The NC General Assembly adjourned today and the impact of its final decisions will reverberate for years to come – from a conniving vote that legalizes fracking and energy exploration, to the disgraceful deal-making that sold out students, the Racial Justice Act and victims of sterilization, to a last-minute change in the final state budget that [...]
The video purporting to document two non-citizens and a dead man receiving ballots during the NC primary turns out to be an even bigger hoax than we first reported. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas carefully edited out a section of the filming where the voter impersonating a dead person actually requests the ballot in the name [...]
Earlier this week, James O’Keefe of Project Veritas released a 10-minute video allegedly documenting voter fraud in North Carolina, featuring two examples of non-citizens who voted in past elections. O’Keefe gained national attention for his cleverly edited videos attacking ACORN, and some in the NC media were ready to gobble up his latest offering. Fortunately, [...]
Wal-Mart is in the middle of a scandal involving allegations of massive bribery in Mexico – and the company is depending on the goodwill built through its generous donations to Congressional leaders of both parties to weather the storm; in other words, it’s using another form of bribery that has become standard practice for major [...]
The multi-part series in the News & Observer about NC hospitals will make you sick. Today’s part adds the money-in-politics dimension to the profile of heartless institutions with unbelievable profit margins, hiding behind the respectable shield of non-profit charitable service. Rep. Dale Folwell, the Republican House Speaker Pro-Tem, says his effort to cap a sales [...]
In a historic decision today, Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks found that prosecutors deliberately excluded qualified black jurors from serving on the jury in the case of death row inmate Marcus Robinson. The hearing was the first to apply North Carolina’s landmark Racial Justice Act. Following the law’s directives, the judge resentenced Robinson to life [...]
In this hour-long production, the radio documentary “This American Life” manages to get Washington politicians and lobbyists saying the worst things possible about themselves, political corruption and the all-consuming money chase. Amazing! Who needs more evidence of the need for fundamental change? It begins with the tape of a shakedown fundraising call from a member of [...]
Maybe you’ve heard about the State Integrity Investigation that scored each state on the strength of its laws and practices governing campaign finances, lobbying regulations, ethics, access to government records, redistricting, etc. Overall, North Carolina earned a C- and ranked 18th best among the 50 states, but in some areas it scored an A, in [...]
Despite promises of cleaning up what it called a “pay-to-play culture in Raleigh,” the new leadership in the General Assembly has done nothing to strengthen ethics or campaign finance laws. It hasn’t even enacted stronger disclosure laws to help the public’s right to know how money flows through the political system. Instead, as the Independent Weekly [...]
A new report by the National Institute on Money in State Politics examines the money behind the telecommunications industry’s recent success in passing legislation to restrict local governments from building broadband networks that hooked local businesses and residents to the Internet, even in areas long ignored by the private providers. According to the report, “The [...]