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Wed.: "it does a Body good"
posted at 2008-07-10 00:40 | Last modified 2008-07-10 00:40
The Senate trounced the House today in the annual milk chug-off. It’s nominally a publicity event for NC dairy farmers, but it’s really about intracameral bragging rights. Last year, the House took it. This year, it was the Senate - Ed Jones (D), Don East (R), and Andrew Brock (R).
The senators got through their serial chug-fest – 2 half-pints each via straws, one at a time – in 85 seconds. Their secret weapon: Davie Rep. Andrew “ChugZilla” Brock. He hadn’t even planned to compete but was shanghaied on his way into the building. Talk about luck – the guy’s a ringer. “I’m trying to cut back,” Brock said, “but I used to drink a gallon [of milk] a day.”
House competitor Arthur Williams said his team lost valuable time when anchor-chugger Dewey Hill got a little mixed up about the order of competition. But excuses aside, the all-Dem House team (Bill Brisson was the third) didn’t really stand a chance against the better-organized, more disciplined Senate machine. (So symbolic!)
Jones and East said they’d been practicing for weeks: “We’ve got a cow out back.” The winning chuggers got $300 from the Ag Dept. for the charity of their choice. Jones says it’ll go to a children’s charity.
High (sweep)Stakes
House lawmakers voted 116 to 1 today to outlaw “sweepstakes slots” – a video gambling operation that’s springing up like kudzu through a loophole in the 2006 video poker ban.
Here’s how it works: You buy a prepaid card (usually for long-distance minutes) that comes with some number of sweepstakes entries. You take your card over to a terminal and swipe it. The display shows you a slot machine, which you “spin” to see if you have a “winning entry.”
Where it gets around existing law is that a) it’s not random. The potential winning value of each entry is already set in a remote server. In that sense, it’s like the code inside the cap of your Pepsi bottle, except that Pepsi doesn’t have a slot-machine interface. And b) you’re not feeding money into the machine. You’re routing it through a rechargeable prepaid “phone card.” (Binker has more background here.)
Guilford Dem Earl Jones was the sole vote against the measure and the only voice in opposition. He says it isn’t technically illegal (which is kind of the whole reason for this bill, but never mind). And he argued the House has no business making legal things illegal, a solipsism that reduced most of his fellow Dems to bewildered silence.
Who knows - maybe Jones actually wants the press to scrutinize his campaign finance reports. If so, I'd say he won.
Lobbying “reform”
A House vote is scheduled tomorrow on a measure to “clarify” reform rules governing when lobbyists can buy your lawmaker dinner.
According to the 2006 reform bill, that can only happen at a public event. But the law doesn’t define how much public notice is required for such events. A state ethics opinion put the threshold at ten days – an interval some say is unworkable.
The new bill would allow lobbyists to declare an event public with no notice at all – as in, “Gee, I’m having dinner with a delegation, and the waiter just brought me the check, so I’m calling the next ten minutes a "public event" so I can pick up the tab.” (And hey, who would ever abuse that?)
The bill’s coming to the floor from House J1. But when I asked members about the public-notice issue, I got lambasted: "No one said anything to us about it! It’s better than the recommendations we were given. And what if the Governor walked by our ice-cream social and we couldn’t invite him?"
(Ice cream? Seriously? Even if that were the point, it could be handled through changes that wouldn’t let lobbyists off the public-reporting hook. But honestly, when’s the last time Easley darkened the legislature’s doorstep for ice cream or anything else?)
Still, the measure has bipartisan support from both Glazier and Stam, which pretty much means it'll pass. More when it does.
Comments? Drop me a line.
