A tale of two Popes -- the one in the Vatican, who takes Jesus' words to heart, and the one in North Carolina

As I confirmed during my December visit, there is evidence of backlash against North Carolina oligarchist "Puppet Master" Art Pope's way-far-right agenda.

by Noah

There are two Popes in the news lately. Both represent organizations that claim to speak for Jesus Christ. One's name is Pope Francis, leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Francis is the better-known of the two, and his actions befuddle and anger U.S. Republicans. The other's name is Art Pope. Art Pope is the North Carolina Republican Party's pope.

Unlike many past Popes, Francis seems to take the reported actions and words of Jesus to heart and uses his own words and actions to lead his organization toward the betterment of humanity. Art Pope plays for the other side.

While Pope Francis seeks to aid the poor and the powerless, even leaving the Vatican at night dressed as an ordinary priest to comfort the homeless, Art Pope's mission is to exploit the poor and the powerless to gain more power, even seeking to expand the numbers of poor in his state. Art Pope is a mini-me to the Koch Brothers. He has a lot of money but not Koch Brothers Kash, so for now he has been content to buy just one state out of 50.

As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.

-- Jesus, as quoted in the Book of Matthew, 25:31-46

Art Pope preaches a very different gospel. He has used his material goods to elect and buy the best and truest form of Republican government he can. The end result has been a takeover of North Carolina by political perps that is as extreme as any since the days of segregation. But the agenda that Art Pope pushes is not based solelyon race. Women, senior citizens, Hispanics, and students are all targets of this pope.

It is oligarchist Art Pope who has financed an insane asylum that serves as the North Carolina legislature and governor's office. He is now even Gov. Pat McCrory's budget director, all but officially making the governor his hand puppet.

In 2010, 75 percent of all the outside money that came into North Carolina's legislative elections came from groups backed by Art Pope. His candidates won 80 percent of those races. Pope's money then financed a 2012 election that was so successful for Republicans that it ended in this being the first time since 1870 that the Repug Party controlled the governorship and both houses of the state legislature, the General Assembly. Without Art Pope putting his money behind his agenda, there is no feo-fascist Gov. "Puppet Pat" McCrory; there are no attacks on the teachers of North Carolina (right down to removing money for instructional supplies).

In fact, Puppet Pat seems to think that education should exist only to train people for jobs -- vocational training for worker bees, as it were. Puppet Pat wants Pope's legislature to pass laws that would provide funds to universities "not based on how many butts in seats but how many of those butts can get jobs." Apparently McCrory never learned that education deals with the brains in your head. His stated outlook reveals that education is not about expanding the mind or improving society and moving it forward. As for the promised jobs, they haven't materialized, as his policies continue to damage the state economy.

Without people like Puppet Pat who are so willing to do the bidding of the money men, there is no chronic union-busting; there are no attacks on the voting rights of legal North Carolina citizens; there is no well-orchestrated attack on democracy itself. He is his state's Scott Walker. To Art Pope, just as to the Walker-backing Koch Brothers, there are the privileged few and "the least of these," with nothing in between: lords and serfs. It's a push back to the past -- way back.

Thanks to Art Pope and his government-by-court-jester, Puppet Pat has been able to cut unemployment benefits in North Carolina by 35 percent and the number of weeks of eligibility from 26 down to 20, the result being that 170,000 citizens of his state are prevented from federal emergency extended benefits. That move alone has removed a sizable amount of money that would have gone into the state's economy. (The demonstrators in the photo are State Sen. Earline Parmon [right] and Democratic activist Mary Dickinson, who's planning a run for the NC House from District 74, the Winston-Salem area. We'll hear from Senator Parmon below.)

Puppet Pat then proudly boasts that he has balanced the budget of the state unemployment fund three years ahead of schedule. Talk about balancing the budget on the backs of the middle and working classes! This is Republican class warfare at its best (worst). Under Pope's direction, Puppet Pat has also gleefully signed a bill from Pope's legislature that opts the state out of the expanded Obamacare Medicaid provision. That heinous act alone has denied health-care coverage to 500,000 people in North Carolina. What would Jesus do?

The Art Pope-financed agenda has also resulted in the repeal of the Racial Justice Act, a law that enabled inmates on death row to challenge their death sentence based on questions about whether they even got a fair trial.

Then there is the matter of trying to vote in North Carolina. As a direct result of a Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court deciding to do away with key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (a goal of the Republican Party and other racist entities for decades), North Carolina has let its freak flag fly by passing some of the most restrictive voting regulations since the Jim Crow era.

NC House Bill 589 not only contains exceptionally strict photo ID requirements, it eliminates seven days of early voting, eliminates same-day voter registration, and, most egregiously, prohibits the counting of provisional ballots that are cast in the right county but wrong precinct. I don't know about you, but I've lived in the same place for 30+ years but my precinct number has changed a few times along the way. The potential for foul-ups is always there, especially when polling places move.

