Archive for 2016
The Christmas Coup D’état
My old boss Governor Hunt should be proud. Forty years after he first took office and 16 years after he last left, he still drives Republicans nuts. Governor-elect Roy Cooper should be proud. He hasn’t even taken office and he’s driving them nuts. All Democrats should grab the Christmas gift the GOP has given us.…
Read MoreNot Enough Glory
There were a lot of folks patting themselves on the back in the newspaper the other morning: The head of the LGBT Human Rights Committee sat down with the editors of the News and Observer and told them, ‘HB2 doomed McCrory.’ However, the Reverend William Barber, head of the NAACP, didn’t see it the same…
Read MoreIntelligence failure
First Trump said he didn’t need to hear any intelligence. Then he named Rick Perry to head a Cabinet department that Perry once wanted to abolish, except he couldn’t remember the name of it. To which a TAPster says, “Somebody get me a dumbrella – it’s raining stupid.”
Read More‘The Fifties’ by David Halberstam
A book about the 1950’s sounds like a bland and vanilla story but it turns out David Halberstam had two stories to tell – and one wasn’t about the 50’s. Back when Milton Berle and ‘I Love Lucy’ ruled the airwaves unemployment was nil, inflation was nil, incomes were rising and families were moving…
Read MoreTrump’s GOP
Forget for now what Democrats will do in the Age of Trump. What will Republicans do? They won their biggest election victories in many a year, thanks to a man who ran against their party establishment, ridiculed and routed their favored candidates, and has at best a tenuous commitment to their conservative orthodoxy. He promises…
Read MoreThe Unraveling
At an ‘Open House’ years ago at our school I listened as Eric talked with a parent I barely knew – then as the parent walked away I said, He sounds like a reasonable man. He mistreats his wife, Eric said. Physically? Eric nodded. I looked back at the parent and saw a different man.…
Read MoreLearning from Clinton’s loss
Masochist that I am, I’ve read a lot of second-guessing and score-settling about why the extraordinarily well-qualified Hillary Clinton lost to one of the most loathsome and unprincipled men ever in politics (and that covers a lot of scoundrels). A fair, thoughtful and balanced analysis – one that is brutally honest, but also constructive rather…
Read MoreHelms and Trump
Rob Christensen recently noted “a number of parallels” between Donald Trump and Jesse Helms. (“Trump, like Helms, rode populist streak as outsider”). But another parallel deserves attention. Read on. Rob wrote: “Both Helms and Trump were plain-spoken populists who gained much of their support from blue-collar workers and from people living in rural areas. “Both…
Read MoreA Real Threat
We Americans thrive on disagreeing and fighting among ourselves – it’s part of the fabric of our democracy. But, since the election, our natural crankiness seems to have deepened into paranoia. Young people in colleges are demonstrating, afraid, after Donald Trump’s election, their freedom of speech is in peril. More than a few Internet websites…
Read MoreTwo Americans
Two Page One stories. Two men. Two very different Americans. John Glenn was my hero when I was 12. He still is 55 years later. Everything shut down at Martin Junior High School in Raleigh so we could watch Glenn’s flight, from launch to splashdown, including the anxiety about reentry. All of us boys wanted…
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