Your execution problems confuse us. Why does your state require a doctor to help you kill somebody? Some of us think it’s to make sure he’s dead. Others insist that you must be hedging your bets in case the governor’s call is a little late. Many marzmas are riding on your answer. Sorry, you’re all […]
Bob Geary
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Breaking point
After seven hard years on the Wake County Board of Education, not much surprises Beverley Clark, or angers her either, for that matter. Still, when a reporter called her on a Saturday night in January to say that the Wake County Commissioners, fresh from a retreat, wanted to put another $1 billion school construction bond […]
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Mike Easley: Low goals, high popularity
Strange bird, Mike Easley. I’ve only met him oncehe was attorney general thenwhen I interviewed him during the 2000 gubernatorial campaign. We were scheduled for an hour. I ran out of questions after two and a half hours, and I left thinking that he was a different person than the man so widely described to […]
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Refund loans target the poor
The latest wrinkle in predatory lending: RALs, short for “refund anticipation loans.” You get your tax refund when you file (but, if you file electronically, you’d get it in a few days anyway), and you only pay interest of, oh, 100 percent, or maybe as much as 700 percent. This “product” is a big money-maker […]
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…about our mental health
We observe that you are closing your psychiatric hospitals and placing the mentally ill in your prisons. Is mental illness now considered a crime? No. You must be confused by the fact that, in Raleigh, we are closing Dorothea Dix Hospital at the same time we are building a new mental health facility at Central […]
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HK on J ‘teach-in’ draws 2,000 to Raleigh
The first thing, the Rev. William Barber said, is “to say with consistency and clarity what the problems are that face our people.” That’s why a 14-point platform, replete with specific sub-points and “action steps,” took center stage Saturday at the state NAACP’s “HK on J” event in Raleigh. “HK on J” stood for “Historic […]
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Tough stands on issues are keeping John Edwards in the race
About this time in the last presidential campaign cycle, a year before the ’04 Iowa cau-cuses and New Hampshire primary, I remember hearing then-U.S. Sen. John Edwards speak in Raleighand con-cluding that his candidacy was issue-free. What a difference four years makes.
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Wake commissioners break off-course on school needs
Of late, I’ve been catching up on episodes of Lost. But not ABC’s saga of crash survivors on a strange island. I’m talking about the Wake County commissioners, who were themselves flying high following the November elections but have since wandered miserably off-course in trying to micromanage the schools. The commissioners first lost their wayand […]
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Greg Pooles Dix is great. His TIF financing plan isnt.
I must say that it’s fun seeing a business guy with fire in his eyes for a public cause. Which is what I saw last week in Gregory Poole Sr., the moving force behind the group called the Dix Visionaries. Poole is determined that the Dorothea Dix Hospital campus, if and when the state is […]
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