Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
A Mystery
It was an outbreak of political correctness. First, Congress gave money to the NEA (the National Endowment of the Arts), then the NEA gave out grants: It gave a theater company in Minneapolis $40,000 to support a series of transgender theater works – like a play “explaining the gender continuum through the prism of a…
Unmitigated politics
Republicans thought they had Governor Cooper trapped on the Atlantic Pipeline mitigation fund. Now old Roy and his team are slum-dunking them – and exposing everything that’s wrong with this legislature. It started when the Governor’s Office got Duke and Dominion to put up $58 million for economic-development and environmental-protection projects in eastern North Carolina.…
A Temptation
Dear News and Observer, A couple of weeks ago, Gary wrote about receiving a $600 bill to renew his subscription. Well, I did too. I received a $600 bill. I thought about it, swallowed hard, and paid it. But it didn’t quite work out quite the way I expected: Every morning, for years, my newspaper…
Sleep
These days the press will hyper-ventilate and have a bout of hysteria over a tweet — but what did it do when Vladimir Putin said Russia now has a super-missile that flies at 20 times the speed of sound that no missile defense can stop? There was barely a tremor. Putin’s bragging he has a…
Rebel Fell
As North Carolina debates the fate of Confederate monuments, ponder this perspective from Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, on why he pushed successfully to remove four Confederate monuments in his city. In “What I learned from my fight to remove Confederate monuments,” Landrieu (a potential Democratic presidential candidate) wrote: “The statues were not…
A Parade
A couple of weeks ago, after the school shooting in Florida, WRAL TV climbed up onto the biggest soapbox around and demanded every North Carolina Republican Congressman support banning the AR-15 rifle. Now the AR-15 looks just like the army’s M-16 but, in fact, it’s not an automatic rifle. Like hundreds of other rifles, it’s…
Trump’s trysts and twists
Which is worse – that Trump hopped in bed with Stormy or that he’s still in bed with Putin? Stormy and Putin have a lot in common. Both show off their chests. Both stories involve thugs. Both might involve illegal campaign activities. And Trump hasn’t said a bad word about either Stormy or Putin. Stormy’s…
The World’s on Fire
A candidate set out to build a database to see who was going to vote in his Republican primary – and what he learned surprised him: He found only 10% of the people had voted in the last off-year (2014) Republican primary. In addition, he discovered a second group of people who had occasionally voted…
Starting Fires
When Sam Nunberg told a CNN reporter that he wasn’t about to obey Robert Mueller’s subpoena, in the blink of an eye, he became a star on cable TV and Twitter. But, of course, complying with subpoenas isn’t optional. Nunberg was just an awkward, unhappy, vexed soul bemoaning his fate to reporters. He wasn’t a…