scharrison's blog

This money trail is well-marked:

In a Schedule 14a proxy filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tree.com reported paying McCrory $78,333 in cash and $62,500 in stock during 2009. That total compensation would be more than $140,000. McCrory still serves on the Tree.com board, and SEC reports indicate his total compensation is more than $100,000 each year.

Binker did a good job on this fact-check, although the presentation leaves something to be desired. The actual fact-checking comes after an analysis of who paid for the ad itself, and an impatient reader might just quit reading before the getting to the info quoted above. In which case, the fact-check itself becomes misleading. As to this finish:

And it's not a happy tale:

The state currently lists all water bodies in the state as contaminated by mercury. The N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources is drafting a plan to quantify sources of mercury such as power plants and sewage treatment plants and propose steps to reduce mercury in North Carolina waterways. Having such a plan will make it easier to press other states that contribute to North Carolina’s pollution problem to cut mercury pollution, officials say.

If DENR is really serious about reducing mercury emissions, refusing Titan Cement's permits would be a no-brainer. That one plant alone will increase atmospheric mercury releases in the state by over 10%. A short list of fish not to eat:

Stepping up to fight undue influence by corporations:

Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia are backing Montana in its fight to prevent the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision from being used to strike down state laws restricting corporate campaign spending.

The entity behind this attack on states' rights is (of course) a Republican-approved, oil & gas-funded, astroturf-carpeted organization called the American Tradition Partnership, which has been waging war against clean, renewable energy for some time now. I'll let Sue Sturgis from Facing South elucidate further:

When the truth begins to hurt too much, send in the lawyers:

In the memo to stations, Foley & Lardner, a Washington law firm representing the McCrory campaign, said the ad is filled with “egregious and false statements” about the former Charlotte mayor. “Unless you stop airing the ad immediately,” the firm wrote, “we will seek all legal remedies to force the ad off the air.”

The ad is centered around Myers Park Pat's association with foreclosure specialist Tree.com while he served as Mayor of Charlotte:

Big government Republicans put the squeeze on cities over annexation:

Both bills are aimed directly at five cities, one of which is Wilmington, that challenged last year's bill that made it virtually impossible for cities to take in territory that has developed around the outskirts. They also impose long waiting periods – one of the bills would make it 12 years – before a city can attempt another involuntary annexation of the same area.

These unincorporated developments sort of remind me of a tick on a dog's back: The tick couldn't survive without the dog, but the dog gets nothing in return except a sore neck.

And it could be short yet painful:

This year legislators are taking on what promise to be contentious issues, ranging from “fracking” for natural gas, competing proposals to ensure that our students get a good education and oldies but goodies such as annexation and Voter ID, a solution in search of a problem.

And they're also going to be plugging a $200 million hole in Medicaid funding, which in GOP-ville will probably entail cutting Medicaid spending or putting malnourished children on a diet. Also, from the Twitter:

If you can't prove lawbreaking without breaking the law yourself, maybe you're tripping down the wrong path:

Zbigniew Gorzkowski is registered to vote in North Carolina, the film shows. Project Veritas acquired his September 21, 2007 voter registration form and provided a copy to TheDC. On May 8 the workers at Gorzkowski’s assigned North Carolina polling place offered his ballot to an actor in the film who gave Gorzkowski’s name while hidden-camera video rolled.

And here's the law that was broken by these Republican fiction artists:

Sometimes doing what's right costs money:

Restoring lost funding to education and health care programs is at the center of a budget plan released today in Raleigh by Together NC, a coalition of 120 organizations from around the state. The proposal includes raising the state sales tax by a full penny and creating an additional upper-income tax bracket for North Carolina households making more than $1 million a year.

I have absolutely zero confidence that Berger & Tillis will pay any attention to these ideas, since progress is apparently a dirty word amongst their followers. But the planning must be done anyway.