News-Record.com

Former Rep. Michael Decker pleaded guilty to extortion charges in connection with his role in the 2002 agreement that kept Speaker Jim Black in power. A few quick thoughts before I go back to reporting on this:

• I did not, until I heard the federal prosecutor read the charges against Decker, think that Black was in any real danger of incurring a serious criminal penalty in all this. The charges read out today suggest otherwise.
• If this had come down while the honorables were still in session, it would have been absolute pandemonium at the legislature.
• It is hot as blazes out today, as an hour on the sidewalk in front of the federal building here in Raleigh will teach you real fast.

Decker had no comment as he left the courthouse. More to come.

Update: More on this:

• N+R Op Ed writer Doug Clark weighs in.
  
• The N.C. GOP has its say.

Black’s office say they’ll have a statement shortly.

Update: Here's the statement from Black's office:

RALEIGH -- Below is a statement from Ken Bell, attorney for N.C. House Speaker Jim Black, D-Mecklenburg, in response to today's guilty plea by former Rep. Michael Decker, (R-Forsyth):

"It was obvious from the State Board of Elections hearing that Michael Decker stole checks that were meant for his campaign," said Ken Bell. "This would not be the first time someone got in trouble and made up stories about someone else to try to get out of it.

"Speaker Black continues to vehemently deny that he gave or offered anything to Decker in exchange for his vote. As Speaker Black has testified, Decker informed the Speaker of his intention to vote for him. Many witnesses are able to testify that Decker decided all on his own to vote for Dr. Black as Speaker in 2003 because Decker's party insulted him and Decker despised his party's leaders.

"Speaker Black neither gave, promised nor offered Decker anything for his vote. After Decker told the Speaker he intended to vote for him, the Speaker offered to help Decker raise funds for what was sure to be a tough re-election campaign, just as he would have done for any member of his caucus. If Decker is telling the government anything other than this, he is not telling the truth.

"Speaker Black would like to discuss this matter further, but I have advised him to make no additional public comments. The Speaker looks forward to the truth coming out, and the truth will completely vindicate him."

Local office supply stores, including at least on in Greensboro, will be happy about this:

RALEIGH – After a thorough review of the evidence, Britt Cobb, Secretary of the Department of Administration, today rejected the recommendations of the administrative law judge and cited an ambiguity regarding the E-Procurement terms in the Request for Proposals to procure office supplies for state agencies. As such, he will terminate the current contract and solicit bids for a new one.

More after the jump.

State Treasurer Richard Moore will be talking for two hours on your television box, assuming you have cable, and are up to watch television at 7 in the morning and can figure out what channel is CNBC.

From the Treasurer’s office:

State Treasurer Richard Moore will guest host CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday, August 3rd from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. Moore will discuss the business news of the day, the global economy and his latest efforts to protect investors in North Carolina and around the country.

Moore is the only public sector member of the regulatory board of the New York Stock Exchange, where he advocates for shareholders from North Carolina and around the country. …

WHAT: CNBC’s Squawk Box
WHO: State Treasurer Richard Moore
WHEN: Thursday, August 3, 2006; 7 a.m. to 9 a.m.

You think he's going to tell all them big-time financial business types about wanting to raise the minimum wage?

Into every life, a little vacation must fall. Mine starts in a couple hours - sort of.

First, I'm off to hang with my colleagues at the big shin dig in Columbus.

In the mean time, if you need your local politics fix, head on over to the blog that spawned this one, Inside Scoop.

Capital Beat will return on Monday, Aug. 14.

I’m back from my travels…raise your hand if you’ve been indicted so I can get a quick count.

No one?

So what is the big news from the past couple weeks? Let’s see: the Republicans are stilling hammering away at Jim Black and the various ethics campaigns for the fall elections (complete with a campaign style attack ad – very Washington), the Democrats are doing their best to ignore the Republicans and rolling out policy ideas, and Gov. Easley is continuing his annual ritual of signing bills one at a time now that the legislature has left town.

Glad I didn’t miss any parties.

If I were actually doing anything useful today – other than sitting in meetings and deleting the spam jamming my e-mail – here’s what would be on the agenda:

• Gov. Easley is getting ready to sign SB 353, the landfill moratorium. This is the bill meant to curb the construction of mega-landfills while the state figures out if and how the permit them in the long run. If you’re in the Wilmington area, check him out at 11:30 a.m. in room L228 of the Cape Fear Community College Health Science Building (415 North 2d Street) in Wilmington.
• Joe Sinsheimer, the Democratic strategist of www.jimblackmustgo.com fame is holding a presser at 304 East Jones Street (Corner of Person and Jones Street) in Raleigh. Does he have some new tidbit on Black or is going to complain that Sen. Andrew Brock’s www.STOPJimBlack.com website is a knock of his?
• It’s not today, but I’m in a bulleting mood: State Treasure Richard Moore will hold a presser on Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. to hammer H&R Block for offering those short-term tax anticipation loans. The State of N.C. holds a bunch of H & R Block stock.

