Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
The News & Observed marked its 119th birthday this week. But will it see 125 – or 130? It’s part of a century-old industry that last week was invaded – to be saved or razed? – by the billionaire owner of a brand-new industry, Amazon. Executive Editor John Drescher wrote in his front-page…
Let’s be honest: The voter ID law that Governor McCrory signed is about political power, not fraud. A letter-writer to the N&O got it right where the Governor got it wrong. McCrory said: “Common practices like boarding an airplane and purchasing Sudafed require photo ID, and we should expect nothing less for the protection…
Republicans are turning mathematical somersaults denying they did what they did in this legislature: take a chainsaw to public education in North Carolina. Clearly, they don’t have the courage of their convictions. They ran for office saying they’ll cut government. Now they deny they did it, and they run for cover. They say:…
Now that Senator Thom Goolsby has compared educators and the media to Vladimir Lenin, I presume that State GOP Chair Claude Pope will denounce him for an “inexcusable, disgusting and shameful” attack. Goolsby wrote on his blog: “Vladimir Lenin said, ‘A lie told often enough becomes the truth.’ Professional educrats (education bureaucrats) and their…
I’m obviously not a big fan of Governor McCrory, but I want an accurate read on him. It doesn’t do Democrats any good to underestimate him. Two in cases in point: (1) Democrats who dismissed Ronald Reagan as an “amiable dunce” and (2) all of Barack Obama’s opponents, Democrats and Republicans, who dismissed him in…
All I can say about Gary’s column on D.G. Martin is – “Amen.” In the fourteen years I’ve known D.G., I’ve never heard him say an unkind word about anyone – so Claude Pope claiming he’d called Republicans Nazis just didn’t pass the smell test. Here’s the column D.G. wrote. Take a look…
Carter has done a couple of insightful (as always) blogs about Senator Phil Berger: that he’s a true-believer conservative and a small-town product, in contrast to the big-city moderates who are the second- and third-most powerful Republicans in North Carolina (respectively, Thom Tillis and Pat McCrory). It also looks like Berger was a lot…
John Wilson went from teaching school in Raleigh to leading the NCAE and then the NEA. He went from leading teacher protests against Governor Hunt in 1984 to working with Hunt 10 years later to raise North Carolina’s teachers’ pay above the national average. He wrote a recent blog in Education Week (“The Most…
D.G. Martin – TV-radio host, newspaper columnist and finalist for Most Interesting Man in the World – riled up the Republican Party with a recent column. State GOP Chair Claude Pope accused D.G. of comparing Republicans to Nazis. “Inexcusable, disgusting and shameful,” Pope fumed. He called on UNC-TV to suspend D.G.’s show “Book Watch,”…
The political sniping began even as chaos still reigned at the White House Correspondents Dinner. My…
A new nationwide poll shows that, if they could run against each other in 2028, Barack…
Senator Phil Berger was out of touch with voters in his district – and suffered the…