Archive for 2013
Wanted: Perfect Party Chair
Our guest TAPster is Mark Ezzell, long time political observer and founder of Englewood Planning Group, a Raleigh-based public affairs firm: I love a good Barack Obama speech as much as the next Democrat, but I always cringed when he used the banal sounding line “we are the ones we’ve been looking for’.…
Read MoreTalking About (Their) Generation
Gary is taking a break from blogging. Our guest today is Joe Stewart. Currently reaching their 18th birthday at a rate of 13,000 a day, the 80 million-strong Generation Y (those born 1982 – 1995) will be the majority of the US workforce and a full third of the voting population by 2015. This…
Read MoreBig Thinking
When it comes to climbing up on a soap box and waving his arms and hollerin’ like a banshee there’s hardly anyone who can hold a candle to Newt Gingrich. But there’s a peculiar trait about people who talk a lot about their ‘bold ideas’— when you boil away their highfalutin rhetoric a lot of…
Read MoreTwo Views of the World
Gary is taking a break from blogging. Our guest blogger today is Nation Hahn. In recent weeks North Carolinians have heard two inaugural addresses. One, from Governor Pat McCrory spoke to “Unlimited Opportunity.” The other, from President Barack Obama, was a call for the “country’s reasonable majority” to act. For North Carolina Democrats,…
Read MoreMcCrory’s Mouthpiece
Gary is taking a break from blogging. Today’s pinch-hitter one of our Tapsters. The choice of a press secretary is a blip on the personnel radar of North Carolina’s new governor, but this choice provides insight into the kind of governor Pat McCrory may become. McCrory’s choice for media mouthpiece has plenty of…
Read MoreOld-Fashioned Tolerance
The other day one of my more peculiar Jesuit friends emailed me an article written fifty years ago by Bishop Fulton Sheen who, contemplating the sharks and villains of his era, had lamented, ‘Our country is not so much overrun with the bigoted as it is with the broad-minded.’ After glancing at the opening…
Read MoreA Serious Man
It was a very serious man who stepped up to the podium in front of the Capitol to give his Inaugural Speech but what he said wasn’t nearly as earthshaking in the reeling world of Republican Congressmen as what he’d already done. Barack Obama raised $1 billion in his reelection campaign and built the…
Read MoreNote to Democrats: Don’t Support Voter ID
Gary is taking a break from blogging. Today’s pinch-hitter is Thomas Mills. Pat McCrory and some of his Republican allies are now saying they are ready to compromise on voter ID. Compromise with whom? With super-majorities in the state house and senate, Republicans can pass whatever bill they want without any Democratic support.…
Read MoreThe New Normal?
Last month up in the hallowed halls of Congress, Speaker John Boehner slipped on a banana peel – deciding it was time to flex his muscles he stripped four Republican Congressmen of their blue-chip committee assignments – which, in Washington, is the same as the army stripping off a general’s epaulets in public. Back then, watching,…
Read MoreJim Hunt’s Pope
Gary’s taking a break from blogging. Pinch-hitting today is a TAPster with a long memory: Re your blog posting about Art Pope (“The Budget Pope”): A lot of people either aren’t old enough to remember, or simply don’t know, that another wealthy Raleigh businessman was indispensable to Jim Hunt in that role. John…
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