Gov. Perdue: The ‘Thin Blue Line’ in North Carolina
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One of the casualties of the tea party takeover last year was the North Carolina Legislature, where Republicans gained control for the first time in over a century. Since then, the tea bagger brigade has done its best to turn North Carolina, historically the most moderate of the Old Confederate states, into Kansas, particularly by passing a series of draconian laws targeting women’s reproductive rights.
The only person with the power to stop them is the state’s embattled Democratic governor, Bev Perdue, who has issued a series of vetoes that represent a profile in courage. Substituting for Rachel Maddow on MSNBC last night, Mellissa Harris-Perry — a graduate of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem who also received her PhD from Duke University in Durham — covered Perdue’s plight and put into the context of the political history of North Carolina in a way that only someone who has lived in the state could understand.