I’ve always loved school. Consequently, I detest what the General Assembly is doing to education.

As a kid, I knew that looking forward to school each day put me in a minority. Maybe it was my parents’ influence. My dad was a high school graduate and the son of a textile mill foreman in Cheraw, S.C. He joined the Navy as soon as he could and got the hell out of Cheraw. My mom quit high school when she got married at 16 but earned her GED when she was in her 40s. I always felt that they both had high expectations for me — the youngest of three boys — from a very early age.

U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows, sporting an Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians button, hosted a town hall meeting last Thursday in Cherokee that he said was the “most vocal” he has held in the district.

The photo ID requirements included in the new voting law passed by the General Assembly and recently signed by Gov. Pat McCrory are problematic. Still, if it was just a voter ID law there wouldn’t be so much hell being raised about the bill’s ramifications. It’s the other voter suppression measures in this over-reaching bill that have many scratching their heads and wondering just what’s going on.

As most anyone who follows public policy in this country knows, voter ID laws — a requirement that every person have a state-approved photo identification card before being allowed to cast a vote — are being passed in many states and are very controversial.

The Moral Monday protests that started  in Raleigh and made national headlines are now making the rounds in North Carolina with a stop scheduled in Sylva next Wednesday, Aug. 28.

It’s difficult for me to believe that the new leadership in Raleigh would purposely sacrifice development in the state’s rural areas at the altar of political ideology. On purpose or not, however, that’s the way it looks to many of us who live in places not named Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro or Winston-Salem. 

Everyone braced for change when Gov. Pat McCrory and Republicans in both the House and Senate were duly elected to govern North Carolina. That’s the natural order of politics — to the winner goes the spoils. However, even many long-time observers were caught unawares by the speed, the ideological bent, and the reliance on unproven economic principals that infused the legislation passed during the first session in which the GOP had total control of the state.

North Carolina is reverting back to paper ballots, forcing Haywood, Jackson and 29 other counties in the state to purchase completely new voting equipment by 2018.

Colorful specialty license plates have been spared the gallows thanks to a bill passed in the final hours of the General Assembly last week. 

By Martin Dyckman

Blackbeard, North Carolina's most famous pirate, was a fitting precursor to the modern brigands at Raleigh. As Scott McLeod's column pointed out last week (www.smokymountainnews.com/opinion/item/11167), there’s no apparent limit to their ruthlessness or to their scorn for the Old North State’s progressive traditions.

Their new tax deal — rhymes with steal — will save the richest of their constituents $10,000 on the average while raising rates on the poor and eventually shorting education and health care by some $700 million a year.

The Waynesville Police Department helped craft and then usher four bills, or some version of them, through the N.C. General Assembly this year, giving law enforcement officers statewide new tools in the fight against drugs.

“Thank you sir, may I have another.”

The line by Kevin Bacon from the now-classic film “Animal House” kept popping into my head as I went down the list of what this year’s GOP-led General Assembly is doing to North Carolina. In the movie, Bacon is being hazed as part of a fraternity initiation, and every time he is hit with a paddle he asks for another painful blow. Here in the Tar Heel state, you think legislative leaders are done pushing the state toward the likes of Mississippi or South Carolina, and then something else almost ridiculous hits the news that they have passed or seriously considered passing.