Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
Republican prospects in the elections this fall are looking pretty glum. The President’s popularity has fallen, even some Republicans are having doubts about the war in Iraq, and about the only voters who agree with President Bush on immigration reform are people who will never vote for him – or any other Republican. The Democrats’…
One of our readers offered an interesting perspective on the issue of whether the city should agree to help finance a new North Hills parking deck with developer John Kane: “Downtown they have taken real tax dollars and spent it on a hotel plus committing a future source of revenue to pay for the Convention…
Local government spending in Raleigh and Wake County is mushrooming. The City Council wants to spend more. The County Commissioners want to spend more. The School Board wants to spend more. The County Commissioners’ Blue Ribbon Task Force wants to spend more. And they all want to borrow and raise taxes to pay for it.…
Prospects for ethics reform and cleaning up the ‘pay to play’ scandals took a blow in the State Senate last week. Senator David Hoyle told the Senate committee considering reform bills that “the issue is too complicated to take up this late in the session” (The News and Observer, 7-13-06). Other senators said the financial…
The North Carolina Turnpike Authority’s mission is to build toll roads. Its problem is people feel, with all the gas taxes they’re paying, they shouldn’t have to pay tolls, too. So the Authority has taken a poll – or more concisely it conducted a focus group – to figure out how to convince voters to…
The News and Observer recently asked the School Board for copies of its e-mails – under the state’s public records law – about student reassignments to different schools. (This year 9300 students are being reassigned.) This is a routine request newspapers often make to government agencies and, initially, it was expected it would only take…
When I hear the words “Blue Ribbon Study Commission,” I automatically think: Another politician is punting. That’s exactly what happened in Wake County this month. Problem is, the “Blue-Ribbon Committee on the Future of Wake County” punted the ball right back to the politicians. The News & Observer summed it up this way in a…
The state’s biggest contract is its $171 million Medicare contract. Two years ago, it put the contract out to bid and Secretary of Human Services, Carmen Hooker Odom, announced with great fanfare she was awarding it to Texas computer giant, ACS – and saving taxpayers millions. Two years later, Secretary Hooker Odom says she is…
The Democrats in the State House have been conducting their version of ‘damage control’ to dodge the political fallout from the ‘pay to play’ scandals in the House. What’s their strategy? Well, it’s to pass meaningless reforms and then to proclaim from the rooftops that they have solved the problem. When, in fact, they have…
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…