General
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 MoreThe N&O leaves home
The N&O has left its old home, about the same time I stopped getting the paper at home. I hope the change works out for both of us. It may be tough for them. I hear money is tight there, and my going digital-only is a $470 hit to their revenues. Rob Christensen was right…
Read MoreImpeachable sources
You don’t have to be a Junior G-Man to be wary of James Comey. After all, he was the American League MVP in Trump’s election, thanks to his late hit on Hillary Clinton. (Vladimir Putin and Cambridge Analytica tied for Foreign League MVP.) Still, Comey is right about two things: (1) Trump is “morally unfit”…
Read MoreGive now – before it’s too late!
If you ever gave a politician money – or your email address – your Inbox was flooded this weekend with desperate, pleading messages. Midnight Saturday was the end of the first-quarter fundraising period, and apparently there’s nothing like a deadline to motivate donors. Here are a few of the weekend pitches: “Big Deadline Looming: My…
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…
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