This isn’t a story of sin begetting sin but of foolishness begetting foolishness. Years ago, somewhere, some Democratic political guru sat in a room with reams of demographics of people who never had voted and when he finished studying those pages of statistics one fact was clear as a bell: If those folks started…
Read MoreGovernor McCrory increasingly looks like a modest Triple-A ballplayer who is befuddled by big league pitching. His latest whiff is defending the DHHS salary debacle. McCrory should have put as much distance as possible between himself and the decision to give 24-year-olds who worked in his campaign senior jobs paying $85,000 and $87,500 in…
Read MoreYes, Newt Gingrich is nuts. But sometimes even a nut sees reality. And last week he summed up why the Republican Party is on the road to disaster: “We are caught up right now in a culture – and you see it every single day – where as long as we are negative, as…
Read MoreGovernor McCrory believes it’s OK to pay a beginning teacher $25,000, but $65,000 isn’t enough for a 24-year-old state government appointee who worked in McCrory’s campaign. So he got a raise to $87,500. That’s three times what a starting teacher gets in North Carolina. Another campaign staffer got a $23,000 raise to $85,000,…
Read MoreThe News & Observed marked its 119th birthday this week. But will it see 125 – or 130? It’s part of a century-old industry that last week was invaded – to be saved or razed? – by the billionaire owner of a brand-new industry, Amazon. Executive Editor John Drescher wrote in his front-page…
Read MoreLet’s be honest: The voter ID law that Governor McCrory signed is about political power, not fraud. A letter-writer to the N&O got it right where the Governor got it wrong. McCrory said: “Common practices like boarding an airplane and purchasing Sudafed require photo ID, and we should expect nothing less for the protection…
Read MoreRepublicans are turning mathematical somersaults denying they did what they did in this legislature: take a chainsaw to public education in North Carolina. Clearly, they don’t have the courage of their convictions. They ran for office saying they’ll cut government. Now they deny they did it, and they run for cover. They say:…
Read MoreNow that Senator Thom Goolsby has compared educators and the media to Vladimir Lenin, I presume that State GOP Chair Claude Pope will denounce him for an “inexcusable, disgusting and shameful” attack. Goolsby wrote on his blog: “Vladimir Lenin said, ‘A lie told often enough becomes the truth.’ Professional educrats (education bureaucrats) and their…
Read MoreI’m obviously not a big fan of Governor McCrory, but I want an accurate read on him. It doesn’t do Democrats any good to underestimate him. Two in cases in point: (1) Democrats who dismissed Ronald Reagan as an “amiable dunce” and (2) all of Barack Obama’s opponents, Democrats and Republicans, who dismissed him in…
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