Bad news for NC budget writers today.
First, Tax Collections Slowing.
Now, Feds withhold $175 million from state. (BTW, how old is that picture of Dan Gerlach? Seriously, is that his high school yearbook picture?)
The Federal government has so little faith in NC to administer the mental health program that they are withholding Medicare and Medicaid funds. Yikes.
Maybe the session will be a little more interesting than the borefest everyone is predicting.
Up in 613, sometime Thursday afternoon, Christin came around the corner and remarked that “something big was going on,” and I muttered only that it sounded like some sort of party, irritated at the earthquake of heavy cattle thundering by literally shaking the floor.
One gets unconsciously sensitive and aware of certain harmonic signatures through the floor new Club 612 enough so that one can actually tell one Principal from another, before distinctive thrummings, whistles and noisy key chain or change fondlings validate their pending arrivals.
This one was chaotic, distracting from the work at hand…
“Dan Gerlach is out there,” she whispered. Her instincts are not to be ignored. It wasn’t just Gerlach, marching up and down, back and forth, perhaps talking on his cellphone. She had picked up on the “vibe” much as I had. But things being “amiss” and hysterical “ados” are common enough at the General Assembly. If you can’t filter it out unconsciously, you can’t get any work done.
The alert from the N&O got my attention much later on. The photograph also seemed as strange, a surreal choice in the context of the story, which at its heart is about the exploitation of the mentally ill and the taxpayer.
And his quote matched the chaos outside the door, making wonder briefly if Ryan Teague Beckwith or Pat Stith had chased him into the Club 612 Loitering Area.
Email. That’s apparently the only way to punch through the noise level around the Gathering of the Tribes. Too bad AFP trashed the servers, a few years back. The walls are high and getting higher, and there’s a bad moon on the rise at the Grand Hall of the People.