Squeal Like a Pig

Thirty-four years ago, in 1979, I tagged along on Governor Jim Hunt’s trade mission to China – the first for a North Carolina governor. The goal: get the Chinese to buy more North Carolina products, like pork.   Now, we’re selling them more than pork; we’re selling them Smithfield Foods. “We’ve gone whole-hog,” Ferrel Guillory…

Read More

It’s the Education, Stupid

In today’s superheated politics, a bit of understatement can be a powerful thing. Exaggeration and overstatement get you headlines, but they don’t necessarily win the hearts and minds of swing voters.   Democrats might remember that as they rail at the Republican-run state government. Crying wolf at every outrage – and there’s a new one every…

Read More

Lust and the Professor

Lust has undone more men than most any other sin and, about a year ago, over in Chapel Hill, it turned an aging professor into a drug runner.   Professor Paul Frampton was born in a working class family in a working class neighborhood in England, earned three degrees from Oxford, earned a Ph.D. in…

Read More

The Democrats Awaken – Round 2

The same day the Democrats tore into Crime Control Secretary Kieran Shanahan they also let fly at Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Aldana Wos.   Now doctors are a complex group of highly intelligent people who labor under a singular handicap: They’ve mastered one incredibly complex subject (say, neurosurgery) no one else can…

Read More

Democratic Dysfunction

Someone asked the obvious question: “Why do Democrats elect fools like David Parker and Randy Voller chairman?”   It’s a “governance crisis,” said one thoughtful Democrat and former statewide candidate. “The chairman is selected by 600 people on the executive committee, most of whom know nothing about getting elected statewide.”   There always has been…

Read More

The Democrats Awaken

In the world of Raleigh politics being appointed a Cabinet Secretary is somewhat akin to being a Grand Duke or a Marquis – you get power and respectability and folks you never heard of start singing your praises.   But then, usually, just when a new Secretary is getting comfortably settled into his new office,…

Read More

GOP Ethics

Attention must be paid when the Republican legislator who wants to roll back ethics laws questions Speaker Tillis’ ethics.   It could just be sour grapes. But someone needs to pursue Rep. Robert Brawley’s written statement about Tillis “slamming my office door shut, standing in front of me and stating that you have a business…

Read More

The Money Changers

Republican legislators, for years, have stood up and spoken up for free markets. It’s part of their creed. They don’t like government picking ‘winners and losers.’ But when a group of Republican legislators in Raleigh decided to sponsor a bill to break the hospitals’ monopoly on outpatient surgeries and put the free market to work…

Read More

What Happens in Vegas…

A good Democratic Party chairman would be blasting the McCrory administration’s budding ethics scandals. But that’s hard to do when you’re in Vegas putting $3,327 on the party’s American Express Business Gold Card.   Michael Biesecker with AP reported that Randy Voller “said he believes a portion of the Vegas charges, including a $557 dinner…

Read More

A Thing You Rarely See

There’re a lot of clever politicians and smart politicians but there’re not many politicians with the courage to take a stand they know is unpopular.   The other day, baffled by the raft of tax reform plans floating around the State Legislature, I asked an economist to explain the virtues of ‘consumption taxes’ to me…

Read More