Here’s the thing, Roy Cooper: We expected this from Pat McCrory. Have you seen the Republican base he answers to, presently in thrall to nativist fabulist Donald Trumpan outrage factory perpetually in search of its next scapegoat? And McCrory’s establishment peers have jumped on the bandwagon, too. Last week, House Republicans, along with some quivering […]
Jeffrey C. Billman
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Wake County workers will soon get a living wage
On Monday, the Wake County Board of Commissioners is set to debateand likely passwhat its author bills as one of the most robust living-wage ordinances in the state, and indeed the entire American South. “I’ve been working on this since my first month in office,” says Commissioner Matt Calabria, one of the four Democrats swept […]
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Raleigh backed off sidewalk-drinking restrictions. What does that mean for downtown’s future?
After the months of heated rhetoric and name-calling, after the issue became a flashpoint in October’s city elections, after a barrage of City Council and task-force meetings that stretched from spring to summer to fall, after a three-month evaluation period that saw downtown turn into something almost resembling a police stateafter all of that, the […]
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How is North Carolina’s economy doing, really?
Probably the foremost issue in next year’s statewide elections, especially the race for governor, will be the health of North Carolina’s economy. More specifically, it will be about whether the supply-side tax-reform experiment Gov. Pat McCrory and the Republican Legislature undertook in 2013 (and continued in 2015)dramatically lowering and flattening individual and corporate income taxes […]
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Surprise! Durham elections turned out exactly like you thought they would
Yesterday’s Durham City Council election played out pretty much as expected, with the three candidates who easily led the October primary—Steve Schewel, Jillian Johnson and Charlie Reece (all candidates the INDY endorsed)—easily winning the at-large Council slots on the November ballot, pulling 28, 23 and 15 percent of ballots, respectively. Same goes with the mayor’s […]
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Under Margaret Spellings, will UNC’s liberal arts programs become a thing of the past?
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for UNC’s Board of Governors. Animosity over the botched, politically motivated firing of beloved president Tom Ross earlier this year still lingers, and the recently concluded selection process for his successor, followed by behind-closed-doors raises for 12 chancellors, can charitably be called tumultuous. (Clusterfuck might be the technical […]
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Why can’t we study gun violence?
The conclusion, at least to U.S. Rep. David Price, D-Durham, is obvious: Of course the federal government should fund research into gun violence, just like it funds research into infectious diseases and mental health and the genetics of grapes and myriad other things, big and small, to use as an empirical basis for policy making. […]
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David Price, congressional Democrats to call for restoration of federally funded gun-violence research
Such is the stranglehold that the NRA has over Congress that not only can we not do anything about the rash of mass shootings we’ve seen this year—294 in the first 274 days of 2015, with some 380 dead—or the spiking gun violence plaguing major American cities, we can’t even do research on them. In […]
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Chapel Hill cops will now give you “good tickets” for obeying the law. (Chapel Hill maybe has too many cops?)
In a quintessentially Chapel Hill thing to do, the town has announced that its police officers will give people “good tickets”—read: coupons—for doing good things. What sort of good things? Over to you, Daily Tar Heel: “It’s a good opportunity to thank those for following the law,” Chapel Hill Police Lt. Celisa Lehew said. Lehew […]
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Does the light-rail line have a math problem?
GoTriangle’s response was precisely what Robert Healy and Eric Ghysels didn’t want. For starters, it was too mucha Google Drive link to 31 documents totaling more than a thousand pages, much of it dense, hyper-technical information. More problematic, though, was when it arrived: Thursday, Oct. 8, more than a month after their initial records request […]
