Mark Binker

The world according to Thom Tillis, Tea Party Republican Speaker of the North Carolina House.

Tomorrow will be the last day I receive the Charlotte Observer at home after nearly 14 years. I decided if the Charlotte Observer is going to reduce itself to being a liberal blog, I'll just read it online like I do ProgressNC, BlueNC, and the like. They are all kind of like road kill. You try not to look at, you do anyway, then you regret it.

If you're not keeping up with Mark Binker's reporting, you're missing the best coverage of the NC GOP Tea Party Tantrum you'll find anywhere. Today's story sorts through what's likely to happen tomorrow in Raleigh.

The General Assembly is due to reconvene Wednesday to consider overriding Gov. Bev Perdue’s veto of the Racial Justice Act (background link), which allows death row inmates to challenge their sentences based on statistical data.

Here's my own take on the subject:

Untangling the hugest political hairball of all.

It sounded to my layman’s ears that the judges wanted to get a better sense of how well or badly the case might go for the plaintiffs before they made a decision on how drastically to intervene in this year’s election schedule.

This is EXACTLY the right strategy for getting government out of the business of discriminatory marriage policy.

Guilford County Register of Deeds Jeff Thigpen and 10 other people filed a lawsuit last week that challenges a requirement that marrying couples in North Carolina obtain a state-issued license.

As far as government is concerned, marriage should be nothing more than a legal contract.

Just the tip of a big, ugly iceberg.

A must read regarding the Kay-Hagan-for-VP silliness.

I returned from the beach relaxed and in a good mood. But my morning through e-mail and ye olde RSS reader gives me the felling [sic] I returned with sand in the rhetorical shorts.

Mark then proceeds, as only Mark can do, to shred the source of the original rumor by digging into the reality of North Carolina election returns over the past two cycles. Then he wraps with the cautionary note below.

Binker gets the bum's rush out of a committee hearing:

At that point, the cop hauled me out of the room. He was nice about it and didn't really seem to want to do what he was being asked to. Because he’s kind of low down on the food chain, I don’t blame him for not knowing the finer points of public meetings laws.

The Sergeant at Arms staff should know better.

Sorry about the Cheech y Chong reference in the title, but I couldn't help myself.

Binker sez Civitas is misleading and uninformed.
Hat tip to Ed Cone.

And gets some substantial results:

Gillespie said the thought of a new source of natural gas may be tantalizing at a time when the state is trying to move toward cleaner-burning, home-grown fuels. However, he cautioned, potential water-and air-contamination issues that come along with drilling should give everyone pause.

Yes, it should. And when industry "experts" submit their reports on how "clean and sustainable" their operations are, the source of that information should give you pause as well.