Carolina Politics Online

Federal agents arrested a local driver’s license examiner Friday following a six-month investigation into her activities.

Susan Honeycutt, 50, a DMV driver’s license examiner since 1991, was detained at her Mt. Pleasant home by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) officers.

Honeycutt’s charges stem from allegations she knowingly arranged for and issued approximately 150 false licenses to illegal immigrants.

Those licenses, investigators said, were based on fraudulent information and non-existent addresses.

The Stanly News and Press

The timing of this is ironic because July 1st was also the same day that the State of North Carolina began its new system of issuing driver’s license.  From now driver’s licenses will now be produced and mailed from Raleigh to the recipient.  The idea behind this is to make the process more secure so that only one entity is issuing licenses rather than 114 different offices.  Apparently, the idea behind this is to prevent exactly what happened with Honeycutt.

This morning was downright cool in the Charlotte region — cool enough to break a record that had stood for more than a century.

The temperature at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport was 56 at about 5:30 a.m., breaking the July 2 record of 58, set in 1885. The normal low for this time of year is 70.

Charlotte Observer

Quick, somebody call Al Gore!  He’s clearly not flying his jet enough!

The national Democratic Party began broadcasting radio commercials this week that use high gas prices to criticize U.S. Reps. Robin Hayes and Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, along with 11 other Republicans nationwide.

The ads, which feature a President Bush impersonator thanking the two lawmakers for oil company tax breaks, effectively place Hayes and McHenry in the top ranks of the Democratic Party’s targets this year. Both face challenges from well-funded opponents.

Charlotte Observer

This ad is farcicle.  Are they trying to imply that the tax breaks given to oil companies is what is causing the high prices?  So if Congress removed them the price of gas would drop?  LOL  Actually, it would do the opposite because they would pass on their additional costs to the consumer.  That’s the way the market works.  Furthermore, McHenry has supported overturning the drilling bans and Hayes is pushing legislation to build more refineries.  In fact, Hayes has put out a press release today touting his introducing of the Alternative Energy Advancement Act.

WASHINGTON, DC - Congressman Robin Hayes (NC-8) recently introduced The Alternative Energy Advancement Act (H.R. 6383), which seeks to use proceeds from domestic oil and gas production to increase the development of new alternative energy technologies by diverting all federal proceeds from future oil and gas leases, on and off shore, into a newly created Alternative Energy Trust Fund.

It would seem to me the two Congressmen are on the right side of the issue here.

Both Hayes and McHenry voted for the 2005 legislation that included tax breaks for fossil fuel production, as well as a variety of incentives to encourage new energy and fuel alternatives. More than 70 House Democrats also supported the bill, including Reps. Bob Etheridge, G.K. Butterfield and Mike McIntyre, all of North Carolina.

Democrats, though, had difficulty explaining how they were implicitly criticizing the Republicans for their vote on a 2005 energy bill when U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee for president, voted for the same legislation.

Uh-huh.  Hypocrites.  This ad is nothing more than a sleazy cheap shot at both Congressmen trying to capitalize on the anger and frustration people have over higher gas prices.  McHenry and Hayes are hardly responsible for that.

John McCain traveled to Montreat over the weekend and met up with legendary evangelist Billy Graham and his son.  I imagine this is part of McCain’s attempt at courting evangelical and conservative Christian voters which he will need if he wants to win the presidency.  McCain has ruffled the feathers of these groups in the past by making some derogatory remarks directed at the “religious right.”

Bank of America has taken more than $6.5 billion in write-downs of securities linked to shoddy mortgages and has drastically downsized its investment bank and cut more than 3,000 jobs. Wachovia has posted $5.3 billion in market-related write-downs since last summer and is downsizing its own investment bank. It has cut 500 jobs so far and slashed its long sacrosanct dividend.

Since Mr. Thompson’s ouster, rumors have whipped through Wall Street and Charlotte’s Tryon Street - which divides the city’s downtown into unofficial Wachovia and Bank of America territories - that Wachovia was open to a buyer. Charlotte is fretting over whether it can remain the last great U.S. banking center outside of New York.

Santa Barbara News-Press

This really worries me.  I don’t work for either Wachovia or Bank of America, but I do work for a bank in an office on Tryon St just a block away from BOA’s headquarters and another two blocks from Wachovia’s.  What’s going on with these two banks should concern every man, woman, and child in the Greater Charlotte region.  Yes, there is more to Charlotte than Bank of America and Wachovia, but let’s face it.  They made this city what it is.  They started the mass migration to Charlotte by people all over the country.  Other industries in the area have prospered through their success.  What will happen to this area if they collapse?

CABARRUS - This week, the N.C. General Assembly passed a bill that will allow for the Cabarrus Board of County Commissioners to expand to seven members in 2012.

