The Labor Day weekend is almost upon us, marking the real beginning of the fall political campaigns, though the distortions paid for by special interest money are already filling up mailboxes in several legislative districts.

Real Jobs NC, a 527 bankrolled by PPD CEO Fred Eshelman, Art Pope, and the national Republican Party, was first out of the gate with fliers attacking a handful of Democratic legislators for raising taxes in 2009 to balance the budget while wasting money on what the ads claim are pork barrel projects.

The ads themselves are ridiculous. One attacks House Majority Leader Hugh Holliman for voting for a $25 million fishing pier in Nags Head that every Republican also supported. Another flier criticizes Rep. Chris Heagarty for voting for the 2009 budget that included a tax hike, but Heagarty wasn't even in the House when the budget passed. He was appointed to seat a few months later.

But facts aren't the point anyway. The point is to claim that Democrats should not have raised taxes to balance the budget and should have cut another $2 billion from education and human services instead, though no additional cuts are ever identified.

A spokesman for Real Jobs NC told the Wilmington Star-News that the group had no plans to produce ads supporting any candidates, only ones criticizing Democrats.

It is a campaign based on no, things that should not have been done with no suggestion about alternatives. That's the entire theme of the mailings and the core of strategy of the Republican Party.

Democrats raised your taxes and didn't need to, and they will do it again to solve the $3 billion budget shortfall facing the state next year. That's the mantra.

If you want to know how Republicans would have balanced the budget in the last two years without raising new revenue or how they will address the massive shortfall next year with cuts alone, you are out of luck.

There's certainly nothing in the slick Real Jobs NC fliers about that. Not much in any Republican candidates' campaign rhetoric either. Instead, many are talking about cutting taxes, pushing a $3 billion shortfall to $4 billion or more.

Almost all of the Republican legislative candidates have signed the absurd no-new taxes pledge. They want us to know they will cut and slash their way out of the current budget crisis.

But they refuse to tell us how. The voters deserve specifics, not talk about a pier that all the legislators supported.

Let's take $3 billion as the hole they have to fill, though it's almost certain to be larger and that doesn't include the tax cuts the Republicans are promising.

You could eliminate the entire community college system and you would still only be one-third of your way to filling the hole. Then abolish the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Cultural Resources, and Environment and Natural Resources and you would still have $1.6 billion to cut.

You could go at it another way, close all the campuses of the University of North Carolina, but that wouldn't get you to $3 billion either.

That's probably why the Republicans and the fliers from the groups supporting them don't provide any alternative budget plans. Because they know people don't want vital state institutions abolished or decimated.

They also know they cannot balance the budget without devastating core functions of the state unless they raise new revenue next year.

That may not bother some of the most zealous anti-government candidates running for the General Assembly. But they at least ought to have the decency to admit it and not hide behind meaningless and misleading corporate-funded campaign propaganda.