Fitzsimon File

Quite a week for Follies.  The state parses words about killing people, , a prominent Democrat thinks philosophical purity about property rights is more important than staying alive, the Governor’s office thinks getting more poor people to play the lottery is best way to help education, and the Chair of the State Republican Party seems to think that schools are pork barrel projects.

Reports in the News and Observer this week reveal that state officials appear to have defied a federal judge’s order in carrying out two executions last year. After lawyers challenged the state’s lethal injection procedure, Judge Malcolm Howard allowed the executions to take place based on the state’s plan to have a physician and registered nurse monitor the inmate’s consciousness using a machine that tracks brain wave activity.

The paper reports that Central Prison Warden Marvin Polk said in a deposition that the physician had no role in reading the brain wave monitor. Whoops. Not exactly what the judge had in mind or what state officials promised would happen.

Even worse is the response given by the Attorney General’s office, who said after Howard’s ruling that the brain wave monitor would be “located such that it can be observed” by the medical professionals. 

Polk now admits that the doctor wasn’t monitoring anything, clearly in violation of what Judge Howard intended. Maybe the Attorney General’s office thinks that having the monitor and the doctor in the same room counts somehow. Or maybe they are trying so hard to execute people, they are willing to parse every word looking for a loophole. Maybe it all depends on what “is” really means.

 

Still no vote in the House on a bill by Rep. Hugh Holliman that would protect people from the dangers of secondhand smoke in restaurants, bars, and workplaces. The smoking ban passed a House Committee last week but has not yet come to the floor as supporters are still counting their votes.

The opposition continues to claim the bill is a vast invasion of private property rights, that business owners should be able to decide if they will allow potentially deadly secondhand smoke to make its way into the lungs of non smoking employees and customers.

Reportedly, some Republican opponents of the bill are scrambling to find some way to challenge the scientific evidence of the harmful effects of the smoke. That ought to take them a while. The first call they ought to make is to the U.S. Surgeon General, appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, who said last year after an extensive review of the data that no exposure to secondhand smoke is safe.

But it’s not just Republican House members balking at protecting people’s lives. Democrat Nelson Cole told his local paper recently that "the most important thing is this is a personal property rights issue, it doesn’t have anything to do with smoking.”

It has everything to do with smoking and the risk posed to people who may not even be aware of the dangers they are being exposed to. It makes you wonder if Cole thinks forcing a bar owner to have a safe electrical system has nothing to do with the risk of fire and is infringing on property rights too.

No one is trying to erode private property rights. People want their government to protect the public health in specific cases. Seems like ending exposure to deadly secondhand smoke would be an easy call.

 

Much has been written this week about the one-year anniversary of the lottery in North Carolina. Many of the stories have focused on the fact that lottery sales feel well short of projections. Others have mentioned a recent report by the John Locke Foundation that shows that people in poorer areas of the state are playing the lottery more than people in wealthier areas.  That’s all true and disturbing enough.

But Governor Mike Easley isn’t satisfied and wants to convince more people to play and is recommending increasing the percentage of lottery revenues that goes to prizes and decreasing the percentage that goes to education. In lottery logic, that is supposed to mean more net money for schools.
 
The problem of course is that the lottery was sold to us all as something we had to do because people living close to our borders with other states were playing lotteries in those state and supporting their schools. Easley said that money should stay here and support education in North Carolina.

Now that is apparently not good enough. Easley just doesn’t want to stop people from crossing the border to buy a lottery ticket, he wants more people in North Carolina to play the lottery and wants people who already play to play more often. 

All for the schools of course. A spokesman for Easley said this week about the efforts to increase lottery sales that "The state needs more money for education and this is the best way to get it.”

The best way to get it, convincing more poor people to play the lottery because you don’t want to make the tough decisions to raise enough revenue to adequately fund education?

That doesn’t sound much like building Easley’s “One North Carolina.”  

 

Whether you agree with them or not, Republicans in the General Assembly have been doing a much better job this session getting their message out through the media and recent stories have detailed the improvement.

The lack of feuding among Republican lawmakers has helped their cause, as has the slow response by legislative Democrats to calls for further reform in the aftermath of the guilty pleas by former House Speaker Jim Black.

The State Republican Party, however, still seems to be struggling with the facts in a rush to come up with new ways to attack Democrats. And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that every Republican Party press release misidentifies their political opponents as the Democrat Party.

There is no Democrat Party in North Carolina. It is still the Democratic Party and the folks at GOP headquarters know it, but apparently can’t help themselves.

The latest release from GOP Chair Linda Daves blasts Democrats in the General Assembly for introducing “legislative bills that will levy a home transfer tax on home sales to increase government revenue for more and more pork barrel projects.”  It is not clear what other kind of bill members of the General Assembly can introduce other than legislative bills, but maybe Daves knows of some.
 
And while the Association of Realtors probably appreciates the help fighting the transfer tax, even the Realtors haven’t charged that it would be used to fund pork barrel projects. Most counties that are seeking the ability to consider the transfer tax want to use the money to build schools and pay for other essential services that the state’s exploding growth demands.

Maybe the real message is that Daves thinks schools are pork barrel projects.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.