Issues
Thanks, Rush
America’s biggest problem is the economy. So, of course, national politics plunges into culture wars – or, more like, sex wars. I guess it’s because Republicans in Congress and Rick Santorum just can’t resist the lure of legislating morality. And maybe it’s because people know more about sex than about the economy. …
Read MoreOld WASP Men
My cousin Spencer sat down, opened the newspaper, stared at the headline and landed in a world where old white WASP’s (like him) are dinosaurs. Being a historian by avocation Spencer set about studying the collapse of WASPdom; at first he figured immigration (not modern immigration but old-fashioned immigration back in the 1820’s and…
Read More‘Real’ Christians
“Republicans being against sex is not good. Sex is popular.” – Republican strategist Alex Castellanos A long, hard-fought presidential nominating race doesn’t hurt Republicans by leaving them divided. They’ll unite against President Obama. No, it hurts with voters in the middle. First there’s this obsession about whether President Obama is “real” Christian. Franklin…
Read MoreSantorum’s Contraception Obsession
Rick Santorum, who wants to take America back to 1900, takes me back to 1984. That was the year of the Hunt-Helms race. In the dying days, we were behind in the polls – and desperate. With the help of (believe it or not) Dick Morris, we came up with a bomb to blow…
Read MoreReading Ayn Rand
Champions of academic freedom are scandalized, but I think this is a wonderful idea: making college students read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” The Guilfordian, Guilford College’s campus paper, reports on a grant to the college by one of Art (“I Am Not an Heir”) Pope’s groups: “The ten-year grant for $500,000 that Guilford…
Read MoreGOP Mini-Me’s
The GOP 13th Congressional District race looks like a mini-version of the Republican presidential race. George Holding is playing the part of Mitt Romney: establishment conservative focusing on cutting spending and deficits (and ignoring the reality that Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush gave us the biggest deficits ever). Paul Coble…
Read MoreCross Your Fingers
Can Democrats get so lucky? Will the Republicans really nominate Rick Santorum? I had high hopes for Newt Gingrich. But, once again, he has proven to be the Hindenburg of American politics: a huge vessel of hot air doomed to go down in flames. Clearly, Mitt Romney would be the toughest Republican in…
Read MoreA Jobs Plan
A Democratic TAPster offers these thoughts “Re – Caterpillar and others over the past several months: “If I were running for governor (and I’m not but have to admit I think I could beat the current group of contenders) I would come out in favor of corporate incentives. I would state I will not…
Read MoreClick Button, File Form
A Republican filed to run for State House and no sooner had he filed than he was told he had to fill out a second form called a Financial Disclosure Report – so he went to the State Ethics Commission’s website and found the form then ran head on into a bureaucratic maze. When…
Read MoreBroken Record
Pat McCrory hasn’t yet figured out how to deal with not having Bev Perdue to kick around any more. He said at his filing that he’s running against “broken government.” Well, who isn’t? As questions he got showed, “broken government” can mean the legislature as well as the executive branch. And McCrory…
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