Cheap shot? You decide. Republican congressional candidate Carolyn Grant, in a press release claiming victory after a recount of GOP primary ballots, went right after her Democratic opponent Brad Miller. Liberal, liberal, liberal, she said, promising to offer “a stark contrast” to Miller’s “liberal ideas,” which are the “liberal ideas espoused by the national Democratic […]
Bob Geary
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Hillsborough Street: Coming Around
If you rebuild it, will they come? The Hillsborough Street Partnership says yes: Shape up the street, spruce up the sidewalks, jazz up the lighting and rezone those parking lots for combo stores-apartments-decks, and before long investors will be turning this economically depressed thoroughfare into a classy urban boulevard, repaying the public investment many times […]
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Getting on the Bus
If you’ve been on a CAT bus lately, someone with a clipboard might have asked where you’re going or how you think the bus system could be improved. Chances are, though, that you haven’t been on a bus. Ridership on the CAT–Capital Area Transit –is just 8,000 trips even on weekdays, and since that double-counts […]
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A Textbook Lesson in Cynical Politics
For the young people aspiring to high office one day, U.S. Senate candidates Elizabeth Dole and Erskine Bowles offered textbook lessons last week on a skill needed by the modern campaigner: Having it both ways. Dole went first. No sooner had she declared victory in the Republican primary than she was challenging Bowles, the Democratic […]
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Look, Up in the Sky, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s … COUGH
Hard to believe it’s still an issue, in the year 2002, whether cropdusters should be allowed to spray pesticides on your house. But there we were on Sunday, 50 of us in the tiny Mt. View AME Zion Church in Chatham County, recalling the “white rain” that came down on people in the Gorgas community […]
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Trotline
Solidarity Forever North Carolina’s antipathy to unions is well-known (e.g., the lowest rate of union membership in the country), and nowhere is that more evident than in public employment. Most states ban strikes by public employees, but state law here goes farther, banning collective bargaining itself–or any contract, for that matter, between a government agency […]
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Trotline
The Meeker File: Checks for Charles From Developers There’s been another, um, “modification” in Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker’s campaign fundraising standards. He now takes money from developers.This unfortunate news came to our attention recently in the form of an invitation to join various “hosts” at a reception for the mayor. Price tag: $250 per. Among […]
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Trotline
In Nunn We Trust, But Munford Pays Cash In their race to replace retiring Republican Rep. Art Pope, R-Wake, in state House District 34, leading GOP candidates Al Nunn and R. Donavon (Don) Munford Jr. have staked competing claims to be the true conservative. Nunn, we see from his TV ads, is the man you […]
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A vanishing breed
The Lightner Funeral Home stands like a watchtower astride the spot in downtown Raleigh where Western Boulevard becomes Martin Luther King Boulevard. It symbolizes the place of Clarence Lightner in the city’s history: He was its only black mayor, serving just one two-year term in 1973-75, but he was at the center of Raleigh’s largely […]
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Exploris Under Fire
The two people who created Exploris are civic heroes. Gordon Smith and Anne Bryan shared a vision and for 15 years they fought to make it real: The museum about the world that opened in downtown Raleigh, to enormous hoopla, in the fall of 1999. Just two-plus years later, though, the heroes are under attack–and […]