Another week has passed since the last Friday Follies and that means another legislative candidate has misrepresented the budget passed by the General Assembly last year. This time it is Republican Senator Harris Blake, running for reelection in district that includes Moore and Harnett Counties.

Blake says he wants to continue to focus on reducing state spending if he is sent back to the Senate by the voters. Not an uncommon campaign promise, even if it is a little vague. But Blake also told his local newspaper, the Pilot, that lawmakers spent the entire budget surplus this past session.

For the millionth time, they did not spend the entire $2 billion surplus. In fact, more than a third of it was not spent and instead paid for $200 million in tax cuts, a $325 million deposit in the state’s rainy day fund, and an allocation of $225 million into a fund that will be used to pay to repair and renovate state buildings.

It is one thing when someone with no legislative experience makes incorrect claims. But when an incumbent Senator says that the General Assembly spent the entire surplus, it means he either wasn’t paying attention to the budget that was debated before him, or he is intentionally misrepresenting the facts. Either way it is disturbing.

If any legislators or candidates are reading this, complain all you want about how the money was spent or what other taxes should have been cut or raised. But repeat after me, the General Assembly did not spend the entire surplus.

It might also help if reporters across the state thought to challenge the next candidate who claims the entire surplus was spent. It shouldn’t be that hard. Just a simple “what about the $200 million that paid for tax cuts?” is all it would take.

Sadly, Blake’s inane claim about the surplus wasn’t the most troubling campaign statement of the week. That award goes to Marge Carpenter from Waynesville, a former Republican member of the House running against Democrat Phil Haire from Jackson County.

Carpenter is making immigration a key part of her campaign, well demagoguery about immigration anyway. The Asheville Citizen-Times reports that Carpenter said that children of illegal immigrants are enrolling in schools with falsified immigration records and “spreading diseases.”

To the paper’s credit, the reporter pushed Carpenter on her claim and she couldn’t come up with any examples of immigrant students using falsified records. Her response was well, it’s possible that it is happening.  That clears it up.

Turns out Carpenter is getting her “information” from the radical right-wing group Americans for Legal Immigration. The director of that group told the paper that he is not sure he has said he has proof that kids are using fake documents to get into school, but he says that illegal immigrants are responsible for the spread of disease nationwide.  No proof there either of course.

It is not disease that is being spread by the right-wing groups and the candidates, it is hate and fear-mongering and Carpenter ought to ashamed of herself.  Good for the Citizen-Times for challenging her assertions, but their headline writer needs rethink the choice of terms. The story ran with a headline “Candidates tap into dissent over illegals.”

That’s an odd and offensive term for a human being, an illegal. Maybe if papers decide to use that term they should also have a name for people who spread vicious misinformation about undocumented immigrants. How about “the reprehensibles?”

Another odd take this week on a commonly used phrase, the grassroots. Most people take that to mean average people in a community, everyday folks, not exactly the kind of people who give big money to political campaigns.

Baron’s Online has a different view. In a recent article about the upcoming election, the publication said it based its election predictions on which candidate had the most money in the bank because that is “a sign of superior grass-roots support.”

Having hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank is a lot of things, but it generally doesn’t mean a candidate has a lot of grassroots support. It means he or she has made a lot of phone calls to wealthy donors instead of talking to grassroots folks.  

It might mean the candidate has gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars from political committees set up by their political party, or has even written a personal check to his or her own campaign for a few hundred thousand dollars.  None of which has much to do with the world the rest of us in the grassroots live in.