Lips pursed, standing at the front of her elementary school classroom, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, conducting a drill my teacher told students to crouch beneath our desks – I crouched wondering how on earth a wooden desk was going to save me from a nuclear missile. Times changed. After the Cold War ended we…
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At a hearing on the tariffs yesterday, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina demanded to know: “Whose throat do I get to choke if this proves to be wrong?” Tillis knows the answer. It’s Trump. Here’s the question for Tillis: Will you stand up and stop him? Or will you choke?
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We’re all trapped on Trump’s Crazy Train, at the mercy of an engineer who’s mad, mean and stupid. Trump has no philosophy or ideology. His only governing principle is to hurt people he hates. And that’s a lot of people. His tariffs are all about punishing countries he hates. He exempts those that flatter him,…
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Sitting down, leaning back, I turned on the news – Fox News played a video Trump posted saying we saved Greenland from the Nazi’s in World War II. Going down its own road CNN did a story saying tariffs mean prices go up on top of inflation. Out to help Trump, Breitbart News said egg…
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Straight-faced, standing in the White House Trump’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called tariffs a tax cut – Trumpsters cheered. Now a tariff can be a lot of things: A fee paid by a Canadian exporter, or by an American importer, or by a consumer standing in a shop – but one thing’s for sure: It’s not…
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Even though I had to put on a suit and tie, the evening was balm for my soul in these troubled times. It was the annual Scholarship Dinner of N.C. State University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, which honors scholarship recipients and donors. I’ve endowed a scholarship in political science/communications at the college, which…
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The morning after Pearl Harbor, surrounded by men he grew up with, standing in a draft board, my grandfather volunteered for the army. Growing up I spent hours listening to stories about World War II. But, like most of my friends, I hardly ever told stories about the hard times Americans struggled through to stop…
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I opened the newspaper, read most Americans are fed up with bickering…that what they really want is unity. That would be a blessing if it’s true. But it doesn’t look that way. The next article was full of bickering. Both sides have fought in politics for years but, not all that long ago, they had…
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My blogging partner Carter Wrenn has written a revealing and engaging memoir of his years in politics – and the rise of the conservative movement in North Carolina in the 1970s and 1980s. His book – The Trail of the Serpent: Stories from the Smoke-Filled Rooms of Politics – takes you inside the conventions, caucuses…
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