Last week, Governor McCrory went out and blamed Attorney General Roy Cooper and “the political left” for HB 2, saying that if Charlotte hadn’t passed a nondiscrimination ordinance in the first place, the legislature wouldn’t have responded. This … did not go over well with readers.
On Facebook, Jay Davis writes: “Pat McCrory is a gutless coward running away from his own record.” Adds Melissa Dittmer: “Mr. Coal Ash needs to put on his big-boy pants, though that would require extracting his head from Trump’s nether regions.” Thanks for that mental image, Melissa.
In Triangulator, we reported on a number of companies that publicly protested HB 2 but went on to write checks to PACs supporting the candidates who conceived it. Israel J. Pattison argues that this is business as usual: “No payments means no influence. If a company’s competitors are raking in that political influence they can’t be left behind. Discrimination hurts, but spurring the will of angry investors hurts worse.”
Commenter RowenHaighMahoney appreciates Byron Woods’s “honest and realistic assessment” of the first year of the Women’s Theatre Festival. “And I applaud the bravery and audacity of Ashley Popio and all of the WTF collaborators for putting on a festival knowing that it was never going to be perfect. I am so glad we did not wait. I am so glad we did not try to find the right time. I am so glad we went for it.”
“Succeed or fail, Popio and all the women and allies who made WTF happen deserve major kudos,” writes Jesse R. Gephart. “This has been long overdue and sorely needed in our theatrical communityand beyond.”
William Bowling, a self-described “retired white guy,” says that Eric Tullis’s feature on black-owned restaurants in Durham overlooked an important one. “I hope [Tullis] will print an ‘add-on’ paragraph about the wonderful, much larger, home-style cooking of Ms. Brown’s Roy’s Kountry Kitchen, five blocks from the Chicken Hut. Roy’s got about seventeen words in [Tullis’s] article, which leads me to believe Mr. Tullis did not eat at the restaurant.”
And, finally, a correction: in the aforementioned Triangulator piece looking at political donations and HB 2, we overlooked several donations made to Democratic PACs. Pfizer, PayPal, eBay, Microsoft, and Uber all donated to Democrats in addition to Republicans. The corrected version of the infographic can be found online at http://bit.ly/2ciiThL.
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