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Moffitt, Murry contributions connected to "Biggest Gambling Ring Bust in SC"

NC House members Tim Moffit and Tom Murry received campaign contributions from two South Carolina men who have since been indicted on charges of illegal gambling and money laundering totalling $386 million.

The campaign committee of Tom Murry, NC House District 41, received a $2,000 check from J Michael Caldwell of South Carolina, listed as "President" of a company simply stated as "Gateway", on 1/29/2013, one day before the North Carolina State House reconvened (after a 1/9/2013 organizational session). On the same day, 1/29/2013, the campaign committee of Tim Moffitt, NC House District 116, received a $2,000 check from Bobby Mosley of South Carolina, listed only as "Principal" with no employer notation. Caldwell is Mosley's son-in-law and together they ran a gambling enterprise spanning multiple corporate entities and over 600 internet cafes in multiple states.

On 8/14/2013 an indictment was entered in federal court in South Carolina naming J Michael Caldwell, Bobby Mosley, Sr., Gateway Systems, LLC, Gateway Gaming, LLC, Frontier Software Systems, LLC and Frontier Gaming, Inc, as defendants on one count of conducting an illegal gambling business and one count of money laundering related to the alleged illegal gambling. It has been described as "the biggest gambling ring bust in South Carolina history."

McCrory quasi-judicial nominee would let personal religious beliefs affect decisions

Attorney Charlton Allen's nomination by Governor Pat McCrory to serve on the quasi-judicial Industrial Commission has come under fire. An article today by the Independent Weekly lays out some of Allen's “Racially Dubious Past”, in particular his activities while a student at UNC Chapel Hill in the early 1990s.

"They [led by Allen] also deposited an inflatable sheep at the headquarters of the campus Gay-Straight Alliance to equate homosexuality with bestiality. One issue of the Carolina Review featured a black man in a bull's eye. Some issues featured cartoons with pictures of Klansmen."

More recently he expressed his opposition to protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation in answering a 2012 candidate questionnaire from the NC Family Policy Council:

Strategic Allied Consulting morphs into Issue Advocacy Partners

Strategic Allied Consulting, the firm hired and fired by the RNC for voter registation and GOTV efforts in North Carolina and other battleground states has quickly morphed into another entity called Issue Advocacy Partners operating similarly in at least Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia, New York and New Jersey according to a review of nationwide job listings.

Pay to play in GOP House caucus

Last week Jordan Green at YES! Weekly reported that GOP NC House candidate Debra Conrad was feeling pressured to raise money for the Republican House Caucus in order to get the best committee assignments. The News & Observer picked up on the story and NC Policy Watch weighed in also:

If there’s anything to Conrad’s claim, this is extremely troubling news for our state. Pay-to-play politics of the kind described by Conrad are at the root of innumerable problems that plague our state’s politics and policies.

BlueNC has acquired a House Republican Caucus document that lends some credence to the claim and may rebut the claim of Thom Tillis' communications director Jordan Shaw that: "There’s none of that type of operation."

Pat McCrory's other gigs

One reason we might never see Pat McCrory's tax returns could be because he doesn't want us to know how much he makes from speaking fees. In October 2010 a check in the amount of $2,500 from the Atlanta Regional Commission was deposited into his campaign account, apparently by accident. In October 2010 McCrory was a keynote speaker for the commission's Regional Leadership Institute annual dinner.

Dalton, McCrory audited by SBOE

The campaign committees of Walter Dalton and Pat McCrory were audited by the North Carolina State Board of Elections (SBOE). Both campaigns had some minor discrepancies that were addressed by their committees. The Dalton campaign forfeited $200 in cash contributions made in 2011. Two $100 cash contributions were over the one time $50 limit. Had the contributions been made as $50 in cash on consecutive days they would have been legal. The McCrory campaign forfeited $5,000 in excess contributions made in 2012 because they occurred between the 2008 general election and the 2012 primary. $1,000 excess came from Ira Jackson III of Raleigh. $4,000 came from Wendell Murphy of Rose Hill. Had the contributions been made by a spouse who had not already exceeded the $4,000 limit per election cycle they would have been legal.

Masters of their own domain: .GOP

I’ve always suspected that Republicans live in a different world. Mitt Romney’s recently revealed comments about the “other” 47% serve to reinforce that view. Now it seems that Republicans want to exist on the internet in their own separate .GOP domain.

The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) earlier this year filed an application for the top level domain “.GOP” with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Federal records indicate that the RSLC paid $185,000 to ICANN in application fees and $32,600 to Minds+Machines to manage the project for a total $217,600 speculative investment in what amounts to an online vanity plate. From the application:

Voter Integrity Project uses invalid form of address

If the Voter Integrity Project were a registered voter its vote could be successfully challenged on the basis that it uses forms of address not recognized as valid by the US Postal Service, which can cause mail to be returned to senders as “Undeliverable”. This anomaly serves to highlight the dangers to voter access posed by various gratuitously strict matching requirements that have been proposed for forms of identity verification for in-person voting.

The right wing Voter Integrity Project, which has been challenging voter registrations in NC, uses an address form that gives the illusion of a physical address but which is actually a Private Mail Box (PMB) at a Raleigh UPS Store.

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