My Man Dan

I’m always looking for something nice to say about a Republican. But Dan Forest? Sorry, I’ve got to do it.   Monday, I posted a blog (Let Teachers Teach) saying we should pay teachers $100,000 a year. Then, on Wednesday, Lieutenant Governor Forest called for North Carolina to pay the nation’s highest teaching salaries.  Asked…

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A Story to Tell

No matter how many hours she works each day or how hard she tries Aldona Wos can’t seem to catch a break.   Almost as soon as she took her job (as Secretary of Health and Human Services) she got flattened by two budget overruns. Then she got run over by two more multi-million dollar…

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Hardball

Governor McCrory has learned one thing about his new job: He’s not in Charlotte anymore, Toto. And he doesn’t like it.   At a news conference, the Governor vented thinly veiled frustration at how politics is played in Raleigh. WRAL reported:   “Asked if he was concerned about the scrutiny DHHS has faced, McCrory said…

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A Good Reason Nobody Knows?

It must be the Governor’s nightmare – opening the newspaper and seeing the acronym ‘DHHS.’   The other morning one headline roared DHHS (the Department of Health and Human Services) had hired another former campaign worker (not from his campaign this time but from the Republican Party) and another headline roared it had fired a…

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DHHS Is the New DOT

A great investigative reporter once said, “DOT is God’s gift to investigative reporters.” Make way for DHHS.   Doesn’t anybody there realize how much political damage they are doing to Governor McCrory? Doesn’t anybody around the Governor? Or McCrory himself?   He based his campaign for Governor on ending Raleigh’s “culture of corruption and cronyism”…

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Trapping an Elusive Varmint

A while back a candidate running for office for the first time sat down in my office and said, What should I do? and I said: Take a poll.   For a moment he didn’t say a word then he smiled and said he already knew what voters in his district thought – which is…

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On TV Ads, Pelion and Ossa

Carter made a great point in his blog about the McCrory TV ad. And he made a wonderful classical allusion that greatly elevated the intellectual level of this blog.   First, the allusion, “piling Pelion on Ossa.” It’s from Greek mythology. I had to look it up. Here’s the Wikipedia link.   As for the…

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Concerned about Pat?

About the last thing on earth the Governor needed when he opened the newspaper the other morning was to read the Department of Health and Human Services had hired another former political campaign worker.   But it had.   Now the young campaign worker – who’s been hired to handle the Department’s ‘branding’ – may…

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Let Teachers Teach

“The problem with education policy is that it’s made by old white men who haven’t been in a classroom since college.” – A professor of education   For decades now, cycles of education “reform” have swept across America and North Carolina. Testing programs, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and now Common Core.…

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The First Test?

It’s hard to say exactly when the tide that landed Republicans in the soup began to whirl and eddy – maybe it was on Election Night, or when the legislature came to town, or when the Moral Monday demonstrations ignited and breathed life into the Democrats. But no matter how or when it began, last…

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