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.

Woolf Joins Orr Campaign

The Orr campaign today, announced that a Dave Woolf has signed on as campaign manager. Justice Robert F. Orr, Republican candidate for Governor, said, in a statement, that Woolf received his BS degree in Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point and his MA degree in International Relations from John Hopkins University.

He commanded an infantry company in the 82nd Airborne Division during Operation Desert Storm and later returned to West Point as an Assistant Professor and Course Director for the Department of Social Sciences.

Woolf lives in Durham and is married with one daughter.

“Dave’s wide range of experience is what this campaign needs as we head into the final months before the primary,” said Justice Orr. “He has the vision to propel the campaign forward and his success in the business and military sector will bring the campaign the management and organization we need to win.”

*A unnamed former military Intel source said that the new campaign manager for the Orr Campaign once was in the secret planning vision division at the Pentagon developing the Iraq Mission Accomplished Victory plan.

Note! Homeland Security issue a Red alert today upon hearing of this serious threat by the Orr Campaign.

Billy, Bob, and Fred were apparently in rare form today as they "debated" the most important issues facing our state and outlined what they would do if elected to Governor. Under the Doom has the blow-by-blow account. But before you head over there, take my quiz to see if you can tell who said what in the sad little sideshow.

Who said:

A. "To think that a candidate for governor could say he doesn't understand how the budget is done is a frightening thing."

B. "It's a lot of closed-door stuff, and they're spending the people's money and Lord knows where it goes."

C. "It is my opinion that affirmative action no longer has any place in American society."

D. "I've told people throughout this campaign that yes, this is about the next four years, but in reality, it's about the next 20, 25 years."

E. "I'm the outsider. I'm not the one from Raleigh and that's what's different about me, and I want all of you to know that as we go through that debate."

My new friend Bob Orr is out on the campaign trail, laying out his two priorities:

Orr attended the Davidson County Republican Party's monthly meeting at Skipper's Seafood on Tuesday night. He's the second candidate to visit the county, after Salisbury attorney Bill Graham. N.C. Sen. Fred Smith, who serves Johnston and Wayne counties, is scheduled to come to Davidson County on Friday.

"I just felt like if the citizens of this state were going to have a vigorous debate about the direction of state government, I needed to get into it," Orr said.

A couple of the issues important to Orr are public education and economic development policy.

This summer, I got to know a little about Bob Orr, one of three Republican candidates for governor. After I gave him holy hell here and here for being so cuddly with Art Pope, we exchanged a few messages about this and that. It didn't take long to discover he wasn't the lunatic I would have expected from someone anointed by the Puppetmaster.

In case you haven't been keeping up with his campaign, Orr is riding one big horse in his bid to fill Easley's chair. He's almost myopic in his passion for stomping out government incentives for corporations (a passion I share), and his timing couldn't be better. The General Assembly's passage of the great Goodyear/Bridgestone giveaway offers Orr a soapbox he couldn't have built for himself in a million years. Don't be surprised to see him filing a lawsuit to stop the giveaway any day now. The state will have one heck of a time defending the money being offered to Bridgestone for investments the company has already made, and Orr will almost certainly argue that spending serves no public good whatsoever. Unless of course you consider it a public good to bribe a company so they won't get mad at you for giving money to one of their competitors.

With a well-timed court challenge, Orr will have his name in the headlines throughout the primary cycle, chipping away at the bazillions being spent by Fred Smith and Bill Graham, neither of whom is half as smart as Orr. I wish him well, but I don't hold out much hope for the ex-judge. Orr's too nice and too reasonable to be the top choice of the North Carolina Party of Greed.