Y’all be good while I get back to filling out paperwork.

Former state Rep. Margaret Keesee-Forrester, 61, passed away this weekend. She served six terms during the 1970s and 1980s.

I wrote a short news obituary for today’s paper. (Click) From talking to those who knew her and reading our clips on her tenure here in Raleigh, she seemed like a very interesting lady and she definitely served the state during interesting times.

Funeral services will be Saturday in Greensboro. Paid obits, I’m told, are running in our paper and in the N+O Wednesday.

I hauled myself downtown this morning to catch Gov. Mike Easley’s bill signing of HB 1896, “an act to amend the sex offender and public protection registration programs.” Click here for bill text and info. And here is the governor’s news release on the bill.

I had hoped to bring you some audio of a Q+A session with the governor today. But you can't record what doesn't take place.

In my relatively short time covering Cap City, Easley has usually taken the occasion of bill signings to field a few questions from us scrubby media types. He doesn’t do regular briefings, so sporadic announcements and bill signings are usually his only opportunities for Q+A.

Today, however, he bolted from the room before anyone could fire off a question.

I’m told by and older, wiser and longer serving hand that the move “is unusual, but not unprecedented.”

Now maybe Easley had a pressing lunch engagement. Maybe he needed to get his dog to the vet or meet the plumber or something. Heck, maybe he just woke up on the wrong side of the bed and didn’t feel like dealing with us.

But it sure felt like he was avoiding questions related to our friendly local Speaker of the House and the upcoming legislative elections.

I could be wrong, but I would bet big money that at least 80 percent of the reporters in the room had questions in their notebooks regarding Speaker Black. And I think Easley would have made that same calculation as well.

In case you didn’t see this story, more lottery games are on the way. The state will start it’s own Pick-3 and Pick-5 games in October.

This notice showed up in my e-mail this afternoon:

Greensboro- August 17, 2006- The Chairman of the Guilford County Republican Party will be joined by local candidates and elected officials for a news conference on the steps of the Old Guilford Courthouse located on west Market St, across from West Market Street United Methodist Church in Greensboro at 12 noon Friday, August 18th to address the legal and political troubles of House Speaker Jim Black.

This isn’t a surprise. Republicans have been making noises for a good nine or ten months now that they would use the embattled House Speaker as a campaign issues against local Democrats. This is just making good on that promise.

Opinion columnist Doug Clark wrote about this, as have others.

I’m going back and forth in my own head on whether the Speaker’s problems will be an effective cudgel for the GOP this fall.

On the one hand, the story has been in the new for the better part of the past year and very little of the coverage approaches flattering. A reasonable voter could be put off by what is at least the perception that something not right has been going on.

On the other hand, when I tell people out in the real world that I cover Raleigh for the paper, their first questions are rarely about the Speaker. I get asked more about the minimum wage or taxes or any number of issue questions.

All that said, I’m going to be interested to hear what the local Republicans have to say Friday.

You can say Vernon Robinson is a lot of things, but boring he is not. Robinson is the challenger in the Fightin’ 13th N.C. Congressional district.

Click here to listen to his latest radio ad, a parody of the Beverly Hillbilly’s theme. Click here for the accompanying news release.

That ads focus is on illegal immigration and how Democratic incumbent Brad Miller “is giving away all your tax dollars to these illegal aliens.” By way of a quick and dirty review:

• Ad pros: Parodies a catchy tune that everyone knows, has a pretty effective 10 seconds in the middle of its minute-long run where Robinson promises to “secure the borders, stop the handouts and protect your jobs,” issues that might resonate with and seem reasonable to voters.

• Ad cons: The language is less than delicate, referring to “sneaky aliens” and featuring a line at the end that reads “Hey all you illegals, put your shoes on. Go home.” Yes, that’ll get attention, but it will put off some voters. It also runs the risk of drawing attention to Robinson as an ad-man rather than Robinson as a candidate.

I have a call in to the Miller campaign asking when we might see some ads from the incumbent and for a response to this latest audio missive from Robinson. Will update when I get a reply.

Update: LuAnn Canipe, a spokeswoman for Miller, e-mailed this response from the Congressman:

"As is often the case with what Robinson says, I have no idea what he's talking about in most of this ad. From growing up in New York City and Los Angeles, Robinson obviously believes Southerners are bigoted ignoramuses. But, voters have proved him wrong before and I trust they will again."

