Author: Tom Sullivan

Stand for something!

by Tom Sullivan

“The Republican message was ‘We’re not Obama,’ no substance whatsoever. What was the Democrats’ message? ‘Oh, we’re not either.’ You cannot win if you are afraid! Where was the Democratic party? You gotta stand for something if you’re gonna win!” – Howard Dean on Meet the Press, November 9, 2014

That message from Howard Dean has stuck with me ever since. After so many episodes of yelling at Democrats on TV to “Stand for something!” it was validating. At long last, are they taking Dean’s advice? This from the Guardian about the aftermath of recent budget fight:

“I’m walking out of this meeting feeling very proud of my caucus because there was moral clarity, there was conviction”, said freshman California congressman Jared Huffman at the height of the great Democratic revolt of 2014. “I had the feeling a few moments ago that we stood for something. I hope it holds.”

Less than 60 minutes later, after that hopeful party meeting wrapped up last Thursday evening, such optimism already seemed naive. Backroom pressure from the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, had quickly killed off an attempt by Democrats in the House of Representatives to draw a line in the sand against a federal budget that favoured Wall Street and wealthy donors.

So don’t hold your breath. Fifty-seven Democrats eventually joined Republicans in passing the spending bill.

There’s the usual speculation in the article about a presidential run by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, of course, but maybe more. Even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi joined Warren’s revolt against the spending bill last week. “[S]omething intangible snapped,” among Democrats, writes the Guardian’s Dan Roberts:

Most surprising of all was the withering disdain for the White House expressed by Pelosi, a usually staunch ally of Obama, of whom his press secretary said the next day: “It is hard to think of anybody that the president has worked with more closely or more successfully on Capitol Hill.”

And yet, Pelosi sided with the Senate’s Warren against the White House on this one. After January 3 when Republicans take control of the Senate too, it only gets worse.

Nevertheless, the future success of more reliable renegades like Senator Warren depends on their being able to capitalise on simmering party divisions like this – arguably in much the same way that the Tea Party has leveraged power among Republicans so successfully in recent years.

Warren and her new-found friends in the House also have the advantage of being able to team up with conservatives on the right on the Republican party when it suits them, something that Pelosi demonstrated to great effect when she almost brought down the budget bill.

As we found here after Republican-led redistricting, there’s nothing quite like being outnumbered with your back to the wall for motivating people to fight. Maybe Democrats will even take a few more stands. And about damned time.

You: Wall Street’s human shield
by Tom Sullivan

During a similar period of prolonged, public face-palming over Washington idiocy, somebody asked: Where’s Tom Lehrer when you really need him? Well at 86, the singer-satirist is no longer performing. Thankfully, we have Matt Taibbi, back at Rolling Stone.

Taibbi gives the Citigroup provision in the “Cromnibus” budget bill a bit of the “vampire squid” treatment. Senator Elizabeth Warren made headlines on Friday night when the Massachusetts Democrat read aloud the title of the Dodd-Frank rule the Citigroup-sponsored provision aimed to repeal: “PROHIBITION AGAINST FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS OF SWAPS ENTITIES.” And then proceeded to vivisect it in her speech on the Senate floor, warning that passage means more corporate welfare in the form of taxpayer-funded bailouts. It is a provision neither Republicans nor Democrats would own up to inserting, neither would defend, yet would not stand up in numbers to remove lest it precipitate a government shutdown. Neither will the White House veto it.

Taibbi writes (emphasis mine):

There’s no logical argument against the provision. The banks only want it because they want to use your bank accounts as a human shield to protect their dangerous gambling activities.

Or maybe us as human sacrifices. The vote to pass the Continuing Resolution without stripping the Citigroup provision proved Warren’s point that the original Dodd-Frank bill properly should have broken Citigroup into pieces:

Think about this kind of power. A financial institution has become so big and so powerful that it can hold the entire country hostage. That alone is a reason enough for us break them up. Enough is enough.

Warren reinforced my point as well: What vestigial meaning has the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers when it is all the same power?

Taibbi gets it too, albeit more colorfully:

Conservatives for welfare, and liberals for big business. It doesn’t make sense unless we’re not really dealing with any divided collection of conservatives or liberals, and are instead talking about one nebulous mass of influence, money and interests. I think of it as a single furiously-money-collecting/favor-churning oligarchical Beltway party, a thing that former Senate staffer and author Jeff Connaughton calls “The Blob.”

