Will Robin Hayes listen?

Will Robin Hayes listen to these veterans?

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We now officially speak English (or Spanish, or French, or German, or whatever...)

I just got back from the Cabarrus County Commissioners meeting where I voiced My concerns over Coy Privette's English only resolution. If you weren't there you might have seen me do that on WBTV and WCNC news. You can see video of this here.

Apparently the commissioners had prepared a completely alternative resolution in a previous work session that completely changed and undermined the original. I can completely agree with this new resolution mostly for the simple reason that it doesn't do or change anything.
This new resolution passed on a vote of 4 against 1.

The approved resolution no longer proclaims that all county services, programs and documents should be in English only. It simply "encourages" people to learn English, asks that churches and non-profits would organize English classes and even encourages English speaking Americans to learn a second language.
It also states that this resolution "shall not be construed to infringe upon the rights of any individual".

One Commissioner, Jay White, stated that he couldn't vote even for this new and completely watered down resolution because he believes that this country was built upon diversity and that we have much bigger problems to tackle in our County (e.g. New jail, Biotech campus,...). Right on Jay. All commissioners proclaimed that this wouldn't change anything and they considered it to be a "feel good" resolution.

So congratulations County Commission, you just passed a resolution that doesn't do or change anything, but it made some of you "feel good". At least one of you (Jay White) seemed to think what I was thinking: what a complete waste of time.

Next month the Cabarrus County Commission will pass another resolution that will make them feel good by proclaiming that Earth officially is round.

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Coy no lee informes (or Coy's english resolution part 2)

As I wrote on Sunday, Coy Privette, republican Cabarrus County Commissioner, plans to introduce a resolution at next Monday's commissioner meeting recognizing English as the county's official language. The resolution doesn't just want to proclaim that we speak English (I'm sure nobody needs a resolution to know that English is the dominant language here) but it also calls for all ordinances, programs and policies adopted by Cabarrus County to be done in English only. In addition, it says all documents, regulations, orders, transactions, proceedings, meetings and publications should be in English.

I have since then done some online investigating and came up with some interesting findings.

Apparently Mr. Privette doesn't read studies and reports about the biggest project in his own city since decades.

Last October the city of Kannapolis revealed a study it had ordered that investigated how well it was prepared for the arrival of the North Carolina (biotech) Research Campus.
The study, made by the Atlanta research company Market Street Research, thoroughly investigates the strong points and weaknesses of Kannapolis when it comes to catering to this huge new project. One of the weaknesses it lists is "in terms of its citizens being able to welcome a diverse group of newcomers".

"There is no question that an influx of researchers and scientists to NCRC will make Kannapolis more diverse. It is critical for Kannapolis to create an atmosphere that is open and welcoming to people with different backgrounds and lifestyles. This requires new services and programs (i.e. publishing documents in multiple languages)."

You can read the whole study right here.


The biotech research campus is expected to deliver 35,000 new jobs to our area. Since he's from Kannapolis i'm sure Mr. Privette doesn't want to give the impression he's working against the biggest new employer his city will have. Then why does he introduce a resolution that's the exact opposite of what the new Research Campus needs?

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¿usted habla inglés?

As reported in the Cabarrus Neighbors section of the Charlotte Observer, Coy Privette, the biggest right wing nut job on our completely republican County Commission, is pushing for the County Board of Commissioners to adopt a resolution recognizing English as the county's official language.

The proposed resolution calls for all ordinances, programs and policies adopted by Cabarrus County to be done in English. In addition, it says all documents, regulations, orders, transactions, proceedings, meetings and publications should be in English.

Privette defended the measure: "It's not discriminatory to these Hispanics at all to ask them to learn English so they can take advantage of the economic opportunities here. It is their civic duty."

First of all, with this ordinance you wouldn't "ask" them to learn English, you force everyone to.

I don't think anyone disputes that English is the official language here. I agree that everyone that plans to spend the rest of their lives here should learn English to fully participate in society. However if you expect every immigrant here to be fluent in English as soon as they arrive you should have a language test before you let anyone enter the country.
As an immigrant myself (non Spanish) I don't recall anyone ever giving me that test. If you don't expect everyone to know English as soon as they get here, i believe you should provide translation for some government services.

Privette, who taught English in China for 10 years, said he was expected to know Chinese if he needed to speak to someone in the Chinese government while he was there. It's pretty funny hearing Mr. Privette proclaim that we should do things here exactly as they do it in the biggest communist country in the world. Further more it would be interesting to hear if He was fluent in Chinese as soon as he got there, or if he needed translation for a pretty long time before he learned any Chinese. I'm pretty sure he never got fluent in Chinese at all, maybe someone can correct me.

