As a fiscal conservative who thinks government is generally too large and taxes too high, I am grateful for the gas tax.
Tuesday, June 15, 2021
Can a Democrat win the race for U.S. Senate in North Carolina next year?
Saturday, June 12, 2021
Houston Methodist Hospital set a deadline this week for its 26,000 employees: Get vaccinated against the coronavirus, or lose your job. Almost everyone complied, except for a small group of dissenters, who are now suing the hospital.
New presidents have only so long to get big legislative initiatives done. It’s already June, and the clock is ticking for President Joe Biden. Big bills take a long time. Congress will spend much of the summer on recess. They’ll be at work in the fall, but by the end of the year, Democratic and Republican lawmakers will be obsessed with winning reelection in 2022.
Now that the Major League Baseball season is well underway, with fans like me relieved and happy to have our absorbing summer pastime back, spectators returning to the ballpark and interesting playoff races in all six divisions, it’s time for the annual spate of “baseball is doomed” articles presaging the game’s inevitable decline and fall.
Anyone who wanted a COVID vaccine has gotten a vaccine.
As lockdowns sent city dwellers “fleeing” to the suburbs for more space, the prices of homes offering that space took off. To play in the bidding wars, homebuyers had to cough up big money and chain themselves to giant mortgages. This painful scenario led many to choose renting over buying, and that’s not a bad thing.
While we’re still fussin’ and fightin’ about the 2020 elections the 2022 races have already begun. Candidates have announced for the US Senate seat vacated when Richard Burr retires. Before going too far into next year’s races can we all agree we want fair elections, referendums that encourage all voters to participate and ensure trustworthy voting procedures? If so, let’s talk about things to help achieve that goal.
Listening to all the rhetoric in the popular media, you would think America is the most unfair, racist nation in the world. You would think that black Americans are uniformly living in oppression and poverty, with no hope for the future, save the federal government arriving on the scene to their rescue.
There is one takeaway from watching Vice President Kamala Harris’ horrifying interview on NBC about whether she’ll visit our southern border to see the crisis with her own eyes:
Summer vacations aren’t just an optional frivolity this year but rather the duty of freedom-loving defenders of democracy worldwide. If you’re in the U.S., a good place to start is with a trip to Canada, my native country. Here’s why.
On Sunday, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin announced in an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail that he opposes the For the People Act. He also opposes ending the filibuster.
When he wasn’t lugging amplifiers and leading sound checks, Tim “Izzy” Israel swapped stories with country music chart-toppers. Criss-crossing the country in tour buses left little time for lobbying. Politics was a game other people played.
North Carolinians are closely divided when it comes to party preference. Our state has long been one of America’s key political battlegrounds. But when it comes to managing the state’s finances, the conservatives in charge of the state legislature are in tune with prevailing public sentiment.
The Convention of States Project seeks, as its name reflects, a convention of states as provided for in Article V of the US Constitution. Such a convention, CPS claims, would “only allow” discussion of amendments that “limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, impose fiscal restraints, and place term limits on federal officials.”
The School of Journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill fostered North Carolina’s tradition of great newspapers, reporters and editors. Now it fosters a debate engulfing the school, the entire university and journalism itself.
One of the great legacies of North Carolina history and our nation was the explosion of the American civil rights movement. As a leader in that movement, Martin Luther King Jr. continually appealed to our strengths as a nation: The American founding, the rule of law, and the Christian tradition.
Have Americans still got the guts for democracy? In light of recent events in Washington, you’d have to say it’s doubtful.
Texas is the latest state to have a big fight over reforming its election laws. Remember that in Georgia, some Democrats — like President Joe Biden — said a Republican-passed law that made several commonsense changes to election practices was “Jim Crow on steroids.”
As Texas Republicans tried to ram a bill through the state legislature that would severely restrict the rights of nonwhite voters, Democratic lawmakers came up with a creative and courageous plan. They simply walked out, denying the Republicans a quorum and preventing them from passing their reprehensible measure before the legislative session ended.
Not that long ago, American shoppers cleaned store shelves of toilet paper. Pandemic panic had fueled the run on toilet paper, the point of it never clear.
All across North Carolina “Face Masks Required” postings on businesses are being replaced by “Help Wanted” signs. But a recent jobs report indicates there were more than 8.1 million unfilled jobs in the U.S. and folks aren’t rushing to fill them.
Wake Forest University has been wrestling with some less savory aspects of its history for a while now — as well as its present — taking steps to ensure that all students, especially minorities, feel welcome on its campus. In February 2020, President Nathan O. Hatch apologized on behalf of the university for its historic role in perpetuating slavery in the late 1800s. The university established a commission on race, equity and community and joined a consortium of universities studying the issue.