Issues
A Great Success
Years behind schedule, millions of dollars over budget, and riddled with 3,200 computer programming errors NC Tracks – the state’s new $486 million computer system for processing Medicaid checks – landed in the newspaper again. The News & Observer reported the Department of Health and Human Services still has no plan to right the ship and clean…
Read MoreA Christmas Truce
Americans are so polarized politically, we argue about Christmas and Santa Clause’s race. I propose a truce. And I’m going first. Through a blessed accident of calendar, Christmas and New Year’s Day are on Wednesdays this year. That effectively wrecks two work weeks. Good riddance. But let’s go farther. Like German and…
Read MoreUnhealthy
Both President Obama and Governor McCrory are learning that reforming health care can be harmful to your political health. Their politics are different, but their experiences are strikingly similar. Both are trying to make big changes in the health care system, Obama with the Affordable Care Act and McCrory with Medicaid privatization. Both…
Read MorePublic Hanging
So, according to the newspaper, a varmint in Fayetteville shanghaied two teenage girls, held them hostage for months, beat them, threatened to kill their families, raped them, turned them into prostitutes, videotaped them having sex then a high judge gave him 45 years in prison. These days we’re civilized and enlightened but given some…
Read MoreApartheid and Us
Nelson Mandela lived half a world away, but North Carolina has a history with South Africa and the apartheid system he destroyed. Go back more than 50 years. Jim Hunt, a student at N.C. State in the late 1950s, heard Allard Lowenstein speak to a National Students Association meeting about “the terrible injustices and cruelties” of…
Read MoreNo Bridge over Troubled Water
Chapel Hill-bashing may play well on the Outer Banks, but it’s not helping people who live or work south of Bonner Bridge. DOT Secretary Tony Tata sounded like the Fox News commentator he once was when he blasted “ivory tower elitists (who) file these lawsuits from their air-conditioned offices in Chapel Hill…with their lattes…
Read MoreMcCrory as a Manager
A TAPster who is a veteran of corporate America and the Raleigh political scene offers another take on Governor McCrory and the Charlotte Observer column: “Gary’s blog ‘McCrory under siege’ and the Observer story that prompted it are revealing, but the governor’s thin skin and ego are not the weaknesses that doom the McCrory administration. “Being…
Read MoreOther People’s Money
It wasn’t exactly subtle the other morning when the newspaper ran two stories side by side: One about a single mother who works all day and then works three additional jobs nights and weekends to make ends meet – and a second story about the Director of the Raleigh Housing Authority. It turns out every year…
Read MoreKennedy and Obama
As if I didn’t get enough JFK last week, I’m reading a new book about how Kennedy, in his last months, was growing into and getting better at the roles of President, politician and persuader-in-chief. If only President Obama could summon some of that mojo now on Obamacare. The book (“JFK’s Last Hundred…
Read MoreMcCroryisms
There he goes again: “We didn’t shorten early voting, we compacted the calendar.” Now, that’s positively Orwellian. And it’s the latest in a long string of eye-catching – and embarrassing – statements by Governor McCrory. Two weeks ago, John Frank wrote in the N&O: “At least a dozen times in his first 10 months…
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