Puppetshow

The feeding frenzy in the NCGOP gubernatorial race has taken a new twist lately as more observers define Bob Orr as a water boy for Art Pope. Consider this piece from the obscure Up and Coming Magazine.

Is Orr the kind of principled moderate that Jim Holshouser proved to be? His close association with Art Pope will lead many to wonder. But in the campaigns to follow, we will learn more.

Principled moderate? Who's this guy trying to kid? If Orr was a moderate, Art Pope wouldn't have given him the keys to the free-market washroom at the John Locke Foundation.

If you've followed the obscure musings of the Stagemanager at the Art Pope Puppetshow lately, you've noticed that he's rapidly losing whatever little touch with reality he once had. Fancying himself an armchair intellectual in the vein of his hero John Locke, Hood has taken to flights of fantasy that must surely stretch the mental capacity of his regular readers.

Call me unashamed to admit that when I see someone make effective use of a Judy Garland song title, I crack a smile. One might say my heartstrings go “zing, zing, zing.” But when I read the original headline of a Christian Science Monitor piece on streetcars and downtowns – “Clang, clang, clang went development” – I had to wince. Apparently so did others, because when the story went online, the tone of the headline went from sentimental musical to Tennessee Williams: “Desire grows for streetcars.”

I put on my hip waders tonight for a stroll through the dark alleys of John Locke Land and found a whole new sideshow being built in the circus. It's like the Man Who Ate His Brain and the Hall of Mirrors all rolled into one, with the official title: The Faculty Affiliate Network, a John Locke Foundation Project.

The list of "faculty" in this so-called network ranges from hard-core Pope Puppets like Roy Cordato, to ex-pols like Jim Martin, to a host of NCSU professors, to a few people from Duke. One of the Dukies, Mr. Michael Munger, is mounting a run for governor in the Libertarian Party in 2008.

A few minutes ago I finished writing a long entry about the junior Puppet named Chad Adams who is holding down the fort this Friday at the John Locke Puppetshow. Adams has written a silly little piece of nothing about how great South Carolina is because it has a 6% tax rate, while mean old North Carolina has a whopping 7% tax rate to do the "same job." Yeah right.

I had even assembled a boatload of US Census data to underscore the lunacy of Adams' claim. For example, NC is 22nd in teacher pay, while SC is 27th. And the NC high school graduation rate is 67% while the SC rate is 53%. I even had data for infant mortality, physicians per capita, violent crime rates (SC is highest in the nation) and more.

And then the site somehow logged me out and I lost everything. So sad. But I did manage to salvage my closing paragraph:

I'm glad the Puppets continue spewing forth this kind of nonsense. Because with every lame "report" and every instance of intellectual dishonesty, they solidify their reputation as ideologues, leftovers from the heyday of the Party of Greed. Keep it coming, Puppets. You're ever-so-surely working your way toward irrelevance.

I was raised in a hard-core Baptist family. We went to church five times a week, and with each close encounter, I sank deeper and deeper in the shame of simply being human. I also developed a keen nose for "fundamentalism" in all its odious forms. So when I found this article by Fred Block, of the Longview Institute, I wasn't surprised to see the parallels he drew between religious fundamentalism and the Gospel of the Free Markets, as preached by the John Locke Foundation.

Market Fundamentalism is a quasi-religious faith that unregulated markets will somehow always produce the best possible results. It rests on the idea that markets are natural and government regulations are artificial. Similar to other fundamentalisms, it paints the world only in black and white. Taxes, by definition are bad, so another round of tax cuts is always desirable since individuals, argue the fundamentalists, are sure to use the money more wisely than governments. A parallel logic lies behind the enthusiasm for replacing government workers with private contractors — even for such delicate tasks as interrogating prisoners — since market employment, they say, provides incentives for efficiency that government employment always lacks.

Consistent with its belief that planning in the public sector is an economic burden on hard-working millionaires, the John Locke Foundation Puppetshow has produced yet another "report," this time arguing against the practice of traffic calming. If you have the stomach for such things, you can find the "report" here. But don't expect much in the way of insight. The few points worth making are lost in a sea of obfuscation, conjecture, wishful thinking and misguided analysis.

I love it when Chris Fitzsimon at NC Policy Watch gets his dander up. Today's take-down of pseudo-scientists at the Puppetshow is a thing of beauty. The subject is the threat of second-hand smoke.

... opposition to protecting the public health comes from the folks who oppose nearly everything government does for the public good, the free-market fundamentalists. Their opposition to the smoking ban follows a familiar pattern.

First, they deny the facts. Last year a staffer with the Charlotte branch of Raleigh’s anti-everything think tank slammed the push by Mecklenburg County Commissioners to pass a ban on smoking in public places, using among his reasons that “actual scientific evidence for harm to non-smokers is scant, at best.”

In case you haven't visited the Puppetshow lately, you might want to swing by for a close-up view of so-called adults grinding away inside a "multi-million-dollar opinion manufacturing" machine. Their current fantasy is a bit of recycled garbage masquerading as science on the important topic of climate change.

RALEIGH – If North Carolina cut its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, what effect would it have on global warming? Nothing that could be measured, even after 100 years. That’s according to a Spotlight report published today by the John Locke Foundation.