Today in NC politics

1) Hooray, school teachers can finally participate in prayer.  What’s that you say?  This law is pretty much identical to others that have already been struck down as unconstitutional?  Minor point when you’ve got to prove that Republicans love Jesus and Democrats don’t.

2) A NC House Committee voted to begin the process of opting out of Common Core standards:

House Bill 1061, which still needs to go through the Appropriations Committee before heading to the House floor, would create an Academic Standards Review Commission to develop standards “tailored to the needs of North Carolina’s students.”

I’m still waiting to find out just how exactly, math, science, etc., should be “tailored to the needs of North Carolina’s students” that is different from the needs of students in other states.  Is it something in the water?

3) Speaking of something in the water…. nice NYT Op-Ed of how we can expect more crap in our water here in NC.  Hooray for deregulation!

In fact, even as North Carolina faces the worst threat to its waterways in a generation, state politicians have started a process to eliminate dozens of environmental protections that have kept our water safe and clean for decades.

Last year, the General Assembly mandated that every single safeguard on our state’s waterways and drinking water be allowed to expire, unless regulators went through a burdensome process to readopt each one. To further stack the deck, legislators have simultaneously slashed 40 percent from the budget of the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the agency charged with ensuring these safeguards are in place and enforced.

Nearly four months after the Dan River spill was discovered, Duke Energy has barely begun to clean up the river (though it reached a deal with the Environmental Protection Agency to do so last month), and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources has yet to force Duke to begin a comprehensive cleanup in its 13 other coal ash sites across North Carolina — all of which are slowly leaking pollutants into our rivers, groundwater and drinking water.

I mean, come on, it’s not like water is essential to human life and health or anything.