Issues
Who’s Our Competition?
Pat McCrory and Walter Dalton are debating whether North Carolina lost its competitive edge. The question is: Who are we competing with? And is competition just about taxes? Rob Christensen’s N&O story Sunday asked whether we’re still a “Dixie Dynamo.” But some people who work in economic development think that’s too narrow. We’re not…
Read MoreSticking to Our Guns
Gun rights vs. gun control: Except for race, it is the starkest divide in America today. The Batman killings revived the familiar debate. One side says, “When are we going to do something about the easy availability of guns and bullets in America?” The other says, “If somebody had been packing a gun in…
Read MoreFracking Out
Methinks the fracking freakout by Democrats is overwrought and overdone. And Becky Carney need not contemplate hari-kari. Maybe it’s age. Or maybe it’s that for too many years I’ve heard too many dire warnings about how some legislative action is certain to lead to environmental devastation. It never does. And every time something…
Read MoreHow Washington Sets Policy
How Washington went about setting health care policy is for more erudite minds than mine but here goes: Tom, Dick and Harry rolled into the ER in ambulances and each was having a heart attack – Tom’s so poor he couldn’t afford to buy health insurance, Dick could almost afford it but not quite,…
Read MoreOwning it All
It happens on Wall Street: A tycoon calls an eager young executive into his office and hands him a job to do (like selling Facebook stock) and says, This is your responsibility – you ‘own’ it. Three years into the ‘Great Recession’ no politician in his right mind wants to ‘own the economy.’ It…
Read MoreHow Government Works
When Dr. Craigon Gray headed Medicaid in North Carolina he didn’t care much for home health care – he would tell anyone who’d listen how home health care was riddled with fraud. Now a lot of folks suspected Dr. Gray’s animus towards home care (and his preference for sending elderly people to nursing homes)…
Read MoreMove On
Will Republicans now make the same mistake on health care reform that President Obama made? Apart from never adequately explaining his reform, the President hurt himself by focusing on health care when Americans were focused on the bad economy. Now a poll shows that, however they feel about the law, Americans want to…
Read MoreHands Off
To celebrate Independence Day, Congress should oblige those patriots who attended the “Hands off My Healthcare” rally in Raleigh this weekend: Pass a law making them ineligible – now and in the future – for Medicare. And give them medals for their sacrifice. Oh, that’s not what they meant? No, they want government…
Read MoreWhose Economy?
Speaker Thom Tillis says Republicans “own the economy” and is optimistic: “I think we are seeing some green shoots.” But Pat McCrory says Governor Perdue owns the economy and it’s “broken.” Nationally, of course, Republicans say President Obama owns the economy and it sucks. Obama avoids sounding too optimistic. Democrats say it’s…
Read MoreWinning One for the Geezers
As an aspiring geezer, I’m inspired when white-hairs beat the young guns at their own new-media game. So today we celebrate Lyle Denniston, the 81-year-old, twice-retired blogger at SCOTUSBlog. He got the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act right and he got it first. Actually, the trigger-happy hot heads at CNN…
Read More