Cabarrus County Departments are bound by federal laws requiring them to provide language assistance to their customers. Such a resolution would defy those state and federal rules, which supersede county ordinances. Of course Privette knows this and knows that His ordinance wouldn't change a thing and might in the worst case scenario even provoke a series of lawsuits. I don't think we need to have our local government involved in any more lawsuits as it is.
Also, in 1987 the state of North Carolina already declared English as the official language.

So since the real reason for Coy to come up with this resolution can't be to actually change anything, what might be his real reason?
Maybe pandering to his racist redneck following?
This resolution would just be a gratuitous statement of intolerance. Measures like this are being used to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment and fan the flames of ethnic conflict.

By constantly coming up with stupid resolutions that don't help our county along at all, but that stir up animosity Mr. Privette has made himself pretty unpopular with a big group of the population. He even managed to piss off a big part of his own republican party by suggesting that some of our Commissioners are RINO's (republicans in name only) and has launched nasty smear campaigns against them in the past, but that's a whole other story.

In the past election republicans had a very good opportunity to get rid of Coy, by voting for 2 republicans and one very moderate Democratic candidate (there were 3 commissioner seats up for grabs). After studying the election results it looks like about 8,000 people that voted for a republican candidate voted for the other 2 republican candidates (not for Coy) and left their 3rd vote unused. I heard a rumor that republican Commissioner Bob Carruth came up with the same analysis. Those republicans could have used that 3rd vote and cast it for a very moderate democrat that was running. I guess for those 8,000 republicans that was one step too far. I don't want to hear anymore republican whining about Coy Privette though, they had their chance.

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Fixing something you broke by breaking it even harder.

Our beloved President announced his "new way forward in Iraq" this week. Something he started thinking about right after the November election in which he, according to his own words, received a good "thumping". I'm sure it was pure coincidence that he didn't seem to think there needed to be a "new plan" until then.

The new plan can be summarized as follows:
I'm not listening to anyone. I'll do what I want, because I'm the decider. neener neener neener.

The president totally ignores his people, the result of the election and the Iraq Study Group (Baker group) report with this plan:

• According to many political analysts the Iraq war was the #1 reason for the huge loss of republicans in the November election.
• According to an AP poll Seventy percent of Americans oppose sending more troops to Iraq. Just 35 percent of Americans think it was right for the United States to go to war, another record low in AP polling and a reversal from two years ago when two-thirds of Americans thought it was the correct move. Other polls showed a similar result.
  
• The Iraq Study Group Report stated: “The United States should immediately launch a new diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region. This diplomatic effort should include every country that has an interest in avoiding a chaotic Iraq, including all of Iraq's neighbors.” Instead the president chose to chide Iran and Syria in his speech again: "These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq." Not a very good start for diplomacy if you ask me.
  

Sending 21,000 additional troops into Iraq will bring the amount of troops to the same level they were 2 years ago. Oh yeah, we were doing sooooo much better back then.
A defense official said that the 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, would move first into Iraq under Bush's plan. The brigade, based at Fort Bragg, NC, is now in Kuwait and poised to head quickly into the country.

Local Bush lapdog Robin Hayes supports the "surge" of course:

"The Iraqis themselves need to step up their commitment to securing their own country," he said, "and (I) want to see a plan that uses our troops to ensure this happens at a faster pace."

How are you going to motivate someone to work harder by doing the work for them?

The real reason for this "plan" to me seems to stretch this clusterf@*# out into 2008 and leave the clean up for Bush's successor.

There was also a very remarkable sentence in Bush's speech:

"Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship."

No ceremony on the deck of a battleship..hmm..what does that remind me of?? oh, I know, this one maybe? :

The reason we went to Iraq in the first place was to punish the ones responsible for 9/11, take out all the WMD's of Saddam, spread democracy in Iraq. Until we ourselves get democracy by having a president who listens to his people, I don't think we need to try and spread that principle anywhere else.
The American body count stands at 3,018 and there's no end in sight. Happy New Year!

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I'll have one electric car please!

I found a reason today for our local republican GM car dealer (Ben Mynatt) to get a bunch of money out of me.
Several news sources today announced what i think a lot of people are waiting for: the rebirth of the electric car.
Some big honcho at GM must have watched the excellent documentary "who killed the electric car" (if you haven't seen it yet, go rent it), because General Motors Corp. today unveiled the Chevrolet Volt sedan concept at the North American International Auto Show.

