A modest economic proposal
Rural North Carolina is at a crossroads. Many counties face double-digit unemployment and almost half are losing population. The loss of manufacturing to trade deals and tobacco to common sense, has left those regions with few viable alternatives. Bribing companies to...
Candidate development
Poor Pat McCrory. Either he doesn’t understand how government works or he's just making stuff up again. Remember when he cut unemployment benefits to North Carolina’s long-term unemployed despite our stubbornly high unemployment rate? He blamed Barack Obama. It wasn't...
The Democratic mind
Yesterday, a letter-to-the-editor in the News & Observer responded to Rob Christensen’s column from last week, “A look inside the GOP mind.” The author asks what’s inside the Democratic mind. He says he can’t understand what Democrats are thinking or how they...
Banking on failure
Republicans think they’ve got a winner in Obamacare. They are so sure that the program is going to fail, that they are almost giddy. And in states across the country, Republicans governors and legislatures are doing everything they can to sabotage the implementation....
That hollow ring
It’s really hard to take Pat McCrory seriously. In his interview with the Heritage Foundation, he says he accomplished more in his first nine months than any governor in 20 years. He also claimed that the federal government might force North Carolina to expand...
The Sandy Hook response
Well, guns are back in the news. A 12 year old boy in Nevada took a gun to school, killed a teacher and wounded two classmates before killing himself. It’s a tragedy. In Morrisville, the town council voted to allow guns on playgrounds in order to comply with state...
Courting extremists
North Carolina was once referred to as “A valley of humility between two mountains of conceit.” The mountains were the aristocratic states of South Carolina and Virginia. Well, this week, we can say that there’s valley of verbosity between mountains of deceit. Pat...
Transparency and insight
I don’t very often agree with the Civitas Institute and they probably don’t often agree with me. But their Carolina Transparency site is great. It offers a wealth of current and historical information about elected officials, districts, counties and voters. Civitas...
It’s not the rumors
To borrow from Mark Twain, rumors of Aldona Wos’ departure were greatly exaggerated. However, they were also eminently believable. That’s why the rumors had such legs. And they may still be true--just not last week. Most people, including Republicans, Democrats and...
Wos loss?
Well, if the rumors swirling around Raleigh are true, Aldona Wos, Secretary of Health and Human Services is gone. If so, it looks like the McCrory administration waited for a Friday afternoon news dump, hoping people are distracted by the weekend. Regardless, the...
