Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
Obama may be aloof but he’s also soft-spoken and temperate and if he’s unpopular (due to his failures) beyond his failures he’s a genial man – a traditional liberal who believes government should help people out by providing healthcare and school lunches and so on. But now and then, standing at a podium, the…
Gary has a point in his column (below) ‘Pat and Jesse’: Pat McCrory’s fight with the Associated Press isn’t like Jesse’s long-running battles with the media. In Jesse’s eyes, the media was biased. It didn’t like his conservative philosophy. Plus, as Senator John East once said admiringly, Jesse was a brawler. Part of him…
Here’s, as Paul Harvey used to say, ‘The rest of the story’ about Louis Zamperini – from John Drescher’s column Angelina Jolie’s ‘Unbroken’ misses subject’s deep faith.
During Governor McCrory’s attack on the AP, one observer compared it to Jesse Helms’ legendary battles with the media. Now, Carter knew Jesse a lot better than I did. But I see a big difference. Jesse attacked the media because he wanted a political fight. McCrory attacked the media because he doesn’t want…
An outfit called Verifeed says “social conversations” on Twitter helped Thom Tillis beat Kay Hagan. Put me down as a skeptic. You hear a lot of sweeping claims about how social media is transforming politics. The acolytes can drown you in numbers about “clicks” and “reads” and “open rates.” But is there hard evidence…
Not even the season is free from America’s politics. Democrats post stories on Facebook about “how to talk to your right-wing uncle at Christmas.” Republicans claim that atheists and Democrats want to “take Christ out of Christmas.” People debate over whether to say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays.” The New York Times Magazine on…
Where was this guy in October when we needed him? In the weeks before the election, President Obama seemed passive and powerless as ISIS ran wild in the Middle East and Ebola panicked America. In the weeks since, he’s come back strong: heralding a recovering economy, challenging Congress on immigration, championing Internet openness,…
When we sat down to our annual Christmas lunch our group of old white conservative men were looking care-worn and weary;—they’d voted against gay marriage and won and a year and a half later gays were marrying right here in North Carolina; the newspaper headline on the table was even more discouraging: President Obama…
GQ just published a list of the 20 craziest politicians and two North Carolinians are on it: Mark Walker, the new Congressman from Greensboro who made the list for joking he’d be for bombing Mexico and that he worries Obama may not leave office at the end of his term, and Congresswoman Virginia Foxx.…
Some progressives groaned when Governor Josh Stein announced a bipartisan “Blue Ribbon Commission on Public Education”…
North Carolina voters don’t like either the Democratic or Republican parties. But Independent voters – who…
How do you get your news? Our statewide poll asked North Carolina voters what their primary…