chris fitzsimon

Chris Fitzsimon at NC Policy watch has a concise preview of the upcoming legislative session and the fuzzy fuzzy budget picture.

It adds up to a challenging session for lawmakers, who will be meeting with one eye focused on their own re-election campaigns and in the shadow of a gubernatorial race that is almost certain to include misleading and simplistic rhetoric about budgets and taxes.

There has been much written recently about the potential risks of over-heated primaries. In the face of increasingly sharp attacks in the presidential and gubernatorial races, Democratic party loyalists rightly cringe, calling on candidates to tone things down. Worried that all the name-calling will come back to haunt the eventual nominee, many activists decry attack advertising and blog wars as providing comfort (and fodder) for the enemy.

History shows, however, that the hot furnace of a primary contest can have positive effects as well. By running the gauntlet of a tough race, a candidate will theoretically be stronger and more thoroughly vetted for the general election in November.

But there is another consequence of over-heated primaries about which candidates seem largely oblivious.

There's been a marked uptick in NC Realtor and Homebuilder attempts to derail the local transfer tax option as they make a final attempt to secure the low ground. Attacking Chris Fitzsimon in radio ads yesterday, a new round of melodramatic TV ads and a full page ad in today's paper attacking everybody who is not feeding at the bottom with them.

Read more below the fold....

The News and Observer’s Sunday edition featured yet another investigative story detailing the dangerous condition of the state’s mental health system. This time the problem revealed is the placement of people with mental illness in rest homes where the staff has no training to take care of them.

That puts everyone at risk, the patients with mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, the other rest home residents, and the staff and visitors. And that’s not just a potential problem. There have been scores of reported incidents including rapes and other violent acts.

The N&O reports that there are now more than 6,000 people suffering from mental illness in the state’s rest homes, a 15 percent increase in the last four years. The culprit, not so indirectly, is the way the state’s mental health reform efforts have been conducted, downsizing state mental hospitals without providing enough funding for community programs to provide services.

I signed up some time ago for the Action for Children North Carolina email list, and it has been a nice addition. The group sends our semi-regular emails about the latest topics that will affect the Health and Safety of North Carolina's Children. That is where I read about this story from the Greensboro News & Record. It is interesting not only because of the content, but because of the ONE "opinion-maker" they sampled.

North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Jerry Meek today sent out an alarming email:

Dear NC Democrat:

It’s Halloween and we’re not surprised that the Republicans are up to their dirty tricks.

Yesterday, I received various complaints about deceptive Republican tactics during the early voting in Chapel Hill. Apparently, Republican canvassers are approaching people entering the polls and asking if they’re Democrats. If the answer is “yes,” they are given a flyer and told "This is a list of our judicial candidates." The problem: the list contains only the Republican candidates! Because Party affiliation isn’t listed on the ballot, voters are being misled.

You know something's fishy when two guys on opposite ends of everything come together with a common mission. But that's exactly what's happening right now with Chris Fitzsimon and John Hood both singing the praises of some recent baby steps on redistricting. Distressed by the lack of competitive races in North Carolina, the two pundits have jumped on the redistricting bandwagon with all four feet.

As we head down to the wire in races that will shape the future of our country and the world, it's important to understand that supporters of the Party of Torture and Perverts will stop at nothing to get and retain power. People like Art Pope and his alter-ego in West Virginia are putting hundreds of thousands of dollars behind their Puppets in state legislative races to tip the balance. And right-wing opinion manufacturing machines like the Cato Institute and the John Locke Foundation continue to recycle the same old bullshit, trying to scare voters into believing their free-market fantasies.

One topic the wackos revisit every other month is the minimum wage, claiming without a shred of reliable evidence that progressive policies around wages destroy value and jobs. Today at NC Policy Watch, Chris Fitzsimon takes them on - again - with compelling data that's hard to dispute.