What last week’s General Assembly evictions say about conservative legislative leaders There’s been a good deal of controversy in recent days over the decision by officials in House Speaker Thom Tillis’ office to evict a group of quiet and peaceful demonstrators from the second floor of the state Legislative Building last [Continue Reading...]
Why common sense, common good solutions make us freer It’s frequently amazing to see the kinds of nutty ideas that can fester and grow in the body politic. Combine a measure of legitimate grievance, a kernel of truth, big helpings of distorted history lessons and rigid, half-baked ideology along with healthy dashes of [Continue Reading...]
Email indicates next week’s special session may target another disfavored group There’s a reason special sessions of the North Carolina General Assembly have traditionally been referred to as “special.” It has long been an established practice that the General Assembly adheres to a regular pattern: one longer, January-to-July session the first year of [Continue Reading...]
Why you should march in Raleigh on Saturday, February 11 It’s a debate that progressives like to have amongst themselves sometimes: Are things better today (in North Carolina or in the country at-large) than they were, say, 25 years ago? The negatives are easy enough to identify: Persistent poverty and the exploding gap [Continue Reading...]
The right’s misleading spin on public education Sometimes you have to hand it to conservative North Carolina political leaders and their adjunct staffs in the right-wing propaganda shops for their truly shameless audacity. Who else could attempt to spin a shortsighted, ideologically-driven, widely unpopular and mean-spirited policy decision to intentionally fire thousands of [Continue Reading...]
The Governor opts for common sense over political correctness There have been plenty of times through the years in which progressives have had reason to question or find fault with Bev Perdue. Typically, this unease has been the result of the her penchant – either as a state legislator, Lt. Governor, or chief executive – [Continue Reading...]
Legislative committees become platforms for far right ideologues Most people are familiar with the fact that the North Carolina General Assembly has been returning to Raleigh for a seemingly endless series of “special sessions” to deal with the last minute whims of conservative legislative leaders. Fewer people, however, are aware that right-wing legislative [Continue Reading...]
“Truth and Hope Tour” will expose the face of Tar Heel poverty According to the folks on Right-wing Avenue, there really aren’t many (if any) poor people in North Carolina. You know this rap – it’s the one in which comfortable pontificators in Washington and Raleigh confidently inform us that a family [Continue Reading...]
The list of “gifts” bestowed by the 2011 General Assembly is long, sobering and, hopefully, energizing My colleague Chris Fitzsimon and I have been on the road quite a bit of late, speaking to audiences around the state about North Carolina policy and politics and, in particular, the “gifts” left under the tree [Continue Reading...]
Insurance benefits to help the unemployed are under assault again A year or so back, The New Yorker magazine featured a fabulous cartoon in which a homeowner whose house was ablaze declined the help of firefighters by explaining that, as a libertarian, he did not believe in the kind of public service they [Continue Reading...]
Whichever one you use, it’s about exclusion and discrimination One of the big challenges for caring and thoughtful North Carolinians in light of the General Assembly’s decision to place a constitutional amendment on next May’s primary ballot that purports to “define marriage” is: What in the heck should the proposal be called? Especially [Continue Reading...]
She should work with advocates for persons with disabilities; not fight them As was discussed at length in this space in 2010 and again this past summer, North Carolina has reached an important moment in the decades-old battle to end the warehousing of people with mental illness and other mental disabilities. [Continue Reading...]
Experience elsewhere indicates that fracking should be kept out of North Carolina We all know that when humans are desperate, they frequently do a lot of dumb things that they later regret. Just ask the millions of Americans who’ve been taken to the cleaners by predatory payday lenders. Most of these borrowers [Continue Reading...]
And the hopeful message from Mississippi What the heck is going on with North Carolina voters? If you only followed the news headlines in recent weeks and months, you’d think that they were suffering from a mass case of the flip flops. One day, they’re telling pollsters that they overwhelmingly support a constitutional [Continue Reading...]
Thoughtfully planned public transit is key to preserving the Triangle’s quality of life In one of his best malapropisms, the famous murderer of baseballs and the English language, Yogi Berra, said the following about a popular St. Louis restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” In a few years, Berra’s at [Continue Reading...]
