#ncga: Shouting “socialism” in a rubber room
You can tell election time is getting close. State Rep. Bob Steinburg and his
team are revving up the whisper & slander machine that so effectively eviscerated primary opponent Clark Twiddy.
It’s almost funny to see how Ol’ Bob transitions on his Facebook page from posting about his latest visit to a church right into carpet-bombing his opponent with personal attacks. (Is THAT WJWD?)
Ol’ Bob is already making the rounds proclaiming his opponent in November, Cole Phelps, is a “gun-grabber.” (Never mind that Phelps has gone on the record calling himself a Second Amendment supporter with concerns about limiting access to guns for the mentally ill.)
Steinburg is also making “socialist” Phelps’s new first name, and proclaiming himself the second-coming of Milton Friedman.
Socialism involves government meddling in the private sector. (Like setting up a private business funded with government money, for instance.) Phelps may favor some of that, but SO DOES Steinburg. 
Here Steinburg is teaming up with a Democrat senator praising the ideas of government mandates and tax credits for solar and wind projects. Here’s a bunch of solar goons naming Steinburg a “champion” of their agenda (i.e., government handouts, mandates to benefit owners and manufacturers of windmills and solar panels).
(Here’s a fun website illustrating how many government giveaways there are for solar and wind folks. You can search by zip code. There are 48 government giveaways for folks in Steinburg’s home zip code. There are 52 in mine.)
There’s nothing free-market capitalist about THAT agenda. It appears you folks in Senate district 1 have some big-government socialist creep infesting BOTH sides of your race there.
Solyndra Republican Steinburg is channeling the renewable energy policies of the former Obama administration and going directly against the North Carolina Republican Party platform when he pushes special favors like subsidies for Big Wind and Big Solar. And in doing so, he is backstabbing North Carolina consumers whose electric rates will be driven up by installing more wind and solar. Ask Germany, whose “Energie Wende” (“energy transformation”) to wind and solar has left German consumers paying three times as much for electricity as North Carolina consumers. Or ask consumers in Australia, where two states saw their consumer electric rates DOUBLE in just twelve months due to the higher cost and lower efficiency of wind and solar power. In pushing to make its power grid 50% renewable, one of those Australian states went from having the cheaper consumer electric rates in the world to having the most expensive consumer electric rates in the world. This is what Bob Steinburg wants for North Carolina and it is Democrat policy, NOT Republican policy.
Of course, this is one reason Steinburg is likely to lose. His district was made highly marginal by Phil Berger in the last redistricting, so he cannot afford to lose any base Republican votes. But there are well organized groups in several counties of the district who are fiercely opposed to wind and/or solar projects in their neighborhoods, and their leaders tend to be Republican. Steinburg’s pandering to Big Wind and Big Solar is going to be radioactive to these voters, making him unelectable.
Obama’s energy policies of subsidizing Big Wind and Big Solar, which could not make it in a free enterprise system, are not really socialist, though. They are a better fit for classical fascist economic theory which is to leave ownership of economic activity in private hands but have it micromanaged by government in how it functions. Fascist economics is exactly what Obama and Steinburg support in energy.
I have always wondered what sort of behind the scenes money-making deal Steinburg has with wind and / or solar that makes him push them so hard?
Voters in this district blew it by not nominating Twiddy.
There have been several excellent articles in the Beaufort observer recently about the solar scam. It is obvious big money talks and steers the green agenda and most recently in a court ruling.
That court case was in Grandy in SD1 where a solar energy facility is about to destroy a neighborhood of largely Republican voters and they fought back, won in Superior Court, but lost in the Court of Appeals. I very much doubt those folks think much of Big Solar waterboy Steinburg. That is not the only neighborhood in the district threatened or already ruined by Steinbburg’s wind and solar buddies..
John Steed I agree thanks for info!
Your last sentence says it all.