If the Republican Party were a father, it would be in jail for child abuse.

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Budget, tax reform will be finalized behind closed doors (WRAL-TV) -- The House and Senate have both offered up tax and spending plans. Now leaders from the two chambers will negotiate over their differences largely behind closed doors.
http://www.wral.com/budget-and-tax-bills-to-head-behind-closed-doors/12553875/

You won't find this on any of those nifty little brochures:

Theresa Terrelonge, another former employee, said loan officers were given restaurant gift cards and $25 cash awards for denying loan applications. The incentives moved workers to reject applicants improperly, Terrelonge said May 15 in a statement. “I witnessed employees and managers change and falsify information in the systems of record, and remove documents from homeowners’ files to make the account appear ineligible for a loan modification,” said Terrelonge, a loan servicing representative. This allowed managers to meet quotas for closed cases, she said.

Bank of America instructed employees to delay applications and mislead customers “as part of a deliberate practice of stringing homeowners along,” lawyers said June 7 in a filing.

I doubt these defrauded homeowners will get any sympathy from the GOP. If they couldn't afford the house, they shouldn't have signed the papers. And besides, let the market fix this. If the bank treats people badly, they can go somewhere else! Unfortunately, it doesn't matter who you get your initial mortgage from; the way they sell these loans back and forth to each other, you don't know who's going to be holding your note. Which is a perfect example of how an average person would fare in a totally free market. Like a leaf on the wind.

Some inspiring words from Mark Marcoplos, one of the 151 people arrested on June 3.

I got arrested at a recent Moral Monday protest with 151 others. The total number is now close to 400.

With the collusion of both parties, diseased politics and corporate corruption have been eating away at our society for a long time. Suddenly, the pace has quickened in North Carolina and voices of moderation are being willfully steam-rolled by a radical agenda that is right out of the playbook of out-of-state heavy-hitters like the Koch brothers’- funded Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council known as ALEC. These efforts are amplified by the Koch brothers’ North Carolina ally, the mega-wealthy free-spender for ultra-conservative causes Art Pope – now ensconced as the state’s Budget Director. In the last election, Pope spent $2.2 million dollars on 22 state legislative candidates, winning 18 of them.

This current crop of self-serving representatives has unleashed an avalanche of bills that will result in the least among us being denied the basic necessities that good neighbors and strong communities have always provided for one another – food when they are hungry, care when they are sick, a quality education for our kids, and a little money to tide them over a tough time. All while screwing around with voting laws to make it more difficult for us to unseat them. Add to that cuts in mental health care that will cost more in social services, police protection, and prisons. They are fast-tracking fracking and off-shore drilling while spitefully attacking the healthy growth of renewables and energy-efficiency. It’s hard to imagine the nightmarish yet realistic possibility of losing the Outer Banks to an oil spill, especially when we don’t really need that oil.

What we are witnessing is the behavior of mentally ill people. By that I mean, if all of us were to follow the same philosophy in our daily life, society would disintegrate.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt has a few choice words for North Carolina voters:

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

April 29, 1938. Message to Congress

And for Art Pope.