In a phone interview, she also said that people who have been getting some of the Robinson campaign’s robo-calls have called the district office to complain.

"Over-saturation...is off-putting to people certainly," Canipe said.

Canipe said that the Miller campaign would probably run both radio and television ads, but had not settled on when. “It’s a thin line. At what point do people just get sick to death of it?” she said.

I contributed this story on N.C. politics to the News and Record’s annual “Discover the Triad” magazine.

The premise was that a lot of folks reading the DTT would be newcomers to the area trying to figure out the lay of the land. So I figured that if you were coming from somewhere else, and all you knew of N.C. politics were Liddy Dole, Richard Burr, Jesse Helms and a solidly red chunk of the electoral map on presidential election night, having Democrats control a lot of the organs of state governance might be confusing. The story was an attempt to sort out that presumed confusion.

Now, if you’ve been around North Carolina for any length of time, you probably know what the deal is and the question seems a bit odd. At any rate, I filed my story months ago and had forgotten about it.

Flash back to my little vacation a couple weeks ago, when I spent some time at the Capital Beat conference in Columbus. One of our speakers there was Ferrel Guillory, who I spoke to for the Discover the Triad story.

Now, Guillory, who is a heck of a nice guy, was going through a couple questions he had gotten from journalists that were a little – let’s say – peculiar.

Yes, mine was one of the two. Yes, mine was the weirder of the two.

No matter. In fact, I’m taking it as a challenge. I want to hold down the title of asking the most bare-end backward political question every year. Feel free to contribute your contenders.

Guilford County Republican Party Chairman Marcus Kindley and the county’s four GOP state House candidates in contested elections held a presser Friday. As expected, they called for House Speaker Jim Black to step down because of the nearly year-long string of ethics-related stories about his campaign fund raising practices.

By inference, and later pretty explicitly, the Republicans were making the case that voters should elect them because, well, they’re not of the party connected to Jim Black.

That's no surprise. It's a reflection of a the state party's plans and, in a political sense, a logical line of attack.

After the presser, I asked Kindley to elaborate on that idea. And I had my handy-dandy minidisk recorder with me:

• Click here for Kindley’s response to being asked whether Jim Black can be the only issue for local Republicans this fall.
• Click here for Kindley’s response to the question: what’s to stop Republicans from doing exactly what they are complaining about in relation to Black.

And read tomorrows paper for a short story on this.

At the GOP presser today, I ran into the guys from IMPAC, the Independent Minority Political Action Committee.

They’re a relatively new group, and if nothing else will add to the groups and organizations that do endorsements this fall.

There’s also the potential for them to do some fund raising and campaign donations, as they have filed an organization statement with the State Board of Elections.

The group is lead by Jerry McClough, who is writes the ThatsWhatzUp! blog.

I asked McClough to talk a bit about his group:

• Click here to listen talk about the group’s goals.
  
• Click here to listen to him talk about the older, better known Simkins PAC.

It was an interesting conversation, one I hope to continue for a story before too long.

In case you missed it: John William Pope, 81, died this weekend.

The governor has vetoed Senate Bill 542, “An Act To Allow Reasonable Access To State Facilities And Employees For Certain Employee Associations.”

From a release on the veto:

By enumerating the right of certain associations to have access to state facilities and employees to sell products offered on the commercial market, the legislation would also give an unfair competitive advantage to insurers affiliated with these particular employee associations. This provision, at the very least, gives an appearance of endorsement of these products by the state of North Carolina, which is inaccurate and therefore not acceptable.

Click here for the full release.

I’m sure the honorables will just be tingling with the possibility of coming back to town for a veto over-ride session.

I got an e-mail this morning promoting a new website for PEFNC, Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina. Basically, this is a group that pushes for school choice – both charter schools and the like but public funding of slots in private schools.

The group is lead by a Darrell Allison, who also has a bio here.

I've heard GA staffers from both chambers use less delicate language, but this is the official notice from the Senate side on the potential for a veto over-ride session on SB 542:

After consulting with a number of Senate members, Senator Basnight is of the opinion that an override of the Governor's veto of SB 542 may not be necessary given the Executive Order issued this week. However, under Article II, Section 22(7) of the NC Constitution, the Governor must call the General Assembly back into session to consider whether to override the vetoed measure unless he receives notice from a majority of members in each chamber that a session is not needed. Early next week, members will receive a form to sign if they are so inclined. The forms will be sent to the Governor stating that a special session is unnecessary.

There was a good story in the Charlotte paper today about Speaker Black’s fund raising prowess (Reg. may be required) and how House Democrats may not be able to rely on their leader for campaign funding this year.

