The silence on the Right

Don't spend too much time looking for the latest study about North Carolina's legal climate on the websites of right-wing candidates or anti-government think tanks that keep telling us how uncompetitive the state is as they clamor for tort reform to further restrict the rights of people who are injured.

The study conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute of Legal Reform ranks all 50 states on "how reasonable and balanced the states' tort liability systems are perceived to be by U.S. business."

And as dubious as that sounds, the results are worth noting. North Carolina ranked 17th in the country, well ahead of Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, every other Southern state except Virginia. That doesn't sound very anti-business.

Maybe that's why the study has been virtually ignored by the anti-everything crowd. It doesn't fit into their talking points. Imagine if the results were the opposite. The propaganda machines on Right-Wight Avenue would be on overdrive.

Condemning and relying on the media

Senate Minority Leader Phil Berger told the Insider this week that one of the reasons Senate Republicans had to create their own website to get their message out is because the big media organizations in the state have a liberal bias.

That would be the Republican website that includes links to all sorts of stories on WRAL-TV, The News & Observer of Raleigh, the Winston-Salem Journal, and other state media outlets.

What is Berger thinking, subjecting his followers to all that left-wing bias?

Under the Locke Dome

Speaking of the media, it almost seemed like the folks at the N&O who write Under the Dome needed a day off recently and let the folks at the Locke Foundation take over.

That's about the only way to explain Saturday's Dome with the headline "Locke linguists demystify plannerspeak," which printed several entries from what Dome called the Locker's "conservative's glossary to the jargon that city planners are known to throw around. "

One of the entries that Dome deemed worthy of reprinting was the Locker's definition of affordable housing as "extortion scheme to force homebuilders to sell their houses at below market prices."

That's absurd and offensive, not demystifying.

And if that wasn't enough, Dome was happy to steer readers to the Locke site to read more of the right-wing diatribe presented as a glossary.

Usually groups have to buy ad space for that kind of presentation.

It's worse than you thought

Don't keep reading if you are already a little depressed by the level of the political debate these days or worried about the effect of all the distortions repeated daily by Fox News and the other parts of the Right-Wing machine.

The latest Harris Poll finds that things may be worse than you think.

One of the questions asked in the survey that was conducted in the first week of March was this.

"On another subject, here are some things people have said about President Obama. Please indicate for each whether you believe it is true or false."

Forty percent said they thought Obama was a socialist, 67 percent of Republicans did. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans said that Obama was a Muslim and 45 percent of the GOP believes that he was not born in the United States and therefore is not eligible to be president.

Forty-five percent of Republicans believe Obama is the "domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitution speaks of" and 38 percent say he doing "many of the things Hitler did."

And if all that is not enough to make you shudder, 24 percent of Republicans actually told pollsters that it is possible that Obama may be the "Anti-Christ."

Happy Friday.