Tag: North Carolina

N.C. Dem Attorney General Roy Cooper: State Will No Longer Defend Same-Sex Marriage Ban

Jon Ponder

Roy Cooper, the attorney general of North Carolina Attorney — and one of the few Democratic statewide officials to survive the 2010 tea party electoral sweep that put Republicans in control of North Carolina for the first time since the 1870s — announced this week that his department will no longer defend the state’s ban on marriage equality. The decision comes after judges in the federal appeals court whose jurisdiction includes North Carolina struck down a similar ban in Virginia:

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Should U.S. Senators Who Voted against Additional Funding for VA Hospitals in February 2014 Also Resign?

Jon Ponder
Filibustered VA hospital funding, from left: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Veterans Affairs Committee Ranking Member Richard Burr of North Carolina and Arizona Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake — all Republicans

With the drumbeat growing to hold VA Secretary Gen. Eric Shinseki accountable for the wait lists at hospitals in Arizona and elsewhere by forcing him to resign, perhaps the U.S. senators who voted in February to filibuster a bill that would have increased the VA’s budget by $24 billion should resign as well.

You’ll find a complete list of senators who voted to filibuster the VA hospital funding after the jump.

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Poll Finds Troublesome News for Tea Party’s U.S. Senate Candidate in North Carolina

Jon Ponder

16%

Percentage of North Carolina voters who approve of the state’s tea-party controlled Legislature, versus 56% who disapprove, according to a new PPP survey. This is not good news for Thom Tillis, the tea partyist who, as speaker, runs the Legislature’s lower body and who won the Republican primary last week to take on Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan in November.

Caught on Tape: Tea Party U.S. Senate Candidate Says GOP Must ‘Divide and Conquer’ By Pitting the Sick and Invalids against the Poor

Jon Ponder

Despite what you read, N.C. Assembly Speaker Thom Tillis, who won the primary race in the U.S. Senate election yesterday, is not a Republican “establishment” candidate. Tillis is, in fact, a tea bagger of the first order, per PM Carpenter:

Tillis takes a second, reactionary pew to no man: he opposes a federally mandated minimum wage; he denies the science of climate change; he supported a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and further restrictions on a woman’s right to abortion; and of course as a NC prophet of national Republican totalitarianism, he just can’t get enough of voter suppression.

As Tillis kicks off his campaign to unseat Sen. Kay Hagan, a conservative Democrat, he already finds himself mired in controversy after being caught on tape suggesting that, in order to advance its war on the poor, the GOP must turn sick and invalided people who receive disability payments against poor people who rely on government assistance:

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GOP Head of North Carolina Environmental Agency Appears to Be an Anti-Science Conspiracy Nut

Jon Ponder

John Skvarla, Secretary of the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources, [bio] has suggested that he believes a theory promoted by World Net Daily contributor Jerome Corsi — one of the originators of Birtherism and a promoter of other conspiracy theories, including one that Pres. Obama is gay — that oil is not a finite resource created by centuries of compression of organic material but is a renewable resource created by the earth on an on-going basis, like wind or solar.

Skvarla is the head of the agency charged with regulating Duke Energy, which is responsible for the third-largest coal-ash spill in U.S. history, an on-going disaster that is still unfolding in North Carolina.

Never heard of it? You’re not alone. As Rachel Maddow says at the end of the segment above, “This North Carolina story, and this federal criminal investigation into what’s happening in North Carolina, is a terrible and amazing story from about a million different angles. Why the Beltway refuses to care about it, I do not know, but it cannot last long.”

Read more about the story here.

N.C. Lawmaker Says Obama Is Not a Traitor — to Kenya!

Buck Banks

Someone had posted something with a picture of Barack Obama and across it said ‘traitor.’ And, you know, I don’t always agree with the guy, I certainly didn’t vote for him but I gotta defend him on this one. I just don’t think it’s right at all to call Barack Obama a traitor. There’s a lot of things he’s done wrong but he is not a traitor. Not as far as I can tell. I haven’t come across any evidence yet that he has done one thing to harm Kenya.

— North Carolina state Rep. Larry Pittman (R), telling a crowd of supporters that President Obama isn’t a traitor to his country — if that country is Kenya.

GOP-Controlled North Carolina Becomes First State to Suspend Welfare Payments Because of Republican Shutdown

Jon Ponder

The North Carolina Republican Party’s war on the state’s poor people got a boost from the congressional GOP’s shutdown of the federal government on Monday. The shutdown gave the tea partyists who run North Carolina an excuse for suspending welfare payments in November:

North Carolina on Monday suspended its Work First program, formerly known as welfare, because of the federal shutdown in Washington.

County social service agencies stopped processing new applications for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families because federal monies are expected to dry up by November unless Congress can reach a deal for funding the federal government.

The Department of Health and Human Services sent out a letter Thursday to county social service directors telling them to stop processing new applications as well as re-certifications for November.

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Will Marriage Equality Come to North Carolina Next?

Trish

After Republicans hijacked North Carolina’s general assembly, an anti marriage equality constitutional amendment was presented to voters, and it passed. But with the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, which ended the ridiculous Defense of Marriage Act, some local officials are doing the right thing anyway.

[Buncombe County Register of Deeds Drew] Reisinger told Reuters: “Lord knows I’ve had a handful of close friends who are in same-sex relationships come in and ask for a marriage license. It’s hard to get the words out to tell them, ‘No.'”

He said licenses were sought by six same-sex couples, including a lesbian couple together for 20 years whose request had been repeatedly denied.

“I have concerns about whether we are violating people’s civil rights based on this summer’s Supreme Court decision,” said Reisinger, 30, who is married and was elected to his post in Asheville, North Carolina, three years ago.

In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Kathleen Kane, who also is a Democrat, said in July she would not defend her state’s ban on gay marriage in a case before federal court in Pennsylvania, calling it “wholly unconstitutional.”

Reisinger’s office issued a statement formally requesting the North Carolina attorney general’s review.

North Carolina Governor Pushed Austerity for the Middle Class, Now Plans $230K Upgrade to Governor’s Mansion Bathrooms

Jon Ponder

$230,000

Cost in taxpayer funds to renovate bathrooms in the residence of North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory at the state’s Governor’s Mansion in Raleigh, according to the Associated Press. Reacting to the news, North Carolina Democratic Party spokesman Ben Ray said, “This is an administration and a legislature that rejected health care for 500,000 North Carolinians [referring to the GOP-controlled state government’s refusal to expand Medicaid, mostly with federal funds, under the Affordable Care Act]. So to drop $230,000 on a bathroom renovation just shows that Pat McCrory’s priority is not North Carolina, but himself.”