Word from Charles Meeker: He is “moving ahead” with his campaign for mayor of Raleigh, though it’s too early to make a formal announcement. (The filing period starts in July.) He has hired Linda Davis, a fundraising consultant who helped businesswoman Carolyn Grant raise a record $650,000 for her mayoral campaign two years ago, not […]
Bob Geary
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Paranoids ‘r’ us
The Future of Success is a funny title for Robert Reich’s new book. Success for UPPIES–upwardly mobile professionals, even the aging ones–would be better. Reich, the popular economist and Friend of Bill, who served as President Clinton’s first labor secretary, is coming to the Triangle this week, and those stressing over how hard they’re working […]
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Mind Game
When the N.C. Council of Churches hosted its annual legislative seminar a week ago, the table-talk was all about Gov. Mike Easley’s state lottery plans, the keynote (keno?) of his State of the State message the night before. The Rev. Gary Gloster, Bishop Suffragan, Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, mentioned the lottery in passing as […]
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Horse sense
Collective bargaining. Now there’s a term you don’t hear much in North Carolina, with our right-to-work law (or as labor calls it, right-to-work-cheap law). All the more unusual, then, to hear it used in a crowd of farmers at the N.C. State Fairgrounds, in the Gov. James B. Hunt Horse Complex of all places. True, […]
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The light fantastic
We’ve been going to Playmakers for years, always with tickets to Cheapskate, er, Preview Fridays. They’re a good deal. A season ticket comes to, oh, $13 a show or so, and for that you get your equity acting, the occasional Judd Hirsch-Rosemary Harris blockbuster, and to say a word for the home team, one nifty […]
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Coker crazy
I was sorry to hear that Raleigh City Councilor Marc Scruggs refused to read our story about Coker Towers–the big, big project developer Neal Coker wants to put up next to Oberlin Village and Cameron Village (see Get Smart, Jan. 10). Scruggs, whose district borders the site, thinks The Independent is “smut,” according to a […]
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A Real Crisis
Perhaps you knew it as Coalition 2000–the four dozen organizations that have worked together for a decade trying to reform North Carolina’s programs for people with developmental disabilities, mental illnesses or substance-abuse problems. Actually, it started out as Coalition 1989, so-named because its goal was to get reforms enacted–and the additional money they require–back when […]
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Infill or Overkill?
Is it only happenstance that the Triangle’s latest mega-development, targeted on the Cameron Village and Oberlin Village neighborhoods of Raleigh, is coming at the holiday season? That’s not what neighborhood leaders think as they scramble to organize for a Jan. 16 public hearing at City Hall on the blandly named “Wade Avenue Project.” Since lead […]
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NC WARN members risk arrest out of “necessity”
Jim Warren, NC WARN’s director (above), and two members of his organization’s board, Raleigh lawyer Lewis Pitts and the Rev. Carrie Bolton, a Chatham County activist, have a date in Wake County District Court Dec. 1 on a charge of second-degree trespass for their sit-in at CP&L’s doorstep in October. They plan to plead not […]
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Boiling Point
To reach the Shearon Harris nuclear power plant in Wake County, exit U.S. 1 about 15 miles southwest of Raleigh and turn left at the sign for the turkey shoot. The pine trees here are thick enough, and the dwellings rough enough, to be the set for Walking Tall. There’s a logging truck on the […]