Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
After Watergate, puzzled, trying to figure out reams of new election laws, I started looking for a lawyer – but there wasn’t a single lawyer in North Carolina who practiced that kind of law. I called Stan Evans, head of the American Conservative Union in Washington, and he said one name: “John Bolton.” A week…
A big thing that people in politics don’t understand is how little attention people pay to politics. We politicos dive in and swim deep in the daily river of news – every Breaking News flash, every headline, every talking head, every twist and turn in every story. But most people take only an occasional dip…
Lying in a hospital bed, past ninety, face peaceful, eyes failing, J. I. Packer could hear his nurse’s footsteps but her face was a blur. Staring down at his hollow cheeks, rail-thin legs, the patch of skin stretched across the awkward dent on the side of his forehead, she asked a question, he didn’t answer,…
My friend Ron is cynical about government, and he couldn’t contain himself when he read that State Auditor Dave Boliek produced a 435-page report on fixing the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles. “435 pages!?” Ron sputtered. “How much time and taxpayer money did that take?” He raged on, “And Boliek’s big idea is to move…
When a jobs report showed the economy lagging, he fired the woman who wrote the report. Rolled on. Calling a press conference in the White House he ordered the National Guard to patrol the streets in Washington, DC to stop crime. The Epstein files sailed away over the horizon. A fading memory. Tariffs erupted again,…
My wife was chatting with a man as we waited for a table at a beachside restaurant. Suddenly she grabbed me, “You need to talk to him. He was a copy editor at The New York Times.” My first full-time job at The News & Observer was as a copy editor, so Andy and I…
In the days before anyone ever turned on a light bulb, sitting in a candle-lit room, practical but with a skeptical streak, puzzled, Thomas stared across the dinner table at the man talking, asked, We don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the road to take to follow you? The answer he got?…
In the old days a political party had to win an election to keep its majority in Congress. So it rolled up its sleeves and went to work to convince people it was right. Times have changed. These days politicians roll up their sleeves and go to work on redistricting. Take a look at what’s…
“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1937, in his second inaugural address. Today, 88 years later, FDR would see one-third of Americans going without medical care. A national poll by Embold Research (1,736 registered voters, July 1-7) found that “nearly 30% of Americans indicated that they faced…
How do you get your news? Our statewide poll asked North Carolina voters what their primary…
Thom Tillis and Phil Berger fed the MAGA alligator. Then it ate them. Thomas Mills wrote…
Exactly 80 years ago, in 1946, Republicans took control of Congress with a simple message: “Had…