Posts by Carter Wrenn
A History Lesson
It’s an old American saga: The President has a program he’s in love with but can’t muster the votes in Congress to fund it. So he doesn’t get his program. That’s the way it’s been for over two centuries. So why, now, isn’t the story coming out of Washington simply, “The President fails…
Read MoreThe Answer…
Yesterday I asked why the three camps in Washington – the House Republican Bigwigs in Washington, the House Republican Conservatives in Washington, and President Obama –couldn’t sit down and make a list of the government departments they can agree to keep open and then fund them this week to avoid an absolute government shutdown. …
Read MoreFriends Falling Out
The Governor, it appears, looking at his ailing poll numbers, figured the legislature had landed him in the soup, so it was only prudent to put some distance between himself and the Republican skunks in the General Assembly. Of course, it’s also sometimes difficult to trace the origin of a smell and to legislators it appears…
Read MoreA Three-Tribe War
With thick smoke clouds billowing out of the Capitol it’s hard to see who’s winning the latest war in Washington – plus, it isn’t a simple us versus them war: It’s a three tribe melee (with two camps of Republicans fighting Obama and each other at the same time). At first, a couple of…
Read MoreSkating Across Ice
A few days ago I wrote how Secretary Aldona Wos, who’d landed in the briar patch, would be wise to step up and start telling her side of the story. Last Friday she did. Now, listening to Dr. Wos is interesting. One moment she’s skating effortlessly across a sheet of rhetorical ice using…
Read MoreA Story to Tell
No matter how many hours she works each day or how hard she tries Aldona Wos can’t seem to catch a break. Almost as soon as she took her job (as Secretary of Health and Human Services) she got flattened by two budget overruns. Then she got run over by two more multi-million dollar…
Read MoreA Good Reason Nobody Knows?
It must be the Governor’s nightmare – opening the newspaper and seeing the acronym ‘DHHS.’ The other morning one headline roared DHHS (the Department of Health and Human Services) had hired another former campaign worker (not from his campaign this time but from the Republican Party) and another headline roared it had fired a…
Read MoreTrapping an Elusive Varmint
A while back a candidate running for office for the first time sat down in my office and said, What should I do? and I said: Take a poll. For a moment he didn’t say a word then he smiled and said he already knew what voters in his district thought – which is…
Read MoreConcerned about Pat?
About the last thing on earth the Governor needed when he opened the newspaper the other morning was to read the Department of Health and Human Services had hired another former political campaign worker. But it had. Now the young campaign worker – who’s been hired to handle the Department’s ‘branding’ – may…
Read MoreThe First Test?
It’s hard to say exactly when the tide that landed Republicans in the soup began to whirl and eddy – maybe it was on Election Night, or when the legislature came to town, or when the Moral Monday demonstrations ignited and breathed life into the Democrats. But no matter how or when it began, last…
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