INDESCRIBABLE… INDESTRUCTIBLE! NOTHING CAN STOP IT! At least, that’s what Big Money would have us believe.

Responding to Warren’s third speech in a week criticizing financial deregulation, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham suggested Warren and other critics of the measure were not mature enough to run Washington. “Don’t follow her lead,” Graham warned the Senate. “She’s the problem.”

Uh-huh.

Washington critics may be a dime a dozen, but for Villagers cozy with the money brokers, Warren is the most irritating kind. Everyone knows she’s right.

StateWrek: The Next Generation

by Tom Sullivan

Just a quick thought or two about tactics. I ran across yet another Koch-funded astroturf website this week aimed at Millennials. It was a spinoff of Generation Opportunity. Plus, there was an article featuring an eighteen year-old Republican legislator from West Virginia. It’s StateWrek: The Next Generation.

I have written extensively on the right’s push to promote photo identity cards by hyping the threat of fraud at the polls. The GOP “plowed cash into state legislative efforts in 2010” to wrest control of redistricting. We’ve seen the results of the Republican State Leadership Committee’s (RSLC) REDMAP efforts up close and personal here. The result is, as Charlie Pierce calls it, the newly insane state of North Carolina.

And if you really want to get into the weeds, there is the continuing saga of the RNC’s efforts to void the 1982 consent decree forbidding it from engaging in election protection efforts in the states without preclearance from a federal judge. They apparently want, you know, FREEDOM to use caging lists and to place off-duty cops wearing armbands reading “National Ballot Security Task Force” outside polling places in minority precincts.

With an aging base and facing unfavorable demographics, Republicans aren’t looking for a silver bullet to keep them politically viable. They know there isn’t one. They’re investing in a scattershot of initiatives that buy them a fraction of a point here, a couple of percentage points there, a slice of this demographic, a judgeship or two, etc. Pretty soon any demographic or coalition advantage Democrats think they have going forward is gone.

They’re not looking for a silver bullet. They’re using silver buckshot.

A 21st-century lynching?
by Tom Sullivan

Questions surrounding the August hanging death of Lennon Lacy, 17, of Bladenboro, NC have been percolating since the summer. With fall election campaigns and higher-profile deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police, the black teenager’s hanging death, quickly ruled a suicide, went largely unnoticed outside North Carolina. But Lacy’s family did not accept the official conclusion that the youth killed himself. Lacy was found hanging by a dog leash wearing someone else’s shoes. Two sizes too small:

Days after he was buried, Lennon’s grave was defiled – an act of vandalism that Lennon’s family believes supports their claim that he was killed in a racially-motivated homicide.

After calls from the North Carolina NAACP and Lacy’s family, the FBI has stepped in:

The FBI will investigate the case of Lennon Lacy, the black teenager found hanging in August from a swing set in North Carolina, whose parents have disputed the official ruling that he killed himself and asked whether his death amounted to a modern-day lynching.

It was confirmed on Friday that a federal agent has been assigned to investigate what happened to Lacy, 17, a budding high-school football prospect found hanging in the middle of a predominantly white trailer park in Bladenboro, North Carolina, on 29 August. The move follows a formal request from the Lacy family and from the North Carolina branch of the NAACP to the US attorney asking for the federal authorities to throw their weight behind the investigation.

Lacy’s mother, Claudia, wants answers. She tells the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington that her son was involved with an older white woman. Black men were lynched for less back in the day.

Moral Mondays organizer, NC NAACP President Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, welcomed the FBI investigation:

We are glad to hear that the request made by the North Carolina NAACP and the family of Lennon Lacy for a federal investigation has been accepted. There must be a thorough investigation. There are too many questions and contradictions raised by our independent pathology report and stories in the community about the facts, quick conclusions, and how the death scene was not protected to leave this case unprobed and unevaluated.

I have never been to Bladenboro, NC, but have spent enough decades in the Carolinas to know about other out-of-the-way places such as this stretch of country road in South Carolina. The locals prominently display these cultural artifacts on poles right beside the road to let outsiders know just who is whom and what is what. My guess is the Lacy family wouldn’t feel too at home there.

