Posts by Carter Wrenn
Looking for a Voice
With the Irish Prime Minister sitting beside him, Obama said Republicans are against education. Infrastructure. Research. The things needed to create jobs. National defense. And the middle class. Then having thrown down the gauntlet, and concisely summed up how he felt about the Republican budget, the President rolled out the welcome mat for the…
Read MorePat and Phil
Pat and Phil don’t gee and haw. Awhile back, after the Coal Ash Spill, Pat went to work cleaning up the mess, then Phil passed a bill to have a Commission take over the job – which got Pat’s hackles up. Pat said the Constitution was written in black and white and no…
Read MoreDeceiving Ourselves?
Back when Navy Seals evened the score with Osama bin Laden, the Secretary of Defense proclaimed “defeating al-Qaeda” was within our grasp. Victory was at hand. Then the wheel came off the cart. And now up in Washington the Director of National Intelligence is telling Congress the threat of ‘terrorism is worse than…
Read MoreThe Same Old Mistake
Over a decade ago some genius up in Washington – I think it may have been Donald Rumsfeld – figured we could conquer Iraq with 150,000 soldiers; that we could fight a little war with a little pain and have the troops home by Christmas – so we rolled straight into Baghdad then found out…
Read MoreTwo Sides of a Coin
There’re two sides to every coin. Last year, when the State Senate took away Governor McCrory’s appointments to the Board of Review, the Governor vetoed the bill. Then the Senate overrode his veto. Then the Governor sued the Senate. Then, this year, as soon as the Senate got back to town it passed another…
Read MoreA Strange Cure
President Obama held a summit up in Washington about terrorism but decided not to say the words ‘Muslim terrorist.’ Instead, he announced, he was leading a crusade to stop ‘Violent Extremism’ and, then he put his finger on the root cause of the villainy: Violent Extremism, he said, is caused by political disenfranchisement and…
Read MoreA Year Away?
The Ayatollahs over in Iran say they want to enrich uranium so they can build a nuclear power plant and, if that were so, they could buy plutonium rods from Russia tomorrow and be in business. But, instead, the Ayatollahs say they want to enrich uranium themselves with centrifuges which doesn’t sound unreasonable until…
Read MoreSecond Fiddle to South Carolina
This is about as good a tale of conniving as I’ve heard: I can’t remember why but forty years ago back in 1976 the state legislature moved our Presidential primary up from May to March – then the unexpected struck and Ronald Reagan whipped Gerald Ford. It was the first time Reagan won a…
Read MoreCalling More Less
It rang a little jarring to open the newspaper and read, Stam Introduces First Bill of New Session – To Limit Eminent Domain. No doubt Representative Skip Stam was right but it was a little like watching a knight errant tilting at a windmill – because, after all, Eminent Domain isn’t one of the…
Read MoreA Darker Power?
The Reverend William Barber got up to pray at a memorial service for three Muslim students killed in Chapel Hill and, right in the middle of his prayer, pointed his finger straight at Reverend Franklin Graham and said Graham lit the fuse to the powder keg that led to the murders. Barber’s thinking went…
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