"Puppet Master" Art Pope and Gov. "Puppet Pat" McCrory

Most importantly, the provisional-ballot game is the most un-American game in American electoral politics. It works like this: If you are challenged at your voting place, whether it's because your registration name doesn't exactly match the name on your driver's license, electric bill, passport, birth certificate, or now Voter ID card or because some A-hole doesn't like something about the way you look, you are not allowed to go into the booth or vote with a voting machine. Instead, you are handed a "provisional ballot." Are you so trusting and naïve that you think your provisional ballot actually gets counted? OK, sometimes they do get counted, usually after the election results are certified. I bet you never heard about that one from David Gregory, Wolf Blitzer, or any of the game-show-host rejects at Fox.

In an effort to prevent students from voting because they tend to vote Democratic, polling places have been moved far from campuses. Also, previously students and others were allowed to register to vote well in advance of their 18th birthday. What happens when your birthday falls on or a bit before Election Day? Answer: You can't vote. When asked how this new obstacle to voting would prevent voter fraud, McCrory replied cynically: "I don't know enough. I'm sorry. I haven't seen that part of the bill." Nice.

There has also now been at least one attempt by Republicans to tell a man named Montravius King (right), who just happens to be African-American, that he can't even run for his local City Council. Oh, would Jesse Helms have loved that one! Welcome to Art Pope's North Carolina. We'll even tell you if you can run for office against us. Sound like 1950s Russia?

Can a return to the good ol' boy Jim Crow days of certain citizens being forced to guess the number of jelly beans in the jar or naming the starting lineup of the 1940 Detroit Tigers before they can touch the voting-machine screen be far behind?

Need you ask about Puppet Pat's position on abortion? Not only has he signed state legislation designed to limit access to abortion after saying he would not do so when he campaigned, he decided to rub it in the faces of women who protested outside his office by personally handing them a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. In other words, "Get back in the kitchen, bitches."

The Backlash

I've often thought that history swings like a pendulum. In this case, North Carolina has swung so far to the right that a backlash was inevitable. Buyer's remorse is growing. That can only help the Democrats in the coming midterm elections. Even some voters who voted Repug in 2012 are disappointed in things like the new voter-suppression legislation in their state. It seems they thought it would be "others" that suffered once Republicans took over. They never dreamed how big that group of "others" was and that it could possibly include anyone who isn't a member of the upper strata. According to a recent PPP poll, Puppet Pat's approval rating is down to 38 percent, and 53 percent of state residents disapprove of the state House and Senate Repugs.

There are other signs that the pendulum is starting to swing back because of the force of how hard Puppet Pat and the Art Pope agenda have pushed the state to the extreme right. Civil disobedience, in the form of what are called Moral Mondays protests, have made the news in recent months. Those who participate in the Moral Mondays actions meet at the state house in Raleigh on Mondays to protest the actions of the lunatic asylum inside. Then they enter the building peacefully and are arrested. Many local progressive religious groups are involved and, in fact local religious leaders such as William Barber II, the head of the North Carolina chapter of the dreaded NAACP are greatly involved in the organization of the protests. I like to think that, perhaps, the other pope, Pope Francis, might even smile about Moral Mondays. The concept is even spreading to other states, like New York.

[Click to enlarge]

Now the protests are branching out with smaller protests targeting specific retail stores -- stores that are owned by Puppet Master Pope. Among the stores owned by Art Pope are the Roses, Maxway, and Super Dollar chains. These stores, located in low-income and African-American neighborhoods, offer low-income citizens cheap goods at dirt- cheap prices. It's the "dollar store" concept. Sounds great. Great bargains on everything from batteries, toothpaste, and dish soap to items that even the slave-labor countries of Republican dreams might be embarrassed about. You get the picture. There's no question that stores like these can be helpful to a very tight budget in the short run. The evil lies in what Art Pope does with the profits.

$40 million linked to Art Pope's stores has gone to political donations and far-right-wing groups like the cynically named Americans for Prosperity. In other words, Pope uses his stores, whose low, low everyday prices appeal to poor people, to elect politicians sho will pass legislation to keep them poor or make them even more poor. You get the feeling that if people like Pope and McCrory could house the citizens of North Carolina in super-size Roach Motels, they would. Then they would tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It's the republican way, after all. Check out the Art Pope Exposed website.

On December 14th, I went to a demonstration


It was one of several demonstrations in the state that day. It was a brutally cold and rainy day. Even sleet hit the umbrellas of the 20 or so protesters who braved the weather. It's a start, and there will be more. That's a measure of the passions involved. The fact that there were seven police cars in attendance to keep an eye on such an "unruly crowd" was a measure of Art Pope's power over the local authorities. Paranoia strikes deep. It should.

Demonstration participants included State Sen. Earline Parmon, Rep. Evelyn Terry, and 2014 NC 74 candidate for the State House Mary Dickinson. Said Parmon:

We want people who shop at Art Pope's stores to understand how he uses the profits to support causes that hurt working-class and minority people, whether it is refusing to expand Medicaid coverage, voter-restriction laws, tax reform that foremost benefits the wealthy, disqualifying North Carolina from federal jobless benefits or cutting back on public education spending.

