*Oops. Forgot the slug, just now noticed it.

The Dispatch profiles Greensboro resident and 6th District congressional candidate Jay Ovittore.

Pretty standard profile. Here are some samples:

“The middle class is getting trounced from every angle,” Ovittore said. “The ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ label, now only consists of, you only have to have 60 percent of your product made in the U.S.A. It used to be 100 percent, so we’ve lowered the bar. What free trade has done has given more corporate welfare, expanded profit margins and put people in the unemployment line. And these folks … don’t have the means to get retraining as the current administration keeps talking about and pay their bills.”

But he doesn’t want to pay industries millions of dollars in the form of incentives, which he said should be banned by all states, to create those jobs. Instead Ovittore has a plan to penalize companies that choose to outsource their workforce overseas – companies that outsource more than 20 percent will lose their tax breaks and more than 25 percent will have to pay more in taxes.

…..Like several other Democrats, Ovittore believes the U.S. got into the Iraq war for the wrong reasons and puts the blame on President George Bush and his administration for the “quagmire” he said the country is now caught up in.

“The war in the Middle East between the Muslims and folks trying to take over the Holy Land has been going on ever since the Holy Land started,” Ovittore said. “It’s an extension of the Crusades. And we look at companies like Blackwater, which are funded by the … extreme religious right; you look at the Bush administration basically funding his own crusading army that has no responsibility.”

Ovittore wants to see a political solution to the Iraq war, but if the battling factions don’t stop, he said the U.S. should just let the country have its own civil war. He said he doesn’t believe countries can be “bombed into democracy.”