Commissioners also proposed a 2010 referendum in which voters would decide whether or not to adopt district representation.

Independent Tribune

I support this move.  Cabarrus County is growing and the more constituents an elected official has to represent, the less representation each voter receives.  Whether the voters in the county decide to go with district representation or at large, I caution them on their decision.  There is nothing wrong with district representation, but don’t let those commissioners gerrymander those districts or accountability goes straight out the door.

With an unemployment office as a backdrop, Democrat Harry Taylor Thursday ripped Republican U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick for voting this month against extending jobless benefits by three months.

“Either she doesn’t know what’s going on or she doesn’t care,” Taylor said at news conference at a south Charlotte unemployment office.

Myrick was among 137 members, all Republican, who voted against the Democratic-sponsored bill.

Charlotte Observer

Myrick made the right vote.  Taylor evidently would have voted for bigger government.  The government isn’t there to take care of you and shouldn’t pay you because you lose your job.  Our entitlement spending is already way out of control.

The entire state hasn’t officially reported in yet, but the leaders have a large enough margin that it’s basically over.  Mary Fant Donnan has won the Labor Commissioner runoff so she will go on to face Republican incumbent Cherie Berry in November.  Justin Burr has defeated incumbent State Representative Kenny Furr in House District 67.  That is awesome.  I like Burr and we need more younger people in Raleigh.  Don Davis handily defeated Kathy Taft in the Democratic runoff for Senate District 5.

The patrol, called Neighborhood Watch Alliance, is comprised of some of Yamanashi’s friends from businesses off Central Avenue. The group is still organizing, he said. But the plan is to patrol the area with handguns, flashlights and notepads.

“We can lurk in the shadows, watch people and report what we see,” he said. “That’s not against the law.”

But the idea has alarmed some residents and concerns police.

“I’m glad that they’re getting involved,” Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Sgt. Tonya Arrington said. “There’s just some concern any time weapons are involved.”

Charlotte Observer

I think it’s a wonderful idea.  Yamanashi and the others in his neighborhood have a Constitutional right to have a gun and there is nothing wrong with them patrolling their own neighborhoods and arming themselves for protection.  Naturally, you’re going to have the anti-gun crowd over sensationalize the “what ifs” and make dire predictions of Old West style street shootouts, like this moron who commented on the Charlotte Observer:

More rabid gun owners, just what we need

That’s the mentality of your anti-gun folks.  If you arm yourself for protection you’re rabid.

The City of Charlotte has dropped the ball on this which is why crime has been spiking in places like Plaza Midwood and Dilworth and others.  Furthermore, the police can’t be everywhere and contrary to the conventional wisdom of Americans, it’s not the job of the police to protect us.  Their job is simply to enforce the laws on the books, not provide individual protection.  The Supreme Court has ruled in numerous cases that the only person charged with the responsibility of protecting you and your family is you.

Well, with taxpayers’ help, he drives an energy-saving hybrid vehicle when he travels around his lightning-bolt shaped district, which stretches from Mecklenburg to Guilford counties.

More than a dozen years ago he was leasing a “great big” sport utility vehicle, and then he went to a van. These days, he’s leasing a Toyota Prius.

“It gets 50 miles per gallon – people find that hard to believe,” he says.

Charlotte Observer

From the first sound of it, Mel Watt appears to be setting a shining example for his district.  He is not just preaching conservation to people, he is practicing it.  It would seem admirable of him, but are things exactly what they seem?

Of course, it does come at a price. According to House spending records, the taxpayers are spending $742.80 a month for him to lease that 2007 Prius from Wilmar Inc., a vehicle leasing company in Charlotte.

Aha!  That’s an awful lot of money for a car lease.  You can lease a BMW for a lot less than that and I guarantee you that this Wilmar Inc. is grossly overcharging on the lease of this vehicle because they know it’s being paid for by all of us.  So when you dig into the details it kind of sours on Watt’s intentions.  I don’t think his vehicle switch was a very economical decision.

CMS Superintendent Peter Gorman has been huffing and puffing about the $18 million the County Commissioners refused to give him of the $28 million increase he requested for the 2008-09 school year. I’m glad they didn’t cave in to his threats of cutting teachers’ positions and other “programs” (he’s never specific). While I still think that the $10 million they agreed on is too much, they were correct in significantly paring down his request. In his two years as superintendent Gorman has not shown himself to be any agent of change. While he pontificates on how the school board should have their own taxing authority to be able to raise the money they “need”, he and the board have shown themselves to be anything but responsible stewards of the money allocated to them to run the school district.

While Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools faces a budget season that Superintendent Peter Gorman has warned could lead to potentially devastating cuts at the schoolhouse level, the district’s Communications Division engine steams forward, fueled by a nearly $4 million budget and a staff of just less than 30 employees.

