Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
Battling Extremism
The headline and teaser on Politico today read: “W.H. counter-radicalization plan due: The administration plans to roll out its new strategy for countering extremism in the U.S. Wednesday.” Given how the debt-ceiling fight turned out, it’s about time the White House came up with a strategy for combating the Tea Party.
Holden On
Can Holden Thorp escape being sacked by an all-out Rams Club blitz? Even worse, he’s catching hell both ways: from people mad he fired Butch Davis and from people mad he didn’t fire Davis earlier. No good deed goes unpunished. Here’s the story I hear: Davis’ firing was Thorp’s doing, not new…
Moody’s and the Meltdown
Barney Frank may be more liberal than Harry Reid or Obama combined but he doesn’t mind marching right into the lion’s den at Fox News and taking on any anchorman in sight. The other day in an interview Neil Cavuto put Frank on the spot, asking if the Democrats’ brinksmanship on the debt ceiling…
Chickens**t
Front-page headlines and much gnashing of teeth greeted the news that a Ukrainian billionaire pulled the plug on the jobs of 1,000 North Carolina chicken plant workers last week. But the stories missed the irony that a TAPster caught: “If, instead, a Ukrainian billionaire announced he was building poultry processing plants in central…
The Glass Debt Ceiling
A TAPster passes along a link raising the question: What if Congress was more than 13 percent women? A NPR commentator is quoted as saying: “In experiments, when men feel there are lots of other men around, they tend to pose more, they tend to talk tough, they become shortsighted, they take bigger bets.…
Super Power
If reincarnation is real, I want to come back as a credit-rating agency. They apparently are the most powerful beings on the planet. They even forced Congress to act!
Is the Center Right?
If both Tea Party Republicans and Democratic liberals don’t like the debt deal, does that make it a good deal for America? There is a line of thinking today that what is missing in politics is a “vital center” – those supposed wise men and women who find the right answer to our problems…
Two Facts about the Debt Ceiling Deal
It’s pretty hard to sort through all the facts and figures and the rhetoric and posturing about the latest debt ceiling deal – but two facts seem clear. President Obama, Speaker Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid all say the latest agreement will raise the debt ceiling $2.4 trillion in exchange for $2.5 trillion…
Secret Sharers
Two recent stories make the “what were they thinking?” list. First, the leaders of Peace College kept secret a plan to take the historic school coed, then sprung it as a done deal. Did they really expect that to go down well? Then the N.C. Department of Commerce told PCS Phosphate to…