Richard Hart

It is beyond comprehension that after revelations about a lottery lobbyist on House Speaker Jim Black’s staff and another appointed to the state lottery commission, about the Wake County district attorney and a federal grand jury investigating campaign contributions from the video poker industry, and reports about the soaring influence of lobbyists and corporate contributions, […]

Lots of people are making note this month of the 50th anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower’s dream of an American autobahn, the interstate highway system. I celebrated by making a previously inconceivable day-trip to Wrightsville Beach on Interstate 40. Then I looked at the I-85 construction that’s taking a corner of century-old Duke Park near […]

Opponents of the far-right have always felt a mix of outrage and marvel at the way neoconservatives defined issues with clever (if misleading) catch phrases. These days it’s “cut and run” (but not when the defense department wants to reduce troop strengths), and in years past it’s been the “death tax” (though 99 percent of […]

A week in New Orleans is a sobering experience (not a word often used to describe my hometown). It is at once frightening and inspiring. It’s frightening for the obvious reasons. In many neighborhoods, homes stand damaged and seemingly abandoned. But it’s inspiring to see that so many New Orleanians have returned and resolved to […]

This week, the Independent features our annual Best of the Triangle issue. But don’t believe it–not because everything we highlight isn’t great, but because there’s so much good stuff in the Triangle one issue can’t do it justice. That’s why we offer readers the best things to do in the region every week: with arts […]

Finally, as the suffering continues in Iraq (2,475 U.S. soldiers dead, 18,000-plus wounded, more than 38,000 civilians killed), as the economy falters (the Dow dropped 200 points Monday when the Fed chairman warned of inflation), as 45 million Americans go without health insurance (including 8.4 million children), as the federal budget deficit grows unabated ($8,359,984,623,929.25 […]

Sometimes newspapers do something that evokes an unexpectedly strong reaction. Sometimes we do something in hopes it will prompt a reaction, and it doesn’t. And sometimes we do something we know might elicit strong feelings, but hope we don’t. The latter was the case with our cover of last week’s issue. We ran a photograph […]

Now that the TV lights have dimmed and there’s a clearer view of the Duke lacrosse saga, one fact shines though: It was never really about the relationship between Duke and Durham. Despite the national media’s simplistic insistence on making it a town-gown battle between a poor, black community at odds with a white, Ivy […]

It’s been obvious from the beginning of the Iraq debacle that the Bush administration put blind pursuit of geopolitical power ahead of military intelligence and planning, then told new lies to sway public opinion when old ones went sour. We’re finding out more about that as we learn the president and those around him leaked […]