Issues
Reality Show Politics
Republicans elected Donald Trump to ‘drain the swamp’ and today they still enjoy watching the ‘Trump Show’ but it’s beginning to look like he’s not going to be able to whip the Washington Establishment. Instead, many of the men around Trump have morphed into Washington Insiders themselves. Tom Price is one example. It’s an old…
Read MoreA Shared Value
You need to ask a question about Workfare, the pollster said. As a rule of thumb, you can ask sixty questions in a poll and I’d started out with ninety – I looked down at the thirty questions I’d deleted then asked, Do you think people are more concerned about Workfare than these other issues?…
Read MoreI renewed The N&O. Digital only
No blog I’ve ever done got more reaction than “Should I renew The N&O?” in February. A lot of readers told me how to get out of paying $600 a year. Threaten to cancel, they said, and you can negotiate a lower rate. Several people, one an old N&O hand, said they did cancel –…
Read MoreSilent Sam and Senator Sam
Two thoughtful readers with differing views on Confederate memorials passed along dueling viewpoints – one from the late Senator Sam Ervin and the other about Silent Sam at UNC-Chapel Hill. Reading both suggests where Confederal memorials should be and where they shouldn’t be. Senator Sam Senator Ervin spoke in August 1965 at the dedication of…
Read MoreA Mystery
It was an outbreak of political correctness. First, Congress gave money to the NEA (the National Endowment of the Arts), then the NEA gave out grants: It gave a theater company in Minneapolis $40,000 to support a series of transgender theater works – like a play “explaining the gender continuum through the prism of a…
Read MoreA Temptation
Dear News and Observer, A couple of weeks ago, Gary wrote about receiving a $600 bill to renew his subscription. Well, I did too. I received a $600 bill. I thought about it, swallowed hard, and paid it. But it didn’t quite work out quite the way I expected: Every morning, for years, my newspaper…
Read MoreSleep
These days the press will hyper-ventilate and have a bout of hysteria over a tweet — but what did it do when Vladimir Putin said Russia now has a super-missile that flies at 20 times the speed of sound that no missile defense can stop? There was barely a tremor. Putin’s bragging he has a…
Read MoreRebel Fell
As North Carolina debates the fate of Confederate monuments, ponder this perspective from Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, on why he pushed successfully to remove four Confederate monuments in his city. In “What I learned from my fight to remove Confederate monuments,” Landrieu (a potential Democratic presidential candidate) wrote: “The statues were not…
Read MoreA Parade
A couple of weeks ago, after the school shooting in Florida, WRAL TV climbed up onto the biggest soapbox around and demanded every North Carolina Republican Congressman support banning the AR-15 rifle. Now the AR-15 looks just like the army’s M-16 but, in fact, it’s not an automatic rifle. Like hundreds of other rifles, it’s…
Read MoreThe World’s on Fire
A candidate set out to build a database to see who was going to vote in his Republican primary – and what he learned surprised him: He found only 10% of the people had voted in the last off-year (2014) Republican primary. In addition, he discovered a second group of people who had occasionally voted…
Read More