Art Pope recently responded to such protests in a letter to State NAACP President William Barber II, saying in part that he was --

shocked that you and your allies would demand any public official to support your political positions, by threatening a business which is not part of state government.

"Not part of state government"? Really? When the profits go to purchase the state government? Nice try, Puppet Master Pope. You don't mind it at all when poor people shop at your stores, just when they might dare to try and vote against you and your toys in the state house. Tell you what: When you die, you can be Pope in Hell, toasting like a little marshmallow on a stick. Hopefully that will be before you have the chance to create Hell in North Carolina. Meanwhile the real Pope might remind you:

And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all those who were buying and selling in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers. . . .

-- the Book of Matthew, 21:12

The display window of Maxway, one of Art Pope's stores. Note the contrast of the Christmas wreath on the door -- mixed message of enticement, welcome, and bars. Pope's Maxway was the only store in the neighborhood that I noticed having bars on the windows, including a pawn shop right next door. Is this some sort of weird Pope conceptual-art piece?

#

Has The State Of North Carolina Given Up On The Concept Of Democracy? Ask Art Pope, Who Owns The State's Political Establishment

For decades you could ask any progressive who the most evil and dangerous man in North Carolina was and the overwhelming response would have been "Jesse Helms" or, just plain "Jesse," a former ConservaDem-- very much like today's ConservaDems-- who finally switched to the Republican Party, just like Strom Thurmond and most of the racist trash from the garbage heap of the pre-Voting Rights Act southern Democratic parties. Today, however, not everyone knows who North Carolina's most evil and dangerous man is. Some might say it's the state's bungling and floundering governor, Pat McCrory. Others might vote for Republican legislative leaders like House Speaker Thom Tillis or Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger. All three of these men are among the worst politicians anywhere in America, for sure, but all three report to a higher-- and more evil-- force: Art Pope. We've met him before... many times.

The Institute for Southern Studies released a report this week about how Art Pope used his fortune to buy the state's Republican Party and then leverage that into an anti-democracy neo-fascist jihad. Their investigation found that Pope played several critical but largely behind-the-scenes roles in advancing the state's new voting restrictions.

1. Pope's ideological network ginned up fear of voter fraud.

Voters cast 3.79 million ballots in North Carolina's 2010 election cycle, and only 28 cases of voter fraud were referred to district attorneys. In 2012, North Carolina voters cast nearly 7 million ballots, and only 121 alleged cases of voter fraud were found. Going back to 2007, the N.C. State Board of Elections has reported a grand total of 80 cases of double voting, three cases involving voter residency issues, and two cases of voter impersonation, which is what the state's new photo ID law aims to prevent.

There simply is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in North Carolina-- a point made by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican who served under President George W. Bush, when he recently visited the state and slammed its new voting law.

"You can say what you like, but there is no voter fraud," Powell told an executive forum in Raleigh. "How can it be widespread and undetected?"

But you get a very different impression about voter fraud reading the publications produced by conservative think tanks founded and largely funded by Pope.

Civitas, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that bills itself as "North Carolina's Conservative Voice," gets over 99 percent of its funding from Pope-- so much that the IRS classifies it as a private foundation. Pope also founded the John Locke Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that promotes limited government, and he provides around 80 percent of its operating budget. Pope sat on the two groups' boards of directors until becoming the state budget director earlier this year, giving him a considerable level of both financial and organizational control.

Over the past five years, with Pope and his money at the helm, Civitas and the John Locke Foundation published more than 50 articles, op-eds and blog posts warning of voter fraud and using the alleged threat to call for a strict photo ID law, an end to same-day registration, and a shorter early voting period.

Some stories in Pope-connected publications took a more measured approach to promoting fear of fraud. "Realistically, voter ID requirements are an insurance policy against the possibility that an extremely close election might be stolen by voter fraud," John Locke Foundation President John Hood wrote in a December 2012 article in Carolina Journal, the organization's flagship publication.

Others suggested that voter fraud is a tool commonly used on the political left. "We know that the SEIU, Democratic Party, lefties of all stripes, and every identity group out there understands that a voter ID law would make it difficult to commit vote fraud," Jon Ham wrote for the John Locke Foundation's Right Angles blog in 2011. "THAT's why many of them oppose it."

Meanwhile, Civitas relentlessly criticized an earlier version of voter ID legislation, saying it allowed too many ID options, including utility bills and bank statements. The bill also allowed voters without ID to simply show their signature matched the one on their voter registration-- an approach Civitas rejected in its effort to get the kind of bill that ultimately passed.

"It is safe to say that anyone who votes for a voter ID bill that includes any of these elements is not a supporter of true voter photo ID," [Pope employee Susan] Myrick wrote at the time.

2. Pope's ideological network gave a platform to voting restriction extremism.

Both the John Locke Foundation and Civitas Institute have prominently featured the work of Jay DeLancy and his group the Voter Integrity Project of NC (VIP-NC), which has been involved in controversial efforts to kick people off the voting rolls.

