Issues
It Wasn’t Always This Way
The one thing you prayed for and lusted after in a political campaign in the old days was to catch your opponent in a lie – because a lie (caught on videotape) was as close to sure death as there was in politics. Back in 1984 I thought we had a pretty good chance of…
Read MoreQuick hits
So much is happening so fast. So let’s fire away at several juicy targets – er, topics. Trumped Just when you think he can’t get worse, he does. His 77-minute tirade in Phoenix was True Trump. The estimable Economist pegged him for who and what he is: “politically inept, morally barren and temperamentally unfit for…
Read MoreGeneral Lee’s Statue
A plump boy wearing a hand-made Confederate soldier’s uniform stood by himself alone at the foot of a statue of General Lee, standing straight at attention like a guard – surrounded by protestors waving their fists, index fingers raised, in his face. Immobile, expressionless, without making a sound, his lip quivered and leaning towards him…
Read MoreClean Hands
The General Assembly is redrawing State House and Senate Districts and it’s like the circus came back in town: Six years ago, last time they drew districts, Republican legislators used ‘race’ as one criteria and Democrats sued them. This time Republican legislators said they wouldn’t even look at or go near ‘race’ and the Democrats…
Read MoreA Carnival Air
The protests just keep getting crazier: Friday morning the attorney for the eight ‘Antifa’ protestors arrested for toppling a Confederate statute in Durham tweeted: First appearances are done. White supremacists arrive at noon. Hundreds of anti-Klan counter-protestors rushed to Main Street in Durham, blocking traffic, chanting, No KKK! No Fascist USA! At five minutes past…
Read MoreHave a Little Faith
The media may be in worse shape than we thought: Most of us have never laid eyes on a Neo-Nazi and who’d ever heard of an ‘Antifa’ before last week? So, can either be a deadly threat to America? Can CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times be right when they paint a…
Read MoreA Code
President Trump wanted Mexico’s President to stop saying Mexico wouldn’t pay for the wall so he called him but when Pena Nieto came on the line he told Trump the last thing Trump wanted to hear: He said he could never agree for Mexico to pay for the wall. Trump purred, told Pena Nieto he’d…
Read MoreTake ‘em down
Now that even the morally obtuse Trump has been forced to say white racist terrorism is wrong, we move on to a knottier issue: Should Confederate statues and memorials stay, or should they go? Here’s a case in point. If you drive down Hillsborough Street toward the State Capitol in Raleigh, you come to a…
Read MoreDevilment
It’s called ‘leverage’ and last weekend President Trump tried it by tweeting: “If a new healthcare bill is not approved quickly BAILOUTS for insurance companies and BAILOUTS for members of Congress will end very soon!” The President was saying to the insurance lobby, Get onboard – or I’ll end $7 billion a year in subsidies…
Read MoreThe “Green Thing”
A TAPster of a certain age – and a certain attitude, you can tell – passed along the following tale of two generations. I post it for the benefit of old and young. Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the much older lady that she should bring her own grocery bags,…
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