Lee County

UPDATE: While the blogging goes on, it seems some of the more inflammatory posts are disappearing. Usually when you think you're untouchable, that's when you're not.

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In this week's edition of the Independent, Billy Ball pulls back the curtain on Jim Womack, a sitting Lee County commissioner from Sanford who chairs the North Carolina Mining and Energy (Fracking) Commission.

Womack founded and for the past two-plus years has operated a vicious, spiteful, and above all unethical anonymous blog in Lee County. He and the other authors use the names of American Founding Fathers as cover. Ball calls it "the worst kept secret in Lee County."

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-gop-north-carolina-2012...

This L.A. Times story highlights Republican efforts to beat Obama in North Carolina. Specifically, the story focuses on the Lee County GOP and its strategy to woo Latino voters into voting for Romney. Lee GOP front man Charles Staley predictably blames the media for creating the impression that the GOP is anti-Latino (I suppose the Republican assault on Latino immigrants in recent years had nothing to do with that impression), and then gives us this little tidbit of revisionist history:

Residents are signing land-lease contracts already:

Energy companies are snapping up the rights to underground natural gas from scores of property owners in Lee County, where indications of a massive natural gas deposit recently surfaced.

"There's several levels of concern," said Ted Feitshans, an extension specialist at N.C. State University's agricultural economics department. "One is they're not getting the level of payment they could get if they were skilled negotiators."

Other issues include contracts that would leave property owners legally responsible for the cleanup costs if an environmental accident on their land contaminated neighboring properties or drinking water.

So, I wake up this morning, and the headline in the Sanford Herald screams, "Political disorganization: Lee GOP loses recognition over failure to file paperwork." Beautiful, huh? I had noticed that our local GOP was in some trouble; hell, I've met its members.