Here are a few observations from my end:

• The fact that the Democrats aren’t raising as much money as in years past won’t mean much if they can still vastly outspend Democratic candidates. In what some argue should be the most competitive House district in Guilford County, incumbent Democrat Pricey Harrison reported $55,123.59 on hand at the beginning of July, versus Republican challenger Ron Styer’s $2,200, both of those figures from revised 2Q reports. Styers has the making of a pretty polished candidate, but a 25:1 fund raising advantage does favor Harrison, to say the least. You find parallels to that fund raising advantage throughout the Triad and throughout the state.
• There has been much talk of this being a “Blue Moon” election, one in which there isn’t a presidential, U.S. Senate or other statewide office – aside from the nonpartisan races for judicial seats – at the top of the ticket to motivate voters to come out or vote in one direction or the other. Because of this, a lot of the outcome is going to depend on turnout. And while money can help with turnout, there are a lot of intangibles involved too. How many volunteers will a party have knocking on doors or giving rides to the polls or just talking up the election? How many voters on either side will just stay home because their fed up or be extra-motivate because, well, they’re just fed up? That stuff doesn’t show up on a campaign finance report.
• House Democratic candidates aren’t exactly broke as a collective. Nor is the state party. If there are one or two races that get really nasty (and you know there will be), expect the money to flow. And there are plenty of folks in the Democratic caucus who want to take Black’s place as Speaker next year. If any of those can play the knight in shiny armor to a cash-strapped fellow Democrat’s campaign this year, they’d be making a case for themselves.

Gov. Mike Easley was down Wilmington way today reminding folks to be prepared in case of a hurricane. That’s fine advice.

Part of the news release from the event points to Ready NC, which has some tips and links on being ready if disaster strikes and links to other sites.

My favorite bit about the site is the handy navigate-by-icon methodology, which tells you how to

or be ready in case of things like .

Greetings to those of you arriving to chew the fat about this story, which says – to no one’s surprise – that we are a state and nation of over-weight folks.

Click here to link to North Carolina’s program.

Now let’s all go take a walk or something.

((Audio below))

I’m just back from a news conference with Gov. Mike Easley who says we should be on the look out for Ernesto, a tropical storm that probably has a chip on its shoulder because it’ll be 4 M.P.H. shy of a hurricane when it lands tonight.

Specific for Greensboro, Easley said state emergency officials expected Buffalo Creek to flood somewhat as the Ernesto cuts through the state. So if you’re in an area that has problems when Buffalo Creek gets too full up, expect some problems over the next day or so.

Oddly enough, your Labor Day beach plans are probably solid, since the storm is expected to miss all by a sliver of the N.C. Coast. It's the center part of the state, from Greensboro to New Bern, that looks to be in for most of whatever mess happens.

More to come, including audio, as soon as I get it sorted out.

Updates:

• Click here for the news release from Easley.
  
• The audio from this morning's briefing is about 15 minutes. Click here to download and listen.
  
• Easley: “The national weather service has identified some areas where they do expect guaranteed flooding … Buffalo Creek in Greensboro, in the Triad … all urban creeks are expected to have some flooding, that is those smaller creeks in urban centers as the runoff gets to them …”
  
• Ealsey: “Please pay attention to flooded waters and don’t try to drive through them.”
  
• Click here for some mpas of the North Buffalo Creek watershed from the USGS.

Okay, I'll admit it. It's August and my mind is just not fully switched into politics mode right at the moment. That's probably a side effect of growing up just a block outside Washington, D.C., where in August the bosses are away and the staffers plays during this traditionally hot, muggy, low-energy month.

And while Raleigh is feeling a bit logy itself, there has been a baseline of activity as the honorables get ready to pursue their fall re-election campaigns. The summer malaise will fully shake off next week when everyone gets back from their Labor Day trips to the beach.

By way of catching up on few things that have been kicking around:

• Republicans have been hopping mad all summer that House Speaker Jim Black has been raising a legal defense fund and that he hasn’t had to report who the donors to the fund are thus far. Sen. Phil Berger sent a missive Thursday asking the N.C. Board of Elections to change the status quo. So far, the BOE has shown little inclination to do so.

• The Republicans have been fighting amongst themselves on the campaign finance front. As the N+O’s Rob Christensen put it: Raleigh businessman Art Pope won. Former House Speaker Richard Morgan lost. (Reg. may be required.) That about covers it, but follow the link for more details.

By way of logging in the existence of what bloggers will start commenting on in a few minutes, Vernon Robinson has a new TV ad out. If you know anything about Robinson, I don’t really have to summarize it. Suffice it to say it’s another knock at Brad Miller and federal immigration policy.

If you’re curious: click here to take a gander at the ad in question.