McCrory's not-so-stealthy campaign

Kudo's to Chris for calling him out:

As recently as the end of July, McCrory was saying that he was trying “to gauge the level of support and confidence in a potential McCrory campaign.” Those remarks came after news that McCrory’s unannounced campaign had raised just over a million dollars in the last year. That is a lot of money for a gauge.

Yeah, it is. And methinks the BoE needs to take a look at which account these checks are going into:

2011 Fracking Summit highlights

Friday fracking video

Burr demands offset cuts for Irene assistance

Holding his own constituents hostage:

“I think we’ve got to offset everything; anything that’s not allocated has got to be offset these days. It shouldn’t delay it,” Burr told POLITICO. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse that could be accessed like that.”

Aside from the fact that you're (once again) throwing people who depend on you under the bus, if it takes a fricking hurricane for you to focus on waste, fraud and abuse, then your own public "service" falls into that "waste" column. And we keep sending him back...

Is Howard Coble (finally) going to retire?

The Magic 8-Ball sez: Who the hell is Howard Coble?

In an interview with News & Record staff writer Mark Binker, Coble acknowledged rumors that he won’t seek re-election next year. He hasn’t decided yet. That’s significant in itself. Coble won the 6th District seat in 1984 and successfully defended it in the next 13 elections.

But apparently his Republican buddies in the Legislature didn't feel the need to protect his District:

After dark

Another wind energy project for Eastern NC

We could be looking at a bumper crop of wind turbines:

A utility based in Chicago is proposing an 80-megawatt wind farm in eastern North Carolina. The company Invenergy sent an application to state officials last week for a facility with 49 turbines at a site in Beaufort County. Jay Lucas is an engineer with the state Utilities Commission. He says an 80-megawatt farm could power 20,000 homes, depending on wind capacity.

Wind energy could end up being Eastern North Carolina's economic savior, and the NCUC should fast-track these applications as much as humanly possible.

NC GOP puts eminent domain on the shelf

Anti-gay extremism trumps protecting private property:

House Speaker Thom Tillis said he thought that the amendment would be handled next year, adding that he expected it to get on the ballot next year. Tillis and Apodaca both cited the marriage amendment, limiting legislative leaders’ terms and giving lawmakers appointments to the state board of elections as the three constitutional amendments most likely to come up Sept. 12.

Not only does the unnecessary marriage amendment "outrank" eminent domain on the GOP's priority list, protecting their own political careers (via the Board of Elections) does too. Oh, and a word of advice for our conservative readers: When a politician promises to take care of your problem after the Primary:

Labor Day 2011: The struggle continues

Union bashers here in North Carolina love to reference Detroit and the difficulties US auto manufacturers face in competing with foreign imports. And that is usually followed by something along the lines of, "We can't allow that to happen here!"

Of course, what these demagogues leave out of their little sermon is: Millions of cars are still being manufactured in the US, while North Carolina's textile and furniture manufacturing industry has all but disappeared. If we had allowed that (unionism) to happen here, many of those jobs would still be here.

Hood gets it wrong on the economy

Making a tired and inaccurate argument:

Their regulatory excesses and fiscal imbalances have chased investment capital into low-risk, low-return securities. These policies have shattered business confidence.

It wasn't "regulatory excesses" that funneled $62 trillion into credit default swaps; it was the naive and reckless faith in the free market, as espoused by pundits like you, that led a hapless Republican Congress to throw caution to the wind and tear down the regulatory walls. And guess what? Most of those walls are still down, which is why investors are so skittish.

BlueNC

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