The Communications Division is the umbrella group for the district’s Public Information Department, CMS TV3 and the Department of Strategic Partnerships. Since the 2004-05 school year, its budget has more than doubled, exploding from $1.73 million to the 2007-08 adopted budget of $3.57 million.

And it’s not done growing. Under the Communications Division’s proposed 2008-09 budget, its total take would have jumped to a whopping $3.84 million, to include the addition of a so-called World Class Service branch. That proposal got nixed during discussions leading up to the superintendent’s approved budget, when several school board members said the World Class Service expansion was overblown.

Rhino Times

This is a perfect example of misplaced priorities and mismanagement of school tax dollars. Why on Earth does CMS need to have a gargantuan budget dedicated to communications? The purpose of the government schools is to supposedly educated peoples’ children so why is a media department taking priority over buses and classrooms? This department has significantly grown under Gorman’s watch.

How much money is spent on CMS’s different programs? There must be close to 100 different departments in the district, many which are not directly related to the basics of education. Are all of these departments even effective at achieving their stated goal? How many administrators and other non-educating personnel are employed and what is the effect of their salary and benefits expenses on the district? My personal favorite is the district employed “Diversity Specialist.” How much money is he drawing in each year to essentially do nothing productive? Shouldn’t the school board be looking at these departments before teachers and buses?  These are the questions that need to be asked.

As I noted earlier, Gorman and the school board are pushing to have the state grant them their own taxing authority. Bill James said it best on the consequences of such a decision.

“They hide behind the phrase ‘it’s all for the children,’” James, a Republican, said. “I’m not about to give them taxing authority when they fail to address the core reason for their being, which is to close the achievement gap and produce intelligent, articulate children. CMS isn’t doing that and in my opinion they don’t deserve to be awarded because they can’t be trusted. Giving CMS taxing authority would be a recipe for disaster.”

Precisley. If they can’t succeed now with the billion and a half dollar budget they are currently using why should they be trusted with the power to waste even more money? I’ve lived in areas where school boards have taxing powers and it is exactly the disaster James described. The Pittsburgh Public School system in Pennsylvania has a budget that is higher than the city’s and one third of the students enrolled never end up graduating. They have taxing power and they tax the hell out of the city residents and it makes no difference.

The school district should not be granted this authority under any circumstances. The County Commission needs to be involved to act as a buffer. If the school board is given this authority they will rapidly increase their expenditures which will result in higher taxes that will push residents and businesses out of the city turning a once vibrant town into a run down shell of its former self. It’s already happened to major cities all over this country.

Mecklenburg County commissioners have approved a new budget that sets aside more money than expected for new crime-fighting initiatives.

Instead of $2 million, the county budget will spend $4 million on fighting crime.

The additional money will go toward putting the recommendations of a new county crime task force into effect. That task force is just now being finalized, and won’t begin work until later this month.

WBT

This is how government should work.  The people were unhappy.  They made their case to their elected officials and those officials responded in kind.  Representative government in action.

Hopefully, with this new money in place and a new Chief of Police in Charlotte with an impeccable record fighting crime, Charlotte can finally begin to clean up the crime sprees that have been increasing steadily over the last several years.  For too long local politicians turned a blind eye to it.  Now the people have spoken.

It’s expected the money would go toward, among other things, additional prosecutors for the Mecklenburg District Attorney’s office and expanded electronic-monitoring of repeat criminals.

Democratic Congressional candidate Larry Kissell pumped up his campaign Sunday by selling gas for $1.22 a gallon, highlighting the energy votes of Republican incumbent Rep. Robin Hayes.

Kissell spent almost three hours selling the cheap gas to a few hundred motorists in downtown Biscoe. He used a similar campaign tactic in his narrow loss to Hayes two years ago.

“The people were very appreciative, very patient and appeared very quickly,” Kissell said.

The Herald-Sun

Kissell gets credit for thinking outside the box and being creative.  However, I still see this as vote buying and any voter who would throw their support to any candidate based on that candidate giving them discounted gasoline is a bonehead.  Kissell’s party has been mostly responsible for the high prices of gasoline in this country by their refusal to allow more domestic drilling and their catering to extremists environmentalist groups which has caused higher energy prices.

There is no one solution to energy costs.  There are several.  Alternative fuels are part of the solution as is nuclear power, but so is increasing today’s current supply of oil.  Unless Kissell is prepared to support these solutions, his recent campaign stunt is nothing more than hypocritical.

Ross and Holas are charged with conspiring to possess with intent to distribute 50 grams or more of crack cocaine. The charge is punishable by up to life imprisonment. It carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Savage told the judge that Ross and Holas are accused of conspiring with David C. Lockhart of Charlotte. Lockhart, 25, has been charged with conspiracy as well as with possessing with intent to distribute 50 grams or more of crack cocaine.

