These are not happy times for North Carolina’s Republican Party, which had hoped to use security, scandal and shifting demographics to leverage a takeover of the state House and Senate. Witness the lackluster case party Chair Ferrell Blount made recently in an interview with the Asheville Citizen-Times. The state, he said, needs a Republican House […]
Kirk Ross
Bio: Kirk Ross is a freelance columnist for INDY Week and founded the online news and feature publication The Carolina Mercury. He lives in Chapel Hill.Link: http://www.exileonjonesstreet.comEmail: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/ExJS
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Race to the bottom
We are less than three months from knowing how ethics scandals–both state and federal–and the declining stock of the president’s Coalition of the Willing will play out at the ballot boxes. With all the heat and light being generated, you might think there will be a battle royal ahead. Maybe so, if the media dutifully […]
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The scandal that keeps on giving
On Monday, state Sen. Andrew Brock, a campaign consultant by trade, got himself a little notoriety as the first Republican to launch an ad campaign based on the scandal swirling around House Speaker Jim Black. Since the ad launch was literally a made-for-TV event, TV made it to the event. Brock, who is running in […]
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Legislature flees after finding some ethics
Ah, relief. Adjournment sine die arrived in near-record time and came while controversy was still swirling over the outcome of ethics reform, permitting those of us in punditry extra ink to tut-tut over the legacy of the short session of ’06. That the ethics legislation would be met with incredulity was not in doubt from […]
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Purple haze
Excuse me while I use a tortured analogy. In a rather spirited moment of debate in the doldrums of late last week, state Sen. David Weinstein (D-Robeson), speaking to defeat an amendment that would make it easier for third parties to get on the ballot, said we’ve already got plenty of parties–eight to 10 at […]
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Major ethics reforms still hanging
A couple of weeks ago, as the budget gelled, Sen. Hugh Webster posed an inquiry to Senate President Beverly Perdue during a lull in the action. “Are we going to get out of here before the tomatoes get ripe?” asked Webster, an Alamance Republican. Perdue said she hoped so, but noted that either way the […]
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Chapel Hill lawyer missing–and so’s money
There always were two sides to John McCormick, the Chapel Hill attorney who disappeared last week just as more than $1.3 million of his clients’ money was found to be missing. For two decades McCormick was the buttoned-down attorney for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Board of Education–a body with a knack for controversy as well as […]
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Shipwrecked
By all accounts I’ve read, Floyd Lupton was a good man. Lupton, who died in May of last year, was chief of staff for 26 years to Congressman Walter Jones Sr. and the go-to guy for Eastern North Carolina. According to a tribute written upon his death by the congressman’s son and successor, “If anybody […]
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Things left undone
Hot on the heels of passage of a rather popular state budget, both the House and Senate got to things still undone while hurtling toward a departure from Dodge maybe as soon as the end of this week. A minimum wage hike, one big leap in getting the heck outta the capital, was approved by […]
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Aaaaaaaaarrrgh!
The media hype over the Fourth of July weekend extravaganza in Beaufort was exceeded only by the frustration of thousands who went–and found they were the victims of corporate piracy. Once again, the good people of Beaufort have survived occupation by privateers. But unlike 1747, when the scurvy dogs had to be persuaded to leave […]