Should I renew the N&O?

I can’t believe I’m even asking. I grew up with the N&O. When I was a year old, my parents moved here from Hertford County so my Dad could take a job in the N&O composing room. When I was 16, I went to work in the newsroom as a copyboy. I stayed there 10…

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Deadly serious politics

The best answer to a bad guy with political power is good guys and girls with political power. To beat the bad guys, you need to understand how political power really works. The NRA’s real power doesn’t come from the money it gives to politicians. The New York Times’s lead story Sunday spelled it out:…

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Politics in the pipeline

A veteran Raleigh hand speculates about what’s behind the Republican shenanigans on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline mitigation fund: “The kerfuffle over the natural gas pipeline fund proves once again that nobody in Raleigh knows what they’re doing. Or does it? “On the surface, the Governor and his team appeared seriously naïve to think the mitigation…

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Ready, aim…vote

Hooray for the high school students in Florida and North Carolina who are mobilizing, marching and pushing politicians to stop mass school shootings. These teenagers need to be in it for the long haul. They already see politicians ducking the debate and offering up stupid ideas like arming school teachers. The outspoken survivors in Florida…

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They’re Back

Hallelujah. The Russians are back. I know that sounds odd to say. Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, for forty years Russian villains plotted to crush us until the Berlin Wall fell then, for thirty years, no more villains. Now, they’re back. But there’s a silver lining in every cloud: Seeing a Russian villain on his doorstep sobers…

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Rethinking Trump

I just got around to reading Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” and my reaction was different from what I heard when the book came out. Then the Rob Porter spouse-abuse scandal erupted – and highlighted what I took from Wolff: Trump is a total, bumbling, ignorant, incompetent fool. He is…

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A Cloud to Keep Your Eye On

For years – for decades – I’ve expected ‘The National Debt’ to the sink the economy but the crash never came; it defies common sense but, somehow, no matter how much the politicians spent the chickens never came to roost. Hardly a soul even noticed when President Trump didn’t mention the debt in his State…

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Pipeline politics

Power turns some politicians into bullies. Especially when they’re running scared. So it was with Republican legislators who embarrassed themselves trying to embarrass Governor Cooper’s new legislative liaison last week. They turned what could be a useful policy debate into a typical political sideshow. Typical. The ostensible issue was a $58 million mitigation fund the…

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Promise Us, Joe: Don’t Run

Joe Biden’s book, “Promise Me, Dad,” is pure Biden: warm, heart-wrenching and, though short, pure-Biden windy. It reminds you what a great human being Uncle Joe is, what a great Vice President he was – and why he shouldn’t run for President. There’s something of a Biden boom now, especially among my old white male…

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The FISA Memos

When you watch the politicians arguing on CNN and FOX about the FISA Memos you can’t make heads or tails of what’s going on. To Republicans their Memo proves the FBI used political research paid for by Democrats to get a warrant to wiretap the Trump campaign – or one-time Trump advisor, Carter Page –…

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