Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
You’ve got to admire John Kane’s chutzpah. But not his political judgment. Kane, the developer of Raleigh’s North Hills, wants $75 million in public money so he can build parking decks for his North Hills East project. What is he thinking? It’s not going to happen. Especially not in an election year. Mayor Meeker immediately…
It’s a baby-boomer politician’s worst nightmare: The New York Times gets holds of personal letters you wrote to a close friend back when you were a self-absorbed college student trying on different personas and personalities. It happened to Hillary Clinton Sunday. This came right after the national media dissected the political and fashion significance of…
North Carolina’s Realtors spent $700,000 on a media campaign against the “home tax.” The campaign failed. Why? The Realtors had a good idea: Mobilize public opinion to change legislative votes. But they didn’t go far enough. Carter is the master of this strategy. He did it for Farmers for Fairness (hog farmers) in the ‘90s.…
Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez – according to the press this morning – mislead to the Senate yesterday. (Even one Republican Senator, Arlen Specter, asked Gonzalez, incredulously, “Do you expect me to believe that?”) The House of Representatives – according to the press – is about to bring contempt charges against President Bush for illegally hiding…
When I read The News and Observer headline – “Tax Enriches Cellular Carriers” –I had to ask, ‘How does a tax enrich anyone but the government?’ The answer turned out to be simple. The government collects a tax on your phone bill then pays the money to telephone companies (in theory for providing phone service…
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama got the most attention after this week’s Democratic debate. But John Edwards had the most pointed message. And it’s why he remains a big threat to the Big Two. The first two questions he got, almost the first words out of Edwards’ mouth were “big insurance companies, big pharmaceutical companies…
An enterprising Wilmington attorney read how the Attorney General of New Jersey won a settlement from Sears for overcharging customers for wheel alignments and promptly brought his own class action lawsuit against Sears (The News and Observer, 7-23-07). And Sears promptly settled. The lawyer received $950,000 in fees. And Sears consumers received $2,402. (Not each,…
There was a short story in The News and Observer last week about the CACs (Raleigh ‘neighborhood groups’) asking the City Council for $25,000 to recruit new members. As a practical matter these semi-official groups have long since turned into adjuncts of Mayor Meeker’s political apparatus. The Council giving them $25,000 to recruit members is…
President Bush now claims that intelligence shows we’re fighting Osama’s Al-Qaeda in Iraq. It’s his latest justification for the war: We either fight them in Iraq or in Illinois. But who believes him? Bush and his cronies cooked the intelligence to get us into Iraq in the first place. Does he think we’ll believe him…
Senator Phil Berger was out of touch with voters in his district – and suffered the…
A reassuring lesson from our trip to Germany and Czechia is that dictators, despots and tyrants…
Gwyn and I just returned from a 12-day journey through 1,000 years of history in Germany…