Tim Tyson

Lifted from comments on another thread:

We need to keep the protests and civil disobedience building week after week; the session will end, by which time this legislature needs to be famous from sea to shining sea. That will bring the Chamber of Commerce types, banking, real estate, and much of the economic interests in the state down on the Republicans like a hammer. Before the protests, they were sitting on their hands and waiting for their huge tax cuts. Now they can see that NC is in danger of being--or worse still, seeming--like Alabama and Mississippi. Large sectors of the economy depend upon NC's more progressive South image. Money is the mother's milk of politics, and we need to raise a lot of it for the coming fight.

Lifted from a comment on another thread:

The WRAL poll that said only 87 per cent of African American voters supported President Obama was as silly as the stories in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, PBS News Hour and NPR, among others, that asserted that black voters in North Carolina were deserting the president over the marriage equality issue. James Protzman was mistaken, too, that the Times story cut to the heart of the election in North Carolina. All of these narratives were rooted merely in what the authors "knew" that they knew without actually doing real research; the poll, of course, did involve research--really badly flawed research. I will never even bother to read another WRAL poll.

The real story

Shrewd politicos in North Carolina knew certain things. For example, African American registration was much higher than in 2008. It certainly looked like turnout would be up, too, and it was. Early voting quickly made it clear that this would be the case; as I called around to check with friends about how things were going, everyone noted the long lines at early voting sites, lines that were sometimes nearly all-black and nearly always heavily black. To go to such places and walk up the line saying hello to people was to realize that none of these people were standing in line to vote for Mitt Romney.

In recent days, longserving Democrat, James W. Crawford of Oxford in Granville County has attained a new and shocking level of notoriety as the ringleader of the infamous Party of Five collaborators who voted with the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. The poisonous fruit of this nefarious conspiracy will impose a disastrous budget featuring draconian cuts of $900 million to the University of North Carolina as well as slashing funds for Planned Parenthood and Medicaid in what many now see as a political pact with the devil.

While the Party rank and file is stunned to see senior Democrat Crawford openly conspiring with Republicans to topple the bright, shining edifice of public instruction built by progressive Democratic leaders in the mold of Terry Sanford and Jim Hunt, little is generally known about his political ideology and his personal background. Crawford's background is a fascinating case of political devilry.