of our students is our ultimate long-range economic development tool, our best defense against politicians who would mislead us, and our moral and constitutional duty. How do we work together to ensure that all of our children get the best possible education? How do we ensure that the limited funds are fairly distributed? How do we ensure that our school personnel have the tools and resources they need? How do we incorporate the best ideas into all of our schools? How do we keep a positive attitude and continue to do the best for all our children? What can you do?

On April 23, from 6:30-8 p.m. at the Asheville City Schools boardroom on Mountain Street, Public Schools First North Carolina, a statewide nonpartisan nonprofit is hosting a gathering of parents, school personnel and the general public to provide information about pending legislation, to identify resources and to hear ideas and suggestions from the attendees. Asheville City Schools Foundation and Children First are co-sponsors of the meeting.

At a time when the citizens of Asheville and Buncombe County are facing water control issues, airport control issues and election issues, we cannot lose sight of the most long-lasting and important responsibility-- our children' s education. We can choose to sleep through this-- but in doing so, who knows what nightmares may come? And that is the rub. See you on the 23rd.

This isn't just happening in Asheville and it isn't just happening in North Carolina. It happens wherever voters give the Republican Party control of state government.

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North Carolina Republicans-- Anti-Democracy Authoritarians At Work

A few days ago we looked at some of the craziest things Republicans are doing in their national crackup. And we started with North Carolina's attempt to set up some kind of official religion. The next day, after an incredible uproar from outraged citizens, the Speaker of the state House, Thom Tillis, killed the nonsense, despite 14 Republicans having had already signed on as cosponsors. Although the bill wasn't going to pick between Christian sects-- just make "Christianity" the state religion-- North Carolina has a considerable number of non-Christians including around 25,000 Jews, 25,000 Muslims and 40,000 Mormons. Oh... and over half the people in the state don't consider themselves religious at all. That's a lot... of voters to offend. And, according to North Carolina-based PPP last month, voters in the state are already having some real buyers' remorse over having handed the General Assembly and governor's mansion over to the GOP.

North Carolina voters disapprove of the way Republicans are running state government in general and of several of their specific policy proposals. Just 38% of voters say they approve of the job Republicans as a whole are running state government, while 52% disapprove. The General Assembly as a whole fares particularly badly, with just 23% job approval and 49% disapproval. 50% say they have an unfavorable opinion of Republicans in the North Carolina Legislature compared to 36% who hold a favorable opinion. Democrats in the Legislature fare only slightly better, with a 38%-44% favorability rating. Only Governor Pat McCrory himself sees a net positive job approval rating, with 49% approving and 35% disapproving.

No sooner had that outburst of fevered right-wing psychosis subside-- one of the principal sponsors, extremist nutbag Harry Warren running around his district apologizing for embarrassing his constituents-- that the GOP found something just as crazy-- and just as unconstitutional-- to get behind: a poll tax meant to keep students from voting. Rachel explained it well in the clip above from her Thursday show but basically what the bill filed this week does is remove the state income tax deduction for dependents who register at an address other than their parents, like where they live while they're in college. Parents of college kids-- particularly working class parents of college kinds-- would be punished with a new tax if their kids registered to vote at school. What a great way to get hard-pressed parents to pressure their children not to register to vote. Yes, finally a tax the GOP likes... an unconstitutional poll tax, meant not to raise revenue as much as keep college students from voting.

The history of America has been a long, hard-fought battle between progressives trying to expand the franchise and conservatives trying to restrict it. Conservatives, for the most part, opposed the Declaration of Independence and fought on the side of the British during the Revolution. After they lost many of them left for Britain, Canada and the West Indies. The trash that stayed behind worked to make the governing documents as unfriendly to democracy as possible. In terms of the franchise, conservatives were adamant that only older white males with property should be allowed to vote at all.

And every push towards universal suffrage-- in terms of women, blacks, immigrants, young people, working people, etc-- has been strenuously contested by conservatives. And that, of course hasn't stopped. Dozens of bill have been proposed in Republican-controlled legislatures to restrict voting rights or to discourage non-white, wealthy, older property owners from voting. With the complete takeover of North Carolina by the GOP last year, that state is one of the worst, but just one of the worst. And every state with a Republican legislature and Republican governor is trying something or other to disenfranchise someone. Rachel got into it Friday evening:

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Seriously, Is The Republican Party Cracking Up?

Yesterday everyone was talking about the Republican plan in the North Carolina legislature to establish a state religion, something clearly prohibited by the Constitution, not to mention centuries of common practice in the U.S. People were scratching their heads and wondering if the proposal was just something from Tea Party crackpots with no influence. Well one of the sponsors, Edgar Starnes, is certainly a Tea Party crackpot but he's serving his 10th term and he's the GOP Majority Leader of the House. He represents tiny, somewhat backward Caldwell County which voted 23,069- 10,795 for Romney over Obama in November. Starnes claims North Carolina can enshrine a state religion if it wants to.

Guess what; Oklahoma has even more cracked Republicans than North Carolina, loons concerned with UN black helicopters. And then there was Louie Gohmert, an actual U.S. Congressman from the saddest part of Texas, who claimed-- and with a straight face-- that gun control is a slippery slope that leads right to gay sex and bestiality

It must be pretty stressful being a Republican. The voting public doesn't agree with any of their core positions and voters don't trust their hands on the levers of power. A new poll from Quinnipiac had nothing but bad news for them.

Among all American voters, the Democratic Party is less disliked than the GOP: the Democrats get a negative 38 - 44 percent favorability, compared to a negative 28 - 52 percent for the Republicans. The Tea Party gets a negative 24 - 43 percent.

Voters also give Republicans in Congress a negative 19 - 71 percent job approval, compared to a negative 34 - 59 percent for the Democrats in Congress.

"The Republican brand is essentially in the toilet these days, but it's worth remembering the Democrats faced a similar situation in the late 1980s and got their house in order and returned to power in short order," said [Assistant Director Peter] Brown.

But the trend is far from favorable for them. Last July when the survey asked who they would vote for for Congress, a generic Republican or a generic Democrat, 43% picked a Democrat and 40% picked a Republican. This month the Democrat still has 43% support. But the Republic support has sunk to 35%, enough to make up for the gerrymander advantage. Among voters with a college degree it's even worse for the GOP. 31% favor a Republican and 44% favor a Democrat. and asked whether the congressional Republicans are doing a good job, only 19% said yes. Even among Republican voters only 34% felt they were doing a good job while 57% said they disapprove of the job Congressional Republicans are doing. No demographic approved-- not even white born-again evangelical voters, 63% disapproving. When asked if the Republicans Party "cares about the needs and problems of people like you or not," 59% said NOT. Among these same respondents 59% said that the Democratic Party does care.

Meanwhile another new poll just out, this one from Marist, shows the GOP severely out of sync with American voters on gun control. Voters don't only want background checks, they want assault weapons banned entirely. Six in 10 respondents-- including 83% of Democrats, 43% of gun owners and 37% of Republicans-- believe that the laws covering gun sales should be stricter. 87% of Americans support background checks for private gun sales and sales at gun shows, and 59% favor legislation that would ban the sale of assault weapons. The same poll also shows the public rejecting the Republican Austerity Agenda.

[T]he Morning Joe/Marist survey shows that Americans-- by nearly a 2-to-1 margin-- want President Barack Obama and Congress to make job creation their top priority (64 percent) instead of deficit reduction (33 percent).

Those who prefer Washington’s political leaders to emphasize job creation include 76 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans; a narrow majority of Republican respondents (51 percent) want the focus to be on deficit reduction.

Also, Obama edges congressional Republicans by four percentage points, 44 percent to 40 percent, on the question of who has a better approach to deal with the federal budget deficit.

But the president’s approach to deficit reduction-- calling for a combination of spending cuts and increased tax revenues-- is more popular than the Republicans’ cuts-only approach.

Forty-two percent of respondents prefer a mixture of spending cuts (including to entitlement programs) and revenue increases; 35 percent pick increasing mostly revenue; and just 17 percent choose mostly cutting government spending (including to programs like Medicare and Medicaid).

Still, an analysis from Think Progress, it appears that a landslide victory in the House would--  thanks to gerrymandering-- only yield a 5 seat majority. Which means Democrats would, once again, be at the mercy of useless Blue Dogs and New Dems who are exactly as corrupted by corporate money as the Republicans are.

According to a Quinnipiac poll released today, if the election were held today 43 percent of the electorate would support a Democratic U.S. House candidate, as opposed to just 35 percent who would back a Republican. That 8 point lead for Democrats is significantly more than the GOP’s margin of victory during the 2010 Republican wave election (6.6 percent) and even more that the Democratic margin of victory during the 2006 wave (7.9 percent)-- when Democrats were bolstered by both an unpopular Republican president and a failing war in Iraq. And yet, if Democrats succeed in maintaining this substantial lead through next year’s congressional election, they will likely emerge with a tiny majority of just 5 seats... Republican gerrymandering was so successful during the last redistricting cycle that Democrats would likely need to win the national popular vote by more than 7 points in order to win the barest of majorities in the House.

As Greg Sargent put it in his Washington Post column, "public opinion among Republicans is increasingly isolated and drifting away from the rest of the electorate. You see this on pretty much every major issue facing the country." He offers lot of examples-- 57% of Americans support a pathway to citizenship for immigrants already here, something 60% of Republicans oppose. 58% of voters (and 62% of Independents) believe the time has come for marriage equality. Only 34% of Republican voters agree, which makes it difficult even for evolved Members to support something that everyone in the country but the crazy GOP base is favoring.

So while you have the RNC vacillating between rebranding and claiming President Obama is plotting infanticide, Democrats need only point to the results of Tuesday's runoff in South Carolina to show the American people that there really is something seriously wrong with Republicans.

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