November 8, 2009
Standing in Tiananmen Square, under the gaze of a giant image of Chairman Mao, I found myself thinking about Greensboro's new city manager, Rashad Young. Young recently told this newspaper that he won't be paying attention to local blogs. "I do...
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October 25, 2009
During the run-up to local elections, Joe Guarino of Greensboro runs a questionnaire for City Council candidates at his blog. The first question: "What, in your opinion, is the single most important activity in which municipal government engage...
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October 11, 2009
During the 2008 presidential campaign, it was alleged in certain quarters that Barack Obama was some sort of closet radical. The charge was implausible at the time, and now, after 11 months of plodding pragmatism, it seems downright laughable.
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September 27, 2009
Wendell Potter looked at the health care bill proposed by Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus and saw within it "more than the insurance industry could have hoped for."
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September 13, 2009
Remember how 9/11 was going to change everything? That was awesome, the way it all turned out. Not the deadly terrorist attacks, of course, but the way we learned from those terrible events, re-evaluated some fundamentals, and grew into a better country.
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August 30, 2009
It’s been a long time since I got summers off, but I still mourn the start of school, especially when it happens before Labor Day. Not that getting up in the dark with two teenagers is anything less than a pleasure, or that cooler weather and...
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July 26, 2009
Blogging is having a midlife crisis. I'm speaking here of Blogging with a capital "B," the self-conscious and often self-important new-media phenomenon. The first famous (by blog standards) polemic declaring blogs irrelevant was published in 199...
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June 21, 2009
My father told me he loved me every day until the day he died. He just did not say it in so many words. I doubt my father's father ever told him, "I love you," either; I know he never spoke the words to me, although he, too, made his affection a...
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May 24, 2009
The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting transparency in government, tracks the frequency with which members of Congress utter particular words in speeches and remarks from the floor. Many of North Carolina's elected repres...
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May 10, 2009
The history of Greensboro, at least the considerable chunk of it that involves the textile industry, seems to be the history of Big Things: enormous brick buildings that took in cotton by the railcar and churned out acres of fabric; great fortunes made by...
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April 26, 2009
I went to the Tea Party protest in downtown Greensboro on Tax Day, and it made me think.
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April 12, 2009
During Monday night's NCAA basketball championship game, the CBS announcers took a break from Carolina's epic beat-down of Michigan State to promote a neat online video service. Fans can click to a Web site and watch any tournament game on their computers...
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March 15, 2009
A friend sent out a broadcast e-mail the other day, asking for some good news to counter the steady drumbeat of gloom she hears at every turn. Another friend quickly replied with a rant about the economy, which pretty much concluded that there is no good...
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March 1, 2009
Well, they told us we'd see radical government intervention in the economy if Barack Obama was elected, and it turns out they were right. It seems increasingly likely that the United States government could nationalize a good chunk of the banking industry...
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February 15, 2009
People react to crises in predictable ways, and no responses are more predictable than denial and panic. Each of these polar opposites is on display amid the ongoing economic unpleasantness. These are boom times for "doomers," who see the recession trigge...
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February 1, 2009
There were four young men, students at A&T. They are famous now for sitting down at a segregated lunch counter at the Woolworth's store on South Elm Street, 49 years ago today, for helping to propel the civil rights movement to new heights. Do not con...
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January 18, 2009
You can ignore reality, but reality will not ignore you. That's kind of a definitional proposition, an essential reality about reality, but it was overlooked willfully and often and with harsh consequences during the last eight years. My hope, modest as i...
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December 7, 2008
My previous column ended with a request to readers for more information on two people buried in Greensboro's oldest African American graveyard, Union Cemetery: a woman named Harrett Pinnix, who died at "about 100 years" in 1918, and Thomas Reese Alexander...
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November 23, 2008
Dead men tell no tales, but their tombstones can be pretty eloquent. The history of a place is chiseled into the plinths and weathered monuments of its boneyards, and this place that we live in is no exception.
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November 9, 2008
Kay Hagan will be North Carolina's first-ever U.S. senator from Greensboro. She joins Winston-Salem's Richard Burr in the Senate, giving the Triad an unprecedented one-two punch in national affairs. The Piedmont fared less well in the gubernatorial race......
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November 2, 2008
Some scattered thoughts about the upcoming election: • It will be nice to watch a ball game without being bombarded by all the political ads, although I guess the people who sell the ads may feel differently. • When someone tells me that Obama's a soc...
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October 12, 2008
Feeling the Elephant, or The Blame Game: A Tragedy Played as Farce The curtain rises on an opulent building, which is afire. Many rooms in the building have been destroyed, and the structure is in evident danger of collapse, an eventuality that seems like...
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September 28, 2008
Thrift, that once-great American value, passed away at roughly the same moment as my father, one of its most fervent practitioners, who died in 1987. Just a coincidence, of course, but one that struck me as the world copes with a financial crisis that ste...
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September 14, 2008
A gentleman of my acquaintance took a moment at a recent social event to say some nice things to me about my newspaper column. He paused, then added, "Except for the socialism, of course." Of course.
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August 17, 2008
If scandal were an Olympic event, the John Edwards version would be a decathlon. Rarely does a story have so many moving parts, and we may be learning more about parts of this one for some time to come.
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