A retired Air Force officer, DeLancy attended a 2011 summit held in Houston by True the Vote, a group with close ties to the Tea Party movement that promotes poll watching efforts to root out what it alleges is widespread fraud. True the Vote has been criticized by voting rights advocates for intimidating voters. It has also come under criticism for describing itself as nonpartisan while making in-kind contributions to Republicans and contributing thousands of dollars to the Republican State Leadership Committee, which works to get party members elected to state office. (Pope's business also funds the RSLC.)

DeLancy launched a North Carolina chapter of True the Vote, but he broke from the national group after it raised concerns about his anti-immigrant leanings. He then founded VIP-NC, which DeLancy says "springs from [his] outrage at the news of how election after election is stolen in some amazingly brazen way."

Last year, DeLancy challenged the registrations of more than 500 voters in Wake County, N.C.-- mostly people of color-- who he said were not U.S. citizens. One voter was found to have improperly registered and was stricken from the rolls, while several others requested their own removal. Of the 18 challenges that the local election board found required further investigation, all were dismissed after hundreds of hours of work by the board. A furious DeLancy stormed out of the hearing, kicking open the building's glass doors and denouncing the board as looking "stupid."

Also during last year's busy election season, DeLancy's group submitted nearly 30,000 names of registered voters it claimed were dead to the state elections board. But after a lengthy investigation, the board found that many of the people on DeLancy's outdated list had already been removed from the rolls-- and others were still alive. No evidence emerged of any kind of fraudulent scheme to steal an election.

DeLancy's less-than-careful work and nativist leanings did not deter Pope's ideological network from giving him a platform, however. In the past year, they have cited him and VIP-NC at least 10 times. In one blog post, the John Locke Foundation published DeLancy's claim that VIVA was too permissive. In another, Civitas applauded VIP-NC's work.

"VIP is doing their best to identify names that should not be on the rolls, both dead and non-citizens," Myrick wrote. "You see, they must do this work, because the State Board of Elections will not..."

3. Pope supported key GOP lawmakers involved in advancing voting restrictions.

House Bill 589, the elections bill that the North Carolina legislature passed this year, was originally introduced in April by four primary sponsors, all Republicans. Two of them-- Reps. Harry Warren of Rowan County and Tom Murry of Wake County-- got generous support in launching their political careers from Pope, his family, and his network of political spending groups.

Running for the legislature for the first time in 2010, Warren narrowly defeated his Democratic opponent, a five-term incumbent, by fewer than 200 votes. Warren's campaign benefited from over $109,000 in spending from Real Jobs NC, a 527 political group co-founded by Pope and whose major funders include Variety Wholesalers. Also in 2010, Murry's campaign to unseat a Democratic incumbent benefited from $12,000 in campaign contributions from Pope and his family, and over $92,000 in independent spending from outside groups affiliated with Pope. That total included more than $45,000 from Real Jobs NC; $25,000 from Civitas Action, the Pope-founded 501(c)(4) sister group of the Civitas Institute; and $21,000 from Americans for Prosperity, on whose national board Pope sat until becoming state budget director.

The revised version of the House elections bill that was unveiled in the state Senate and passed in the closing days of this year's session was even harsher than the original House proposal. Pope's network also supported the lawmakers behind voting restrictions that were added to the final version of the bill.

State Sen. E.S. "Buck" Newton III is a Wilson County Republican who formerly served as an aide to deceased U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, an outspoken foe of the Voting Rights Act whose 1990 campaign against Harvey Gantt, the African-American former mayor of Charlotte, got in trouble for illegally trying to suppress the black vote. Newton was the primary sponsor of an omnibus elections bill introduced in April that had a strict voter ID provision and disallowed the use of student IDs for voting. It also dramatically shortened early voting and eliminated same-day registration-- all provisions that were added to the House bill and became law. Newton was first elected to the state Senate in 2010, defeating the Democratic incumbent with the help of $4,000 in contributions from Pope and his family and more than $17,000 in independent expenditures from Americans for Prosperity.

Pope and his network also generously supported the 2010 election to the state House of Bill Cook, a Republican who is now a state senator representing the northeastern North Carolina coastal district that's home to Elizabeth City State University. In the 2010 cycle, Cook benefited from over $79,000 in outside support from Pope-backed groups, as well as $16,000 in direct campaign contributions from Pope and his family. Running for state Senate two years later, Cook was helped by over $9,700 in expenditures by Americans for Prosperity, winning by just 21 votes.

Cook went on to become one of the primary sponsors of Senate Bill 666-- dubbed the "Bill of the Beast" by voting rights advocates -- that cut early voting, eliminated same-day registration, and expanded the rights of party-appointed poll observers. All of those provisions made it into the law signed by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, whose 2012 campaign received $20,000 in contributions from Pope and his family, and benefited from independent expenditures of $380,000 by Real Jobs NC and $130,000 from Americans for Prosperity.

This year Cook was also a primary sponsor of another bill that would have imposed a tax penalty on the parents of students who register to vote at school. That proposal was tabled after public outcry.

