Issues
Respect
The President, unhappy with North Korea, announced he was going to ‘proportionately’ respond and the next day North Korea’s Internet went black which possibly is a coincidence but may also be proportionate. Now, to be clear, getting hacked by North Korea is a little like getting bitten on the ankle by a small varmint.…
Read MoreA Little Nuance
A reporter at The Hill newspaper up in Washington let Jeb Bush have it right between the eyes, reporting there’s ‘no love lost’ between Bush and the Republican base and that in Iowa the Tea Party activists are torching Bush’s conservative credentials. “Jeb Bush,” he quoted a radio talk show host as saying, “is…
Read MoreWhat on Earth is Next?
Obama may be aloof but he’s also soft-spoken and temperate and if he’s unpopular (due to his failures) beyond his failures he’s a genial man – a traditional liberal who believes government should help people out by providing healthcare and school lunches and so on. But now and then, standing at a podium, the…
Read MoreJumping Out of the Frying Pan…
Gary has a point in his column (below) ‘Pat and Jesse’: Pat McCrory’s fight with the Associated Press isn’t like Jesse’s long-running battles with the media. In Jesse’s eyes, the media was biased. It didn’t like his conservative philosophy. Plus, as Senator John East once said admiringly, Jesse was a brawler. Part of him…
Read MoreThe Star of Bethlehem
When we sat down to our annual Christmas lunch our group of old white conservative men were looking care-worn and weary;—they’d voted against gay marriage and won and a year and a half later gays were marrying right here in North Carolina; the newspaper headline on the table was even more discouraging: President Obama…
Read MoreNot The Faintest Idea
It was a simple question but back in February after the big coal ash spill it needed a quick answer: Were the coal ash ponds a ticking time bomb or nothing to worry about? A few days ago the State Official in charge of the coal ash cleanup told the Environmental Review Commission, “We…
Read MoreMaybe Not The Best Idea
About a week ago the Governor went on a tear about 60 Minutes, saying Leslie Stahl had done him wrong; that he’d sat sweating under the hot lights for an hour answering questions but she hadn’t even blamed Democrats once for the coal ash spill – all his work had been for nothing. Worse than…
Read MoreHe Gets No Respect
He’d been through, he said, the ordeal of sitting for a whole hour and fifteen minutes under hot lights, sweating, answering questions but then, he added, when he saw the interview on TV he had been shocked. He sounded – not in the TV interview but, later, when he described the interview to a…
Read MoreA Third Crime
The talk shows and newspapers were full of stories last weekend about riots and protests about white policemen killing young black men – people opined about our country’s ‘systematic racial problems’ and how Michael Brown was killed for stealing a box of cigars and Eric Garner died for selling tax free cigarettes on the street…
Read MoreCross of Gold
A little known prairie lawyer got up and gave a speech at the Democratic Convention in 1896 and the next day was nominated for President. Last weekend, a conservative posted a link to this speech on Twitter with a one word comment: Wow. It’s Elizabeth Warren’s talking about Citigroup and it’s as close…
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