James Eubert Holshouser Jr. was a transformative figure in North Carolina politics, a genial but tough mountain politician who led the rebirth of a Republican party marginalized for decades and then came to exemplify a strain of tempered partisanship that contrasts markedly with our present climate.
Watching the weekly arrest of protesters at the General Assembly the past several Monday evenings, I’ve been struck by how many of those going to jail seem to be, well, sort of my age.
Or older.
A marketing analyst would describe Durham as having a lot of noise.
In the now-infamous "47 Percent" video secretly captured during a Mitt Romney fundraising speech, the GOP hopeful gleefully mentioned Jimmy Carter's Iran Hostage Crisis moment and admitted, "By the way, if something of that nature presents itself, I will work to find a way to take advantage of the opportunity."
Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger’s office issued a press release last Sunday night about the Senate budget, a few hours before the actual budget itself was online for reporters and citizens to read.
During the past year, North Carolinians have heard many things about Obamacare, Medicaid, and health care reform that turned out to be untrue.
But doesn't the other NSA program -- the spooky-sounding James Bond-evoking PRISM -- give you the willies? Well, what we know thus far is that PRISM is designed to read the emails of non-U.S. citizens outside the United States. If an al-Qaeda operative in Yemen is emailing a potential recruit, it would be folly NOT to intercept it.
What does the German language have to do with one of the most contentious environmental issues facing North Carolinians?
Where have all the liberals gone?
President Obama, who as a Democratic senator accused the Bush administration of violating civil liberties in the name of security, now vigorously defends his own administration's collection of Americans' phone records and Internet activities.
In these post-Snowden days, the notion of anonymity is ludicrous. But so it has been for some time, though recent disclosures bring pause even to the habitually inured. It is one thing for Mrs. McQueen and Mrs. Harry G. Brown, my elderly dowager neighbors from childhood, to spy on each other through their porch screen doors. It is another for the National Security Agency to compile records of one's phone calls.
For years, I've argued with certain African-American people about their insistence upon using the so-called N-word which, to my ears, is, inalterably, a statement of self-loathing. They say I don't understand. They say the word no longer means what it has always meant. They say it's just a friendly fraternal greeting.
Yesterday I read an interesting article in Newsweek about the connection between tornadoes and climate change.
Newsweek's story explained how top climate scientists were concerned about several ominous and fundamental changes occurring in Earth's weather patterns.
In Syria, the Obama administration seems to be stumbling back to the future: An old-fashioned proxy war, complete with the usual shadowy CIA arms-running operation, the traditional plan to prop up ostensible "moderates" whose prospects are doubtful and, of course, the customary shaky grasp of what the fighting is really about.
So what can we expect out of the next inventor’s garage or lab? That’s a good question to which there are no sure answers. But there can be some fairly good educated guesses. Fortunately, the smart people at the McKinsey Global Institute, one of the leading consulting and business management firms in the world, recently released a detailed report giving their forecasts for the next wave of gadgets.
In May 1918, with America embroiled in the First World War, Iowa's Gov. William Lloyd Harding dealt a blow against Germany. His Babel Proclamation -- that was its title; you cannot make this stuff up -- decreed: "Conversation in public places, on trains and over the telephone should be in the English language." The proscription included church services, funerals and pretty much everything else.
"This abuse of state power," writes Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei about the U.S. government's surveillance of U.S. citizens, "goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilized society."