4. Pope helped Republicans win control of state government.

As Facing South has documented, Pope, his family, his company, and the network of outside political groups he's affiliated with-- Americans for Prosperity, Civitas Action, and Real Jobs NC-- spent a total of over $2.2 million in the 2010 election cycle to elect Republican state lawmakers, helping give the party control of both the state House and Senate for the first time since Reconstruction. Those wins also put Republicans in control of drawing new political lines, with Pope serving as an adviser to the redistricting process and further consolidating GOP control of state government.

Pope was an important force again in the 2012 election cycle, as he, his family, and his affiliated groups spent over $2 million on state-level races, helping Republicans win supermajorities in both chambers and putting a Republican in the executive mansion. Without the GOP in power in Raleigh, legislative proposals to limit access to the ballot box-- which disproportionately affect minorities, young people, and other Democratic-leaning constituencies-- would have gone nowhere.

That those proposals are now the law in North Carolina is due in no small part to the efforts of Pope.

In 2012 alone, the neo-fascist front group, Americans for Prosperity, spent $33,542,051 on broadcast ads smearing Democrats. Pope was one of the biggest single donors to the shadowy group that doesn't reveal contributors. Sometimes donations leak out, like one from Pope on November 21, 2011 for $500,000 an d another for $500,000 on the same day!. And another one for a mere $100,000 on that November day as well. In fact on November 21, 2011, Pope gave $1,350,000 to Americans for Prosperity. The two biggest targets of their smears were Barack Obama and Tammy Baldwin-- around $36,000,000 combined-- and both won comfortable victories. The state of North Carolina, it turns out, was far easier to pick off.

What Happens When Voters Just Eliminate The Nihilist Republicans From Government?

Puppet Pat might want to call Jerry Brown and get a lesson in being a governor

California has no statewide Republicans in office. Many of the Democrats in the legislature are conservative corporate whores but at least the Republicans are relegated to the sidelines and can't even obstruct the smooth functioning of government any longer. In 2012, the Democrats won 2/3s majorities in each house of the legislature. They won 4 more seats in the state Senate, for a total of 29 to the GOP's 10. The Dems gained 3 Assembly seats, bringing the partisan split to 55 to 25. Republicans can no longer block anything in either body. Two years earlier the state elected Jerry Brown over big-spending Meg Whitman, who managed to get a mere 40.9% for the $140 million she spent out of her personal fortune.

So while in DC, anti-government ideologues on the far right-- particularly Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Marco Rubio (R-DL) and Rand Paul (R-KY)-- are working, with a great deal of success, to gum up the workings of government functionality and to prevent an economic recovery, in Sacramento, the shriveled nihilist faction can... talk darkly among themselves and watch the state move forward. I hope you read the collection of IMs last night by economist Umair Haque on the nature of conservatism. It helps explain why the federal government is such a mess while California is thriving. California is kind of the opposite of what's happening to the people in North Carolina, who elected an all-Republican government which is failing miserably and making the state unlivable and the legislature veers off the ideological cliff.

Haque's Sunday follow-up

The state’s hard turn to the right comes less than five years after people took to the streets here to celebrate the 2008 victory of Barack Obama, the first Democratic presidential candidate to capture the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976. The win prompted Obama’s supporters to crow about the growing influence of progressive and minority voters not only in North Carolina but across the South.

But that euphoria is now a distant memory. Since the recession hit, North Carolina has been saddled with one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates. The bad times helped prepare the way for a carefully executed strategy, with big financial support from a major conservative activist, that helped the GOP win control of both chambers of the state General Assembly in 2010.

Those victories were capped last year when Republican Pat McCrory was elected governor, giving the party control of all levers of state government for the first time since 1870.

The victories were aided by the strong financial support of Art Pope, a multimillionaire who spent heavily in support of the state’s GOP candidates. The Institute for Southern Studies, a North Carolina-based research organization, said Pope’s advocacy network spent $2.2 million on 22 legislative races, winning 18. Overall, conservative organizations largely supported by Pope accounted for three-fourths of the outside money spent in North Carolina legislative races in 2010, according to the institute.

One of McCrory’s first acts after being elected governor was to install Pope, a former legislator, as the state budget chief. (The governor’s office declined to make Pope available for an interview.) And now, GOP lawmakers are moving swiftly to enact a long list of legislation they say is largely aimed at limiting government debt and snapping the state’s economy out of a years-long malaise.

Legislators have slashed jobless benefits. They have also repealed a tax credit that supplemented the wages of low-income people, while moving to eliminate the estate tax. They have voted against expanding Medicaid to comply with the 2010 federal health-care law. The expansion would have added 500,000 poor North Carolinians to the Medicaid rolls.

...Lawmakers are also considering proposals to reduce and flatten income tax rates while expanding the sales tax, perhaps to even include groceries and prescription drugs-- which some advocates see as a first step toward eliminating the state income tax.

North Carolina is in a hole and the GOP has shovels digging deeper, much, much deeper. Instead of looking to Art Pope's plans for plutocracy, it should be looking at the way California Democratic voters got rid of Schwarzenegger and taken the ability to block progress away from the Republicans and then went on to turn a $60 billion deficit into a $4 billion surplus.

