Issues
A History Lesson
It’s an old American saga: The President has a program he’s in love with but can’t muster the votes in Congress to fund it. So he doesn’t get his program. That’s the way it’s been for over two centuries. So why, now, isn’t the story coming out of Washington simply, “The President fails…
Read MoreA Three-Tribe War
With thick smoke clouds billowing out of the Capitol it’s hard to see who’s winning the latest war in Washington – plus, it isn’t a simple us versus them war: It’s a three tribe melee (with two camps of Republicans fighting Obama and each other at the same time). At first, a couple of…
Read MoreWos-ectomy?
That’s what one TAPster suggests Governor McCrory needs. The question is whether the legislature will perform the procedure. When the legislature adjourned, the Governor worried that the honorables were dragging down his approval ratings. So he vetoed a couple of bills. That didn’t work out. Now, GOP legislators worry that the Governor and…
Read MoreMy Man Dan
I’m always looking for something nice to say about a Republican. But Dan Forest? Sorry, I’ve got to do it. Monday, I posted a blog (Let Teachers Teach) saying we should pay teachers $100,000 a year. Then, on Wednesday, Lieutenant Governor Forest called for North Carolina to pay the nation’s highest teaching salaries. Asked…
Read MoreA Good Reason Nobody Knows?
It must be the Governor’s nightmare – opening the newspaper and seeing the acronym ‘DHHS.’ The other morning one headline roared DHHS (the Department of Health and Human Services) had hired another former campaign worker (not from his campaign this time but from the Republican Party) and another headline roared it had fired a…
Read MoreTrapping an Elusive Varmint
A while back a candidate running for office for the first time sat down in my office and said, What should I do? and I said: Take a poll. For a moment he didn’t say a word then he smiled and said he already knew what voters in his district thought – which is…
Read MoreLet Teachers Teach
“The problem with education policy is that it’s made by old white men who haven’t been in a classroom since college.” – A professor of education For decades now, cycles of education “reform” have swept across America and North Carolina. Testing programs, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and now Common Core.…
Read MoreLost in Syria
Foreign policy is not my forte, so don’t ask me what America should do about Syria. But I get politics, and I don’t get President Obama’s political strategy. If you want to do something, why ask permission from a Congress that has proven itself incapable of doing anything? Most Republicans won’t vote for…
Read MoreThe Price of a Fiction
In the Senate of the world’s oldest democracy the Honorables sat down around a giant horseshoe-shaped table to hold a hearing to ask the Secretary of State how he figured bombing Syria was a good idea – but a strange thing happened: As soon as each Senator asked his first question the Secretary of State…
Read MoreNot One Overheated Washington Politician…
Broken politics and posturing politicians present one degree of mendacity when it comes to passing a budget – but the moment a war appears on the horizon that same devilment turns lethal. A few days ago the President declared that, as leader of the oldest constitutional democracy on earth, he needs the support of…
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