Richard Hart

There’s every reason to hate zoning. It’s really boring. The language is impenetrable. Decisions involve long, interminable meetings and arcane regulations that usually mean discussing things that aren’t even there yet. It’s difficult to have a sane argument about something when the moment you say it’s going to mean one thing, someone on the other […]

For months now, as the U.S. invasion of Iraq loomed, raged and become an occupation, it has been difficult for most of us to focus our attention elsewhere. But not all of us. Quietly, a cabal of leaders in the General Assembly has been putting together their budgets, out of public view. The version produced […]

For all our bashing of the media for their inexplicable failure to capture the lies and true intentions of the Bush administration in Iraq, some newspapers and magazine have been getting it right. There’s the foreign press, so amazingly available on the Web. There are magazines like The Nation, a progressive voice that has always […]

We can lose this war. Not just in the ways we’ve already suffered losses–of our own young men and women, by bearing responsibility for the deaths of hundreds and likely thousands of innocent Iraqis, by breaking faith with virtually the entire global community. We can lose this war the old-fashioned way, by getting our asses […]

Suicide bombers. Vanloads of women and children shot. All-war TV channels. Front pages and special sections. This war has invaded the comics pages already. We can’t ignore it. We shouldn’t. We have to do what we can. But… we have to take care of ourselves, too. Ryan Thompson knows at least part of the answer. […]

One precept should guide everything you see, hear and read right now about the war in Iraq: Don’t believe it. Just as the march to Baghdad wasn’t really as easy as a gleeful Charlie Gibson indicated that first day of the war on Good Morning, America, laughing about a strategy called “bypass and haul ass,” […]

We failed. We failed as a government, we failed as a republic, we failed as a civilization. That’s what war means. The decision to attack Iraq is the final, tragic result of so many failures on so many levels. By the president’s own standards, we have failed diplomatically, and in Brobdingnagian proportions. Starting out with […]

Gov. Mike Easley must be taking notes on the way President Bush is running the country. How else to explain a State of the State address that calls for expanding education programs, increasing pay for state workers and professors at community colleges while at the same time not raising taxes, cutting up to $800 million […]

Millions around the globe turned out to show their opposition to a U.S.-led war on Iraq. But it may not matter. President Bush and his braintrust are talking as if they’ve made up their minds to go to war regardless of what Saddam Hussein does to disarm. Yes, Saddam’s sure to drag out the process. […]