It was a banner week for the folks on Right Wing Avenue as they provided an unusually high number of misstatements and factual errors, even for them, combined with several breathless and sweeping claims that deserve a mention too.

Chad Adams at the Locke Foundation weighs in on the effort by homebuilders and realtors to convince state lawmakers to overturn new sensible stormwater runoff regulations approved by the Environmental Management Commission.

You can guess which side Adams is on. Here's a hint—it's the side of the big money boys who always want more profits, regardless of the effects on the water or land or quality of life in Eastern North Carolina.

That's not much of a surprise, but Adams reveals in a recent blog post that the goal of environmentalists is really "the eradication of freedom."

Wow, who knew that folks dedicated to preserving rivers and streams and protecting our drinking water are really trying to enslave us all? Nice of him to let us know.

Next up is Max Borders with the Pope Civitas Institute, one of Adams' partners in right-wing radical ramblings. Borders simply can't deal with the success of Charlotte's light rail system that has won over many of its fiercest opponents, like former County Commissioner Jim Puckett.

Puckett help lead the move to repeal the local half-cent sales tax for transit, an effort that voters soundly defeated in November. Ridership on the first leg of the Charlotte light rail system continues to outpace projections, prompting Puckett to tell the Observer that the system is doing better than he expected and that his "concern was whether we would have a white elephant, and it doesn't seem we do."

Border, who described light rail as a fetish in a panel discussion a few weeks ago, remains rabid in his opposition, this week blasting a column by the Charlotte Observer's Jack Betts that discusses the success of the city's light rail.

Borders is angry that Betts' article was "biased," but Betts is a columnist and an editorial writer. He is paid to have a point of view and express it. Borders works himself into a lather about Betts, trying to use him as an example of the elites that Borders claims are the real beneficiaries of public transportation.

Borders says that "maybe Jack Betts is rich and lives in South Charlotte. But he has forgotten about the less affluent people in Mint Hill who're bankrolling his boondoggle." Maybe not Max, Betts lives in Raleigh and has for a long time. 

Those pesky facts never seem to get in the way of the desperate attempts of folks on the right to disguise their market fundamentalism as concern for working class.

In a recent television appearance, New York Times Columnist David Brooks tried to portray Senator Barack Obama as an elitist, saying that "Obama's problem is he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who could go into an Applebee's salad bar, and people think he fits in naturally there."

But Applebee's doesn't have salad bars in its restaurants. Sounds like Brooks doesn't fit in too naturally in them either.

Both the Locke Foundation and the Civitas Institute blasted the House budget this week. The Lockers think the budget spends too much, a criticism they level every year. One specific complaint is that the budget expands the children's health care program. Horror of horrors.

The report also points out that the "government would literally grow" under the House budget because it creates 329 new state positions. The Lockers don't mention that 223 of the jobs are in mental hospitals that almost everyone agrees are vastly understaffed.

Another 30 of the new jobs are at the state's chronically understaffed juvenile detention centers. More are created in the court system too. You'd think that taking care of the mentally ill and keeping communities safe wouldn't be so troubling to the market fundamentalists.

One of the complaints by the Civitasers is that the House budget "raids" the Tobacco Trust Fund and the Health and Wellness Trust Fund by directing $5 million from each to the General Fund.

The funds were set up along with the Golden Leaf Foundation to allocate money the state receives from the national tobacco settlement. The folks on the right have long argued that the settlement money should have all been directed to the General Fund, and now they are complaining that lawmakers are doing it small doses.

Finally, a puzzling reaction to the House budget by Senate Minority Leader Phil Berger, who said the problem with the House plan is that "there are too few Republican initiatives" in it.

Somebody forgot to tell the majority of House Republicans who voted for the budget that it was so bad. But Berger himself seems confused. He praises the budget for spending less than budgets of prior years, and then complains that it doesn't do enough for the courts or the state's mental health system, though he hasn't introduced or co-sponsored legislation to invest more in either area.

Can't have it both ways. Well you can, in your own press release or if you work in those backward thinking tanks on Right Wing Avenue.