Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
When companies like Delta, Dick’s, WalMart and Kroger adopt their own gun control laws, you can bet public opinion is changing. And you can count on the NRA and its wholly owned Republican politicians firing back. A TAPster offers these thoughts on what happened to Delta in Georgia: “It’s been a scary couple of years…
I can’t believe I’m even asking. I grew up with the N&O. When I was a year old, my parents moved here from Hertford County so my Dad could take a job in the N&O composing room. When I was 16, I went to work in the newsroom as a copyboy. I stayed there 10…
The best answer to a bad guy with political power is good guys and girls with political power. To beat the bad guys, you need to understand how political power really works. The NRA’s real power doesn’t come from the money it gives to politicians. The New York Times’s lead story Sunday spelled it out:…
A veteran Raleigh hand speculates about what’s behind the Republican shenanigans on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline mitigation fund: “The kerfuffle over the natural gas pipeline fund proves once again that nobody in Raleigh knows what they’re doing. Or does it? “On the surface, the Governor and his team appeared seriously naïve to think the mitigation…
Hooray for the high school students in Florida and North Carolina who are mobilizing, marching and pushing politicians to stop mass school shootings. These teenagers need to be in it for the long haul. They already see politicians ducking the debate and offering up stupid ideas like arming school teachers. The outspoken survivors in Florida…
Hallelujah. The Russians are back. I know that sounds odd to say. Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, for forty years Russian villains plotted to crush us until the Berlin Wall fell then, for thirty years, no more villains. Now, they’re back. But there’s a silver lining in every cloud: Seeing a Russian villain on his doorstep sobers…
I just got around to reading Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” and my reaction was different from what I heard when the book came out. Then the Rob Porter spouse-abuse scandal erupted – and highlighted what I took from Wolff: Trump is a total, bumbling, ignorant, incompetent fool. He is…
For years – for decades – I’ve expected ‘The National Debt’ to the sink the economy but the crash never came; it defies common sense but, somehow, no matter how much the politicians spent the chickens never came to roost. Hardly a soul even noticed when President Trump didn’t mention the debt in his State…
Power turns some politicians into bullies. Especially when they’re running scared. So it was with Republican legislators who embarrassed themselves trying to embarrass Governor Cooper’s new legislative liaison last week. They turned what could be a useful policy debate into a typical political sideshow. Typical. The ostensible issue was a $58 million mitigation fund the…
The political sniping began even as chaos still reigned at the White House Correspondents Dinner. My…
Senator Phil Berger was out of touch with voters in his district – and suffered the…