The Volt has a battery-powered electric motor that can run the car for up to 40 city miles on a single charge. This is more than enough for the average commuter because 78 percent of daily commuters travel 40 miles or less. About half of U.S. households travel less than 30 miles per day.

Beyond that, a gasoline-powered three-cylinder engine can generate electricity to power the car and replenish the battery, with a range of up to 640 miles, GM said.

The car can be recharged by plugging it in to a household 110-volt outlet for about six hours, and the gasoline engine can get about 50 miles per gallon when producing electricity to run the car, GM said. The turbocharged engine also can run on E85 ethanol. This is no "girlie" car either: GM officials estimated a top speed of 100 to 120 mph for the Volt, which can carry up to five passengers.

You could call the Volt a "plug-in hybrid" that runs on nothing but electricity for the first 40 miles and then turns into a hybrid like we already have on the roads these days (e.g. Toyota Prius).

This might be the car that saves the GM company from dying out after a decade of refusing to invest in environmentally friendly cars and instead aiming to sell mainly gas guzzling SUV's (e.g. the Hummer) and big trucks to machos with a tiny wiener. One of those machos lives in my neighborhood and thinks he needs a H2 Hummer to drive just one person to work in Charlotte everyday at less than 10 mpg. Since I'm a pacifist I am not going to say he deserves to be shot, but he needs at least a swift kick in the nachos. For guys like that there's the good alternative of joining the army and driving vehicles like this.

The result? GM lost $1.3 billion during the first quarter and a whopping $10.6 billion in 2005 as a whole.
At the same time sane people flocked to companies like Toyota to buy a Prius, thereby making Toyota the biggest car company in the world now. I guess somebody at GM finally got the message and decided to invest money in the electric car once more.

The bad news is that the Chevy Volt is a concept car and it won't be commercially available until 2010 or 2012. The folks at GM seem to have the marketing figured out (you can visit the fancy Volt website here), now hurry up and make the damn thing already.

Then all we need in this country is an administration that pumps money into research on how to produce more electricity through alternative environmentally friendly resources, instead of giving huge tax breaks to oil companies, so we don't have to produce it through very polluting coal plants like the "cliffside" ones Duke energy is planning to build.

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The law doesn't apply to republican women

The Charlotte observer reported today that a group of North Carolina republican women seems to think the law doesn't apply to them.
State lawmakers passed a new ethics law last year, which took effect January 1st.
The law prohibits lobbyists from contributing to a lawmaker's political campaign. It was designed to reduce the influence of well-funded lobbyists.

But the law doesn't apply to the hundreds of political action committees in North Carolina. And that exception has not been lost on the leaders of the Committee to Elect Republican Women, a group of 14 female state officials.

The group sent a letter this week to lobbyists, inviting them to attend a breakfast Jan. 24 before the new session of the General Assembly and to contribute as much as $4,000. The invitation even mentions the new law and argues that the group is exempt.

Cherie Berry is founder of the Committee to Elect Republican Women and is also Labor Commissioner of our State. As such she is better known as the "elevator lady", since you see her picture posted in every elevator.
It's also interesting to note that our own Rep. Linda Johnson, R-Cabarrus, is listed in state records as the treasurer.

The republican committee is clearly undercutting the spirit of what the new law says.
The new law was part of a package of ethics changes that was approved in the wake of criminal investigations involving House Speaker Jim Black, a Matthews Democrat. Republicans made a lot of noise (rightfully so) about the scandals Jim Black was involved in, so it is very ironic they are the first ones to undercut the law that was passed to prevent such scandals in the future.

By specifically inviting lobbyists to contribute to their campaign these republican women are going against the will of the majority of voters tired of lobbyists and big companies buying new laws and legislation.
Politicians (from both parties) should listen to what their constituents want, not to what the big wallets of lobbyists want.

It seems clear to me that our representatives in Raleigh need to push for even tighter rules.

Update: Since some people seem to think I'm lying about Cherie Berry's picture being in elevators, i'm posting the following picture. Feel free to click on it to see an enlarged version.

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Whiny boy

As the New York Times reported, local Congress member Patrick T. McHenry, a republican of the very creepy kind, didn't have a good day on the opening of the 110th U.S. Congress.

Waving his hands and stomping his feet, Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina acted out on Wednesday what the rest of the Republican caucus must have felt. “It is so hypocritical, just on its face,” Mr. McHenry fumed.

His complaint: That Democrats, on the verge of taking control of Congress, were planning to run the place their way, driving the legislative agenda themselves without input from the Republican minority.

Wasn’t that, someone asked, how the Republicans had run Congress for more than a decade?

