Mark Robinson should get an Emmy for Most Appearances in Other Campaigns’ TV Ads. For months, he has starred in Josh Stein’s ads, admonishing women who didn’t “keep your skirt down” and warning that “some folks need killing.” Stein’s ads drove Robinson’s negative ratings so high that every Democrat from Kamala Harris down is linking…
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Republicans usually are better than Democrats at closing out elections, because they’re better at scaring voters. This year, what Republicans will do if they win should scare voters. As they do every election, Trump and MAGA are stoking fears about non-existent crime waves and fictitious immigrant invasions. And now there’s “tax-paid sex-change operations for prison…
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Ethel Kennedy’s death recalls a time when hope and idealism triumphed over hate and fear. Robert and Ethel Kennedy were noisy, passionate and boisterous, a contrast to cool, stylish and sophisticated Jack and Jackie. But the two very different brothers became “the Kennedys” who stood down the Soviet Union in Cuba and stood up for…
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First came cataclysmic floods. Then came the cascade of lies. The lies – and the lying liars who tell them – compound the suffering in Western North Carolina and complicate the recovery. Like supercharged hurricanes fueled by superheated ocean waters, the lies explode in today’s social-media ecosystem. Elon Musk has turned X/Twitter into a breeding…
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As a boy growing up in Virginia my grandmother told me, Be polite…to dowager aunts, grandmothers, rudeness was taboo. Courtesy was an old southern habit. In college I sat down in the bleachers to watch a football game – students poured whiskey into paper cups, guzzled, faces flushed screamed, cheered – but politeness still held.…
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As Hurricane Helene ravaged the mountains, my wife and I were thousands of miles away, on a two-week trip to Turkey and Greece. We followed news of the devastation as we toured historic sites in Istanbul, Gallipoli, Ephesus, Rhodes, Crete, Athens, Mycenae and Delphi. We walked on the stones of ancient empires that rose and…
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From Walter Mondale to Obama Democrat politicians preached the same gospel: Government was the way to solve problems – the way they saw it the more money and power government held in its hands the more problems they’d solve. The way Republicans saw it was different: Government didn’t solve problems – it made them worse.…
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At the end of the Vance–Walz debate I thought, I wish those two were the ones running for president. Their debate was like a flashback to an earlier time – both men threw punches, got punched, but did it in a courteous way. Without meanness. An old niceness we haven’t seen for a while in…
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In 1984, Carter hired me to work for the Helms campaign. While my primary assignment was to travel with the candidate, Carter occasionally sent me to speak for the campaign. In September of 1984, he dispatched me to the campus of NCSU for a Q&A with Fraternity Leaders. He didn’t bother to tell me that…
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