Rep. Patsy Keever

Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan is bad for North Carolina and bad for America.

On March 29, 2012, Paul Ryan, aided and abetted by my opponent, Patrick McHenry, passed a budget in the U.S. House of Representatives that betrayed every man, woman and child in North Carolina.

The Ryan/McHenry budget would have destroyed Medicare, cut agriculture by $60 billion, cut taxes for the super rich and increased the budget deficit by $3 trillion dollars. That would have hurt every person and business in North Carolina. (Republican Fiscal Year 2013 budget offered by Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin. Vote on March 29, 2012)

By choosing Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney has embraced the most extreme posture of the most extreme parts of the Tea Party Republicans.

Bizarrely, Patrick McHenry even found a way to be more extreme than Ryan and his fellow Tea Party Republicans. On the same day he voted for the Ryan budget, McHenry voted for a budget that would have, among other things, raised the Social Security retirement age to 70. More than 100 of his fellow Republicans, including Paul Ryan, did not vote for this budget … but Patrick McHenry did.

Eleven of my fellow NC state legislators and I have proposed a resolution calling on Congress to ban unlimited corporate cash in elections, but our efforts are being ignored by the Republican leadership. Click here to join the 800 people who have signed up as citizen co-sponsors of this vital bill.

Let’s tell Republicans in Raleigh and in Washington that our democracy is not for sale!

Can you believe that Karl Rove and GOP front organizations plan to spend more than $1 billion during this year’s election to advance their extreme agenda? Just last week we saw the power of unlimited corporate cash in Wisconsin’s recall election in which the Democratic candidate for governor was outspent by a whopping 10 to 1 margin.

That’s why eleven of my fellow North Carolina state legislators and I have proposed a resolution calling on Congress to ban unlimited corporate cash in elections. However, the Republican leadership in Raleigh is ignoring our resolution and refusing to even debate it.

Today I signed a Clean Campaign Pledge, and I asked all the Democratic candidates in the race to join me. I think voters are tired of mudslinging and attack ads. While I don’t believe my opponents in this race would participate in such despicable tactics, the Clean Campaign Pledge gives all of us an opportunity to promise that we will talk about the issues.

To read the entire Clean Campaign Pledge, click here. Below is an excerpt from the pledge:

As Democratic primary candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives in North Carolina’s 10th Congressional District, we hereby agree that the people of this district deserve a positive campaign. They deserve a campaign on the issues most important to them – not one full of cheap, divisive attacks.

Bad legislation further exposed:

The legislation also would eliminate a requirement that charter schools have at least 65 students, said Fisher, who represents Buncombe. “Home-schoolers through Senate Bill 8 can now charter their own schools and draw resources from those charter public schools now in existence,” she said.

If you think that's crazy, check out this bright idea puppet George Leef recently promoted as a cure for our education system: