The two hats of Myers Park Pat

Straddling the fence of political ideology:

the right wing of his party seems to have real problems with McCrory. No one knows whether he could actually move enough to the right to lasso support from hard-line conservatives. If former Charlotte City Councilman, and longtime local conservative leader, Don Reid had his way, someone would challenge McCrory from the right in the primary.

But neither Don Reid nor the Don't-Tread-On-Me flag wavers have the money or the guts to challenge the corporate puppetmasters who manage the purse strings:

Ah yes, the Koch brothers and Art Pope. These days, you can't get around them. You certainly can't discuss the GOP's new majorities in several state legislatures without including them. To critics like Parker, it seems obvious that McCrory found out who is running the N.C. GOP these days, and jumped on their bandwagon. As is the case in many other states, the GOP in North Carolina is being reconfigured by an influx of money and advice from groups with ties to billionaire industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch (pronounced Coke). They control various foundations and have contributed to an array of conservative and libertarian causes for at least 30 years. The Kochs' most prominent, influential group is Americans For Prosperity (AFP), which progressives jokingly call "Americans For the Prosperous" because of its strong pro-business, anti-union activities. Since President Obama's election, AFP and other Koch-funded groups have grown rapidly. They helped organize the 2009 Tax Day Tea Party protests; financed conservative anti-health-reform events and other Tea Party organizations; and led the charge in Wisconsin where the GOP-led government launched sweeping moves to get rid of public employee unions. They held seminars for supportive state governors in which they developed plans for coordinated lawmaking strategies in those states, resulting in many GOP-run state legislatures pushing strikingly similar agendas in 2011. The AFP North Carolina chapter's 2011 legislative agenda, to give just one example, is very close to the final list of what the N.C. General Assembly actually passed.

In North Carolina, the main link to AFP is millionaire Art Pope, a Raleigh retail magnate who is on the group's national board of directors, and whose family foundation is AFP's second-largest contributor. Pope's foundation also provides around 90 percent of the income for think tanks and policy groups such as the Civitas Institute and the John Locke Foundation, which promote a libertarian/conservative agenda in the state. Art Pope's organizations and family members also poured $2.2 million into 22 N.C. races, making the GOP's 2010 takeover of the legislature that much easier.

I'm issuing a challenge, right now, to those Tea Partiers who think they've got some political clout: Show me the money. Show me you can put forward a real Conservative to contest McCrory's coronation, or roll up your flags and go home.