ed cone

Ed Cone has a reasonable take on likely election outcomes. Except for this part:

I'd guess that a lot of Democrats are pretty comfortable with the assumption that McCrory, a sensible Guilford County native, will govern more like he did as Mayor of Charlotte and less as the hard-liner he's pretended to be on the campaign trail. Ditto for Romney, for that matter.

If any of you Democrats are thinking that Pat McCrory will govern anything "sensibly," you're wrong as rain. Having sold his souls to the radical right, McCrory has no room to maneuver toward the center in any way, shape or form. Witness his slippery response to a question about Republican legislation to restrict abortion rights, covered earlier today by Steve Harrison.

Waiting on Kay.

Being a pro-business Democrat is a good thing; being a corporate-owned Democrat, less so. Working with leadership to better serve North Carolina is a good thing; responding "how high?" when party bosses and well-paid alums tell you to jump, less so.

Don Moore in 1989: "They been using asbestos since 1858. Is this the first case of mesothelioma they've discovered?"

From a thread at Ed Cone's place, responding to another commenter who wrote:

I like a lot of what Ed Cone writes, including this:

It's curious that media coverage and public policy around immigration focuses so little on the moneyed interests that profit from illegal immigrants.

Actually, when you consider who owns the media and the government, it's not really surprising at all. Better to get people riled up about those service-sucking brown people than thinking about where their strawberries come from.

"It doesn't make any sense, it costs too much money, and we know it doesn't work." And yet somehow Congressional Democrats are too dumb to make it an issue.

Hat tip to Ed Cone.

One of my daily blog stops is Ed Cone's, where folks from the Triad cover local issues from every angle. It's a cross-spectrum group, always entertaining and often interesting. Today's discussion includes comments from an unhinged asshole called Angry as hell. People like this are the base of the radical right, hardly a step removed from Art Pope's crowd in Wake County.

Every now and then, when I start to have hope about this fragile world, jerks like Angry come along to remind me that our species is barely more evolved than pit bulls, rabid frothing at the mouth and lusting for blood. If god gave us brains hoping we'd use them for goodness and peace, she is surely disappointed with her grand experiment.

Sorry to hit and run, but I'm late for a meeting and just saw this post at Ed Cone's blog about a power play in progress on the broadband front. Check it out and suggest courses of action. Pretty please?

UPDATE

Here is a sample e-mail message to send to all of the Committee members involved:

Subject: Don’t You Dare Vote for an Anti-Municipal Broadband Bill!

Go give 'em a piece of your socialist mind!

Thanks, Ed.

Hagan: I didn't understand the complexity before how I got there of how you can use this procedure (filibuster) to delay everything. So I think that this year, I'd have to look up the number, we were at about 92 different votes where the Republicans voted no in moving forward any piece of legislation, which is way over anything from a historical perspective.

Go read the rest. Kay is remarkably candid, and pretty darn smooth.

Want a lesson in how not to maintain anonymity online? Read the crazy comments in this mildly amusing thread.