Alas, Babylon
by Tom Sullivan

Daniel 5:27 (KJV)

TEKEL, thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

This morning the estimable teacherken weighs his leaders in the balances and finds them wanting. Having watched the release of the torture report this week and the budget vote in the House last night, he is sickened:

Tom Harkin is supposed to be a Liberal. Then why in Hell has he moved to pay off education loan lenders by cutting funding for Pell Grants?

If Obama is opposed to torture, why are not there criminal investigations of the CIA, starting with the destruction of the waterboarding tapes, a destruction that was NOT properly authorized even within the CIA?

If this administration and the Democratic leadership of the House is in theory committed to the environment, why agree to a bill that slashes even further funding for environmental initiatives?

If this administration and the Democratic leadership of the House believes in real fiscal responsibility, why agree to a bill that slashes the enforcement budget of the Internal Revenue Service?

I refuse to watch TV right now.

If the Liberal and Progressive Senators will not filibuster this bill, then they have succumbed to the terrorism of Wall Street and the Tea Party. The Republicans not only take hostages, they get Democrats to acquiesce in their slaughter.

You have to wonder how much longer oligarchs can continue to strip America to the walls to enrich themselves before the walls collapse on them. Wikipedia’s explanation of “the hand writing on the wall” from the Book of Daniel is a negative event “easily predictable based on the current situation.” Teacherken wonders whether we are seeing “the last gasp of an Ancien Regime before the guillotines made their appearance.”

This week we watched good, “churchgoing” neighbors defend morally abhorrent, clearly illegal practices contrary to everything they learned at their parents’ knees and everything their faith declaims. We watched as politicians and “good men of business” voted for relaxed rules that Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned will guarantee more bank failures requiring taxpayer bailouts of the very same banks We the People bailed out last time. Whatever happened to moral hazard? teacherken wonders.

But I wonder something else. What are the long-term effects on the psyche of spending 40-60 hours per week for decades on end working within an economic system that values the interests of amoral artificial persons above those of flesh-and-blood ones? Has anyone done a study on that? (Not that anyone of means would pay for it.) Do we really think a few hours in church each week provide a counterbalance? I submit instead we are breeding “persons” who would sell you the air you breathe if they could control how it gets to your nose. And if you cannot afford to buy “their” air? You should have worked harder, planned better, and saved more.

“The thing is,” Ken says of events this week, “when I get sickened I get determined.”

Cynics find it easy to sit on the sidelines and not get their nice, white vinyl souls besmirched by contact with either of the major parties. When such people ask why I do what I do, I tell them if I’m not in the fight I feel like roadkill. And I don’t like feeling like roadkill. I may still get run over, but I don’t feel like roadkill. Not terribly idealistic, but there it is.

I used to be a victim. I’m not anymore.

Becoming them
by Tom Sullivan

A few years back I wrote an op-ed about extraordinary rendition flights and the case of Maher Arar, asking readers whether the Bush administration was fighting terrorists, breeding them, or becoming them. In a case of mistaken identity, Arar had been detained at Kennedy International while changing planes on his way home to Canada. He was taken by police in front of his family and sent to Syria where he was tortured for months. He’s been on Twitter recently for some reason:

"4 of the 20 cells at the facility included a bar across the top of the cell"- #TortureReport. A copycat of cell I was detained in in Syria— Maher Arar (@ArarMaher) December 10, 2014

Mistaken identity as a terror suspect'd keep u in a Syrian dungeon 4months on end. Not any different in CIA-run prisons as in #TortureReport— Maher Arar (@ArarMaher) December 10, 2014

Given the release of the SSCI torture report and this news from the Guardian, I guess the answer to my original question was all of the above.

Abu Ahmed (nom de guerre), a jihadist with misgivings about the brutality of the so-called Islamist State, spoke with Martin Chulov about the inner workings of ISIS and the rise of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, at the Americans’ Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq:

“We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else,” he told me. “It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred metres away from the entire al-Qaida leadership.”

Baghdadi had inside “a darkness that he did not want to show other people,” Abu Ahmed explained. But he hid it well from the Americans.

Baghdadi also seemed to have a way with his captors. According to Abu Ahmed, and two other men who were jailed at Bucca in 2004, the Americans saw him as a fixer who could solve fractious disputes between competing factions and keep the camp quiet.

