
{"id":467,"date":"2007-06-21T07:46:36","date_gmt":"2007-06-21T15:46:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/2007\/06\/21\/exile-on-jones-street-11\/"},"modified":"2007-06-21T07:46:36","modified_gmt":"2007-06-21T15:46:36","slug":"exile-on-jones-street-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2007\/06\/21\/exile-on-jones-street-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Exile on Jones Street"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>By Kirk Ross<\/strong><br \/>\nColumnist <\/em><\/p>\n<p>From the people who brought you massive purges of voter rolls in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere, some helpful suggestions about North Carolina\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s electoral system. Seems the feds think we have too many voters on the rolls and we ought to get to whacking some folks off.<\/p>\n<p>That helpful federal advice comes from the Department of Justice\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Voting Rights Division, which last time we checked was having a little trouble explaining why some of its executives decided to violate long-running DOJ policy and intervene ahead of the vote in places with close elections. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>State Auditor Les Merritt also got into the act. The auditor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s office sounded an alarm about the issue, throwing out numbers and raising such a fuss that it delayed Senate passage of a bill designed to make it easier for people to vote.<\/p>\n<p>Now the State Board of Elections is disputing some of Merritt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s findings, which are as yet unreleased. In a ten-page rebuttal, elections board chair Gary Bartlett stopped just short of calling the auditor clueless about how the state registration and voting system works.<\/p>\n<p>Democratic activists are starting to speak up because of concerns that the state may become the scene of the same kind of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153voter-integrity\u00e2\u20ac\u009d efforts out of the Gonzalez Justice Department witnessed elsewhere. (First clue: suddenly, a whole lotta noise about voter fraud.) Some Dems, though, see one silver-lining: It must mean the Tar Heel State is in play in \u00e2\u20ac\u212208.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, the Institute for Southern Studies\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Facing South blog, the Charlotte Observer and the N&amp;O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new Under the Dome blog are all hitting this story hard. If Merritt hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t gotten them already, the FOIA requests for any emails back and forth with DOJ are probably just around the corner.<\/p>\n<p><strong>WordSmith<\/strong><br \/>\nGOP gubernatorial candidate Sen. Fred Smith \u00e2\u20ac\u201c he of the larger-than-life billboard series along U.S. 70 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c has penned his first book. The subject, of course, is Fred Smith.<\/p>\n<p>A Little Extra Effort: Hard Work and Straight Talk in a Sound Bite World, is as detailed and as frank as a 165-page self-published autobiography gets. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also likely to boost the OP research operations of Smith\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s opponents, including those delving into his business deals and what he refers to as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a messy divorce.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Smith also lays into Gov. Easley pretty good.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never seen Mike Easley in the General Assembly except when he walks in and gives a speech. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve twice been to the Governor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mansion. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s my entire contact as a three-term senator with the leader of the state. Governor Easley is not engaged in making the public policy of this state. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not acceptable. North Carolina needs a chief executive who understands the first, simple rule of leadership: show up.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Ye-ouch.<\/p>\n<p>And while Extra Effort is certainly more than a soundbite, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t worry \u00e2\u20ac\u201d he spares not the platitudes and demonstrates acute attention to the obvious.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Running an organization isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t easy, though. It requires long, hard meetings. It takes getting down into the details. It takes rigorous followthrough (sic). It demands extra effort.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Whew. So will reading this thing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Errata<\/strong><br \/>\nNot to be outdone by Billboard Fred, Gov. Mike Easley\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s staff did a little touch-up on the governor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s biography in a recent state-sponsored history of the governors. UNC history prof Harry Watson told the News &amp; Observer recently that the passage reads like a PR document. It should. Most of it was rewritten by the governor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s press staff.<\/p>\n<p>But after the flap over the bio ensued, even the press office suggested it might be a good idea to wait for a governor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s term to expire before rewriting his bio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Kirk Ross Columnist From the people who brought you massive purges of voter rolls in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere, some helpful suggestions about North Carolina\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s electoral system. Seems the feds think we have too many voters on the rolls and we ought to get to whacking some folks off. That helpful federal advice comes&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}