Beverly Perdue

It has been a little over a week since the North Carolina General Assembly voted to repeal the Racial Justice Act, a landmark piece of legislation which enabled death row inmates to challenge their sentences by showing patterns of racial discrimination in the jurisdictions where they were tried.

Since then, Republican lawmakers have been accused of ignoring undisputed evidence of racial bias in the administration of the death penalty and abusing the legislative system to sneak through legislation without public oversight.

Groups including the NC-NAACP have called on Governor Beverly Perdue to veto the bill, but there has been no word from her office as of this writing. Under North Carolina law, Governor Perdue has 30 days to issue a veto. The Governor has indicated that she will make her decision next week.

There is a bill sitting on Gov. Perdue's desk today submitted by the Republican Legislature against Community Broadband. This has been written about by others on this blog. Today in the Huffington Post, Lawrence Lessig has posted an open letter to Gov. Perdue asking her to veto this bill.

Commercial broadband providers are not happy with this new competition, however. After spending millions in lobbying and campaign contributions in North Carolina, they convinced your legislature to override the will of local North Carolina communities, and ban these faster, cheaper broadband networks. Rather than compete with better service, and better prices, they secured a government-granted protection against competition. And now, unless you veto H. 129, that protection against competition will become law.

Just in the off chance that you're so busy working you don't have time to think, have you seen this?

Increased taxes on high earners should be the first step toward balancing the federal budget, a new poll suggested Monday. Raising taxes on the rich beats out cuts to defense spending, Medicare and Social Security as U.S. adults' top preference on how to close the deficit, according to a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll.

I know it's hard to get the governor to do anything even remotely resembling "progressive" in terms of public policy, but still. When 60% of citizens think it's time to raise taxes on multimillionaires, shouldn't you at least consider the idea? And so what if her budget is dead on arrival in the General Assembly? Anything she wants that's important will be dead on arrival with the Tarheel Taliban, so why not want something worth wanting?

It's time to raise taxes on multimillionaires. All you need is a new top tax bracket and a 1% increase in the rate over the current top bracket. Don't make this complicated. Just do it.

Gary Pearce wrote this last week at Talking About Politics.

Governor Perdue’s first statement got it right: We need to work together in a time of economic and fiscal crisis. But she’ll have conflicting advice. Move to the middle and work with the Republicans, some will say. No, confront them at every turn, others will counsel.

Move to the middle? The Governor would have to take a few giant steps to the left in order to get anywhere near middle. And the only people she confronts at every turn are progressive Democrats. Looks like North Carolina is screwed either way.

I was a little surprised when the governor of our state cut short her press conference Wednesday when reporters began asking her questions about her previous relationship with Col. Glover of the Highway Patrol. And again when her public affairs person abruptly ended Glover's time at the microphone after he blamed the media for the patrol's image problem.

I guess transparency and accessibility are not the same, but still. After eight years of a governor who rarely ventured out of his office and rarely interacted with the media, I thought Gov. Perdue was going to be more open with the media and her constituents.

Bev withdraws at the last minute for this:

Gov. Bev Perdue was scheduled to appear at an event next week organized by a group backing ethics reform, one of her pet issues.

But there was a catch that the governor's staff says she didn't know about: The event is a fundraiser for the reform group, and was being hosted by an all-star group of lobbyists, a format that seemed to run counter to the proposals to clean up state government.

I don't like it when people I believed in and voted for break the law and get busted on ethics charges. It makes me even madder than when the "other side" does it because I feel betrayed. But I'm also a realist about human behavior and I know hubris is a powerful force. I understand how it happens. But this? To back off from the chance to publicly lead the charge for stronger ethics -- and possibly turn the tide of public opinion -- while also doing the right thing? I don't get it. It's unnecessarily stupid. The huge percentage of new NC voters who choose to go on the books as Unaffiliated would indicate a problem that needs addressing.

Senator Murkowski recently introduced a resolution that would strip the EPA of its power to regulate carbon emissions. This legislation comes three years after the Supreme Court upheld the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and after the EPA proved that greenhouse gases pose a danger to public health and the environment. Senator Burr is a co-sponsor of this legislation, but today the more important issue is a letter that will be circulated at the National Governors Assoc. this weekend. The letter which was written by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour supports Murkowski's effort to weaken the Clean Air Act.

StarNews has published a letter dated yesterday detailing the reasons why Governor Perdue should halt permitting for Titan Cement's Castle Hayne project:

Governor Perdue, with the recent scandals uncovered by the news media, the public has lost confidence in the objectivity of regulatory decisions by the Department of Energy and Natural Resources ("DENR"), and questions whether the agency is acting in the public interest.