A Little Nuance

A reporter at The Hill newspaper up in Washington let Jeb Bush have it right between the eyes, reporting there’s ‘no love lost’ between Bush and the Republican base and that in Iowa the Tea Party activists are torching Bush’s conservative credentials.   “Jeb Bush,” he quoted a radio talk show host as saying, “is…

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Happy New Year!

2015 will mark the 10th year Carter and I have been doing this blog, as best I can tell from my records. The first posts I could unearth were in late 2005.   If memory serves, this was Carter’s idea. He and I worked together with a (non-partisan) client, and we traveled around the state…

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What on Earth is Next?

Obama may be aloof but he’s also soft-spoken and temperate and if he’s unpopular (due to his failures) beyond his failures he’s a genial man – a traditional liberal who believes government should help people out by providing healthcare and school lunches and so on.   But now and then, standing at a podium, the…

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Jumping Out of the Frying Pan…

Gary has a point in his column (below) ‘Pat and Jesse’: Pat McCrory’s fight with the Associated Press isn’t like Jesse’s long-running battles with the media.   In Jesse’s eyes, the media was biased. It didn’t like his conservative philosophy. Plus, as Senator John East once said admiringly, Jesse was a brawler. Part of him…

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Best Column

  Here’s, as Paul Harvey used to say, ‘The rest of the story’ about Louis Zamperini – from John Drescher’s column Angelina Jolie’s ‘Unbroken’ misses subject’s deep faith.    

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Pat and Jesse

During Governor McCrory’s attack on the AP, one observer compared it to Jesse Helms’ legendary battles with the media.   Now, Carter knew Jesse a lot better than I did. But I see a big difference.   Jesse attacked the media because he wanted a political fight. McCrory attacked the media because he doesn’t want…

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Online BS

An outfit called Verifeed says “social conversations” on Twitter helped Thom Tillis beat Kay Hagan. Put me down as a skeptic.   You hear a lot of sweeping claims about how social media is transforming politics. The acolytes can drown you in numbers about “clicks” and “reads” and “open rates.” But is there hard evidence…

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A Christmas Prayer

Not even the season is free from America’s politics. Democrats post stories on Facebook about “how to talk to your right-wing uncle at Christmas.” Republicans claim that atheists and Democrats want to “take Christ out of Christmas.” People debate over whether to say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays.”   The New York Times Magazine on…

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Obama Redux

Where was this guy in October when we needed him?   In the weeks before the election, President Obama seemed passive and powerless as ISIS ran wild in the Middle East and Ebola panicked America.   In the weeks since, he’s come back strong: heralding a recovering economy, challenging Congress on immigration, championing Internet openness,…

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The Star of Bethlehem

  When we sat down to our annual Christmas lunch our group of old white conservative men were looking care-worn and weary;—they’d voted against gay marriage and won and a year and a half later gays were marrying right here in North Carolina; the newspaper headline on the table was even more discouraging: President Obama…

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