The welcome mat might be the last thing you see:

The following definitions apply in this section:

Dwelling. – A building or conveyance of any kind, including any attached porch, whether the building or conveyance is temporary or permanent, mobile or immobile, which has a roof over it, including a tent, and is designed to be occupied by people lodging therein at night.

Bolding mine. According to this bill, the porch is no longer outside the dwelling; once you've climbed the steps and are getting ready to knock, you've already crossed the legal threshold into someone's dwelling.

Can somebody hand Skip a copy?

Article IX, Section 2: "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."

And then there's Section 5: "The State Board of Education shall supervise and administer the free public school system and the educational funds provided for its support ..."

That second part should stamp "denied" on the idea for having a separate board, outside of DPI, to administer charter schools. If the GOP wants to adhere to the Constitution, that is.

Whacked by the irony stick:

We support Catholic education, including the school at our parish, even though we do not have school-age children.

To be clear, I don't dislike public schools or their board members, administrators or teachers. But I don't trust their priorities. Time and again, they put their ideology and interests ahead of individual student needs.

Those words were not snipped and placed together out of context, that's the sequence in which they were written. I'm surprised the dead-tree version of the paper didn't spontaneously combust from the laughable logical conflict.

If the voters don't like what you're trying to do, just call it something else:

The N.C. Association of Educators posted a video of House Majority Leader Paul Stam warning supporters not to refer to private school tax credits as vouchers. "The term voucher polls way below tax credit," he said. "So get it out of your vocabulary."

That's because the term "tax credits" is associated with a wide range of issues, not just the dismantling of the public school system.

And that bad advice is all the help states can expect from Patty:

McHenry criticized states for not preparing better for the end of the 2009 stimulus funding that the federal government poured into state budgets in the past two years.

"The era of the bailout is over," McHenry said.

More nonsense from the king of nonsense. This bankruptcy "solution" will erode states' abilities to prepare better, by making one of their tools (borrowing) harder to access and more expensive. But that second thing might be exactly what McHenry is trying to bring about: