Taking arrogance and paranoia to dizzying heights.

A Lee County community college stopped airing a radio talk show this month after a state lawmaker took issue with an online post a radio host wrote criticizing the lawmaker.

A legislative assistant for State Rep. Mike Stone, wrote the president of Central Carolina Community College on April 3 asking what the school’s affiliation was with “The Rant,” a weekly radio show hosted by three former Sanford-area journalists on the college’s FM radio station WDCC, 90.5. Stone is a Sanford Republican serving his second term in the state legislature.

As everyone in North Carolina knows, Deputy Assistant Governor McCrory beat the “voter ID” horse quite nearly to death in his run for office. Without a shred of evidence to prove there actually is significant voter fraud, he has proposed a costly solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. How costly? According to some estimates, the price tag could run upwards of $100 million in the first year alone. If there were even 100 instances of known voter fraud (there are not), McCrory would be spending a million dollars on each case.

But voter ID is only one of Pat McCrory’s partisan voter suppression schemes. He also wants to (1) make it harder for college students to vote, (2) cut back on one-stop voting, and (3) shorten the window for early voting. This what happens when a person’s agenda is driven by politics instead of principles.

In the area of electoral politics, here are the principles I advocate.

The Clean Water Management Trust Fund appropriation in Pat McCrory's budget is 93.2 percent lower than it was in 2007. And if that weren't bad enough, the proposed budget makes it "non-recurring," an item whose very existence the General Assembly has to affirm with every biennial session.

Makes perfect sense, right? After all, no one really knows whether water will be important to human life next year or the year after that, so why commit to preservation now?

On the other hand, using taxpayer dollars to bribe private businesses to come to North Carolina, well, we all know that's really really really important. So important, in fact, that our government is going to create and control an entire new bureaucracy to pass out the payola.

What gives?

After all their happy talk about the evils of the North Carolina State Lottery, Republican leaders in Raleigh did what they always do: put money ahead of morals. They had a clear chance to kill the lottery, but took the easy way out. It's hard to say what is more disgusting ... all their sanctimonious blather about family values or their despicable cowardice.