Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
When Joyce brought up Edward Snowden and NSA spying, table talk veered from the McCrory Ballgate story, Moral Mondays and legislative lunacy. Snowden is a 29-year-old high school dropout, former Elizabeth City resident and computer nerd who was making $200,000 a year until he started an international furor over U.S. government surveillance. Snowden…
Maybe it’s the heat, the humidity or just that it’s June. A reporter gets arrested. Senator Tom Goolsby has 60s flashbacks. Governor McCrory sees “outsiders” when they’re not there. The Democratic Party debacle deepens. But the flap over the Governor’s game of catch – and his spokesperson’s bizarre statement – still stand out in…
Ah, the old “outsider” shibboleth rears its head. Shades of George Wallace’s “outside agitators.” But it’s not outsiders that Republicans should worry about; it’s the changing electorate inside North Carolina. The Republican overreaction to Moral Mondays looks shaky and out of synch. Especially when you see this photo of a policeman hauling off a…
It seems Republicans up in Congress have split into two hostile tribes – whether you call them ‘Moderates and Conservatives’ (as they did forty years ago) or the ‘Conservatives and Pragmatists’ (as they did twenty years ago) or ‘Insiders and Outsiders’ (as they do now). Now, say, on spending, the Conservatives (or Outsiders) are…
These days conservatives are reeling in the face of the sudden ascendance of gay marriage as a popular issue – they’re looking back at all the votes traditionalists (or old fogies) have won in referendums (including one in North Carolina just a year ago) and then looking at the latest polls saying there’s been a…
John Drescher recently shared this quote from a column by A.C. Snow: “In my many years I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a Congress.” -President John Adams
Governor McCrory’s style reminds me of Mike Easley: as in, the exact opposite. Easley was notoriously private. He hated being out in public and going to events. Which is bizarre in a politician. But Easley had real beliefs and convictions that he stood up for: smaller class sizes, early-childhood education, economic development in rural…
Daniel Gilligan, a bright young Democratic policy consultant from Raleigh, offers an analysis of Republican and taxes: “Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly have got themselves all worked up over a humdinger of a ‘new’ idea. They want to get rid of that ‘antiquated’ and ‘Depression era’ tax code we got lying around,…
Every session, some legislator does something astoundingly bone-headed. This year we have Rep. Bryan Holloway, R-Stokes. Holloway told WRAL’s Laura Leslie and Mark Binker that he had nothing to do with the embarrassingly sophomoric and allegedly sexist preppy-fantasy blog “Wasp 101.” Leslie and Binker listed the coincidences between Stokes and blog author, “Richard.”…
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…