Charlotte Observer

Oh, come on.  Give the guys a break.  They were just doing what they were told.  Didn’t Darrel Stephens want his officers working with the community?

“This shouting Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! stuff is not going to work this year,” Lee Teague, Mecklenburg’s GOP chairman, e-mailed a reporter.

“McHenry and a lot of other Republicans in Washington need to get a clue,” he added later.

Charlotte Observer

Mr. Teague gets it. The RNC doesn’t. People want solutions, not talking points. One of the reasons why Barack Obama has attracted as many cult like followers as he has is because he is talking more about ideas of change and focuses less on political attacks. In all three special elections for Congress this year in which the Republicans lost the seat, they spent their time with negative attacks attempting to link their opponents to Obama’s far left extremist views. It didn’t work. The Democrat candidates focused on ways to fix problems and that’s what people want to hear.

“We don’t have the brand power to do that right now, so we need to come to the table with a better game,” said Michael Steele, chairman of GOPAC, a national group charged with electing Republicans.

“We need some common-sense solutions that speak to where people are in their everyday lives. So running around screaming ‘this guy’s a liberal’ won’t get you re-elected.”

Michael Steele is a great man with an even greater future ahead of him. I have no doubt we’ll see him running for President some day. He is the guy they should have tapped to run the RNC. Duncan is absolutely useless and Martinez was nothing more than a Bush lackey.

Daniel Johnson, Democratic nominee for the 10th Congressional District, is opening his campaign office tomorrow, June 12th at 1333 1st Ave SW in Hickory.  Festivities will be from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM.

How much of an increase did you get this year? When I had my yearly review done, I received a 2% cost of living increase, which amounted to less than $1,000 a year and hardly covers the increased cost of living we’ve experienced. From what I am hearing my story is typical and I may even be one of the luckier ones. While the country is experiencing an economic slowdown in general and a heightened increase in inflation, the Charlotte City Council felt they were deserving of a 27% pay raise yesterday. On a contentious six to five vote, the money grabbers won. How do you feel about this? Let those who voted for it know:

Patsy Kinsey - D

Contact the Council Member
Email: pkinsey@carolina.rr.com
Phone: 704-376-5367
Address: 2334 Greenway Ave.
Charlotte, NC 28204

Warren Turner - D

Contact the Council Member
Email: district3_turner@yahoo.com
Phone: 704-713-0452
Address: P.O. Box 35465
Charlotte, NC 28231

James Mitchell, Jr - D

Contact the Council Member
E-Mail: JamesDistrict2@aol.com
Address: 3425 Valerie Drive
Charlotte, NC 28216
Phone: 704-398-9480
Cell: 704-577-3349
Fax: 704-398-9479

Nancy Carter - D

Contact the Council Member
E-Mail: n3157w@yahoo.com
Address: 1401 Cavendish Court, Charlotte, NC 28211
Phone: 704-336-3431
Fax: 704-770-0189

Michael Barnes - D

Contact the Council Member:
E-mail: barnesdistrict4@aol.com
Address: 1909 J.N. Pease Place, Suite 202, Charlotte, NC 28262
Phone: 704-509-6141
Fax: 704-548-1166

Warren Cooksey - R

Contact the Council Member:
Email: warren@warrencooksey.com
Phone: 704-347-0420
Address: 14025 Dunbritton Lane #607
Charlotte, NC 28277

Cooksey was the only Republican that voted for this budget containing the raise, so he could have stopped this if he wanted to. He claims that the raise was a small part of the budget as a whole and it was more important to get the budget passed. That may be true, but that doesn’t mean it was the best move to make. When your constituents are facing financial setbacks due to rising costs around every corner you don’t go and vote yourself a 27% pay increase. Cooksey says he won’t accept the raise. That’s all fine and dandy, but his vote allowed all the others to have it.

Artives Freeman stunned the courtroom on the first day of his murder trial. He walked in dressed in a suit and tie – and covered in his own feces.

Charlotte Observer

Alrighty then…..

This gives a whole new meaning to the term “shit head.”

Mecklenburg County commissioners moved a step closer Wednesday night toward asking voters for a quarter-cent sales tax increase to fight crime.

By a 5-to-3 vote, commissioners declared their intent to put a tax referendum on the Nov. 4 ballot. They’ll vote later to actually authorize the measure.

Wednesday’s vote split along party lines, with all five Democrats voting in favor of the plan.

A quarter-cent increase would push Mecklenburg’s sales tax to 7.5 percent. The current rate is already highest in the state.

Charlotte Observer

It’s absurd that they would request another tax increase to fund something they should already be funding out of existing revenue.  The city has blown money on stadiums, arenas, public transportation, etc instead of putting it where it should have been in the first place.  Voters should reject this tax and demand that the county cut back on its excess.