“We didn’t campaign on this openness,” Mr. McHenry argued, denying that he and his colleagues were just being sore losers. “It’s not whining,” he said. “It’s a matter of calling them out on their rhetoric.”

Newsflash for you Patrick boy: You're a hypocritical whiny ass. Now sit down and grow up.
If you've ever seen Patty boy you know he has a lot of room left to grow.

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A historic day

On the opening day of the two-year Congress, Nancy Pelosi, a liberal California Democrat, was sworn in as the first woman to lead the U.S. House of Representatives as its speaker.

The convening of the new House and Senate marked the first time in his six years as president that Bush will not have fellow Republicans in control of either legislative body.

Pelosi delivered her first speech as House speaker, warning that the November 7 congressional elections were "a call to change" that went far beyond Democrats' taking power from Republicans.

"Nowhere were the American people more clear about the need for a new direction than in Iraq," Pelosi said, adding voters "rejected an open-ended obligation to a war without end."

"In order to achieve a new America, we must return this House to the American people," Pelosi said. "So our first order of business is passing the toughest ethics reform in history."

"By electing me as speaker you have brought us closer to the ideal of equality that is America's heritage and America's hope," Pelosi said. "This is an historic moment — for the Congress, and for the women of America. It is a moment for which we have waited more than 200 years. Never losing faith, we waited through the many years of struggle to achieve our rights."

Amen Sister! Now get to work.

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Fall out from the Hayes BlueNC blogpost

The day after I posted the Hayes story on the bluenc blog, things took off like a rocket.
BlueNC's website hits went from a daily average of 1300 to 38,000.
The story was picked up by numerous other blogs, HuffingtonPost and DailyKos probably being the biggest ones.
It was only a matter of time after that until the "regular" media caught wind of the story.
It made the Charlotte Observer twice and MSNBC reportedly interviewed Dale Cline, the publisher of the Concord Standard (if anyone can find video of this online, please let me know).
And finally my crowning achievement: Tom Delay's blog.

Meanwhile in the Hayes camp his spokeswoman (she's actually a girl in her early 20's), Carolyn Hern, said she did not attend the speech but that she has "no reason to doubt the accuracy of Hayes' initial quotes".

It's interesting how these bloggers can distort the news," Hern said.

If you can explain to me how publishing the exact quotes of someone (and they themselves saying those quotes are correct) is in any way distorting news, i'll buy you a beer.

When I first read the original story I immediately thought "this needs to be on CNN". I didn't quite make it, but hey, MSNBC ain't bad.
So next time you want to break a national news story, keep your eye on those newspaper vending machines when you're out for a walk!

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The one that started it all (aka Hayes goes nuts).

This is the one that started my "career" as a blogger. As I was walking around in downtown Concord my eye caught the front page of our local newspaper "the Concord Standard" in a vending machine. I couldn't believe what i was reading. Since I knew our local paper did not publish their stories online and only the few 1000 readers of this paper had access to this story, I decided I needed to bring this story to the world. I posted the story on bluenc. I couldn't foresee what would follow.

Robin Hayes has the solution to the Iraq war: have our soldiers convert all Muslims to Christianity.

Having won the election by only a hair’s width and almost getting himself kicked out of Congress seems to have had some profound psychological effects on poor Mr. Hayes. A speech that flip-floppin’ Robin gave last week at the Concord Rotary Club seems to prove he has finally gone off the deep end.

Our local weekly newspaper the “Concord Standard and Mount Pleasant Times” reported on Mr. Hayes speech in his hometown:

First there’s the usual talk of how we’re “winning” over there: “The war in Iraq has got to be won; it’s being won” (A couple of months ago Hayes said that the rise in violence in Iraq was an indication that we’re winning.)

Then comes the real kicker: “Stability in Iraq ultimately depends on spreading the message of Jesus Christ, the message of peace on earth, good will towards men. Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the Savior.”

So if we just turn our soldiers into missionaries everything will be okay, Mr. Hayes?

First we sent our men over there to take out the WMD’s, then it was to “spread democracy”, now you want them there to “spread the message of Jesus Christ”? It so happens that people in Iraq already have a savior but unfortunately for Mr. Hayes it’s Muhammed, not Jesus.

If we can’t keep Muslims from killing each other over there, I don’t think that trying to make them all Christian is going to be any easier.

With this kind of talk Hayes just plays into the hands of Al-Qaeda by confirming what their leaders have always been saying: those American soldiers are just modern Crusaders. He is thereby strengthening the beliefs of terrorists that want to kill every American soldier they come across.

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