“But as time went on, every time there was a problem in the camp, he was at the centre of it,” Abu Ahmed recalled. “He wanted to be the head of the prison – and when I look back now, he was using a policy of conquer and divide to get what he wanted, which was status. And it worked.” By December 2004, Baghdadi was deemed by his jailers to pose no further risk and his release was authorised.

“He was respected very much by the US army,” Abu Ahmed said. “If he wanted to visit people in another camp he could, but we couldn’t. And all the while, a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.”

As Isis has rampaged through the region, it has been led by men who spent time in US detention centres during the American occupation of Iraq – in addition to Bucca, the US also ran Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport, and, for an ill-fated 18 months early in the war, Abu Ghraib prison on the capital’s western outskirts. Many of those released from these prisons – and indeed, several senior American officers who ran detention operations – have admitted that the prisons had an incendiary effect on the insurgency.

Mission accomplished, eh?

“Enough is enough”
by Tom Sullivan

After #TortureTuesday, I needed a break from thinking about rectal rehydration.

Here’s a link to video of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s keynote address to the “Managing the Economy” conference this week in Washington, D.C. The event was sponsored by Americans for Financial Reform, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Roosevelt Institute. (sorry, no embed; transcript here)

The speech is being called Warren’s sharpest rebuke to date of President Obama’s nomination of investment banker Antonio Weiss for Treasury’s undersecretary of domestic finance. It is another example of “the revolving door at its most dangerous” between Washington and Wall Street, Warren believes, and for a nominee unqualified for the job and from an industry already overrepresented in Washington. The Boston Globe cites an unnamed Treasury official as being unaware of “any prominent Wall Street officials currently serving at the department.”

While Warren spoke alone, she cited her own exprts.

Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin on Weiss’ qualifications:

“The shock of Mr. Weiss’s supporters that anyone would dare question his suitability reflects an unspoken assumption that anyone from Wall Street is of course expert in all things financial. That’s hooey.”

Quoting Sheila Bair, former head of the FDIC (a Republican) on the $20 million golden parachute from Weiss’ employer that supporters justify as necessary to induce Wall St. executives to serve in public policy positions:

[She] responded that “only in the Wonderland of Wall Street logic could one argue that this looks like anything other than a bribe.” End Quote. She went on: “We want people entering public service because they want to serve the public. Frankly, if they need a $20 million incentive, I’d rather they stay away.”

Warren concludes her case against the revolving door:

This is about building some counterpressure on the Wall Street bankers. Members of Congress, their staffs, and the regulatory agencies are going to hear the Wall Street perspective loud and clear, each and every minute of each and every day. That isn’t going to change. But we need a real mix of people in the room when decisions are made. When the President has an opportunity to decide who will be at the financial decision making table, he should think about who knows about the economics of job creation, about community banks and access to financing for small businesses, about who has the skills and determination to make sure that the biggest banks can’t take down our economy again.

The titans of Wall Street have succeeded in pushing government policies that made the megabanks rich beyond imagination, while leaving working families to struggle from payday to payday. So long as the revolving door keeps spinning, government policies will favor Wall Street over Main Street. I hope you‘ll all join me in saying “enough is enough.”

I guess she didn’t take Larry Summers’ advice.

“It’s the nature of the business”
by Tom Sullivan

And all this time I thought regulatory capture of the Supreme Court just had to do with the sitting justices. Reuters’ lengthy, 3-part series on the attorneys who appear most frequently before the Supreme Court is titled, “The Echo Chamber.” Really, though, these lawyers need their own “Lifestyles of” show. (An overwhelmingly white-male cast, of course.)

A Reuters examination of nine years of cases shows that 66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients’ appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Their appeals were at least six times more likely to be accepted by the court than were all others filed by private lawyers during that period.

They represent less than 1 percent of lawyers who file appeals to the Supreme Court, yet appear in 43 percent of the cases the court heard from 2004 through 2012. Fifty-one of the 66 represent firms whose work is primarily for corporations. “It’s the nature of the business,” Ashley Parrish, a partner at King & Spalding told reporters. Which is why firms avoid individuals’ cases against current or prospective corporate clients. Pro bono First Amendment and criminal cases that don’t conflict with moneyed clients’ interests are the exception.

