bill graham

Via email from Americans for Prosperity:

RALEIGH – With tax bills on the minds of millions of North Carolina taxpayers, five of North Carolina’s gubernatorial candidates have signed a pledge to support spending restraint, the grassroots free-market group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) announced today. Candidates Bill Graham, Pat McCrory, Michael Munger, Bob Orr, and Fred Smith have pledged to support a constitutional limit on state spending known as the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR).

My 48th birthday was on Monday, Feb. 25th. I work for a non-profit agency that gets most of its funding from the state, so budgets are tight. One year, we weren't able to give cost of living increases, so the board voted to give our birthdays as a personal holiday. What do you choose to do with a personal holiday? Get a manicure, a massage? Maybe some people would. Not me. I chose to haul my butt out of bed early, get stuck in construction, and fight traffic to get to a Forum on Mental Health so that I could listen to most of the candidates for Governor and Lt.Governor talk about the crisis in North Carolina's Mental Health System. As some of you might have realized by now, I am a political geek, but what you might not know is that I've had two family members struggle with mental illness and fall through cracks - one in NJ, and one in NC. So this was a very important day for me.

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/cartoon-culture/spongebob-rectal-thermometer

Following a page from the national GOP playbook, nearly all of the Republican gubernatorial candidates refused to show up Saturday for the NAACP debate.

African-Americans make up more than 20 percent of North Carolina’s population.

Republicans would rather ignore 1.1 million African-American voters than address concerns about education, health care, jobs, and safe communities.

If you're not reading Laura Leslie's blog at WUNC-FM, you should be. It's the sharpest coverage of statewide politics coming out of the Capital Press Corpse by a wide margin. Her report on Friday of the Four Horsemen in the Replicant race for governor is a work of art. I've chosen the "cons" for highlights here, but the whole thing is worth the read.

Republican Bill Graham sure is an outsider. Even his staff operates outside of the law.

Campaign manager Marty Ryall resigned in 2003 as executive director of the Arkansas GOP amid federal investigations into the party’s finances. Four of the five other staffers were fired in the aftermath.

Ryall resurfaced this year working for another outsider, indicted Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher.

Ryall joins Michael Aaron Lay, Graham’s campaign spokesman, who was indicted earlier this year of voter fraud in connection with Patrick McHenry.

Lay, a field director for McHenry, was indicted in May on felony voter fraud charges. In 2004, Lay voted twice in elections while living in a district in which he was not a permanent resident.

Over the past three days, an extremist Republican wedge appears to have been driven into the heart and soul of the Old North State. In response to the (gasp) horror of allowing children of illegal immigrants to attend community colleges in North Carolina, we have witnessed a stunning level of political expediency among five of the six people who consider themselves worthy of holding our state's highest elected office - plus the one already holding it.

The debacle started predictably enough with the two richest Republican candidates, Fred Smith and Bill Graham. Smith has made his fortunes on the backs of working class people who have shoveled his dirt and poured his concrete with no need for education whatsoever. Graham's future is even more tightly tied to sustaining ignorance among a permanent underclass that will buy his never-ending stream of anti-government rhetoric. There's no surprise with these two, none at all.

Then Bob Orr joined the party, quickly followed by Richard Moore, and this morning by Beverly Perdue. Along the way, Governor Mike Easley himself joined the debate, sort of, saying he wouldn't comment on the policy.

Woolf Joins Orr Campaign

The Orr campaign today, announced that a Dave Woolf has signed on as campaign manager. Justice Robert F. Orr, Republican candidate for Governor, said, in a statement, that Woolf received his BS degree in Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point and his MA degree in International Relations from John Hopkins University.

He commanded an infantry company in the 82nd Airborne Division during Operation Desert Storm and later returned to West Point as an Assistant Professor and Course Director for the Department of Social Sciences.

Woolf lives in Durham and is married with one daughter.

“Dave’s wide range of experience is what this campaign needs as we head into the final months before the primary,” said Justice Orr. “He has the vision to propel the campaign forward and his success in the business and military sector will bring the campaign the management and organization we need to win.”

*A unnamed former military Intel source said that the new campaign manager for the Orr Campaign once was in the secret planning vision division at the Pentagon developing the Iraq Mission Accomplished Victory plan.

Note! Homeland Security issue a Red alert today upon hearing of this serious threat by the Orr Campaign.

Billy, Bob, and Fred were apparently in rare form today as they "debated" the most important issues facing our state and outlined what they would do if elected to Governor. Under the Doom has the blow-by-blow account. But before you head over there, take my quiz to see if you can tell who said what in the sad little sideshow.

Who said:

A. "To think that a candidate for governor could say he doesn't understand how the budget is done is a frightening thing."

B. "It's a lot of closed-door stuff, and they're spending the people's money and Lord knows where it goes."

C. "It is my opinion that affirmative action no longer has any place in American society."

D. "I've told people throughout this campaign that yes, this is about the next four years, but in reality, it's about the next 20, 25 years."

E. "I'm the outsider. I'm not the one from Raleigh and that's what's different about me, and I want all of you to know that as we go through that debate."

Wow. It was a little over a year and a half ago that I wrote one of my first diaries here at BlueNC about the death of the gas tax debate. You see, I had high hopes that a very well written editorial in the Charlotte Observer [no active link available] would put an end to the ignorant rantings of Republicans clamoring for an end to the transfer of funds from the Highway Trust Fund to the General Fund. I will share a large portion of that diary.

The Charlotte Observer has an excellent piece on the editorial page from a couple of weeks ago about the gas tax and the state highway budget funds and how they are used.