Good morning. The world is still mostly trash. 1. Last night, someone else was killed by the police. Not even forty-eight hours after the death of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Philando Castile – a 32-year old Minneapolis-area man, a legal gun owner who complied with the police’s orders, a school cafeteria worker for […]
Paul Blest
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We Went to the Trump Rally and Boy, Was It Terrible
Donald Trump held a rally at the Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts in Raleigh last night. Predictably, it was a complete shitshow. I got there just as Lt. Governor Dan Forest was finishing up his speech, and found out that the press credentials I had submitted earlier in the day were never approved. […]
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Five Terrible Things the Legislature Did During the Short Session
If you were hoping the state legislature, chastened by the backlash over House Bill 2, might opt for a quiet short session focused on budget tweaks and eschewing hot-button issues, you’re probably pretty disappointed right now. Instead, over the last two months, lawmakers found new and sundry ways to move the state backward in areas […]
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The Short Session Could Have Been Worse
It’s not easy to find a silver lining in the legislature’s dealings this year, but there wereseveral terrible ideas that lawmakers either spiked or didn’t get around to enacting. Hereare five bullets we dodged. 1. PUNISHING SANCTUARY CITIES A jury-duty bill was gutted in the last week of the session and replaced with a proposal […]
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The Legislature’s Short Session, By the Numbers
68 Number of days the North Carolina General Assembly was in session. 1 Bill vetoed by the governor. Senate Bill 71 would have reformed the Coal Ash Management Commission that Governor McCrory and the legislative leaders were battling over for more than a year. $22,341,437,590 The total cost of the budget passed by the General […]
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Breaking: Wake County Commission, School Board Districts Ruled Unconstitutional By Federal Court
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against the General Assembly’s redrawing of the Wake County Commission and Wake County School Board districts. “This is clearly a decisive victory for the citizens of Wake County,” Wake County Democratic Party chairman Brian Fitzsimmons said, “and it further proves that the Assembly’s continued relentless aggression against […]
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Budget “Correction” Set To Take $500,000 From Emergency Relief Fund To Pay For HB 2 Litigation
The budget is still being hashed out in the North Carolina General Assembly, but this tidbit from WRAL makes it seem like Republicans are doing a bit of charity work by helping Democrats write their talking points in November. Those budget technical corrections were tacked onto an unrelated bill, House Bill 805, Thursday morning in […]
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Did House Majority Leader Mike Hager Leak the HB 2 ‘Fix’ to Try to Doom It?
You may have heard yesterday that there may be some changes to HB 2. WBTV in Charlotte posted “draft legislation” of something called the “Privacy, Dignity, and Safety for All Act,” which the station says was dreamed up by the House leadership. The bill creates “a certificate of sex reassignment” that trans people would have […]
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A Raleigh Abortion Provider Worries about a Pro-Life Group’s Plans for the Building Next Door
It’s an overcast Saturday morning, and, like many Saturday mornings over the past five years, Jim Tsantles is spending it trying to badger women into not terminating their pregnancies. “You don’t have to make a plan that ends a child’s life,” Tsantles, a deacon at Sovereign Redeemer Baptist Church in Youngsville, says through a headset […]
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The Senate Wants to Punish Sanctuary Cities by Gutting Their Funding
On the off chance you needed any reminder how terrible the General Assembly can be, here you go: while everyone was focused on budget negotiations, a simple jury-duty bill was gutted, replaced with a xenophobic anti-immigrant provisions, and passed in the Senate on Monday. The Senate voted 32–17 to approve the legislation, which creates a […]