Proud boys, polls, and other thoughts
As usual, there’s a lot going on this week. We’re finally supposed to get a budget from the legislature, but I’m not holding my breath. They need to get that out of the way so they gerrymander themselves supermajorities again and make our Congressional Districts an...
Let’s Stop and Think on NCInnovation
Economic survival in the 21st century depends upon a community's ability to innovate. With the rise of emerging markets around the world, places like North Carolina have exhausted their ability to mobilize crude resources for industrial development. Advanced economies...
Dale Folwell is Embarrasing Himself
In a party crackling with populist showmanship, Dale Folwell has forged an image as a grim-faced policy wonk. While others stir controversy, he does the people's business. His self-conscious seriousness has won him an eclectic clique of admirers in Raleigh circles,...
When people needed mental health care, Republicans gave them more access to guns
The Republican response to the shooting in Chapel Hill has been disturbing. They’ve downplayed the emotional trauma while making excuses for their utter failure to address the gun violence that is terrorizing our country. They blasted Democrats for politicizing the...
The Roots of Pro-Gun Zealots’ Rage
The right-wing mind seems impervious to tragedy. This week's brutal violation of social peace at UNC has not shaken the conservative commitment to maximal gun rights, despite a death on campus and a wave of trauma devastating the university and the state. These people...
Run for AG, Justice Morgan. NC Needs You.
Speculation is swirling in state-politics circles about the future of Mike Morgan. Morgan, a justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court, has announced his retirement from the post he currently holds and has proffered some indications that he plans to seek another...
It’s not just the guns. It’s the Republicans.
On Monday, my community saw the results of Republicans’ dystopian view of the world. Around 1pm, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill issued an alert, telling all students to shelter in place. An armed and dangerous man was on campus. Within minutes, the...
Terror
It was raining on the afternoon of the shooting. The Devil was beating his wife, as we say in the South. In Carrboro near UNC campus, everyone in our lively and upbeat community had a traumatized look on their face. At Armadillo Grill, a family sat munching their...
More manufactured outrage
I was not going to respond to the most recent manufactured outrage over a song. I already did that earlier this summer. However, after watching the singer’s response to the controversy, I want to weigh in. Two weeks ago, Oliver Anthony was an obscure...
Defeating Republicans is an act of patriotism
We had another busy week in politics--except in the North Carolina legislature. The GOP leadership here still has not delivered the budget they promised to have completed by July. The delay is holding up Medicaid for tens of thousands of working North Carolinians who...
The Case for an American Renaissance
Like a butterfly breaking free from a cocoon, America has often been reborn as something new. These renewals took place in the colonial era, in the Antebellum awakenings and reforms, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights era. America's plasticity is its great gift, a...
Florida Lite
The United States of America is transforming into 25 Californias and 25 Floridas. In the context of this dichotomy, reactionary purism is the more potent force. Red-state America has, over the past five years, transmogrified from a conservative outpost of the Western...