Archive for August 2013
Will Pope Denounce Goolsby?
Now that Senator Thom Goolsby has compared educators and the media to Vladimir Lenin, I presume that State GOP Chair Claude Pope will denounce him for an “inexcusable, disgusting and shameful” attack. Goolsby wrote on his blog: “Vladimir Lenin said, ‘A lie told often enough becomes the truth.’ Professional educrats (education bureaucrats) and their…
Read MoreSizing Up Pat
I’m obviously not a big fan of Governor McCrory, but I want an accurate read on him. It doesn’t do Democrats any good to underestimate him. Two in cases in point: (1) Democrats who dismissed Ronald Reagan as an “amiable dunce” and (2) all of Barack Obama’s opponents, Democrats and Republicans, who dismissed him in…
Read MoreThe Smell Test
All I can say about Gary’s column on D.G. Martin is – “Amen.” In the fourteen years I’ve known D.G., I’ve never heard him say an unkind word about anyone – so Claude Pope claiming he’d called Republicans Nazis just didn’t pass the smell test. Here’s the column D.G. wrote. Take a look…
Read MoreHow Berger Won
Carter has done a couple of insightful (as always) blogs about Senator Phil Berger: that he’s a true-believer conservative and a small-town product, in contrast to the big-city moderates who are the second- and third-most powerful Republicans in North Carolina (respectively, Thom Tillis and Pat McCrory). It also looks like Berger was a lot…
Read MoreA Lesson From John Wilson
John Wilson went from teaching school in Raleigh to leading the NCAE and then the NEA. He went from leading teacher protests against Governor Hunt in 1984 to working with Hunt 10 years later to raise North Carolina’s teachers’ pay above the national average. He wrote a recent blog in Education Week (“The Most…
Read MoreD.G. and the GOP
D.G. Martin – TV-radio host, newspaper columnist and finalist for Most Interesting Man in the World – riled up the Republican Party with a recent column. State GOP Chair Claude Pope accused D.G. of comparing Republicans to Nazis. “Inexcusable, disgusting and shameful,” Pope fumed. He called on UNC-TV to suspend D.G.’s show “Book Watch,”…
Read MoreThe Sum of Human Foibles
Some fellow up in the mountains decided it would be a cute idea to drop a possum in a tinsel draped cage twenty feet onto a stage on New Year’s Eve at a party. To the possum’s chagrin, the State Wildlife Resources Commission agreed it was a cute idea and gave the fool a…
Read MoreDevilment
An old friend who now lives in Maryland wrote the other day and asked, What in blazes is going on in the North Carolina legislature? Well, right now, thankfully, nothing. The legislators have decamped. But what kind of devilment went on in the legislature before the peace of August southern afternoons was restored?…
Read MoreNew State Seal
Translation: “To be backward, rather than to seem backward.”
Read MoreCookies
It was a frozen moment in time, a sort of thirty-second epiphany revealing the compounded double griefs of fading courtliness and ascending Yankeedom (I say Yankeedom because most Yankees never experienced the good fortune of having a maiden aunt whose sole purpose in life was to indoctrinate – by force if necessary – wayward nieces…
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