North Carolina – Democrats
A Symbol
The newspaper headline read: Dome, full of cracks. And the newspaper reported: The aging iron dome ‘is slowly crumbling…riddled with hundreds of cracks and rust.’ The dome is the Capitol Dome. But the newspaper could just as easily have been writing about Congress itself.
Read MorePossums
Up in Brasstown deep in the Smoky Mountains, on every New Years Eve a local merchant holds a ‘Possum Drop’ – a western North Carolina version of the Yankees’ ball drop in Times Square. What the mountain folks hadn’t counted on was PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) taking umbrage at the…
Read MoreA 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 More2014: Another 2010?
Maybe I should apologize. But would Bob Rucho apologize? No sir! So I’ll double down, as they say. My blog yesterday – warning that the next Congress might be run by people who think like Rucho – apparently ruined the Christmas spirit for some Democrats. My friend Jerry Wayne Williamson of Boone (follow…
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 MoreAshes and Switches
Every child knows just before Christmas is the time to be ‘as good as you can be’ – so you might think after the mischief it’s been up to this year Congress would be rolling up its sleeves and planning to work straight through the holidays to pass the farm bill, a jobless benefits bill,…
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 MoreHunt Vs. Sanford
A TAPster who pays attention to politics and high school football notes that James Hunt High and Terry Sanford High played each other in the first round of the state 3AA football playoffs. The Hunt Warriors beat the Sanford Bulldogs 35-21 on November 15. Since then, Hunt has also beaten West Brunswick and Douglas…
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 MoreTime to Panic?
Is Senator Kay Hagan overreacting on Obamacare, or should Democrats rush to the lifeboats and abandon ship? If you go by the N&O website’s headline – “Hagan calls for probe of healthcare website as political support drops” – you’d panic. After all, she had a conference call with reporters to call for investigations of…
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