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Friday, October 21, 2011
Boomer with Attitude McCrory confuses City Hall with his own property
Posted By John Grooms on Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 12:08 PM
- Illustration by Marcus Kiser for CL
- King of all he surveys
Pat McCrory seems to think he’s still mayor of Charlotte. McCrory, a GOP gubernatorial candidate who is waiting till 2012 to announce his candidacy so the hosts for his speeches can continue to pay his food and travel bills, has found a new, super-critical issue to run on: the Occupy protesters.
The former mayor says Charlotte and N.C. officials (including, of course, Gov. Perdue) are setting a dangerous precedent by “allowing” Occupy Charlotte and Occupy Raleigh protesters to set up shop on city- and state-owned land. McCrory says he’s concerned about what will happen when the Democratic convention comes to Charlotte next year.
"Where do they draw the line?" McCrory asked, according to Tim Funk at the Charlotte Observer. "If they let one, do they let 10 — or 1,000? . . . That's not good for the economy, for public safety, and it's surely not sanitary for our city. . . . They [Occupy Charlotte] do not have a right to occupy" city-owned property. The former mayor who thinks he's still mayor says, "the city council should create an ordinance to deal with it — today." Jawohl, Mein Herr, they’ll get right on it.
Here’s a wake-up call, Pat: It’s public land. That means that, as BlueNC’s James Protzman points out, the land “is owned by We the People. Only in Pat McCrory's upside down world would owners of property be banned by Republican brownshirts from occupying their own land.”
In a fine essay on Huffington Post, Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman notes that the Occupy movement "is revealing distortions in our current understanding of the First Amendment. In recent decisions, the Supreme Court has protected Wall Street's constitutional right to pour millions into political campaigns. But as presently construed, the First Amendment isn't an obstacle when it comes to silencing the Occupiers.”
Here’s the headline from Protzman’s piece, which pretty much sums up this writer’s view, also: “The arrogance of the ruling elite: McCrory the one percenter.”
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