The debate reflects uncertainty about whether the revenue is a one-time event, a result of state taxes on wealthy residents selling off investments at the end of last year to avoid increased costs as the Bush-era federal tax cuts expired. But it also illustrates philosophical differences about the role of government, about spending versus taxes and about the need, as Mr. Brown argued, to learn lessons from a decade in which many states saw the bottom fall out from their revenue collections.

“We’re seeing a change in conversation in state legislatures this year,” said Todd Haggerty, a policy analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures. “They’re not talking about how to close a budget gap anymore, which is a welcome relief after years of that during and after the Great Recession. Rather, states are having conversations about how to allocate increased revenues.”

Nowhere does that battle promise to play out with more force and intricacy than in California, the state that underwent perhaps the most severe retrenchments in the country.

[Governor] Brown, a Democrat who has always had a fiscally conservative streak, is leading the don’t-pop-any-Champagne-corks brigade, saying that he would oppose significant increases in new spending and that the money should go into a rainy-day fund. His administration put out the lower $1.2 billion estimate.

Voting nihilists and crazed ideologues out of government makes government more successful for the citizens. North Carolina would do well do defeat every Republican on the ballot next year and get back on the road to prosperity.

Does Anyone Think The Republican Party Is The Same As A Garden Variety Fascist Party? Consider North Carolina

Just how the GOP, financed by wealthy fascist Art Pope, took over the entire North Carolina state government and immediately turned to subverting democracy and cementing their own power, is a well-known story, at least in circles where people care about such things. And barely a day passes without the Republican extremists in the legislature and the Republican extremist governor working their asses off-- on behalf of consolidating and retaining power. This week, for example, the House, largely along party-lines, passed a controversial voter ID law meant to disenfranchise African-Americans, poor people and students. Most North Carolina voters oppose it, but ALEC and Pope insist. In fact, ALEC and Pope insist on a lot of things-- and the North Carolina Republican Party is delivering for them:

With no remaining checks to Republican rule in North Carolina, the state has now become a haven for some of the most ideological-- and ill-considered-- tea party fantasies dressed up as legislation. Here are just a few of the bills being pushed in the house (and the senate) that Art Pope built:

• Voter Suppression : It’s a sad commentary on the state of American politics that once Republicans take over a state, they almost immediately begin enacting laws to make it harder for Democratic-leaning groups to cast a ballot. North Carolina Republicans, however, have embraced voter suppression with unusual enthusiasm. They’ve introduced voter ID, a common GOP method of reducing turnout among minorities, low-income voters and students. They’ve introduced Florida-like restrictions on early voting, cutting early voting hours and eliminating voting the Sunday before election day in order to thwart voting drives at African-American churches. And they want to punish parents whose children vote from their college addresses.

• Reverse Robin Hood: A GOP bill in the North Carolina Senate would eliminate all individual and corporate income taxes, and largely replace it with higher sales taxes. Sales taxes disproportionately burden lower-income taxpayers, because they spend a larger percentage of their income on basic needs. It is also far more difficult to create a progressive sales tax than to enact a progressive income tax code that places a lesser tax burden on those who can least afford it. As a result, a similar tax plan in Louisiana would raise taxes on 80 percent of residents, while giving Louisianans in the top 1 percent of income earners an average tax cut of $25,423.

• Shutting Down Abortion Clinics: Another bill in the state senate would add new restrictions to abortion clinics in an attempt to force them to close their doors. Among other things, the bill requires doctors to have admitting privileges in a hospital located within 30 miles of the clinic, an unnecessary restriction that serves little purpose other than to limit the pool of doctors available to clinics.

• Anti-Worker Constitutional Amendment: A so-called “right-to-work” law, which depresses worker wages by cutting back unions’ ability to collectively bargain for wages and benefits, is already the law in North Carolina, effectively cutting both union and non-union wages by $1,500 a year. Nevertheless, 34 Republican lawmakers (and one Democrat) sponsored a state constitutional amendment that would lock this anti-worker policy into the state Constitution. The same amendment would strip public sector workers of their right to collectively bargain, and lock in policies making it easier for companies to pressure their workers against unionizing to boot.

• Subsidizing Home Schooling: Eight Republican lawmakers sponsored a bill giving families a $1,250 per semester tax subsidy if they home school their children.

• Judges For Sale: A pair of bills in the state senate would eliminate the state’s successful public financing system for judicial elections. Prior to this system’s enactment in 2004, “73 percent of campaign funds for judicial candidates came from attorneys and special interest groups,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice’s Alicia Bannon. Now, it’s 14 percent. So public financing was successful in rolling back moneyed interest groups’ ability to buy and sell judges through campaign donations, and these GOP bills would throw judicial elections back to the old ways.

• State Sponsored Religion: Eleven Republicans, including the state’s House Majority Leader, backed a resolution proclaiming that the Constitution “does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional,” and then decreeing that North Carolina could establish its own state religion. On the bright side, state house Speaker Thom Tillis announced that he would not advance this resolution after it was widely panned.

Back to that polling for a moment, though:

• Only 6% of voters support allowing legislators to start receiving gifts from lobbyists again, while 88% are opposed. There's pretty strong bipartisan agreement that that's a bad idea with independents (4/93), Democrats (5/87), and Republicans (8/86) all firmly against it.

