Today, the oh-so-broke state legislature voted to give away $35 million in taxpayer money to Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. 
   When the state started doling out hundreds of millions of dollars this way years ago, the money initially went to lure businesses here. One problem. Goodyear is already located here. So why give them money?
   The blackmail gambit worked like this. Execs at Goodyear, which employs 2,500, claimed they would close the company's Fayetteville plant and take 2,500 jobs elsewhere if the state didn't pony up. Legislators were more than happy to do so.
 Goodyear will use the money to modernize its Fayetteville plant, which company officials claim is at risk of closing, state officials say.
   Not that Goodyear needs the money. The company's profits are through the roof. Goodyear earned $56 million, or 26 cents per share, for the quarter ended June 30 compared with $2 million, or a penny a share, a year ago, The Associated Press reported.
   State legislators call this scheme "job maintenance." They passed a bill today that would fork the money over in $3.5 million installments over 10 years.
   Although Goodyear isn't named in the bill, Rep. Rick Glazier, D-Cumberland, told WRAL it is targeted at the company.   
   This is the same oh-so-broke state government of North Carolina that supposedly doesn't have the money to keep up with road construction. As a result, our urban roads are now the fourth most congested in the US according to a recent study.  
   Without major tax increases, tackling our road problems is simply impossible, legislators and the state's major daily newspapers insist. The real problem, I suspect, is that they've blown money on everything under the sun and don't have any left.
   Here's a sample of what legislators did have money for this year.

In other legislative news ...
   On Friday at 9:30 PM, Sen. Eddie Goodall was still waiting for a copy of the 300-page state budget that he was due to vote on at 9 AM the next morning. At that point, he and his colleagues still hadn't read it.    
   Holding back the budget until the last minute is part of a long-standing tradition on the part of the Democrats who run the legislature. If most legislators don't have time to fully read the budget before they vote on it, it makes it difficult to debate it or take issue with anything unseemly that might have been stuffed in at the last minute.
   Apparently there was good reason for that this year.