Ron Christensen: “North Carolina’s national brand may be changing – but not the way Gov. Pat McCrory intended when he talked during his campaign about the Tar Heel state undergoing an image makeover.”

“There was the suggestion of perhaps a new advertising slogan. The new brand that McCrory seems to want is that North Carolina is more business-friendly. But since he took office in January, the state has been undergoing a brand change of a very different kind.”

“The sharp rightward turn of the legislature and the Moral Monday protests have turned North Carolina into one of the nation’s top political spectacles.”

Jaxine Bubis (R), who is vying to represent the GOP in a fall recall election of Democratic Senate President John Morse, “has drawn ire from some constituents for her hot-and-heavy prose,” the Denver Post reports.

For much of the past decade, Bubis has written novels under the pseudonym “Jaxine Daniels,” and describes herself as a “grammy who writes erotic romance.”

In her candidacy, Bubis has the endorsements from some of the state’s most conservative lawmakers.

Robert “Bert” Webbe (R) says a handshake from Easton, CT First Selectman Tom Herrmann (R) was nothing short of an assault, and he wants the three-term incumbent exposed for the “bully he is,” the Connecticut Post reports.

Said Webbe: “He’s a brute. At first, I didn’t want to file a complaint because I didn’t want it to influence anyone in a special election last year that I was running in. But I’ve had enough of his tactics and the way he does business — through intimidation — it has to stop.”

“With drugs needed for lethal injection in short supply and courts wrangling over how to execute prisoners without them,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster (D) “is floating one possible solution: Bring back the gas chamber.”

Koster says Missouri statutes “allow two options for executions: lethal injection and death by gas. Koster’s comments come amid his growing frustration over the Missouri Supreme Court’s refusal to set execution dates until lethal injection issues are resolved.”

The Guardian notes Koster’s extraordinary statement “is a sign of the increasing fall-out on the 32 death-penalty states of the boycott on sales of medical drugs for use in executions. Drugs companies in America, Europe and Asia have refused on ethical grounds to sell their products to corrections departments, and the European Commission has imposed tough restrictions on the export of anaesthetics to the US.”

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) signed a bill “requiring doctors who perform abortions to have hospital admitting privileges, and abortion clinics responded by immediately suing state officials over the measure,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

“The law — signed Friday by Walker in a private ceremony — would cut the number of clinics offering abortions in Wisconsin from four to two, and one of the remaining clinics would have to dramatically cut the number of abortions it provides, according to the operators of the clinics.”

The Washington Post notes the measure is “part of a wave of abortion limits passed this year by conservative lawmakers and governors, who have approved more than 40 restrictions in statehouses around the country.”