Posts by Carter Wrenn
The Professor
Looking back the first warning sign was his crowing: For years, the professor wrote, he’d traveled the world. He’d set up elections in strange places like Sudan. Along with his Danish colleague he’d designed the first model – measuring over 50 moving parts of the political process – to determine whether elections were fair. He’d…
Read MoreThe Clash
The election proved just about everyone’s fed up with Washington politics but the first day of the new Congress the Washington Politicians proved they didn’t get the message: Foolishness usually starts at the top in Congress but this time it started at the bottom with the Republican back-benchers who, out of a clear blue sky,…
Read MoreThe Times and Trump
When North Korea said it was going to test an intercontinental ballistic missile that would reach the U.S. Donald Trump grabbed his Twitter machine and roared, ‘North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!’ Reading Trump’s tweet…
Read MoreDarkness is Bi-partisan
The other morning laying in bed, opening John’s Gospel I read: Truth is the road to light. Later that morning in my office opening the newspaper I read a new poll (by The Economist) said half of Donald Trump’s voters believe President Obama was born in Kenya (even though Trump now says that’s not so)…
Read MoreA Breach of Trust?
Along with other protestors the professor was evicted from the State Senate gallery by the police. Then, a day or so later, he published an op-ed but he didn’t argue the legislature stripping Roy Cooper of his power was illegal – he called it a breach of trust. Since the majority of people had voted…
Read MoreA Twitter Brawl
On Christmas Day an editor at Buzzfeed News contacted Sean Spicer the RNC spokesman and Spicer tweeted back: “When you asked me if that Trump/”new King”/Jesus comparison was intentional: I hope you were kidding.” It was too late. A brawl had already broken out on Twitter with a legion of tweeters – like ‘Sentient Space…
Read MoreHitler and Fake News
Even with four degrees behind him Eric remains untouched by either pretension or the wonders of the Internet – so it came as a surprise when I asked, Did you buy the book about Hitler? and he said, I looked it up on the internet. It said the book compares Trump to Hitler. Hitler wasn’t…
Read MoreA Plague on Both Their Houses
The devil never sleeps; for four years the Republican powers-that-be in Raleigh worked and strained to have Pat McCrory appoint their sons, cousins, friends and contributors to patronage jobs – then Roy Cooper defeated Pat and, a moment later, temptation whispered, Protect your friends. And loved ones. If you don’t they’ll lose their jobs. Only…
Read MoreNot Enough Glory
There were a lot of folks patting themselves on the back in the newspaper the other morning: The head of the LGBT Human Rights Committee sat down with the editors of the News and Observer and told them, ‘HB2 doomed McCrory.’ However, the Reverend William Barber, head of the NAACP, didn’t see it the same…
Read More‘The Fifties’ by David Halberstam
A book about the 1950’s sounds like a bland and vanilla story but it turns out David Halberstam had two stories to tell – and one wasn’t about the 50’s. Back when Milton Berle and ‘I Love Lucy’ ruled the airwaves unemployment was nil, inflation was nil, incomes were rising and families were moving…
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