If you’re reading this in print, you’ve probably noticed that today’s INDY is a little different. The pictures are bigger. The type is cleaner. There’s more of what the designers call “white space.” And, yes, eagle eye, we are using the serial comma. (Actually, we’ve chucked many of the old-school AP guidelines in favor of […]
Jeffrey C. Billman
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Arthur Laffer Gets His Supply-Side Revenge in North Carolina
Arthur Laffer, the 75-year-old “father of supply-side economics,” developed a theory decades ago that posits that tax cuts pay for themselves by unleashing economic growth. In the Reagan administration, he was a key architect of trickle-down tax policies, and his ideas are still very much in vogue among modern conservative intelligentsia. One problem: they’ve never […]
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The Morning Roundup: A big night in Iowa and a big day for voter rights in NC
Happy Monday, everybody. Let’s get right to it: 1. So, fellow politics junkies, tonight’s the night. The first actual ballots cast in the 2016 presidential race (albeit in a weird and quirky caucus system that somehow favors both progressives and evangelicals and affords disproportionate power to white, rural and often very religious people). As The […]
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The Morning Roundup: Ted Cruz hates Trump, Tim Moore hates teachers, the economy hates us all
Happy Friday! So who won last night’s Republican debate? The guy who didn’t show? Or maybe one of the losers on the undercard? Or maybe moderator Megyn Kelly, who really rode this “Donald is afraid of me” thing for all it was worth? Or was it, you know, Hillary Clinton, who looks better and better […]
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Let’s recap the wild week in the race for North Carolina’s U.S. Senate seat
You may have missed it, what with all the power outages and hillside sledding and busting ass on the ice that we did this weekend, but it’s been a wild week in a heretofore uneventful race for U.S. Senate. Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane, shall we? First, on Thursdaythe same day a […]
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The Morning Roundup: The Panthers keep pounding, the snow keeps melting, and the state keeps trying to make it harder to vote
Good morning, everyone. Hope you made it survived the winter storm intact. Let’s jump right into today’s headlines: 1. Voter ID heads back to court. The General Assembly’s not-at-all cynical effort to make it harder for, um, some people to vote heads back before a judge in a trial starting this morning. The wrinkle is […]
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12 things I learned in my first year in the Triangle
I applied to be the INDY‘s Raleigh news editor in January. I drove up for an interview in February. I moved from Florida to Raleigh in March. I was promoted to editor in chief in August. I bought a home in Durham in November. It’s been quite the year. But I can say without equivocation […]
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Failure to launch: What do the experts say about North Carolina’s new branding campaign?
So perhaps you’ve heard by now that North Carolina has a brand-new slogan (“Nothing Compares”) and logo, courtesy of the McCrory administration, which shelled out almost $450,000 to a Charlotte advertising agency called Luquire George Andrews. And after spending what had to be a stressful afternoon sketching on a bar napkin, Luquire gave us … […]
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Dept. of Bad Timing: The News and Observer ran a front-page gun-shop ad the day after the California massacre
Yes, the N&O, like all reputable news outlets, has a wall between edit and sales, such that one doesn’t know what the other is doing. Still, this ad placement, atop an above-the-fold headline on the 14 people who were gunned down yesterday in California, seems particularly unfortunate, the kind of thing someone, somewhere should have […]
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Pat McCrory does not like The News and Observer, send him money please
So hey, remember how The News & Observer did this big thing in late October on the governor securing a private-prisons deal for a buddy/campaign contributor over the objections of prison-system officials? No? You should go read it. We’ll wait. Now, remember how McCrory dismissed the whole thing as a big ol’ liberal conspiracy ginned […]