• Only 25% of voters support a proposal to forbid parents from claiming college students registered to vote away from home as dependents on their state taxes, compared to 57% who are opposed. This is another one where the Republican legislators supporting the measure are out of touch with actual Republican voters- only 26% support it with 56% opposed, not that different from the numbers among Democrats which are 22% supportive and 61% opposed.

• Just 33% of voters support cutting the early voting period by a week, while 59% are opposed. Republicans do narrowly support this idea (51/42), but Democrats (22/70) and independents (28/62) are heavily opposed to it.

• Only 22% of voters support eliminating the state's renewable energy standards, while 39% are against that idea. Republican voters (29/25) only narrowly support eliminating the standard while Democrats (13/47) and independents (28/41) are pretty firmly against it.

• Only 28% of voters support a proposal to make it a crime for law enforcement officers to enforce federal gun laws on North Carolina manufactured fire arms, while 42% are opposed. Democrats (33/41), Republicans (24/41), and independents (26/46) all think that one's a bad idea.

• The only high profile Republican initiative we polled that has much traction with voters is the one to make Christianity the official state religion. 42% support that to 45% who are opposed and while much of that support is because a majority of Republicans favor it (53/33) it actually has 41% support from Democrats too, much more appeal across party lines than any of these other proposals. Despite the decent level of support for Christianity as the state religion, only 16% of voters agree with the state legislator who labeled a prayer to Allah as an act of terrorism last week, although that does go up to 25% among Republicans.

The GOP is becoming increasingly unpopular as a governing party in the state. The Democratic Party is in complete turmoil, riven with dissension, and nearly moribund as a functional organization-- which allows McCrory to keep goin' for the gold. Friday evening, just as the State Board of Elections was investigating how he and other Republicans were able to subvert democracy to seize power last year, he announced he had fired the whole Board and his replacements-- 3 Republicans and 2 Democrats-- would take over this week.

The move puts the progress of the board’s investigation into campaign contributions from an indicted sweepstakes software company owner in question.

Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, last week asked the board to investigate more than 60 campaign contributions totaling more than $230,000. Some of the contributions went to McCrory, House Speaker Thom Tillis and Senate leader Phil Berger.

A majority of sitting board members said they were interested in investigating, according to an Associated Press story. But on Friday night, Chairman Larry Leake said it would be inappropriate for members on their last day in office to talk about the investigation or give staff any direction. The board has a meeting scheduled for Tuesday.

“It might be presumptuous for us to attempt to do anything with a new board coming on May 1,” Leake said. “It makes no sense for our board to attempt to direct the conduct of our office when we are in fact exiting out the door.”

...Two of the governor’s GOP appointees said they didn’t know how the board would proceed with the sweepstakes inquiry.

...Charles Winfree, a Republican who has served on the board for 12 years, said he would encourage the new members to pursue the investigation. “Based on what I’ve been told by the staff, it appears to me that there is enough to warrant an investigation,” he said. “Certainly the practice of the contributors needs to be examined.”

Hall said he was “nervous” about the 100 percent turnover on the elections board, but hoped the new members would approach the questions objectively.

“I think there were veterans, both Republicans and Democrats, on the Board of Elections that have been objective in reviewing complaints against both parties and I’ve admired their ability to get the facts even when they don’t agree with my personal opinions,” he said. “I hope the new group will also be very professional and fulfill the responsibilities to be above partisan biases and search for the truth.”

Hall asked the board to investigate three issues related to contributions from Chase Burns, the Oklahoma-based owner of International Internet Technologies, as well as other donations connected to the sweepstakes industry. Burns’ company supplies the software that Internet sweepstakes cafes use to run their games.

Checks for Burns’ contributions were written from a trust account that Florida investigators said received millions in illegal proceeds from Burns’ business customers. Hall wants to know whether Burns used a business account or an account that was part of an illegal business operation to make campaign contributions.

Campaign disclosure reports erroneously list Burns as an attorney with Moore & Van Allen, according to Hall’s complaint. Moore & Van Allen is a legal and lobbying firm that represented Burns’ company and also employed McCrory until days before he took office.

The five-member State Board of Elections, which for years has had three Democrats and two Republicans, has been aggressive in recent years in investigating campaign finance law violations. It investigated former House Speaker Jim Black, and former state Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps, among others. Both were Democrats who ended up sentenced to federal prison. But Republicans were critical of the board for limiting the inquiry into Perdue’s undisclosed campaign flights.

The North Carolina Pope

#

Is The Future Of Democracy In The Hands Of Critters Like Claire McCaskill And Ben Nelson?

Ari Berman, was one of the journalists who most effectively pointed out how right-wing takeovers in states-- governorships, legislatures, judiciaries-- like Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Indiana, Alabama, Texas, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee has led to a conspiracy to lock in permanent neo-fascist governance. Disappointment with Democrats allowed the right to grab power on a state level last year and the first thing they did-- powered by Koch money through ALEC and similar front groups-- was disenfranchise millions of traditional Democratic voters: minorities, students, the elderly, poor people...

