Art Pope

It's almost the end of the year, and Mr. Pope hasn't yet registered here at BlueNC, hasn't bothered to answer all the questions we've been asking. I guess that's the high price of having an unelected fat cat calling the shots behind the magic curtain. Still, Rob Christensen today has angled in on some answers Under the Dome. Feel free to drop by and ask your own questions.

This is pure speculation on my part, based on a few random tea leaves, but I recently received an e-mail from Civitas that included this:

Give a Tax-Deductible Gift to Civitas & North Carolina before the end of the year

The Civitas Institute is a beacon of conservative thought in North Carolina. Our vision is of a state that enjoys liberty and prosperity derived from limited government, personal responsibility, and civic engagement. Help us to continue this effort of voter education and our shared vision of a freer and more prosperous North Carolina.

So...a gift to Civitas can also be considered a gift to the entire State of North Carolina? ;o I'd be more apt to describe that as chasing the State of North Carolina down a dark alley, slapping it around a bit, then choking the life out of it. But that's me.

In the wake (pun intended) of Art Pope choosing an inexperienced general to lead the largest school system in North Carolina, I did some reading to see exactly what the fuss is all about. Simply put, the guy's a doozie. For starters, he doesn't seem to have the brains god gave an animal cracker, as evidenced in this cliche-ridden tribute to Sarah "I quit" Palin:

She has a gritty determination borne in the salmon hauls and caribou hunts that make her pioneer tough.

Nor is he in touch with what most people would consider reality. At least four of the six adjectives he uses in this sentence are demonstrably not true:

Sarah Palin is precisely what the American people are seeking: an honest, intelligent, passionate, practical conservative who is nonpartisan and a tough decision maker.

There's a lot to read about the one-star wonder out there on the intertubes, most of which can probably be traced back to his brainwashing at West Point.

And there's this sweet little picture of his final status in his ultimate ego trip. Too bad Wake County didn't come to the same conclusion:

It's pretty close to a full time job inducting new Puppets into the Show.
Ah well. Somebody's gotta do it.

The love affair of American investors with the stock market appears to have ended. The year now ending will be the fourth consecutive year in which mutual funds that invest primarily in American stocks experienced net outflows of funds, meaning that investors as a group withdrew more money than they put in.

No big deal, you think? Well think again. With nearly $10 trillion in corporate debt maturing over the next few years, competition for scarce capital is on the verge of become more intense than ever. And America is rapidly becoming a stand for nothing except arming the world.

Some say we arrive at moments of truth only rarely; others argue that such moments show up a thousand times a day. But whatever your view, Art Pope's takeover of North Carolina state government qualifies on both counts. In a rare condescension to explain himself to the peasant class, Mr. Pope recently told Rob Christensen that good government was his primary motivation, that the only reason he spent $10 million last year to influence North Carolina elections was to dismantle the entrenched power of corrupt Democrats.

Which brings us to redistricting, the ultimate moment of truth for Mr. Pope. Said simply, it's time for the knight of the right to either put up or shut up when it comes to reforming machinery of politics and government.

The knight of the right
has bought himself a kingdom;
still no answers for the pesky peasants

Cross-posted from Facing South, article by Sue Sturgis.

Federal civil rights investigators visited North Carolina last week to meet with Wake County Public School System leaders about allegations of racism made after the school board scrapped a student assignment policy designed to prevent segregation in the classroom.

Representatives of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights met with school board chairman Ron Margiotta and others in Raleigh, N.C. on Dec. 7 to discuss the scope of their investigation into a complaint filed by the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. The complaint came in response to a decision earlier this year by the recently-elected Republican majority on the officially nonpartisan board to eliminate a decade-old policy considering socioeconomic diversity in student assignments -- an approach that has been lauded for preventing the sort of urban-suburban educational disparities that have plagued other communities.

Instead, the board has called for a return to "neighborhood schools" while condemning "forced busing" and "social engineering" -- terms that the NAACP notes were used by pro-segregationists in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

The Wake schools controversy was also the topic of the NAACP education conference held in Raleigh earlier this month. The civil rights organization is also planning a march in Raleigh on Feb. 12 to protest the board's plans. Meanwhile, AdvancED -- the national group that accredits Wake schools -- is reviewing the board's effort to scrap the diversity policy.

Hood lays it on thick when promoting school choice:

As a longtime proponent of the cause, I think that more than doubling the share of students attending schools of choice in the next few years would have a huge and positive effect, not just on those students but on North Carolina education as a whole.

And it would draw new resources into education – human resources, mostly, those of involved parents and innovative educators and entrepreneurial philanthropists – while reducing the cost to taxpayers by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

That last sentence is a doozy. Or I should say a "whopper". Why don't we see what Pennsylvania's Auditor General has to say about that cost reduction:

Good morning, Mr. Pope.

Since you didn't acknowledge my first request and my apology, I thought I'd try again. As the single most powerful individual in North Carolina politics, you would seem to have an obligation to share your agenda with those of us in the peasant class for whom you are now morally, if not literally, responsible.

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