Posts by Carter Wrenn
A Shared Value
You need to ask a question about Workfare, the pollster said. As a rule of thumb, you can ask sixty questions in a poll and I’d started out with ninety – I looked down at the thirty questions I’d deleted then asked, Do you think people are more concerned about Workfare than these other issues?…
Read MoreA Mystery
It was an outbreak of political correctness. First, Congress gave money to the NEA (the National Endowment of the Arts), then the NEA gave out grants: It gave a theater company in Minneapolis $40,000 to support a series of transgender theater works – like a play “explaining the gender continuum through the prism of a…
Read MoreA Temptation
Dear News and Observer, A couple of weeks ago, Gary wrote about receiving a $600 bill to renew his subscription. Well, I did too. I received a $600 bill. I thought about it, swallowed hard, and paid it. But it didn’t quite work out quite the way I expected: Every morning, for years, my newspaper…
Read MoreSleep
These days the press will hyper-ventilate and have a bout of hysteria over a tweet — but what did it do when Vladimir Putin said Russia now has a super-missile that flies at 20 times the speed of sound that no missile defense can stop? There was barely a tremor. Putin’s bragging he has a…
Read MoreA Parade
A couple of weeks ago, after the school shooting in Florida, WRAL TV climbed up onto the biggest soapbox around and demanded every North Carolina Republican Congressman support banning the AR-15 rifle. Now the AR-15 looks just like the army’s M-16 but, in fact, it’s not an automatic rifle. Like hundreds of other rifles, it’s…
Read MoreThe World’s on Fire
A candidate set out to build a database to see who was going to vote in his Republican primary – and what he learned surprised him: He found only 10% of the people had voted in the last off-year (2014) Republican primary. In addition, he discovered a second group of people who had occasionally voted…
Read MoreStarting Fires
When Sam Nunberg told a CNN reporter that he wasn’t about to obey Robert Mueller’s subpoena, in the blink of an eye, he became a star on cable TV and Twitter. But, of course, complying with subpoenas isn’t optional. Nunberg was just an awkward, unhappy, vexed soul bemoaning his fate to reporters. He wasn’t a…
Read MoreInfection?
It was the kind of thing district attorneys do all the time: Robert Mueller was fishing. He subpoenaed Trump and Company for all the documents they had that mentioned nine of Trump’s associates. But on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd, erupting, reported because of the subpoena, “Sources say the President is ‘unglued’ as chaos plagues…
Read MoreWalking Around in a Fog
In the blink of an eye, CNN, pouncing, announced the real reason Hope Hicks had resigned – it reported after Trump had read she said she’d told ‘little white lies’ for him, he’d berated her, asking, How could you be so stupid? CBS had it’s own theory: It reported that a titanic power struggle was…
Read MoreReality Show Politics
The state Democratic Party heard the Republican Party was making automated calls, had heart palpitations, and filed a complaint with the Consumer Protection Division of the Attorney General’s office. The Consumer Protection Agency sent the complaint to the Republican Party – and asked for a response. When GOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse read the Democrats…
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