In the video above, from Monday night, Rachel Maddow introduced many Americans to hereditary multimillionaire Art Pope, a virulent North Carolina fascist, and a kind of mini-Koch. He was up to the same tricks in North Carolina as Koch has been nationwide-- just without the illegal Iranian money-- and he's been very successful at it.

Now if these wealthy domestic fascists could disenfranchise so many millions of likely Democratic voters and do so much to undermine democracy itself in just a few states, what's going to happen when they take over the entire government... next year?

Next year? You bet! Voters are over Obama-- O.V.E.R. Do they dislike him enough to cut off their own noses in spite? We'll see, but it is a really distinct possibility. His polling is in the toilet-- and so is his economy. The House, which looked like it could be won back by the Democrats, is probably out of reach thanks to a clueless Blue Dog, Steve Israel-- oops, sorry, clueless "ex"-Blue Dog, Steve Israel-- being put in charge of the DCCC and already demonstrating he learned not a single lesson from the Great Shellacking. The Democrats are going to the voters with a contingent of Blue Dogs and conservatives again, even after the voters decimated them just one year ago, Democratic voters clearly telling the DCCC they'd rather not vote at all than be forced into voting for a conservative in a blue T-shirt. (As you probably know by now, the Blue America is supporting a slate of progressives for Congress-- all of whom happen to be Democrats. Even if Israel & the DCCC blow the chance to take back the majority, we're determined to have as progressive and activist a House caucus as is humanly possible.)


Now... what about the Senate? Will it be a bulwark against the whole country turning into Scott Walker's fascist mini-state? The billionaire brigade is targeting Senate races around the country, second only to their effort to displace Obama. Yesterday in the Beltway political trade press

The Republican super PAC American Crossroads today is launching a new messaging campaign targeting 2012 Senate races and the Democrats’ tenuous hold on the chamber.

The nonprofit is urging Congressional Republicans and two dozen conservative groups to seize the opportunity to retake the Senate by focusing its rhetorical attacks on what it deems the Democrats’ “feckless, sclerotic, politicized” management of the chamber compared to the “well-managed” GOP House.

American Crossroads outlined its strategy in a memo from President and CEO Steven Law, who told Roll Call that paid media and other political activity could follow if this messaging proves successful.

...Republicans need a net gain of four seats to win control of the Senate in the next Congress. American Crossroads and its affiliated nonprofit 501(c)(4), Crossroads GPS, raised more than $71 million in the 2010 cycle, most of which was invested in advertising to influence Senate races.

And conventional wisdom is that the Democratic majority is a goner. But is it? Elizabeth Warren's entry into the Massachusetts race could be a game changer-- if she can keep from being swamped by gushers of Wall Street/fascist money flooding into Scott Brown's warchest. (Please help Elizabeth here-- and think about tossing in for Bernie and Tammy at the same time.) Roll Call claims that conventional wisdom isn't the whole story and that the Senate majority could go either way. Sounds overly optimistic to me but...

The overall numbers favor Republicans-- Democrats are defending 23 seats to the GOP’s 10-- but controlling at least 50 seats may once again hinge on how some primaries shake out.

Several races still have maturing to do, and the third-quarter reports due Oct. 15 will offer the latest clues about the Republican primaries in states such as Indiana, Missouri and Florida, where the nomination is up for grabs. It will be months before GOP nominees are selected in those states, and in some cases, the primary winner could change the race’s outlook.

Despite that uncertainty, there are more than enough vulnerable Democratic seats to give National Republican Senatorial Committee strategists several paths to the majority. Winning Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and North Dakota would be enough, and there are plenty of opportunities with varying degrees of likelihood beyond those.

Other certain Senate battlegrounds next year include Wisconsin, Montana, Ohio and Virginia, where fundraising isn’t expected to be an issue for any of the top candidates. All are Democratic-held seats-- as are most of the top races.

It’s highly likely that the GOP will pick up North Dakota’s open seat. But Republicans have a couple of tossup races of their own to defend in Massachusetts and Nevada. Losses there would complicate the math and help the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee hold the Senate, barely, for a second straight cycle. Nomination surprises last cycle helped keep Republicans from winning seats in Nevada, Colorado and Delaware, giving Democrats a 53-47 edge in the 112th Congress.

...Beyond Massachusetts and Nevada, which is a pure tossup, there are only a couple of second-tier pickup opportunities for Democrats. They include Arizona, where a few candidates are emerging but will face a tough opponent in Rep. Jeff Flake, and Indiana. For now, Republicans are favored to hold Indiana, but that could change if Sen. Dick Lugar loses the GOP nomination to state Treasurer Richard Mourdock.

The problem for Democrats is that they're determined to nominate conservatives-- like anti-Choice reactionary Blue Dog Joe Donnelly in Indiana-- who will depress Democratic turnout even worse than Obama. And which Democratic incumbents are the in the worst trouble, incoherent conservative boobs like Ben Nelson and Claire McCaskill who can only win reelection if the GOP nominates even bigger imbeciles-- not an unlikely prediction.