Bill Graham

I don't expect Bill Graham to know the difference between a falafel and a loofah any more than Bill O'Reilly. Nor do I expect either to know the difference between a pita and a parantha.

It's safe to say that when Bill Graham named a company PITA Raleigh, LLC, he wasn't planning on starting a chain of Middle Eastern restaurants. To give him credit he may have been thinking of this description:

The "pocket" in pita bread is created by steam, which puffs up the dough. As the bread cools and flattens, a pocket is left in the middle.

- An empty pocket that is, reminiscent of the failed and drained campaign for Governor masterminded by Tom Fetzer.

It seems more likely that PITA is the acronym that is patoi for "major annoyance" and that the annoyance is likely Tom Fetzer.

Quick: What causes a politician's popularity to tank? A controversial vote, weak performance, general voter unrest ... all can cause poll numbers to drift downward. But for your approval ratings to really bottom out, it takes a scandal.

You might have missed it -- the media largely has -- but in the final hours of testimony yesterday at the N.C. State Board of Elections' hearings into former Gov. Michael Easley (D), Democratic attorneys unleashed an unexpected bombshell: Testimony from a former IRS criminal investigator that at least three Republican candidates for governor failed to disclose dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of campaign flights in 2004 and 2008, the very charge that helped launch the investigation into Easley.

Via email from Americans for Prosperity:

RALEIGH – With tax bills on the minds of millions of North Carolina taxpayers, five of North Carolina’s gubernatorial candidates have signed a pledge to support spending restraint, the grassroots free-market group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) announced today. Candidates Bill Graham, Pat McCrory, Michael Munger, Bob Orr, and Fred Smith have pledged to support a constitutional limit on state spending known as the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR).

My 48th birthday was on Monday, Feb. 25th. I work for a non-profit agency that gets most of its funding from the state, so budgets are tight. One year, we weren't able to give cost of living increases, so the board voted to give our birthdays as a personal holiday. What do you choose to do with a personal holiday? Get a manicure, a massage? Maybe some people would. Not me. I chose to haul my butt out of bed early, get stuck in construction, and fight traffic to get to a Forum on Mental Health so that I could listen to most of the candidates for Governor and Lt.Governor talk about the crisis in North Carolina's Mental Health System. As some of you might have realized by now, I am a political geek, but what you might not know is that I've had two family members struggle with mental illness and fall through cracks - one in NJ, and one in NC. So this was a very important day for me.

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/cartoon-culture/spongebob-rectal-thermometer

Following a page from the national GOP playbook, nearly all of the Republican gubernatorial candidates refused to show up Saturday for the NAACP debate.

African-Americans make up more than 20 percent of North Carolina’s population.

Republicans would rather ignore 1.1 million African-American voters than address concerns about education, health care, jobs, and safe communities.

If you're not reading Laura Leslie's blog at WUNC-FM, you should be. It's the sharpest coverage of statewide politics coming out of the Capital Press Corpse by a wide margin. Her report on Friday of the Four Horsemen in the Replicant race for governor is a work of art. I've chosen the "cons" for highlights here, but the whole thing is worth the read.

Republican Bill Graham sure is an outsider. Even his staff operates outside of the law.

Campaign manager Marty Ryall resigned in 2003 as executive director of the Arkansas GOP amid federal investigations into the party’s finances. Four of the five other staffers were fired in the aftermath.

Ryall resurfaced this year working for another outsider, indicted Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher.

Ryall joins Michael Aaron Lay, Graham’s campaign spokesman, who was indicted earlier this year of voter fraud in connection with Patrick McHenry.

Lay, a field director for McHenry, was indicted in May on felony voter fraud charges. In 2004, Lay voted twice in elections while living in a district in which he was not a permanent resident.

Over the past three days, an extremist Republican wedge appears to have been driven into the heart and soul of the Old North State. In response to the (gasp) horror of allowing children of illegal immigrants to attend community colleges in North Carolina, we have witnessed a stunning level of political expediency among five of the six people who consider themselves worthy of holding our state's highest elected office - plus the one already holding it.

The debacle started predictably enough with the two richest Republican candidates, Fred Smith and Bill Graham. Smith has made his fortunes on the backs of working class people who have shoveled his dirt and poured his concrete with no need for education whatsoever. Graham's future is even more tightly tied to sustaining ignorance among a permanent underclass that will buy his never-ending stream of anti-government rhetoric. There's no surprise with these two, none at all.

Then Bob Orr joined the party, quickly followed by Richard Moore, and this morning by Beverly Perdue. Along the way, Governor Mike Easley himself joined the debate, sort of, saying he wouldn't comment on the policy.