The Mardi Gras before Lent – Please?

The Citizen-Times posted some peculiar pictures of the governor, apparently living it up yesterday with lots of beer. She was celebrating the state’s appropriation of twenty teacher salaries toward corporate welfare to coax Sierra Nevada to locate a brewery in Mills River. The photos seemed inappropriate, but in retrospect, they’re even weirder. Today, WWNC 570AM talk show host Pete Kaliner described the governor’s at her last hoorah as “walking dead.”

In sum, the government could be construed to be sacrificing 100 (one-year, full-time) teacher jobs for the beer joint:

Henderson County is offering about $3.5 million in incentives over five years, and Mills River is offering $86,800.

The project was made possible in part by a $1.025 million grant from the One North Carolina Fund.

Now that I’ve cast the governor in a negative light (which sounds darker than dark), it’s time to shine rainbows of heavenly light on her. According to news stories, she has repented; and I support wholeheartedly her verbal commitment to get on the right track, now. She announced today she will not run for a second term in order to fight for education dollars. Let’s give her all the support we can to help her keep her word.

A Little Bamanomics

There’s nothing a little taxpayer dollars can’t fix. AppalCART, the transit provider for Watauga County, wanted to build a new headquarters a couple years ago. They procured $5.5 million in porkulus. Then, they were blasted by the ever-amplifying reverberations from Bush’s economic turndown. To make matters worse, some weird microclimate caused extremely cold winters to occur at the work site, when the rest of the world was warming at an accelerated pace.

Why the project should have run into difficulties, however, remains a mystery. After all, it features such green features as solar heating and rainwater collection. However, the FTA did not like the fact that a change of plans called for $700,000 steel canopies. They should have been green roofs growing hemp. Regardless, the NCDOT came to the rescue and agreed to provide a cool $300,000 to get the show back on the road.

The project is, reportedly, “on budget.”

Superb! Bravo!

I commend Mission Hospitals for a brilliant marketing strategy: boasting mass layoffs in their marketing department.

It’s All Good

The Occupy movement gets a bad rap, but they have at least done one thing good. They appear to have motivated the Asheville Citizen-Times to practice extinction – ignoring the fifth marathon public hearing failing to address subsidized urban camping for one-sided political speech – to the extent they are scrutinizing council’s consent agenda for headline material.