Michael Luttig is general counsel for Boeing Co.:

“It has become a guild, a narrow group of elite justices and elite counsel talking to each other,” Luttig said. The court and its bar have grown “detached and isolated from the real world, ultimately at the price of the healthy and proper development of the law.”

We’ve come a long way from first principles and our rustic notions of citizen legislators. Why should we expect any different for our courts? Specialization is the name of the game, and law firms that hope to play attract elite, former law clerks to their Supreme Court practices, attorneys who know sitting justices personally. Reuters explains that “Supreme Court clerks are so prized that the market-rate signing bonus is $300,000.”

Which is not to say that these attorneys are just mercenaries.

“It’s not that there aren’t lawyers at these large firms who aren’t public-spirit minded and don’t want to do these [individual] cases. It’s that their business model won’t allow it,” said Joseph Sellers, a lawyer for the mid-sized firm Cohen Milstein, who argued against Wal-Mart at the Supreme Court.

Nor is it to say that these elite law firms don’t have principles.

Law firms have different goals than advocacy groups – profit, for one – but their Supreme Court practices often share an ideological interest in shaping the law for clients. For firms that are most active before the high court, those clients are more often than not corporations.

[snip]

“We hired people with commitment, belief and purity of purpose,” said Claffee, who can quote by heart phrases from Powell’s 1971 memo. “It’s all part of strengthening our brand and our substance.”

That would be the memo from soon-to-be Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urging them (among other things) to exploit the judiciary to advance the interests of business.

In the wake of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), corporate monies flooded electoral politics nationwide from city hall to state legislatures to congressional and presidential elections. And the Sunlight Foundation estimates (2012): “For every one member of Congress, the influence industry produces about $12.5 million in lobbying.” Meanwhile, the America Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) crafts corporate-written bills that get filed verbatim in state capitals — the analogue of what lobbyists do in Washington. “The Echo Chamber” simply confirms the corporate capture of the judicial branch as well. As if we didn’t already see that in SCOTUS decisions.

Getting back to first principles, what vestigial meaning has the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers when it is all the same power?

Workingman’s Dems
by Tom Sullivan

Like a lot of columns dissecting the Democrats’ nonperformance this fall, Thomas Frank’s in Salon focuses on how Democrats have largely abandoned their erstwhile working-class base. Mocking David Brooks’ call for a “common project” to fight the scourge of “classism,” Frank believes instead we need a project to help wealthy professionals understand the struggles of working people:

By “we,” I mean the Democratic Party. Once upon a time it was the dedicated champion of the interests of average people, but today Democrats are hemorrhaging the votes of the white working class. This catastrophic development is the pundit subject du jour, replacing the happy tales of demographic inevitability of two years ago. Since the beginning of September, according to Lexis-Nexis, there have been no fewer than 46 newspaper stories predicting, describing and analyzing the evaporation of Democratic appeal among this enormous slice of the electorate.

This is not merely disastrous, it is pathetic. What kind of lamestain left can’t win the working class . . . in year seven of a crushing demonstration of the folly of free markets? What kind of political leadership can’t figure out a way to overcome the backlash sensibility after four decades?

After losing the white working class by 30 points this fall, you’d think it would be obvious to Democratic leaders. And you’d be wrong. The “courthouse gangs” of old boys who dominated Democratic county-level politics for years have yet to get religion or exit the stage in many parts of the country. Higher up the food chain, the Republican wing of the Democratic Party — New Dems and other corporate-friendly Democrats — holds dwindling authority in Washington, yet will not readily change course either. At best, most will give new lip service to the concerns of working-class Americans even as their lips remain firmly planted elsewhere.

Frank again, on the impact of passing NAFTA on the Democrat’s base:

The deal crushed enthusiasm for the Democratic Party among the working-class voters who were then considered part of the Democratic base and contributed to the Democrats’ loss of the House of Representatives in 1994, a disaster from which, the economist Jeff Faux wrote in 2006, “the Democratic Party still has not recovered.” And, indeed, from which the party seemingly has no desire to recover. Just the other day, President Obama announced that he is fired up and ready to go . . . with the Republicans in Congress on the Trans Pacific Partnership, even though much of his own party is opposed to it.

Democrats who sign up for our master class on classism might also look back over their response to the financial crisis, during which they bailed out their BFFs on Wall Street and let everyone else go to hell. Or the many favors they failed to do for their former BFFs in organized labor. Or their lack of interest in getting a public option included in health-care reform.

When Democrats give voters the choice of Republican or Republican-lite, voters choose the real thing. Howie Klein and others noted how Democrats who ran this fall on a populist message won even as Blue Dogs and New Dems lot even more ground. North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan, who lost narrowly, ran instead on being America’s most moderate senator. Meanwhile, progressive ballot initiatives won even in red states.

But it will take more than a populist message to win back a working class Democrats abandoned with NAFTA. It will take admitting the error and a changing of ways. In the South at least, repentance is something working-class voters understand. Yet it is not clear that it is even possible to return to a twentieth-century economic model that seems extinct. It will take a bold, new vision of an economy that has a place for America’s working class and a future for Millennials entering the workforce. And it will take Democratic politicians willing to fight for it.

A small conclave over the weekend discussed what kind of message in 2016 might resurrect Democrats’ fortunes in North Carolina. The concerns of the working class were a prominent theme. Yet a yearning to return to what worked back in the day was an undercurrent. Via email, a friend described the consultants working for a major 2016 candidate here as “super old school.” That’s about as auspicious a beginning for Democrats’ redemption story as, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

They’re not always crazy
by Tom Sullivan

Out here in the Laboratories of Democracy, ALEC is testing market-based solutions to problems other market-based policies created. But unless one of these solutions barrels right into you (ask Mike Stark), you might not know about it ahead of time.

You know when you hear a speech (or read a quote) by a not-as-crazy conservative and a phrase strikes your ear a little odd? After you baroo, the speech continues and you shrug it off as random weirdness. Something I learned during the George W. Bush administration was to pay attention to those odd phrases. They are usually either racial dog whistles or else a reference to some issue conservatives know about and the left needs to (unless you like getting blindsided). That happened again here recently.

In an article on the Cesspool of Sin’s $4.8 million effort to reduce its carbon footprint, a critic from a local business-owners’ organization argued that the money would have been better spent on transportation improvements, even though half the investment has already paid back in energy savings [emphasis mine]:

Regardless, Swicegood said, the money and energy would be better spent on projects such as rerouting and widening the tangle of interstates around Asheville. Efficient roads will be crucial to bringing new businesses and jobs to the area, he said.

Baroo!? But funding interstates is a state and federal matter, you say? And how much interstate would $4.8 million in local money buy anyway? What’s this guy smoking?

Funny you should ask. As it happens, in 2013 Republicans here passed the Strategic Transportation Investments (STI) bill. (Primary sponsor? One of Swicegood’s friends.) Having cut taxes and facing Kansas-like revenue shortfalls, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory and friends want to fund future highway projects around the state using public-private partnerships and tolls rather than gas or other taxes. The state Department of Transportation’s formula for prioritizing highway projects provides two ways local planners can boost their project’s STI score [emphasis mine]:

A project’s benefit/cost can be improved if funding is provided during the project submission phase through local entity contributions or tolling approved by the local planning organization. In addition, a bonus allocation of up to 50% will be returned to the contributing area for a subsequent project scored through STI.

The 50% bonus? “A little sweetener slipped into the bill” to make up for “the bitter pill of a half century of tolls.”

As it also happens, a needed project to widen and improve I-26 through our area has long been in the works. We have suspected that, as with Thom’s Tholl Road on I-77, tolling might be in this project’s future. Unless, of course, locals would like to avoid that and hasten the project along by enacting a local sales tax to raise the score.

As Admiral Ackbar said, “It’s a trap!”

Should Democratic officials pass local sales taxes to help fund highway construction, what do you think the attack ads will look like in coming elections? Or if they sign on to plans to bring tolls to local highways for the next 50 years? Like most states, in North Carolina the largest blocks of blue votes are in the cities where Democrats tend to control. So cities are next on the target list in the GOP’s effort to defund the left. One side benefit of cutting taxes for the rich at the state and federal level is to push the cost of government and infrastructure down to the cities where Democrats can take the blame for cutting services and/or raising taxes.

Not so crazy after all.

[h/t Barry Summers]