CNN: North Carolina lawmakers shame state. TalkingDog: No shit.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/29/opinion/barber-north-carolina-protest/index.htmlIn the first 50 days of this session alone, the General Assembly and McCrory cut the earned income tax credit for more than 900,000 poor and working people. They rejected federal funding to expand Medicaid to cover 500,000 North Carolinians without health insurance. They slashed state unemployment benefits and rejected federally funded Emergency Unemployment Compensation to 170,000 laid-off workers. This vicious war on the poor will devastate hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians who are already suffering. And with no checks on the Republican hold on the legislature and governorship, these laws are only the beginning.
Piling further indignities on the poor, they also want to require people applying for temporary assistance or benefits to submit to criminal background checks, and force applicants to a job training program for low-income workers to take a drug test, for which they have to pay.
Now the legislature wants to increase and expand taxes on groceries, haircuts and prescription drugs. They're even taking aim at poor children with a bill to lower the income requirement for North Carolina's prekindergarten program, making it off limits to nearly 30,000 children who would have previously qualified.
Perhaps most terrifying is that the politicians who have seized control are trying to rig the state's election rules, seeking to remain in power far after this legislative session. In their kitchen sink approach to voter suppression, they have pushed bills to require strict forms of photo ID for voting, repeal same-day registration, cut early voting from 17 days to six and ban early voting on Sundays.
More, much more at link.
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It's all those black welfare queens just ruining everything for the rest of us! The gospel truth, of course!!!!! I must have been having a brain fart or something...
They're doing as much damage as possible before being kicked to the curb.
And that's "the bright side."
-Laelth
a good look at ALEC 
http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2013/05/17/shining-sunlight-on-a-secretive-lobby-group/
Shining sunlight on a secretive lobby group
Published on May 17th, 2013
Written by: Nancy MacLean
<snip>
As a U. S. historian, I am deeply alarmed at the growing power of this secretive body, founded by the longtime right-wing strategist Paul Weyrich in 1973 and bankrolled by some of the largest corporations in America.
<snip>
Breathtakingly unethical and cynical in the extreme, the effort worked. It helped build a mass base for the Republican right. As the religious right turned citizens against one another through a deliberately amped-up “culture war,” ALEC quietly built a powerhouse out of the limelight.
Today, as we have witnessed in North Carolina, the group can move the same legislation in dozens of states at once. In neighboring Virginia, Weyrich’s and Falwell’s home state, ALEC’s minions in the General Assembly have been even more audacious: as the New York Times reported in February of this year, Virginia GOP legislators introduced more than 50 ALEC-proposed laws, “many practically word for word.”
<snip>
Our nation has never seen a bolder private bid to transform public life—even in the heyday of corporate influence, the Gilded Age. Every school child (at least in public schools) encounters the irrefutable evidence that this period between the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1877 and the progressive reforms of the early 1900s was the nadir of American democracy; a period in which corporations controlled both major parties, virtually ran the Congress, and produced corruption on a scale that left even brilliant humorists like Mark Twain at a loss for words. What most people today don’t understand, though, is that this dismal era was the golden age of the ALEC version of “liberty.”
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