Under the Dome post on Sen. Tony Rand’s now chilly relationship with Mike Easley:

But these days, Rand says they aren’t speaking, J. Andrew Curliss reports. It’s because of the federal investigation, Rand said, that also includes a Rand buddy, car dealer Robert F. Bleecker. Easley’s son was apparently driving a Bleecker-owned car for years. The Easley campaign recently amended reports to show it was first a campaign vehicle and then was used for “personal” reasons since mid-2005.

Rand is on Bleecker’s dealership board of directors.

Rand said his friendship with Bleecker goes back 30 years and he thought it best to not talk with the former governor while the probes are ongoing.

Related.

I posted a comment on a youtube video that presents a completely one-sided picture of last week’s rallies at Hagan’s office in GSO.

I think the first comment said “Here is the other side of the coin” and linked to a roundup or story about the counterprotests.

I think the other comment may have just been a link to the articles.

The comments never appeared. A note from the video poster now appears explaining his “comment policy” for his youtube channel.

Do the above comments seem to fit his criteria for being removed or do you think this is a case of curtailment of free expression by the liberal activist?

I understand this activist is associated with the campaign of Joel Landau for Greensboro City Council.

Do they believe in censorship or free speech?

You let me know now, won’t ya’.

In God We Trust. In Obama, not so much.

As seen at a tea party in Chicago. Not seen on the evening news.

maybe its what i been should have doing all along. using the
energy with a clear mind. take action. make action, step to the mike.

speak your mind with clarity and release the energy.
dont stop. dont think. make it move. move with it. move toward the clear.

yes i said it and no i’m not. but it makes sense.
it makes sense to me and to a number of people i admire.
it’s not my thing, but this concept is clear.
reference chick.

Reidsville’s Dorothy Hairston turns 108.

Wow.

I wonder how long ’till they fix this headline:

“Tea Party tanks”

A reader comments:

“To the editorial staff:

I’m just curious why you chose to title this letter “Tea Party Tanks” which implies that the reader thought the tea party was a bust and had no intrinsic value, when just the opposite appears to be the case.  I hope that was merely a mistake and not your overt liberalism coming out again.”

I started an online petition against the public option. Please sign it if you agree with it.

Text of Petition:

##We oppose any legislation that imposes greater government control over health care. We are against the public option because the government has no business taking over any segment of the American economy.

Doctors and other independent health care providers should drive the conversation about health care reform, not special interest groups from MoveOn to ACORN.

We urge you to be guided by free market principles when you consider how to vote on health care reform. The national debt and annual budget deficits are too large and cannot support expanded entitlement spending.##

Here is an AFP ad targeting members of Congress to vote no on government run healthcare.

Below are links to two petitions.

The AFP petition target was 100k. That’s been exceeded and they are not going for 250k

This petition is from Grassfire.

I have heard that there may be an organized effort to visit Kay Hagan’s offices next week. I will fully participate in those events and hope you will too.

Weekly update from Taxpayers for Common Sense:

##July is check-writing season for Congress. The House and Senate churn out spending bills almost daily in a rush to make the October 1st payment date for the start of fiscal year 2010.

In May, we wrote about 121 proposed cuts worth $17 billion in the President’s budget. Now that Congress has put pen to paper, we thought it would be worthwhile to see if they have taken a knife to the cuts.

Much work remains, but a quick perusal of the spending bills passed thus far by the House and Senate indicates the President would fit right in on the Washington Nationals roster because his batting average is looking pretty weak. Congress responded to his efforts to cut the heavily earmarked and duplicative Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Water Infrastructure State and Tribal Assistance grants ($145 million in FY09) by providing $150 million (Senate) and $160 million (House) for the program.

The President also took some swings at the Agriculture budget, but was again stymied. The $24 million cut to the Watershed and Flood Prevention Program was met with a $20 million increase by the House and $24.4 million in the Senate. This program has become little more than a parochial slush fund and does a poorer job meeting flood prevention needs than Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers programs.

Bells are ringing over the most prominent of the cuts – the weapons system reductions and eliminations proposed by Defense Secretary Gates. The crystal ball is still foggy on those, but storm clouds are gathering: While we won’t see the defense spending bills until next week, both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees pushed to restore funding for programs including the F-22 fighter jet, Joint Strike Fighter alternate engine, and missile defense.

The President has had some mixed successes. The House went along with his call to eliminate funding ($5 million in FY09) for the Department of Agriculture’s Public Broadcasting grants, opting to shift the work to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but the Senate plowed forward with another $5 million. In the Department of Homeland Security, with the proliferation of GPS, the President wanted to stop spending $36 million on the old LORAN-C radio navigation system (President Bush tried the same the last few years). The House went off course and restored the funding, but the Senate allowed the Coast Guard Commandant to make the decision and potentially pull the plug on this World War II technology in 2011.

Cutting the budget is hard work. But by consistently offering cuts and justification for them, baby budgetary steps can be made. In addition, lawmakers can try to enforce cuts via amendments. Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) tried to do just that, offering to restore the President’s cut to the corporate welfare Market Access Program in the Agriculture spending bill. Unfortunately he was cut off at the pass and not allowed to offer an amendment on the floor.

We recognize all too painfully that these cuts are not anywhere close enough to balance the books. But if we are ever going to reach that budgetary nirvana, we have to start somewhere. And cuts big and small, early and often, are a critical part of the solution.##

I wondered last night how the same liberals who foamed at the mouth about W. spending $600 billion on a foreign venture could in  good conscience extol the virtues of multiple trillion dollar expansions of the federal budget deficit less than six months after taking complete control of the apparatus of state:

CQ:

Facing resistance from their own moderates to the [health care] legislation’s roughly $1 trillion price tag, House leaders have put off release of their draft legislation.

Brenda Bowers linked to a story about a group of Blue Dogs going against the grain:

The Blue Dog Democrats’ list of demands came on the eve of House Democratic leaders’ planned unveiling of their final bill Friday. The bill release was pushed back to Monday at the earliest and Democratic leaders agreed to devote Friday to meetings with the fiscally conservative Blue Dogs to work through their concerns.

These include the need for more cost containment measures, protections for small businesses and a focus on rural health care.

And since I’ve been trying to find out what the practitioners think of all the hoopla surrounding government financed health insurance, I thought this was interesting (from Brenda’s link):

Among the Blue Dogs’ concerns is the shape of a new public insurance plan that would compete with private insurers. House leaders envision making payment rates to providers in the plan some 5 percent higher than Medicare payment rates. Blue Dogs say they can’t support any link to Medicare rates, which they say pays well below market rates and varies unfairly around the country.