Bob Geary

Suddenly there’s a spate of stories about the important health, education and social services programs slashed in the budget passed last week by the state House of Representatives. Better late than never. The day the budget hit the House floor, though, one organization called it for what it is: “very, very bad … contains huge […]

After the charges were dropped in the Case of the John Edwards 8, talk among the expert witnesses for the defense turned to Sen. Edwards himself and his presidential ambitions. The Rev. W.W. Finlator, Raleigh’s venerable Baptist preacher emeritus, had hoped to testify that the Iraq invasion failed every test of just war theory as […]

When the statue of Saddam Hussein fell in Baghdad, CNN likened it to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Paris. I watched for an hour in my allergist’s waiting room, and while I did the camera position never changed. It fixed on a dozen men trying futilely to haul or bash […]

Is the Wake County school system destined to be broken up into districts (or perhaps, to use Cary Mayor Glen Lang’s term, “baby zones”)? So far, the debate over school reassignment policies has been conducted in the abstract terms of diversity and parental choice. School leaders want a relatively free hand to reassign students so […]

What next for the anti-war movement? We couldn’t stop the invasion, so now the job is to learn from it. Here’s what Mara Evans of Durham is doing. She’s canceled her local newspaper. She’s canceling cable TV and switching to C-Span on the radio. “I will use the saved money to subscribe to news sources […]

Wednesday: Target of Opportunity. Bush unloads his first shots on “senior Iraqi leadership” asleep in a bunker. Could it be over that fast? Saddam dead? Dubya’d be a magician, making the regime in Baghdad disappear while he misdirected our attention to the borders. Wouldn’t that make us on the antiwar side look like idiots. Suddenly, […]

If there’s one thing both sides agree on after the King’s Motel fiasco in Raleigh last week, it’s the lack of leadership they found in City Hall. “We didn’t get any political cooperation,” says Debra King, executive director of CASA, a well-regarded nonprofit organization that provides housing for the most disadvantaged folks among us. (King […]

No surprise that President Bush–scion of the Prescott Bush clan of Kennebunkport and Connecticut–would sound the imperial charge on St. Patrick’s Day. “The world’s more full of weeping for it,” as the Irish bard once said. But we’ll raise a pint notwithstanding for our two congressmen. Democrat David Price, representing the 15-501 side of the […]